Outlines of psychology / by Harald Höffding ; translated by Mary E. Lowndes.

  • Harald Høffding
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of psychology / by Harald Höffding ; translated by Mary E. Lowndes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    with metaphysical speculation, we exclude from psychology material- ism as well as spiritualism. We have referred especially to the spiritualistic psychology, because it is of greatest interest, and has the most acute supporters. But it is obvious that materialism makes the same encroachments as spiritualism. Materialism also infers the existence of a substance, which is supposed to lie hidden behind the phenomena of consciousness, but finds this substance in matter, not in a spiritual principle. Spiritualism takes its stand on the difference between mental life and material phenomena, and thence infers a special mental substance, which] in itself has nothing to do with matter. Materialism, on the other hand, argues from the connection of mental life with material, that the mind must be a material being. It is enough for us to know, says Holbach {Systeme de la Nature,!, p. 118), that the mind is moved and modified by material causes acting upon it. We are justified in concluding from this that it must be material. Broussais defined the mind as un cerveau agissant, et rien de plus (a brain in action, and nothing more). Both in what it maintains and in what it denies, materialism, equally with spiritualism, goes beyond the standpoint of experiential psychology. That in the course of the investigations proper to psychology a point may be reached whence judgment can be pronounced on these hypotheses, is quite another matter. Psychology in and for itself, then, is not a part of philosophy, if by philosophy is meant metaphysics, a search after a general view of the universe ; like the experiential science of external nature, it is a preparation for philosophy, a part of the foundation on which philosophy, in the sense of metaphysical speculation, should build, one of the witnesses it should call in. Nor is psychology philosophy, if by philosophy we mean a critical science of the nature and limits of knowledge : while psychology has purely the character of natural history, observes mental phenomena in their development and in their mutual relations, the theory of knowledge (sometimes called logic) tries by critical analysis to bring out the general principles of cognition. The theory of knowledge also, therefore, presupposes psychology. On the other hand, philosophical thought also becomes one of the objects of psychology. As a form of mental activity, philo- sophy lies within the sphere of psychological observation. And in many ways philosophical research has played into the hands of psychological research ; consciously or unconsciously, philosophical