Chapter XXIX: Section D: RELIGIOUS WORK. (Hall 1, September 24, 3 p. m.) (2)

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 classification 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 classification 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 CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

1. _The Development of Classification_

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 classification 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 classification. 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 Ampère, 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 classified, but still more from the differences of logical interest. Sometimes the classification 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 God; 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 classifiers 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 æsthetics, 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 coördinated, not subordinated, to the knowledge of the physical world. We should say thus: all knowledge falls into two classes, 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 classification, 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 coördinated with sciences of phenomena. Only if all these tendencies of our time are fully acknowledged can the outer framework of our classification 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 classification, 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 substitute 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 naïve experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective attitudes 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, naïve 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 attitudes, 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 asserted that experience gives us the data which mere abstract reasoning can never supply; the other asserted 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 naïve 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 antithesis 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 antithesis between the object in its undifferentiated state on the one side and the subject in its will-attitude on the other side. Yes, even if we speak of the subject which stands as a unity behind the will-attitudes, we are already reconstructing the real experience in the interest of the purposes of knowledge. In the immediate experience, we have the will-attitudes 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-attitude, 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 attitude 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 attitudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object without attitude, and no attitude without object. The two are one state; object and attitude 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 attitude. It is a different kind of awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the attitude. 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-attitudes and objects of will, and the different attitudes of the will give the fundamental classes 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-attitudes. 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 analogy. But the complex reconstructions of physiological psychology are therein substituted 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-attitude as merely individual and our will-attitude as act of agreement with the will-attitude 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 constitutes the historical significance of our attitude. 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-attitude 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 attitude, 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 superstition 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 assume 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, constitutes 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 classification 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 classification. 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 constitute 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 substitute imperceptible atoms for the physical object and the psychologist may substitute sensations for the real idea, and the historian may substitute combinations of influences for the real personality, and the student of norms may substitute combinations of conflicting demands for the one complete duty; yet in every case the substitution 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 substitutions 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 passive 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 attitudes, 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 passively 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 attitudes 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 passive 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 passive 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. As a physicist, in the widest sense of the word, I have to ignore the objects in so far as they are my ideas and have to consider the stones and the stars, the inorganic and the organic objects, as they are outside of me, material for every one. The logical purpose of this second abstraction may be perhaps formulated in the following way.

We have seen that the purpose of the study of the objects is to find out what we have to expect from them; that is, to what effects of the given thing we have to submit ourselves in anticipation. The ideal aim is thus to understand completely how present objects and future objects--that is, how causes and effects--are connected. The first stage in such knowledge of causal connections is, of course, the observation of empirical consequences. Our feeling of expectation grows with the regularity of observed succession; yet the ideal aim can never be fulfilled in that way. The mere observation of regularities can help us to reduce a particular case to a frequently observed type, but what we seek to understand is the necessity of the process. Of course we have to formulate laws, and as soon as we acknowledge a special law to be expressive of a necessity, the subsumption of the particular case under the law will satisfy us even if the necessity of the connection is not recognized in the particular case. We are satisfied because the acknowledgment of the law involved all possible cases. But we do not at all feel that we have furnished a real explanation if the law means to us merely a generalization of routine experiences, and if thus no absolute validity is attached to the law. This necessity between cause and effect must thus have its ultimate reason in our own understanding. We must be logically obliged to connect the objects in such a way, and wherever observation seems to contradict that which is logically necessary, we must reshape our idea of the object till the demands of reason are fulfilled. That is, we must substitute for the given object an abstraction which serves the purpose of a logically necessary connection. That demand is clearly not satisfied if we simply group the totality of such causal judgments under the single name, Causality, and designate thus all these judgments as results of a special disposition of the understanding. We never understand why just this cause demands just this effect so long as we rely on such vague and mystical power of our reason to link the world by causality.

But the situation changes at once if we go still further back in the categories of our understanding. While a mere demand for causality never explains what cause is to be linked with what effect, the vagueness disappears when we understand this demand for causality itself as the product of a more fundamental demand for identity. That an object remains identical with itself does not need for us any further interpretation. That is the ultimate presupposition of our thought, and where a complete identity is found nothing demands further explanation. All scientific effort aims at so rethinking different experiences that they can be regarded as partially identical, and every discovery of necessary connection is ultimately a demonstration of identity. If we seek connections with the final aim to understand them as necessary, we must conceive the world of our objects in such a way that it is possible to consider the successive experiences as parts of a self-identical world; that is, as parts of a world in which no substance and no energy can disappear or appear anew. To reach this end it is obviously needed that we eliminate from the world of objects all that cannot be conceived as identically returning in a new experience; that is, all that belongs to the present experience only. We do eliminate this by taking it up conceptually into the subject and calling it psychical, and thus leaving to the object merely that which is conceived as belonging to the world of everybody's experience, that is, of over-individual experience. The whole history of natural science is first of all the gigantic development of this transformation, resolution, and reconstruction. The objects of experience are re-thought till everything is eliminated which cannot be conceived as identical with itself in the experiences of all individuals and thus as belonging to the over-individual world. All the substitutions of atoms for the real thing, and of energies for the real changes, are merely conceptional schemes to satisfy this demand.

The logically primary step is thus not the separation of the physical and the psychical things plus the secondary demand to connect the physical things causally; the order is exactly opposite. The primary desire is to connect the real objects and to understand them as causes and effects. This understanding demands not only empirical observation, but insight into the necessary connection. Necessary connection, on the other hand, exists merely for identical objects and identical qualities. But in the various experiences only that is identical which is independent of the momentary individual experiences, and therefore we need as the ultimate aim a reconstruction of the object into the two parts, the one perceptional, which refers to our individual experience; and the other conceptional, which expresses that which can be conceived as identical in every new experience. The ideal of this constructed world is the mechanical universe in which every atom moves by causal necessity because there is nothing in that universe, no element of substance and no element of energy, which will not remain identical in all changes of the universe which are possibly to be expected. It becomes completely determinable by anticipation and the system of our submissions to the object can be completely constructed. The totality of intellectual efforts to reconstruct such a causally connected over-individual world of objects clearly represents a unity of its own. It is the system of physical sciences.

The physical universe is thus not the totality of our objects. It is a substitution for our real objects, constructed by eliminating the individual parts of our objects of experience. These individual parts are the psychical aspects of our objective experience, and they clearly awake our scientific interest too. The physical sciences need thus as counterpart a division of mental sciences. Their aim must be the same. We want to foresee the psychical results and to understand causally the psychical experience. Yet it is clear that the plan of the mental sciences must be quite different in principle from that of the sciences of nature. The causal connection of the physical universe was ultimately anchored in the identity of the object through various experiences; while the object of experience was psychical for us just in so far as it could never be conceived as identical in different phases of reality. The psychical object is an ever new creation; my idea can never be your idea. Their meaning may be identical, but the psychical stuff, the content of my consciousness, can never be object for any one else, and even in myself the idea of to-day is never the idea of yesterday or to-morrow. But if there cannot be identity in different psychical experiences, it is logically impossible to connect them directly by necessity. If we yet want to master their successive appearance, we must substitute an indirect connection for the direct one, and must describe and explain the psychical phenomena through reference to the physical world. It is in this way that modern psychology has substituted elementary sensations for the real contents of consciousness and has constructed relations between these elementary mental states on the basis of processes in the organism, especially brain processes. Here, again, reality is left behind and a mere conceptional construction is put in its place. But this construction fulfills its purpose and thus gives us truth; and if the basis is once given, the psychological sciences can build up a causal system of the conscious processes in the individual man and in society.

4. _The Historical and the Normative Sciences_

The two divisions of the physical and mental sciences represent our systematized submission to objects. But we saw from the first that it is an artificial abstraction to consider in our real experience the object alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and in our attitudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to objects, merely, but to will-acts; and that these will-acts were the individual ones of other subjects or the over-individual ones which come to us in our consciousness of norms. The sciences which deal with our submissions to the individual will-acts of others are the Historical Sciences. Their starting-point is the same as that of the object sciences, the immediate experience. But the other subjects reach our individuality from the start in a different way from the objects. The wills of other subjects come to us as propositions with which we have to agree or disagree; as suggestions, which we are to imitate or to resist; and they carry in themselves that reference to an opposite which, as we saw, characterizes all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is destroyed if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenomenon, as an object in the world of objects. Whoever has clearly understood that politics and religion and knowledge and art and law come to me from the first quite differently from objects, can never doubt that their systematic connection must be most sharply separated from all the sciences which connect impressions of objects, and is falsified if the historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of the sciences of phenomena--for instance, as parts of sociology, the science of society as a psycho-physical object.

Just as natural science transcends the immediately experienced object and works out the whole system of our necessary submissions to the world of objects, so the historical sciences transcend the social will-acts which approach us in our immediate experience, and again seek to find what we are really submitting to if we accept the suggestions of our social surroundings. And yet this similar demand has most dissimilar consequences. We submit to an object and want to find out what we are really submitting to. That cannot mean anything else, as we have seen, than to seek the effects of the object and thus to look forward to what we have to expect from the object. On the other hand, if we want to find out what we are really submitting to if we agree with the decision of our neighbor, the only meaning of the question can be to ask what our neighbor really is deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and as his decision must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act of another subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to us without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those subjects of will which enter into our immediate experience to other subjects whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand to the present ones. And if we try to develop the system of these relations, we come to an endless chain of will-relations, in which one individual will always points back in its decisions to another individual will with which it agrees or disagrees, which it imitates or overcomes by a new attitude of will; and the whole network of these will-relations is the political or religious or artistic or social history of mankind. This system of history as a system of teleologically connected will-attitudes is elaborated from the will-propositions which reach us in immediate experience, with the same necessity with which the mechanical universe of natural science is worked out from the objects of our immediate experience.

The historical system of will-connections is similar to the system of object-connections, not only in its starting in the immediate experience, but further in its also seeking identities. Without this feature history would not offer to our understanding real connections. We must link the will-attitudes of men by showing the identity of the alternatives. Just as the physical thing is substituted by a large number of atoms which remain identical in the causal changes, in the same way the personality is substituted by an endless manifoldness of decisions and becomes linked with the historical community by the thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alternative which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there remains a most essential difference between the historical and the causal connection. In a world of things the mere identical continuity is sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. In a world of will the identity of alternatives cannot determine beforehand the actual decision; that belongs to the free activity of the subject. If this factor of freedom were left out, man would be made an object and history a mere appendix of natural science. The connection of the historian can therefore never be a necessary one, however much we may observe empirical regularities. If there were no identities, our reason could not find connection in history; but if the historical connections were necessary, like the causal ones, it would not be history. The historian is, therefore, unable and without the ambition to look into the future like the naturalist; his domain is the past.

Yet will-attitudes and will-acts can also be brought into necessary connection; that is, we can conceive will-acts as teleologically identical with each other and exempt from the freedom of the individual. That is clearly possible only if they are conceived as beyond the freedom of individual decision and related to the over-individual subject. The question is then no longer how this special man wills and decides, but how far a certain will-decision binds every possible individual who performs this act if he is to share our common world of will and meaning. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is what we call the logical connection. It shares with all other connections the dependence upon the category of identity. The logical connection shows how far one act or combination of acts involves, and thus is partially identical with, a new combination. This logical connection has, in common with the causal connection, necessity; and in common with the historical connection, teleological character. Any individual will-act of historical life may be treated for certain purposes as such a starting-point of over-individual relations; it would then lead to that scientific treatment which gives us an interpretation, for instance, of law. Such interpretative sciences belong to the system of history in the widest sense of the word.

The chief interest, however, must belong to the logical connections of those will-acts which themselves have over-individual character. A merely individual proposition can lead to necessary logical connection, but cannot claim that scientific importance which belongs to the logical connection of those propositions which are necessary for the constitution of every real experience: the science of chess cannot stand on the same level with the science of geometry, the science of local legal statutes not on the same level with the system of ethics. The logical connections of the over-individual attitudes thus constitute the fourth large division besides the physical, the mental, and the historical sciences. It must thus comprise the systems of all those propositions which are presuppositions of our common reality, independent of the free individual decision. Here belong the acts of approval--the ethical approval of changes and achievements, as well as the æsthetic approval of the given world; the acts of conviction--the religious convictions of a superstructure of the world as well as the metaphysical convictions of a substructure; and above all, the acts of affirmation and submission, the logical as well as the mathematical. But to be consistent we must really demand that merely the over-individual logical connections are treated in this division. If we deal, for instance, with the æsthetical or ethical acts as psychological experiences, or as historical propositions, they belong to the psychical or historical division. Only the philosophical system of ethics or æsthetics finds its place in this division. It is difficult to find a suitable name for this whole system of logical connections of over-individual attitudes. Perhaps it would be most correct to call it the Sciences of Values, inasmuch as every one of these over-individual decisions constitutes a value in our world which our individual will finds as an absolute datum like the objects of experience. Seen from another point of view, these values appear as norms which bind our practical will inasmuch as these absolute values demand of our will to realize them, and it may thus be permitted to designate this whole group of sciences as a Division of Normative Sciences.

Our logical explanation of the meaning of these four divisions naturally began with the interpretation of that science which usually takes precedence in popular thought--with the science of nature, that is, and passed then to those groups whose methodological situation is seen rather vaguely by our positivistic age. But as soon as we have once defined and worked out the boundary lines of each of these four divisions, it would appear more logical to change their order and to begin with that division whose material is those over-individual will-acts on which all possible knowledge must depend, and then to turn to those individual will-acts which determine the formulation of our present-day knowledge, and then only to go to the objects of knowledge, the over-individual and the individual ones. In short, we must begin with the normative sciences, consider in the second place the historical sciences, in the third place the physical sciences, and in the fourth place the psychical sciences. There cannot be a scientific judgment which must not find its place somewhere in one of these four groups. And yet can we really say that these four great divisions complete the totality of scientific efforts? The plan of our Congress contains three important divisions besides these.

5. _The Three Divisions of Practical Sciences_