Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/224

210 B. B. HALDANE: be no contradiction between the results of the sciences. The physicist may reduce the universe to an ideal con- struction of atoms and energy. He in no way interferes with the results of the biologist, who gets existence, by abstracting from a different point of view, as containing self-conserving and developing wholes, whose control of these parts cannot be expressed in mathematical relations of quantity or physical relations of cause and effect. The puzzle of the freedom of the will in like manner ceases to be a puzzle when it is realised that the relation of volition and motive is even farther away from that of effect and cause than is the relation of response and stimulus. With this view of the field of knowledge before his eyes, Prof. Miinsterberg, in his volume of essays, proceeds to investigate the limits and validity of the methods of psychol- ogy in the various fields to which it has been applied. To begin with, the will as such, that which just because it makes experience possible can never itself be an object in experi- ence, is not cognisable by psychological methods. Psycho- logical procedure is one of the purposes of the will which seeks to arrange and group the concrete riches of the object world for its own ends, but it is after all an artificial process. "If psychology, like physics, deals with the objects of the world in their artificial separation from the will, how can the will itself be an object of psychology ? The pre-supposi- tion of the question is in some way wrong ; the will is primarily not at all an object of psychology" (p. 30). He goes on to point out that the objects of psychology are abstractions, not realities, just like the lines and triangles and circles of geometry. The field of psychology is an ideal aspect of mental life as constructed out of "atomistic elements which the psychologists call sensations. The will is not a possible object ; psychology must make a substitution therefore ; it identifies the real personality with the psycho- physical organism, and calls the will the set of conditions which psychologically and physiologically determine the actions of this organism." The real will, he tells us, is free, and it is its own work to have pictured the world, in- cluding itself, by means of the abstractions of the special sciences, as unfree or causally connected ; and, " if it is the triumph of modern psychology to master even the best in man, the will, and to dissolve even the will into its atom- istic sensations and their causal, unfree play, we are blind if we forget that this transformation and construction is itself the work of the will which dictates ends, and the finest herald of its freedom ". The method of psychology is