Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/22

6 B. BOSANQUET : But the further tendency which has suggested itself in Sociology has already taken shape in Psychology. It has been found possible, by a recognition of the more definite facts of mental organisation, to come closer to the operations of developed intelligence than could be effected by the Laws of Association alone. The Theory of Apperception, in its modern form, is to the Laws of Association what an ex- planation of special machines is to a general account of the working of mechanical parts. It still, indeed, remains ostensibly within the province of Psychology ; but it re- cognises that though the reality which we think of may not fall within the mind, yet the mind is very different according to the reality which it thinks of. 1 The science, then, may still claim to maintain its speculative impartiality ; but this is no longer to be understood as more than the universal justice of reason. For it cannot any longer be said that the terms in which the highest phenomena are explained are such, without modification, as sufficed for the analysis of the lower. No doubt, indeed, it will always be convenient that Psychology as such should not pretend to absorb into itself the whole range of philosophical sciences, and therefore that it should maintain on the whole the peculiar abstraction which excludes the relation to reality from its view. But the line of this abstraction will always tend to be a vanishing one ; and Psychology, armed with the theory of Appercep- tion, will tend to be the science, not merely of any and every mind, but of mind where it is most mind, because best and most typical. The same relation may be predicted for Sociology. There will always no doubt be a difference in point of view, accord- ing as we approach the study of " association " from the side of anthropology or of zoology, or from any member of the linked circle of philosophical sciences, which attempt to bring together what is most profoundly real in the world. But as social science acquires command over its material and its conceptions, and as the mere unity of all phases of social existence ceases to be a novelty worth insisting on, it will recognise a gradation and a tendency, and find means to distinguish, on its own ground, the social forms in which development is fullest from those in which it is most meagre. In as far as it succeeds in this, it will assume to- wards the Philosophy of Society the same general attitude which Psychology holds towards Logic, Ethics, and ^Esthetic; and will be able to render services of the same class. 1 Mr. F. H. Bradlev has somewhere a sentence to this effect.