Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 / Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.

by Unknown

This difference is wrongly set forth if the antithesis to voluntarism is called intellectualism. Intellectualism is based on the category of judgment, and judgment too is a ideological attitude. Phenomenalism does not presuppose a subject which knows its contents but a subject which simply has its contents; the consciousness which has the thought as content does not take through that the voluntaristic attitude of knowing it and the psychologist has therefore no reason to prefer the thought to the volition and thus to play the intellectualist. If the psychologist does emphasize the idea and its elements, the sensations, it is not because they are vehicles of thought but because their relations to physical objects make them vehicles of communication. The elements of ideas are negotiable and thus through their reference to the common physical world indirectly describable; as the elements of ideas are alone in this position, the psychologist is obliged to consider all contents of consciousness, ideas and volitions alike, as complexes of sensations.

The antithesis is also misinterpreted, or at least wrongly narrowed, if it is called voluntarism versus associationism. Recent discussions have sufficiently shown that the principle of association is not the only possible one for phenomenalistic theories. If associationism is identified with objective psychology, all the well-founded objections to the monopoly of the somewhat sterile principle of association appear as objections to phenomenalism in psychology, and voluntaristic theories, especially those which work with the teleological category of apperception, are put in its place. But without returning to apperceptionism we can overcome the one-sidedness of associationism if full use is made of the means which the world of phenomena offers to theory. The insufficiency of associationism disappears if the content of consciousness is considered as variable not only as to quality and intensity but also as to vividness. This variation of vividness, on the other hand, is no exception from the psychophysical parallelism as soon as the psychical process is considered as dependent not only upon the local and quantitative differences of the sensory process but also upon the motor function of the central physical process. The one-sidedness of the physiological sensory theories has been the hidden reason for the one-sidedness of associationism. The sensory-motor system must be understood as the physical basis of the psychophysical process and the variations in the motor discharge then become conditions of those psychical variations of vividness which explain objectively all those phenomena in whose interest associationism is usually supplemented by apperceptionism. The association theory must thus be given up in favor of an 'action-theory'[1] which combines the consistency of phenomenalistic explanation with a full acknowledgment of the so-called apperceptive processes; it avoids thus the deficiency of associationism and the logical inconsistency of apperceptionism.

Only if in this way the sciences of voluntaristic type, including all historical and normative sciences, are fully separated from phenomenalistic psychology, will there appear on the psychological side room for a scientific treatment of the phenomena of social life, that is, for sociology, social psychology, folk-psychology, psychical anthropology and many similar sciences. All of them have been in the usual system either crowded out by the fact that history and the other mental sciences have taken all the room or have been simply identified with the mental sciences themselves. And yet all those sciences exist, and a real system of sciences must do justice to all of them. A modern classification has perhaps no longer the right as in Bacon's time to improve the system by inventing new sciences which have as yet no existence, but it has certainly the duty not to ignore important departments of knowledge and not to throw together different sciences like the descriptive phenomenalistic account of inner life and its interpretative voluntaristic account merely because each sometimes calls itself psychology. A classification of sciences which is to be more than a catalogue fulfills its logical function only by a careful disentanglement of logically different functions which are externally connected. Psychology and the totality of psychological, philosophical and historical sciences offer in that respect far more difficulty than the physical sciences, which have absorbed up to this time the chief interest of the classifier. It is time to follow up the ramifications of knowledge with special interest for these neglected problems. It is clear that in such a system sciences which refer to the same objects may be widely separated, and sciences whose objects are unlike may be grouped together. This is not an objection; it indicates that a system is more than a mere pigeon-holing of scholarly work, that it determines the logical relations; in this way only can it indeed become helpful to the progress of science itself.

The most direct way to our end is clearly that of graphic representation wherein the relations are at once apparent. Of course such a map is a symbol and not an argument; it indicates the results of thought without any effort to justify them. I have given my arguments for the fundamental principles of the divisions in my 'Grundzüge der Psychologie' and have repeated a few points more popularly in 'Psychology and Life,' especially in the chapter on 'Psychology and History.' And yet this graphic appendix to the Grundzüge may not be superfluous, as the fulness of a bulky volume cannot bring out clearly enough the fundamental relations; the detail hides the principles. The parallelism of logical movements in the different fields especially becomes more obvious in the graphic form. Above all, the book discussed merely those groups which had direct relation to psychology; a systematic classification must leave no remainder. Of course here too I have not covered the whole field of human sciences, as the more detailed ramification offers for our purpose no logical interest; to subdivide physics or chemistry, the history of nations or of languages, practical jurisprudence or theology, engineering or surgery, would be a useless overburdening of the diagram without throwing new light on the internal relations of knowledge.

Without now entering more fully into any arguments, I may indicate in a few words the characteristic features of the graphically presented proposition. At the very outset we must make it clear that phenomena and voluntaristic attitudes are not coördinated, but that the reality of phenomena is logically dependent upon voluntaristic attitudes directed towards the ideal of knowledge. And yet it would be misleading to place the totality of phenomenalistic sciences as a subdivision under the teleological sciences. Possible it would be; we might have under the sciences of logical attitudes not only logic and mathematics but as a subdivision of these, again, the sciences which construct the logical system of a phenomenalistic world—physics being in this sense merely mathematics with the conception of substance added. And yet we must not forget that the teleological attitudes, to become a teleological science, must be also logically reconstructed, as they must be teleologically connected, and thus in this way the totality of purpose-sciences might be, too, logically subordinated to the science of logic. Logic itself would thus become a subdivision of logic. We should thus move in a circle, from which the only way out is to indicate the teleological character of all sciences by starting not with science but with the strictly teleological conception of life—life as a system of purposes, felt in immediate experience, and not as the object of phenomenalistic knowledge. Life as activity divides itself then into different purposes which we discriminate not by knowledge but by immediate feeling; one of them is knowledge, that is, the effort to make life, its attitudes, its means and ends a connected system of overindividual value. In the service of this logical task we connect the real attitudes and thus come to the knowledge of purposes: and we connect the means and ends—by abstracting from our subjective attitudes, considering the objects of will as independent phenomena—and thus come to phenomenalistic knowledge. At this stage the phenomenalistic sciences are no longer dependent upon the teleological ones, but coördinated with them; physics, for instance, is a logical purpose of life, but not a branch of logic: the only branch of logic in question is the philosophy of physics which examines the logical conditions under which physics is possible.

One point only may at once be mentioned in this connection. While we have coördinated the knowledge of phenomena with the knowledge of purposes we have subordinated mathematics to the latter. As a matter of course much can be said against such a decision, and the authority of most mathematicians would be opposed to it. They would say that the mathematical objects are independent realities whose properties we study like those of nature, whose relations we 'observe,' whose existence we 'discover' and in which we are interested because they belong to the real world. All that is true, and yet the objects of the mathematician are objects made by the will, by the logical will, only, and thus different from all phenomena into which sensation enters. The mathematician, of course, does not reflect on the purely logical origin of the objects which he studies, but the system of knowledge must give to the study of the mathematical objects its place in the group where the functions and products of logical thought are classified. The arithmetical or geometrical material is a free creation, and a creation not only as to the combination of elements—that would be the case with many laboratory substances of the chemist too—but a creation as to the elements themselves, and the value of the creation, its 'mathematical interest,' is to be judged by ideals of thought, that is, by logical purposes. No doubt this logical purpose is its application in the world of phenomena, and the mathematical concept must thus fit the world so absolutely that it can be conceived as a description of the world after abstracting not only from the will relations, as physics does, but also from the content. Mathematics would then be the phenomenalistic science of the form and order of the world. In this way mathematics has a claim to places in both fields: among the phenomenalistic sciences if we emphasize its applicability to the world, and among the teleological sciences if we emphasize the free creation of its objects by the logical will. It seems to me that a logical system as such has to prefer the latter emphasis; we thus group mathematics beside logic and the theory of knowledge as a science of objects freely created for purposes of thought.

All logical knowledge is divided into Theoretical and Practical. The modern classifications have mostly excluded the practical sciences from the system, rightly insisting that no facts are known in the practical sciences which are not in principle covered by the theoretical sciences; it is art which is superadded, but not a new kind of knowledge. This is quite true so far as a classification of objects of knowledge is in question, but as soon as logical tasks as such are to be classified and different aspects count as different sciences, then it becomes desirable to discriminate between the sciences which take the attitude of theoretical interest and those which consider the same facts as related to certain human ends. But we may at first consider the theoretical sciences only. They deal either with the objectified world, with objects of consciousness which are describable and explainable, or with the subjectivistic world of real life in which all reality is experienced as will and as object of will, in which everything is to be understood by interpretation of its meaning. In other words, we deal in one case with phenomena and in the other with purposes.

The further subdivision must be the same for both groups—that which is merely individual and that which is 'overindividual'; we prefer the latter term to the word 'general,' to indicate at once that not a numerical but a teleological difference is in question. A phenomenon is given to overindividual consciousness if it is experienced with the understanding that it can be an object for every one whom we acknowledge as subject; and a purpose is given to overindividual will in so far as it is conceived as ultimately belonging to every subject which we acknowledge. The overindividual phenomena are, of course, the physical objects, the individual phenomena the psychical objects, the overindividual purposes are the norms, the individual purposes are the acts which constitute the historical world. We have thus four fundamental groups: the physical, the psychological, the normative and the historical sciences.

Whoever denies overindividual reality finds himself in the world of phenomena a solipsist and in the world of purposes a sceptic: there is no objective physical world, everything is my idea, and there is no objective value, no truth, no morality, everything is my individual decision. But to deny truth and morality means to contradict the very denial, because the denial itself as judgment demands acknowledgment of this objective truth and as action demands acknowledgment of the moral duty to speak the truth. And if an overindividual purpose cannot be denied, it follows that there is a community of individual subjects whose phenomena cannot be absolutely different: there must be an objective world of overindividual objects.

In each of the four groups of sciences we must consider the facts either with regard to the general relations or with regard to the special material; the abstract general relations refer to every possible material, the concrete facts which fall under them demand sciences of their own. In the world of phenomena the general relations are causal laws—physical or psychical laws; in the world of purposes theories of teleological interrelations—normative or historical; the specific concrete facts are in the world of phenomena objects, physical or psychical objects, in the world of purposes acts of will—specific norms or historical acts. If we turn first to phenomena, the laws thereof are expressed in the physical sciences, by mechanics, physics, chemistry, and we make mechanics the superior as chemistry must become ultimately the mechanics of atoms. In the psychological sciences the science of laws is psychology, with the side-branch of animal psychology, while human psychology refers to individuals and to social groups. Social psychology, as over against individual psychology, is thus a science of general laws, the laws of those psychological phenomena which result from the mutual influence of several individuals.