Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/11

viii final form to my present statement, I have undoubtedly felt the influence both of these expressed opinions of Professor Münsterberg, and of the admirable monograph by Professor Rickert entitled Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, — a work to which Professor Miinsterberg first called my attention, shortly after its publication in 1892.

In my own former accounts, so far as they bore upon this doctrine, the contrast between these two types of human knowledge, the “descriptive” and the “appreciative,” has been made to depend solely upon the difference between the “social” and the “individual” points of view. I still defend, and, in the fourth lecture of this volume I expound afresh, the thesis that the contrast between our “descriptive” knowledge of the physical world and our “appreciative” knowledge of the facts of finite life, is determined precisely by this difference between our social consciousness of what is “valid for all individuals” and our personal consciousness of what is valid for the Self. But it is true that one must still seek within the consciousness of the individual Self for the motives that make it logically possible for this Self to regard the abstraction called “a view valid for all individuals” as a possible abstraction. We must show how the Self can make such a view the object of its own contemplation in any sense whatever. For the human Self, although (as I have shown in the course of these lectures) it comes to be aware of itself in terms of its social contrast with other Selves, still (in so far as it has become self-conscious at all) acknowledges its objects as valid, in the first place, from its own point of view, and not from the point of view of another Self. How comes