104 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



shaped and remoulded by scientific conceptions and by the demands 

 of knowledge. And from this basis of primary, naive reality we must 

 ask ourselves what we mean by seeking knowledge, and how this 

 demand of ours is different from the other activities in which we work 

 out the meaning and the ideals of our life. 



One thing is certain, we cannot go back to the old dogmatic stand- 

 point, whether rationalistic or sensualistic. In both cases dogmatism 

 took for granted that there is a real world of things which exist in 

 themselves independent of our subjective attitudes, and that our 

 knowledge has to give us a mirror picture of that self-dependent 

 world. Sensualism averred that we get this knowledge through our 

 perceptions; rationalism, that we get it by reasoning. The one as- 

 serted that experience gives us the data which mere abstract reason- 

 ing can never supply; the other asserted that our knowledge speaks 

 of necessity which no mere perception can find out. Our modern 

 time has gone through the school of philosophical criticism, and the 

 dogmatic ideas have lost for us their meaning. We know that the 

 world which we think as independent cannot be independent of the 

 forms of our thinking, and that no science has reference to any other 

 world than the world which is determined by the categories of our 

 apperception. There cannot be anything more real than the immedi- 

 ate pure experience, and if we seek the truth of knowledge, we do not 

 set out to discover something which is hidden behind our experience, 

 but we set out simply to make something out of our experience which 

 satisfies certain demands. Our immediate experience does not contain 

 an objective thing and a subjective picture of it, but they are com- 

 pletely one and the same piece of experience. We have the object of 

 our immediate knowledge not in the double form of an outer object 

 independent of ourselves and an idea in us, but we have it as our 

 object there in the practical world before science for its special pur- 

 poses has broken up that bit of reality into the physical material 

 thing and the psychical content of consciousness. And if this double- 

 ness does not hold for the immediate reality of pure experience, it 

 cannot enter through that reshaping and reconstructing and connect- 

 ing and interpreting of pure experience which we call our knowledge. 

 All that science gives to us is just such an endlessly enlarged expe- 

 rience, of which every particle remains objective and independent, 

 inasmuch as it is not in us as psychical individuals, while yet com- 

 pletely dependent upon the forms of our subjective experience. The 

 ideal of truth is thus not to gain by reason or by observation ideas 

 in ourselves which correspond as well as possible to absolute things, 

 but to reconstruct the given experience in the service of certain 

 purposes. Everything which completely fulfills the purposes of this 

 intentional reconstruction is true. 



What are these purposes? One thing is clear from the first : There 



