PROBLEMS OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 641 



have phenomenal relations to another. But as I cannot be my own 

 shadow, so there is a like inconvenience as Kant humorously 

 put it in my being wholly the subject and yet solely the object 

 in my own experience. Just as little as we can identify centre and 

 circumference, organism and environment, because the one implies 

 the other; just so little can subject and object be identified, because 

 the one implies the other. The real contradiction, then, lies not in 

 accepting, but in denying, this dual relation, one term of which is 

 being subject, and the other a certain continuity of known object. 

 For psychology the being of this subject means simply its actual 

 knowing, feeling, and striving as an Ego or Self confronted by a 

 counterpart non-Ego or not-self: the two constituting a universe 

 of experience, in which, as Leibnitz held, activity is the fundamental 

 fact, am Anfang war die That. 



But this subjective activity itself furnishes us with another 

 problem, and one of the acutest at the present time. Bradley some 

 years ago went so far as to call the existing confusion concerning 

 this topic the scandal of psychology. Quite recently, however, views 

 have been propounded that make the old confusion worse con- 

 founded. One distinguished psychologist, 1 whilst seemingly accept- 

 ing entirely an analysis of experience such as I have just endeavored 

 to sketch and admitting its validity within the moral sciences, or 

 Geistesioissenschaften, as he terms them, nevertheless regards sub- 

 jective activity as lying altogether beyond the purview of psycho- 

 logy, because it can neither be described nor explained. Another, 2 

 starting from a diametrically opposite standpoint, finds subjective 

 activity, or psychical energy, essential to the explanation of any 

 and every experience, but finds it actually experienced in none. 

 According to his view, it belongs entirely to the unconscious pro- 

 cesses underlying the contents of consciousness or experience: in 

 these contents as such there is no working factor, but only the symp- 

 toms or phenomenal accompaniments of one. A " feeling of activity," 

 he allows, has place within those contents; but it is only a feeling, 

 it is not activity. A necessity of thought, he holds, constrains us to 

 affirm the existence of real psychical activity, power, or energy; 

 though we never actually experience it, because it resides ultimately 

 in the "world-ground," and how experience proceeds from this is 

 ineffable (unsagbar). Yet a third psychologist thinks that he has 

 disposed of subjective activity by maintaining that introspection 

 discovers no causal laws. In agreement with the first author men- 

 tioned, and in opposition to the second, he regards all psychological 

 connections as really psycho-physical. Efficaciousness, as he calls it, 



1 Mxinsterberg, in his Grundzuge der Psychologic, pp. 77 ff. 1900. 



1 G. T. Lipps, Leitfaden der Psychologic, pp. 51 ff. 1903; Psychische Vorgdnge 

 und psychische Causalitat, Zeitschrift f. Psychologic, xxv, pp. 15 ff. 1901. Lipps 

 distinguishes between Kraft and Energie. 



