Yet if our work stands for the unity of knowledge, aims to consider the fundamental conceptions which bind together all the specialistic results, and seeks to inquire into the methods which are common to various fields, all this is after all merely a symptom of the whole spirit of our times. A reaction against the narrowness of mere fact-diggers has set in. A mere heaping up of disconnected, unshaped facts begins to disappoint the world; it is felt too vividly that a mere dictionary of phenomena, of events and laws, makes our knowledge larger but not deeper, makes our life more complex but not more valuable, makes our science more difficult but not more harmonious. Our time longs for a new synthesis and looks towards science no longer merely with a desire for technical prescriptions and new inventions in the interest of comfort and exchange. It waits for knowledge to fulfill its higher mission, it waits for science to satisfy our higher needs for a view of the world which shall give unity to our scattered experience. The indications of this change are visible to every one who observes the gradual turning to philosophical discussion in the most different fields of scientific life.
When after the first third of the nineteenth century the great philosophic movement which found its climax in Hegelianism came to disaster in consequence of its absurd neglect of hard solid facts, the era of naturalism began its triumph with contempt for all philosophy and for all deeper unity. Idealism and philosophy were stigmatized as the enemies of true science and natural science had its great day. The rapid progress of physics and chemistry fascinated the world and produced modern technique; the sciences of life, physiology, biology, medicine, followed; and the scientific method was carried over from body to mind, and gave us at the end of the nineteenth century modern psychology and sociology. The lifeless and the living, the physical and the mental, the individual and the social, all had been conquered by a.n.a.lytical methods.
But just when the climax was reached and all had been a.n.a.lyzed and explained, the time was ripe for disillusion, and the lack of deeper unity began to be felt with alarm in every quarter. For seventy years there had been nowhere so much philosophizing going on as suddenly sprung up among the scientists of the last decade. The physicists and the mathematicians, the chemists and the biologists, the geologists and the astronomers, and, on the other side, the historians and the economists, the psychologists and the sociologists, the jurists and the theologians--all suddenly found themselves again in the midst of discussions on fundamental principles and methods, on general categories and conditions of knowledge, in short, in the midst of the despised philosophy. And with those discussions has come the demand for correlation. Everywhere have arisen leaders who have brought unconnected sciences together and emphasized the unity of large divisions. The time seems to have come again when the wave of naturalism and realism is ebbing, and a new idealistic philosophical tide is swelling, just as they have always alternated in the civilization of two thousand years.
No one dreams, of course, that the great synthetic apperception, for which our modern time seems ripe, will come through the delivery of some hundred addresses, or the discussions of some hundred audiences. An ultimate unity demands the gigantic thought of a single genius, and the work of the many can, after all, be merely the preparation for the final work of the one. And yet history shows that the one will never come if the many have not done their share. What is needed is to fill the sciences of our time with the growing consciousness of belonging together, with the longing for fundamental principles, with the conviction that the desire for correlation is not the fancy of dreamers, but the immediate need of the leaders of thought. And in this preparatory work the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science seemed indeed called for an important part when it was committed to this topic of correlation.
To call the scholars of the world together for concerted action towards the correlation of knowledge meant, of course, first of all, to work out a detailed programme, and to select the best authorities for every special part of the whole scheme. Nothing could be left to chance methods and to casual contributions. The preparation needed the same administrative strictness which would be demanded for an encyclopedia, and the same scholarly thoroughness which would be demanded for the most scientific research. A plan was to be devised in which every possible striving for truth would find its place, and in which every section would have its definite position in the system. And such a ground-plan given, topics were to be a.s.signed to every department and sub-department, the treatment of which would bring out the fundamental principles and the inner relations in such a way that the papers would finally form a close-woven intellectual fabric. There would be plenty of room for a retrospective glance at the historical development of the sciences and plenty of room for emphasis on their practical achievements; but the central place would always belong to the effort towards unity and internal harmonization.
We thus divided human knowledge into large parts, and the parts into divisions, and the divisions into departments, and the departments into sections. As the topic of the general divisions--we proposed seven of them--it was decided to discuss the Unity of the whole field. As topic for the departments--we had twenty-four of them--the addresses were to discuss the fundamental Conceptions and Methods and the Progress during the last century; and in the sections, finally--our plan provided for one hundred and twenty-eight of them--the topics were in every one the Relation of the special branch to other branches, and those most important Present Problems which are essential for the deeper principles of the special field. In this way the ground-plan itself suggested the unity of the practically separated sciences; and, moreover, our plan provided from the first that this logical relation should express itself externally in the time order of the work. We were to begin with the meetings of the large divisions, the meetings of the departments were to follow, and the meetings of the sections and their ramifications would follow the departmental gatherings.
3. _The Objections to the Plan_
It was evident that even the most modest success of that gigantic undertaking depended upon the right choice of speakers, upon the value of the ground-plan, and upon many external conditions; thus no one was in doubt as to the difficulty in realizing such a scheme. Yet there were from the scholarly side itself objections to the principles involved, objections which might hold even if those other conditions were successfully met. The most immediate reason for reluctance lies in the specializing tendencies of our time. Those who devote all their working energy as loyal sons of our a.n.a.lyzing period of science to the minute detail of research come easily into the habit of a nervous fear with regard to any wider general outlook. The man of research sees too often how ignorance hides itself behind generalities. He knows too well how much easier it is to formulate vague generalities than to contribute a new fact to human knowledge, and how often untrained youngsters succeed with popular text-books which are rightly forgotten the next day.
Methodical science must thus almost encourage this aversion to any deviation from the path of painstaking specialistic labor. Then, of course, it seems almost a scientific duty to declare war against an undertaking which explicitly asks everywhere for the wide perspectives and the last principles, and does not aim at adding at this moment to the mere treasury of information.
But such a view is utterly one-sided, and to fight against such one-sidedness and to overcome the specializing narrowness of the scattered sciences was the one central idea of the plan. If there existed no scholars who despise the philosophizing connection, there would have hardly been any need for this whole undertaking; but to yield to such philosophy-phobia means to declare the a.n.a.lytic movement of science permanent, and to postpone a synthetic movement indefinitely.
Our time has just to emphasize, and the leaders of thought daily emphasize it more, that a mere heaping up of information can be merely a preparation for knowledge, and that the final aim is a _Weltanschauung_, a unified view of the whole of reality. All that our Congress had to secure was thus merely that the generalizing discussion of principles should not be left to men who generalized because they lacked the substantial knowledge which is necessary to specialize. The thinkers we needed were those who through specialistic work were themselves led to a point where the discussion of general principles becomes unavoidable.
Our plan was by no means antagonistic to the patient labors of a.n.a.lysis; the aim was merely to overcome its one-sidedness and to stimulate the synthesis as a necessary supplement.
But the objections against a generalizing plan were not confined to the mistaken fear that we sought to antagonize the productive work of the specialist. They not seldom took the form of a general aversion to the logical side of the ground-plan. It was often said that such a scheme has after all interest only for the logician, for whom science as such is an object of study, and who must thus indeed cla.s.sify the sciences and determine their logical relation. The real scientist, it was said, does not care for such methodological operations, and should be suspicious from the first of such philosophical high-handedness. The scientist cannot forget how often in the history of civilization science was the loser when it trusted its problems to the metaphysical thinker who subst.i.tuted his lofty speculations for the hard work of the investigator. The true scholar will thus not only object to generalizing "commonplaces" as against solid information, but he will object as well to logical demarcation lines and systematization as against the practical scientific work which does not want to be hampered by such philosophical subtleties. Yet all these fears and suspicions were still more mistaken.
Nothing was further from our intentions than a subst.i.tution of metaphysics for concrete science. It was not by chance that we took such pains to find the best specialists for every section. No one was invited to enter into logical discussions and to consider the relations of science merely from a dialectic point of view. The topic was everywhere the whole living manifoldness of actual relations, and the logician had nothing else to do than to prepare the programme. The outlines of the programme demanded, of course, a certain logical scheme. If hundreds of sciences are to take part, they have to be grouped somehow, if a merely alphabetical order is not adopted; and even if we were to proceed alphabetically, we should have to decide beforehand what part of knowledge is to be recognized as a special science. But the logical order of the ground-plan refers, of course, merely to the simple relation of coordination, subordination, and superordination, and the logician is satisfied with such a cla.s.sification. But the endless variety of internal relations is no longer to be dealt with from the point of view of mere logic. We may work out the ground-plan in such a way that we understand that logically zoology is coordinated to botany and subordinated to mechanics and superordinated to ichthyology; but this minimum of determination gives, of course, not even a hint of that world of relations which exists from the standpoint of the biologist between the science of zoology and the science of botany, or between the biological and the mechanical studies. To discuss these relations of real scientific life is the work of the biologist and not at all of the logician.
The foregoing answers also at once an objection which might seem more justified at the first glance. It has been said that we were undertaking the work of bringing about a synthesis of scientific endeavors, and that we yet had that synthesis already completed in the programme on which the work was to be based. The scholars to be invited would be bound by the programme, and would therefore have no other possibility than to say with more words what the programme had settled beforehand. The whole effort would then seem determined from the start by the arbitrariness of the proposed ground-plan. Now it cannot be denied indeed that a certain factor of arbitrariness has to enter into a programme. We have already referred to the fact that some one must decide beforehand what fraction of science is to be acknowledged as a self-dependent discipline. If a biologist were to work out the scheme, he might decide that the whole of philosophy was just one science; while the philosopher might claim a large number of sections for logic and ethics and philosophy of religion, and so on. And the philosopher, on the other hand, might treat the whole of medicine as one part in itself, while the physician might hold that even otology has to be separated from rhinology. A certain subjectivity of standpoint is unavoidable, and we know very well that instead of the one hundred and twenty-eight sections of our programme we might have been satisfied with half that number or might have indulged in double that number. And yet there was no possible plan which would have allowed us to invite the speakers without defining beforehand the sectional field which each was to represent. A certain courage of opinion was then necessary, and sometimes also a certain adjustment to external conditions.
Quite similar was the question of cla.s.sification. Just as we had to take the responsibility for the staking-out of every section, we had also to decide in favor of a certain grouping, if we desired to organize the Congress and not simply to bring out haphazard results. The principles which are sufficient for a mere directory would never allow the shaping of a programme which can be the basis for synthetic work. Even a university catalogue begins with a certain cla.s.sification, and yet no one fancies that such catalogue grouping inhibits the freedom of the university lecturer. It is easy to say, as has been said, that the essential trait of the scientific life of to-day is its live-and-let-live character. Certainly it is. In the regular work in our libraries and laboratories the year round, everything depends upon this democratic freedom in which every one goes his own way, hardly asking what his neighbor is doing. It is that which has made the specialistic sciences of our day as strong as they are. But it has brought about at the same time this extreme tendency to unrelated specialization with its discouraging lack of unity; this heaping up of information without an outer harmonious view of the world; and if we were really at least once to satisfy the desire for unity, then we had not the right to yield fully to this live-and-let-live tendency. Therefore some principle of grouping had to be accepted, and whatever principle had been chosen, it would certainly have been open to the criticism that it was a product of arbitrary decision, inasmuch as other principles might have been possible.
A cla.s.sification which in itself expresses all the practical relations in which sciences stand to each other is, of course, absolutely impossible. A programme which should try to arrange the place of a special discipline in such a way that it would become the neighbor of all those other sciences with which it has internal relation is unthinkable. On the other hand, only if we had tried to construct a scheme of such exaggerated ambitions should we have been really guilty of antic.i.p.ating a part of that which the specialistic scholars were to tell us. The Congress had to leave it to the invited partic.i.p.ants to discuss the totality of relations which practically exist between their fields and others, and the organizers confined themselves to that minimum of cla.s.sification which just indicates the pure logical relations, a minimum which every editor of encyclopedic work would be asked to initiate without awakening suspicions of interference with the ideas of his contributors.
The only justified demand which could be met was that a system of division and cla.s.sification should be proposed which should give fair play to every existing scientific tendency. The minimum of cla.s.sification was to be combined with the maximum of freedom, and to secure that a careful consideration of principles was indeed necessary.
To bring logical order into the sciences which stand out clearly with traditional rights is not difficult; but the chances are too great that certain tendencies of thought might fail to find recognition or might be suppressed by scientific prejudice. Any serious omission would indeed have necessarily inhibited the freedom of expression. To secure thus the greatest inner fullness of the programme, seemed indeed the most important task in the elaboration of the ground-plan. The fears that we might offer empty generalization instead of scholarly facts, or that we might simply heap up encyclopedic information instead of gaining wide perspectives, or that we might interfere with the living connections of sciences by the logical demarcation lines, or that we might disturb the scholar in his freedom by determining beforehand his place in the cla.s.sification,--all these fears and objections, which were repeatedly raised when the plan was first proposed, seemed indeed unimportant compared with the fear that the programme might be unable to include all scientific tendencies of the time.
That would have been, indeed, the one fundamental mistake, as the whole Congress work was planned in the service of the great synthetic movement which pervades the intellectual life of to-day. The undertaking would be useless and even hindering if it were not just the newer and deeper tendencies that came to most complete expression in it. Everything depended, therefore, upon the fullest possible representation of scientific endeavors in the plan. But no one can become aware of this manifoldness and of the logical relations who does not go back to the ultimate principles of the human search for truth. We have, therefore, to enter now into a full discussion of the principles which have controlled the cla.s.sification and subdivision of the whole work. The discussion is necessarily in its essence a philosophical one, as it was earlier made plain that philosophy must lay out the plan, while in the realization of the plan through concrete work the scientist alone, and not the logician, has to speak. Yet here again it may be said that while our discussion of principles in its essence is logical, in another respect it is a merely historical account. The question is not what principles of cla.s.sification are to be acknowledged as valuable now that the work of the Congress lies behind us, but what principles were accepted and really led to the organization of the work in that form in which it presents itself in the records of the following volumes.
II
THE CLa.s.sIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES
1. _The Development of Cla.s.sification_
The problem of dividing and subdividing the whole of human knowledge and of thus bringing order into the manifoldness of scientific efforts has fascinated the leading thinkers of all ages. It may often be difficult to say how far the new principles of cla.s.sification themselves open the way for new scientific progress and how far the great forward movements of thought in the special sciences have in turn influenced the principles of cla.s.sification. In any case every productive age has demanded the expression of its deepest energy in a new ordering of human science. The history of these efforts leads from Plato and Aristotle to Bacon and Locke, to Bentham and Ampere, to Kant and Hegel, to Comte and Spencer, to Wundt and Windelband. And yet we can hardly speak of a real historical continuity. In a certain way every period took up the problem anew, and the new aspects resulted not only from the development of the sciences themselves which were to be cla.s.sified, but still more from the differences of logical interest. Sometimes the cla.s.sification referred to the material, sometimes to the method of treatment, sometimes to the mental energies involved, and sometimes to the ends to be reached. The reference to the mental faculties was certainly the earliest method of bringing order into human knowledge, for the distinction of the Platonic philosophy between dialectics, physics, and ethics pointed to the threefold character of the mind, to reason, perception, and desire; and it was on the threshold of the modern time, again, when Bacon divided the intellectual globe into three large parts according to three fundamental psychical faculties: memory, imagination, and reason. The memory gives us history; the imagination, poetry; the reason, philosophy, or the sciences. History was further divided into natural and civil history; natural history into normal, abnormal, and artificial phenomena; civil history into political, literary, and ecclesiastical history. The field of reason was subdivided into man, nature, and G.o.d; the domain of man gives, first, civil philosophy, parted off into intercourse, business, and government, and secondly, the philosophy of humanity, divided into that of body and of soul, wherein medicine and athletics belong to the body, logic and ethics to the soul. Nature, on the other hand, was divided into speculative and applied science,--the speculative containing both physics and metaphysics; the applied, mechanics and magic. All this was full of artificial constructions, and yet still more marked by deep insight into the needs of Bacon"s time, and not every modification of later cla.s.sifiers was logically a step forward.
Yet modern efforts had to seek quite different methods, and the energies which have been most effective for the ordering of knowledge in the last decades spring unquestionably from the system of Comte and his successors. He did not aim at a system of ramifications; his problem was to show how the fundamental sciences depend on each other. A series was to be constructed in which each member should presuppose the foregoing.
The result was a simplicity which is certainly tempting, but this simplicity was reached only by an artificial emphasis which corresponded completely to the one-sidedness of naturalistic thought. It was a philosophy of positivism, the background for the gigantic work of natural science and technique in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century. Comte"s fundamental thought is that the science of Morals, in which we study human nature for the government of human life, is dependent on sociology. Sociology, however, depends on biology; this on chemistry; this on physics; this on astronomy; and this finally on mathematics. In this way, all mental and moral sciences, history and philology, jurisprudence and theology, economics and politics, are considered as sociological phenomena, as dealing with functions of the human being. But as man is a living organism, and thus certainly falls under biology, all the branches of knowledge from history to ethics, from jurisprudence to aesthetics, can be nothing but subdivisions of biology. The living organism, on the other hand, is merely one type of the physical bodies on earth, and biology is thus itself merely a department of physics. But as the earthly bodies are merely a part of the cosmic totality, physics is thus a part of astronomy; and as the whole universe is controlled by mathematical laws, mathematics must be superordinated to all sciences.
But there followed a time which overcame this thinly disguised example of materialism. It was a time when the categories of the physiologist lost slightly in credit and the categories of the psychologist won repute. This newer movement held that it is artificial to consider ethical and logical life, historic and legal action, literary and religious emotions, merely as physiological functions of the living organism. The mental life, however necessarily connected with brain processes, has a positive reality of its own. The psychical facts represent a world of phenomena which in its nature is absolutely different from that of material phenomena, and, while it is true that every ethical action and every logical thought can, from the standpoint of the biologist, be considered as a property of matter, it is not less true that the sciences of mental phenomena, considered impartially, form a sphere of knowledge closed in itself, and must thus be coordinated, not subordinated, to the knowledge of the physical world. We should say thus: all knowledge falls into two cla.s.ses, the physical sciences and the mental sciences. In the circle of physical sciences we have the general sciences, like physics and chemistry, the particular sciences of special objects, like astronomy, geology, mineralogy, biology, and the formal sciences, like mathematics. In the circle of mental sciences we have correspondingly, as a general science, psychology, and as the particular sciences all those special mental and moral sciences which deal with man"s inner life, like history or jurisprudence, logic or ethics, and all the rest. Such a cla.s.sification, which had its philosophical defenders about twenty years ago, penetrated the popular thought as fully as the positivism of the foregoing generation, and was certainly superior to its materialistic forerunner.
Of course it was not the first time in the history of civilization that materialism was replaced by dualism, that biologism was replaced by psychologism; and it was also not the first time that the development of civilization led again beyond this point: that is, led beyond the psychologizing period. There is no doubt that our time presses on, with all its powerful internal energies, away from this _Weltanschauung_ of yesterday. The materialism was anti-philosophic, the psychological dualism was unphilosophic. To-day the philosophical movement has set in.
The one-sidedness of the nineteenth century creed is felt in the deeper thought all over the world: popular movements and scholarly efforts alike show the signs of a coming idealism, which has something better and deeper to say than merely that our life is a series of causal phenomena. Our time longs for a new interpretation of reality; from the depths of every science wherein for decades philosophizing was despised, the best scholars turn again to a discussion of fundamental conceptions and general principles. Historical thinking begins again to take the leadership which for half a century belonged to naturalistic thinking; specialistic research demands increasingly from day to day the readjustment toward higher unities, and the technical progress which charmed the world becomes more and more simply a factor in an ideal progress. The appearance of this unifying congress itself is merely one of a thousand symptoms of this change appearing in our public life, and if the scientific philosophy is producing to-day book upon book to prove that the world of phenomena must be supplemented by the world of values, that description must yield to interpretation, and that explanation must be harmonized with appreciation: it is but echoing in technical terms the one great emotion of our time.
This certainly does not mean that any step of the gigantic materialistic, technical, and psychological development will be reversed, or that progress in any one of these directions ought to cease. On the contrary, no time was ever more ready to put its immense energies into the service of naturalistic work; but it does mean that our time recognizes the one-sidedness of these movements, recognizes that they belong only to one aspect of reality, and that another aspect is possible; yes, that the other aspect is that of our immediate life, with its purposes and its ideals, its historical relations and its logical aims. The claim of materialism, that all psychical facts are merely functions of the organism, was no argument against psychology, because, though the biological view was possible, yet the other aspect is certainly a necessary supplement. In the same way it is no argument against the newer view that all purposes and ideals, all historical actions and logical thoughts, can be considered as psychological phenomena. Of course we can consider them as such, and we must go on doing so in the service of the psychological and sociological sciences; but we ought not to imagine that we have expressed and understood the real character of our historical or moral, our logical or religious life when we have described and explained it as a series of phenomena. Its immediate reality expresses itself above all in the fact that it has a meaning, that it is a purpose which we want to understand, not by considering its causes and effects, but by interpreting its aims and appreciating its ideals.
We should say, therefore, to-day that it is most interesting and important for the scientist to consider human life with all its strivings and creations from a biological, psychological, sociological point of view; that is, to consider it as a system of causal phenomena; and many problems worthy of the highest energies have still to be solved in these sciences. But that which the jurist or the theologian, the student of art or of history, of literature or of politics, of education or of morality, is dealing with, refers to the other aspect in which inner life is not a phenomenon but a system of purposes, not to be explained but to be interpreted, to be approached not by causal but by teleological methods. In this case the historical sciences are no longer sub-sections of psychological or of sociological sciences; the conception of science is no longer identical with the conception of the science of phenomena. There exist sciences which do not deal with the description or explanation of phenomena at all, but with the internal relation and connection, the interpretation and appreciation of purpose.
In this way modern thought demands that sciences of purpose be coordinated with sciences of phenomena. Only if all these tendencies of our time are fully acknowledged can the outer framework of our cla.s.sification offer a fair field to every scientific thought, while a positivistic system would cripple the most promising tendencies of the twentieth century.
2. _The Four Theoretical Divisions_
We have first to determine the underlying structure of the cla.s.sification, that is, we have to seek the chief Divisions, of which our plan shows seven; four theoretical and three practical ones. It will be a secondary task to subdivide them later into the 24 Departments and 128 Sections. We desire to divide the whole of knowledge in a fundamental way, and we must therefore start with the question of principle:--what is knowledge? This question belongs to epistemology, and thus falls, indeed, into the domain of philosophy. The positivist is easily inclined to subst.i.tute for the philosophical problem the empirical question: how did that which we call knowledge grow and develop itself in our individual mind, or in the mind of the nations?
The question becomes, then, of course, one which must be answered by psychology, by sociology, and perhaps by biology. Such genetic inquiries are certainly very important, and the problem of how the processes of judging and conceiving and thinking are produced in the individual or social consciousness, and how they are to be explained through physical and psychical causes, deserves fullest attention. But its solution cannot even help us as regards the fundamental problem, what we mean by knowledge, and what the ultimate value of knowledge may be, and why we seek it. This deeper logical inquiry must be answered somehow before those genetic studies of the psychological and the sociological positivists can claim any truth at all, and thus any value, for their outcome. To explain our present knowledge genetically from its foregoing causes means merely to connect the present experience, which we know, with a past experience, which we remember, or with earlier phenomena which we construct on the basis of theories and hypotheses; but in any case with facts which we value as parts of our knowledge and which thus presuppose the acknowledgment of the value of knowledge. We cannot determine by linking one part of knowledge with another part of knowledge whether we have a right to speak of knowledge at all and to rely on it.
We can thus not start from the childhood of man, or from the beginning of humanity, or from any other object of knowledge, but we must begin with the state which logically precedes all knowledge; that is, with our immediate experience of real life. Here, in the nave experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective att.i.tudes as agents of will, as personalities, here we find the original reality not yet shaped and remoulded by scientific conceptions and by the demands of knowledge. And from this basis of primary, nave reality we must ask ourselves what we mean by seeking knowledge, and how this demand of ours is different from the other activities in which we work out the meaning and the ideals of our life.
One thing is certain, we cannot go back to the old dogmatic standpoint, whether rationalistic or sensualistic. In both cases dogmatism took for granted that there is a real world of things which exist in themselves independent of our subjective att.i.tudes, and that our knowledge has to give us a mirror picture of that self-dependent world. Sensualism averred that we get this knowledge through our perceptions; rationalism, that we get it by reasoning. The one a.s.serted that experience gives us the data which mere abstract reasoning can never supply; the other a.s.serted that our knowledge speaks of necessity which no mere perception can find out. Our modern time has gone through the school of philosophical criticism, and the dogmatic ideas have lost for us their meaning. We know that the world which we think as independent cannot be independent of the forms of our thinking, and that no science has reference to any other world than the world which is determined by the categories of our apperception. There cannot be anything more real than the immediate pure experience, and if we seek the truth of knowledge, we do not set out to discover something which is hidden behind our experience, but we set out simply to make something out of our experience which satisfies certain demands. Our immediate experience does not contain an objective thing and a subjective picture of it, but they are completely one and the same piece of experience. We have the object of our immediate knowledge not in the double form of an outer object independent of ourselves and an idea in us, but we have it as our object there in the practical world before science for its special purposes has broken up that bit of reality into the physical material thing and the psychical content of consciousness. And if this doubleness does not hold for the immediate reality of pure experience, it cannot enter through that reshaping and reconstructing and connecting and interpreting of pure experience which we call our knowledge. All that science gives to us is just such an endlessly enlarged experience, of which every particle remains objective and independent, inasmuch as it is not in us as psychical individuals, while yet completely dependent upon the forms of our subjective experience. The ideal of truth is thus not to gain by reason or by observation ideas in ourselves which correspond as well as possible to absolute things, but to reconstruct the given experience in the service of certain purposes. Everything which completely fulfills the purposes of this intentional reconstruction is true.
What are these purposes? One thing is clear from the first: There cannot be a purpose where there is not a will. If we come from pure experience to knowledge by a purposive transformation, we must acknowledge the reality of will in ourselves, or rather, we must find ourselves as will in the midst of pure experience before we reach any knowledge. And so it is indeed. We can abstract from all those reconstructions which the sciences suggest to us and go back to the most immediate nave experience; but we can never reach an experience which does not contain the doubleness of subject and object, of will and world. That doubleness has nothing whatever to do with the difference of physical and psychical; both the physical thing and the psychical idea are objects.
The ant.i.thesis is not that between two kinds of objects, since we have seen that in the immediate experience the objects are not at all split up into the two groups of material and mental things; it is rather the ant.i.thesis between the object in its undifferentiated state on the one side and the subject in its will-att.i.tude on the other side. Yes, even if we speak of the subject which stands as a unity behind the will-att.i.tudes, we are already reconstructing the real experience in the interest of the purposes of knowledge. In the immediate experience, we have the will-att.i.tudes themselves, and not a subject which wills them.
If we ask ourselves finally what is then the ultimate difference between those two elements of our pure experience, between the object and the will-att.i.tude, we stand before the ultimate data: we call that element which exists merely through a reference to its opposite, the object, and we call that element of our experience which is complete in itself, the att.i.tude of the will. If we experienced liking or disliking, affirming or denying, approving or disapproving in the same way in which we experience the red and the green, the sweet and the sour, the rock and the tree and the moon, we should know objects only. But we do experience them in quite a different way. The rock and the tree do not point to anything else, but the approval has no reality if it does not point to its opposition in disapproval, and the denial has no meaning if it is not meant in relation to the affirmative. This doubleness of our primary experience, this having of objects and of antagonistic att.i.tudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object without att.i.tude, and no att.i.tude without object. The two are one state; object and att.i.tude form a unity which we resolve by the different way in which we experience these two features of the one state: we find the object and we live through the att.i.tude. It is a different kind of awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the att.i.tude. In real life our will is never an object which we simply perceive. The psychologist may treat the will as such, but in the immediate experience of real life, we are certain of our action by doing it and not by perceiving our doing; and this our performing and rejecting is really our self which we posit as absolute reality, not by knowing it, but by willing it. This corner-stone of the Fichtean philosophy was forgotten throughout the uncritical and unphilosophical decades of a mere naturalistic age. But our time has finally come to give attention to it again.
Our pure experience thus contains will-att.i.tudes and objects of will, and the different att.i.tudes of the will give the fundamental cla.s.ses of human activity. We can easily recognize four different types of will-relation towards the world. Our will submits itself to the world; our will approves the world as it is; our will approves the changes in the world; our will transcends the world. Yet we must make at once one more most important discrimination. We have up to this point simplified our pure experience too much. It is not true that we experience only objects and our own will-att.i.tudes. Our will reaches out not only to objects, but also to other subjects. In our most immediate experience, not reshaped at all by theoretical science, our will is in agreement or disagreement with other wills; tries to influence them, and receives influences and suggestions from them. The pseudo-philosophy of naturalism must say of course that the will does not stand in any direct relation to another will, but that the other persons are for us simply material objects which we perceive, like other objects, and into which we project mental phenomena like those which we find in ourselves by the mere conclusion of a.n.a.logy. But the complex reconstructions of physiological psychology are therein subst.i.tuted for the primary experience. If we have to express the agreement or disagreement of wills in the terms of causal science, we may indeed be obliged to transform the real experience into such artificial constructions; but in our immediate consciousness, and thus at the starting-point of our theory of knowledge, we have certainly to acknowledge that we understand the other person, accept or do not accept his suggestion, agree or disagree with him, before we know anything of a difference between physical and mental objects.
We cannot agree with an object. We agree directly with a will, which does not come to us as a foreign phenomenon, but as a proposition which we accept or decline. In our immediate experience will thus reaches will, and we are aware of the difference between our will-att.i.tude as merely individual and our will-att.i.tude as act of agreement with the will-att.i.tude of other individuals. We can go still further. The circle of other individuals whose will we express in our own will-act may be narrow or wide, may be our friends or the nation, and this relation clearly const.i.tutes the historical significance of our att.i.tude. In the one case our act is a merely personal choice for personal purposes without any general meaning; in the other case it is the expression of general tendencies and historical movements. Yet our will-decisions can have connections still wider than those with our social community or our nation, or even with all living men of to-day. It can seek a relation to the totality of those whom we aim to acknowledge as real subjects. It thus becomes independent of the chance experience of this or that man, or this or that movement, which appeals to us, but involves in an independent way the reference to every one who is to be acknowledged as a subject at all. Such reference, which is no longer bound to any special group of historical individuals, thus becomes strictly over-individual. We can then discriminate three stages: our merely individual will; secondly, our will as bound by other historical individuals; and thirdly, our over-individual will, which is not influenced by any special individual, but by the general demands for the idea of a personality.
Each of those four great types of will-att.i.tude which we insisted on--that is, of submitting, of approving the given, of approving change, and of transcending--can be carried out on these three stages, that is, as individual act, as historical act, and as over-individual act. And we may say at once that only if we submit and approve and change and transcend in an over-individual act, do we have Truth and Beauty and Morality and Conviction. If we approve, for instance, a given experience in an individual will-act, we have simply personal enjoyment and its object is simply agreeable; if we approve it in harmony with other individuals, we reach a higher att.i.tude, yet one which cannot claim absolute value, as it is dependent on historical considerations and on the tastes and desires of a special group or a school or a nation or an age. But if we approve the given object just as it is in an over-individual will-act, then we have before us a thing of beauty, whose value is not dependent upon our personal enjoyment as individuals, but is demanded as a joy forever, by every one whom we acknowledge at all as a complete subject. In exactly the same way, we may approve a change in the world from any individual point of view: we have then to do with technical, practical achievements; or we may approve it in agreement with others: we then enter into the historical interests of our time. Or we may approve it, finally, in an over-individual way, without any reference to any special personality: then only is it valuable for all time, then only is it morally good. And if our will is transcending experience in an individual way, it can again claim no more than a subjective satisfaction furnished by any superst.i.tion or hope.
But if the transcending will is over-individual, it reaches the absolute values of religion and metaphysics.
Exactly the same differences, finally, must occur when our will submits itself to experience. This submission may be, again, an individual decision for individual purposes; no absolute value belongs to it. Or it may be again a yielding to the suggestions of other individuals; or it may, finally, again be an over-individual submission, which seeks no longer a personal interest. This submission is not to the authority of others, and is without reference to any individual; we a.s.sume that every one who is to share with us our world of experience has to share this submission too. That alone is a submission to truth, and experience, considered in so far as we submit ourselves to it over-individually, const.i.tutes our knowledge.
The system of knowledge is thus the system of experience with all that is involved in it in so far as it demands submission from our over-individual will, and the cla.s.sification which we are seeking must be thus a division and subdivision of our over-individual submissions.
But the submission itself can be of very different characters and these various types must give the deepest logical principles of scientific cla.s.sification. To point at once to the fundamental differences: our will acknowledges the demands of other wills and of objects. We cannot live our life--and this is not meant in a biological sense, but, first of all, in a teleological sense--our life becomes meaningless, if our will does not respect the reality of will-demands and of objects of will. Now we have seen that the will which demands our decision may be either the individual will of other subjects or the over-individual will, which belongs to every subject as such and is independent of any individuality. We can say at once that in the same way we are led to acknowledge that the object has partly an over-individual character, that is, necessarily belongs to the world of objects of every possible subject, and partly an individual character, as our personal object. We have thus four large groups of experiences to which we submit ourselves: over-individual will-acts, individual will-acts, over-individual objects, individual objects. They const.i.tute the first four large divisions of our system.
The over-individual will-acts, which are as such teleologically binding for every subject and therefore norms for his will, give us the Normative Sciences. The individual will-acts in the world of historical manifoldness give us the Historical Sciences. The objects, in so far as they belong to every individual, make up the physical world, and thus give us the Physical Sciences; and finally the objects, in so far as they belong to the individual, are the contents of consciousness, and thus give us the Mental Sciences. We have then the demarcation lines of our first four large divisions: the Normative, the Historical, the Physical, and the Mental Sciences. Yet their meaning and method and difference must be characterized more fully. We must understand why we have here to deal with four absolutely different types of scientific systems, why the over-individual objects lead us to general laws and to the determination of the future, while the study of the individual will-acts, for instance, gives us the system of history, which turns merely to the past and does not seek natural laws; and why the study of the norms gives us another kind of system in which neither a causal nor an historical, but a purely logical connection prevails. Yet all these methodological differences result necessarily from the material with which these four different groups of sciences are working.
Let us start again from the consideration of our original logical purpose. We feel ourselves bound and limited in our will by physical things, by psychical contents, by the demands of other subjects, and by norms. The purpose of all our knowledge is to develop completely all that is involved in this bondage. We want to develop in an over-individual way all the obligations for our submission which are necessarily included in the given objects and the given demands of subjects. We start of course everywhere and in every direction from the actual experience, but we expand the experience by seeking those objects and those demands to which, as necessarily following from the immediately given experience, we must also submit. And in thus developing the whole system of submissions, the interpretation of the experience itself becomes transformed: the physicist may perhaps subst.i.tute imperceptible atoms for the physical object and the psychologist may subst.i.tute sensations for the real idea, and the historian may subst.i.tute combinations of influences for the real personality, and the student of norms may subst.i.tute combinations of conflicting demands for the one complete duty; yet in every case the subst.i.tution is logically necessary and furnishes us what we call truth inasmuch as it is needed to develop the concrete system of our submissions and thus to express our confidence in the order-lines of reality. And each of these subst.i.tutions and supplementations becomes, as material of knowledge, itself a part of the world of experience.
3. _The Physical and the Mental Sciences_
The physicist, we said, speaks of the world of objects in so far as they belong to every possible subject, and are material for a merely pa.s.sive spectator. Of course the pure experience does not offer us anything of that kind. We insisted that the objects of our real life are objects of our will and of our att.i.tudes, and are at the same time undifferentiated into the physical things outside of us and the psychical ideas in us. To reach the abstraction of the physicist, we have thus to cut loose the objects from our will and to separate the over-individual elements from the individual elements. Both transformations are clearly demanded by our logical aims. As to the cutting loose from our will, it means considering the object as if it existed for itself, as if it were a mere pa.s.sively given material and not a material of our personal interests.
But just that is needed. We want to find out how far we have to submit ourselves to the object. If we want to live our life, we must adjust our att.i.tudes to things, and, as we know our will, we must seek to understand the other factor in the complex experience, the object of our will, and we must find out what it involves in itself. But we do not understand the object and the submission which it demands if we do not completely understand its relation to our desires. Our total submission to the thing thus involves our acknowledgment of all that we have to expect from it. And although the real experience is a unity of will and thing, we have thus the most immediate interest in considering what we have to expect from the thing in itself, without reference to our will.
That means finding out the effects of the given object with a subject as the pa.s.sive spectator. We eliminate artificially, therefore, the activity of the subject and construct as presupposition for this circle of knowledge a nowhere existing subject without activity, for which the thing exists merely as a cause of the effects which it produces.
The first step towards natural science is, therefore, to dissolve the real experience into thing and personality; that is, into object and active subject, and to eliminate in an artificial abstraction the activity of the subject, making the object material of merely pa.s.sive awareness, and related no longer to the will but merely to other objects. It may be more difficult to understand the second step which naturalism has to take before a natural science is possible. It must dissolve the object of will into an over-individual and an individual part and must eliminate the individual. That part of my objects which belongs to me alone is their psychical side; that which belongs to all of us and is the object of ever new experience is the physical object.