I came across this interesting passage from the book “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by Wiliam James. Here it is:

“The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of what so ever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous, — the cosmic times and spaces, for example,— whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude towards the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs — such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the ‘object’ is when taken all alone.”

He further continues:

“That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.

If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egoistic elements of experience should be suppressed. … To describe the world with all the various feelings of the individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out from the description— they being as describable as anything else— would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual’s religion may be egoistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.

A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one real egg instead of the word ‘egg’ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound.”

Having read this, I realized that to treat psychology as a science that solely takes into account the objective reality of people, the measurable facts and figures, seems to me like the “bill of fare” instead of the “solid meal”. As James expresses that reality consists of both the objective and the subjective, it is rather unfair of science to study only one of these aspects. If it does that then it can never grasp the whole of reality.

But then the question remains how does one study the inner realities or the deeply personal experiences of man?

I am inclined to believe that the Indian tradition has this answer!