Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/173

162 consciousness had realised itself, though only partially and interruptedly, in us, he certainly would have been able to make very positive statements regarding it, and would also have furnished a basis in fact for his logical method, which now seems to hang upon nothing but a unity of which all that can be said is that it is a unity, and that it is not anything in particular. When one reflects that it is not only upon the existence of this unity, but upon its working in and through us, that all philosophy and philosophising depend, one cannot conceal the apprehension that too great a load of philosophy has been hung upon too feeble a peg.

So, too, after his victorious demonstration that upon the existence of this spiritual unity depends the possibility of all moral experience, he finds himself obliged to state (p. 180), with that candour so characteristic of all his thinking: "Of a life of completed development, of activity with the end attained, we can only speak or think in negatives, and thus only can we speak or think of that state of being in which, according to our theory, the ultimate moral good must consist". Once more, had he started from the fact that as matter of actual realisation this absolute good has been reproduced in our lives and the end attained (for surely the good is a matter of quality and not of quantity, and the end a power, not a sum), he would not have found himself in this difficulty. But with a purely logical method, one can end only with the must be or the ought: the is vanishes, because it has been abstracted from. The psychological method starts from the is, and thereby also gives the basis and the ideal for the ought and must be.

But it is time that we returned to our thesis, which, in brief, was that no distinction which maintains that psychology is the science of man as "part of this partial world" can be maintained. The following reasons for this denial have been given: it was pointed out that the relative validity which this distinction in man's nature undoubtedly possesses is itself the product and manifestation of psychological experience; that man as man, or as the conscious experience whose science is psychology, is self-conscious, and that therefore self-consciousness as the unity of subject and object, not as "purely objective," as the totality, not as a "part," must be included in the science of psychology; and that furthermore this treatment of self-consciousness is necessary for the explanation and comprehension of any partial fact of conscious experience. And finally, it was pointed out that the denial of self-consciousness as