^ f. UBBARV - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

INTRODUCTION 3
upon questions which exceed the bounds of phenomena,
e. g. as to the nature of mind out of relation to the living
organism, he passes the limits of science and therefore of
psychology, as this term is here employed. As regards the
study of mind, empirical psychology, assisted by physiology,
will and ought to have the. first word, though it cannot have
the last.
§ 3. The ancient Greek psychologists endeavoured to give Appredaobservation
its due weight in determining such psychological a°cie°nt
questions as they raised. For this reason they deserve to be '^''^^^
"DsvcnO"
called the founders of psychological science. Their honest logy.
differences from one another, as well as from their better
informed successors, and their helpless ignorance of much
which is now familiarly known and fundamental for psychology,
contribute to the curious interest which a history of their
efforts has for a modern reader. This history is, of course,
largely a history of failure. Those, however, who know how
far empirical psychology is still from the achievement of its
aims will not hastily disparage the Greeks on this account.
It was not so much the defectiveness of their psychological
methods—defective as these were no doubt—as that of their
physical and physiological science that rendered fruitless
their best attempts to comprehend the elementary facts of
sense-perception, and to place them in an intelHgible connexion
with their conditions. The most ancient Greek
psychologists treated psychology as an integral part of
physics or of physiology. With the possible exception of
Anaxagoras, they looked upon ' knowing,' for example, as
one of the many properties of matter. Problems as to the
nature of space, critically considered, lay beyond their
horizon. They never asked how it comes to pass that we
' project' our percepts in an extra-organic space, and fall
into the habit of speaking of them as outside ourselves.
Questions of the objective existence of things whose qualities
are perceived or known only in virtue of our faculty of
Cognition did not come up for discussion until some centuries
after Thaies. Before the Sophists—or ' die Sophistik'—all
agreed that there is on one hand such a thing as truth
B a