Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/555

 HUGO MUNSTERBERG, Psychology and Life. 541 science of the individual objects, physics of the over-individual objects, while the normative and historical sciences are respectively concerned with the over-individual and individual will-acts. The sciences of the first group are naturalistic, and demand mechanical causal connexions to the exclusion of all freedom ; those of the second are teleological and free and exclusive of causal connexion (p. 211 et passim). The latter deal with the real world of the inner life which alone has value, and for which the " causal view has not the slightest meaning" (p. 266), while the former are systems of the laws into which the reality is transformed for the purpose of description, a purpose which is fully attained only when psychical events have been conceived as dependent on brain motions. The real life on the other hand is wholly will, and out of time (p. 279), deathless or ' immortal ' (p. 280) and non-existent (pp. 24-25) ; its ' transformation ' is unreal, for " whatever is thought as existing cannot have reality," but psychology is never- theless bound to perform this operation if it is not to be ruined (p. 183). Such is the basis on which Prof. Miinsterberg supposes himself to erect " a scientific synthesis of ethical idealism, with the physiological psychology of our days," and from which he pro- ceeds to prolix discussions of the relation of psychology to life, physiology, education, art, history and mysticism. The results are, as might be supposed, sufficiently curious, if not always entirely consistent (cp., e.g., pp. 14 and 270). They derive their importance from the fact that Prof. Miinsterberg is the repre- sentative of the ' experimental ' psychology in the leading American university, and quulquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi. More- over it behoves us all to realise with what barbarisms the fashion- able developments of a naturalistic psychology threaten philosophy. To be informed that scientific psychology cannot recognise a will or personality, and must reduce all psychic events to atomic sensations, while at the same time real life is wholly volitional and a realisation of purposes (which are nevertheless declared to be out of time), that a causal and a teleological explanation of events are incompatibles, that any attempt to avoid such con- clusions is unscientific and inadmissible, all this is surely calculated to arouse the calmest. Yet Prof. Miinsterberg is by no means himself one of the untutored savages, innocent of the least comprehension of philosophy, who roam over the wide stretching laboratories of the new psychology, and fancy that the solution of all philosophic questions is to be looked for from some physiological experiment. He sees that psychology cannot take the place of logic and ethics, and that in common with all scientific doctrines its methods have ultimately to be subjected to metaphysical criticism. In fact it is just because he recognises the inadequacy of mere psychology and aspires to transcend it by means of a metaphysic which draws its inspiration from Schopenhauer, and, more remotely, from Kant, that he arrives at the paradoxes and