International Congress of Arts and Science Part 28

As a physicist, in the widest sense of the word, I have to ignore the objects in so far as they are my ideas and have to consider the stones and the stars, the inorganic and the organic objects, as they are outside of me, material for every one. The logical purpose of this second abstraction may be perhaps formulated in the following way.

We have seen that the purpose of the study of the objects is to find out what we have to expect from them; that is, to what effects of the given thing we have to submit ourselves in antic.i.p.ation. The ideal aim is thus to understand completely how present objects and future objects--that is, how causes and effects--are connected. The first stage in such knowledge of causal connections is, of course, the observation of empirical consequences. Our feeling of expectation grows with the regularity of observed succession; yet the ideal aim can never be fulfilled in that way. The mere observation of regularities can help us to reduce a particular case to a frequently observed type, but what we seek to understand is the necessity of the process. Of course we have to formulate laws, and as soon as we acknowledge a special law to be expressive of a necessity, the subsumption of the particular case under the law will satisfy us even if the necessity of the connection is not recognized in the particular case. We are satisfied because the acknowledgment of the law involved all possible cases. But we do not at all feel that we have furnished a real explanation if the law means to us merely a generalization of routine experiences, and if thus no absolute validity is attached to the law. This necessity between cause and effect must thus have its ultimate reason in our own understanding.

We must be logically obliged to connect the objects in such a way, and wherever observation seems to contradict that which is logically necessary, we must reshape our idea of the object till the demands of reason are fulfilled. That is, we must subst.i.tute for the given object an abstraction which serves the purpose of a logically necessary connection. That demand is clearly not satisfied if we simply group the totality of such causal judgments under the single name, Causality, and designate thus all these judgments as results of a special disposition of the understanding. We never understand why just this cause demands just this effect so long as we rely on such vague and mystical power of our reason to link the world by causality.

But the situation changes at once if we go still further back in the categories of our understanding. While a mere demand for causality never explains what cause is to be linked with what effect, the vagueness disappears when we understand this demand for causality itself as the product of a more fundamental demand for ident.i.ty. That an object remains identical with itself does not need for us any further interpretation. That is the ultimate presupposition of our thought, and where a complete ident.i.ty is found nothing demands further explanation.

All scientific effort aims at so rethinking different experiences that they can be regarded as partially identical, and every discovery of necessary connection is ultimately a demonstration of ident.i.ty. If we seek connections with the final aim to understand them as necessary, we must conceive the world of our objects in such a way that it is possible to consider the successive experiences as parts of a self-identical world; that is, as parts of a world in which no substance and no energy can disappear or appear anew. To reach this end it is obviously needed that we eliminate from the world of objects all that cannot be conceived as identically returning in a new experience; that is, all that belongs to the present experience only. We do eliminate this by taking it up conceptually into the subject and calling it psychical, and thus leaving to the object merely that which is conceived as belonging to the world of everybody's experience, that is, of over-individual experience. The whole history of natural science is first of all the gigantic development of this transformation, resolution, and reconstruction. The objects of experience are re-thought till everything is eliminated which cannot be conceived as identical with itself in the experiences of all individuals and thus as belonging to the over-individual world. All the subst.i.tutions of atoms for the real thing, and of energies for the real changes, are merely conceptional schemes to satisfy this demand.

The logically primary step is thus not the separation of the physical and the psychical things plus the secondary demand to connect the physical things causally; the order is exactly opposite. The primary desire is to connect the real objects and to understand them as causes and effects. This understanding demands not only empirical observation, but insight into the necessary connection. Necessary connection, on the other hand, exists merely for identical objects and identical qualities.

But in the various experiences only that is identical which is independent of the momentary individual experiences, and therefore we need as the ultimate aim a reconstruction of the object into the two parts, the one perceptional, which refers to our individual experience; and the other conceptional, which expresses that which can be conceived as identical in every new experience. The ideal of this constructed world is the mechanical universe in which every atom moves by causal necessity because there is nothing in that universe, no element of substance and no element of energy, which will not remain identical in all changes of the universe which are possibly to be expected. It becomes completely determinable by antic.i.p.ation and the system of our submissions to the object can be completely constructed. The totality of intellectual efforts to reconstruct such a causally connected over-individual world of objects clearly represents a unity of its own.

It is the system of physical sciences.

The physical universe is thus not the totality of our objects. It is a subst.i.tution for our real objects, constructed by eliminating the individual parts of our objects of experience. These individual parts are the psychical aspects of our objective experience, and they clearly awake our scientific interest too. The physical sciences need thus as counterpart a division of mental sciences. Their aim must be the same.

We want to foresee the psychical results and to understand causally the psychical experience. Yet it is clear that the plan of the mental sciences must be quite different in principle from that of the sciences of nature. The causal connection of the physical universe was ultimately anch.o.r.ed in the ident.i.ty of the object through various experiences; while the object of experience was psychical for us just in so far as it could never be conceived as identical in different phases of reality.

The psychical object is an ever new creation; my idea can never be your idea. Their meaning may be identical, but the psychical stuff, the content of my consciousness, can never be object for any one else, and even in myself the idea of to-day is never the idea of yesterday or to-morrow. But if there cannot be ident.i.ty in different psychical experiences, it is logically impossible to connect them directly by necessity. If we yet want to master their successive appearance, we must subst.i.tute an indirect connection for the direct one, and must describe and explain the psychical phenomena through reference to the physical world. It is in this way that modern psychology has subst.i.tuted elementary sensations for the real contents of consciousness and has constructed relations between these elementary mental states on the basis of processes in the organism, especially brain processes. Here, again, reality is left behind and a mere conceptional construction is put in its place. But this construction fulfills its purpose and thus gives us truth; and if the basis is once given, the psychological sciences can build up a causal system of the conscious processes in the individual man and in society.

4. _The Historical and the Normative Sciences_

The two divisions of the physical and mental sciences represent our systematized submission to objects. But we saw from the first that it is an artificial abstraction to consider in our real experience the object alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and in our att.i.tudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to objects, merely, but to will-acts; and that these will-acts were the individual ones of other subjects or the over-individual ones which come to us in our consciousness of norms. The sciences which deal with our submissions to the individual will-acts of others are the Historical Sciences. Their starting-point is the same as that of the object sciences, the immediate experience. But the other subjects reach our individuality from the start in a different way from the objects. The wills of other subjects come to us as propositions with which we have to agree or disagree; as suggestions, which we are to imitate or to resist; and they carry in themselves that reference to an opposite which, as we saw, characterizes all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is destroyed if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenomenon, as an object in the world of objects. Whoever has clearly understood that politics and religion and knowledge and art and law come to me from the first quite differently from objects, can never doubt that their systematic connection must be most sharply separated from all the sciences which connect impressions of objects, and is falsified if the historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of the sciences of phenomena--for instance, as parts of sociology, the science of society as a psycho-physical object.

Just as natural science transcends the immediately experienced object and works out the whole system of our necessary submissions to the world of objects, so the historical sciences transcend the social will-acts which approach us in our immediate experience, and again seek to find what we are really submitting to if we accept the suggestions of our social surroundings. And yet this similar demand has most dissimilar consequences. We submit to an object and want to find out what we are really submitting to. That cannot mean anything else, as we have seen, than to seek the effects of the object and thus to look forward to what we have to expect from the object. On the other hand, if we want to find out what we are really submitting to if we agree with the decision of our neighbor, the only meaning of the question can be to ask what our neighbor really is deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and as his decision must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act of another subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to us without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those subjects of will which enter into our immediate experience to other subjects whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand to the present ones. And if we try to develop the system of these relations, we come to an endless chain of will-relations, in which one individual will always points back in its decisions to another individual will with which it agrees or disagrees, which it imitates or overcomes by a new att.i.tude of will; and the whole network of these will-relations is the political or religious or artistic or social history of mankind. This system of history as a system of teleologically connected will-att.i.tudes is elaborated from the will-propositions which reach us in immediate experience, with the same necessity with which the mechanical universe of natural science is worked out from the objects of our immediate experience.

The historical system of will-connections is similar to the system of object-connections, not only in its starting in the immediate experience, but further in its also seeking ident.i.ties. Without this feature history would not offer to our understanding real connections.

We must link the will-att.i.tudes of men by showing the ident.i.ty of the alternatives. Just as the physical thing is subst.i.tuted by a large number of atoms which remain identical in the causal changes, in the same way the personality is subst.i.tuted by an endless manifoldness of decisions and becomes linked with the historical community by the thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alternative which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there remains a most essential difference between the historical and the causal connection. In a world of things the mere identical continuity is sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. In a world of will the ident.i.ty of alternatives cannot determine beforehand the actual decision; that belongs to the free activity of the subject. If this factor of freedom were left out, man would be made an object and history a mere appendix of natural science. The connection of the historian can therefore never be a necessary one, however much we may observe empirical regularities. If there were no ident.i.ties, our reason could not find connection in history; but if the historical connections were necessary, like the causal ones, it would not be history. The historian is, therefore, unable and without the ambition to look into the future like the naturalist; his domain is the past.

Yet will-att.i.tudes and will-acts can also be brought into necessary connection; that is, we can conceive will-acts as teleologically identical with each other and exempt from the freedom of the individual.

That is clearly possible only if they are conceived as beyond the freedom of individual decision and related to the over-individual subject. The question is then no longer how this special man wills and decides, but how far a certain will-decision binds every possible individual who performs this act if he is to share our common world of will and meaning. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is what we call the logical connection. It shares with all other connections the dependence upon the category of ident.i.ty. The logical connection shows how far one act or combination of acts involves, and thus is partially identical with, a new combination. This logical connection has, in common with the causal connection, necessity; and in common with the historical connection, teleological character. Any individual will-act of historical life may be treated for certain purposes as such a starting-point of over-individual relations; it would then lead to that scientific treatment which gives us an interpretation, for instance, of law. Such interpretative sciences belong to the system of history in the widest sense of the word.

The chief interest, however, must belong to the logical connections of those will-acts which themselves have over-individual character. A merely individual proposition can lead to necessary logical connection, but cannot claim that scientific importance which belongs to the logical connection of those propositions which are necessary for the const.i.tution of every real experience: the science of chess cannot stand on the same level with the science of geometry, the science of local legal statutes not on the same level with the system of ethics. The logical connections of the over-individual att.i.tudes thus const.i.tute the fourth large division besides the physical, the mental, and the historical sciences. It must thus comprise the systems of all those propositions which are presuppositions of our common reality, independent of the free individual decision. Here belong the acts of approval--the ethical approval of changes and achievements, as well as the aesthetic approval of the given world; the acts of conviction--the religious convictions of a superstructure of the world as well as the metaphysical convictions of a substructure; and above all, the acts of affirmation and submission, the logical as well as the mathematical. But to be consistent we must really demand that merely the over-individual logical connections are treated in this division. If we deal, for instance, with the aesthetical or ethical acts as psychological experiences, or as historical propositions, they belong to the psychical or historical division. Only the philosophical system of ethics or aesthetics finds its place in this division. It is difficult to find a suitable name for this whole system of logical connections of over-individual att.i.tudes. Perhaps it would be most correct to call it the Sciences of Values, inasmuch as every one of these over-individual decisions const.i.tutes a value in our world which our individual will finds as an absolute datum like the objects of experience. Seen from another point of view, these values appear as norms which bind our practical will inasmuch as these absolute values demand of our will to realize them, and it may thus be permitted to designate this whole group of sciences as a Division of Normative Sciences.

Our logical explanation of the meaning of these four divisions naturally began with the interpretation of that science which usually takes precedence in popular thought--with the science of nature, that is, and pa.s.sed then to those groups whose methodological situation is seen rather vaguely by our positivistic age. But as soon as we have once defined and worked out the boundary lines of each of these four divisions, it would appear more logical to change their order and to begin with that division whose material is those over-individual will-acts on which all possible knowledge must depend, and then to turn to those individual will-acts which determine the formulation of our present-day knowledge, and then only to go to the objects of knowledge, the over-individual and the individual ones. In short, we must begin with the normative sciences, consider in the second place the historical sciences, in the third place the physical sciences, and in the fourth place the psychical sciences. There cannot be a scientific judgment which must not find its place somewhere in one of these four groups. And yet can we really say that these four great divisions complete the totality of scientific efforts? The plan of our Congress contains three important divisions besides these.

5. _The Three Divisions of Practical Sciences_

The three divisions which still lie before us represent Practical Knowledge. Have we a logical right to put them on an equal level with the four large divisions which we have considered so far? Might it not rather be said that all that is knowledge in those practical sciences must find its place somewhere in the theoretical field, and that everything outside of it is not knowledge, but art? It cannot be denied indeed that the logical position of the practical sciences presents serious problems. That the function of the engineer or of the physician, of the lawyer or of the minister, of the diplomat or of the teacher, contains elements of an art cannot be doubted. They all need not only knowledge, but a certain instinct and power and skill, and their schooling thus demands a training and discipline through imitation which cannot be subst.i.tuted by mere learning. Yet when it comes to the cla.s.sification of sciences, it seems very doubtful whether practical sciences have to be acknowledged as special divisions, inasmuch as the factor of art must have been eliminated at the moment they are presented as sciences. The auscultation of the physician certainly demands skill and training, yet this practical activity itself does not enter into the science of medicine as presented in medical writings. As soon as the physician begins to deal with it scientifically, he needs, as does any scholar, not the stethoscope, but the pen. He must formulate judgments; and as soon as he simply describes and a.n.a.lyzes and explains and interprets his stethoscopic experiences, his statements become a system of theoretical ideas.

We can say in general that the science of medicine or of engineering, of jurisprudence or of education, contains, as science, no element of art, but merely theoretical judgments which, as such, can find their place somewhere in the complete systems of the theoretical sciences. If the physician describes a disease, its symptoms, the means of examining them, the remedies, their therapeutical effects, and the prophylaxis, in short, everything which the physician needs for his art, he does not record anything which would not belong to an ideally complete description and explanation of the processes in the human body. In the same way it can be said that if the engineer characterizes the conditions under which an iron bridge will be safe, it is evident that he cannot introduce any facts which would not find their logical place in an ideally complete description of the properties of inorganic nature; and finally, the same is true for the statements of the politician, the jurist, the pedagogue, or the minister. Whatever is said about their art is a theoretical judgment which connects facts of the ideally complete system of theoretical science; in their case the facts of course belong in first line to the realm of the psychological, historical, and normative sciences. There never has been or can be practical advice in the form of words, which is not in principle a statement of facts which belong to the absolute totality of theoretical knowledge. Seen from this point of view, it is evident that all our knowledge is fundamentally theoretical, and that the conception of practical knowledge is logically unprecise.

But the opposite point of view might also be taken. It might be said that after all every kind of knowledge is practical, and our own deduction of the meaning of science might be said to suggest such interpretation. We acknowledged at the outset that the so-called theoretical knowledge is by no means a pa.s.sive mirror picture of an independent outside world; but that in every judgment real experience is remoulded and reshaped in the service of certain purposes of will. Here lies the true core of that growing popular philosophy of to-day which, under the name of pragmatism, or under other t.i.tles, mingles the purposive character of our knowledge and the evolutionary theories of modern biology in the vague notion that men created knowledge because the biological struggle for existence led to such views of the world; and that we call true that correlation of our experiences which has approved itself through its harmony with the phylogenetic development.

Certainly we must reject such circle philosophies. We must see clearly that the whole conception of a biological development and of a struggle of organisms is itself only a part of our construction of causal knowledge. We must have knowledge to conceive ourselves as products of a phylogenetic history, and thus cannot deduce from it the fact, and, still less, the justification of knowledge. Yet one element of this theory remains valuable: knowledge is indeed a purposive activity, a reconstruction of the world in the service of ideals of the will. We have thus from one side the suggestion that all knowledge is merely theoretical, from the other side the claim that all knowledge is practical activity. It seems as if both sides might agree that it is superfluous and unjustified to make a demarcation line through the field of knowledge and to separate two sorts of knowledge, theoretical and practical. For both theories demand that all knowledge be of one kind, and they disagree only as to whether we ought to call it all theoretical or all practical.

Yet the true situation is not characterized by such an ant.i.thesis. If we say that all knowledge is ultimately practical, we are speaking from an epistemological point of view, inasmuch as we take it then as a reconstruction of the world through the purposive activity of the over-individual subject. On the other hand it is an empirical point of view from which ultimately all knowledge, that of the physician and engineer and lawyer, as well as that of the astronomer, appears theoretical. But this ant.i.thesis can, therefore, not decide the further empirical question, whether or not in the midst of theoretical knowledge two kinds of sciences may be discriminated, of which the one refers to empirical practical purposes and the other not. Such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the epistemological problem of pragmatism; it would be strictly non-philosophical, just as the separation of chemistry into organic and inorganic chemistry. This empirical question is indeed to be answered in the affirmative. If we ask what causes bring about a certain effect, for the sake of a practical purpose of ours,--for instance, the curing a patient of disease,--no one can state facts which are not in principle to be included in the complete system of physical causes and effects and thus in the system of physical sciences. And yet it may well be that the physical sciences, as such, have not the slightest reason to mention the effect of that special drug on that special pathological alteration of the tissues of the organism. The descriptions and explanations of science are not a mere heaping up of material, but a steady selection in the interest of the special aim of the science. No physical science describes every special pebble on the beach; no historical science deals with the chance happenings in the daily life of any member of the crowd. And we already well know the point of view from which the selection is to be performed. We want to know in the physical and psychical sciences whatever is involved in the object of our experience, and in the historical and normative sciences whatever is involved in the demands which reach our will. But whether we have to do with the objects or with the demands, in both cases we have systems before us which are determined only by the objects or demands themselves, without any relation to our individual will and our own practical activity. Theoretically, of course, our will, our activity, our organism, our personality is included in the complete system; and if we knew absolutely everything of the empirical effects of the object or of the consequences of these demands, we should find among them their relation to our individual interests; but that relation would be but one chance case among innumerable others, and the sciences would not have the slightest interest in giving any attention to that particular case.

Thus if our knowledge of chemical substances were complete, we should certainly have to know theoretically that a few grains of antipyrine introduced into the organism have an influence on those brain centres which regulate the temperature of the human body. Yet if the chemist does not share the interest of the physician who wants to fight a fever, he would have hardly any reason for examining this particular relation, as it hardly throws light on the chemical const.i.tution as such. In this way we might say in general that the relation of the world to us as acting individuals is in principle contained in the total system of the relations of our world of experience, but has a strictly accidental place there and can never be in itself a centre around which the scientific data are cl.u.s.tered, and science will hardly have an interest in giving any attention to its details.

This relation of the world, the physical, the psychical, the historical, and the normative world, to our individual, practical purposes can, however, indeed become the centre of scientific interest, and it is evident that the whole inquiry receives thereupon a perfectly new direction which demands not only a completely new grouping of facts and relations, but also a very different shading in elaboration. As long as the purpose was to understand the world without relation to our individual aims, science had to gather endless details which are for us now quite indifferent, as they do not touch our aims; and in other respects science was satisfied with broad generalizations and abstractions where we have now to examine the most minute details. In short, the shifting of the centre of gravity creates perfectly new sciences which must be distinguished; and if we call them again theoretical and practical sciences, it is clear that this difference has then no longer anything to do with the philosophical problems from which we started.

The term practical may be preferable to the other term which is sometimes used: Applied Science. If we construct the ant.i.thesis of theoretical and applied science, the underlying idea is clearly that we have to do on the practical side with a discipline which teaches how to apply a science which logically exists as such beforehand. Engineering, for instance, is an applied science because it applies the science of physics; but this is not really our deepest meaning here. Our practical sciences are not meant as mere applications of theoretical sciences.

They are logically somewhat degraded if they are treated in such a way.

Their real logical meaning comes out only if they are acknowledged as self-dependent sciences whose material is differentiated from that of the theoretical sciences by the different point of view and purpose.

They are methodologically perfectly independent, and the fact that a large part or theoretically even everything of their teaching overlaps the teaching of certain theoretical sciences ought not to have any influence on their logical standing. The practical sciences could be conceived as completely self-dependent, without the existence of any so-called theoretical sciences; that is, the relations of the world of experience to our individual aims might be brought into complete systems without working out in principle the system of independent experience.

We might have a science of engineering without acknowledging an independent science of theoretical physics besides it. To be sure, such a science of engineering would finally develop itself into a system which would contain very much that might just as well be called theoretical physics; yet all would be held together by the point of view of the engineer, and that part of theoretical physics which the engineer applies might just as well be considered as depracticalized engineering.

If this logical self-dependence of the practical science holds true even for such technological disciplines, it is still more evident that it would cripple the meaning and independent character of jurisprudence and social science, or of pedagogy and theology, to treat them simply as applied sciences, that is, as applications of theoretical science.

This point of view determines, also, of course, the cla.s.sification of the Practical Sciences. If they were really merely applied sciences it would be most natural to group them according to the cla.s.sification of the theoretical sciences which are to be applied. We should then have applied physical sciences, applied psychological sciences, applied historical sciences, and applied normative sciences. Yet even from the standpoint of practice, we should come at once into difficulties, and indeed much of the superficiality of practical sciences to-day results from the hasty tendency to consider them as applied sciences only, and thus to be determined by the points of view of the theoretical discipline which is to be applied. Then, for instance, pedagogy becomes simply applied psychology, and the psychological point of view is subst.i.tuted for the educational one. Pedagogy then becomes simply a selection of those chapters in psychology which deal with the mental functions of the child. Yet as soon as we really take the teachers'

point of view, we understand at once that it is utterly artificial to subst.i.tute the categories of the psychologist for those of immediate practical will-relations and to consider the child in the cla.s.s-room as a causal system of psycho-physical elements instead of a personality which is teleologically to be interpreted, and whose aims are not to be connected with causal effects but with over-individual att.i.tudes. In this way the historical relation and the normative relation have to play at least as important a role in the pedagogical system as the psycho-physical relation, and we might quite as well call education applied history and applied ethics.

Almost every practical science can be shown in this way to apply a number of theoretical sciences; it synthesizes them to a new unity. But better, we ought to say, that it is a unity in itself from the start, and that it only overlaps with a number of theoretical sciences. If we want to cla.s.sify the practical sciences, we have thus only the one logical principle at our disposal: we must cla.s.sify them in accordance with the group of human individual aims which control those different disciplines. If all practical sciences deal with the relation of the world of experience to our individual practical ends, the cla.s.ses of those ends are the cla.s.ses of our practical sciences, whatever combinations of applied theoretical sciences may enter into the group.

Of course a special cla.s.sification of these aims must remain somewhat arbitrary; yet it may seem most natural to separate three large divisions. We called them the Utilitarian Sciences, the Sciences of Social Regulation, and the Sciences of Social Culture. Utilitarian we may call those sciences in which our practical aim refers to the world of things; it may be the technical mastery of nature or the treatment of the body, or the production, distribution, and consumption of the means of support. The second division contains everything in which our aim does not refer to the thing, but to the other subjects; here naturally belong the sciences which deal with the political, legal, and social purposes. And finally the sciences of culture refer to those aims in which not the individual relations to things or to other subjects are in the foreground, but the purposes of the teleological development of the subject himself; education, art, and religion here find their place. It is, of course, evident that the material of these sciences frequently allows the emphasis of different aspects. For instance, education, which aims primarily at self-development, might quite well be considered also from the point of view of social regulation; and still more naturally could the utilitarian sciences of the economic distribution of the means of support be considered from this point of view. Yet a cla.s.sification of sciences nowhere suggests by its boundary lines that there are no relations and connections between the different parts; on the contrary, it is just the manifoldness of these given connections which makes it so desirable to become conscious of the principles involved, and thus to emphasize logical demarcation lines, which of course must be obliterated as soon as any material is to be treated from every possible point of view. It may thus well be that, for instance, a certain industrial problem could be treated in the Normative Sciences from the point of view of ethics; in the Historical Sciences, from the point of view of the history of economic inst.i.tutions; in the Physical Sciences, from the point of view of physics or chemistry; in the Mental Sciences, from the point of view of sociology; in the Utilitarian Sciences, from the point of view of medicine or of engineering, or of commerce and transportation; and finally in the Regulative Sciences, from the point of view of political administration, or in the Social Sciences, from the standpoint of the urban community, and so on. The more complex the relations are, the more necessary is it to make clean distinctions between the different logical purposes with which the scientific inquiries start. Practical life may demand a combination of historical, sociological, psychological, economical, social, and ethical considerations; but not one of these sciences can contribute its best if the consciousness of these differences is lost and the deliberate combination is replaced by a vague mixture of the problems.

6. _The Subdivisions_

We have now before us the ground-plan of the scheme, the four theoretical divisions, and the three practical divisions; every additional comment on the cla.s.sification must be of secondary importance, as it has to refer to the smaller subdivisions, which cannot change the principles of the plan, and which have not seldom, indeed, been a result of practical considerations. If, for instance, our Division of Cultural Sciences shows in the final plan merely the departments of Education and of Religion, while the originally planned Department of Art is left out, there was no logical reason for it, but merely the practical ground that it seemed difficult to bring such a practical art section to a desirable scientific level; we confine art, therefore, to the normative aesthetic and historical points of view. Or, to choose another ill.u.s.tration, if it happened that the normative sciences were finally organized without a section for the philosophy of law, this resulted from the fact that the American jurists, in contrast with their Continental European colleagues, showed a general lack of appreciation for such a section. A few sections had to be left out even for the chance reason that the leading speakers were obliged to withdraw at a time when it was too late to ask subst.i.tutes to work up addresses.

And almost everywhere there had to be something arbitrary in the limitation of the special sections. Though Otology and Laryngology were brought together into one section, they might just as well have been placed in two; and Rhinology, which was left out, might have been added as a third in that company. As to this subtler ramification, the plan has been changed several times during the period of the practical preparation of the plan, and much is the result of adjustment to questions of personalities. No one claims, thus, any special logical value for the final formulation of the sectional details, for which our chief aim was not to go beyond eight times sixteen, that is 128, sections, inasmuch as it was planned to have the meetings at eight different time-periods in sixteen different halls. If we had fulfilled all the wishes which were expressed by specialists, the number would have been quickly doubled.

Yet a few remarks may be devoted to the branching off within the seven divisions, as a short discussion of some of these details may throw additional light on the general principles of the whole plan. If we thus begin with the Normative Sciences, we stand at once before one feature of the plan which has been in an especially high degree a matter of both approval and criticism: the fact that Mathematics is grouped with Philosophy. The Division was to contain, as we have seen, the systems of logically connected will-acts of the over-individual subject. That Ethics or Logic or aesthetics or Philosophy of Religion deals with such over-individual att.i.tudes cannot be doubted; but have we a right to coordinate the mathematical sciences with these philosophical sciences?

Has Mathematics not a more natural place among the physical sciences coordinated with and introductory to Mechanics, Physics, and Astronomy?

The mathematicians themselves would often be inclined to accept without hesitation this neighborhood of the physical sciences. They would say that the mathematical objects are independent realities whose properties we study like those of nature, whose relations we "observe," whose existence we "discover," and in which we are interested because they belong to the real world. All this is true, and yet the objects of the mathematician are objects made by the logical will only, and thus different from all phenomena into which sensation enters. The mathematician, of course, does not reflect on the purely logical origin of the objects which he studies, but the system of knowledge must give to the study of the mathematical objects its place in the group where the functions and products of the over-individual att.i.tudes are cla.s.sified. The mathematical object is a free creation, and a creation not only as to the combination of elements--that would be the case with many laboratory substances of the chemist too--but a creation as to the elements themselves, and the value of that creation, its "mathematical interest," is to be judged by ideals of thought; that is, by logical purposes. No doubt this logical purpose is its application in the world of objects and the mathematical concepts must thus fit the objective world so absolutely that mathematics can be conceived as a description of the world after abstracting not only from the will-relations, as physics does, but also from the content. Mathematics would, then, be the phenomenalistic science of the form and order of the world. In this way, mathematics has indeed a claim to places in both divisions: among the physical sciences if we emphasize its applicability to the world, and among the teleological sciences if we emphasize the free creation of the objects by the logical will. But if we really go back to epistemological principles, our system has to prefer the latter emphasis; that is, we must coordinate mathematics with logic and not with physics.

As to the subdivision of philosophy, it is most essential for us to point to the negative fact that of course psychology cannot have a place in the philosophical department, as part of the Normative Division.

There is perhaps no science whose position in the system of knowledge offers so many methodological difficulties as psychology. Historical tradition of course links it with philosophy; throughout a great part of its present endeavors it is, on the other hand, linked with physiology.

Thus we find it sometimes coordinated with logic and ethics, and sometimes, especially in the cla.s.sical positivistic systems, coordinated with the sciences of the organic functions. We have seen why a really logical treatment has to disregard those historical and practical relations and has to separate the psychological sciences from the philosophical and the biological sciences. Yet even this does not complete the list of problems which must be settled, inasmuch as modern thinkers have frequently insisted that psychology itself allows a twofold aspect. We can have a psychology which describes and explains the mental life by a.n.a.lyzing it into its elements and by connecting these elements through causality. But there may be another psychology which treats inner life in that immediate unity in which we experience it and seeks to interpret it as the free function of personality. This latter kind of psychology has been called voluntaristic psychology as against the phenomenalistic psychology which seeks description and explanation. Such voluntaristic psychology would clearly belong again to a different division. It would be a theory of individual life as a function of will, and would thus be introductory to the historical sciences and to the normative sciences too. Yet we left out this teleological psychology from our programme, as such a science is as yet a programme only. Wherever an effort is made to realize it, it becomes an odd mixture of an inconsistent phenomenalistic psychology on the one side, and philosophy of history, logic, ethics, and aesthetics on the other side. The only science which really has a right to call itself psychology is the one which seeks to describe and to explain inner life and treats it therefore as a system of psychical objects, that is, as contents of consciousness, that is, as phenomena. Psychology belongs, then, in the general division of psychical sciences as over against physical sciences, and both deal with objects as over against philosophy and history, which deal with subjects of will.

The subdivision of the Historical Sciences offers no methodological difficulty as soon as those epistemological arguments are acknowledged by which we sharply distinguish history from the Physical and Mental Sciences. If history is a system of will-relations which is in teleological connection with the will-demands that surround us, then political history loses its predominant role, and the history of law and of literature, of language and of economy, of art and religion, become coordinated with political development, while the mere anthropological aspect of man is relegated to the physical sciences. The more complete original scheme was here again finally condensed for practical reasons; for instance, the planned departments on the History of Education, on the History of Science, and on the History of Philosophy were sacrificed, and the department of Economic History was joined to that of Political History. In the same way we felt obliged to omit in the end many important sections in the departments; we had, for instance, in the History of Language at first a section on Slavic Languages; yet the number of scholars interested was too small to justify its existence beside a section on Slavic Literature. Also the History of Music was omitted from the History of Art; and the History of Law was planned at first with a fuller ramification.

The division of Physical Sciences naturally suggested that kind of subdivision which the positivistic cla.s.sification presents as a complete system of sciences. Considering physics and chemistry as the two fundamental sciences of general laws, we turn first to astronomy, then from the science of the whole universe to the one planet, to the sciences of the earth; thence to the living organisms on the earth; and from biology to the still narrower circle of anthropology. The special cla.s.sification of physics offers a certain difficulty. To divide it in text-book fashion into sound, light, electricity, etc., seems hardly in harmony with the effort to seek logical principles in the other parts of the cla.s.sification. The three groups which we finally formed, Physics of Matter, Physics of Ether, and Physics of Electron, may appear somewhat too much influenced by the latest theories of to-day, yet it seemed preferable to other principles. In the biological department, criticism seems justified in view of the fact that we constructed a special section, Human Anatomy. A strictly logical scheme might have acknowledged that human anatomy is to-day not a separate science, and that it has resolved itself into comparative anatomy. Sections of Invertebrate and Vertebrate Anatomy might have been more satisfactory.

The final arrangement was a concession to the practical interests of the physicians, who have naturally to emphasize the anatomy of the human organism.

In the division of Mental Sciences, we have the Department of Sociology.

We were, of course, aware that the sociological interest includes not only the psychological, but also the physiological life of society, and that it thus has relations to the physical sciences too. Yet these relations are logically not more fundamental than those of the individual mental life to the functions of the individual organism. Much of the physiological side was further to be handed over to the Department of Anthropology, and thus we felt justified in grouping sociology with psychology under the Mental Sciences, as the psychology of the social organism. Here, too, a larger number of sections was intended and only the two most essential ones, Social Structure and Social Psychology, were finally admitted.

The ramifications of the practical sciences had to follow the general principle that their character is determined by purpose and not by material. The difficulty was here merely in the extreme specialization of the practical disciplines, which suggests on the whole the forming of very small units, while our plan was to provide for fifty practical sections only. It seemed, therefore, incongruous to have the whole of Internal Medicine or the whole of Private Law condensed into one section. Yet as the purpose of the scheme was a theoretical and not a practical one, even where the theory of practical sciences was in question, we felt justified in constructing coordinated sections, even where the practical importance was very unequal. On the other hand, some glaring defects just here are due merely to chance circ.u.mstances. That there were, for instance, no sections on Criminal Law or Ecclesiastical Law in the Department of Jurisprudence, nor on Legal Procedure, resulted from the unfortunate accident that in these cases the speakers who were to come from Europe were withheld by illness or public duties. The absence of the Department of Art in the Division of Social Culture, and thus of the Sections on the theory and practice of the different arts, has been explained before. It is evident that also in the Economical Department the practical development has interfered with the original symmetrical arrangement of the sections. This is not true of the Religious Department, whose six sections express the tendencies of the original plan. The frequently expressed criticism that the different religions and their denominations ought to have found place there shows a misconception of our purpose; a Parliament of Religion did not belong to this plan.

III

THE RESULTS OF THE CONGRESS

The programme of the Congress, as outlined in the previous pages, was in this case somewhat more than a mere programme. It not only invited to do a piece of work, but it sought to contribute to the work itself. Yet the chief work had to be done by others, and their part needed careful preparation. Yet very little of the preparation showed itself to the eyes of the larger public, and few were fully aware what a complex organization was growing up and how many persons of mark were cooperating.

It was essential to find for every address the best man. Specialists only could suggest to the committees where to find him. It has been told before how our invitations were brought to the foreigners first till the desired number of foreign partic.i.p.ants was secured, and how the Americans followed. As could not be otherwise expected, interferences of all kinds disturbed the ideal configuration of the first list of acceptances; subst.i.tutes had sometimes to be relied on; and yet, when on the nineteenth of September President Francis welcomed the Congress of Arts and Science in the gigantic Festival Hall of the St. Louis Exposition, the Committee knew that almost four hundred speakers had completed their ma.n.u.scripts, and that it was a galaxy which far surpa.s.sed in importance that of any previous international congress. And the list of those who stood for the success of the work was not confined to the official speakers. Each Department and each Section had its own honorary President, who was also chosen by the consent of leading specialists and whose introductory remarks were to give additional importance to the gathering. At their side stood the hundred and thirty Secretaries, carefully chosen from among the productive scholars of the younger generation. And a large number of informal, yet officially invited contributors, had announced valuable discussions and addresses for almost every Section. Invitations to membership finally had been sent to the universities and scholarly societies of all countries.

That the turmoil of a world's fair is out of harmony with the scholar's longing for repose and quietude is a natural presupposition, which has not been disproved by the experience of St. Louis. When Professor Newcomb, our President, spoke to the opening a.s.sembly on the dignity of scholarship, the scholar's peaceful address was accentuated by the thunder of the cannons with which Boer and British forces were playing at war near by. The roaring of the Pike overpowered many a quiet session, and the patient speaker had not seldom to fight heroically with a bra.s.s band on the next lawn. The trains were delayed, trunks were mixed up, and the sultry St. Louis weather stirred much secret longing for the seash.o.r.e and the mountains, which most had to leave too early for that pilgrimage to the Mississippi Valley. Yet all this could have been easily foreseen, and every one knew that all this would soon be forgotten. These slight discomforts were many times made up for by the overwhelming beauty of that ivory city in which the civilization of the world was focused by the united energy of the nations, and it seemed well worth while to cross the ocean for the delight of that enchantment which came with every evening's myriad illumination. And every day brought interesting festivities. No one will forget the receptions of the foreign commissioners, or the charming hospitality of the leading citizens of St. Louis, or the enthusiastic banquet which brought one thousand speakers and presidents and official members of the Congress together as guests of the master mind of the Exposition, President Francis.

While the discomfort of external shortcomings was thus easily balanced, it is more doubtful whether the internal shortcomings of the work can be considered as fully compensated for. It would be impossible to overlook these defects in the realization of our plans, even if it may be acknowledged that they were unavoidable under the given conditions. The princ.i.p.al difficulty has been that many speakers have not really treated the topic for the discussion of which they were invited. This deviation from the plan took various forms. There was in some cases a fundamental att.i.tude taken which did not harmonize with those logical principles which had led to the cla.s.sification; for instance, we had sharply separated, for reasons fully stated above, the Division of History from the Division of Mental Sciences, including sociology; yet some papers for the Division of History clearly indicated sympathy with the traditional positivistic view, according to which history becomes simply a part of sociology. And similar variations of the general plan occur in almost every division. But there cannot be any objection to this secondary variety as long as the whole framework gives the primary uniformity. Certainly no one of the contributors is to be blamed for it; no one was pledged to the philosophy of the general plan, and probably few would have agreed if any one had had the idea of demanding from every contributor an identical background of general convictions. Such monotony would have been even harmful, as the work would have become inexpressive of the richness of tendencies in the scholarly life of our time. This was not an occasion where educated clerks were to work up in a secondhand way a report whose general trend was determined beforehand; the work demanded original thinkers, with whom every word grows out of a rich individual view of the totality. If every paper had been meant merely as a detailed amplification of the logical principles on which the whole plan was based, it would have been wiser to set young Doctor candidates to work, who might have elaborated the hint of the general scheme. To invite the leaders of knowledge meant to give them complete freedom and to confine the demands of the plan to a most general direction.