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This book, a work not in but on psychology (as the author points out), tries to determine the proper problem and appropriate method of psychology. Mason seeks 'a further development beyond Kant's critical philosophy' and develops what he calls a fuller definition of mind, the 'X in psychology'. He feels, that gestalt psychology comes nearest to his own 'awareness-unity' or 'ego-content' theory, although this does not mean that gestalt psychology 'is by any means an adequate psychology' (p. IX). He professes to be stimulated mostly by the Marburg School of Cohen and Natorp and its interpretation of Kant.
Mason develops a concept of 'a system of truth' which is subdivided into several subsystems of truth which has an objective character. I would say that he tries to define what we are used to call reality in terms of 'truth'. Only secondarily truth is massed and grouped within the confines of consciousness, thus becoming the content of mind. The process of truth becoming content of mind is limited by the limitations of 'span, change, division and plurality of centres'. Truth is considered as a developing structure, moving along from stage to stage, a movement which Mason understands as a dynamic second dimension of truth which he identifies as knowledge. The X of psychology, Mind, is defined as the awareness unity of limited truth as content.
Mason's outline of mind, his skeleton of mind's content, has four phases which might be referred to, roughly, as thinking, willing, knowing and an 'irreducible' element which comprises desire, feeling and emotion. One can read between the lines how he regrets the irreducibility of those subjective factors. He calls those factors 'material factors'. For a philosopher whose concept of mind comes near to the concept of 'logos' this is almost a contemptuous