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
an abstract selected from that experience, or rather a set of artificial
symbols only partially corresponding with the realities symbolized, and
devised for the special object of submitting the realm of mental
sequences to mathematical calculation. We might, in fact, have based
this inference upon the single reflection that every psychological "law"
is obtained, like physical laws, by the statistical method of
elimination of individual peculiarities, and the taking of an average
from an extended series of measurements. For this very reason, no
psychological law can possibly describe the unique realities of
individual experience. We have in psychology, as in the physical
sciences, the duty of suspecting _exact_ correspondence between the
single case and the general "law" to be of itself proof of error
somewhere in the course of our computation. These views, which I suppose
I learned in the first instance from Mr. F. H. Bradley's paper called _A
Defence of Phenomenalism in Psychology_, may now, I think, be taken as
finally established beyond doubt by the exhaustive analysis of Professor
Münsterberg's _Grundzüge der Psychologie_. They possess the double
advantage of freeing the psychologist once for all from any interference
by the metaphysician in the prosecution of his proper study, and
delivering metaphysics from the danger of having assumptions whose sole
justification lies in their utility for the purpose of statistical
computation thrust upon it as self-evident principles. For their full
discussion I may perhaps be allowed to refer to the first three chapters
of the concluding book of my _Elements of Metaphysics_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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