hand, there are those whose primary interest is in the apparent
fact that we have KNOWLEDGE, that there is a world surrounding us
of which we are aware. These men are interested in the mind
because of its relation to the world, because knowledge, if it is
a fact, is a very mysterious one. Their interest in psychology is
naturally centred in the relation of consciousness to its object,
a problem which, properly, belongs rather to theory of knowledge.
We may take as one of the best and most typical representatives
of this school the Austrian psychologist Brentano, whose
"Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint,"* though published in
1874, is still influential and was the starting-point of a great
deal of interesting work. He says (p. 115):

* "Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte," vol. i, 1874. (The
second volume was never published.)


"Every psychical phenomenon is characterized by what the
scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (also the
mental) inexistence of an object, and what we, although with not
quite unambiguous expressions, would call relation to a content,
direction towards an object (which is not here to be understood
as a reality), or immanent objectivity. Each contains something
in itself as an object, though not each in the same way. In
presentation something is presented, in judgment something is
acknowledged or rejected, in love something is loved, in hatred
hated, in desire desired, and so on.

"This intentional inexistence is exclusively peculiar to
psychical phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything