Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory by Hugo Münsterberg (100 books to read .txt) 📕

as to vividness. This variation of vividness, on the other hand, is no

exception from the psychophysical parallelism as soon as the psychical

process is considered as dependent not only upon the local and

quantitative differences of the sensory process but also upon the

motor function of the central physical process. The one-sidedness of

the physiological sensory theories has been the hidden reason for the

one-sidedness of associationism. The sensory-motor system must be

understood as the physical basis of the psychophysical process and the

variations in the motor discharge then become conditions of those

psychical variations of vividness which explain objectively all those

phenomena in whose interest associationism is usually supplemented by

apperceptionism. The association theory must thus be given up in favor

of an ‘action-theory’[1] which combines the consistency of

phenomenalistic explanation with a full acknowledgment of the

so-called apperceptive processes; it avoids thus the deficiency of

associationism and the logical inconsistency of apperceptionism.

[1] H. Münsterberg, ‘Grundzüge der Psychologie.’ Bd. I.,

Leipzig, 1900, S. 402-562.

Only if in this way the sciences of voluntaristic type, including all

historical and normative sciences, are fully separated from

phenomenalistic psychology, will there appear on the psychological

side room for a scientific treatment of the phenomena of social life,

that is, for sociology, social psychology, folk-psychology, psychical

anthropology and many similar sciences. All of them have been in the

usual system either crowded out by the fact that history and the other

mental sciences have taken all the room or have been simply identified

with the mental sciences themselves. And yet all those sciences exist,

and a real system of sciences must do justice to all of them. A modern

classification has perhaps no longer the right as in Bacon’s time to

improve the system by inventing new sciences which have as yet no

existence, but it has certainly the duty not to ignore important

departments of knowledge and not to throw together different sciences

like the descriptive phenomenalistic account of inner life and its

interpretative voluntaristic account merely because each sometimes

calls itself psychology. A classification of sciences which is to be

more than a catalogue fulfills its logical function only by a careful

disentanglement of logically different functions which are externally

connected. Psychology and the totality of psychological, philosophical

and historical sciences offer in that respect far more difficulty than

the physical sciences, which have absorbed up to this time the chief

interest of the classifier. It is time to follow up the ramifications

of knowledge with special interest for these neglected problems. It is

clear that in such a system sciences which refer to the same objects

may be widely separated, and sciences whose objects are unlike may be

grouped together. This is not an objection; it indicates that a

system is more than a mere pigeon-holing of scholarly work, that it

determines the logical relations; in this way only can it indeed

become helpful to the progress of science itself.

The most direct way to our end is clearly that of graphic

representation wherein the relations are at once apparent. Of course

such a map is a symbol and not an argument; it indicates the results

of thought without any effort to justify them. I have given my

arguments for the fundamental principles of the divisions in my

‘Grundzüge der Psychologie’ and have repeated a few points more

popularly in ‘Psychology and Life,’ especially in the chapter on

‘Psychology and History.’ And yet this graphic appendix to the

Grundzüge may not be superfluous, as the fulness of a bulky volume

cannot bring out clearly enough the fundamental relations; the detail

hides the principles. The parallelism of logical movements in the

different fields especially becomes more obvious in the graphic form.

Above all, the book discussed merely those groups which had direct

relation to psychology; a systematic classification must leave no

remainder. Of course here too I have not covered the whole field of

human sciences, as the more detailed ramification offers for our

purpose no logical interest; to subdivide physics or chemistry, the

history of nations or of languages, practical jurisprudence or

theology, engineering or surgery, would be a useless overburdening of

the diagram without throwing new light on the internal relations of

knowledge.

Without now entering more fully into any arguments, I may indicate in

a few words the characteristic features of the graphically presented

proposition. At the very outset we must make it clear that phenomena

and voluntaristic attitudes are not coördinated, but that the reality

of phenomena is logically dependent upon voluntaristic attitudes

directed towards the ideal of knowledge. And yet it would be

misleading to place the totality of phenomenalistic sciences as a

subdivision under the teleological sciences. Possible it would be; we

might have under the sciences of logical attitudes not only logic and

mathematics but as a subdivision of these, again, the sciences which

construct the logical system of a phenomenalistic world—physics

being in this sense merely mathematics with the conception of

substance added. And yet we must not forget that the teleological

attitudes, to become a teleological science, must be also logically

reconstructed, as they must be teleologically connected, and thus in

this way the totality of purpose-sciences might be, too, logically

subordinated to the science of logic. Logic itself would thus become a

subdivision of logic. We should thus move in a circle, from which the

only way out is to indicate the teleological character of all sciences

by starting not with science but with the strictly teleological

conception of life—life as a system of purposes, felt in immediate

experience, and not as the object of phenomenalistic knowledge. Life

as activity divides itself then into different purposes which we

discriminate not by knowledge but by immediate feeling; one of them is

knowledge, that is, the effort to make life, its attitudes, its means

and ends a connected system of overindividual value. In the service of

this logical task we connect the real attitudes and thus come to the

knowledge of purposes: and we connect the means and ends—by

abstracting from our subjective attitudes, considering the objects of

will as independent phenomena—and thus come to phenomenalistic

knowledge. At this stage the phenomenalistic sciences are no longer

dependent upon the teleological ones, but coördinated with them;

physics, for instance, is a logical purpose of life, but not a branch

of logic: the only branch of logic in question is the philosophy of

physics which examines the logical conditions under which physics is

possible.

One point only may at once be mentioned in this connection. While we

have coördinated the knowledge of phenomena with the knowledge of

purposes we have subordinated mathematics to the latter. As a matter

of course much can be said against such a decision, and the authority

of most mathematicians would be opposed to it. They would say that the

mathematical objects are independent realities whose properties we

study like those of nature, whose relations we ‘observe,’ whose

existence we ‘discover’ and in which we are interested because they

belong to the real world. All that is true, and yet the objects of the

mathematician are objects made by the will, by the logical will,

only, and thus different from all phenomena into which sensation

enters. The mathematician, of course, does not reflect on the purely

logical origin of the objects which he studies, but the system of

knowledge must give to the study of the mathematical objects its place

in the group where the functions and products of logical thought are

classified. The arithmetical or geometrical material is a free

creation, and a creation not only as to the combination of

elements—that would be the case with many laboratory substances of

the chemist too—but a creation as to the elements themselves, and the

value of the creation, its ‘mathematical interest,’ is to be judged by

ideals of thought, that is, by logical purposes. No doubt this logical

purpose is its application in the world of phenomena, and the

mathematical concept must thus fit the world so absolutely that it can

be conceived as a description of the world after abstracting not only

from the will relations, as physics does, but also from the content.

Mathematics would then be the phenomenalistic science of the form and

order of the world. In this way mathematics has a claim to places in

both fields: among the phenomenalistic sciences if we emphasize its

applicability to the world, and among the teleological sciences if we

emphasize the free creation of its objects by the logical will. It

seems to me that a logical system as such has to prefer the latter

emphasis; we thus group mathematics beside logic and the theory of

knowledge as a science of objects freely created for purposes of

thought.

All logical knowledge is divided into Theoretical and Practical. The

modern classifications have mostly excluded the practical sciences

from the system, rightly insisting that no facts are known in the

practical sciences which are not in principle covered by the

theoretical sciences; it is art which is superadded, but not a new

kind of knowledge. This is quite true so far as a classification of

objects of knowledge is in question, but as soon as logical tasks as

such are to be classified and different aspects count as different

sciences, then it becomes desirable to discriminate between the

sciences which take the attitude of theoretical interest and those

which consider the same facts as related to certain human ends. But we

may at first consider the theoretical sciences only. They deal either

with the objectified world, with objects of consciousness which are

describable and explainable, or with the subjectivistic world of real

life in which all reality is experienced as will and as object of

will, in which everything is to be understood by interpretation of its

meaning. In other words, we deal in one case with phenomena and in the

other with purposes.

The further subdivision must be the same for both groups—that which

is merely individual and that which is ‘overindividual’; we prefer the

latter term to the word ‘general,’ to indicate at once that not a

numerical but a teleological difference is in question. A phenomenon

is given to overindividual consciousness if it is experienced with the

understanding that it can be an object for every one whom we

acknowledge as subject; and a purpose is given to overindividual will

in so far as it is conceived as ultimately belonging to every subject

which we acknowledge. The overindividual phenomena are, of course, the

physical objects, the individual phenomena the psychical objects, the

overindividual purposes are the norms, the individual purposes are the

acts which constitute the historical world. We have thus four

fundamental groups: the physical, the psychological, the normative and

the historical sciences.

Whoever denies overindividual reality finds himself in the world of

phenomena a solipsist and in the world of purposes a sceptic: there is

no objective physical world, everything is my idea, and there is no

objective value, no truth, no morality, everything is my individual

decision. But to deny truth and morality means to contradict the very

denial, because the denial itself as judgment demands acknowledgment

of this objective truth and as action demands acknowledgment of the

moral duty to speak the truth. And if an overindividual purpose cannot

be denied, it follows that there is a community of individual subjects

whose phenomena cannot be absolutely different: there must be an

objective world of overindividual objects.

In each of the four groups of sciences we must consider the facts

either with regard to the general relations or with regard to the

special material; the abstract general relations refer to every

possible material, the concrete facts which fall under them demand

sciences of their own. In the world of phenomena the general relations

are causal laws—physical or psychical laws; in the world of purposes

theories of teleological interrelations—normative or