Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

settle, as it were, what we are to observe and look for, and how we are to describe our observations. And by the conception of Soul, is meant not a soul, as a thing or agent (subject) which has properties attaching to it; but soul, as the generic feature, the universal, which is set as a stamp on everything that claims to be psychical. In other words, Soul is one, not as a single thing contrasted with its attributes, activities, or exercises of force (such single thing will be shown by logic to be a metaphysical fiction); but as the unity of form and character, the comprehensive and identical feature, which is present in all its manifestations and exercises. But there is a second consideration. The question is asked by Aristotle whether it is completely and strictly accurate to put Soul under the category of natural objects. There is in it, or of it, perhaps, something, and something essential to it, which belongs to the order of the eternal and self-active: [pg lv] something which is “form” and “energy” quite unaffected by and separate from “matter.” How this is related to the realm of the perishable and changeable is a problem on which Aristotle has been often (and with some reason) believed to be obscure, if not even inconsistent21.

In these divergent elements which come to the fore in Aristotle's treatment we have the appearance of a radical difference of conception and purpose as to psychology. He himself does a good deal to keep them both in view. But it is evident that here already we have the contrast between a purely physical or (in the narrower sense) “scientific” psychology, empirical and realistic in treatment, and a more philosophical—what in certain quarters would be called a speculative or metaphysical—conception of the problem. There is also in Aristotle the antithesis of a popular or superficial, and an accurate or analytic, psychology. The former is of a certain use in dealing, say, with questions of practical ethics and education: the latter is of more strictly scientific interest. Both of these distinctions—that between a speculative and an empirical, and that between a scientific and a popular treatment—affect the subsequent history of the study. Psychology is sometimes understood to mean the results of casual observation of our own minds by what is termed introspection, and by the interpretation of what we may observe in others. Such observations are in the first place carried on under the guidance of distinctions or points of view supplied by the names in common use. We interrogate our own consciousness as to what facts or relations of facts correspond to the terms of our national language. Or we attempt—what is really an inexhaustible quest—to get definite divisions between them, and clear-cut [pg lvi] definitions. Inquiries like these which start from popular distinctions fall a long way short of science: and the inquirer will find that accidental and essential properties are given in the same handful of conclusions. Yet there is always much value in these attempts to get our minds cleared: and it is indispensable for all inquiries that all alleged or reported facts of mind should be realised and reproduced in our own mental experience. And this is especially the case in psychology, just because here we cannot get the object outside us, we cannot get or make a diagram, and unless we give it reality by re-constructing it,—by re-interrogating our own experience, our knowledge of it will be but wooden and mechanical. And the term introspection need not be too seriously taken: it means much more than watching passively an internal drama; and is quite as well describable as mental projection, setting out what was within, and so as it were hidden and involved, before ourselves in the field of mental vision. Here, as always, the essential point is to get ourselves well out of the way of the object observed, and to stand, figuratively speaking, quite on one side.

But even at the best, such a popular or empirical psychology has no special claim to be ranked as science. It may no doubt be said that at least it collects, describes, or notes down facts. But even this is not so certain as it seems. Its so-called facts are very largely fictions, or so largely interpolated with error, that they cannot be safely used for construction. If psychology is to accomplish anything valuable, it must go more radically to work. It must—at least in a measure—discard from its preliminary view the data of common and current distinctions, and try to get at something more primary or ultimate as its starting-point. And this it may do in [pg lvii] two ways. It may, in the one case, follow the example of the physical sciences. In these it is the universal practice to assume that the explanation of complex and concrete facts is to be attained by (a) postulating certain simple elements (which we may call atoms, molecules, and perhaps units or monads), which are supposed to be clearly conceivable and to justify themselves by intrinsic intelligibility, and by (b) assuming that these elements are compounded and combined according to laws which again are in the last resort self-evident, or such that they seem to have an obvious and palpable lucidity. Further, such laws being always axioms or plain postulates of mechanics (for these alone possess this feature of self-evident intelligibility), they are subject to and invite all the aids and refinements of the higher mathematical calculus. What the primary and self-explicative bits of psychical reality may be, is a further question on which there may be some dispute. They may be, so to say, taken in a more physical or in a more metaphysical way: i.e. more as units of nerve-function or more as elements of ideative-function. And there may be differences as to how far and in what provinces the mathematical calculus may be applicable. But, in any case, there will be a strong tendency in psychology, worked on this plan, to follow, mutatis mutandis, and at some distance perhaps, the analogy of material physics. In both the justification of the postulated units and laws will be their ability to describe and systematise the observed phenomena in a uniform and consistent way.

The other way in which psychology gets a foundation and ulterior certainty is different, and goes deeper. After all, the “scientific” method is only a way in which the facts of a given sphere are presented in thoroughgoing interconnexion, each reduced to an exact multiple [pg lviii] or fraction of some other, by an inimitably continued subtraction and addition of an assumed homogeneous element, found or assumed to be perfectly imaginable (conceivable). But we may also consider the province in relation to the whole sphere of reality, may ask what is its place and meaning in the whole, what reality is in the end driving at or coming to be, and how far this special province contributes to that end. If we do this, we attach psychology to philosophy, or, if we prefer so to call it, to metaphysics, as in the former way we established it on the principles generally received as governing the method of the physical sciences.

This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called empirical (or, to use the more English phrase, inductive) sciences. On many hands they are actually so treated: and not without result. Considering the tendency of metaphysical inquiries, it may be urged that it is well to avoid preliminary criticism of the current conceptions and beliefs about reality which these sciences imply. Yet such beliefs are undoubtedly present and effective. Schopenhauer has popularised the principle that the pure empiricist is a fiction, that man is a radically metaphysical animal, and that he inevitably turns what he receives into a part of a dogmatic creed—a conviction how things ought to be. Almost without effort there grows up in him, or flows in upon him, a belief and a system of beliefs as to the order and values of things. Every judgment, even in logic, rests on such an order [pg lix] of truth. He need not be able to formulate his creed: it will influence him none the less: nay, his faith will probably seem more a part of the solid earth and common reality, the less it has been reduced to a determinate creed or to a code of principles. For such formulation presupposes doubt and scepticism, which it beats back by mere assertion. Each human being has such a background of convictions which govern his actions and conceptions, and of which it so startles him to suggest the possibility of a doubt, that he turns away in dogmatic horror. Such ruling ideas vary, from man to man, and from man to woman—if we consider them in all their minuteness. But above all they constitute themselves in a differently organised system or aggregate according to the social and educational stratum to which an individual belongs. Each group, engaged in a common task, it may be in the study of a part of nature, is ideally bound and obliged by a common language, and special standards of truth and reality for its own. Such a group of ideas is what Bacon would have called a scientific fetich or idolum theatri. A scientific idolum is a traditional belief or dogma as to principles, values, and methods, which has so thoroughly pervaded the minds of those engaged in a branch of inquiry, that they no longer recognise its hypothetical character,—its relation of means to the main end of their function.

Such a collected and united theory of reality (it is what Hegel has designated the Idea) is what is understood by a natural metaphysic. It has nothing necessarily to do with a supersensible or a supernatural, if these words mean a ghostly, materialised, but super-finely-materialised nature, above and beyond the present. But that there is a persistent tendency to conceive the unity and coherence, the theoretic idea of reality, [pg lx] in this pseudo-sensuous (i.e. super-sensuous) form, is of course a well-known fact. For the present, however, this aberration—this idol of the tribe—may be left out of sight. By a metaphysic or fundamental philosophy, is, in the present instance, meant a system of first principles—a secular and cosmic creed: a belief in ends and values, a belief in truth—again premising that the system in question is, for most, a rudely organised and almost inarticulate mass of belief and hope, conviction and impression. It is, in short, a natural metaphysic: a metaphysic, that is, which has but an imperfect coherence, which imperfectly realises both its nature and its limits.

In certain parts, however, it is more and better than this crude background of belief. Each science—or at least every group of sciences—has a more definite system or aggregate of first principles, axioms, and conceptions belonging to it. It has, that is,—and here in a much distincter way—its special standard of reality, its peculiar forms of conceiving things, its distinctions between the actual and