Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2 — John Shaqi
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2
Science
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2
Psychology, Experimental
Just such synthetic
harmonization, and not at all a stubborn ignorance of the other side
or a compromise with cheap concessions, was the aim of the period from
Kant to Emerson. It is merely the naturalistic period which ignores its
idealistic counterpart, which delights in its one-sidedness, which is
afraid of harmony because it is suspicious of demands for concessions.
It is naturalism only which thinks that mankind can walk on one leg.
If we ask where such harmonization can be found, where the great
Idealists of the beginning of the last century have sought it, and
where our modern philosophy is seeking it again, well aware that by
the progress of science in the mean time the difficulties have been
multiplied, the logical responsibilities have become gigantic, we
cannot do more here than to point out the direction; we cannot go
the way. And it is clear, of course, too, that such an answer has its
individual shape, and that no one can promise to give a bird's-eye
view of the marching movement while he is himself marching among his
comrades. But the individual differences are non-essential. The one
great tendency, the Emersonian spirit, if it is rightly understood,
is common to them all. What has modern philosophy all over the world
to say about that threefold claim concerning Nature, Freedom, and
Oversoul? What has it to say when natural science has fully said its
say and had its fair hearing, and has been approved as sound and
welcome?
A philosopher might answer, perhaps, as follows: You Positivists have
done wonderfully with your microscopes and your telescopes, with your
chronoscopes and spectroscopes; you have measured and weighed and
analyzed and described, and finally explained the whole world which you
perceive, and there is nothing in space and time and causality which
can escape your search. But did not all that work of yours involve
certain presuppositions which you had accepted and which it was not
your business to look on critically, but which, nevertheless, may be
open to enquiry? Your first claims granted, all may follow; but how is
it with the first claims? You examine all that is in space and time,
but what are space and time? You examine the material substances and
the contents of consciousness, but what is consciousness, and what is
matter? You seek the special applications of causality, but what is
causality? Well, you reply, you give the facts just as you find them;
but do you do that really? And what do you mean by saying that you find
the facts? Let us look, at least for a moment, at the very simplest
facts with which your work begins. You say there are physical objects
made up of atoms, and you describe them as a physicist; and there are
mental ideas in consciousness made up of sensations, and you describe
them as a psychologist; and both, you say, you are finding. But what
does it mean, that you find the physical object outside there and the
mental idea of the object inside in you; is that really a statement
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