Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/455

THE THEORETICAL EGO. 435 fpurth stadium is " understanding," which steadies the fluctuating intuition into a concept, realizes the object, and looks upon it as the cause of the intuition. Fifthly, " judgment " makes its appearance as the faculty of free reflection and abstraction, or the power to consider a definite content or to abstract from it. As judg- ment is itself the condition of the bound reflection of the understanding, so it points in turn to its condition, to the sixth and highest stage of intelligence, " reason," by means of which we are able to abstract from all objects whatever, while reason itself, pure self-consciousness, is that from which abstraction is never possible. It is only in the highest stage that consciousness or a representation of representation takes place. And at the culmination of the theoretical ego the point of transition to the practical ego appears. Here the ego becomes aware that in positing itself as determined by the non-ego it has only limited itself, and therefore is itself the ground of the whole content of consciousness; here it apprehends itself as determining the non-ego or as acting, and recognizes as its chief mission to impress the form of the ego as far as possible on the non-ego, and ever to extend the boundary further. The " deduction of representation " whose outline has just been given was the first example (often imitated in the school of Schelling and Hegel) of a constructive psychology, which, from the mission or the concept of the soul — in this case from the nature of self-consciousness — deduces the various psychical functions as a system of actions, each of which is in its place implied by the rest, as it in turn presupposes them. This is distinguished from the sensationalistic psychology, which is also genetic (cf. pp. 245-250), as well as from the mechanical or associationaJ psychology, which likewise excludes the idea of an isolated! coexistence of mental faculties, by the fact that it demands a new manifestation of the soul-ground in order to the ascent from one member of the series to the next higher, rather as a thing in itself independent of the ego and affecting it. Further, tB must so appear, because the ego, in its after reflection on its productive activity^ and just by this reflection, transforms the productive action considered into «  fixed and independent product found existing.