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III.

PSYCHOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY.1

When it has been possible

IT is an often-quoted remark of Kant's, "that the sciences are not promoted but confused when their boundaries are allowed to run into one another." The maxim has its utility and at the same time its dangers. to determine from a comprehensive point of view the relations which certain groups of problems or certain methods of inquiry bear to one another, then the maxim is applicable but hardly requires application. When, on the other hand, the special sciences, as they may be called, have grown up in a kind of vague independence only of one another, when they have severally acquired a unity that is little more than accidental, then the attempt prematurely to refer problems exclusively to one or the other may stifle legitimate inquiry and confuse rather than facilitate thinking. If the maxim be applied to philosophy in particular, then, by reason of the intimate relation in which all its questions stand to one another, a further danger is incurred, that of isolating and giving a quite fictitious independence to what has meaning only in connexion with the whole.

Kant's general remark was no doubt determined, as is the case with most general remarks, by reference to a particular case to the distinction running through all his work between the critical theory of the conditions of experience and the

1 [Read to the Glasgow University Philosophical Society, 7th March 1894.]

special investigation of any one group of facts of experience. In the light of this distinction, it served for him and for his followers as a methodical precept, justifying the total separation of the critical or transcendental theory of knowledge and action from the special treatment of concrete fact, whether in the natural sciences or in psychology or in what may be called moral anthropology. With some (at times with a fundamental) change of significance, the same distinction has been drawn between the general inquiry into the validity of knowledge and the more special researches into the nature and laws of connexion of the facts of mind. The contrasted doctrines of Epistemology and Psychology need not be defined as Kant defined them, but the general conception of a distinction in kind between them comes directly from the Kantian system.

Apart from the special form of the distinction between these doctrines, which is an essential feature of the Critical Philosophy, and to which I purpose returning, there is no difficulty in finding general grounds for a contrast between the problems and methods of Epistemology and Psychology. The broadly marked difference between the existence in an individual mind of the state or act of knowing and the significance or import of what is contained therein-the difference between knowing as a psychical fact and knowledge as the represented relations obtaining in the material known-presses itself upon our attention, and perhaps at no time in the history of thinking has failed to receive some recognition, however inadequate. The existence of an idea as a mental fact, and its meaning as an item of cognition, seem wholly distinct and even antithetic. Whatever portion of knowledge we select, whether perceiving or thinking, we seem able in regard to it to put two wholly distinct questions. We may ask how it comes about in the individual mind, of what simpler facts

it is composed, if it should be deemed complex, and how, in that case, the combination has been brought about, and under what conditions its various appearances are presented. We may ask, on the other hand, what validity its content possesses as an apprehension, which it professes to be, of some object or objective relation, and how it is possible that the content of a subjective act or state of * mind should inform us in regard to what, ex hypothesi, is distinct both from the act and from the mind itself. On the one hand seems to stand the inner life, with its successive states or processes, of which we are in some way aware, but whose nature as known to us is emphatically and simply that of existing fact. On the other hand, in and through this mental life, we seem to become aware both of the inner states themselves and of much that is essentially different from it. No distinction can well appear more sharp and precise; and it costs us little to dwell so on it that the antithesis shall appear absolute, and, somewhat to our astonishment, we may find reappearing from a new quarter and with a new force of meaning the familiar formula of the Kantian work, How is knowledge at all possible?

Fact, even if qualified as psychical, and import or meaning; existence and validity; individual mind and apprehension of general truth extending to what is not-mind: these come forward in such opposition that we are readily induced to sharpen the distinction to the utmost verge. The inner life appears as concentrated in itself, as an exclusive unity, a monad without windows, as Leibniz would say. What is known, on the other hand, appears as distinct from mind and in an altogether indeterminable relation thereto. If the inner life, the life of mind, be called subjective, that which is known must be called, at least in its most important part if not wholly, trans-subjective. It is by no means unnatural that, in presence of this sharp distinction, the question should

arise, In what possible relation to one another are the two contrasted aspects of knowledge, the two contrasted inquiries or sciences? As a distinguished American writer expressed it some years ago in 'Mind,' "How can the consciousness which in its primary aspect exists in time as a series of psychical events or states be the consciousness for which a permanent world of spatially related objects, in which all sentient beings participate, exists?"1

The series of somewhat easy reflexions which have just been referred to may be expressed in a variety of ways; but it rests in the long run on recognition of the total difference between knowing as a fact forming part of the complex we call a mind and knowledge as the apprehension of objective fact. It leads to the establishment of a complete distinction between the problem and method of Psychology and Epistemology. There may be differences, particularly in regard to the latter doctrine, in the way of formulating the problems and methods of the two distinct doctrines; but in general the one is conceived of after the fashion of a natural science, having for its aim the complete account, descriptive, genetic or what not, of the facts of mind, and pursuing the ordinary scientific method; the other, in a somewhat unique fashion, as having for its aim the determination of the validity of the information seemingly given in and through the facts of mind, and for its method something of whose nature I can form no clear idea,]

It is impossible that these reflexions should contain nothing of real significance. The contrast from the recognition of which they take their rise is, in some form, real; and one can trace the recognition of it, or, perhaps, even the unrecog nised presence of it, far back in the history of philosophic thought. That it affected the speculations of Plato and of Aristotle might easily be made out; that it made its appear1 [J. Dewey, Mind, xi. (1886) 13.]

ance as of quite decisive importance in the Stoic theory of knowledge is one of the results we owe to recent researches in that unduly neglected quarter of the history of philosophy. The greater scholastic writers abound in fine distinctions, some of which might with advantage be utilised by us, all of them due to a more or less obscure appreciation of the distinction. Some of the most interesting discussions of modern pre-Kantian philosophy - for example, that which I would cite as specially relevant, between Malebranche and Arnauld-turn upon the distinction; and it has been the consistent reproach of the later Kantian writers to Locke,s that he habitually ignores the broad difference between mere * factual existence of knowing and the import or content of knowledge.

But, however real the distinction may be in some sense, it is in itself so ultimate and so penetrating that one may fairly expect to find no small difficulty in formulating it and in basing on it a satisfactory account of the relation between the two contrasted doctrines, epistemology and psychology. When one attempts to express in definite terms a distinction of great generality and of far-reaching importance, one is apt to be misled by the influence of sidethoughts, of glances towards well-worn problems known to be affected by our decision, which accompany all our reflexions and too often determine their direction and scope. A single question, like that which has presented itself as the epistemological, the question of the validity of that pronounce ment in respect to objective fact which knowledge, whether in the form of perceiving or of thinking, seems to contain, comes to us weighted with the memories of many a past controversy; and it is under the influence of these memories, exercised consciously or unconsciously, that we proceed afresh to the task of formulating the problem. To this it may be added, that ultimate distinctions are like edged tools: they

VOL. II.

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