ground and are handling psychological conceptions as soon as they make any statements concerning the inner life.  But if we examine the real purposes and presuppositions of the various sciences, we must recognize that the human experience can be looked on from two entirely different points of view.  Only from one of the two does it present itself as psychological material and as a fit object for psychological study.  From the other point of view, which is no less valuable and no less important for the understanding of our inner life, human experience offers itself as a reality with which psychology as such has nothing to do, even though it may be difficult to eliminate the usual psychological words.

The psychologist considers human experience as a series of objects for consciousness.  All the perceptions and memory ideas and imaginative ideas and feelings and emotions, are taken by him as mental objects of which consciousness becomes aware, and his task is to describe and to explain them and to find the laws for their succession.  He studies them as a naturalist studies the chemical elements or the stars.  It makes no difference whether his explanation leads him to connect these mental contents with brain processes as one theory proposes, or with subconscious processes as another theory suggests.  The entirely different aspect of inner life is the one which is most natural in our ordinary intercourse.  Whenever we give an account of our inner life or are interested in the experience of our friends, we do not consider how their mental experiences as such objective contents of consciousness are to be described and explained, but we take them as inner actions and attitudes toward the world, and our aim is not to describe and to explain them but to interpret and to understand them.  We do not seek their elements but their meaning, we do not seek their causes and effects but their inner relations and their inner purposes.  In short, we do not take them at all as objects but as functions of the subject, and our dealing with them has no similarity to the method of the naturalist.

This method of practical life in which we seek to express and to understand a meaning, and relate every will-act to its aim, is not confined to the mere popular aspect; it can lead to very systematic scholarly treatment.  It is exactly the treatment which is fundamental in the case of all history, for example, or of law, or of logic.  That is, the historian makes us understand the meaning of a personality of the past and is really interested in past events only as far as human needs are to be interpreted.  It would be pseudo-psychology, if we called such an account in the truly historical spirit a psychological description and explanation.  The student of law interprets the meaning of the will of the legislator; he does not deal with the idea of the law as a psychological content.  And the logician has nothing to do with the idea as a conscious object in the mind; he asks as to the inner relations of