102 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



be harmonized with appreciation: it is but echoing in technical 

 terms the one great emotion of our time. 



This certainly does not mean that any step of the gigantic material- 

 istic, technical, and psychological development will be reversed, or 

 that progress in any one of these directions ought to cease. On the 

 contrary, no time was ever more ready to put its immense energies 

 into the service of naturalistic work; but it does mean that our time 

 recognizes the one-sidedness of these movements, recognizes that they 

 belong only to one aspect of reality, and that another aspect is pos- 

 sible; yes, that the other aspect is that of our immediate life, with its 

 purposes and its ideals, its historical relations and its logical aims. 

 The claim of materialism, that all psychical facts are merely functions 

 of the organism, was no argument against psychology, because, 

 though the biological view was possible, yet the other aspect is cer- 

 tainly a necessary supplement. In the same way it is no argument 

 against the newer view that all purposes and ideals, all historical 

 actions and logical thoughts, can be considered as psychological phe- 

 nomena. Of course we can consider them as such, and we must go on 

 doing so in the service of the psychological and sociological sciences; 

 but we ought not to imagine that we have expressed and understood 

 the real character of our historical or moral, our logical or religious 

 life when we have described and explained it as a series of phenomena. 

 Its immediate reality expresses itself above all in the fact that it has 

 a meaning, that it is a purpose which we want to understand, not by 

 considering its causes and effects, but by interpreting its aims and 

 appreciating its ideals. 



We should say, therefore, to-day that it is most interesting and 

 important for the scientist to consider human life with all its strivings 

 and creations from a biological, psychological, sociological point of 

 view; that is, to consider it as a system of causal phenomena; and 

 many problems worthy of the highest energies have still to be solved 

 in these sciences. But that which the jurist or the theologian, the 

 student of art or of history, of literature or of politics, of education or 

 of morality, is dealing with, refers to the other aspect in which inner 

 life is not a phenomenon but a system of purposes, not to be ex- 

 plained but to be interpreted, to be approached not by causal but by 

 teleological methods. In this case the historical sciences are no longer 

 sub-sections of psychological or of sociological sciences; the concep- 

 tion of science is no longer identical with the conception of the 

 science of phenomena. There exist sciences which do not deal with 

 the description or explanation of phenomena at all, but with the 

 internal relation and connection, the interpretation and appreciation 

 of purpose. In this way modern thought demands that sciences of 

 purpose be coordinated with sciences of phenomena. Only if all these 

 tendencies of our time are fully acknowledged can the outer frame- 



