Philosophy and Philosophical Studies

The last abstraction which it becomes the duty of philosophy to remove is the abstraction from the knowing subject which is made by all the sciences, including, as we shall see, the science of psychology. The sciences, one and all, deal with a world of objects, but the ultimate fact as we know it is the existence of an object for a subject. Subject-object, knowledge, or, more widely, self-consciousness with its implicates—this unity in duality is the ultimate aspect which reality presents. It has generally been considered, therefore, as constituting in a special sense the problem of philosophy. Philosophy may be said to be the explica tion of what is involved in this relation, or, in Kantian phraseology, a theory of its possibility. Any would-be theory of the universe which makes its central fact impossible stands self-condemned. On the other hand, a sufficient analysis here may be expected to yield us a statement of the reality of things in its last terms, and thus to shed a light backwards upon the true nature of our sub ordinate conceptions.

Psychology, Epistemology and Ontology.

This leads to the consideration of the main divisions of philosophy--psychol ogy (q.v.), epistemology (theory of knowledge) and ontology. A special relation has always existed between psychology and sys tematic philosophy, but the closeness of the connection has been characteristic of modern and more particularly of English thought. The connection is not difficult to explain, seeing that in psychology, or the science of mind, we study the fact of intelligence (and moral action), and have, so far, in our hands the fact to which all other facts are relative. From this point of view we may even see a truth in Jacobi's dictum as quoted by Sir W. Hamilton: "Nature conceals God; man reveals God." Nature by itself, that is to say, is insufficient. The ultimate explanation of things cannot be given by any theory which excludes from its survey the in telligence in which nature, as it were, gathers herself up. But knowledge, or the mind as knowing, willing, etc., may be looked at in two different ways. It may be regarded simply as a fact; in which case the evolution of mind may be traced and reduced to laws in the same way as the phenomena treated by the other sciences. This study gives us the science of empirical psychology, or, as it is now termed, psychology sans phrase. In order to give an adequate account of its subject-matter, psychology may re quire higher or more complex categories than are employed in the other sciences, just as biology, for example, cannot work with mechanical categories alone, but introduces the conception of development or growth. But the affinities of such a study are manifestly with the sciences as such rather than with philos ophy ; and the definitive establishment of psychology as an inde pendent science has already been alluded to. Since it has been taken up by specialists, psychology is being established on a broader basis of induction, and with the advantage, in some depart ments, of the employment of experimental methods of measure ment. But it is not of mind in this aspect that such assertions can be made as those quoted above. Mind, as studied by the psychol ogist—mind as a mere fact or phenomenon—grounds no inference to anything beyond itself. The distinction between mind viewed as a succession of "states of consciousness" and the further aspect of mind which philosophy considers was very clearly put by Croom Robertson, who also made a happy suggestion of two terms to designate the double point of view : "We may view knowledge as mere subjective function, but it has its full meaning only as it is taken to represent what we may call objective fact, or is such as is named (in different circum stances) real, valid, true. As mere subjective function, which it is

to the psychologist, it is best spoken of by an unambiguous name, and for this there seems none better than Intellection. We may then say that psychology is occupied with the natural function of Intellection, seeking to discover its laws and distinguishing its various modes (perception, representative imagination, conception, etc.) according to the various circumstances in which the laws are found at work. Philosophy, on the other hand, is theory of Knowledge (as that which is known)."—"Psychology and Phil osophy," Mind (1883), pp. i 5, 16.

The confusion of these two points of view has led, and still leads, to serious philosophical misconception. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, in the English school since Hume, psychology superseded properly philosophical inquiry. And we find even a thinker with a wider horizon like Sir W. Hamilton encouraging the confusion by speaking of "psychology or meta physics," while his lectures on metaphysics are mainly taken up with what belongs in the strictest sense to psychology proper, with an occasional excursus (as in the theory of perception) into epistemology. The distinction between psychology and theory of knowledge was first clearly made by Kant, who repeatedly in sisted that the Critique of Pure Reason was not to be taken as a psychological inquiry. He defined his problem as the quid juris or the question of the validity of knowledge, not its quid facti or the laws of the empirical genesis and evolution of intellection (to use Croom Robertson's phraseology). Since Kant, philosophy has chiefly taken the form of theory of knowledge or of a criticism of experience. Not, indeed, a preliminary criticism of our faculties or conceptions such as Kant himself proposed to institute, in order to determine the limits of their application; such a criticism ab extra of the nature of our experience is essentially a thing im possible. The only criticism which can be applied in such a case is the immanent criticism which the conceptions or categories exercise upon one another. The organized criticism of these con ceptions is really nothing more than the full explication of what they mean and of what experience in its full nature or notion is. This constitutes the theory of knowledge in the only tenable sense of the term, and it lays down, in Kantian language, the conditions of the possibility of experience. These conditions are the con ditions of knowledge as such, or, as it may be put, of objective consciousness—of a self-consciousness of a world of objects and through them conscious of itself. The inquiry is, therefore, transcendental in its nature, and does not entangle us in any de cision as to the conditions of the genesis of such consciousness in the individual. When we inquire into subjective conditions we are thinking of facts causing other facts. But the transcendental con ditions are not causes or even factors of knowledge; they are the statement of its idea. Hence the dispute between evolutionist and transcendentalist rests, in general, on an ignoratio elenchi; for the history of the genesis of an idea does not contain an answer to— though it may throw light on—the philosophical question of its truth or validity. Speaking of this transcendental consciousness, Kant goes so far as to say that it is not of the slightest conse quence "whether the idea of it be clear or obscure (in empirical consciousness), no, not even whether it really exists or not. But the possibility of the logical form of all knowledge rests on its relation to this apperception as a faculty or potentiality" (Werke, ed. Hartenstein, iii. 578 note).