Primarily, natural science, or physics, in its widest sense, makes us
acquainted with only the firmest connexions of groups of elements.
Provisorily, we may not bestow too much attention on the single
constituents of those groups, if we are desirous of retaining a
comprehensible whole. Instead of equations between the primitive
variables, physics gives us, as much the easiest course, equations
between _functions_ of those variables. Physiological psychology teaches
us how to separate the visible, the tangible, and the audible from
bodies--a labor which is subsequently richly requited, as the division
of the subjects of physics well shows. Physiology further analyses the
visible into light and space sensations; the first into colors, the last
also into their component parts; it resolves noises into sounds, these
into tones, and so on. Unquestionably this analysis can be carried much
further than it has been. It will be possible in the end to exhibit the
common elements at the basis of very abstract but definite logical acts
of like form,--elements which the acute jurist and mathematician, as it
were, _feels_ out, with absolute certainty, where the uninitiated hears
only empty words. Physiology, in a word, will reveal to us the true real
elements of the world. Physiological psychology bears to physics in its
widest sense a relation similar to that which chemistry bears to physics
in its narrowest sense. But far greater than the mutual support of
physics and chemistry will be that which natural science and psychology
will render each other. And the results that shall spring from this
union will, in all likelihood, far outstrip those of the modern
mechanical physics.
What those ideas are with which we shall comprehend the world when the
closed circuit of physical and psychological facts shall lie complete
before us, (that circuit of which we now see only two disjoined parts,)
cannot be foreseen at the outset of the work. The men will be found who
will see what is right and will have the courage, instead of wandering
in the intricate paths of logical and historical accident, to enter on
the straight ways to the heights from which the mighty stream of facts
can be surveyed. Whether the notion which we now call matter will
continue to have a scientific significance beyond the crude purposes of
common life, we do not know. But we certainly shall wonder how colors
and tones which were such innermost parts of us could suddenly get lost
in our physical world of atoms; how we could be suddenly surprised that
something which outside us simply clicked and beat, in our heads should
make light and music; and how we could ask whether matter can feel, that
is to say, whether a mental symbol for a group of sensations can feel?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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