A history of psychology / by Otto Klemm ; authorized translation with annotations by Emil Carl Wilm ; and Rudolf Pintner.

  • Otto Klemm
Date:
[1914], [©1914]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of psychology / by Otto Klemm ; authorized translation with annotations by Emil Carl Wilm ; and Rudolf Pintner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    properly belong to metaphysics. In this respect psychology does not differ from the rest of the factual sciences. And if metaphysical problems arise more inevitably in psychology than in some of the other sciences, it is doubtless due to the close affinity between the subjective mode of viewing the contents of consciousness and the reflection upon the move- ments of the inner life which so naturally carries one forward to a metaphysical view of existence. The various tendencies within metaphysical psychology exhibit a close resemblance in the manner in which psychical phenomena are deduced from the concept of the soul, the difference appearing in the definition of the soul itself. The empirical tendencies start with the same method, that of introspection; they differ from each other mainly in the principles employed in the interpretation of the data which introspection reveals.^ The oldest forms of metaphysical psychology were domi- nated by categories developed within the domain of natural science, from which they were transferred to the realm of the inner life. The soul, accordingly, appears as an entity, a substance, corresponding to substances and things in the external world. There occurs thus a complete reversal of the more familiar anthropomorphic modes of thinking: psychical facts, in order that they may be thought real at all, are brought under concepts originally derived from the domain of external nature. The contrasts between spirit and matter familiar in meta- physical systems thus reappear in psychology in the specula- tions concerning the nature of the soul. The most natural con- ception here is dualism, which opposes material substance and soul substance. Attempts to transcend this antithesis lead ^ These and a number of subsequent distinctions are drawn from Wundt's Grundriss der Psychologies 1909. [English tr. by C. H. Judd, Outlines of Psychology, 2d ed., Leipzigj 1902. Trs.]