282 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



57. 

 Avenarius. 



In dealing with modern empirical psychology, I have 

 confined myself mainly to the work of English thinkers, 

 and notably to the expositions of James Ward. A move- 

 ment in many ways similar has taken place among 

 German psychologists ; though perhaps nowhere in their 

 voluminous writings has the matter been so simply and 

 lucidly dealt with as in the expositions given in English 

 philosophical literature. In Germany the philosophy of 

 Richard Avenarius 1 aims apparently at a similar reduction 



is essentially genetic in its method, 

 and might, if we had the power to 

 revise our existing terminology, be 

 called biology ; the latter, on the 

 other hand, is essentially devoid of 

 everything historical, and treats 

 sub specie (eternitatis, as Spinoza 

 might have said, of human know- 

 ledge, conceived as the possession 

 of ' mind ' in general. The prin- 

 ciples of psychology are part of the 

 material, the logical worth and 

 position of which a theory of know- 

 ledge has to assign ; but they are 

 not, neither do they furnish, the 

 critical canons by which knowledge 

 is to be tested. Yet, in three 

 several ways, epistemology has been 

 supposed to depend upon psycho- 

 logy, in so far, viz., as psychology 

 might explain the origin of know- 

 ledge, the process of knowing, or 

 the limits of the knowable. But 

 it can answer none of these ques- 

 tions in the way required. To ask 

 them at all betrays serious mis- 

 conception as to the nature of 

 psychology. ... So far, knowledge 

 has contained the means of its own 

 advance, and mere psychology can- 

 not tell us whether this is to hold 

 always or must cease at some point, 

 while there remain possibilities of 

 knowledge still beyond. Psychology 

 seems, in fact, far more intimately 

 related to metaphysics, that is to 

 say, to theories about being and 



becoming, than to theories of know- 

 ledge" (J. Ward, "Psychological 

 Principles," ' Mind,' 1883, p. 167). 

 1 Born 1843, Avenarius died 1896, 

 as Professor of Philosophy, at 

 Zurich. His philosophy, which cer- 

 tainly possesses the merit of origin- 

 ality both in form and substance, 

 was elaborated under the influence 

 of the different lines of thought 

 which prevail in modern scientific 

 and philosophical literature. Thus 

 we find such heterogeneous aspects 

 as the physiological (through 

 Ludwig), the purely physical and 

 descriptive (through Kirchhoff and 

 Mach), the Herbartian (through 

 Drobisch), and, above all, the pan- 

 theistic or parallelistic of Spinoza, 

 brought together. The modern con- 

 ception of science and philosophy 

 as a unification of knowledge or 

 thought takes with him the form of 

 "economy of thought," as, in con- 

 sequence of the limited nature of 

 the human intellect, a condensation 

 and simplification of ideas is inevi- 

 tably called for. It seems, there- 

 fore, as if his object was to reduce 

 the complex mass of our intellectual 

 conceptions to a minimum of what 

 he terms ' ' pure " experience ; the 

 latter is, therefore, not, as in Kant's 

 conception of pure reason, the fun- 

 damental endowment of the human 

 mind ; it is rather the ultimate 

 outcome of a purifying process of 



