I am only suggesting a continuation of the sane line of thought when I say that in so far as behaviorists tend to ignore the social qualities of behavior, they are perpetuating exactly the tradition against which they are nominally protesting. To conceive behavior exclusively in terms of the changes going on within an organism physically separate in space from other organisms is to continue that conception of mind which Professor Perry has well termed ''subcutaneous." This conception is appropriate to the theory of the existence of a field or stream of consciousness that is private by its very nature; it is the essence of such a theory. But when one breaks loose from such a theory he is authorized to take behavior as he finds it; if he finds attitudes and responses toward others which can not be located under the skin, they still have the full claim to recognition.
The teacher of philosophy has, therefore, at the present time a deep concern with the way in which psychology is developing. In the degree in which he feels that current philosophy is entangled in epistemological questions that are artificial and that divert energy away from the logical and social fields in which the really vital opportunities for philosophy now lie, he will welcome every sign of the turning away by psychologists from subjective immediatism; every sign of a disposition to take a more objective, public, and out-door attitude. The future of the teaching of philosophy for the next generation seems to be intimately bound up with the crisis psychology is passing through. Anything that tends to make psychology a theory of human nature as it concretely exists and of human life as it is actually lived can be only an instrument of emancipation of philosophy.
JOHN DEWEY.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
Psychology as Philosophic Method
In an article on "The Psychological Standpoint," in MIND II I endeavored to point out that the characteristic English development in philosophy -- the psychological movement since Locke -- had been neither a "threshing of old straw," nor a movement of purely negative meaning, whose significance for us was exhausted when we had learned how it necessarily led to the movement in Germany -- the so-called "transcendental" movement. Its positive significance was found to consist in the fact that it declared consciousness to be the sole content, account and criterion of all reality; and psychology, as the science of this consciousness, to be the explicit and accurate determination of the nature of reality in its wholeness, as well as the determination of the value and validity of the various elements or factors of this whole. It is the ultimate science of reality, because it declares what experience- in its totality is; it fixes the worth and meaning of its various elements by showing their development and place within this whole. It is, in short, philosophic method. But that paper was necessarily largely negative, for it was necessary to point out that as matter of fact the movement had not been successful in presenting psychology as the method of philosophy, for it had not been true to its own basis and ideal. Instead of determining all, both in its totality and its factors, through consciousness, it had endeavored to determine consciousness from something out of and beyond necessary relation to consciousness. It had determined its psychology from a dogmatically presupposed ontology, instead of getting at its ontology from a critical examination of the nature and contents of consciousness, as its standpoint required. It had a thing-in-itself, something whose very existence was to be opposed to consciousness, as in the unknowable "substances" of Locke, the transcendent Deity of Berkeley, the sensations or impressions of Hume and Mill, the "transfigured real" of Spencer; and it used this thing-in-itself as the cause and criterion of conscious experience. Thus it contradicted itself; for, if psychology as method of philosophy means anything, it means that nothing shall be assumed except just conscious experience itself, and that the nature of all shall be ascertained from and within this.
It is to the positive significance of psychology as philosophic method -- its significance when it is allowed to develop itself free from self-contradictory assumptions -- that this present paper is directed. It was suggested in the previous paper that this method, taken in its purity, would show substantial identity with the presuppositions and results of the "transcendental" movement. And as the principal attacks upon the pretensions of psychology to be method for philosophy, or anything more than one of the special sciences, have come from representatives of this movement, this paper must be occupied with treating psychology in reference to what we may call German philosophy, as the other treated it in reference to English philosophy. In so far as the criticisms from this side have been occupied with pointing out the failure of the actual English psychology to be philosophy, there is of course no difference of opinion. That arises only in so far as these criticisms have seemed (seemed, I repeat) to imply that the same objections must hold against every possible psychology; while it seems to the writer that psychology is the only possible method.
It is held, or seems to be held, by representatives of the post-Kantian movement, that man may be regarded in two aspects, in one of which he is an object of experience like other objects: he is a finite thing among other finite things; with these things he is in relations of action and reaction, but possesses the additional characteristic that he is a knowing, feeling, willing phenomenon. As such, he forms the object of a special science, psychology, which, like every other special science, deals with its material as pure object, abstracting from that creative synthesis of subject and object, self-consciousness, through which all things are and are known. It is therefore, like all the special sciences, partial and utterly inadequate to determining the nature and meaning of that whole with which philosophy has to deal. Nay more, it is itself ultimately dependent upon philosophy for the determination of the meaning, validity, and limits of the principles, categories, and method which it unconsciously assumes. To regard psychology therefore as philosophic method is to be guilty of the same error as it would be to regard the highest generalizations of, say, physics as adequate to determining the problems of philosophy. It is an attempt to determine the unconditioned whole, self-consciousness, by that which has no existence except as a conditioned part of this very whole.
Metaphysics (says Professor Caird) has to deal with conditions of the knowable, and hence with self-consciousness or that unity which is implied in all that is and is known. Psychology has to inquire how this self-consciousness is realized or developed in man, in whom the consciousness of self grows with the consciousness of a world in time and space, of which he individually is only a part, and to parts of which only he stands in immediate relation. In considering the former question we are considering the sphere within which all knowledge and all objects of knowledge are contained. In considering the latter, we are selecting one particular object or class of objects within this sphere.... It is possible to have a purely objective anthropology or psychology -- which abstracts from the relation of man to the mind that knows him -- just as it is possible to have a purely objective science of nature.'1
The other aspect of man is that in which he, as self-conscious, has manifested in him the unity of all being and knowing, and is not finite, i.e., an object or event, but is, in virtue of his self-conscious nature, infinite, the bond, the living union of