Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/181

 170 J. DEWEY : Science is the systematic account, or reason of fad ; Psycho- logy is the completed systematic account of the ultimate fact, which, as fact, reveals itself as reason, and hence accounts for itself, and gives the " reasons " of all sciences. The other point, the relation of psychology to logic, has al- ready been dealt with by implication, and need not detain us long again. (2) The Relation of Psychology to Logic. The whole course of philosophic thought, so far as the writer can comprehend it, has consisted in showing that any distinction between the form and the matter of philosophic truth, between the content and the method, is fatal to the reaching of truth. Self-consciousness is the final truth, and in self-conscious- ness the form as organic system and the content as organ- ised system are exactly equal to each other. It is a process which, as form, has produced itself as matter. Psychology as the account of this self-consciousness must necessarily fulfil all the conditions of true method. Logic, since it neces- sarily abstracts from the ultimate fact, cannot reach in matter what it points to in form. While its content, if it be true philosophy, must be the whole content of self-consciousness or spirit, its form is only one process within this content, that of thought-conditions, the Idee. While the content is the eternal nature of the universe, its form is adequate only to " thinking what God thought and was before the creation of the world," that is, the universe in. its unreality, in its abstraction. It is this contradiction between content and form in logic which makes it not philosophic method, but only one moment within that method. No contradiction results as soon as logic is given its proper place fithi/i the system. The contradiction occurs when, at the same moment that it is said that logic is " abstract," the logical method is still said to be the method of philosophy. Such contradictions certainly appear to exist, for example, in the philosophy of Hegel. They have been often pointed out, and I shall only summarise them, following for the most part a recent writer. 1 There is no way of getting from logic to the philosophy of nature logically. The only way is to fall back upon the fact ; " we know from experience" that we have nature as well as the Idee. In truth we do not go from logic to nature at all. The movement is a re- verse movement. " In reality, the necessity for any such transition is purely factitious, because the notions never existed otlwrwise than in nature and spirit. . . . They were got 1 Prof. A. Seth, " Hegel : an Exposition and Criticism," MIND 24.