THE THREE DIVISIONS OF PRACTICAL SCIENCES 121 



standpoint of practice, we should come at once into difficulties, and 

 indeed much of the superficiality of practical sciences to-day results 

 from the hasty tendency to consider them as applied sciences only, 

 and thus to be determined by the points of view of the theoretical dis- 

 cipline 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 sub- 

 stitute the categories of the psychologist for those of immediate 

 practical will-relations and to consider the child in the class-room as 

 a causal system of pyscho-physical elements instead of a personality 

 which is teleologically to be interpreted, and whose aims are not to be 

 connected with causal effects but with over-individual attitudes. In 

 this way the historical relation and the normative relation have to 

 play at least as important a role in the pedagogical system as the 

 psycho-physical relation, and we might quite as well call education 

 applied history and applied ethics. 



Almost every practical science can be shown in this way to apply 

 a number of theoretical sciences; it synthesizes them to a new unity. 

 But better, we ought to say, that it is a unity in itself from the start, 

 and that it only overlaps with a number of theoretical sciences. If 

 we want to classify the practical sciences, we have thus only the one 

 logical principle at our disposal : we must classify them in accordance 

 with the group of human individual aims which control those dif- 

 ferent disciplines. If all practical sciences deal with the relation of 

 the world of experience to our individual practical ends, the classes of 

 those ends are the classes of our practical sciences, whatever combina- 

 tions of applied theoretical sciences may enter into the group. Of 

 course a special classification of these aims must remain somewhat 

 arbitrary; yet it may seem most natural to separate three large divi- 

 sions. We called them the Utilitarian Sciences, the Sciences of Social 

 Regulation, and the Sciences of Social Culture. Utilitarian we may 

 call those sciences in which our practical aim refers to the world of 

 things; it may be the technical mastery of nature or the treatment 

 of the body, or the production, distribution, and consumption of the 

 means of 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 



