Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/177

 166 J. DEWEY : of these sciences ; they have no existence except through their position in this living synthesis. Now the question is, where does psychology stand within this organism ? On the one hand, psychology is certainly a positive science. It finds its materials in certain facts and events. As to systematic observation, experiment, conclu- sion and verification, it can differ in no essential way from any one of them. It is based upon and deals with fact, and aims at the ordered comprehension and explanation of fact as any special science does. Yet the whole drift of this paper has been to show that in some way psychology does differ very essentially from any one of them. Where shall we find this difference ? In one word, its relation to them is precisely that which we have discovered philosophy to bear : it is not only a science, but it turns out to be science as an organic system, in which every special science has its life, and from which it must abstract when it sets up for an independent existence of its own. We begin with any special science. That turns out to be not only some one department or sphere of reality, but also some one depart- ment of conscious experience. From one science to another we go, asking for some explanation of conscious experience, until we come to psychology, which gives us an account of it, in its own behalf, as neither mathematics, nor phy- sics, nor biology does. So far we have only a special science, though the highest and most concrete of all. But the very process that has made necessary this new science reveals also that each of the former sciences existed only in abstraction from it. Each dealt with some one phase of conscious experience, and for that very reason could not deal with the totality which gave it its being, consciousness. But in psychology we have the manifestation and explication of this consciousness. It gives in its wholeness what each of them would give in part, viz., the nature of experience, and hence is related to them as the whole is to the part. It appears no longer, therefore, as the highest of sciences : it appears as Science itself, that is, as systematic account and comprehension of the nature of conscious experience. Mathematics, physics, biology exist, because conscious ex- perience reveals itself to be of such a nature, that one may make virtual abstraction from the whole, and consider a part by itself, without damage, so long as the treatment is purely scientific, that is, so long as the implicit connexion with the whole is left undisturbed, and the attempt is not made to present this partial science as metaphysic, or as an explanation of the whole, as is the usual fashion of our