METAPHYSICS AND THE OTHER SCIENCES 241 



acter of the real as such. The consequence, indeed, disappears at once 

 if the views maintained in this address as to the intimate relation of 

 metaphysics and logic, and the radical expulsion from logic of all 

 discussion of mental processes as such, be admitted. But it is still 

 important to note that the premises from which the conclusion in 

 question was drawn are themselves false. We must never allow our- 

 selves to forget that, as the ever-increasing domination of psychology 

 by the highly artificial methods of observation and experiment intro- 

 duced by Fechner and Wundt is daily making more apparent, 

 psychology itself, like physics, deals not directly with the concrete 

 realities of individual experience, but with an abstract selected from 

 that experience, or rather a set of artificial symbols only partially 

 corresponding with the realities symbolized, and devised for the spe- 

 cial object of submitting the realm of mental sequences to mathemat- 

 ical calculation. We might, in fact, have based this inference upon 

 the single reflection that every psychological "law" is obtained, like 

 physical laws, by the statistical method of elimination of individual 

 peculiarities, and the taking of an average from an extended series 

 of measurements. For this very reason, no psychological law can 

 possibly describe the unique realities of individual experience. We 

 have in psychology, as in the physical sciences, the duty of suspecting 

 exact correspondence between the single case and the general "law" 

 to be of itself proof of error somewhere in the course of our computa- 

 tion. These views, which I suppose I learned in the first instance from 

 Mr. F. H. Bradley's paper called A Defence of Phenomenalism in 

 Psychology, may now, I think, be taken as finally established beyond 

 doubt by the exhaustive analysis of Professor Miinsterberg's Grund- 

 zilge der Psychologie. They possess the double advantage of freeing 

 the psychologist once for all from any interference by the meta- 

 physician in the prosecution of his proper study, and delivering 

 metaphysics from the danger of having assumptions whose sole justi- 

 fication lies in their utility for the purpose of statistical computation 

 thrust upon it as self-evident principles. For their full discussion I 

 may perhaps be allowed to refer to the first three chapters of the 

 concluding book of my Elements of Metaphysics. 



When we turn to the sciences which aim at the appreciation or 

 evaluation of empirical fact, the case seems rather different. It may 

 fairly be regarded as incumbent on the metaphysician to consider 

 how far the general conception he has formed of the character of 

 reality can be substantiated and filled in by our empirical knowledge 

 of the actual course of temporal sequence. And thus the way seems 

 to lie open to the construction of what may fairly be called a Philo- 

 sophy of Nature and History. For instance, a metaphysician who has 

 rightly or wrongly convinced himself that the universe can only be 

 coherently conceived as a society of souls or wills may reasonably go 



