Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/223

 PROF. MUNSTEBBEBG AS CRITIC OF CATEGORIES. 209 cannot be one belonging to the object world, and is what he calls 'over-individual'. The important thing in Prof. Miin- sterberg's volume is not, however, the statement of his general standpoint, for this is not novel, but that he is one of the first, if not the very first, to do what the Hegelians have already endeavoured to do from their point of view, to attempt a systematic criticism of categories from the point of view of will as the ultimate reality. This is substantially how he would reason : If will be that which makes possible and creates the object world of experience, then the special sciences, which can only do their work within the field of experience, must be regarded each as abstracting under special categories. That is to say each science, in order to get clear knowledge of a certain kind, applies its own general conceptions for the purpose of shutting out those aspects of existence which do not concern it, aud so getting into clearer consciousness those relations which it desires to elaborate. Thus, if we wish to extend our knowledge of the quantita- tive aspects of the object world, and to begin with the triangle, we shall abstract from all relations of colour, etc., and concern ourselves with an object which concrete experi- ence never does present to us, a figure made up of Euclidean straight lines, possessing neither breadth, depth, nor solidity. It is so that we get clear consciousness of geometrical relations. In like manner physical science figures the world by means of its peculiar points of abstraction, as though that world consisted of causes and effects, and that, although a self-subsisting cause or effect, is no more to be met with in nature than is a perfect straight line. The conception of a whole conserving itself through a definite course of development from its embryonic commencement to death, notwithstanding the complete change of its material, is just as incomprehensible from the standpoint of the cate- gories of physics, as are the categories of the latter from the standpoint of pure quantity. ^Esthetical and ethical relation- ships in like manner lie beyond what of concrete experience can be admitted through the categories of biology. In other words, the special sciences present us not with the spectacle of concrete and real existences, but with certain aspects of these existences, separated out by abstraction, and hyposta- tised to the exclusion of all else. This is a legitimate and necessary process, for faculties limited as are ours, if know- ledge is to be extended and made definite, but it is destructive for the moment of all the relationships which it puts aside. For the moment only, because when we understand the relations to one another of these categories, there is and can 14