Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/262

 248 CRITICAL NOTICES : ness or the apperception ". For, though an analysis of conscious- ness into elements is justifiable and necessary, it is only when ve mistake these artificial products of abstraction for entities coming independently into existence, that we feel the need of an organ or a function which shall bring them together again, which shall unify in reality the elements that we have separated in thought only. This strange conception of consciousness as something that exists beside its contents and exercises its specific unifying function upon them is bound up with Wundt's unsatisfactory attitude to- wards the problem of the relations of the psychical to the physical. There are five positions that a psychologist may consistently main- tain : (1) He may confine himself to the task of describing mental process, putting aside the desire for causal explanation in both physical and mental science as a natural weakness of the mind to be sternly suppressed ; (2) he may base his psychology on psycho- physical materialism and attempt, like Miinsterberg, to redeem his position from absurdity by the recognition of a world of values and purposes unrelated to that of physical causation ; (3) he may adopt thoroughgoing parallelism, the doctrine of the universal double aspect of Fechner and Paulsen ; (4) he may, with Lotze, regard our mental life as the product of the interaction of soul and body ; (5) he may prefer the scientific attitude, and, admitting the impos- sibility of settling the question by general considerations, he may content himself with regarding the third and fourth of these views as working hypotheses to he tested in the light of increasing em- pirically-based knowledge. Wundt adopts no one of these five positions. The first, which is in harmony with his phenomena- listic non-committal attitude towards things in general, he rejects at the outset in asserting that psychology attempts " to arrive at a causal analysis of mental process" and by the dictum that the causal principle is applicable without reserve to every kind of real change. The second he condemns as giving rise to a materialistic pseudo- science, and as the gravest danger that besets the path of our science to-day. The third is incompatible with his principles of purely psychical causation, especially that of psychical synthesis (schopferische Eesultanten), according to which the psychical ele- ments alone have physical correlates while their combinations have no such correlates, and it necessitates the assumption of vast realms of unconscious psychical life and the acceptance of some theory of psychical dispositions or subconscious persistence of presentations to account for the facts of retention, conceptions with which Wundt will have nothing to do, rightly asserting that " there are numerous natural processes of which we have not the slightest ground for as- serting that they, as is said, ' have a psychical side ' ". The fourth he rejects because the conception of a substantial soul seems to him antiquated and superseded by that of the actual soul, the con- ception of the soul as consisting merely of the train of psychical events. The last is incompatible with his philosophic habit of mind which will not allow him to pursue his science without at