594 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



as the Mills in England, Comte in France, Lotze in 

 Germany, somewhat later by Du Bois Eeymond, Charles 

 Renouvier, Claude Bernard, Stanley Jevons, and others. 

 But the merit of having devoted himself without pre- 

 judice and bias to the solution of this critical problem in 

 a comprehensive and exhaustive manner is undoubtedly 

 due to Prof. Wundt of Leipsic. It is interesting to 

 see how in the course of his researches he has been led 

 to adopt a position which, though arrived at on quite 

 different lines, has tended to confirm and strengthen 

 what we may term the voluntaristic movement of thought. 

 This emphasises the active principle of the will, and gives 

 clearer expression to a tendency of thought which we 

 find already in Maine de Biran in France, in Alexander 

 Bain in England, and, in an extreme form, in Schopen- 

 hauer and Hartmann in Germany : to it Prof. Wundt 

 lias given an independent expression. How he gradu- 

 ally arrived at his position he has himself described 

 in an article entitled " On Psychical Causality and the 

 Principle of Psycho-physical Parallelism," published in 

 the year 1894.^ "I learned first," he says, "in the 



1 The writings of Prof. Wundt 

 are extremely numerous and vol- 

 uminous, covering an enormous 

 field of research unparalleled by 

 any contemporary thinker, with 

 the exception perhaps of Hartmann. 

 But whereas Hartmann put forward 

 the main idea of his philosophy in 

 one of his earliest works, giving 

 currency to certain watchwords 

 and a certain form of pessimism, 

 the one - sided accentuation of 

 which he has been at great pains 

 to mitigate in his later writings, 

 the really valuable and original 

 conceptions of Wundt's philosophy 

 — the notion of creative syn- 



1 



thesis and that of the growth of 

 spiritual energy — lie buried in 

 such an enormous mass of de- 

 tailed exposition, of criticism, and 

 of scattered articles, that it is only 

 with difficulty that the student ar- 

 rives at any tolerably concise view of 

 Wundt's philosophical system. We 

 must therefore be especially grate- 

 ful to Dr E. Konig for his excel- 

 lent Monograph on Wundt (' From- 

 mann's Klassiker der Philosophie,' 

 xiii. ), to which may be added 

 Prof. Hoffding's account of Wundt's 

 philosophy in his ' Moderne Phil- 

 osophen,' pp. 6-38. 



