Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/164

 No. 42.] [APRIL, 1886.

MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY. — I.—PSYCHOLOGY AS PHILOSOPHIC METHOD. By JOHN DEWEY. IN an article on "The Psychological Standpoint" in MIND 41, I endeavoured to point out that the characteristic English development in philosophy the psychological movement since Locke had been neither a "threshing of old straw," nor a movement of purely negative meaning, whose significance for us was exhausted when we had learned how it necessarily led to the movement in Germany the so-called "transcendental" movement. Its positive significance was found to consist in the fact that it declared consciousness to be be the sole content, account and criterion of all reality; and psychology, as the science of this consciousness, to be the explicit and accurate determination of the nature of reality in its wholeness, as well as the determination of the value and validity of the various elements or factors of this whole. It is the ultimate science of reality, because it declares what experience in its totality is; it fixes the worth and meaning of its various elements by showing their development and place within this whole. It is, in short, philosophic method. But that paper was necessarily largely negative, for it was necessary to point out that as matter of fact the movement had not been successful in