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Relation of Psychology to Logic. -- The whole course of philosophic thought, so far as the writer can comprehend it, has consisted in showing that any distinction between the form and the matter of philosophic truth, between the content and the method, is fatal to the reaching of truth. Self-consciousness is the final truth, and in self-consciousness the form as organic system and the content as organized system are exactly equal to each other. It is a process which, as form, has produced itself as matter. Psychology as the account of this self-consciousness must necessarily fulfill all the conditions of true method. Logic, since it necessarily abstracts from the ultimate fact, cannot reach in matter what it points to in form. While its content, if it be true philosophy, must be the whole content of self-consciousness or spirit, its form is only one process within this content, that of thought-conditions, the Idee. While the content is the eternal nature of the universe, its form is adequate only to "thinking what God thought and was before the creation of the world,'' that is, the universe in its unreality, in its abstraction. It is this contradiction between content and form in logic which makes it not philosophic method, but only one moment within that method. No contradiction results as soon as logic is given its proper place within the system. The contradiction occurs when, at the same moment that it is said that logic is "abstract" the logical method is still said to be the method of philosophy.
Such contradictions certainly appear to exist, for example, in the philosophy of Hegel. They have been often pointed out, and I shall only summarize them, following for the most part a recent writer.5 There is no way of getting from logic to the philosophy of nature logically. The only way is to fall back upon the fact; "we know from experience" that we have nature as well as the Idee. In truth we do not go from logic to nature at all. The movement is a reverse movement. "In reality, the necessity for any such transition is purely factitious, because the notions never existed otherwise than in nature and spirit.... They were got by abstraction from the concrete.... We owe, therefore, no apology for a return to the reality from which we took them." In short, it is necessity of fact, a necessity of conscious experience, which takes us from the realm of the Idee to the realm of nature, from the sphere of thought-conditions to the sphere of existent relations. "The same is true when we pass to the philosophy of spirit. The general form of personality is deducible, but not a living human spirit with its individual thoughts, feelings and actions." This remains "the incomprehensible and inexplicable point in philosophy." And so it does undoubtedly while we regard logic as method of philosophy. But this "inexplicability" is but the express condemnation of the method, not a fact to be contented with. If we go deeper and inquire not how is the transition from logic to the philosophy of nature or to the philosophy of spirit made, but how is any transition whatever possible, we find the same difficulty. It exists only by reason of the presupposed fact. "We cannot in strictness say that the result has been independently proved, because it has been reached in this fashion by the method. It was presupposed in the method all along." In a definite case, how is the transition, say from the category of quality to that of quantity, made? It occurs not by virtue of the category of quality in itself, but by virtue of the fact that the whole Idee is implicitly contained in the principle of quality, and must manifest itself, which it does by forcing quality, as an inadequate expression of its own nature, into quantity, which expresses its being more fully. And thus the process continues until the Idee has manifested itself as the whole organic system, which has expressed explicitly all that which in Idee it is. But this movement itself depends on spirit, and on the manifestation of spirit in nature, as already seen. Every purely logical transition therefore occurs at bottom because of fact? i.e., seen in its wholeness it is not a logical transition but a factual. Psychology, as philosophic method, merely starts from this everywhere presupposed fact, and by so doing, for the first time, gives logic its basis and validity.
There can be no escape from this result by saying that after all in the philosophy of spirit, spirit is shown to be the prius and condition of the whole, as it undoubtedly is by Hegel himself. This merely brings the contradiction itself into clearer light. For logic, being thus confessedly determined as abstract, is still retained to determine the nature of the concrete. Logic, while it is thus declared to be only one moment of spirit, is still used to determine the nature of the whole. Thus is revealed the contradiction between form and content involved in the use of logic as the method of philosophy. Spirit is reached by a logical process, and the logical result is that as fact it is not reached at all. As concrete, it is beyond the reach of any abstract process. Either one must call in the aid of the presupposed but suppressed Fact, and recognize that after all the process has been going on within a further and higher determination; or, failing to see this, must recognize Spirit as only one factor or moment of the logical movement, that is, give up the notion of self-consciousness as subject, and fall back into Spinozistic pantheism. The logical movement, considered by itself, is always balancing in unstable equilibrium between dualism and pantheism. Set up as absolute method, it either recognizes the fact, but being unable to comprehend it, has to regard this fact, as foreign element over against it, as the matter of Plato and Aristotle, the thing-in-itself of Kant, and Anstoss of Fichte,6 or endeavors to absorb the Fact as a mere element in its own logical being, and falls into Pantheism.
This is the reason why Hegel, although the very center of his system is self-conditioned spirit, lends himself so easily to pantheistic treatment. Logic cannot reach, however much it may point to, an actual individual. The gathering up of the universe into the one self-conscious individuality it may assert as necessary, it cannot give it as reality. It is only as logic contradicts itself and faces back on the constant presupposition of this reality that it can demonstrate what it asserts. Taken purely by itself it must issue in a pantheism where the only real is the Idee, and where all its factors and moments, including spirit and nature, are real only at different stages or phases of the Idee, but vanish as imperfect ways of looking at things, or as illusions, when we reach the Idee. And thus the Idee itself vanishes; as an organic system, as a unity which lives through its distinctions, and becomes a dead identity, in no way distinguishable from the substance of Spinoza. Logic set up as absolute method reveals its self-contradiction by destroying itself. In a purely logical method the distinctions, the process, must disappear in the final unity, the product. Only a living actual Fact can preserve within its unity that organic system of differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being. It is with this fact, conscious experience in its entirety, -that psychology as method begins. It thus brings to clear light of day the presupposition implicit in every philosophy, and thereby affords logic, as well as the philosophy of nature, its basis, ideal and surety. If we have determined the nature of reality, by a process whose content equals its form, we can show the meaning, worth and limits of any one moment of this reality.
The conclusion of the whole matter is that a "being like man," since self-conscious, is an individualized universe, and hence that his nature is the proper material of philosophy, and in its wholeness the only material. Psychology is the science of this nature, and no dualism in it, or in ways of regarding it, is tenable. Whatever the dualism may be, it is only relative, and one which occurs within, not without, psychological experience. Psychology, as the complete systematic account of man, at the same time shows the value and meaning, and affords the condition, of the special sciences, the philosophy of nature and of logic. Or, in a word, if the reality of spirit be the presupposition, the prius and the goal, the condition and the end of all reality, the science of spirit must occupy a corresponding position with relation to all science. Surely then, as the Editor of Mind formerly urged, "the method of psychological approach is not philosophically valueless," and we have "ground for the belief that it has only to be more systematically followed out for the attaining of as great results as have been claimed for another way, while in this way the results are more likely to secure general acceptance"7 -- because, we may add, it simply expresses in a scientific way that which lies at the basis of all that has been otherwise secured.
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