One word on the relation of rational to empirical psychology. The
former, because it sets itself to apply thought to cognise mind and
even to demonstrate the result of such thinking, is the higher; whereas
empirical psychology starts from perception, and only recounts and
describes what perception supplies. But if we propose to think the
mind, we must not be quite so shy of its special phenomena. Mind is
essentially active in the same sense as the Schoolmen said that God
is 'absolute actuosity.' But if the mind is active it must as it were
utter itself. It is wrong therefore to take the mind for a processless
_ens,_ as did the old metaphysic which divided the processless inward
life of the mind from its outward life. The mind, of all things, must
be looked at in its concrete actuality, in its energy; and in such a
way that its manifestations are seen to be determined by its inward
force.
35.] The _third_ branch of metaphysics was Cosmology. The topics
it embraced were the world, its contingency, necessity, eternity,
limitation in time and space: the laws (only formal) of its changes:
the freedom of man and the origin of evil.
To these topics it applied what were believed to be thorough-going
contrasts: such as contingency and necessity; external and internal
necessity; efficient and final cause, or causality in general and
design; essence or substance and phenomenon; form and matter; freedom
and necessity; happiness and pain; good and evil.
The object of Cosmology comprised not merely Nature, but Mind too, in
its external complication in its phenomenon--in fact, existence in
general, or the sum of finite things. This object however it viewed not
as a concrete whole, but only under certain abstract points of view.
Thus the questions Cosmology attempted to solve were such as these: Is
accident or necessity dominant in the world? Is the world eternal or
created? It was therefore a chief concern of this study to lay down
what were called general Cosmological laws: for instance, that Nature
does not act by fits and starts. And by fits and starts (_saltus_) they
meant a qualitative difference or qualitative alteration showing itself
without any antecedent determining mean: whereas, on the contrary, a
gradual change (of quantity) is obviously not without intermediation.
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