Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles D. Broad

Science’s great magic trick is subtraction: it builds reliable knowledge by pretending the observer isn’t in the room. Broad’s line spots the sleight of hand and names Psychology as the awkward discipline that can’t pull it off. Physics can talk about falling bodies without asking what it feels like to see one fall; chemistry can track reactions without inventorying the chemist’s expectations. Psychology, by contrast, is forced to study the very instrument other sciences treat as transparent: the mind that measures, categorizes, and narrates.

The intent is less a put-down than a boundary marker. Broad is clarifying why psychology so often looks messier, more argumentative, and more method-fractured than the “hard” sciences. Its subject matter is reflexive: the observer becomes part of the observed, and that recursion destabilizes the clean separation between object and method. When you “leave out of account” the mind, you’re not being dishonest; you’re making a strategic simplification that enables precision. Psychology inherits the cost of taking that simplification back.

The subtext carries a warning against importing physics-envy into the study of mental life. If you insist on treating experience as just another object, you risk flattening what makes it psychologically meaningful: intention, interpretation, bias, self-deception. Broad was writing in a 20th-century philosophical landscape shaped by behaviorism’s push to expel introspection and by logical positivism’s suspicion of anything not easily operationalized. His sentence reads like a calm refusal: you can tidy psychology into object-talk, but you’ll be amputating the very thing you came to study.