An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 204 pages of information about An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy.

An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 204 pages of information about An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy.

It is probable that Eucken has done less justice to psychology from the side of the [p.92] connection of consciousness with the external world.  He is aware, and points out the fact in several of his books, of the close connection between mind and body; but seems to think that the fact is sufficiently brought out by text-books on psychology that some kind of dualism or parallelism is absolutely necessary to be held in order to account for the content of consciousness.  What exact meaning and province should be assigned to psychology is to-day a matter of serious dispute.  Textbooks of the nature of William James’s Principles of Psychology present a double aspect of the subject-matter as well as of its mode of treatment.  It is often difficult to differentiate in James’s works where one aspect ends and another begins.  Psychology is presented by him as a natural science on one page, and on the opposite page we discover ourselves in the region of ethics and even of metaphysics and religion.  On the one side, we find the connection of consciousness and its mode of operation with the physical organism presented in terms which emphasise the mechanical and chemical sides.  On the other side, the content of consciousness itself, after the connection has taken place, is presented as a psychology as well.  So that several important writers on psychology have emphasised the need of differentiating one aspect from the other, and of confining the meaning of psychology to the description and explanation of the connection [p.93] of mind and body.[26] But when we pass to the content of consciousness, something more than a mere connection of mind and body is discovered.  The content of consciousness includes the Will—­the unrest of consciousness in its actual situation, a dissatisfaction with its state of inertia, and a movement towards some End.  When the Will operates with the content of consciousness we are in a realm which is beyond the physical—­a realm, too, which is other than a passive, descriptive attitude of a spectator of things.  The realm of values has now been reached; and a content, different in its nature from any account it is able to give of itself or of its connection with the physical, starts on its own independent course.  The psychologist is “right in insisting that the atoms do not build up the whole universe of science.  There are contents in consciousness, sensations and perceptions, feelings and impulses, which the scientist must describe and explain too.  But if the psychologist is the real natural scientist of the soul, this whole interplay of ideas and emotions and volitions appears to him as a world of causally connected processes which he watches and studies as a spectator.  However rich the manifold of the inner experience, everything, seen from a strictly psychological standpoint, [p.94] remains just as indifferent and valueless as the movement of the atoms in the outer experience.  Pleasures

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An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.