SEMINAR NOTES.
THE METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM.
DIVISION I. THE SOURCES AND USES
OF MATERIAL.
PART II. THE LOGIC OF THE PSYCHICAL SCIENCES.
CHAPTER II.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE PSYCHICAL SCIENCES.'
Like mathematics and natural science, the psychical sciences have devel- oped out of philosophy. Ethical rules which, derived from observation of human conduct and its motives, were deposited in ancient proverbial popu- lar wisdom, together with a body of naive reflection about the general cor- relations of natural phenomena, constitute everywhere the beginnings of scientific thought. At the outset, science is dominated by interest in the cos- mological problems. The consequence was that for a long time the science of the psychical nature of man — psychology — which, we would say, should have been posited as the basis of all other psychical sciences, was entirely neglected. That is, psychology was not made into a distinct and independent realm of research. Meanwhile it was treated either as a branch of natural philosophy or as an appendix of metaphysics. It has followed, in fact, that the development of the psychical sciences has not proceeded from psychology, but from the cultivation of special fields of research, whose coherence in a totality analogous with that of the natural sciences Has but just been appre- hended. Accordingly the phrase " psychical sciences " {Geistesiuissenschafien) is of recent origm. It seems to have occurred for the first time in the attempts, in the early decades of this century, to find a comprehensive clas- sification of the sciences.'
■The remainder of Part II, i. e., chaps. 2-5, is an epitome of Wundt, 2. Bd., 2. Abth., pp. 1-51. Cf. Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization.
•Thus Bentham (Chrestomalhia, 1829 (?) ) divides all sciences into somatology and pneumatology ; AMPfeRE, Essai sur la PAUosophie des sciences, Paris, 1834, into cosmology and neology.
Hegel designates as Geisteslehre — theory of spirit — the whole body of philoso- phy which corresponds with the Geisteswissenschaften — psychical sciences — (Encyclo- pddie. Ill, %i%t).
John Stuart Mill seems to have been the first to put alongside of the logic of the natural sciences a logic of psychical sciences.
235
