Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/551

LUDWIG BUSSE, Geist und Korper, Seele und Leib. 537 and servile enough to try to turn into absolute metaphysical truths. Yet it is these special hypothetical interpretations and additions to the concept through which we seek to render constant and regular relations of dependence intelligible to ourselves, that are supposed to set aside psycho-physical dependence as non-causal. Science may be contented with a causal concept reduced to mere regular succession, sufficient to describe and reckon the processes of nature, but philosophy cannot deplete it of the concept of action, force, active being. It has been said, in answer to criticisms similar to those of Prof. Busse, that quantitative methods are only applicable on the assumption of the conservation of energy. It is, in Kant's sense of the term, an a priori proposition, and only implies that the universe is one coherent system, in which we need not fear, for certain purposes, to regard the organic as a higher form of the mechanical, or oppose the ideal of scientific explanation, found in a complete description of the universe in its simplest and most abstract terms. To some minds this is a completely satisfactory answer, to others the translation of teleology into mechanism conveys no intelligible meaning. It appears to confuse "why" with "how," by assuming that everything spiritual has a physical aspect, to which the methods of science can be applied, and iden- tifying this with the immediate content of the Absolute, to which " why " would be improperly addressed. But, if the Absolute can have no possible estrangement from his immediacy, the finite spirit is barely resigned to its own : it cannot find itself again in the mechanism of nature. Prof. Busse does not state his objection in this way, but he questions both the assumptions on which, as it appears to me, the view he opposes rests. He cannot recognise as self-evident the assumption made by Paulsen and Heymans that everything psychical must also present itself in the mundus sensibilis as physical. This is so if parallelism is valid, not otherwise. As it evidently depends upon the nature of things how they are perceived by us, so it may depend upon their nature whether they appear in sensuous form at all or not. Prof. Busse holds that we can hardly escape the conclusion that there are reals evident to sense and reals only cognisable in a non- -sensuous manner. If we are under the compulsion of the forms -of sensuous apperception, why do we perceive ourselves not only so, but also in a non-sensuous manner? And if we possess, along with the faculty of sensuous knowledge, also the faculty of non- sensuous knowledge, why can we perceive only ourselves in this way, and not other things as well? Is it impossible that the universal spirit should have posited in itself a stratum of eternally unchangeable, primitive, spiritual realities, appearing to our sensu- ous perception as nature, a world of corporeal things, extended and moving in space ? The consequence would be that, not the Absolute itself, but only its partial content, appears to us in sensuous form; whilst of itself, active in all its works, but not