Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles D. Broad

Broad is drawing a boundary line that sounds modest but is actually a power move: psychology, he insists, should treat the mind as its own domain, not as a transparent window onto the world. The phrasing "leave out of account as far as possible" is doing careful, almost legal work. He knows you cannot fully subtract the objects we perceive, because minds are always minds-of-something. Still, he wants the discipline to resist sliding into metaphysics or epistemology every time it talks about perception, belief, or memory.

The subtext is a quiet rebuttal to two temptations. One is naive realism: the idea that psychology can just take the world "out there" for granted and focus on behavior or sensation as if the object were a fixed given. The other is the philosopher's temptation to turn psychology into a debate about what really exists. Broad is saying: study the machinery first. What are the processes by which something becomes "known"? How does the mind construct, distort, and stabilize experience?

Context matters. Broad sits in early-to-mid 20th century British philosophy, in the long shadow of empiricism and in the wake of the new scientific psychology. Behaviorism was trying to purge inner life; introspective traditions were under pressure; analytic philosophy was policing conceptual clarity. Broad offers a compromise: keep psychology focused on mental processes without pretending it can settle the ultimate status of perceived objects. It's a division of labor meant to protect psychology's rigor - and to remind philosophers that "the world" enters our theories already filtered through the very mind we're trying to understand.