Elements of metaphysics

by A. E. Taylor

§ 2. The Place of Psychology among the Sciences.—From the metaphysician’s point of view, it is of the utmost importance to recognise clearly and constantly that Psychology, like the other sciences, deals throughout not with the actual experiences of real subjects, but with “data” obtained by the artificial manipulation and transformation of actual experience into a shape dictated by certain special interests and purposes. This is a point upon which the idealist metaphysician, in particular, is peculiarly liable to go wrong when left to himself. Starting with the conviction that the key to the nature of existence as a whole is to be found in our own direct experience of our sentient and purposive life, he almost inevitably tends, unless he has given particular attention to the methodology of psychological science, to take it for granted that the concepts and hypotheses of the psychologist afford a description of this experience in its concrete directness, and may therefore be treated without misgiving as a fruitful source of certain knowledge about the inmost structure of the absolute or infinite individual itself. And even the reiterated demonstration that one or another of the current categories of Psychology cannot be predicated of the absolute whole of reality without flagrant contradiction, frequently fails to produce conviction where it is not accompanied by direct proof of the artificiality and remoteness from concrete actuality of the psychologist’s data. Hence it would be worse than useless to discuss such questions as, whether the infinite individual can properly be thought of as a “self” or an “ethical person,” or again as a “society of ethical persons,” or again whether finite “selves” are “eternal” or only transitory constituents of the world-system, without first arriving at some definite view as to the way in which these psychological concepts are derived from the concrete actualities of experience, the special interests which lead to their formulation, and the restrictions imposed by those interests on the sphere of their valid application.

That Psychology, like all descriptive science, deals throughout with data which are not concrete experience-realities, but artificial products of a process of abstraction and reconstruction, should be sufficiently clear from the very consideration that, like the other sciences, it is a body of general descriptions of typical situations. An actual process of knowing or acting, like every actual event, is always individual, and because of its individuality defies adequate description. It is only in so far as a situation admits of being generalised by the selection of certain of its aspects or qualities as representative of its whole reality, that it is capable of being described at all. Even History and Biography, in which the teleological interpretation of a series of events as internally united by the singleness of the purpose underlying them takes the place of external connection in accord with mechanical laws of sequence as the ideal of explanation, are only possible on the condition that such transformation of the concrete realities of life as is implied in such a degree of abstraction and reconstruction can be carried out without detriment to the special interests of the historian and the biographer. And Psychology is unreal and abstract even as compared with history. It provides us with general formulæ which are, or should be, valuable as affording a means of describing certain universal features of the processes of willing and knowing which it is desirable to study in isolation, but it is of itself as incapable of adequately tracing the actual course of a real process of willing or thinking, as Mechanics is of following the actual course of a real individual process in “external” nature. In this respect the concepts and formulæ of scientific Psychology stand on precisely the same footing, as regards their relation to the individual and actual, as do those of scientific Physics. Their truth and validity means simply that by substituting them for concrete actualities we can get answers to certain special questions which we have an interest in solving, not that they are unaltered transcripts of the actualities themselves.

This is perhaps most strikingly shown by observing that the very existence of Psychology as a distinct branch of science presupposes that artificial severance of the unity of direct experience into a physical order and a non-physical realm external to that order, of which we have already investigated the origin. Psychology has no subject-matter at all until we have first, for the practical reasons already discussed, constructed the physical order by the inclusion in it of all those experience-contents which are equally accessible under specified conditions to the observation of a plurality of subjects, and then gone on to assign to the realm of “psychical” or “mental” existence whatever experience-contents fall outside the system so defined. And this whole separation of the physical and the psychical or mental, as we have already seen, has no place in the direct experience of actual life. In actual life, until we come to reconstruct it in thought for the purposes of description and calculation, there are neither material bodies nor “immaterial minds” or “consciousnesses” which are “in” them or “animate” them; there are simply sentient and purposive beings and the environment of things to which they have to adjust themselves in the execution of their purposes. How and for what reasons this naïvely realistic view of existence comes to give place to the dualistic conception of a physical world and a plurality of non-physical beings in relation with it, we have already seen in our study of the methodology of the physical sciences. We have now to follow the development of the dualistic line of thought somewhat further, before we can see precisely what is the character of the logical reconstruction of actual experience presupposed by the existence of a science of Psychology.

§ 3. As we have already learned, our recognition of the actuality of our own and our fellow-men’s life of unique and incommunicable feeling compelled us to admit the existence of much that, from its incommunicable nature, falls outside the sphere of physical reality. We have now to see how Psychology, in taking this non-physical existence as its subject-matter, conceives of its mode of existence and its relation to the subject-matter of the physical sciences. In recent years, much light has been thrown upon the methodological problem in question by the labours of Avenarius and his followers, from whom the substance of our account will be largely drawn. What Avenarius has for the first time made perfectly clear is, that the psychological interpretation of our own experience is throughout based upon reading into that experience a theory originally devised to meet a difficulty suggested by the existence of our fellow-men.

We have already seen, in dealing with the subjectivist’s fallacy, what this difficulty is. So long as I am concerned only with the analysis of my own experience, there is nothing to suggest the distinction between a physical and a psychical aspect of existence. All that I require, or rather all that I should require had I any interest in analysing my own experience independent of the need for intercommunication, is the simpler and more primitive distinction between myself as one thing in the world and the other things which form my environment. But the case is altered when I come, after the creation of the concept of a physical order, to analyse the experience of my fellow-men. My fellow-men, on the one hand, belong to the physical order, and, as belonging to it, are known to me as objects cognisable through my senses. On the other hand, it is necessary for all the purposes of practical intercourse to credit them with the same kind of sentience and feeling which I directly know in myself. This sentience and feeling are, of course, inaccessible to the perception of my own senses; I can see my fellow’s eye and can hear his voice, but I cannot see that he sees or hear that he hears. My fellow thus comes to be thought of as having a double existence; besides that aspect of him in which he is simply one among other things perceived, or in principle perceptible, by my senses, he has another aspect, not directly perceptible but necessarily presupposed in all social relation with him. On the side of his body he belongs entirely to the physical order; but there is, associated with this bodily existence, another side to him which I call his psychical aspect. Now, how must this “psychical aspect” be supposed to be constituted when once it has come to be thus artificially separated in thought from the physical side of my fellow’s existence? It is here that the theory of “introjection,” as worked out by Avenarius, comes to our aid.

When I perceive any object directly, without sophisticating myself by devising psychological hypotheses about the process, what I am aware of is, on the one side, the thing as a constituent of my environment, and, on the other, a variety of movements or impulses to movement in myself, marked by a peculiar tone of satisfied or dissatisfied feeling, and determined by the relation in which the thing in question stands to my various interests. But when I come to explain to myself what is meant by my fellow-man’s assertion that he also perceives the same object, a difficulty seems to arise which renders this simple analysis inadequate. The perceived object, the sun for example, appears to belong to my world of sensible things, for I too see the sun. Not so my fellow-man’s perception of it; as I cannot “see him seeing the sun,” so to say, I find it hard to understand how the sun, which is a thing in my sensible world, can be an object for his perception, which is not in my sensible world. Hence I draw the inference that while I see the actual sun, the content of my fellow’s perception is an image or idea of the sun (cf. p. 81).

By the extension of this process of inference I come to think of the non-physical aspect of my fellow’s existence as consisting, as a whole, of a vast complex of successive ideas or images, attended with their characteristic tone of satisfied and dissatisfied feeling; as this series of “mental states” or “ideas” has now to be represented as in some way related to the sensible physical reality I call my fellow’s body, I imagine it as going on “within” his skin somewhere, and thus arrive at the conception of my fellow as a dualistic compound of a physical factor, perceptible by my senses, his body, and a non-physical factor, composed of a stream of “mental images,” and imperceptible to sense, his mind. One further step remains to be taken and the work of “introjection” is complete. That step is the artificial re-interpretation of my own experience in terms of the distinction I have been led to establish for the case of my fellow. I come to think of my own conscious life in terms of the distinction between body and mind, and to analyse what as originally experienced was the direct reaction of a unitary self upon the things which formed its environment into a succession of “mental states” or “images” going on “within” a body, their relation to which will yet form a prominent scientific problem.

Now, it is only when this process of “introjection” has reached its final issue, and the actual life of sentient purposive intercourse with the other actual things of our environment has been replaced in thought by the conception of a mental succession of “images” or “contents of consciousness,” taken to “refer” to “things” which are themselves “outside consciousness,” while the felt unity of experience has given way to the radical sundering of human existence into a physical and a psychical aspect, that we have reached the point of view from which psychological science takes its departure. Only when the actualities of experience have been artificially transformed into “mental states” or “images” of actualities by the hypothesis of “introjection,” and thus definitely constituted into a non-physical order, have we the materials for the construction of a special science of the “psychical side” of our nature. Psychology, in fact, presupposes “psychical states” as the material of its studies, and “psychical states” are not data of immediate experience, but symbols derived from and substituted for the actual data of experience by an elaborately artificial method of transformation. Hence we should be committing a grave fallacy in Logic if we were to argue that since subjects of experience are the sole real things, the hypotheses of Psychology must be the final metaphysical truth about the world.

When we attempt to criticise the logical validity of the process of “introjection,” and the scientific constructions of a Psychology built up on an introjectionist foundation, we cannot fail to observe certain apparent gross breaches of logic which affect it. In the first place, the fundamental assumption that my fellow’s “mental life” is composed of “images” of the actual things of my own experience, is clearly at variance with the principle previously implied in the construction, for purposes of co-operation, of the physical order as composed of things equally accessible to the perception of a plurality of individuals. This discrepancy is once more done away with, when the process of introjection has been completed, by the reduction of my own mental life to a succession of images or states of consciousness, but only at the cost of forgetting that the original motive to “introjection” was a supposed disparity between my own and my fellow’s relation to the physical things of my environment.

Hence it is not strange that Avenarius should apparently hold the whole introjectionist transformation of the “naïvely realistic” standpoint to be essentially fallacious, and should close his discussion of the subject with the proposition that all attempts to vary the “natural view of the world” lead to superfluities or contradictions.[^[168]] It does not, however, seem necessary to follow him in this unfavourable judgment. Indeed, if we reflect that such a thorough-going rejection of all the results of introjection must involve as a consequence the repudiation of the whole science of Psychology, a science which may fairly be said to be at present about as fully justified by its successful growth as most of the physical sciences, we shall probably be inclined to hold that a process so fruitful in results must have its logical justification, however artificial the assumptions upon which it rests.