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
science may be leading up to an Ideal of the Ultimate Reality, in which
philosophy will gratefully and gladly coincide. At any rate, the modern
conception of nature and the modern conception of God are not so far
apart from each other, as either of these conceptions is now removed
from the conceptions covered by the same terms, some centuries gone by.
There is one of the positive sciences, however, with which the
development of philosophy during the last century has been particularly
allied. This science is psychology. To speak of its history is not the
theme of this paper. But it should be noted in passing how the
development of psychology has brought into connection with the physical
and biological sciences the development of philosophy. This union,
whether it be for better or for worse,--and, on the whole, I believe it
to be for better rather than for worse,--has been in a very special way
the result of the last century. In tracing its details we should have to
speak of the dependence of certain branches of psychology on physiology,
and upon Sir Charles Bell's discovery of the difference between the
sensory and the motor nerves. This discovery was the contribution of the
beginning of the century to an entire line of discoveries, which have
ended at the close of the century with putting the localization of
cerebral function upon a firm experimental basis. Of scarcely less
importance has been the cellular theory as applied (1838) by Matthias
Schleiden, a pupil of Fries in philosophy, to plants, and by Theodor
Schwann about the same time to animal organisms. To these must be added
the researches of Johannes Müller (1801-1858), the great biologist, a
listener to Hegel's lectures, whose law of _specific energies_ brings
him into connection with psychology and, through psychology, to
philosophy. Even more true is this of Helmholtz, whose _Lehre von den
Tonempfindungen_ (1862) and _Physiologische Optik_ (1867) placed him in
even closer, though still mediate, relations to philosophy. But perhaps
especially Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), whose researches in
psycho-physics laid the foundations of whatever, either as psychology or
as philosophy, goes under this name; and whether the doctrine have
reference to the relation of man's mind and body, or to the wider
relations of spirit and matter.
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