quired sufficient unity and exclusiveness of aim to warrant their being regarded as a special science. But such is now so far the case that the psychologist of this type pursues his way quite independently of philosophy. It is true his research has advanced considerably beyond his understanding of its province. But it is generally recognized that he must examine those very factors of subjectivity which the natural scientist otherwise seeks to evade, and, furthermore, that he must seek to provide for them in nature. He treats the inner life in what Locke called "the plain historical method," that is to say, instead of interpreting and defining its ideas, he analyzes and reports upon its content. He would not seek to justify a moral judgment, as would ethics, or to criticise the cogency of thought, as would logic; but only to describe the actual state as he found it. In order to make his data commensurable with the phenomena of nature, he discovers or defines bodily conditions for the subjective content which he analyzes. His fundamental principle of method is the postulate of psycho-physical parallelism, according to which he assumes a state of brain or nervous system for every state of mind. But in adopting a province and a method the psychologist

foregoes finality of truth after the manner of all natural science. He deals admittedly with an aspect of experience, and his conclusions are no more adequate to the nature of the self than they are to the nature of outer objects. An admirable | reference to this abstract division of experience occurs in Külpe's "Introduction to Philosophy":

For the developed consciousness, as for the naive, every experience is an unitary whole; and it is only the habit of abstract reflection upon experience that makes the objective and subjective worlds seem to fall apart as originally different forms of existence. Just as & plane curve can be represented in analytical geometry as the function of two variables, the abscissæ and the ordinates, without prejudice to the unitary course of the curve itself, so the world of human experience may be reduced to a subjective and an objective factor, without prejudice to its real coherence." 10

Psychology

and Philosophy.

§ 100. The problems of psychology, like those of theology, tend to disappear as independent philosophical topics. The ultimate nature of the self will continue to interest philosophers—more deeply, perhaps, than any aspect of experience but their conception of it will be a corollary of their metaphysics and epistemology. The remainder of the field of the old philosophical psychology, the introspective and experimental

19 Translation by Pillsbury and Titchener, p. 59.

analysis of special states of mind, is already the province of a natural science which is becoming more and more free from the stand-point and method of philosophy.

from Classifi

cation by Problems to

§ 101. Reminding ourselves anew that philosophical problems cannot be treated in isolation Transition from one another, we shall hereinafter seek to become acquainted with general Classification stand-points that give systematic unity to the issues which have been enumerSubjectivism. ated. Such stand-points are not clearly defined by those who occupy them,

by Doctrines. Naturalism.

Absolute

Idealism.

Absolute

Realism.

and they afford no clear-cut classification of all historical philosophical philosophies. But system-making in philosophy is commonly due to the moving in an individual mind of some most significant idea; and certain of these ideas have reappeared so frequently as to define more or less clearly marked tendencies, or continuous strands, out of which the history of thought is forever weaving itself. Such is clearly the case with naturalism. From the beginning until now there have been men whose philosophy is a summation of the natural sciences, whose entire thought is based upon an acceptance of the methods and the fundamental conceptions

1

:

of these disciplines. This tendency stands in the history of thought for the conviction that the visible and tangible world which interacts with the body is veritable reality. This philosophy is realistic and empirical to an extent entirely determined by its belief concerning being. But while naturalism is only secondarily epistemological, subjectivism and absolute idealism have their very source in the self-examination and the selfcriticism of thought. Subjectivism signifies the conviction that the knower cannot escape himself. If reality is to be kept within the range of possible knowledge, it must be defined in terms of the processes or states of selves. Absolute idealism arises from a union of this epistemological motive with a recognition of what are regarded as the logical necessities to which reality must submit. Reality must be both knowledge and rational knowledge; the object, in short, of an absolute 1 mind, which shall be at once all-containing and systematic. This rationalistic motive was, how ever, not originally associated with an idealistic epistemology, but with the common-sense principle that being is discovered and not constituted by thought. Such an absolute realism is, like naturalism, primarily metaphysical rather than episte

mological; but, unlike naturalism, it seeks to define reality as a logical or ethical necessity.

Under these several divisions, then, we shall meet once more with the special problems of philosophy, but this time they will be ranged in an order that is determined by some central doctrine. They will appear as parts not of the general problem of philosophy, but of some definite system of philosophy.