Psychology and the Real Life

THE world of science and learning, as well as the social world, has its alternating seasons and its capricious fashions. Mathematics and philosophy, theology and physics, philology and history, each has had its great time ; each was once favored by both the leaders of knowledge and the crowd of imitating followers. The nineteenth century, which began with high philosophical inspirations, has turned decidedly toward natural science ; the description of the universe by dissolving it into its atomistic elements, and the explanation by natural laws without regard for the meaning and the value of the world, has been the scientific goal. But this movement toward naturalistic dissolution has also gone through several phases. It started with the rapid development of physics and chemistry, which brought as a practical result the wonderful gifts of technique. From the inorganic world the scientific interest turned toward the organic world. For a few decades, physiology, the science of the living organism, enjoyed an almost unsurpassed development, and brought as its practical outcome modern medicine. From the functions of the single organism the public interest has been drawn to the problems of the evolution of the organic world as a whole. Darwinism has invaded the educated quarters, and its practical consequence has been rightly or wrongly a revolution against dogmatic traditions.

Finally, the interests of the century have gone a step further, — the last step which naturalism can take. If the physical and the chemical, the physiological and the biological world, in short the whole world of outer experience, is atomized and explained, there remains only the world of inner experience, the world of the conscious personality to be brought under the views of natural science. The period of psychology, of the natural science of the mental life, began. It began ten, perhaps fifteen years ago, and we are living in the middle of it. No Edison and no Roentgen can make us forget that the great historical time of physics and physiology is gone ; psychology takes the central place in the thought of our time, and overflows into all channels of our life. It began with an analysis of the simple ideas and feelings, and it has developed to an insight into the mechanism of the highest acts and emotions, thoughts and creations. It started by studying the mental life of the individual, and it has rushed forward to the psychical organization of society, to the social psychology, to the psychology of art and science, religion and language, history and law. It began with an increased carefulness of self-observation, and it has developed to an experimental science, with the most elaborate methods of technique, and with scores of big laboratories in its service. It started in the narrow circles of philosophers, and it is now at home wherever mental life is touched. The historian strives to-day for psychological explanation, the economist for psychological laws ; jurisprudence looks on the criminal from a psychological standpoint ; medicine emphasizes the psychological value of its assistance ; the realistic artist and poet fight for psychological truth ; the biologist mixes psychology in his theories of evolution ; the philologist explains the languages psychologically ; and while æsthetical criticism systematically coquets with psychology, pedagogy seems even ready to marry her.

As the earlier stages of naturalistic interests, the rush toward physics, physiology, biology, were each, as we have seen, of characteristic influence on the practical questions of real life, it is a matter of course that this highest and most radical type of naturalistic thinking, the naturalistic dissolution of mental life, must stir up and even revolutionize the whole practical world. From the nursery to the university, from the hospital to the court of justice, from the theatre to the church, from the parlor to the parliament, the new influence of psychology on the real daily life is felt in this country as in Europe, producing new hopes and new fears, new schemes and new responsibilities.

Let us consider the world we live in, from the point of view of this new creed. What becomes of the universe and what of the human race, what becomes of our duty and what of our freedom, what becomes of our friends and what of ourselves, if psychology is not only true, but the only truth, and has to determine the values of our real life ?

What is our personality, seen from the psychological point of view ? We separate the consciousness and the content of consciousness. From the standpoint of psychology, — I mean a consistent psychology, not a psychology that lives by all kinds of compromises with philosophy and ethics, — from the standpoint of psychology the consciousness itself is in no way a personality ; it is only an abstraction from the totality of conscious facts, — an abstraction just as the conception of nature is abstracted from the natural physical objects. Consciousness does not do anything ; consciousness is only the empty place for the manifoldness of psychical facts ; it is the mere presupposition making possible the existence of the content of consciousness, but every thought and feeling and volition must be itself such a content of consciousness. Personality, too, is thus a content; it is the central content of our consciousness, and psychology can show in a convincing way how this fundamental idea grows and influences the development of mental life. We know how the whole idea of personality crystallizes about those tactual and muscular and optical sensations which come from the body; how at first the child does not discriminate his own limbs from the outside objects he sees; and how slowly the experiences, the pains, the successes, which connect themselves with the movements and contacts of this one body blur into the idea of that central object, our physical personality, into which the mental experiences become gradually introjected.

Psychology shows how this idea of the Ego grows steadily together with the idea of the Alter, and how it associates itself with the whole manifoldness of personal achievements and experiences. Psychology shows how it develops itself toward a sociological personality, including now everything which works in the world under the control of our will, in the interest of our influence, just as our body works, including thus our name and our clothing, our friends and our work, our property and our social community. Psychology shows how, on the other hand, this idea can shrink and expel everything which is not essential for the continuity of this central group of psychical contents. Our personality does not depend upon our chance knowledge and chance sensations ; it remains, once formed, if we lose even our arms and legs with their sensations ; and thus the personality becomes that most central group of psychical contents which accompany the transformation of experiences into actions; that is, feelings and will. Psychology demonstrates thus a whole scale of personalities in every one of us, — the psychological one, the sociological one, the ideal one; but each one is and can be only a group of psychical contents, a bundle of sensational elements. It is an idea which is endlessly more complicated, but in principle not otherwise constituted, than the idea of our table or our horse ; just as, from the point of view of chemistry, the substance which we call a human body is in principle not otherwise constituted than any other physical thing. The influence of the idea of personality means psychologically, then, its associative and inhibitory effects on the mechanism of the other contents of consciousness, and the unity and continuity of the personality mean that causal connection of its parts by which anything that has once entered our psychical life maybe at any time reproduced, and may help to change the associative effects which come from the idea of ourselves.

Has this psychological personality freedom of will? Certainly. Everything depends in this case upon the definitions, and the psychologist can easily construct a conception of freedom which is in the highest degree realized in the psychophysical organism and its psychological experiences. Freedom of will means to him absence of an outer force, or of pathological disturbance in the causation of our actions. We are free, as our actions are not the mere outcome of conditions which lie outside of our organism, but the product of our own motives and their normal connections. All our experiences and thoughts, our inherited dispositions and trained habits, our hopes and fears, are coöperating in our consciousness and its physiological substratum, in our brain, to bring out the action. Under the same outer conditions, somebody else would have acted otherwise ; or we ourselves should have preferred and done something else, if our memory or our imagination or our reason had furnished some other associations. The act is ours, we are responsible, we could have stopped it; and only those are unfree, and therefore irresponsible, who are the passive sufferers from an outer force, or who have no normal mental mechanism for the production of their action, a psychophysical disturbance which might come as a kind of outer force to paralyze the organism ; it might be alcohol or poison, hypnotism or brain disease, which comes as an intruder to inhibit the regular free play of the motives.

Of course, if we should ask the psychologist whether this unfree and that free action stand differently to the psychological and physiological laws, he would answer only with a smile. To think that freedom of will means independence of psychological laws is to him an absurdity ; our free action is just as much determined by laws, and just as psychologically necessary, as the irresponsible action of the hypnotized or of the maniacal subject. That the whole world of mental facts is determined by laws, and that therefore in the mental world just, as little as in the physical universe do wonders happen, — that is the necessary presupposition of psychology, which it does not discuss, but takes for granted. If the perceptions and associations and feelings and emotions and dispositions are all given, the action must necessarily happen as it does. The effect is absolutely determined by the combination of causes; only the effect is a free one, because those causes were lying within us. To be sure, those causes and motives in us have themselves again causes, and these deeper causes may not lie in ourselves. We have not ourselves chosen all the experiences of our lives; we have not ourselves picked out the knowledge with which our early instruction provided us ; we have not ourselves created those brain dispositions and talents and tendencies which form in us the decisions and actions. And so the causes refer to our ancestors and our teachers and the surrounding conditions of society, and with the causes must the responsibility be pushed backwards. The unhealthy parents, and not the immoral children, are responsible; the unfitted teacher, and not the misbehaving pupil, should be blamed ; society, and not the criminal, is guilty. To take it in its most general meaning, the eosmical elements, with their general laws, and not we single mortals, are the fools !

The actions of personalities form the substance of history. Whatever men have created by their will in politics and social relations, in art and science, in technics and law, is the object of the historian’s interest. What that all means, seen through the spectacles of psychology, is easily deduced. The historical material is made up of will functions of personalities ; personalities are special groups of psychophysical elements ; freewill functions are necessary products of the foregoing psychophysical conditions; history, therefore, is the report about a large series of causally determined psychophysical processes which happened to happen. But it is a matter of course that the photographic and phonographic copy of raw material does not constitute a science. Science has everywhere to go forward from the single unconnected data to the general relations and connections. Consequently, history as a scientific undertaking is not satisfied with the kinematographic view of all the mental processes which ever passed through human brains, but it presses toward general connection, and the generalizations for single processes are the causal laws which underlie them. The aim of history, then, must be to find the constant psychological laws which control the development of nations and races, and which produce the leader and the mob, the genius and the crowd, war and peace, progress and social diseases. The great economic and climatic factors in the evolution of the human race come into the foreground ; the single individual and the single event disappear from sight; the extraordinary man becomes now the extreme case of the average crowd, produced by a chance combination of dispositions and conditions ; genius and insanity begin to touch each other; nothing is new ; the same conditions bring again and again the same effects in new masks and gowns ; history, with all its branches, becomes a vast department of social psychology.

But if the free actions of the historical personalities are the necessarily determined functions of the psychophysical organisms, what else are and can be the norms and laws which these personalities obey? Certainly, the question which such laws answer, the question what ought to be, does not coincide with the question what is ; but even that " ought ” exists only as a psychical content in the consciousness of men, as a content which gets the character of a command only by its associative and inhibitory relations to our feelings and emotions. In short, it is a psychical content which may be characterized by special effects on the psychological mechanism of associations and actions, but which is in principle coördinated to every other psychical idea, and which grows and varies, therefore, in human minds, under the same laws of adaptation and inheritance and tradition as every other mental thing. Our ethical laws are, then, the necessary products of psychological laws, changing with climate and race and food and institutions, types of action desirable for the conservation of the social organism. And just the same must be true for the æsthetical and even for the logical rides and laws. Natural processes have in a long evolutionary development produced brains which connect psychological facts in a useful correspondence to the surrounding physical world ; an apparatus which connects psychical facts in a way which misleads in the outer physical world is badly adapted, and must be lost in the struggle for existence. Logical laws are, then, just so many types of useful psychical processes, depending upon the psychophysical laws, and changing with the conditions and complications of life.

The psychologist will add : Do not feel worried by that merely psychological origin of all our inner laws. Is not their final goal in any case also only the production of a special psychophysical state ? What else can our thinking and feeling and acting strive for than to produce a mental state of agreeable character? We think logically because the result is useful for us ; that is, secures the desired agreeable, practical ends. We seek beauty because we enjoy beautiful creations of art and nature. We act morally because we wish to give to others also that happiness which we desire for ourselves. In short, the production of the psychological states of delight and enjoyment in us and others, and the reduction of the opposite mental states of pain and sorrow, are the only aim and goal of a full, sound life. Were all the disagreeable feelings in human consciousness replaced by happy feelings, one psychological content thus replaced by another, heaven would be on earth.

But psychology can go one more step forward. We know what life means to it, but what does the world mean ? What is its metaphysical credo? There need not be much speculative fight about it. All who understand the necessary premises of psychology ought to agree as to the necessary conclusions. Psychology starts with the presupposition that all objects which have existence in the universe are physical or psychical, objects in matter or objects in consciousness. Other objects are not perceivable by us, and therefore do not exist. To come from this to a philosophical insight into the ultimate reality, we must ask whether these physical and psychical facts are equally true. To doubt that anything at all exists is absurd, as such a thought shows already that at least thoughts exist. The question is, then, only whether both physical and psychical facts are real, or physical only, or psychical only. The first view is philosophical dualism ; the second is materialistic monism ; the third is spiritualistic monism. Psychology cannot hesitate long. What absurdity to believe in materialism, or even in dualism, as it is clear that in the last reality all matter is given to us only as idea in our consciousness ! We may see and touch and hear and smell the physical world, but whatever we see we know only as our visual sensations, and what we touch is given to us as our tactual sensations ; in short, we have an absolute knowledge which no philosophical criticism can shake, only in our own sensations and other contents of consciousness. Physical things may be acknowledged as a practical working hypothesis for the simple explanation of the order of our sensations, but the philosophical truth must be that our psychical facts alone are certain, and therefore undoubtedly real.

Only our mind-stuff is real. Yet I have no right to call it “ours,” as those other personalities whom I perceive exist also only as my perceptions; they are philosophically all in my own consciousness, which I never can transcend. But have I still the right to call that my consciousness ? An I has a meaning only where a Thou is granted ; where no Alter is there cannot be an Ego. The real world is, therefore, not my consciousness, but an absolutely impersonal consciousness in which a series of psychical states goes on in succession. Have I the right to call it a succession ? Succession presupposes time, but whence do I know about time ? The past and the future are given to me, of course, only by my present thinking of them. I do not know the past; I know only that I at present think the past; the present thought is, then, the only absolutely real thing. But if there is no past and no future, to speak of a present has no meaning. The real psychical fact is without time as without personality; it is for nobody, for no end, and with no value. That is the last word of a psychology which pretends to be philosophy.

Now let us return to our starting-point: are we really obliged to accept this view of the world as the last word of the knowledge of our century ? Can our historical and political, our ethical and æsthetical, our logical and philosophical thinking, — in short, can the world of our real practical life be satisfied with such a credo ? And if we wish to escape it, is it true that we have to deny in our conscience all that the century calls learning and knowledge ? Is it true that only a mysterious belief can overcome such positivistic misery, and that we have to accept thus the most anti-philosophical attitude toward the world which exists ; that is, a mixture of positivism and mysticism ?

To be sure, we cannot, no, we cannot be satisfied with that practical outcome of psychology, with those conclusions about the final character of personality and freedom, about history and logic and ethics, about man and the universe. Every fibre in us revolts, every value in our real life rejects such a construction. We do not feel ourselves such conglomerates of psychophysical elements, and the men whom we admire and condemn, love and hate, are for us not identical with those combinations of psychical atoms which pull and push one another after psychological laws. We do not mean, with our responsibility and with our freedom in the moral world, that our consciousness is the passive spectator of psychological processes which go on causally determined by laws, satisfied that some of the causes are inside of our skull, and not outside. The child is to us in real life no vegetable which has to be raised like tomatoes, and the criminal is no weed which does not feel that it destroys the garden.

Does history really mean to us what psychological and economical and statistical laws put in its place ? Are “ heroism " and “ hero-worship ” empty words ? Have Kant and Fichte, Carlyle and Emerson, really nothing to say any more, and are Comte and Buckle our only apostles ? Do we mean, in speaking of Napoleon and Washington, Newton and Goethe, those complicated chemical processes which the physiologist sees in their life, and those accompanying psychical processes which the psychologist enumerates between their birth and their death ? Do we really still think historically, if we consider the growth of the nations and this gigantic civilization on earth as the botanist studies the growth of the mould which covers a rotten apple ? Is it really only a difference of complication ?

But worse things are offered to our belief. We are asked not only to consider all that the past has brought as the necessary product of psychological laws, but also to believe that all we are striving and working for, all our life’s fight, — it may be the noblest one, — means nothing else than the production of some psychological states of mind, of some feelings of agreeableness; in short, that the tickling sensations are the ideal goal of our life. The greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, that discouraging phrase in which the whole vulgarity of a naturalistic century seems condensed, is it really the source of inspiration for an ideal soul, and does our conscience really look out for titillation in connection with a majority vote ?

If you repeat again and again that there are only relative laws, no absolute truth and beauty and morality, that they are changing products of the outer conditions without binding power, you contradict yourself by the assertion. Do you not demand already for your skeptical denial that at least this denial itself is an absolute truth ? And when you discuss it, and stand for your conviction that there is no morality, does not this involve your acknowledgment of the moral law to stand for one’s conviction ? If you do not acknowledge that, you allow the inference that you yourself do not believe that which you stand for, and that you know, therefore, that an absolute morality does exist. The psychological skepticism contradicts itself by its pretensions ; there is a truth, a beauty, a morality, which is independent of psychological conditions. When such ideal duties penetrate our life, we cannot rest at last in a psychological metaphysics where the universe is an impersonal content of consciousness; and every straightforward man, to whom the duties of his real life are no sounding brass, speaks with a calm voice to the psychologist: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Is there really no possible combination of these two attitudes ? Certainly such combination is not given by an inconsistent compromise. If we say to the intellect, Go on with your analyzing and explaining psychology, but stop halfway, before you come to practical acting ; and say to our feeling and conscience, Go on with your noble life, but do not try to think about it, for all your values would show themselves as a poor illusion ; then there remains only one thing doubtful, whether the conscience or the intellect is in the more pitiful state. Thinking that is too faint-hearted to act, and acting that is ashamed to think, are a miserable pair who cannot live together through a real life. No such coward compromise comes here in question, and still less do we accept the position that the imperfectness of the sciences of to-day must be the comfort of our conscience.

The combination of the two attitudes is possible ; more than that, it is necessary in the right interests of both sides, as the whole apparent contradiction rests on an entire misunderstanding. It is not psychology that contradicts the demands of life, but the misuse of psychology. Psychology has the right and the duty to consider everything from the psychological standpoint, but life and history, ethics and philosophy, have neither the duty nor the right to accept as a picture of reality the impression which is reached from the psychological standpoint.

We have asked the question whether the psychical objects or the physical objects, or both, represent the last reality ; we saw that dualistie realism and materialism decided for the last two interpretations, while psychology voted for the first. It seems that one of these three decisions must be correct, and just here is the great misunderstanding. No, all three are equally wrong and worthless ; a fourth alone is right, which says that neither the physical objects nor the psychical objects represent reality, but both are ideal constructions of the subject, both deduced from the reality which is no physical object, no psychical object, and even no existing object at all, as the very conception of an existing object means a transformation of the reality. Such transformation has its purpose for our thoughts and is logically valuable, and therefore it represents scientific truth ; but this truth nevertheless does not reach the reality of the untransformed life. It is exactly the same relation as that between natural science and materialism. Natural science considers the world a mechanism, and for that purpose transforms the reality in a most complicated and ingenious way. It puts in the place of the perceivable objects unperceivable atoms which are merely products of mathematical construction quite unlike every known thing ; and nevertheless these atoms are scientifically true, as their construction is necessary for that special logical purpose. To affirm that they are true means that they are of objective value for thought. But it is absurd to think, with the materialistic philosopher, that these atoms form a reality which is more real than the known things, or even the only reality, excluding the right of all not space-filling realities. The physical science of matter is true, and is true without limit and without exception ; materialism is wrong from the beginning to the end. There is, indeed, no physical object in the world which natural science ought not to transmute into atoms, hut no atom in the world has reality, and these two statements do not contradict each other.

In the same way psychology is right, but the psychologism which considers the psychological elements and their mechanism as reality is wrong from its root to its top, and this psychologism is not a bit better than materialism. It makes practically no difference whether the real substance is of the clumsy space-filling material or of the finer stuff that dreams are made of ; both are existing objects, both are combinations of atomistic indivisible elements, both are in their changes controlled and determined by general laws, both make the world a succession of causes and effects. The psychical mechanism has no advantage over the physical one ; both mean a dead world without ends and values, — laws, but no duties ; effects, but no purposes ; causes, but no ideals.

There is no mental fact which the psychologist has not to metamorphose into psychical elements; and as this transformation is logically valuable, his psychical elements and their associative and inhibitory play are scientifically true. But a psychical element, and anything which is thought as combination of psychical elements and as working under the laws of these psychical constructions, has as little reality as have the atoms of the physicist. Our body is not a heap of atoms; our inner life is still less a heap of ideas and feelings and emotions and volitions and judgments, if we take these mental things in the way the psychologist has to take them, as contents of consciousness made up from psychical elements. If it is understood that any naturalistic science has not to discover a reality which is more real than our life and its immediate battlefield, but has only to transform the reality in a special way, then it must be clear that the demands of our real life can never be contradicted by the outcome of the empirical sciences. The sciences, therefore, find their way free to advance without fear till they have mastered and transmuted the physical and the psychical universe.

But we can go a step farther. A contradiction is the more impossible since this transformation is itself under the influence of the elements of real life, and by that the apparent ruler becomes the vassal. If psychology pretends that there is no really logical value, no absolute truth, because everything shows itself under psychological laws, we must answer, This very fact, that we consider even the logical thinking from the psychological point of view, and that we have psychology at all, is only an outcome of the primary truth that we have logical ends and purposes. The logical thinking creates psychology for its own ends; psychology cannot be itself the basis for the logical thinking. And if psychology denies all values because they prove to be psychical fancies only, we must confess that this striving for the understanding of the world by transforming it through our science would have no meaning if it were not work toward an end which we appreciate as valuable. Every act of thought, every affirmation and denial, every yes or no which constitutes a scientific judgment, is an act of a will which acknowledges the over-individual obligation to decide so, and not otherwise, — acknowledges an “ ought,” and works thus for duty. Far from allowing psychology to doubt whether the real life has duties, we must understand that there is no psychology, no science, no thought, no doubt, which does not by its very appearance solemnly acknowledge that it is the child of duties. Psychology may dissolve our will and our personality and our freedom, and it is constrained by duty to do so, but it must not forget that it speaks only of that will and that personality which are by metamorphosis substituted for the personality and the will of real life, and that it is this real personality and its free will which create psychology in the service of its ends and aims and ideals.

In emphasizing thus the will as the bearer of all science and thought, we have reached the point from which we can see the full relations between life and psychology. In the real life we are willing subjects whose reality is given in our will attitudes, in our liking and disliking, loving and hating, affirming and denying, agreeing and fighting ; and as these attitudes overlap and bind one another, this willing personality has unity. We know ourselves by feeling ourselves as those willing subjects ; we do not perceive that will in ourselves; we will it. But do we perceive the other subjects ? No, as little as ourselves. In real life, the other subjects also are not perceived, but acknowledged ; wherever subjective attitudes stir us up, and ask for agreement or disagreement, there we appreciate personalities. These attitudes of the subjects turn toward a world of objects, — a world which means in real life a world of tools and helps and obstacles and ends ; in short, a world of objects of appreciation.

Do those subjects and their objects exist ? No, they do not exist. I do not mean that they are a fairy tale ; even the figures of the fairy tale are for the instant thought as existing. The real world we live in has no existence, because it has a form of reality which is endlessly fuller and richer than that shadow of reality which we mean by existence. Existence of an object means that it is a possible object of mere passive perception ; in real life, there is no passive perception, but only active appreciation, and to think anything as object of perception only means a transmutation by which reality evaporates. Whatever is thought as existing cannot have reality. Our real will does not exist, either as a substance which lasts or as a process which is going on ; but our will is valid, and has a form of reality which cannot be described because it is the last foothold of all description and agreement. Whoever has not known himself as willing cannot learn by description what kind of reality is given to us in that act of life ; but whoever has willed knows that the act means something else than the fact that some object of passive perception was in consciousness ; in short, he knows a reality which means more than existence.

The existing world, then, does not lack reality because it is merely a shadow of a world beyond it, a shadow of a Platonistic world of potentialities. No, it is a shadow of a real world, which stands not farther from us, but still nearer to us, than the existing world. The world we will is the reality ; the world we perceive is the deduced, and therefore unreal system ; and the world of potential forms and relations, as it is deduced from this perceivable system, is a construction of a Still higher degree of unreality. The potentialities that form the only possible metaphysical background of reality are not the potentialities of existing objects, but the potentialities of will acts. This world of not existing but valid subjective will relations is the only world which history and society, morality and philosophy, have to deal with.

The willing subjects and their mutual relations are the only matter history can speak of, but not those subjects thought as perceivable existing objects ; no, as willing subjects whose reality we can understand, not by describing their physical or psychical elements, but by interpreting and appreciating their purposes and means. The stones, the animals, even the savages, have no history ; only where a network of individual will relations has to be acknowledged by our will have we really history ; and our own historical position means the system of will attitudes by which we acknowledge other willing subjects. To be sure, history, like every other science, has to go from the raw material of single facts to generalities ; but if we are in a world of not existing but valid realities, the generalities cannot be laws, but will relations of more and more general importance. Existing processes are scientifically generalized by laws; valid relations are generalized by more and more embracing relations. The aim of the real historian, therefore, is, not to copy the natural laws of physics and social psychology, but to work out the more and more general inner relations of mankind by following up the will influence of great men, till finally philosophy of history comprises tins total development from paradise to the day of judgment by one all - embracing will connection. Thus, history in all its departments, history of politics and constitutions, of art and science, of language and law, has as its object the system of those human will relations which we ourselves as willing subjects acknowledge, and which are for us objects of understanding, of interpretation, of appreciation, even of criticism, but not objects of description and explanation, as they are valid subjective will functions, not existing perceivable objects.

But history speaks only of those will acts which are acknowledged as merely individual. We know other will acts in ourselves which we will with an overindividual meaning, those attitudes we take when we feel ourselves beyond the desires of our purely personal wishes. The will remains our own, but its significance transcends our individual attitudes ; it has over-individual value ; we call it our duty. To be sure, our duty is our own central will ; there is no duty which comes from the outside. The order which comes from outside is force which seduces or threatens us ; duty lies only in ourselves; it is our own will, but our will in so far as we are creators of overindividual attitude.

If the system of our individual will acts is interpreted and connected in the historical sciences, the system of our over-individual will acts is interpreted and connected in the normative sciences, logic, æsthetics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. Logic speaks about the overindividual will acts of affirming the world, æsthetics about those of appreciating the world, religion about those of transcending the world, ethics about those of acting for the world ; and this attitude has, then, to control also all the side branches of ethics, as jurisprudence and pedagogy. All speak of over-individual valid will relations, and no one has therefore directly to deal with existing psychical objects. On the basis of these normative sciences the idealistic philosophy has to build up its metaphysical system, which may connect the disconnected will attitudes of our ethical, æsthetical, religious, and logical duties in one ideal dome of thoughts. But however we may formulate this logically ultimate source of all reality, we know at least one thing surely, that we have deprived it of all meaning and of all values and of all dignity, if we picture it as something which exists. The least creature of all mortals, acknowledged as a willing subject, has more dignity and value than even an almighty God, if he is thought of merely as a gigantic psychological mechanism ; that is, as an object the reality of which has the form of existence.

How do we come, then, to the idea of existing objects ? There is no difficulty in understanding that. Our life is will, and our will has its duties ; but every action turns toward those means and obstacles and ends, those objects of appreciation, which are material for our will and our duties. Every act is thus coöperation of subjects and subjectively appreciated objects ; we cannot fulfill our duty, therefore, if we do not know what we have to expect in this cooperation from the objects. There must arise, then, the will, to isolate our expectation about the objects ; that is, to think what we should have to expect from the objects if they were independent of the willing subjects. In reality, they are never independent; in our thoughts, we can cut them loose from the willing subjects, and think of them as objects which are not any more objects of appreciation, but objects of perception only. These objects in their artificial separation from the real subject, thought of as objects of a passive spectator, take by that change a form which we call existence, and it is the aim of natural science to study these existing things. The path of their study is indicated to them by the goal they try to reach. They have to determine the expectations the objects bring up; at first, therefore, they look out for those features of the objects which suggest the different expectations, and natural science calls these features of the objects their elements. These elements are not really in the objects, but they represent all that which determines the possible variations of the objects in the future. Thus science considers the present thing a combination of elements to determine its relation to the future thing; but the present thing is, then, itself the future of the past thing, and it stands, in consequence, between past and future ; that is, as a link in a chain in which everything is determining the future and determined by the past, everything cause and everything effect.

Natural science finds in this attempt that there may be two classes of such existing objects: objects which are possible, perceivable objects for every subject, and others which are perceivable only for one subject. Natural science calls the first group physical objects, the second group psychical objects, and separates the study of them, as this relation to the one or the many brings with it numerous characteristic differences, the differences between physics and psychology. But the point of view for both is exactly the same ; both consider their material as merely perceivable objects which are made up from elements, and which determine one another by causal connections. As they are thought cut loose from the attitude of the will, neither the physical nor the psychical objects can have a value or teleological relations.

But the will itself ? If psychology, like physics, deals with the objects of the world in their artificial separation from the will, how can the will itself be an object of psychology ? The presupposition of this question is in some way wrong; the will is primarily not at all an object of psychology. The real psychological objects are the ideas of our perception and memory and imagination and reason. Only if psychology progresses, it must come to the point where it undertakes to consider every factor of our mental life from a psychological point of view ; that is, as an object made up from atomistic elements which the psychologist calls sensations. The will is not a possible object; psychology must make a substitution, therefore; it identifies the real personality with the psychophysical organism, and calls the will the set of conditions which psychologically and physiologically determine the actions of this organism. This will is now made up of sensations, too, muscle sensations and others ; and this will is depending upon psychological laws, is the effect of conditions and the cause of effects ; it is ironed with the chains of natural laws to the rock of necessity. The real will is not a perceivable object, and therefore neither cause nor effect, but has its meaning and its value in itself; it is not an exception of the world of laws and causes; no, there would not be any meaning in asking whether it has a cause or not, as only existing objects can belong to the series of causal relations. The real will is free, and it is the work of such free will to picture, for its own purposes, the world as an unfree, a causally connected, an existing system ; and if it is the triumph of modern psychology to master even the best in man, the will, and to dissolve even the will into its atomistic sensations and their causal unfree play, we are blind if we forget that this transformation and construction is itself the work of the will which dictates ends, and the finest herald of its freedom.

Of course, as soon as the psychologist enters into the study of the will, he has absolutely to abstract from the fact that a complicated substitution is the presupposition for his work. He has now to consider the will as if it were really composed of sensational elements, and as if his analysis discovered them. The will is for him really a complex of sensations ; that is, a complex of possible elements of perceptive ideas. As soon as the psychologist, as such, acknowledges in the analysis of the will a factor which is not a possible element of perception, he destroys the possibility of psychology just as much as the physicist who acknowledges miracles in the explanation of the material world denies physics. There is nothing more absurd than to blame the psychologist because his account of the will does not do justice to the whole reality of it, and to believe that it is a climax of forcible arguments against the atomizing psychology of to-day if philosophers exclaim that there is no real will at all in those compounds of sensations which the psychologist substitutes. Certainly not, as it was just the presupposition of psychology to abstract from that real will. It is not wiser than to east up against the physicist that his moving atoms do not represent the physical world because they have no color and sound and smell. If they sounded and smelled still, the physicist would not have fulfilled his purpose.

Psychology can mean an end, and can mean also a beginning. Psychology can be, and in this century, indeed, has been, the last word of a naturalistic attitude toward the world, — an attitude which emphasized only the expectations from the objects, and neglected the duties of the subjects. But psychology degenerates into an unphilosophical psychologism, just as natural science degenerates into materialism, if it does not understand that it works only from one side, and that the other side, the reality which is not existence, and therefore no possible object of psychology and natural science, is the primary reality. Psychology can be also a beginning. It can mean that we ought to abandon exaggerated devotion for the physical world, that we ought to look out for our inner world ; then a good psychology is the most important supplement to those sciences which consider the inner life, not as existing, deseribable, explainable objects, but as a will system to be interpreted and to be appreciated. If that is the attitude, the psychological sciences on the one side, the historical and normative sciences on the other side, can really do justice to the totality of the problems of the inner life. If psychology tries to stand on both sides, its end must be near ; the real life will tear it up and rend it in pieces. If it stands with strong feet on the one side, and acknowledges the right of the other side, it will have a future. The psychology of our time too often seems determined to die out in psychologism; that must he stopped. Psychology is an end as the last word of the naturalistic century which lies behind us ; it may become a beginning as the introductory word of an idealistic century to be hoped for.

Hugo Münsterberg.