PROBLEMS OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 643 



Does the fact that I find no laws within my individual experience, 

 but only a succession of unique events, eo ipso preclude me from 

 experiencing immanent activity, and convict me of contradiction 

 when I talk of myself as a real agent, or Ursache f Quite the con- 

 trary, as it seems to me: precisely because I am an individual agent, 

 or Ego, with an equally individual counterpart, Non-Ego, is my 

 experience unique: were it, in fact, from end to end but the out- 

 come of universal laws or deducible from such, as the psycho- 

 physical theory implies, then certainly all efficient activity would 

 be as absent from it as from other mere mechanisms. It is just this 

 uniqueness and seeming contingency which defy mechanical ex- 

 planations that conative activity explains. True, this activity is 

 itself indescribable and inexplicable in other terms. But to say this 

 is only to say that it is our immediate actual being, that we cannot 

 get behind or beyond it, cannot set it away from us or project it. 



To admit this eigene Aktivitdt as das wirklich Wirksame, die zen- 

 trale Innerlichkeit that for immediate experience leaves kein uner- 

 kldrter Rest, 1 as the first of these writers does, and yet to eliminate 

 it from psychology in order with the help of psycho-physics to 

 convert psychology into a natural science, is surely a desperate 

 procedure, the motives for which it is hard to conjecture. To turn 

 geistige Aktivitdt out of the science, in order to separate it from 

 the Geistesivissenschaften, is like giving a dog a bad name, taking 

 away his character, in order to hang him. 



With the views of the second writer I have personally much 

 more sympathy. There is here no heroic inconsequence to bring 

 psychology into line with mechanism at any cost; but a serious 

 metaphysical problem, perhaps the most fundamental of all pro- 

 blems, that, namely, of the Absolute One and the Finite Many, 

 seems to have biased him in the treatment of the problem before 

 us. For the Finite Many he conceives that we are necessitated to 

 postulate a transcendent " real " as substratum, and so they figure 

 as phenomena, dominated and determined by the law of causality, 

 and this in precisely the same sense, whether they are psychical 

 or physical. For the Absolute One, the World-ground, however, 

 there is no transcendent, no substratum; here the causal becomes 

 the teleological, and we have pure actuality. The Absolute, in 

 short, is a World-consciousness. But, if so, we naturally ask at 

 once, must there not be a correspondence between this absolute 

 consciousness and phenomenal consciousness which does not exist 

 between it and the physical phenomena, over which the law of 

 causality is supreme? Or, if there is no such correspondence, if 

 what the author calls the voluntarisch-teleologischer Standpunkt 

 has no place in finite experience, whence do we derive this concept 

 1 Munsterberg, op. cit. p. 578. 



