THE THREE DIVISIONS OF PRACTICAL SCIENCES 119 



as such, have not the slightest reason to mention the effect of that 

 special drug on that special pathological alteration of the tissues of 

 the organism. The descriptions and explanations of science are not a 

 mere heaping up of material, but a steady selection in the interest of 

 the special aim of the science. No physical science describes every 

 special pebble on the beach ; no historical science deals with the chance 

 happenings in the daily life of any member of the crowd. And we 

 already well know the point of view from which the selection is to be 

 performed. We want to know in the physical and psychical sciences 

 whatever is involved in the object of our experience, and in the his- 

 torical and normative sciences whatever is involved in the demands 

 which reach our will. But w r hether we have to do with the objects or 

 with the demands, in both cases we have systems before us which are 

 determined only by the objects or demands themselves, without any 

 relation to our individual will and our own practical activity. Theo- 

 retically, of course, our will, our activity, our organism, our person- 

 ality is included in the complete system; and if we knew absolutely 

 everything of the empirical effects of the object or of the consequences 

 of these demands, we should find among them their relation to our 

 individual interests; but that relation would be but one chance 

 case among innumerable others, and the sciences would not have the 

 slightest interest in giving any attention to that particular case. Thus 

 if our knowledge of chemical substances were complete, we should 

 certainly have to know theoretically that a few grains of antipyrine 

 introduced into the organism have an influence on those brain centres 

 which regulate the temperature of the human body. Yet if the chem- 

 ist does not share the interest of the physician who wants to fight 

 a fever, he would have hardly any reason for examining this particular 

 relation, as it hardly throws light on the chemical constitution as 

 such. In this way we might say in general that the relation of the 

 world to us as acting individuals is in principle contained in the total 

 system of the relations of our world of experience, but has a strictly 

 accidental place there and can never be in itself a centre around which 

 the scientific data are clustered, and science will hardly have an inter- 

 est in giving any attention to its details. 



This relation of the world, the physical, the psychical, the histor- 

 ical, and the normative world, to our individual, practical purposes 

 can, however, indeed become the centre of scientific interest, and it is 

 evident that the whole inquiry receives thereupon a perfectly new 

 direction which demands not only a completely new grouping of facts 

 and relations, but also a very different shading in elaboration. As 

 long as the purpose was to understand the world without relation to 

 our individual aims, science had to gather endless details which are 

 for us now quite indifferent, as they do not touch our aims; and in 

 other respects science was satisfied with broad generalizations and 



