Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/248

 all possible psychological truths rest on behaviour as their only and absolutely sufficient basis.

If it is this, and nothing else what is implied by the doctrine of "behaviourism" (of which I am not sure) the behaviouristic view seems to me absolutely unassailable.

Just one word about the so-called moral sciences, especially history. History has often been contrasted with the natural sciences, and the view has been advocated, especially by a very influential school of thought in modern Germany, that historical knowledge was of an essentially different kind from that afforded by the natural sciences, it was deeper, of greater intrinsic value, revealing more of the inner nature of things; it gave us real understanding, whereas it was the business of natural science to give explanation.

This view seems to me entirely errorious. After all we have said there cannot be the slightest doubt but that all the genuine knowledge contained in history (of political events, of art, civilisation etc.) is of exactly the same nature as we found it to be in all other cases. As a matter of fact, it is very easy to see that it consists of an immense amount of factual or descriptive knowledge and a rather small and disconnected body of explanatory knowledge in just that sense in which we have introduced these terms.

But it is not difficult to discover the reason why the doctrine I have just criticised was advanced. It lies in the fact that history is akin to art in that the ultimate purpose of those who study it is, in most cases, enjoyment rather than knowledge. For the historian proper the main end of his endeavours may often be a casual explanation of events, and in so far they will be scientific, but there will be another purpose in his mind also — and this will be the chief purpose of historical studies for most people and for many historians, namely: to enjoy within themselves the emotions and thoughts which they believe to have been the emotions and thoughts of the heroes of history and to visualise in their own imagination the great events of the past, as the contemporaries would have seen them; they want to live the past over again.

It is this awakening of certain emotions and pictures of the imagination which is called "understanding" by those modern philosophers and is mistaken by them for a special kind of knowledge. In reality it is a result of historical knowledge, but quite distinct from it, it is an enjoyment of the past, not an understanding of it, which could be achieved only by causal structures.