Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/165

No. 2.] will make, perhaps, the most important contributions of all to the pile. But, as I just remarked, few of these persons have any aptitude or fondness for general philosophy; they have quite as little as the pure-blooded philosophers have for discovering particular facts.

The actual existence of two utterly distinct types of mind, with their distinct needs, both of them having legitimate business to transact with psychology, must then be recognized; and the only question there can be is the practical one of how to distribute the labor so as to waste it least and get the most efficient results. For my part, I yield to no man in my expectations of what general philosophy will some day do in helping us to rational conceptions of the world. But when I look abroad and see how almost all the fresh life that has come into psychology of recent years has come from the biologists, doctors, and psychical researchers, I feel as if their impulse to constitute the science in their own way, as a branch of biology, were an unsafe one to thwart; and that wisdom lies, not in forcing the consideration of the more metaphysical aspects of human consciousness upon them, but, on the contrary, in carefully rescuing these aspects from their hands, and handing them over to those of the specialists in philosophy, where the metaphysical aspects of physics are already allowed to belong. If there could be, after sufficient ventilation of the subject, a generally expressed consent as to the kind of problems in psychology that were metaphysical and the kind that were analogous to those of the natural sciences, and if the word 'psychology' could then be restricted so as to cover as much as possible the latter and not the former problems, a psychology so understood might be safely handed over to the keeping of the men of facts, of the laboratory workers and biologists. We certainly need something more radical than the old division into 'rational' and 'empirical' psychology, both to be treated by the same writer between the covers of the same book. We need a fair and square and explicit abandonment of such questions as that of the soul, the transcendental ego, the fusion of ideas or particles of mind stuff, etc., by the practical man; and a fair and square