Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/30



OW does the problem of the ultimate nature of Reality stand related to the problem of the possibility of knowledge? In attempting to deal with this question, it seems most convenient to refer directly to the opinions on the subject which have been advocated by Professor Andrew Seth in this, especially in his articles in No. 2 and No. 5. In the first of these articles, Mr. Seth has argued for the separation of Psychology, Epistemology, and Metaphysics from one another. With what he says about psychology I am inclined on the whole to agree, though with some qualifications. The question of the separation of psychology from epistemology (I should prefer to say, in more general terms, 'from Logic') and from metaphysics is to a great extent a question of convenience of terminology. But it is also a question which depends upon the possibility of the existence of psychology as a particular science of nature. This possibility might, indeed, seem to be proved by the existence of psychologists, who adopt that view of their science. The question, however, may still be raised, how far these psychologists are consistent with themselves. If, however, psychology can be treated as a special science like the other sciences of nature, it can be kept free of metaphysics in the same sense, and in the same sense only, in which they can be kept free of metaphysics. We know that even the mathematician, still more the physicist or the biologist, is apt to trespass beyond the limits of his special science and to put forward the abstractions or the conventional concepts, of which in his special science he has rightly made use, as if they were absolute realities, truths about the universe as a whole, truths about the ultimate nature of things. It is obviously still harder for the psychologist, dealing as he does with a more complex material and with a material in which the idola fori and idola theatri