If folk-psychology, whose title but imperfectly expresses the comprehensive endeavor to construct a psychology of society or of the universal spirit, is, as it were, an empirical confirmation of Hegel’s theory of Objective Spirit, Rudolf Eucken[1] (born 1846), pressing on in the Fichtean manner from the secondary facts of consciousness to an original real-life, endeavors to solve the question of a universal becoming, of an all-pervasive force, of a supporting unity ("totality”) in the life of spirit (neither in a purely noetical nor a purely metaphysical, but) in a nooelogical way, and demands that the fundamental science or doctrine of principles direct its attention not to cognition by itself, but to the activity of psychical life as a whole.

[Footnote 1:  Eucken:  The Unity of Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and Deeds of Humanity, 1888; Prolegomena to this, 1885.  A detailed analysis of the latter by Falckenberg is given in the Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie, vol. xc, 1887; cf. above, pp. 17 and 610.]

We have elsewhere discussed the more recent attempts to establish a metaphysic which shall be empirically well grounded and shall cautiously rise from facts.[1] In regard to the possibility of metaphysics three parties are to be distinguished:  On the left, the positivists, the neo-Kantians, and the monists of consciousness, who deny it out of hand.  On the right, a series of philosophers—­e.g., adherents of Hegel, Herbart, and Schopenhauer—­who, without making any concessions to the modern theory of knowledge, hold fast to the possibility of a speculative metaphysics of the old type.  In the center, a group of thinkers who are willing to renounce neither a solid noetical foundation nor the attainment of metaphysical conclusions—­so Eduard von Hartmann, Wundt,[2] Eucken, Volkelt (pp. 590, 617).  Otto Liebmann (born 1840; On the Analysis of Reality, 1876, 2d ed., 1880; Thoughts and Facts, Heft i. 1882) demands a sharp separation between the certain and the uncertain and an exact estimation of the degree of probability which theories possess; puts the principles of metaphysics under the rubric of logical hypothesis; and, in his Climax of the Theories, 1884, calls attention to the fact that experiential science, in addition to axioms necessarily or apodictically certain and empeiremes possessing actual or assertory certainty, needs, further, a number of “interpolation maxims,” which form an attribute of our type of intellectual organization (i.e., principles, according to the standard of which we supplement the fragmentary and discrete series of single perceptions and isolated observations by the interpolation of the needed intermediate links, so that they form a connected experience).  The most important of these maxims are the principles of real identity, of the continuity of existence, of causality, and of the continuity of becoming.  Experience is a gift of the understanding; the premises,