Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/829

PHILOSOPHY 793 tween philosophy and the sciences will be, to some extent, one of reciprocal influence. The sciences may be said to furnish philosophy with its matter, but philosophical criti cism reacts upon the matter thus furnished, and transforms it. Such transformation is inevitable, for the parts only exist and can only be fully, i.e., truly, known in their relation to the whole. A pure specialist, if such a being were possible, would be merely an instrument whose results had to be co-ordinated and used by others. Now, though a pure specialist may be an abstraction of the mind, the tendency of specialists in any department naturally is to lose sight of the whole in attention to the particular cate gories or modes of nature s working which happen to be exemplified, and fruitfully applied, in their own sphere of investigation ; and in proportion as this is the case it becomes necessary for their theories to be co-ordinated with the results of other inquirers, and set, as it were, in the light of the whole. This task of co-ordination, in the broadest sense, is undertaken by philosophy ; for the philosopher is essentially what Plato, in a happy moment, styled him, O-WOTTTIKOS, the man who insists on seeing things together. The aim of philosophy (whether attain able or not) is to exhibit the universe as a rational system in the harmony of all its parts ; and accordingly the philo sopher refuses to consider the parts out of their relation to the whole whose parts they are. Philosophy corrects in this way the abstractions which are inevitably made by the scientific specialist, and may claim, therefore, to be the only concrete science, that is to say, the only science which takes account of all the elements in the problem, and the only science whose results can claim to be true in more than a provisional sense. For it is evident from what has been said that the way in which we commonly speak of " facts " is calculated to convey a false impression. The world is not a collection of individual facts existing side by side and capable of being known separately. A fact is nothing except in its relations to other facts ; and as these relations are multi plied in the progress of knowledge the nature of the so- called fact is indefinitely modified. Moreover, every state ment of fact involves certain general notions and theories, so that the "facts "of the separate sciences cannot be stated except in terms of the conceptions or hypotheses which are assumed by the particular science. Thus mathe matics assumes space as an existent infinite, without investi gating in what sense the existence or the infinity of this " Unding," as Kant called it, can be asserted. In the same way, physics may be said to assume the notion of material atoms and forces. These and similar assump tions are ultimate presuppositions or working hypotheses for the sciences themselves. But it is the office of philo sophy, or theory of knowledge, to submit such conceptions to a critical analysis, with a view to discover how far they can be thought out, or how far, when this is done, they refute themselves, and call for a different form of statement, if they are to be taken as a statement of the ultimate nature of the real. 1 The first statement may frequently turn out to have been merely provisionally or relatively true ; it is then superseded by, or rather inevit ably merges itself in, a less abstract account. In this the same " facts " appear differently, because no longer sepa rated from other aspects that belong to the full reality of the known world. There is no such thing, we have said, as an individual fact ; and the nature of any fact is not fully known unless we know it in all its relations to the 1 The revisional office which philosophy here assumes constitutes her the critic of the sciences. It is in this connexion that the mean ing of the definition of philosophy as "the science of principles" can best be seen. This is perhaps the most usual definition, and, though vague, one of the least misleading. system of the universe, or, in Spinoza s phrase, " sub specie aeternitatis." In strictness, there is but one res completa or concrete fact, and it is the business of philosophy, as science of the whole, to expound the chief relations that constitute its complex nature. The last abstraction which it becomes the duty of philo sophy to remove is the abstraction from the knowing subject which is made by all the sciences, including, as we shall see, the science of psychology. The sciences, one and all, deal with a world of objects, but the ultimate fact as we know it is the existence of an object for a sub ject. Subject-object, knowledge, or, more widely, self-con sciousness with its implicates this unity in duality is the ultimate aspect which reality presents. It has generally been considered, therefore, as constituting in a special sense the problem of philosophy. Philosophy may be said to be the explication of what is involved in this relation, or, in modern phraseology, a theory of its possibility. Any would-be theory of the universe which makes its central fact impossible stands self -condemned. On the other hand, a sufficient analysis here may be expected to yield us a statement of the reality of things in its last terms, and thus to shed a light backwards upon the true nature of our subordinate conceptions. Psychology, Epistemology, and Metaphysics. This leads to the consideration of our first group of subsidiary sciences PSYCHOLOGY (q.v.}, epistemology (theory of knowledge, Erkenntnisstheorie), and metaphysics (ontology; see META- PHYSIC). A special relation has always existed between psychology and systematic philosophy, but the closeness of the connexion has been characteristic of modern and more particularly of English thought. The connexion is not diffi cult to explain, seeing that in psychology, or the science of mind, we study the fact of intelligence (and moral action), and have, so far, in our hands the fact to which all other facts are relative. From this point of view we may even agree with Sir "W. Hamilton when he quotes Jacobi s dictum " Nature conceals God ; man reveals God." In other words, as has just been said, the ultimate explana tion of things cannot be given by any theory which excludes from its survey the intelligence in which nature, as it were, gathers herself up. But knowledge, or the mind as knowing, willing, etc., may be looked at in two different ways. It may be regarded simply as a fact, in which case the evolutions of mind may be traced and reduced to laws in the same way as the phenomena treated by the other sciences. This study gives us the science of empirical psychology, or, as it is now termed, psychology sans phrase. In order to give an adequate account of its subject-matter, psychology may require higher or more complex categories than are employed in the other sciences, just as biology, for example, cannot Avork with mechanical categories alone, but introduces the conception of development or growth. But the affinities of such a study are manifestly with the sciences as such rather than with philosophy ; and it has been already pointed out that the division of labour in this respect is proceeding rapidly. Since it has been taken up by specialists, psychology is being established on a broader basis of induction, and with the advantage, in some departments, of the employment of experimental methods of measurement. But it is not of mind in this aspect that such assertions can be made as those quoted above. Mind, as studied by the psychologist mind as a mere fact or phenomenon grounds no inference to any thing beyond itself. The distinction between mind viewed as a succession of " states of consciousness " and the further aspect of mind which philosophy considers is very clearly put in a recent article by Professor Groom Robertson, who also makes a happy suggestion of two terms to designate the double point of view. XVIII. ioo