Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/165

 154 J. DEWET : presenting psychology as the method of philosophy, for it had not been true to its own basis and ideal. Instead of determining all, both in its totality and its factors, through consciousness, it had endeavoured to determine conscious- ness from something out of and beyond necessary relation to consciousness. It had determined its psychology from a dogmatically presupposed ontology, instead of getting at its ontology from a critical examination of the nature and con- tents of consciousness, as its standpoint required. It had a thing-in-itself, something whose very existence was to be opposed to consciousness, as in the unknowable "substances" of Locke, the transcendent Deity of Berkeley, the sensa- tions or impressions of Hume and Mill, the " transfigured real " of Spencer ; and it used this thing-in-itself as the cause and criterion of conscious experience. Thus it con- tradicted itself ; for, if psychology as method of philosophy means anything, it means that nothing shall be assumed except just conscious experience itself, and that the nature of all shall be ascertained from and within this. It is to the positive significance of psychology as philo- sophic method its significance when it is allowed to develop itself free from self-contradictory assumptions that this present paper is directed. It was suggested in the previous paper that this method, taken in its purity, would show substantial identity with the presuppositions and results of the " transcendental " movement. And as the principal attacks upon the pretensions of psychology to be method for philosophy, or anything more than one of the special sciences, have come from representatives of this movement, this paper must be occupied with treating psychology in reference to what we may call German philosophy, as the other treated it in reference to English philosophy. In so far as the criticisms from this side have been occupied with pointing out the failure of the actual English psychology to be philo- sophy, there is of course no difference of opinion. That arises only in so far as these criticisms have seemed (seemed, I repeat) to imply that the same objections must hold against every possible psychology ; while it seems to the writer that psychology is the only possible method. It is held, or seems to be held, by representatives of the post-Kantian movement, that man may be regarded in two aspects, in one of which he is an object of experience like other objects : he is a finite thing among other finite things ; with these things he is in relations of action and reaction, but possesses the additional characteristic that he is a knowing, feeling, willing phenomenon. As such, he forms