study, some hint as to its purpose and problem would be desirable. If it
is only an abstract branch of science, of course, no such hint is in
place.
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.
Allusion has already been made to the question of the boundaries between
logic and psychology, between logic and ethics, ethics and psychology, and
psychology and epistemology. Each of these occasionally comes to cover
ground that seems more appropriate to the others. Logic is sometimes
restricted to denote the study of the conditions of derivative knowledge,
of the canons of inference and the modes of proof. If taken more widely as
the science of thought-form, it is supposed to imply a world of fixed or
stereotyped relations between ideas, a system of stable thoughts governed
by inflexible laws in an absolute order of immemorial or eternal truth. As
against such fixity, psychology is supposed to deal with these same ideas
as products—as growing out of a living process of thought—having a history
behind them and perhaps a prospect of further change. The genesis so given
may be either a mere chronicle-history, or it may be a philosophical
development. In the former case, it would note the occasions of incident
and circumstance, the reactions of mind and environment, under which the
ideas were formed. Such a psychological genesis of several ideas is found
in the Second Book of Locke’s Essay. In the latter case, the account would
be more concerned with the inner movement, the action and reaction in
ideas themselves, considered not as due to casual occurrences, but as
self-developing by an organic growth. But in either case, ideas would be
shown not to be ready-made and independently existing kinds in a world of
idea-things, and not to form an unchanging diagram or framework, but to be
a growth, to have a history, and a development. Psychology in this sense
would be a dynamical, as opposed to the supposed statical, treatment of
ideas and concepts in logic. But it may be doubted how far it is well to
call this psychology: unless psychology deals with the contents of the
mental life, in their meaning and purpose, instead of, as seems proper,
merely in their character of psychic events. Such psychology is rather an
evolutionist logic,—a dialectic process more than an analytic of a datum.