Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/304

 Rh The result will be a practical idealism or a romantic yearning.

Avenarius made a special study of the case of R > E. The solution involves three stages—need, effort, discharge —and the problem disappears. Avenarius regards these three stages of problematization and deproblematization essentially as symptoms of certain physiological processes in the brain. His theory is physiological rather than psychological —even though as a matter of fact he constantly deduces the correlative physiological processes from the psychological "symptoms."

The result of the process, the deproblematization, does not always constitute a real solution. A tentative or purely individual viewpoint may be attained, without excluding the possibility of a new state of tension, a new problematization. Deproblematization is definite and universal only whenever a perfect adaptation has taken place, from which all subjective and tentative elements have been eliminated. This is realized whenever knowledge essentially consists in a quantitative description, and a description furthermore in which the consequent is always the equivalent of the antecedent. We have then realized the viewpoint of pure experience.

Avenarius differs from Maxwell and Mach, especially from the fact that he failed to see the relation between economy and symbolism (analogizing), as he underestimates the significance and the necessity of analogy in general.

3. William James (born 1842 ), the Harvard professor, in an article published in 1898 (The Pragmatic Method, reprinted in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1904) laid the foundation of a theory of knowledge by which he wished at once to review and