This is a new magazine which will be an additional proof that the
philosophical interest in America is by no means so poor as the
inhabitants of the old world generally suppose it to be. The character
of the journal, it is to be expected, will be in harmony with the
publications of its scholarly editor, Prof. J. G. Schurmann, whose
position is clearly set forth in a little volume of his “Belief in God,”
in which he conceives God in three ways (1) as the cause or ground of the
world (2) as the realising purpose of the world, and (3) as the father of
spirits.
Professor Watson reviews in an elaborate article Edward Caird’s work
“The Critical Philosophy of Emanuel Kant.” “The philosophy of Kant,”
says Watson, “was accepted at first by submissive disciples, but it had
afterwards to submit to a severe process of criticism which culminated
in the Absolute Idealism of Hegel. The synthesis of Kant, as based upon
an untenable opposition of the phenomenal and the real, was weighed
and found wanting.... We must be grateful to any one who helps us,
not merely to see Kant, but to see beyond him. This is the task which
Professor Caird, in his exhaustive work on the Critical Philosophy, has
set himself to perform,” and adds Watson, “he has done it in a way that
leaves nothing to be desired.”
Professor Ladd criticises Professor James’s Psychology as so-called
natural science.
“What we wish to have in the name of cerebral psychology, is a
description, in terms of a comprehensible theory of molecular physics;
and, also, a statement of the formulæ which define the relations between
the molecular changes and the ‘corresponding’ orders of mental phenomena.
But this is precisely what Professor James avoids doing, even to the
extent which so-called ‘nerve-physiology’ makes possible. And, nothing
worthy of the name ‘science’ _is_ possible for any one in this branch of
cerebral psycho-physics.”
Professor James replies to the criticism in the second number of _The
Philosophical Review_. He says:
“Psychology is to-day hardly more than what physics was before Galileo,
what chemistry was before Lavoisier. It is a mass of phenomenal
description, gossip, and myth, including, however, real material enough
to justify one in the hope that its study may become worthy of the
name of natural science at no very distant day. I wished, by treating
Psychology _like_ a natural science, to help her to become one.”
Professor Ladd is a transcendentalist and Professor James has great
expectations of the work inaugurated by the Society for Psychical
Research.
Theoretically they stand much nearer than practically, as well indicated
by Professor James’s remark:
“In Professor Ladd’s own book on ‘Physiological Psychology,’ that ‘real
being, proceeding to unfold powers that are _sui generis_, according to
laws of its own,’ for whose recognition he contends, plays no organic
part in the work, and has proved a mere stumbling block to his biological
reviewers.”
He adds in a foot-note:
“I mean that such a being is quite barren of particular consequences. Its
character is only known by its reactions on the signals which the nervous
system gives, and these must be gathered by observation after the fact.
If only it were subject to successive reincarnations, as the theosophists
say it is, so that we might guess what sort of a body it would unite with
next, or what sort of persons it had helped to constitute previously,
those would be great points gained. But even those gains are denied us;
and the real being is, for practical purposes, an entire superfluity,
which a _practical_ psychology can perfectly well do without.”
Andrew Seth, the well-known coryphæus of philosophy and psychology
at Edinburgh, presses the importance of distinguishing the different
standpoints of psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics. Locke,
Berkeley, Hume and other English as well as Continental thinkers “speak
sometimes from one point of view, sometimes from the other without being
aware that the two points of view are different.”
“Psychology, assuming the existence of a subject or medium of
consciousness, seeks to explain, mainly by the help of association or
processes practically similar, how out of the come-and-go of conscious
states, there are evolved such subjective facts as perceptions, the
belief in an independent real world, and the idea of the Ego or subject
himself.... Metaphysics has to do with the ultimate nature of the reality
which reveals itself alike in the consciousness which knows and the world
which is known.... The epistemological thing-in-itself to be identified
with the metaphysical essence.... The problem of knowledge and the Real,
is the question which Epistemology has to face.” (Boston, New York,
Chicago: Ginn & Co.)
κρς.
VOPROSUI FILOSOFII I PSICHOLOGII.[67] Vol. III. No. 11. January, 1892.