Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/411

 .losi.rii PETZOLDT, Philosophic dei l,'i-in,'n Krfahmnij. M7 transfer the synthetic, unifying function from the psychical to the biological vital series. The Avenarian Biology is of course not the Biology of the Biologist. It consists simply and solely in the persevering application of one hypothetical principle that the life of the brain, namely, consists in a perpetual warding off of whatever troubles its equilibrium not so as to interpret any single biological fact, but only so as to give intelligibility, that is unity, to the psychical life. For that is what this whole twist of method comes to. Had Avenarius believed in the existence of anything that could be called a synthetic Unity of Conscious- 0688, something psychical that could enable us to trace true psychical development in psychical change, we should assuredly have heard less of Biology. But he holds that it is only the unity and continuity of the biological vital series that can render intelligible the discontinuous succession of the psychical vital series, the only imaginable form of psychical synthesis being that of the rope of sand. On such a crucial point as this Mr. Petzoldt does not allow himself to be misunderstood. The only psychical unity he will allow within the psychical life is the unity, not of a psychical process, but of a psychical act. Each psychical act exists as it were in solid singleness, like the indivisible soul of mediaeval philosophy. It is a unity without parts. A psychical act, say a perception, cannot be divided into component parts like some material thing (p. 258) ; in itself it is one and indivisible, it is analysable only by thought, and the parts into which it is thus analysed are mere Abstrakta (p. 337), and only exist for thought. As for psychical process, a process, that is, showing psychical growth or development, there is no such thing (p. 278). What is characteristic of the psychical is its discreteness and discontinuity (p. 166). The process is a mere mosaic laid in Time (p. 278), and as we must logically add, though Mr. Petzoldt does not make the inference, Unity of Consciousness is a vital or organic fact, not a psychical fact at all. This whole procedure of Avenarius, as defined by Mr. Petzoldt, finds its explanation in the presupposition from which he starts. Having convinced himself that psychical processes cannot deter- mine each other he is not tempted for a moment to seek for a principle of synthesis within the psychical series which he analyses, but considers the analysis only as the means for dis- covering the true biological syntheses. It is Hume over again, but with this difference, that whereas Hume abides by his lirst error and accepts all its consequences, Avenarius seeks to remedy the lirst error by a second. Their common error, as I take it, is in starting with what is in essence an atomistic conception of the psychical life, the error peculiar to Avenarius is that of seeking to superinduce upon the discontinuous atoms of this psychical life a synthetic principle of unity, hypothetically borrowed from elsewhere.