Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/493

PHILOSOPHICAL TERMINOLOGY. 479 unite only in the summits and branches ; so that it is hard to estimate the relative share of any language in extending our knowledge. This co-operation has become especially fruitful where, as in Biology and Individual-psychology, it rests upon natural sciences which deal with matter of fact and are terminologically firmly established. International understanding finds here its limits. Meanwhile the psycho- logy of the isolated sensations is more and more promoted by experimental methods and treated like a natural science (the way had long been prepared in the physics of the perceptible qualities), and it coins for itself at any rate a limited number of concepts, in such a way that they may be easily transferred into all languages and may yield the foundation of an identical terminology in this branch. The division of all psychical facts into sensations and feelings, although somewhat opposed to the spirit of the English language, seems likely to prevail ; it is only a renewal, adapted to our present knowledge, of the old dichotomy intellectus-voluntas : the simple potentialities have been re- placed by a number of acts. 72. (4) But in the differences of thought itself we have a powerful, and indeed internal, check to mutual understanding in words (hence a chief cause of the present state of affairs). In principle, the question whether in spite of differing principles, opinions, theories, a common terminology is pos- sible, must be unconditionally answered in the affirmative. That is, indeed, the purpose for which a scientific " language " has always been prized and sought, to put an end to sense- less and fruitless disputes about words, but not to thoughtful and fruitful disputes about things. But Kant was right in opposing the oft-repeated maxim " all disputes of the philosophical schools are to be regarded as mere verbal disputes". It is not alone that we find contrary instances, apparent agreements which consist only of words, which mean something different to every one ; not alone that different judgment concerning things and processes takes shape even in technical expressions ; but many disputes are empty because the object which A denotes by his term, and of which he states something, is altogether unknown to B, and because B again is neither willing nor able to know this object. 73. Eucken rightly points out how everywhere philosophical language is connected with philosophical thought itself. If we consider from this point of view the development from scholasticism and against it, what we first see is a great work of destruction. The simplification of terminology, to which