Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/495

 494 S. H. HODGSON : ILLUSORY PSYCHOLOGY. The method is here described by negatives only. It consists in the precepts to avoid the faults exemplified by the physical evolutionists on the one hand and the empirical psycholo- gists on the other. But as to any positive direction how to go to work in investigation, there is a blank. This is quite what we should expect from the identification of psychology with transcendental philosophy. The reproach of being wanting in a positive method by no means attaches to philosophy when philosophy is taken in its true sense. There is a very definite method in Meta- physic as I have sketched it above. Besides the character- istics already named of being subjective, analytic and avoiding presuppositions, its method consists in taking the distinction between nature and genesis as its guide, and using it so as always to subordinate the question of genesis to the question of nature. It always asks first the question, What is this thing l-notni as, before proceeding to the questions, how it comes and how it behaves, or what it does. Positive science proceeds by way of definition, hypothesis and verification. Metaphysic, the business of which is to get a true picture of things, a content of consciousness at once complete and self-accordant in all its parts, proceeds by way of analysis guided by the above distinction, in order to avoid, or at any rate to eliminate, assumptions unwarranted by experience. In conclusion I would remark that the fundamental fallacy of Transcendentalism as well as of Empiricism, when this latter sets up for philosophy, consists in a violation of what I hope I have made evident is the fundamental principle of true, that is, metaphysical philosophy. This principle is, that the all-embracing character of consciousness (which is that feature in it which enables it to be the basis of philosophy), is true as fact only when understood of the nature or content of consciousness, abstracting from its agent or bearer, the conscious being, whether this being is conceived as an universal or as an individual being. English thought, when it does not adopt this distinction, and I need hardly say that it most commonly ignores it altogether, usually inclines to the individual hypothesis, I mean to identify consciousi with an individual being. By so doing it retains validity only as scientific psychology and cuts philosophy entirely adrift. Transcendentalism, which also ignores it, inclines on the other hand to the universal hypothesis, that is, identifies consciousness with an universal being. Thereby it retains validity neither as philosophy nor yet as scientific psycho- logy. By one stroke it substitutes psychology for philosophy and makes its psychology illusory.