Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/500

 486 FEEDINAND TONNIES : in its necessary relation to time, i.e. to activity, performance, completion. It must be noted most carefully, how here the regenerated Aristotelian concepts meet with the concepts of modern physics. For what is energy, which is now accosted as the true reality, but capacity, inclination, tendency (or whatever it is called) to perform work ? 76. But this whole renewal of thought is of the deepest im- portance for Psychology. Critical (or empirical, or positive) reflexion has for its chief result, that there is no ground in the given facts for the separation of subject and object. The Cartesian view, that a subject is connected only with the human body and then as a miracle, is definitely abolished by the theory of evolution. However radically it may be opposed to tradition and to na'ive opinion, that view is never- theless a remnant of the old belief that the soul has its seat in the body as another being ; a belief which was much refined in Aristotelianism, but in the Christian scholasticism, at any rate for the anima rationalis, was reduced again to its vulgar form. For Descartes, as for his predecessors, the soul per- ceives movements of the body and reacts upon them. The actual facts are sufficiently described by saying that the body perceives itself and reacts upon itself, i.e. as a whole upon its parts. We may give the body, so far as it is subject, i.e. psychical fact, the traditional name of " soul ". Body and soul are then different names of one and the same object, which as body is perceptible in its parts, but as whole, i.e. as persistent relations of the parts (what the Aristotelians called form) is, like the soul, an object of thought alone. 77. Between Descartes as Intellectualist (regarding the soul as independent of all experience) and his sensationalist opponents (Gassendi, Hobbes, Locke, Condillac) there is from the present point of view no essential difference. The latter also retain the soul as another being, but treat it still more as something passive, because they think that they can suffi- ciently explain sensations by the effects of " impressions " of external objects, and rightly derive thought as a process of memory from complications of persistent sensations. This view has transplanted itself into the whole of the modern Association-Psychology, which, in connexion with the Phy- siology of the nervous system, has resolved so great a part of the facts of knowledge into its atoms (with which Cams compares the isolated sensations) and has synthetically re- constructed them. But the philosophers of this tendency, especially the Herbartians, return quite consistently to the soul as a simple being, as something which must correspond to the grammatical and logical (i.e. denoted by a name)