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though the highest and most concrete of all. But the very process that has made necessary this new science reveals also that each of the former sciences existed only in abstraction from it. Each dealt with some one phase of conscious experience, and for that very reason could not deal with the totality which gave it its being, consciousness. But in psychology we have the manifestation and explication of this consciousness. It gives in its wholeness what each of them would give in part, viz., the nature of experience, and hence is related to them as the whole is to the part. It appears no longer, therefore, as the highest of sciences: it appears as Science itself, that is, as systematic account and comprehension of the nature of conscious experience. Mathematics, physics, biology, exist, because conscious experience reveals itself to be of such a nature, that one may make virtual abstraction from the whole, and consider a part by itself, without damage, so long as the treatment is purely scientific, that is, so long as the implicit connection with the whole is left undisturbed, and the attempt is not made to present this partial science as metaphysic, or as an explanation of the whole, as is the usual fashion of our uncritical so-called "scientific philosophies." Nay more, this abstraction of some one sphere is itself a living function of the psychologic experience. It is not merely something which it allows: it is something which it does. It is the analytic aspect of its own activity, whereby it deepens and renders explicit, realizes its own nature; just as their connection with each other is the synthetic aspect of the same self-realizing movement, whereby it returns to itself: while psychology in its completeness is the whole self-developing activity itself, which shows itself as the organic unity of both synthetic and analytic movements, and thus the condition of their possibility and ground of their validity. The analytic movement constitutes the special sciences; the synthetic constitutes the philosophy of nature; the self-developing activity itself, as psychology, constitutes philosophy.
What other position can be given psychology, so soon as we recognize the absurdity and impossibility of considering it a purely objective science? It is the science of the modes by which, in and through the individual, the universe is realized, it is said. But that the universe has no existence except as absolutely realized in an individual, i.e., except as self-consciousness, is precisely the result of philosophy, and can therefore be no objection to such a consideration of the universe: in fact, such a statement only amounts to saying that psychology considers the universe as it really is. If the assertion is varied again, to read that philosophy treats of this individualized universe as it eternally is, while psychology can treat of it only as it partially and interruptedly becomes, this loses sight of two very important facts. First, philosophy can treat of absolute self-consciousness only in so far as it has become in a being like man, for otherwise it is not material for philosophy at all; and, secondly, it falls into the error of regarding this realization in man as a time-conditioned product, which it is not. Time is not something outside of the process of conscious experience; it is a form within it, one of the functions by which it organically constitutes its own being. In fact, psychology as philosophic method has an immense advantage at just this point over any other method of treating this problem. To any philosophy attempting to consider the absolute self-consciousness by itself, it must remain forever an insoluble problem why the is should ever appear as becoming, why the eternal should ever appear through the temporal. Psychology solves the problem by avoiding the assumption which makes it a problem. For, dealing with an individualized universe, one of whose functions of realization is time, it knows nothing about any consciousness which is out of relation to time. The case is just here: if philosophy will deal with the absolute consciousness conceived as purely eternal, out of relation to time, then the existence of that which constitutes the actual content of man's experience is utterly inexplicable; it is not only a mystery, but a mystery which contradicts the very nature of that which is, ex hypothesi, the absolute. If philosophy does deal with the eternal absolute consciousness as forever realized, yet as forever having time as one of its organic functions, it is not open to anyone to bring charges against psychology as philosophy, for this and no more psychology does.
The question just comes to this: If we start from reason alone we shall never reach fact. If we start with fact, we shall find it revealing itself as reason. The objection to an account of fact or experience as philosophy is but a prejudice, though historically considered a well-grounded one. On the one hand, it has arisen because some partial account of experience, or rather account of partial experience, has been put forth as the totality, and just because thus put forth as absolute, has lost even the relative validity which it possessed as partial. Such is the procedure of Empiricism. On the other hand, we have had put forth as matter of fact certain truths declared to be immediate and necessary and intuitive, coming no one knows whence and meaning no one knows what. The aversion to immediacy, to ''undeduced ' fact as given us by the Intuitionalists, is certainly a well-grounded one. But neither of these objections lies against psychology as account of the facts of experience. Men are mortal, and every actual account of experience will suffer from the defects of mortals, and be but partial, no doubt; unfortunately we are none of us omniscient yet. But the very essence of psychology as method is that it treats of experience in its absolute totality, not setting up some one aspect of it to account for the whole, as, for example, our physical evolutionists do, nor yet attempting to determine its nature from something outside of and beyond itself, as, for example, our so-called empirical psychologists have done. The vice of the procedure of both is at bottom precisely the same -- the abstracting of some one element from the organism which gives it meaning, and setting it up as absolute. It is no wonder that the organism always has its revenge by pronouncing this abstracted element "unknowable." The only wonder is that men should still bow in spirit before this creation of their own abstracting thought, and reverence it as the cause and ground of all reality and knowledge. There is indeed an anthropomorphism which is degrading, but it is the anthropormorphism which sets up the feeblest element of its own thinking, pure being, as Mr. Spencer does, or the poorest element of its own feeling, a sensation, and reverences that as its own and the universe's cause. That is the anthropomorphism of the enslaved thought which has not yet awakened to the consciousness of its own totality and spiritual freedom.
Now does the account of fact given by psychology have anything in common with the "ultimate, inexplicable, necessary" mental facts called intuitions. The fact of psychology reveals itself as precisely reason, which thereby accounts for itself, and in accounting for itself accounts for all its members. The fact of psychology is not isolated "truths," but the organic system of self-consciousness. This fact is indeed "immediate," but it is immediate only in and through a process, hence of mediation. It is indeed self-evidencing, but what it evidences is simply, of the parts, relation to and dependence upon the whole, and of the whole, that it is self-conditioned and self-related. Of the whole fact it may be said indeed that it is inexplicable. "It is true that we cannot explain the spiritual principle which is implied in all experience by reference to anything else than itself."2 "Because all we can experience is included in this one world, and all our inferences and explanations relate only to its details, neither it as a whole, nor the one consciousness which constitutes it, can be accounted for in the ordinary sense of the word. They cannot be accounted for by what they include; and being all-inclusive, there remains nothing else by which they can be accounted for."3 In short, any system of philosophy must ultimately fall back on the fact for which no reason can be given except precisely just that it is what it is. This implication of fact4 is latent in all philosophy whatever, and all that psychology as philosophic method does is to render this necessary implication explicit. It alone starts from the completed fact, and it alone is therefore completed philosophy.
If it may have seemed at times in the course of the discussion that the nominal subject -- the relation of psychology to science -- had been left, it will now appear, I think, that we have all the time been dealing with just that subject. Science is the systematic account, or reason of fact; Psychology is the completed systematic account of the ultimate fact, which, as fact, reveals itself as reason, and hence accounts for itself, and gives the "reasons" of all sciences. The other point, the relation of psychology to logic, has already been dealt with by implication, and need not detain us long again.
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