546 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



KINETICS AND .ESTHETICS. 



Noire divides the whole of philosophy, accord- 

 ng to the views just explained, into two branches, 

 which he calls Kinetics and ^Esthetics. 



By Kinetics every problem from the first mo- 

 tion of the atom to the revolutions of the solar 

 system, from the formation of the first cell to the 

 life of man, has to be solved as a purely mechani- 

 cal problem. 



By ^Esthetics, using that word in the Kantian 

 sense, he tries to unravel the growth of the sub- 

 jective world, from the first tremor of the embryo 

 to the brightest thoughts of man, from the first 

 reaction of the moneres to the highest flights of 

 human genius. 



The field for the study of Kinetics is open ; it 

 is the whole realm of Nature, which anybody may 

 explore who has eyes to see. It is physical sci- 

 ence in the largest sense of the word. Experi- 

 ence and experiment are the two tools, Nature 

 the never-failing material, for those who want to 

 work out the history of evolution in the objective 

 world. 



For the study of ^Esthetics the same tools are 

 at hand, but where is the material ? where are the 

 documents in which to study the growth or his- 

 tory of the sentient subject ? Must we be satisfied 

 either with introspection, the most uncertain of all 

 vivisectory experiments, in which he who dissects 

 is at the same time he who is being dissected ? or 

 with the study of that short period of growth 

 which we call the history of the world, compris- 

 ing no more than a few thousand years, filled 

 with names of kings and battles rather than with 

 an account of the silent growth of the mind ¥ 

 No wonder that men accustomed to deal with 

 facts, and to base their theories upon them, 

 should turn away with dismay from mental sci- 

 ence in which every fact can be disputed by men 

 who profess that they do not see it, and where 

 there is hardly one technical term that admits of 

 one definition only. An exact philosophy of the 

 human mind seemed to become more and more 

 hopeless the greater the achievements in the con- 

 quest of Nature. 



LANGUAGE, AS SUBJECTIVE NATURE. 



And yet while philosophers complained about 

 the scarcity or the total absence of trustworthy 

 materials, there were old archives brimful of 

 them, if people would only see them, open them^ 

 and read them. What should we say if we were 

 told that, in studying the growth of the earth, 

 we must be satisfied with looking at its surface 

 only — that everything else was hidden and lost ? 



Were there not chronicles of the past written on 

 that very surface, if people would only recog- 

 nize them as such ? Was there not a history to 

 be read in every bit of coal, in every flake of 

 flint ? We can hardly understand how men 

 could have been so blind as not to see what 

 stared them in the face ; and yet all mental phi- 

 losophy has hitherto been struck with such blind" 

 ness. Noire is, in fact, the first philosopher by 

 profession who has perceived what students of 

 the science of language, more particularly Gei- 

 ger, have pointed out again and again, that lan- 

 guage is the embodiment of mind, the nature, so 

 to say, of mind, the subjective universe in which 

 the whole objective universe is reflected, per- 

 ceived, imaged, and conceived. Here is the 

 realm of mental science, here are materials, as 

 real as any that physical science has to deal 

 with. Nor have we only the surface, the living 

 language of the day, in which to study the rem- 

 nants of that unbroken series of growth which 

 begins with the first conscious sensation. We 

 possess in the so-called dead languages petrifac- 

 tions of former stages of growth, and in the 

 many families of human speech a wealth of form 

 comparable only to the numberless forms of 

 vegetable and animal life which overwhelm the 

 student of objective Nature. The evolution of 

 sensation, therefore, can be studied as well as the 

 evolution of motion, viz., in the enormous wealth 

 of language. The history of the human mind is 

 the history of language ; the true philosophy of 

 the human mind — true, because resting on facts 

 — is the philosophy of language. 



I quote from Noire (" Einleitung," p. 213) : 



" How could such a new creation as we have in 

 reason spring from antecedent and less perfect 

 forms ? How could what is rational and thinking 

 proceed from what is without reason and without 

 speech \ 



" If we want to know the means by which hu- 

 man reason worked its way from small beginnings 

 to always-increasing clearness with reference to 

 the qualities of things, and always higher self- 

 consciousness, this can be done historically only, 

 by investigating the regular development of the 

 conceptual contents of words, which, without such 

 contents, are empty sound. Concepts, as Geiger 

 shows, determine each other in their genesis, so 

 that not every one could spring accidentally from 

 every other, but certain concepts only from certain 

 concepts, according to rule. While there can be 

 no science to determine the connection between 

 concept and sound, a scientific method must be 

 found, following the development of concepts, 

 without reference to their phonetic forms ; and in 



