Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/263

 WILHELM WUNDT, Grundziige d. Physiologischen Psychologic. 249 the same time solving all the world-riddles and finding for psycho- logy a niche in the logical construction which he offers us as a substitute for reality. What, then, is Wundt's position ? I confess that in spite of prolonged and painful efforts I cannot understand it. He accepts psycho-physical parallelism as a heuristic principle, but the paral- lelism only holds between the psychical elements (the conceptual products of abstraction) and processes in the nervous system, while to the concrete states of consciousness, resulting from the combina- tions of these elements according to the laws of psychical causality, no physical processes are parallel. The parallelism of the psychical elements and their physical correlates remains a bald unintelligible fact, and, although the elements are supposed to have causal rela- tions with one another, no causal explanation of their appearance in consciousness can be given. Again, " Body and soul are a unity, but they are not identical ; they are not the same, but they are inseparable properties of living beings " and "this unityis not an assumption but an experience which we can never put aside " (iii., 764), and again this unity is an indispensable presupposition for science. Wundt's position seems to combine most of the draw- backs of those other positions indicated above and to lack their consistency and intelligibility. Fearing to commit himself to any inference as to realities behind the veil of appearances and con- demning every such inference as metaphysical, he yet seeks causal explanations of appearances, forgetting that the conception of a cause is at least as " metaphysical " as that of a substance and, like it, an inference from the facts of immediate experience which has rendered immense services in the past and without which science has not yet learned to do its work. All this vagueness, not to say incoherence, of Wundt's treatment of this question is but another melancholy instance of the evils that psychology has so long suffered from its all too intimate con- nexion with philosophy. Like so many others, Wundt strives to construct his psychology so as to avoid the dualism which alone enables us to give a causal explanation of mental process without committing ourselves to the extravagant assumptions of thorough- going parallelism or to the absurdities of materialism ; and this be- cause, in the words of Prof. Meumann, " every dualistic metaphysic would leave over a number of open questions and does not satisfy man's desire for unity in his efforts after explanations ". As well might the great natural philosophers of the last century have re- fused to entertain the atomic theory on the ground that a pluralistic metaphysic might seem to leave open a number of questions. If we seek in these pages an answer to the essential question Is the causal physical series of events, that issues in a bodily action, a closed series that contains the complete determination of the action, or does the accompanying psychical series in any way co-operate in that determination ? we find no answer. The question is not faced but avoided by sinking the discussion to an unreal and purely verbal plane.