110 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



itself. But we do not understand the object and the submission which 

 it demands if we do not completely understand its relation to our 

 desires. Our total submission to the thing thus involves our acknow- 

 ledgment of all that we have to expect from it. And although the 

 real experience is a unity of will and thing, we have thus the most 

 immediate interest in considering what we have to expect from the 

 thing in itself, without reference to our will. That means finding out 

 the effects of the given object with a subject as the passive spec- 

 tator. We eliminate artificially, therefore, the activity of the subject 

 and construct as presupposition for this circle of knowledge a nowhere 

 existing subject without activity, for which the thing exists merely 

 as a cause of the effects which it produces. 



The first step towards natural science is, therefore, to dissolve 

 the real experience into thing and personality; that is, into object 

 and active subject, and to eliminate in an artificial abstraction the 

 activity of the subject, making the object material of merely passive 

 awareness, and related no longer to the will but merely to other 

 objects. It may be more difficult to understand the second step which 

 naturalism has to take before a natural science is possible. It must 

 dissolve the object of will into an over-individual and an individual 

 part and must eliminate the individual. That part of my objects 

 which belongs to me alone is their psychical side; that which belongs 

 to all of us and is the object of ever new experience is the physical 

 object. As a physicist, in the widest sense of the word, I have to ignore 

 the objects in so far as they are my ideas and have to consider the 

 stones and the stars, the inorganic and the organic objects, as they 

 are outside of me, material for every one. The logical purpose of this 

 second abstraction may be perhaps formulated in the following way. 



We have seen that the purpose of the study of the objects is to find 

 out what we have to expect from them; that is, to what effects of the 

 given thing we have to submit ourselves in anticipation. The ideal 

 aim is thus to understand completely how present objects and future 

 objects that is, how causes and effects are connected. The first 

 stage in such knowledge of causal connections is, of course, the obser- 

 vation of empirical consequences. Our feeling of expectation grows 

 with the regularity of observed succession; yet the ideal aim can 

 never be fulfilled in that way. The mere observation of regularities 

 can help us to reduce a particular case to a frequently observed type, 

 but what we seek to understand is the necessity of the process. Of 

 course we have to formulate laws, and as soon as we acknowledge 

 a special law to be expressive of a necessity, the subsumption of the 

 particular case under the law will satisfy us even if the necessity of the 

 connection is not recognized in the particular case. We are satisfied 

 because the acknowledgment of the law involved all possible cases. 

 But we do not at all feel that we have furnished a real explanation if 



