The same kind of consideration applies to the favorable view taken of
psychology. If reference to modes and ways of experience--to
experiencing--is important for understanding the things with which
philosophy deals, then psychology is useful as a matter of course. For
what is meant by psychology is precisely a discrimination of the
acts and attitudes of the organism which have a bearing upon
respective subject-matters and which have accordingly to be taken
account of before the subject-matters can be properly discriminated.
The matter was especially striking in the case of Lotze. He protested
constantly against the use of psychology, and yet his own data and
procedures were infected at every turn by psychology, and, if I am at
all correct, by a false psychology. The particular separation which he
made between psychology and logic rested indeed upon a particular
psychological assumption. The question is worth asking: Is not the
marked aversion on the part of some philosophers to any reference to
psychology a Freudian symptom?
A word more upon the place assigned by the essays to _need_ and
_purpose_ and the humanistic factor generally. To save time I may
quote a sentence from an early review which attributes to the essays
the following doctrine: "If the plan turns out to be useful for our
need, it is correct--the judgment is true. The real-ideal distinction
is that between stimulus of environment and plan of action or
tentative response. Both real and ideal are equally experiences of the
individual man." These words can be interpreted either so as to convey
the position fairly, or so as radically to misconceive it; the latter
course is a little easier, as the words stand. That "real and ideal"
are experiences of the individual man in the sense that they actually
present themselves as specifications which can be studied by any man
who desires to study them is true enough. That such a study is as much
required for determining their characters as it is for determining
those of carbon dioxide or of the constitution of Great Britain is
also the contention of the paper. But if the words quoted suggest to
anyone that the real or even the ideal are somehow possessions of an
individual man, things secreted somewhere about him and then ejected,
I can only say that I cannot understand the doctrine. I know of no
ready-made and antecedent conception of "the individual man." Instead
of telling about the nature of experience by means of a prior
conception of individual man, I find it necessary to go to experience
to find out what is meant by "individual" and by "man"; and also by
"the." Consequently even in such an expression as "my experience," I
should wish not to contradict this idea of method by using the term
"my" to swallow up the term "experience," any more than if I said "my
house," or "my country." On the contrary, I should expect that any
intelligible and definite use of such phrases would throw much more
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