Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/247

No. 2.] and scientific sides. Most of the men who have adopted Rousseau's methods were influenced by Condillac, student of Locke. Trade schools in practice tend sometimes to sharpen class distinctions, and to encourage neglect of spiritual values, but they are useful for developing a sense of duty to society, as well as a respect for manual labor, and also in the training of the child's mind by way of his hands.

Hedonism holds that concepts are objective because inherent in human nature. Pleasure and pain are in this sense objective. Development is change from a less pleasant to a more pleasant condition, and starts with certain instincts and impulses biologically explained. We do not know whether the reactions of the amoeba indicate pleasure and pain. But since the behavior of man is much like that of the lower animals, either they have intelligence and moral intuition or these are abstractions. Representative knowledge is manifested in the sea urchin when it shrinks from a shadow. When we shrink from falsehood is it not, therefore, because of the same emotional fear? Yet emotions have their origin in sensation. Different responses to the same situation are due to different psychophysical states, not to wickedness. Pleasure and pain create ethical values; for example, sympathy is aroused by actions that have given us pain. If it be said that these psycho-physical causes have dropped out of consciousness, and that we now perform duty for duty's sake, the answer is that the pleasantness or unpleasantness is present, though unnoticed, and is discoverable by introspection.

The results of experimental psychology or psycho-physiology seem negative, and appear even to mislead investigators. They are successful only with physiological variations and the lower mental functions. As M. Kostyleff has pointed out, a crisis seems to be approaching. In some quarters psychology is being reduced to an applied science, anthropometry, in others, it is becoming metaphysical; in still others, investigators are turning with hope towards child study for light on psychical processes. It has long been evident that historical and social causes must explain our thought processes. Consciousness represents the relations of individuals in society. Writers like Durkheim and Tarde, following Comte, have begun to recognize this. The truth is that psycho-sociology should replace psycho-physiology in the study of consciousness. In defining consciousness, we may say it is that which continually emerges from the unconscious, past, or potential experience. The primitive man was a care-free and relatively unconscious being. With the advent of social interdicts, and socially imposed pains, his consciousness