Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/549

 PSYCHOLOGY. S^/ like all the higher mental life, they are the results of a psy= chical mechanism, results whose production needs no renewed exertion on the part of the soul itself. It has been a very harmful error in psychology hitherto to ascribe each par- ticular mental activity to a s^tcidA faculty of the soul having a similar name, instead of deriving it from combinations of simple representations. Abstract, empty class ideas have been treated as real forces, in the belief that thus the single concrete acts had been "explained." There is]no bitterer foe of the faculty theory than Herbart. His campaign against it, if not victorious, was yet salutary, and the motives of his hostility, up to a certain point, entirely justified. Nothing is more useless than the assur- ance that what the soul actually does, that it must also have the power to do. Who disputes this? A faculty explains nothing so long as the laws under which its functions and its relations to otlier faculties remain unexplained. But although the faculty idea serves no positive end, it can- not be entirely discarded. It marks the boundary where our ability to reduce one class of psychical phenomena to another ceases. Herbart's polemic has no force against the moderate and necessary use of this idea, no matter how much it was in place in view of the impropriety of a super- fluous multiplication of the faculties of the soul. The real- ization of the ideal of psychology, the reduction of the com- plex phenomena of mental life to the smallest possible number of simple elements, is limited by the heterogeneity of the original phenomena, knowing, feeling, willing, which wholly resists derivation from the combination of sensations. That which blinded Herbart to these limitations was that tendency toward unity, which, as a metaphysician and moral philosopher, he had all too willfully suppressed, and which now took revenge for this infringement of its rights by mis- leading the psychologist to an exaggeration which had important consequences. Nevertheless his unsuccessful attempt remains interesting and worthy of gratitude. The discovery of the laws which govern the interaction of the psychical elements is the task of a statics and a mechanics of representations. The former investigates the equilibrium or the settled final state ; the latter, the