“originally accepts over against him an environment with manifold parts, other individuals making manifold statements, and what is stated in some way dependent upon the environment.” Statements dependent upon the environment are what he means by pure experience. At first this starting-point looks like dualistic realism, but in reality the author only meant dualism within experience. By the environment he meant not a thing existing in itself, but only a counterpart (Gegenglied) of ourselves as central part (Centralglied). “We cannot,” he adds, “think ourselves as central part away.” He went so far as to assert that, where one assumes that at some time there was no living being in the world, all one means is that there was besides oneself no other central part to whom one’s counterparts might also be counterparts. The consequence is that all the world admitted into his philosophy is what he called the “empirio-critical essential co-ordination” (empirio-kritische Prinzipialkoordination), an inseparable correlation of central part and counterpart, of ego and environment. Within this essential co-ordination he distinguished three values: R-values of the environment as stimulus; C-values of the central nervous system; and E-values of human statements—the latter being characterized by that which at the time of its existence for the individual admits of being named, and including what we call sensations, &c., which depend indirectly on the environment and directly on the central nervous system, but are not, as the materialist supposes, in any way reducible to possessions of the brain or any other part of that system. This division of values brings us to the second point in his philosophy, his theory of what he called “vital series,” by which he assayed to explain all life, action and thought. A vital series he supposed to be always a reaction of C against disturbance by R, consisting in first a vital difference, or diminution by R of the maintenance-value of C, and then the recovery by C of its maintenance-value, in accordance with the principle of least action. He further supposed that, while this independent vital series of C is sometimes of this simple kind, at other times it is complicated by the addition of a dependent vital series in E, by which, in his fondness for too general and far-fetched explanations, he endeavoured to explain conscious action and thought. (Thus, if a pain is an E-value directly dependent on a disturbance in C, and a pleasure another E-value directly dependent on a recovery of C, it will follow that a transition from pain to pleasure will be a vital series in E directly dependent on an independent vital series in C, recovering from a vital difference to its maintenance-maximum.) Lastly, supposing that all human processes can in this way be reduced to vital series in an essential co-ordination of oneself and environment, Avenarius held that this empirio-critical supposition, which according to him is also the natural view of pure experiences, contains no opposition of physical and psychical, of an outer physical and an inner psychical world—an opposition which seemed to him to be a division of the inseparable. He considered that the whole hypothesis that an outer physical thing causes a change in one’s central nervous system, which again causes another change in one’s inner psychical system or soul, is a departure from the natural view of the universe, and is due to what he called “introjection,” or the hypothesis which encloses soul and its faculties in the body, and then, having created a false antithesis between outer and inner, gets into the difficulty of explaining how an outer physical stimulus can impart something into an inner psychical soul. He concluded therefore that, having disposed of this fallacy of introjection, we ought to return to the view of reality as an essential co-ordination of ego and environment, of central part and counterpart, with R-values, C-values and E-values.
It is curious that Avenarius should have brought forward this artificial hypothesis as the natural view of the world, without reflecting that on the one hand the majority of mankind believes that the environment (R) exists, has existed, and will exist, without being a counterpart of any living being as central part (C); and that on the other hand it is so far from being natural to man to believe that sensation and thought (E) are different from, and merely dependent on, his body (C), that throughout the Homeric poems, though soul is required for other purposes, all thinking as well as sensation is regarded as a purely bodily operation. It is indeed difficult to assign any rational place to the empirio-criticism of Avenarius. It is materialistic without being materialism; it is realistic without being realism. Its rejection of the whole relation of physical and psychical makes it almost too indefinite to classify among philosophical systems. But its main point is the essential co-ordination of ego and environment, as central part and counterpart, in experience. It is therefore nearly connected with “immanent philosophy.” Schuppe, indeed, wrote an article in the Vierteljahrsschrift of Avenarius to prove their essential agreement. At the same time Schuppe’s hypothesis of one common consciousness uniting the given by a priori categories could hardly be accepted by Avenarius as pure experience, or as a natural view of the world. His “empirio-criticism” is idealistic dualism within experience in an a posteriori form, but with a tendency towards materialism.
4. Voluntaristic Phenomenalism of Wundt.—Wundt’s metaphysics will form an appropriate conclusion of this sketch of German idealism, because his patient industry and eclectic spirit have fitted him to assimilate many of the views of his predecessors. Wundt proves that all idealisms are in a way one. He starts as a phenomenalist from the hypothesis, which we have just described, that knowledge is experience Wundt. containing subject and object in inseparable connexion, and has something in common with the premature attempt of Avenarius to develop the hypothesis of dualism in experience into a scientific philosophy comprehending the universe in the simplest possible manner. Again he agrees with the reaction both to Hume and to Kant in limiting knowledge to mental phenomena, and has affinities with Mach as. well as with Lange. His main sympathies are with the Neo-Kantians, and especially with Lange in modifying the a priori, and in extending the power of reason beyond phenomena to an ideal world; and yet the cry of his phenomenalism is not “back to Kant,” but “beyond Kant.” Though no noumenalist, in many details he is with noumenalists; with Fechner in psychophysics, in psychophysical parallelism, in the independence of the physical and the psychical chains of causality, in reducing physical and psychical to a difference of aspects, in substituting impulse for accident in organic evolution, and in wishing to recognize a gradation of individual spiritual beings; with Schopenhauer and Hartmann in voluntarism; and even with Schelling and Hegel in their endeavour, albeit on an artificial method, to bring experience under notions, and to unite subject and object in one concrete reality. He has a special relation to Fichte in developing the Kantian activity of consciousness into will and substituting activity for substantiality as the essence of soul, as well as in breaking down the antithesis between phenomena and things in themselves. At the same time, in spite of his sympathy with the whole development of idealism since Kant, which leads him to reject the thing in itself, to modify a priorism, and to stop at transcendent “ideals,” without postulates of practical reason, he nevertheless has so much sympathy with Kant’s Kritik as on its theories of sense and understanding to build up a system of phenomenalism, according to which knowledge begins and ends with ideas, and finally on its theory of pure reason to accord to reason a power of logically forming an “ideal” of God as ground of the moral “ideal” of humanity—though without any power of logically inferring any corresponding reality. He constructs his system on the Kantian order—sense, understanding, reason—and exhibits most clearly the necessary consequence from psychological to metaphysical idealism. His philosophy is the best exposition of the method and argument of modern idealism—that we perceive the mental and, therefore, all we know and conceive is the mental.
Wundt founds his whole philosophy on four psychological positions: his phenomenalistic theory of unitary experience, his voluntarism, his actualistic theory of soul, and his psychological theory of parallelism. They are positions also which deeply affect, not only the psychological, but also the metaphysical idealisms of our time, in Germany, and in the whole civilized world.
i. His first position is his phenomenalistic theory of unitary experience. According to him, we begin with an experience of ideas, in which object and idea are originally identical (Vorstellungsobject); we divide this unitary experience into its subjective and objective factors; and especially in natural science we so far abstract the objects as to believe them at last to be independent things; but it is the office of psychology to warn us against this popular dualism, and to teach us that there is only a duality of psychical and physical, which are divisible, not separable, factors of one and the same content of our immediate experience; and experience is our whole knowledge. His metaphysical deduction from this psychological view is that all we know is mental phenomena, “the whole outer world exists for us only in our ideas,” and all that our reason can logically do beyond these phenomena is to frame transcendent “ideals.”
ii. His second position is his voluntarism. He agrees with Schopenhauer that will is the fundamental form of the spiritual. He does not mean that will is the only mental operation; for he recognizes idea derived from sensation, and feeling, as well as will. Moreover, he contends that we can neither have idea without feeling and will, nor will without idea and feeling; that idea alone wants activity, and will alone wants content; that will is ideating and
activity (vorstellende Thätigkeit), which always includes motives
