The self-conscious intellect improved by the positive product of philosophy knows that it can understand, describe, the whole world in a natural, sensible way. There is nothing that can resist it. But in the sense of a transcendental metaphysics, our understanding is not worthy of that name. In return, this metaphysics is pure vagary in the eyes of critical reason.
Taking its departure from fantastical ideals, from contradictions, especially between being and not being, metaphysics has gradually transformed itself in the course of civilization and become philosophy, which in its turn has progressed step by step the same as all other science.
Philosophy was at first impelled by the nebulous desire for universal world wisdom and has finally assumed the form of a lucid special investigation of the theory of understanding.
This theory is part, and the most essential part at that, of psychology or the science of the soul. Modern psychologists have at least divined, if not recognized, that the human soul is not a metaphysical thing, but a phenomenon. Like Professor Haeckel, they also complain about the dead classification in their specialty. The human soul is presented to them as a multitude of faculties. There is the faculty of understanding, of feeling, of perceiving, etc., without number and end. But how is life infused into them? Where is the consistent connection?
There is, for instance, the conception and feeling of beauty in the human soul. The beautiful again is divided into the artistically beautiful and the ethically beautiful, and each of these into other subdivisions. There is beside the beautiful also the pretty, the charming, the graceful, the dignified, the noble, the solemn, the splendid, the pathetic, the touching. Psychology also treats of the ridiculous, of the joke, the wit, the satire, the irony, the humor, of a thousand subtleties and distinctions, the ideological separation of which it attempts just as do botany, zoology, and every other science in their field.
To all of them, being is the object of study. What is the use of metaphysics under these circumstances? Only because it had in mind a different being, a transcendental one, could it induce Kant to sum up all his studies in the question: How is metaphysics possible as a science?
It is the merit of philosophy to have demonstrated that metaphysics is possible only as fantastical speculation.
It is the business of metaphysics to treat being transcendentally. It is the business of special sciences to classify being after the manner of herbarium botany. Classical order is already present in the vegetable kingdom, otherwise no specialist in botany could classify it.
But the objective arrangement of the vegetable kingdom in infinitely more multiform than the subjective arrangement of botany. The latter is always excellent, if it corresponds to the scientific progress of its period. Whoever is looking for absolute botany or psychology, or for any other absolute science, misunderstands the universally natural character of the absolute as well as the relative special character of the human faculty of understanding.
Philosophy familiar with its historical achievement understands being as the infinite material of life and science which is taken up by the special sciences and classified by them. It teaches the specialists to remember throughout all their classifications according to departments and concepts that all specialties are connected by life and not so separated in life as they are in science, but that they are flowing and passing into one another.