THE FOUR THEORETICAL DIVISIONS 103 



work of our classification offer a fair field to every scientific thought, 

 while a positivistic system would cripple the most promising tend- 

 encies of the twentieth century. 



2. The Four Theoretical Divisions 



We have first to determine the underlying structure of the classifi- 

 cation, that is, we have to seek the chief Divisions, of which our plan 

 shows seven; four theoretical and three practical ones. It will be a 

 secondary task to subdivide them later into the 24 Departments and 

 128 Sections. We desire to divide the whole of knowledge in a funda- 

 mental way, and we must therefore start with the question of prin- 

 ciple: what is knowledge? This question belongs to epistemology, 

 and thus falls, indeed, into the domain of philosophy. The positivist 

 is easily inclined to substitute for the philosophical problem the 

 empirical question: how did that which w r e call knowledge grow 

 and develop itself in our individual mind, or in the mind of the 

 nations? The question becomes, then, of course, one which must be 

 answered by psychology, by sociology, and perhaps by biology. Such 

 genetic inquiries are certainly very important, and the problem of 

 how the processes of judging and conceiving and thinking are pro- 

 duced in the individual or social consciousness, and how they are to 

 be explained through physical and psychical causes, deserves fullest 

 attention. But its solution cannot even help us as regards the funda- 

 mental problem, what we mean by knowledge, and what the ultimate 

 value of knowledge may be, and why we seek it. This deeper logical 

 inquiry must be answered somehow before those genetic studies of the 

 psychological and the sociological positivists can claim any truth at 

 all, and thus any value, for their outcome. To explain our present 

 knowledge genetically from its foregoing causes means merely to con- 

 nect the present experience, which we know, with a past experience, 

 which we remember, or with earlier phenomena which we construct 

 on the basis of theories and hypotheses; but in any case with facts 

 which we value as parts of our knowledge and which thus presuppose 

 the acknowledgment of the value of knowledge. We cannot deter- 

 mine by linking one part of knowledge with another part of know- 

 ledge whether we have a right to speak of knowledge at all and to 

 rely on it. 



We can thus not start from the childhood of man, or from the begin- 

 ning of humanity, or from any other object of knowledge, but we 

 must begin with the state which logically precedes all knowledge; 

 that is, with our immediate experience of real life. Here, in the naive 

 experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we 

 perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective attitudes as 

 agents of will, as personalities, here we find the original reality not yet 



