Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/18

4 D. G. EITCHIE : its relation to the special sciences different from that which I have just adopted. The reality which philosophy attempts to understand must be reality as a whole, but as knowable by us. With the genuinely " unknowable " we can have nothing to do, and it is waste of words to talk about it. The reality we deal with must mean the same thing as experience " ex- perience," however, being taken in its very widest sense. Each of the special sciences takes up some aspect of reality. Each of them, therefore, deals with abstractions of varying degrees of abstractness and not with the whole concrete fact. It is with the totality, with the concrete, complex whole that philosophy attempts to deal. If we consider psychology as one of the special sciences, we must nevertheless recognise that it divides the field of experience with the other sciences in a different way from that in which they divide it between themselves. They are each concerned with some aspect of the content of experience, some with more abstract, others with less abstract, aspects ; but all, even the least abstract of them, e.g., biology and sociology, leave out of consideration the fact that no reality exists for us at all save as an actual or possible object of consciousness. Psychology, on the other hand, makes the opposite abstraction. It is concerned with experience only on its subjective side, with the mental process as such, and is not directly concerned with this or that aspect of the content. Now, philosophy as the attempt to understand experience as a whole, to get at " the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," must inevitably take up an attitude of criticism towards the concepts which the various special sciences, including psychology, use in dealing with their problems. The thinking of experience as a whole remains the ideal for philosophy, an ideal which to different persons may seem more or less attainable ; but the task which all philosophers must accept includes at least the criticism of the concepts used in the sciences and in ordinary thinking. The question which Kant came to formulate ex- plicitly as the problem of what he called "Transcendental Logic," "How is knowledge possible?" is a question with which every serious philosophy deals in some way or other, however much the particular form and the particular results of the Kantian criticism be ignored or rejected or superseded. Only the thoroughgoing sceptic gives up the problem of how knowledge is possible, and in giving up this, he gives up metaphysics altogether and cultivates some other intellectual garden as best he may. Empiricists and idealists alike have their answer to the question, more or less dogmatic. They have some account to give of the concepts, such as thing