ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 515 



Wuiult differs quite as much from Lotze, who also strove 33. 



^ WulKlt, 



to arrive at a view of the totaUty of liuman life and its Fecimer, 



'' and Lotze 



significance. Lotze belonged, in spite of the original compared, 

 and independent view which he took of the psycho- 

 physical problem, to the older school of philosophers. 

 AVundt belongs quite to the modern school.^ Fechner 

 forms the transition. Lotze begins his psychology, and 

 even his physiology of the soul, with a lengthy disserta- 

 tion on the unity of the soul as a special being, just 

 as Herbart begins his psychology with metaphysics. 

 This metaphysical introduction, these definitions relating 

 to the essence of the soul, its unity, and its location, are 

 absent in the modern psychology. Instead of founding 

 psychology on experience, metaphysics, and mathematics, 

 AVundt founds it on experience (including experiment), 

 physiology, and mathematics. In consequence of this 

 altered foundation a new problem has arisen, precisely 

 as a new problem arose for biologists when they dis- 

 carded vital force as a meaningless and useless encum- 

 brance. For the older biologists life was the exhibition 



"O" 



^ See the preface to the second ' the problems. But I quite well uii- 



erlition of the ' System der Fhilo- 

 >ophie' (Leipzig, 1897), p. ix : "I 

 have always tried to co-operate in 

 the endeavour to secure for psycho- 

 logy an independent position as 

 an empirical science outside of 

 philosophy, and to see that she 

 should not lack the support of the 

 scientific method in so far as this 

 could be transferred to her. . . . 

 As I started from natural science 



understand that the position may 

 be different for him who begins with 

 philosophy and then makes occa- 

 sional excursions into the regions 

 of science or| psychologj'." Com- 

 pare with this what Lotze says in 

 the Introduction to his ' Streit- 

 schriften ' (1857), or the following 

 passage from one of his last essays 

 ('Contemp. Rev.,' January 1880), 

 " Except in rare cases, a prolonged 



and then came to philosophy 1 philosophical labour is nothing else 



through occupation with empirical j but the attempt to justify, scientif- 



|)syc!iology, it would have appeared ically, a fundamental view of things 



to me impossible to philosophise ! which has been adc)pted in early 



in any other way than in corre- j life." 

 spondence with this sequence of 



