388 METHODOLOGY OF SCIENCE 



systems or modes of activity. The thoughts to which such a doctrine 

 leads are accordingly not new or unheard of. The substances have 

 always been regarded as sources of modes of activity. We have here 

 merely new modifications of thoughts that have been variously de- 

 veloped, not only from the side of empiricism, but also from that 

 of rationalism. They carry with them methodologically the implica- 

 tion that it is possible to grasp the totality of reality, as far as it 

 reveals uniformities, as a causally connected whole, as a cosmos. 

 They give the research of the special sciences the conceptual bases for 

 the wider prospects that the sciences of facts have through hard 

 labor won for themselves. The subject of consciousness is unitary as 

 far as the processes of memory extend, but it is not simple. On the 

 contrary, it is most intricately put together out of psychical com- 

 plexes, themselves intricate and out of their relations; all of which 

 impress upon us, psychologically and, in their mechanical correlates, 

 physiologically, an ever-recurring need for further empirical analysis. 

 Among the mechanical images of physical reality that form the 

 foundation of our interpretation of nature, there can finally be but 

 one that meets all the requirements of a general hypothesis of the 

 continuity of kinetic connections. With this must be universally 

 coordinated the persistent properties or sensible modes of action 

 belonging to bodies. The mechanical constitution of the compound 

 bodies, no matter at what stage of combination and formation, must 

 be derivable from the mechanical constitution of the elements of this 

 combination. Thus our causal thought compels us to trace back 

 the persistent coexistences of the so-called elements to combin- 

 ations whose analysis, as yet hardly begun, leads us on likewise to 

 indefinitely manifold problems. Epistemologically w r e come finally 

 to a universal phenomenological dynamism as the fundamental 

 basis of all theoretical interpretation of the world, at least funda- 

 mental for our scientific thought, and we are here concerned with 

 no other. 



