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
Let us start again from the consideration of our original logical
purpose. We feel ourselves bound and limited in our will by physical
things, by psychical contents, by the demands of other subjects, and by
norms. The purpose of all our knowledge is to develop completely all
that is involved in this bondage. We want to develop in an
over-individual way all the obligations for our submission which are
necessarily included in the given objects and the given demands of
subjects. We start of course everywhere and in every direction from the
actual experience, but we expand the experience by seeking those objects
and those demands to which, as necessarily following from the
immediately given experience, we must also submit. And in thus
developing the whole system of submissions, the interpretation of the
experience itself becomes transformed: the physicist may perhaps
substitute imperceptible atoms for the physical object and the
psychologist may substitute sensations for the real idea, and the
historian may substitute combinations of influences for the real
personality, and the student of norms may substitute combinations of
conflicting demands for the one complete duty; yet in every case the
substitution is logically necessary and furnishes us what we call truth
inasmuch as it is needed to develop the concrete system of our
submissions and thus to express our confidence in the order-lines of
reality. And each of these substitutions and supplementations becomes,
as material of knowledge, itself a part of the world of experience.
3. _The Physical and the Mental Sciences_
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