Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/533

BEN EKE. 5 1 1 treatment of experience as external natural science, i, r., the explanation of facts by laws, and, further still, by hy- potheses and theories. Gratefully recognizing the removal of two obstacles to psychology, the doctrine of innate ideas and the traditional theory of the faculties of the soul by Locke and Herbart, (the commonly accepted faculties — memory, understanding, feeling, will — are in fact not simple powers, but mere abstractions, hypostatized class concepts of extremely complex phenomena,) Beneke seeks to discover the simple elements from which all mental life is com- pounded. He finds these in the numerous elementary faculties of receiving and appropriating external stimuli, which the soul in part possesses, in part acquires in the course of its life, and which constitute its substance ; each separate sense of itself includes many such faculties. Every act or product of the soul is the result of two mutu- ally dependent factors : stitmihis and receptivity. Their coming together gives the first of the fotir fundamental processes, that of perception. The second is the constant addition of new elementary faculties. By the third, the equilibration or reciprocal transfer of the movable elements in representations, Beneke explains the reproduction of an idea through another associated with it, and the widening of the mental horizon by emotion, e.g.,.t astounding eloquence of the angry. Since each representation which passes out of consciousness continues to exist in the soul as an unconscious product (where we cannot tell ; the soul is not in space), it is not retention, but obliviscence which needs explanation. That which persists of the representation which is passing into unconsciousness, and which makes its reappearance in consciousness possible, is called a " trace " in reference to its departed cause, and a " disposition " {Angelegtheit) in reference to its future results. Every such trace or germ {Anlage) — that which lies intermediate be- tween perception and recollection — is a force, a striving, a tendency. The fourth of the fundamental processes (which may be traced downward into the material world, since the corporeal and the psychical differ only in degree and pass over into each other) is the combination of mental products according to the measure of their similarity, as these come