I'm not sure where the confusion lies. You seem to have answered your own question! I'll try again in different words, though. Maybe that'll help
As James explained, the
println() method is a method of the
PrintStream class, and
out is an instance of
PrintStream. So, imagine we had created out own object and called
println() on it, like this:
So, in this case, what you said is exactly true: methods in Java can be called by using an instance.
Again, as James explained, the
System class contains a
public static field called
out:
If we wanted to access
out from another class, we could use
System.out to get that reference, correct? As you said: you can use the class name if the method [or field] is static. Now that we have a reference to our
PrintStream object (
System.out), we can do things with it by calling it's methods. We want to print something, so we call
println() on the object. All together, that's
System.out.println();
You can imagine it broken into steps, if that helps make things clearer:
Don't do that, though. ;)