Page:B20442294.djvu/237

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
MALE AND FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY
209

single explanation as to the deeper laws of masculine life; it can be regarded only as a series of sporadic empirical efforts, and its method is wrong inasmuch as it seeks to reach the kernel of things by surface examination, and as it cannot possibly give an explanation of the deep-seated source of all psychical phenomena. When it has attempted to discover the real nature of psychical phenomena by measurements of the physical phenomema that accompany them, it has succeeded in showing that even in the most favourable cases there is an inconstancy and variation. The fundamental possibility of reaching the mathematical idea of knowledge is that the data should be constant. As the mind itself is the creator of time and space, it is impossible to expect that geometry and arithmetic should explain the mind, that the creature should explain the creator.

There can be no scientific psychology of man, for the aim of psychology is to derive what is not derivative, to prove to every man what his real nature and essence are, to deduce these. But the possibility of deducing them would imply that they were not free. As soon as it has been admitted that the conduct, action, nature, of an individual man can be determined scientifically, it will be proved that man has no free-will. Kant and Schopenhauer understood this fully, and, on the other hand, Hume and Herbart, the founders of modern psychology, did not believe in free-will. It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an empirical factor. The will, like the power of judgment, is associated inevitably with the existence of an ego, or soul. It is not a matter of experience, it transcends experience, and until psychology recognises this extraneous factor, it will remain no more than a methodical annex of physiology and biology. If the soul is only a complex of experiences it cannot be the factor that makes experiences possible. Modern psychology in reality denies the existence of the soul, but the soul rejects modern psychology.