[15] This apparatus was essentially the same as Scripture's device for the giving of tactual stimulation.
[16] For full discussion of the normal respiratory movements of the frog see Martin, Journal of Physiology, Vol. 1., 1878, pp. 131-170.
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY.
THE POSITION OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE.
BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG.
The modern efforts to bring all sciences into a system or at least to classify them, from Bacon to Spencer, Wundt and Pearson have never, if we abstract here from Hegel, given much attention to those questions of principle which are offered by the science of psychology. Of course the psychological separation of different mental functions has often given the whole scheme for the system, the classification thus being too often more psychological than logical. Psychology itself, moreover, has had for the most part a dignified position in the system; even when it has been fully subordinated to the biological sciences, it was on the other hand placed superior to the totality of mental and moral sciences, which then usually have found their unity under the positivistic heading 'sociology.' And where the independent position of psychology is acknowledged and the mental and moral sciences are fully accredited, as for instance with Wundt, psychology remains the fundamental science of all mental sciences; the objects with which philology, history, economics, politics, jurisprudence, theology deal are the products of the processes with which psychology deals, and philology, history, theology, etc., are thus related to psychology, as astronomy, geology, zoölogy are related to physics. There is thus nowhere a depreciation of psychology, and yet it is not in its right place. Such a position for psychology at the head of all 'Geisteswissenschaften' may furnish a very simple classification for it, but it is one which cannot express the difficult character of psychology and the complex relations of the system of mental sciences. The historical and philological and theological sciences cannot be subordinated to psychology if psychology as science is to be coördinated with physics, that is, if it is a science which describes and explains the psychical objects in the way in which physics describes and explains the physical objects. On the other hand, if it means in this central position of mental sciences a science which does not consider the inner life as an object, but as subjective activity needing to be interpreted and subjectively understood, not as to its elements, but as to its meaning, then we should have two kinds of psychology, one which explains and one which interprets. They would speak of different facts, the one of the inner life as objective content of consciousness, as phenomenon, the other of the inner life as subjective attitude, as purpose.
The fact is, that these two sciences exist to-day. There are psychologists who recognize both and keep them separated, others who hold to the one or the other as the only possible view; they are phenomenalists or voluntarists. Mostly both views are combined, either as psychological voluntarism with interposed concessions to phenomenalism or as phenomenalism with the well-known concessions to voluntarism at the deciding points. Further, those who claim that psychology must be phenomenalistic—and that is the opinion of the present writer—do not on that account hold that the propositions of voluntarism are wrong. On the contrary: voluntarism, we say, is right in every respect except in believing itself to be psychology. Voluntarism, we say, is the interpretative account of the real life, of immediate experience, whose reality is understood by understanding its meaning sympathetically, but we add that in this way an objective description can never be reached. Description presupposes objectivation; another aspect, not the natural aspect of life, must be chosen to fulfill the logical purposes of psychology: the voluntaristic inner life must be considered as content of consciousness while consciousness is then no longer an active subject but a passive spectator. Experience has then no longer any meaning in a voluntaristic sense; it is merely a complex of elements. We claim that every voluntaristic system as far as it offers descriptions and explanations has borrowed them from phenomenalistic psychology and is further filled up by fragments of logic, ethics and æsthetics, all of which refer to man in his voluntaristic aspect. We claim, therefore, that such a voluntaristic theory has no right to the name psychology, while we insist that it gives a more direct account of man's real life than psychology can hope to give, and, moreover, that it is the voluntaristic man whose purpose creates knowledge and thus creates the phenomenalistic aspect of man himself.
We say that the voluntaristic theory, the interpretation of our real attitudes, in short teleological knowledge, alone can account for the value and right of phenomenalistic psychology and it thus seems unfair to raise the objection of 'double bookkeeping.' These two aspects of inner life are not ultimately independent and exclusive; the subjective purposes of real life necessarily demand the labors of objectivistic psychology. The last word is thus not dualistic but monistic and the two truths supplement each other. But this supplementation must never be misinterpreted as meaning that the two sciences divide inner experience, as if, for instance, the phenomenalistic study dealt with perceptions and ideas, the voluntaristic with feelings and volitions. No, it is really a difference of logical purpose of treatment and thus a difference of points of view only; the whole experience without exception must be possible material for both. There is no feeling and no volition which is not for the phenomenalist a content of consciousness and nothing else. There is, on the other hand, no perception and no idea which is not, or better, ought not to be for the voluntarist a means, an aim, a tool, an end, an ideal. In that real life experience of which the voluntarist is speaking, every object is the object of will and those real objects have not been differentiated into physical things under the abstract categories of mechanics on the one hand, and psychical ideas of them in consciousness on the other; the voluntarist, if he is consistent, knows neither physical nor psychical phenomena. Phenomenalist and voluntarist thus do not see anything under the same aspect, neither the ideas nor the will.