Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/10

Rh “acknowledgment,” whose significance is ethical, rather than to a mere passive acceptance of “given” contents of present experience, was insisted upon in the concluding section of that paper. When, in preparing my Religious Aspect of Philosophy (published in 1885), I had definitely passed over from my earlier sceptical position to the constructive Idealism that I have ever since endeavored to work out, I attempted at once to take up this former view of our finite knowledge into what was then, in my own personal growth, a new doctrine as to the nature of the Absolute. In 1892, in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy, I essayed a still further development of this theory regarding human knowledge, in the lecture entitled The World of Description and the World of Appreciation. Since then, in the paper called Self-consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature, published as one of my Studies of Good and Evil (1898), as well as in other essays, I have attempted to apply the same essential view to the explanation of the bases and characteristics of our human knowledge of the physical world. In recent years I have been much interested in comparing my views about this matter with those of my colleague and friend, Professor Münsterberg, who has independently reached a somewhat similar doctrine regarding the two-fold nature and basis of what he also consents to call our “descriptive” and our “appreciative” knowledge. This topic, as well as the ethically significant character of our “acknowledgment” of facts, has been discussed summarily in Professor Münsterberg’s book, entitled Psychology and Life, and, more exhaustively, in his important Grundzüge der Psychologie (Vol. I, 1900). In giving