LECTURE  XXX

. Concluding Remarks ; the Question of Immortality. § II.
The Principle of Psychophysical Parallelism. § III. Old
AND New Phrenology. § IV. The Empirical Significance
OF the Principle of Parallelism. § V. The Nature of
Mind.
 

AT the beginning of these lectures upon the mental life of
man and the animals we declined to base our considera¬
tions from the outset upon any hard and fast conception
of the nature of mind, and to force the facts of experience into
agreement with that conception, in the way of the metaphysical
psychologists. On the contrary, we regarded it as our primary
duty to acquaint ourselves with the facts, and then, without the
aid of any other assumptions than those suggested by intro¬
spection and supported by experimentation and objective
observation, to try and establish laws under which the phe¬
nomena of mind might be subsumed.

But, now that we have come to the end of our task, it becomes
imperative for us to cast a glance over the body of facts that
we have collected, and to consider what answer is to be given
to the ultimate questions of psychology. The path that we
have travelled was not lighted by any metaphysical guiding
star. What is the result ? Do these questions refuse to be
answered ? do they transcend the limits of human knowledge ?
Or has experimental psychology something to say about them,
something which may be believed and accepted as the issue of
an unprejudiced appeal to experience ?

There is, indeed, one problem of speculative psychology which
we must exclude from the first as insoluble. Not only does it
transcend the limits of the empirical doctrine of mind : it does
not stand upon the plane of scientific knowledge at all.    It is