lives through its distinctions, and becomes a dead identity, in no way distinguishable from the substance of Spinoza. Logic set up as absolute method reveals its self-contradiction by destroying itself. In a purely logical method the distinctions, the process, must disappear in the final unity, the product. Only a living actual Fact can preserve within its unity that organic system of differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being. It is with this fact, conscious experience in its entirety, -that psychology as method begins. It thus brings to clear light of day the presupposition implicit in every philosophy, and thereby affords logic, as well as the philosophy of nature, its basis, ideal and surety. If we have determined the nature of reality, by a process whose content equals its form, we can show the meaning, worth and limits of any one moment of this reality.
The conclusion of the whole matter is that a "being like man," since self-conscious, is an individualized universe, and hence that his nature is the proper material of philosophy, and in its wholeness the only material. Psychology is the science of this nature, and no dualism in it, or in ways of regarding it, is tenable. Whatever the dualism may be, it is only relative, and one which occurs within, not without, psychological experience. Psychology, as the complete systematic account of man, at the same time shows the value and meaning, and affords the condition, of the special sciences, the philosophy of nature and of logic. Or, in a word, if the reality of spirit be the presupposition, the prius and the goal, the condition and the end of all reality, the science of spirit must occupy a corresponding position with relation to all science. Surely then, as the Editor of Mind formerly urged, "the method of psychological approach is not philosophically valueless," and we have "ground for the belief that it has only to be more systematically followed out for the attaining of as great results as have been claimed for another way, while in this way the results are more likely to secure general acceptance"7 -- because, we may add, it simply expresses in a scientific way that which lies at the basis of all that has been otherwise secured.
Notes
1. Art. "Metaphysic," Ency. Britt., xvi, 89. Cp. Professor Adamson, Philosophy of Kant, pp. 22 ff., Fichte, pp. 109 ff.; Essays in Philosophical Criticism, pp. 44 ff.; Professor A. Seth, Ency. Britt., art. ''Philosophy".
2. Professor E. Caird, Mind, viii, 560.
3. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 52.
4. The insistence upon this seems to have been Lotze's great work as a philosopher.
5. Professor A. Seth, "Hegel: an Exposition and Criticism," Mind, 24.
6. The inability to go from the "because" of reason to the ''cause" of fact, from logic to reality, when logic is not taken simply as one movement within reality, is clearly set forth in the closing chapters of Mr. Bradley's Principles of Logic.
7. "Psychology and Philosophy," Mind, Vol. viii, 20.
The New Psychology
Bacon's dictum regarding the proneness of the mind, in explanation, towards unity and simplicity, at no matter what sacrifice of material, has found no more striking exemplification than that offered in the fortunes of psychology. The least developed of the sciences, for a hundred years it has borne in its presentations the air of the one most completely finished. The infinite detail and complexity of the simplest psychical life, its interweavings with the physical organism, with the life of others in the social organism,-- created no special difficulty; and in a book like James Mill's Analysis we find every mental phenomenon not only explained, but explained by reference to one principle. That rich and colored experience, never the same in two nations, in two individuals, in two moments of the same life,-- whose thoughts, desires, fears, and hopes have furnished the material for the ever-developing literature of the ages, for a Homer and a Chaucer, a Sophocles and a Shakespeare, for the unwritten tragedies and comedies of daily life,-- was neatly and carefully dissected, its parts labeled and stowed away in their proper pigeon-holes, the inventory taken, and the whole stamped with the stamp of un fait accompli. Schematism was supreme, and the air of finality was over all.
We know better now. We know that that life of man whose unfolding furnishes psychology its material is the most difficult and complicated subject which man can investigate. We have some consciousness of its ramifications and of its connections. We see that man is somewhat more than a neatly dovetailed psychical machine who may be taken as an isolated individual, laid on the dissecting table of analysis and duly anatomized. We know that his life is bound up with the life of society, of the nation in the ethos and nomos; we know that he is closely connected with all the past by the lines of education, tradition, and heredity; we know that man is indeed the microcosm who has gathered into himself the riches of the world, both of space and of time, the world physical and the world psychical. We know also of the complexities of the individual life. We know that our mental life is not a syllogistic sorites, but an enthymeme most of whose members are suppressed; that large tracts never come into consciousness; that those which do get into consciousness, are vague and transitory, with a meaning hard to catch and read; are infinitely complex, involving traces of the entire life history of the individual, or are vicarious, having significance only in that for which they stand; that psychical life is a continuance, having no breaks into "distinct ideas which are separate existences"; that analysis is but a process of abstraction, leaving us with a parcel of parts from which the " geistige Band" is absent; that our distinctions, however necessary, are unreal and largely arbitrary; that mind is no compartment box nor bureau of departmental powers; in short, that we know almost nothing about the actual activities and processes of the soul. We know that the old psychology gave descriptions of that which has for the most part no existence, and which at the best it but described and did not explain.
I do not say this to depreciate the work of the earlier psychologists. There is no need to cast stones at those who, having a work to do, did that work well and departed. With Sir William Hamilton and J. Stuart Mill the school passed away. It is true that many psychologists still use their language and follow their respective fashions. Their influence, no doubt, is yet everywhere felt. But changed conditions are upon us, and thought, no more than revolution, goes backward. Psychology can live no better in the past than physiology or physics; but there is no more need for us to revile Hume and Reid for not giving birth to a full and complete science, than there is for complaining that Newton did not anticipate the physical knowledge of to-day, orHarvey the physiological.
The work of the earlier psychologists bore a definite and necessary relation both to the scientific conditions and the times in which it was done. If they had recognized the complexity of the subject and attempted to deal with it, the science would never have been begun. The very condition of its existence was the neglect of the largest part of the material, the seizing of a few schematic ideas and principles, and their use for universal explanation. Very mechanical and very abstract to us, no doubt, seems their division of the mind into faculties, the classification of mental phenomena into the regular, graded, clear-cut series of sensation, image, concept, etc.; but let one take a look into the actual processes of his own mind, the actual course of the mental life there revealed, and he will realize how utterly impossible were the description, much more the explanation,
