Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/180

PSYCHOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. 169 reality and knowledge. There is indeed an anthropomor- phism which is degrading, but it is the anthropomorphism which sets up the feeblest element of its own thinking, pure being, as Mr. Spencer does, or the poorest element of its own feeling, a sensation, and reverences that as its own and the universe's cause. That is the anthropomorphism of the enslaved thought which has not yet awakened to the con- sciousness of its own totality and spiritual freedom. Nor does the account of fact given by psychology have anything in common with the " ultimate, inexplicable, necessary " mental facts called intuitions. The fact of psychology reveals itself as precisely reason, which thereby accounts for itself, and in accounting for itself accounts for all its members. The fact of psychology is not isolated " truths," but the organic system of self-consciousness. This fact is indeed " immediate," but it is immediate only in and through a process, hence of mediation. It is indeed self-evidencing, but what it evidences is simply, of the parts, relation to and dependence upon the whole, and of the whole, that it is self-conditioned and self-related. Of the whole fact it may be said indeed that it is inexplicable. " It is true that we cannot explain the spiritual principle which is implied in all experience by reference to anything else than itself." 1 "Because all we can experience is in- cluded in this one world, and all our inferences and explana- tions relate only to its details, neither it as a whole, nor the one consciousness which constitutes it, can be accounted for in the ordinary sense of the word. They cannot be accounted for by what they include ; and being all-inclusive, there remains nothing else by which they can be accounted for." 2 In short, any system of philosophy must ultimately fall back on the fact for which no reason can be given except precisely just that it is what it is. This implication of fact 3 is latent in all philosophy whatever, and all that psychology as philosophic method does is to render this necessary im- plication explicit. It alone starts from the completed fact, and it alone is therefore completed philosophy. If it may have seemed at times in the course of the dis- cussion that the nominal subject the relation of psychology to science had been left, it will now appear, I think, that we have all the time been dealing with just that subject. 1 Prof. E. Caird, MIND viii. 560. 2 Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 52. 3 The insistence upon this seems to have been Lotze's great work as a philosopher. 12