Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/31

Rh are more difficult to escape, to avoid such trespassing on metaphysics. And it may be argued that psychology, apart from metaphysics, or at least apart from epistemology, is too apt to mean an uncritical use of fundamental conceptions and a tacit and therefore mischievous assumption of some general philosophical theory; that psychology, apart from a critical theory of knowledge, is too often only a combination of haphazard observation and bad metaphysics, helped out by a little second-hand physiology. But a better ideal is possible, and is certainly present to the minds of many psychologists at the present day. A full recognition of the necessary abstractness of the psychologist's point of view and a careful elimination of metaphysical assertions, whether affirmative or negative, justify the claim to treat psychology as a natural science, or at least as what 'wishes to be' a natural science.

If, however, psychology be treated in this way, as a special science like physiology or chemistry, it can no longer put forward the claim to be the foundation of philosophy or even of any of the special philosophical sciences, such as logic, ethics, æsthetics. All the special sciences form part of the material for philosophy. That is one reason why philosophy is never complete, but has to have its problems worked out afresh by every generation, and, in a sense, by every individual who takes it seriously. All changes in scientific conceptions, just as all changes in religious ideas, in economical, social, and political conditions, bring new problems to light and compel us to face old problems in new ways. Psychology, from the nature of its subject-matter, has a closer connection with many philosophical problems than some of the other sciences. But philosophy cannot be based on psychology (as a science excluding epistemology and metaphysics) in any sense in which it is not also based on sociology and history, the sciences which deal with the human mind 'writ large.'

Admitting, then, a possible separation of psychology from epistemology and from metaphysics, we have to ask whether these can be separated from one another. Mr. Seth admits that metaphysics should be based on epistemology: at least he says