OF THE SOUL. 



201 



Eational Psychology. Empirical Psychology professed to 

 give a description of the inner or mental life, and in 

 doing so it confined itself mostly to such methods and 

 statements, and to the use of such terms as had already 

 been laid down in Aristotle's celebrated treatise. This 

 Empirical Psychology had been cultivated not so 

 much in a methodical manner as by popular writings, 

 among which the most brilliant were furnished by the 

 French moralists from Montaigne and Pascal, through 

 La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, down to Rousseau 

 and Diderot. Lectures on this subject belonged to the 

 recognised course of German University studies, and 

 were as such delivered also by Kant, who — except for 

 the distinction between thinking, feeling, and willing, to 

 which he gave its subsequent importance by adopting 

 it from Tetens — did not add anything very novel 

 to the subject. Besides this Empirical Psychology, 

 there was another definite philosophical science which 

 was termed Rational Psychology ; this treated of the 

 highest questions, such as the nature of the soul, its 

 fate, its destiny, its origin and future. It formed 

 together with Cosmology and Rational Theology that 

 large branch of philosophical inquiry which went 

 under the name of Metaphysics. The relation of em- 

 pirical and rational psychology may be compared with 

 the relation which exists for instance between a treatise 

 on the nature of things (such as the great poem of 



names ' psychology ' and ' meta- 

 physics' — both so exactly adapted 

 to the subjects — would have come 

 in alike by a sort of historical 

 accident." The word did not be- 

 come current in French or English 



literature before the nineteenth 

 century, and seems to have been 

 introduced into the latter through 

 Coleridge's connection with Ger- 

 many, and into the former in the 

 school of Victor Cousin. 



