International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
But there followed a time which overcame this thinly disguised example
of materialism. It was a time when the categories of the physiologist
lost slightly in credit and the categories of the psychologist won
repute. This newer movement held that it is artificial to consider
ethical and logical life, historic and legal action, literary and
religious emotions, merely as physiological functions of the living
organism. The mental life, however necessarily connected with brain
processes, has a positive reality of its own. The psychical facts
represent a world of phenomena which in its nature is absolutely
different from that of material phenomena, and, while it is true that
every ethical action and every logical thought can, from the standpoint
of the biologist, be considered as a property of matter, it is not less
true that the sciences of mental phenomena, considered impartially, form
a sphere of knowledge closed in itself, and must thus be coördinated,
not subordinated, to the knowledge of the physical world. We should say
thus: all knowledge falls into two classes, the physical sciences and
the mental sciences. In the circle of physical sciences we have the
general sciences, like physics and chemistry, the particular sciences of
special objects, like astronomy, geology, mineralogy, biology, and the
formal sciences, like mathematics. In the circle of mental sciences we
have correspondingly, as a general science, psychology, and as the
particular sciences all those special mental and moral sciences which
deal with man's inner life, like history or jurisprudence, logic or
ethics, and all the rest. Such a classification, which had its
philosophical defenders about twenty years ago, penetrated the popular
thought as fully as the positivism of the foregoing generation, and was
certainly superior to its materialistic forerunner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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