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,
t when it comes to the classification 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 int
eally 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
eories 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 kno
ysical 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
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 abstractio
ferentiated 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 theo
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 substituted 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 substitute the categor
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 classification 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