ree practical ones. It will be a secondary task to subdivide them later into the 24 Departments and 128 Sections. We desire to divide the whole of knowledge in a fundamental w
ess, and how they are to be explained through physical and psychical causes, deserves fullest attention. But its solution cannot even help us as regards the fundamental problem, what we mean by knowledge, and what the ultimate value of knowledge may be, and why we seek it. This deeper logical inquiry must be answered somehow before those genetic studies of the psychological and the sociological positivists can claim any truth at all, and thus any value, for their outcome. To explain our present knowledge genetic
na?ve experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective attitudes as agents of will, as personalities, here we find the original reality not yet shaped and remoulded by scientific conceptions
ms of our thinking, and that no science has reference to any other world than the world which is determined by the categories of our apperception. There cannot be anything more real than the immediate pure experience, and if we seek the truth of knowledge, we do not set out to discover something which is hidden behind our experience, but we set out simply to make something out of our experience which satisfies certain demands. Our immediate experience does not contain an objective thing and a subjective picture of it, but they are completely one and the same piece of experience. We have the object of our immediate knowledge not in the double form of an outer object independent of ourselves and an idea in us, but we have it as our object there in the practical world before science for its special purposes has broken up that bit of reality into the phy
e most immediate na?ve experience; but we can never reach an experience which does not contain the doubleness of subject and object, of will and world. That doubleness has nothing whatever to do with the difference of physical and psychical; both the physical thing and the psychical idea are objects. The antithesis is not that between two kinds of objects, since we have seen that in the immediate experience the objects are not at all split up into the two groups
erent way. The rock and the tree do not point to anything else, but the approval has no reality if it does not point to its opposition in disapproval, and the denial has no meaning if it is not meant in relation to the affirmative. This doubleness of our primary experience, this having of objects and of antagonistic attitudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object without attitude, and no attitude without object. The two are one state; object and attitude form a unity which we resolve by the different way in which we experience these two features of the one state: we find the object and we live through the attitu
hes out not only to objects, but also to other subjects. In our most immediate experience, not reshaped at all by theoretical science, our will is in agreement or disagreement with other wills; tries to influence them, and receives influences and suggestions from them. The pseudo-philosophy of naturalism must say of course that the will does not stand in any direct relation to another will, but that the other persons are for us simply material objects which we perceive, like other objects, and into which we project mental phenomena like those which we find in ourselves by the mere conclusion of analogy
rly constitutes the historical significance of our attitude. In the one case our act is a merely personal choice for personal purposes without any general meaning; in the other case it is the expression of general tendencies and historical movements. Yet our will-decisions can have connections still wider than those with our social community or our nation, or even with all living men of to-day. It can seek a relation to the totality of those whom we aim to acknowledge as real subjects. It thus becomes independent of the chance experience of this or that ma
with other individuals, we reach a higher attitude, yet one which cannot claim absolute value, as it is dependent on historical considerations and on the tastes and desires of a special group or a school or a nation or an age. But if we approve the given object just as it is in an over-individual will-act, then we have before us a thing of beauty, whose value is not dependent upon our personal enjoyment as individuals, but is demanded as a joy forever, by every one whom we acknowledge at all as a complete subject. In exactly the same way, we may approve a change in the world from any individual point of visuggestions of other individuals; or it may, finally, again be an over-individual submission, which seeks no longer a personal interest. This submission is not to the authority of others, and is without reference to any individual; we assume t
owledges the demands of other wills and of objects. We cannot live our life-and this is not meant in a biological sense, but, first of all, in a teleological sense-our life becomes meaningless, if our will does not respect the reality of will-demands and of objects of will. Now we have seen that the will which demands our decision may be either the individual will of other subjects or the over-individual will, which belongs to every subject as such and is independent of any individuality.
ents of consciousness, and thus give us the Mental Sciences. We have then the demarcation lines of our first four large divisions: the Normative, the Historical, the Physical, and the Mental Sciences. Yet their meaning and method and difference must be characterized more fully. We must understand why we have here to deal with four absolutely different types of scientific systems, why the over-individual objects lead us to general laws and to the determinatio
n every direction from the actual experience, but we expand the experience by seeking those objects and those demands to which, as necessarily following from the immediately given experience, we must also submit. And in thus developing the whole system of submissions, the interpretation of the experience itself becomes transformed: the physicist may perhaps substitute imperceptible atoms for the physical object and the psychologist may substitute sensations for the real idea, and the historian may substitute co