[81] I am thinking of Münsterberg’s contention in his Grundzüge and his other books, that the life of actual persons can never be adequately described by the objective sciences, by psycho-physics, and so on, and of his apparent acceptance of the distinction of Rickert between the “descriptive” and the “normative” sciences (logic, ethics, aesthetics, and so on).
[82] The leaders of this school are the two influential thinkers and teachers Cohen and Natorp, the former the author of a well-known book upon Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871), formerly much used by English and American students, and the latter the author of an equally famous book upon Plato’s Theory of Ideas, which makes an interesting attempt to connect Plato’s “Ideas” with the modern notion of the law of a phenomenon. Cohen has given forth recently an important development of the Kantian philosophy in his two remarkable books upon the Logic of Pure Knowledge and the Ethic of the Pure Will. These works exercise a great influence upon the entire liberal (Protestant and Jewish) thought of the time in Germany. They teach a lofty spiritualism and idealism in the realm of ethics, which transcends altogether anything as yet attempted in this direction by Pragmatism.
[83] See the instructive reports to the Philosophical Review by Dr. Ewald of Vienna upon Contemporary Philosophy in Germany. In the 1907 volume he speaks of this renewed interest, “on a new basis,” in the work of the great founders of transcendentalism as an “important movement partly within and partly outside of Neo-Kantianism,” as “a movement heralded by some and derided by others as a reaction,” as the “fulfilment of a prophecy by von Hartmann that after Kant we should have Fichte, and after Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.” The renewed interest in Schelling, and with it the revival of an interest in university courses in the subject of the Philosophy of Nature (see the recent work of Driesch upon the Science and Philosophy of the Organism) is all part of the recent reaction in Germany against Positivism.
[84] We may associate, I suppose, the new German journal Logos, an international periodical for the “Philosophie der Kultur,” with the same movement.
[85] See [Chapter VII.] upon “Pragmatism as Americanism.”
[86] See an article in the Critical Review (edited by the late Professor Salmond, of Aberdeen), by the author upon “Recent Tendencies in American Philosophy.” The year, I think, was either 1904 or 1905.
[88] Without pretending to anything like a representative or an exhaustive statement in the case of this magazine literature, I may mention the following: Professor Perry of Harvard, in his valuable articles for the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, 1907, vol. iv., upon “A Review of Pragmatism as a Philosophical Generalization,” and a “Review of Pragmatism as a Theory of Knowledge”; Professor Armstrong in vol. v. of the same journal upon the “Evolution of Pragmatism”; and Professor Lovejoy in the 1908 vol. upon the “Thirteen Pragmatisms.” These are but a few out of the many that might be mentioned. The reader who is interested in looking for more such must simply consult for himself the Philosophical Review, and Mind, and the Journal of Philosophy and Psychology, for some years after, say, 1903. There is a good list of such articles in a German Doctor Thesis by Professor MacEachran of the University of Alberta, entitled Pragmatismus eine neue Richtung der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1910. There is also a history of pragmatist articles in the 1907 (January) number of the Revue des Sciences, Philosophiques et Theologiques.
[89] That this has really taken place can be clearly seen, I think, if we inspect the official programmes of the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association for the last year or two.
[90] P. 144.