Part 20 (1/2)

As soon as the disjunction is decided by a yes, the desire which lies at its basis, and which in the condition of consciousness is arrested, pa.s.ses over into activity. All consciousness is based on interest, and in its origin is ”arrested impulse” (Triebhemmung). ”The direction of impulse to an intuition to be expected only in the future is called consciousness.” The rank of a being depends on its capacity for reflection: the greater the extent of its attention and the smaller the stimuli which suffice to rouse this to action, the higher it stands. Impulse-this is the fundamental idea of Fortlage's psychology, like will with Fichte, and representation with Herbart-consists of an element of representation and an element of feeling.

Pleasure + effort-image = impulse.

[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's other works we may mention his valuable History of Poetry, 1839; the Genetic History of Philosophy since Kant, 1852; and the attractive Six Philosophical Lectures, 1869, 2d ed., 1872.]

In his metaphysical convictions, to which he gave expression in his Exposition and Criticism of the Arguments for the Existence of G.o.d, 1840, among other works, Fortlage belongs to the philosophers of ident.i.ty. Originally sailing in Hegel's wake, he soon recognizes that the roots of the theory of ident.i.ty go back to the Kantio-Fichtean philosophy, with which the system of absolute truth, as he holds, has come into being. He thus becomes an adherent of the Science of Knowledge, whose deductive results he finds inductively confirmed by psychological experience. Psychology is the empirical test for the metaphysical calculus of the Science of Knowledge. In regard to the absolute Fortlage is in agreement with Krause, the younger Fichte, Ulrici, etc., and calls his standpoint transcendent pantheism. According to this all that is good, exalted, and valuable in the world is divine in its nature; the human reason is of the same essence as the divine reason (there can be nothing higher than reason); the G.o.dhead is the absolute ego of Fichte, which employs the empirical egos as organs, which thinks and wills in individuals, in so far as they think the truth and will the good, but at the same time as universal subject goes beyond them. If, after the example of Hegel, we give up transcendent pantheism in favor of immanence, two unphilosophical modes of representing the absolute at once result-on the one hand, materialism; on the other, popular, unphilosophical theism. If the Fichtean Science of Knowledge could be separated from its difficult method, which it is impossible ever to make comprehensible to the unphilosophical mind, it would be called to take the place of religion.[1]

[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's posthumous ma.n.u.scripts was one on the Philosophy of Religion, on which Eucken published an essay in the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie, vol. lx.x.xii. 1883, p. 180 seq. after Lipsius had given a single chapter from it-”The Ideal of Morality according to Christianity”-in his Jahrbucher fur protestantische Theologie (vol. ix. pp. 1-45). The journals Im Neuen Reich, 1881, No. 24, and Die Gegenwart, 1882, No. 34, contained warmly written notices of Fortlage by J. Volkelt. Leopold Schmid (in Giessen, died 1869) gives a favorable and skillfully composed outline of Fortlage's system in his Grundzuge der Einleitung in die Philosophie mit einer Beleuchtung der von K. Ph. Fischer, Sengler, und Fortlage ermoglichten Philosophie der That, 1860, pp. 226-357. Cf. also Moritz Brasch, K. Fortlage, Ein philosophisches Charakterbild, in Unsere Zeit, 1883, Heft II, pp. 730-756, incorporated in the same author's Philosophie der Gegenwart, 1888.]

2. Realism: Herbart.

Johann Friedrich Herbart was scientifically the most important among the philosophers of the opposition. Herbart was born at Oldenburg in 1776, the son of a councilor of justice, and had already become acquainted with the systems of Wolff and Kant before he entered the University of Jena in 1794. In 1796 he handed in to his instructor Fichte a critique of two of Sch.e.l.ling's treatises, in which the youthful thinker already broke away from idealism. While a private tutor in Switzerland he made the acquaintance of Pestalozzi. In 1802 he habilitated in Gottingen, where, in 1805, he was promoted to a professors.h.i.+p extraordinary; while in 1809 he received the professors.h.i.+p in Konigsberg once held by Kant, and later by W. Tr. Krug (died 1842). He died in 1841 at Gottingen, whither he had been recalled in 1833. His Collected Works were published in twelve volumes, 1850-52 (reprinted 1883 seq.), by his pupil Hartenstein, who has also given an excellent exposition of his master's system in his Probleme und Grundlehren der allgemeinen Metaphysik, 1836, and his Grundbegriffe der ethischen Wissenschaften, 1844; a new edition, in chronological order, and under the editors.h.i.+p of K. Kehrbach, began to appear in 1882, or rather 1887, and has now advanced to the fourth volume, 1891. Herbart's chief works were written during his Konigsberg residence: the Text-book of Introduction to Philosophy, 1813, 4th ed., 1837 (very valuable as an introduction to Herbartian modes of thought); General Metaphysics, 1829 (preceded in 1806 and 1808 by The Princ.i.p.al Points in Metaphysics, with a supplement, The Princ.i.p.al Points in Logic); Text-book of Psychology,[1] 1816, 2d ed., 1834; On the Possibility and Necessity of applying Mathematics to Psychology, 1822; Psychology as a Science, 1824-25. The two works on ethics, which were widely separated in time, were, on the other hand, written in Gottingen: General Practical Philosophy, 1808; a.n.a.lytical Examination of Natural Right and of Morals, 1836. To these may be added a Discourse on Evil, 1817; Letters on the Doctrine of the Freedom of the Human Will, 1836; and the Brief Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 1831, 2d ed., 1841. His works on education and instruction, whose influence and value perhaps exceed those of his philosophical achievements (collected editions of the pedagogical works have been prepared by O. Willmann, 1873-75, 2d ed., 1880; and by Bartholomaei), extended through his whole life. Besides pedagogics, psychology was the chief sphere of his services.

[Footnote 1: English translation by M.K. Smith, 1891.]

In ant.i.thesis to the philosophy of intuition with its imagined superiority to the standpoint of reflection, Herbart makes philosophy begin with attention to concepts, defining it as the elaboration of concepts. Philosophy, therefore, is not distinguished from other sciences by its object, but by its method, which again must adapt itself to the peculiarity of the object, to the starting point of the investigation in question-there is no universal philosophical method. There are as many divisions of philosophy as there are modes of elaborating concepts. The first requisite is the discrimination of concepts, both the discrimination of concepts from others and of the marks within each concept. This work of making concepts clear and distinct is the business of logic. With this discipline, in which Herbart essentially follows Kant, are a.s.sociated two other forms of the elaboration of concepts, that of physical and that of aesthetic concepts. Both of these cla.s.ses require more than a merely logical elucidation. The physical concepts, through which we apprehend the world and ourselves, contain contradictions and must be freed from them; their correction is the business of meta-physics. Metaphysics is the science of the comprehensibility of experience. The aesthetic (including the ethical) concepts are distinguished from the nature-concepts by a peculiar increment which they occasion in our representation, and which consists in a judgment of approval or disapproval. To clear up these concepts and to free them from false allied ideas is the task of aesthetics in its widest sense. This includes all concepts which are accompanied by a judgment of praise or blame; the most important among them are the ethical concepts. Thus, aside from logic, we reach two princ.i.p.al divisions of philosophy, which are elsewhere contrasted as theoretical and practical, but here in Herbart as metaphysics and aesthetics. Herbart maintains that these are entirely independent of each other, so that aesthetics, since it presupposes nothing of metaphysics, may be discussed before metaphysics, while the philosophy of nature and psychology depend throughout on ontological principles. Together with natural theology the two latter sciences const.i.tute ”applied” metaphysics. This in turn presupposes ”general” metaphysics, which subdivides into four parts: Methodology, Ontology, Synechology, i.e., the theory of the continuous ([Greek: suneches]), which treats of the continua, s.p.a.ce, time, and motion, and Eidolology, i.e., the theory of images or representations. The last forms the transition to psychology, while synechology forms the preparation for the philosophy of nature, whose most general problems it solves. Our exposition will not need to observe these divisions closely.

Metaphysics starts with the given, but cannot rest content with it, for it contains contradictions. In resolving these we rise above the given. What is given? Kant has not answered this question with entire correctness. We may, indeed, term the totality of the given ”phenomena,” but this presupposes something which appears. If nothing existed there would also nothing appear. As smoke points to fire, so appearance to being. So much seeming, so much indication of being. Things in themselves may be known mediately, though not immediately, by following out the indications of being contained by the given appearance. Further, not merely the unformed matter of cognition is given to us, but it is rather true that everything comes under this concept which experience so presses on us that we cannot resist it; hence not merely single sensations, but entire sensation-groups, not merely the matter, but also the forms of experience. If the latter were really subjective products, as Kant holds, it would necessarily be possible for us at will to think each perceptive-content either under the category of substance, or property, or cause-possible for us, if we chose, to see a round table quadrilateral. In reality we are bound in the application of these forms; they are given for each object in a definite way. The given forms-Herbart calls them experience-concepts-contain contradictions. How can these contradictions be removed? We may neither simply reject the concepts which are burdened with contradictions, for they are given, nor leave them as they are, for the logical principium contradictionis requires that the contradiction as such be rooted out. The experience-concepts are valid (they find application in experience), but they are not thinkable. Therefore we must so transform and supplement them that they shall become free from contradictions and thinkable. The method which Herbart employs to remove the contradictions is as follows: The contradiction always consists in the fact that an a should be the same as a b, but is not so. The desiderated likeness of the two is impossible so long as we think a as one thing. That which is unsuccessful in this case will succeed, perhaps, if in thought we break up the a into several things-[Greek: a b g]. Then we shall be able to explain through the ”together” (Zusammen) of this plurality what we were unable to explain from the undecomposed a, or from the single const.i.tuents of it. The ”together” is a ”relation” established by thought among the elements of the real. For this reason Herbart terms his method of finding out necessary supplements to the given ”the method of relations.” Another name for the same thing is ”the method of contingent aspects.” Mechanics operates with contingent aspects when, for the sake of explanation, it resolves a given motion into several components. Such fictions and subst.i.tutions-auxiliary concepts, which are not real, but which serve only as paths for thought-may be successfully employed by metaphysics also. The abstract expression of this method runs: The contradiction is to be removed by thinking one of its members as manifold rather than as one. In order to observe the workings of this Herbartian machine we shall go over the four princ.i.p.al contradictions by which his acuteness is put to the test-the problems of inherence, of change, of the continuous, of the ego.

We call the given sensation-complexes ”things,” and ascribe ”properties” to them. How can one and the same thing have different properties-how can the one be at the same time many? To say that the thing ”possesses” the properties does not help the matter. The possession of the different properties is itself just as manifold and various as the properties which are possessed. Hence the concept of the thing and its properties must be so transformed that the plurality which seems to be in the thing shall be transferred without it. Instead of one thing let us a.s.sume several, each with a single definite property, from whose ”together” the appearance of many qualities in one thing now arises. The appearance of manifold properties in the one thing has its ground in the ”together” of many things, each of which has one simple quality. Again, it is just as impossible for a thing to have different qualities in succession, or to change, as it is for it to have them at the same time. The popular view of change, which holds that a thing takes on different forms (ice, water, steam) and yet remains the same substance, is untenable. How is it possible to become another, and yet to remain the same? The universal feeling that the concept needs correction betrays itself in the fact that everyone involuntarily adds a cause to the change in thought, and seeks a cause for it, and thus of himself undertakes a transformation of the concept, though, it is true, an inadequate one. If we think this concept through we come upon a trilemma, a threefold impossibility. Whether we endeavor to deduce the change from external or from internal causes, or (with Hegel) to think it as causeless, in each case we involve ourselves in inconceivabilities. All three ideas-change as mechanism, as self-determination or freedom, as absolute becoming-are alike absurd. We can escape these contradictions only by the bold decision to conceive the quality of the existent as unchangeable. For the truly existent there is no change whatever. It remains, however, to explain the appearance of change, in which the wand of decomposition and the ”together” again proves its magic power. Supported by the motley manifoldness of phenomena, we posit real beings as qualitatively different, and view this diversity as partial contraposition; we resolve, e.g., the simple quality a into the elements x + z, and a second quality b into y - z. So long as the individual things remain by themselves, the opposition of the qualities will not make itself evident. But as soon as they come together, something takes place-now the opposites (+z and -z) seek to destroy or at least to disturb each other. The reals defend themselves against the disturbance which would follow if the opposites could destroy each other, by each conserving its simple, unchangeable quality, i.e., by simply remaining self-identical. Self-conservation against threatened disturbances from without (it may be compared to resistance against pressure) is the only real change, and apparent change, the empirical changes of things, to be explained from this. That which changes is only the relations between the beings, as a thing maintains itself now against this and now against that other thing; the relations, however, and their change are something entirely contingent and indifferent to the existent. In itself the self-conservation of a real is as uniform as the quality which is conserved, but in virtue of the changing relations (the variety of the disturbing things) it can express itself for the observer in manifold ways as force. The real itself changes as little as a painting changes, for instance, when, seen near at hand, the figures in it are clearly distinguished, while for the distant observer, on the contrary, they run together into an indistinguishable chaos. Change has no meaning in the sphere of the existent.

Anyone who speaks thus has denied change, not deduced it. Among the many objections experienced by Herbart's endeavor to explain the empirical fact of change by his theory of self-conservation against threatened disturbances Lotze's is the most cogent: The unsuccessful attempt to solve the difficulties in the concept of becoming and action is still instructive, for it shows that they cannot be solved in this way-from the concept of inflexible being. If the ”together,” the threatened disturbance, and the reaction against the latter be taken as realities, then, in the affection by the disturber, the concept of change remains uneliminated and uncorrected; if they be taken as unreal concepts auxiliary to thought, change is relegated from the realm of being to the realm of seeming. Herbart gives to them a kind of semi-reality, less true than the unmoving ground of things (their unchangeable, permanent qualities), and more true than their contradictory exterior (the empirical appearance of change). Between being and seeming he thrusts in, as though between day and night, the twilight region of his ”contingent aspects,” with their relations, which are nothing to the real, their disturbances, which do not come to pa.s.s, and their self-conservations, which are nothing but undisturbed continuance in existence on the part of the real.

Besides the contradictions in the concepts of inherence, of change, and action and pa.s.sion, it is the concept of being which prevents our philosopher from ascribing a living character to reality. Being, as Kant correctly perceived, contains nothing qualitative; it is absolute position. Whoever affirms that an object is, expresses thereby that the matter is to rest with the simple position; in which is included that it is nothing dependent, relative, or negative. (Every negation is something relative, relates to a precedent position, which is to be annulled by it.) Besides being, the existent contains something more-a quality; it consists of this absolute position and a what. If this what is separated from being we reach an ”image”; united with being it yields an essence or a real. This what of things is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circ.u.mstances, and apart from these they would not exist-what is color in the dark? what sound in airless s.p.a.ce? what weight in empty s.p.a.ce? what fusibility without fire?-they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely simple and unchangeable; it brooks no manifoldness, no quant.i.ty, no distinctions in degree, no becoming; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative or positive character of being. The existent is unextended and eternal. The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and of the simple, h.o.m.ogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity. But while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an advance by a.s.suming a plurality of reals. The truly one never becomes a plurality; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be postulated. Herbart characterizes his own standpoint as qualitative atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by quant.i.tative relations (size and figure). The idealists and the pantheists make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one. There is absolutely nothing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the existent as many; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and their many properties, gives irrefragable grounds which compel us to this conclusion. Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very large, though not, it is true, an infinite[1]) plurality of supra-sensible (non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they consist (for the existent is not distinct from its quality; it does not have the quality, but is the quality). Each thing has but one response for the most varied influences: it answers all suggestions from without by affirming its what, by continually repeating, as it were, the same note, which gains a varying meaning only in so far as, in accordance with the character of the disturber, it appears now as a third, now as a fifth or seventh. This picture of the world is certainly not attractive; in it all change and becoming, all life and all activity is offered up on the altar of monotonous being. Happily Herbart is inconsistent enough to enliven this comfortless waste of changeless being by the relatively real or semi-real manifoldness of the self-conservations.

The infinite divisibility of s.p.a.ce and of matter forms the chief difficulty in the problem of the continuous. Herbart endeavors to solve it by the a.s.sumption of an intelligible s.p.a.ce with ”fixed” lines (lines formed by a definite number of points, hence finitely divisible, and not continuous). Metaphysics demands the fixed or discrete line, although common thought is incapable of conceiving it. s.p.a.ce is a mere form of combination in representation or for the observer, and yet it is objective, i.e., it is valid for all intelligences, and not merely for human intelligence. From his complex and unproductive endeavors to derive the appearance of continuity from discontinuous reality we hurry on to the fourth, the psychological problem, which Herbart discusses with great acuteness. He considers it the chief merit of Fichte's Science of Knowledge that it called attention to this problem.

The concept of the ego, of whose reality we have so strong and immediate a conviction that, in the formula of a.s.severation, ”as true as I exist,” it is made the criterion of all other cert.i.tude, labors under various contradictions. Besides the familiar difficulty, here especially sensible, of one thing with many marks, it contains other absurdities of its own. In the ego or self-consciousness subject and object are to be identical. The ident.i.ty of the representing and the represented ego is a self-contradictory idea, for the law of contradiction forbids the equation of opposites, while a subject is subject only through the fact that it is not object. But, again, self-consciousness can never be realized, because it involves a regressus in infinitum. The ego is defined as that which represents itself. What is this ”self”? It is, in turn, the self-knower. This new explanation contains still a further self; which once more signifies the self-knower and so on to infinity. The ego represents the representation (Vorstellen) of its representation (Vorstellen), etc. The representation (Vorstellung) of the ego, therefore, can never be actually brought to completion. (The a.s.sumption of the freedom of the will leads to an a.n.a.logous regressus in infinitum, in which the question, ”Willst thou thy volition?” ”Willst thou the willing of this volition”? is repeated to infinity.) The only escape from this tissue of absurdities is to think the ego otherwise than is done by popular consciousness. The knowing and the known ego are by no means the same, but the observing subject in self-consciousness is one group of representations, the observed subject another. Thus, for example, newly formed representations are apperceived by the existing older ones, but the highest apperceiver is not, in turn, itself apperceived. The ego is not a unit being, which represents itself in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that which is represented is a plurality. The ego is the junction of numberless series of representations, and is constantly changing its place; it dwells now in this representation, now in that. But as we distinguish the point of meeting from the series which meet there, and imagine that it is possible simultaneously to abstract from all the represented series (whereas in fact we can only abstract from each one separately), there arises the appearance of a permanent ego as the unit subject of all our representations. In reality the ego is not the source of our representations, but the final result of their combination. The representation, not the ego, is the fundamental concept of psychology, the ego const.i.tuting rather its most difficult problem.[1] It is a ”result of other representations, which, however, in order to yield this result, must be together in a single substance, and must interpenetrate one another” (Text-book of Introduction, p. 243). In this way Herbart defends the substantiality of the soul against Kant and Fries. The soul's immortality (as also its pre-existence) goes without saying, because of the non-temporal character of the real.

[Footnote 1: On the Herbartian psychology, cf. Ribot, German Psychology of To-day, English Translation by Baldwin, 1886, pp. 24-67; and G.F. Stout, Mind, vols. xiii.-xiv.-TR.]

The soul is one of these reals which, unchangeable in themselves, enter into various relations with others, and conserve themselves against the latter. In its simple what as unknowable as the rest, it is yet familiar to us in its self-conservations. In the absence of a more fitting expression for the totality of psychical phenomena we call these representations, the phenomenal manifoldness of which is due to the variety of the disturbances and exists for the observer alone. In itself, without a plurality of dispositions and impulses, the soul is originally not a representative force, but first becomes such under certain circ.u.mstances, viz., when it is stimulated to self-conservation by other beings. The sum of the reals which stand in immediate relation to the soul is called its body; this, an aggregate of simple beings, furnishes the intermediate link of causal relation between the soul and the external world. The soul has its (movable) seat in the brain. In opposition to the physiological treatment of psychology, Herbart remarks that psychology throws much more light on physiology than she can ever receive from it.

The simplest representations are the sensations, which, amid all their variety, still group themselves into definite cla.s.ses (odors, sounds, colors). They serve us as symbols of the disturbing reals, but they are not images of things, nor effects of these, but products of the soul itself: the generation of sensations is the soul's peculiar way of guarding itself against threatened disturbances. Every representation once come into being disappears again from consciousness, it is true, but not from the soul. It persists, unites with others, and stands with them in a relation of interaction-in both cases according to definite laws. These original representations are the only ones which the soul produces by its own activity; all other psychical phenomena, feeling, desire, will, attention, memory, judgment, the whole wealth of inner events, result of themselves from the interplay of the primary representations under law. Representation (more exactly sensation) is alone original; s.p.a.ce, time, the categories, which Kant makes a priori, are all acquired, i.e., like all the higher mental life, they are the results of a psychical mechanism, results whose production needs no renewed exertion on the part of the soul itself. It has been a very harmful error in psychology hitherto to ascribe each particular mental activity to a special faculty of the soul having a similar name, instead of deriving it from combinations of simple representations. Abstract, empty cla.s.s ideas have been treated as real forces, in the belief that thus the single concrete acts had been ”explained.”

There is no bitterer foe of the faculty theory than Herbart. His campaign against it, if not victorious, was yet salutary, and the motives of his hostility, up to a certain point, entirely justified. Nothing is more useless than the a.s.surance that what the soul actually does, that it must also have the power to do. Who disputes this? A faculty explains nothing so long as the laws under which its functions and its relations to other faculties remain unexplained. But although the faculty idea serves no positive end, it cannot be entirely discarded. It marks the boundary where our ability to reduce one cla.s.s of psychical phenomena to another ceases. Herbart's polemic has no force against the moderate and necessary use of this idea, no matter how much it was in place in view of the impropriety of a superfluous multiplication of the faculties of the soul. The realization of the ideal of psychology, the reduction of the complex phenomena of mental life to the smallest possible number of simple elements, is limited by the heterogeneity of the original phenomena, knowing, feeling, willing, which wholly resists derivation from the combination of sensations. That which blinded Herbart to these limitations was that tendency toward unity, which, as a metaphysician and moral philosopher, he had all too willfully suppressed, and which now took revenge for this infringement of its rights by misleading the psychologist to an exaggeration which had important consequences. Nevertheless his unsuccessful attempt remains interesting and worthy of grat.i.tude.

The discovery of the laws which govern the interaction of the psychical elements is the task of a statics and a mechanics of representations. The former investigates the equilibrium or the settled final state; the latter, the change, i.e. the movements of representations. These names of themselves betray Herbart's conviction that mathematics can and must be applied to psychology. The bright hopes, however, which Herbart formed for the attempt at a mathematical psychology, were fulfilled neither in his own endeavors nor in those of his pupils, although, as Lotze remarks, it would be a.s.serting too much to say that the most general formulas which he set up contradict experience.-The unity of the soul forces representations to act on one another. Disparate representations, those, that is, which belong to different representative series, as the visual image of a rose and the auditory image of the word rose, or as the sensations yellow, hard, round, ringing, connected in the concept gold piece, enter into complications [complexes]. h.o.m.ogeneous representations (the memory image and the perceptual image of a black poodle) fuse into a single representation. Opposed representations (red and blue) arrest one another when they are in consciousness together. The connection and graded fusion of representations is the basis of their retention and reproduction, as well as of the formation of continuous series of representations. The reproduction is in part immediate, a free rising of the representation by its own power as soon as the hindrances give way; in part mediate, a coming up through the help of others. On the arrest of partially or totally opposed representations Herbart bases his psychological calculus. Let there be given simultaneously in consciousness three opposed representations of different intensities, the strongest to be called a, the weakest c, the intermediate one b. What happens? They arrest one another, i.e. a part of each is forced to sink below the threshold of consciousness.[1]

What is the amount of the arrest? As much as all the weaker representations together come to-the sum of arrest or the sum of that which becomes unconscious (as it were the burden to be divided) is equal to the sum of all the representations with the exception of the strongest (hence = b + c), and is divided among the individual representations in the inverse ratio of their strength, consequently in such a way that the strongest (the one which most actively and successfully resists arrest) has the least, and the weakest the most, of it to bear. It may thus come to pa.s.s that a representation is entirely driven out of consciousness by two stronger ones, while it is impossible for this to happen to it from a single one, no matter how superior it be. The simplest case of all is when two equally strong representations are present, in which case each is reduced to the half of its original intensity. The sum of that which remains in consciousness is always equal to the greatest representation.

[Footnote 1: By their mutual pressure representations are transformed into a mere tendency to represent, which again becomes actual representation when the arrest ceases. The parts of a representation transformed into a tendency, and the residua remaining un.o.bscured, are not pieces cut off, but the quant.i.ty denotes merely a degree of obscuration in the whole representation, or rather in the representation which actually takes place.]

As soon as a representation reaches the zero point of consciousness, or as soon as a new representation (sensation) comes in, the others begin at once to rise or sink. The Mechanics seeks to investigate the laws of these movements of representations; but we may the more readily pa.s.s over its complicated calculations since their precise formulas can never more than very roughly represent the true state of the case, which simply rebels against precision. The rock on which every immanent use of mathematics in psychology must strike, is the impossibility of exactly measuring one representation by another. We may, indeed, declare one stronger than another on the basis of the immediate impression of feeling, but we cannot say how much stronger it is, nor with reason a.s.sert that it is twice or half as intense. Herbart's mathematical psychology was wrecked by this insurmountable difficulty. The demand for exactness which it raised, but which it was unable to satisfy with the means at its disposal, has recently been renewed, and has led to a.s.sured results in psycho-physics, which works on a different basis and with ingenious methods of measurement.

Herbart endeavors, as we have seen, to deduce the various mental activities from the play of representations, Feeling and desire are not something beside representations, are not special faculties of the soul, but results of the relations of representations, changing states of representations arrested and working upward against hindrances. A representation which has been forced out of consciousness persists as a tendency or effort to represent, and as such exerts a pressure on the conscious representations. If a representation is suspended between counteracting forces a feeling results; desire is the rise of a representation in the face of hindrances, aversion is hesitation in sinking. If the effort is accompanied by the idea that its goal is attainable, it is termed will. The character of a man depends on the fact that definite ma.s.ses of representations have become dominant, and by their strength and persistence hold opposing representations in check or suppress them. The longer the dominant ma.s.s of representations exercises its power, the firmer becomes the habit of acting in a certain way, the more fixed the will. Herbart's intellectualistic denial of self-dependence to the practical capacities of the soul leads him logically to determinism. Volition depends on insight, is determined by representations; freedom signifies nothing but the fact that the will can be determined by motives. If the individual decisions of man were undetermined he would have no character; if the character were free in the choice between two actions, then, along with the n.o.blest resolve, there would remain the possibility of an opposite decision; freedom of choice would make pure chance the doer of our deeds. Pedagogics, above all, must reject the idea of an undetermined freedom; education, along with imputation, correction, and punishment, would be a meaningless word, if no determining influence on the will of the pupil were possible.-This last objection overlooks the fact that the pedagogical influence is always mediate, and can do no more than, by disciplining the impulses of the pupil and by supplying him with aids against immoral inclinations, to lighten his moral task. We can work on the motives only, never directly on the will itself. Otherwise it would be inexplicable that even the best pedagogical skill proves powerless in the case of many individuals.