Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/178

PSYCHOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. 167 uncritical so-called " scientific philosophies ". Nay more, this abstraction of some one sphere is itself a living function of the psychologic experience. It is not merely something which it allows : it is something which it does. It is the analytic aspect of its own activity, whereby it deepens and renders explicit, realises its own nature ; just as their con- nexion with each other is the synthetic aspect of the same self-realising movement, whereby it returns to itself: while psychology in its completeness is the whole self-developing activity itself, which shows itself as the organic unity of both synthetic and analytic movements, and thus the condi- tion of their possibility and ground of their validity. The analytic movement constitutes the special sciences ; the syn- thetic constitutes the philosophy of nature ; the self-deve- loping activity itself, as psychology, constitutes philosophy. What other position can be given psychology, so soon as we recognise the absurdity and impossibility of considering it a purely objective science ? It is the science of the modes by which, in and through the individual, the universe is realised, it is said. But that the universe has no existence except as absolutely realised in an individual, i.e., except as self-consciousness, is precisely the result of philosophy, and can therefore be no objection to such a consideration of the universe : in fact, such a statement only amounts to saying that psychology considers the universe as it really is. If the assertion is varied again, to read that philosophy treats of this individualised universe as it eternally is, while psy- chology can treat of it only as it partially and interruptedly becomes, this loses sight of two very important facts. First, philosophy can treat of absolute self-consciousness only in so far as it has become in a being like man, for otherwise it is not material for philosophy at all ; and, secondly, it falls into the error of regarding this realisation in man as a time-con- ditioned product, which it is not. Time is not something outside of the process of conscious experience ; it is a form within it, one of the functions by which it organically con- stitutes its own being. In fact, psychology as philosophic method has an immense advantage at just this point over any other method of treating this problem. To any philo- sophy attempting to consider the absolute self-consciousness by itself, it must remain for ever an insoluble problem why the is should ever appear as becoming, why the eternal should ever appear through the temporal. Psychology solves the problem by avoiding the assumption which makes it a problem. For, dealing with an individualised universe, one of whose functions of realisation is time, it knows nothing