Psychological Doctrine and Philosophical Teaching

ABSTRACT methodology has long seemed to me the dreariest field among all the territories, waste and fertile, occupied by philosophy. That philosophy---which, in the last analysis, means some philosopher---should, by means of a general philosophical position, at; tempt to catalogue the various provinces in the domain of learning, to set forth their respective boundaries, to locate their capital cities and fix their proper jurisdictions, appears to me an undertaking more likely to reveal the limitations of the philosopher's experience, interests, and intelligence than to throw light upon the subject. In discussing the relations of philosophy and psychology, I therefore disavow any attempt to pass upon what psychology must be or ought to be; I am content that psychology should be whatever competent investigators in that fieldmake it to be in the successful pursuit of their inquiries. But a teacher and student of philosophy is within his scope when he reflects upon what philosophy in its own past has done in fixing the standpoints, ruling conceptions, and procedures of present psychology, and in raising questions as to the after-effects of this influence-its hearing, namely, upon present philosophical study and Leaching.

From this point of view, I say without more ado that, so far as I can observe, the larger part of the time and energy of teachers of philosophy is taken up in the discussion of problems which owe their existence-at least in the way in which they are currently formulated-to the influence of psychology. In its dominant conceptions and professed methods, this psychology is a survival of a. philosophy which is daily becoming more incredible and more irrelevant to our present intellectual and social situation. Grant that philosophy has no more to do, intrinsically, with psychology than it has with any other positive science, the fact remains that philosophy is neither taught nor studied, neither written nor read, by discarnate logical essences, but by human beings whose intellectual interests, problems, and attitudes, to say nothing of their vocabulary, are determined by what they already know or think they know in cognate fields. Let a man be as persuaded as you please that the relation between psychology and

philosophy is lacking in any peculiar intimacy, and yet let him believe that psychology has for its subject-matter a field antithetical to that of the physical sciences, and his problems are henceforth the problems of adjusting the two opposed subject-matters: the problems of how one such field can know or be truly known by another; of the bearing of the principles of substantiality and causality within and between the two fields. Or let him be persuaded that the antithesis is an unreal one, and yet let his students come to him with beliefs about consciousness and internal observation, the existence of sensations, images, and emotions as states of pure consciousness, the independence of the organs of action in both observation and movement from"consciousness" (since the organs are physical), and he will still be obliged to discuss the type of epistemological and metaphysical problems that inevitably follow from such beliefs. The beliefs do not cease to operate as intellectual habits because one gravely hangs the sign"philosophy" over the shop whence one dispenses one's philosophical wares.

More specifically : The student of philosophy comes to his philosophical work with a firmly established belief in the existence of two distinct realms of existence, one purely physical and the other purely psychical. The belief is established not as speculative, not as a part of or incident to the philosophy lie is about to study, but because lie M s already studied twosciences. For every science at once assumes .and guarantees the genuineness of its own appropriate subject-matter.That much of naive realism even the later study of epistemology hardly succeeds in displacing.

Given this established"scientific" background, it