METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 245
not called in question by theoretical physical science. On the other hand, the psychical world is the world of values.
These may occur in the most multiform qualitative modifications, and in the most various degrees. Sensuous, aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual values are merely the most evident groups, between which there occur innumerable transitions and combinations. A common feature, however, is that they move between contrasted extremes. They thus point to feeling as the subjective condition of their existence. In a judgment of values the action of the feelings comes first as a rule, and combines presently with intellectual weigh- ing of quality and degree of value. In the psychical world, everything has its positive or negative, its greater or lesser, value. Apparent exceptions mean only temporary suspension of motives or of judgment.
{U) Every valuation rests implicitly, however, upon the positing of a purpose. The psychical world is the realm of purposes. Hence, natural science is obliged to reckon with the notion of purpose, as a phase of causality, wherever psychical facts cooperate in the production of physical objects or processes. (Thus, mechanics in the case of machines, and biology in the case of propagation among the higher order of animals. For what is the machine designed ? What are the elements of human sexual selection ?)
(c) Formation of purpose is finally the outcome of volition. Not mere presentation of a conception to the mind makes it into a purpose, but volition, which is in closest connection with valuation. Feeling, from which valuation springs, may be described as incipient volition. Physical nature is without volition in its units. The psychical is the realm of will. This proposition requires more emphasis than the preceding.
Conception {Vorstellung), thought apart from will and the adjunct purpose and valuation, is simply a phenomenon of natural science. Intelligence is the unification of volition and conception in knowledge and in self-control of action. Intelligence is, accordingly, a mark of the psychical, in so far as it organizes the elementary traits of volition, purpose, and valuation. The further consideration must here be added that the objects of scientific atten- tion gain in importance in proportion as these purposes become more signifi- cant, and the valuations connected with these purposes become more compre- hensive. In the light of this consideration, it is plain that the deliberative action of the will is the final criterion of those phenomena which are the peculiar subject-matter of the psychical sciences. Hence, man is the well- nigh exclusive subject-matter of these sciences — not man in abstract isola- tion from surrounding nature, but actual human beings.
In short, the division line between the psychical and the natural sciences must be drawn where man, as a willing and reflecting agent, begins to be an essential factor in phenomena. All phenomena in which this factor may be disregarded fall within the territory of the natural sciences. It need hardly be repeated that even the objects in which the psychical sciences find these
