108 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



that every one who is to share with us our world of experience has to 

 share this submission too. That alone is a submission to truth, and 

 experience, considered in so far as we submit ourselves to it over- 

 individually, constitutes our knowledge. 



The system of knowledge is thus the system of experience with all 

 that is involved in it in so far as it demands submission from our over- 

 individual will, and the classification which we are seeking must be 

 thus a division and subdivision of our over-individual submissions. 

 But the submission itself can be of very different characters and these 

 various types must give the deepest logical principles of scientific 

 classification. To point at once to the fundamental differences: our 

 will acknowledges the demands of other wills and of objects. We can- 

 not live our life -- and this is not meant in a biological sense, but, 

 first of all, in a teleological sense -- our life becomes meaningless, if 

 our will does not respect the reality of will-demands and of objects of 

 will. Now we have seen that the will which demands our decision may 

 be either the individual will of other subjects or the over-individual 

 will, which belongs to every subject as such and is independent of any 

 individuality. We can say at once that in the same way we are led to 

 acknowledge that the object has partly an over-individual character, 

 that is, necessarily belongs to the world of objects of every possible 

 subject, and partly an individual character, as our personal object. 

 We have thus four large groups of experiences to which we submit 

 ourselves: over-individual will-acts, individual will-acts, over-indi- 

 vidual objects, individual objects. They constitute the first four large 

 divisions of our system. 



The over-individual will-acts, which are as such teleologically bind- 

 ing for every subject and therefore norms for his will, give us the 

 Normative Sciences. The individual will-acts in the world of historical 

 manifoldness give us the Historical Sciences. The objects, in so far 

 as they belong to every individual, make up the physical world, and 

 thus give us the Physical Sciences; and finally the objects, in so far 

 as they belong to the individual, are the contents of consciousness, 

 and thus give us the Mental Sciences. We have then the demarca- 

 tion lines of our first four large divisions: the Normative, the Histor- 

 ical, the Physical, and the Mental Sciences. Yet their meaning and 

 method and difference must be characterized more fully. We must 

 understand why we have here to deal with four absolutely different 

 types of scientific systems, why the over-individual objects lead us 

 to general laws and to the determination of the future, while the study 

 of the individual will-acts, for instance, gives us the system of history, 

 which turns merely to the past and does not seek natural laws; and 

 why the study of the norms gives us another kind of system in which 

 neither a causal nor an historical, but a purely logical connection pre- 

 vails. Yet all these methodological differences result necessarily from 



