Chapter V: Psychology

Mind reading not science.—Experience a reconstruction.—The honest art of education.—Arbitrary readings of the mind.—Human nature appealed to rather than described.—Dialectic in psychology.—Spinoza on the passions.—A principle of estimation cannot govern events.—Scientific psychology a part of biology.—Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.—Differentia of the psychic.—Approach to irrelevant sentience.—Perception represents things in their practical relation to the body.—Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.—Attempt at idealistic physics.—Association not efficient.—It describes coincidences.—Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in dialectic.—Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and will another.—Double attachment of mind to nature.—Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?—Sentience is representable only in fancy.—The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not sentience, are also real.—Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other things. Pages 126-166

CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

Dialectic better than physics.—Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous and unpleasant.—Physics should be largely virtual, and dialectic explicit.—Intent is vital and indescribable.—It is analogous to flux in existence.—It expresses natural life.—It has a material basis.—It is necessarily relevant to earth.—The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.—Intent starts from a datum, and is carried by a feeling.—It demands conventional expression.—A fable about matter and form. Pages 167-186

CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

Dialectic elaborates given forms.—Forms are abstracted from existence by intent.—Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous intent.—The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical.—Its moral value is therefore contingent.—Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment—Constancy and progress in intent.—Intent determines the functional essence of objects.—Also the scope of ideals.—Double status of mathematics.—Practical rôle of dialectic.—Hegel’s satire on dialectic.—Dialectic expresses a given intent.—Its empire is ideal and autonomous. Pages 187-209

CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

Empirical alloy in dialectic.—Arrested rationality in morals.—Its emotional and practical power.—Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of anthropology.—Estimation the soul of philosophy.—Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.—A choice of proverbs.—Their various representative value.—Conflict of partial moralities.—The Greek ideal.—Imaginative exuberance and political discipline.—Sterility of Greek example.—Prerational morality among the Jews.—The development of conscience.—Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims.—Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programme. Pages 210-232

CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

Moral passions represent private interests.—Common ideal interests may supervene.—To this extent there is rational society.—A rational morality not attainable, but its principle clear.—It is the logic of an autonomous will.—Socrates’ science.—Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy.—Its vitality.—Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.—Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to harmony.—Self-love artificial.—The sanction of reason is happiness.—Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its unrecognised scope.—Fallacy in democratic hedonism.—Sympathy a conditional duty.—All life, and hence right life, finite and particular. Pages 233-261

CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

Socratic ethics retrospective.—Rise of disillusioned moralities.—The illusion subsisting in them.—Epicurean refuge in pleasure.—Stoic recourse to conformity.—Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in arbitrary doctrines.—The latter alone lend it practical force.—Moral ambiguity in pantheism.—Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.—A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.—The Hebraic cry for redemption.—The two factors meet in Christianity.—Consequent eclecticism.—The negation of naturalism never complete.—Spontaneous values rehabilitated.—A witness out of India.—Dignity of post-rational morality.—Absurdities nevertheless involved.—The soul of positivism in all ideals.—Moribund dreams and perennial realities. Pages 262-300

CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

Various modes of revising science.—Science its own best critic.—Obstruction by alien traditions.—Needless anxiety for moral interests.—Science an imaginative and practical art.—Arrière-pensée in transcendentalism.—Its romantic sincerity.—Its constructive impotence.—Its dependence on common-sense.—Its futility.—Ideal science is self-justified.—Physical science is presupposed in scepticism.—It recurs in all understanding of perception.—Science contains all trustworthy knowledge.—It suffices for the Life of Reason. Pages 301-320

REASON IN SCIENCE