ork. Nothing
shows more clearly the confusion between a purposive and causal view of
the mind. In the purposive view of our real life, only our will and our
personality have a meaning and can be related to the ideas and higher
aims. Nature is there nothing but the dead material which is the tool of
our will and which has to be mastered by the personality. In that world
alone lie our duty and our morality. But as soon as we have gone over to
the causal aspect of our life and have taken the point of view of the
psychologist, making our inner life a series of contents of
consciousness, of psychical phenomena, we have transformed our inner
experience in such a way that it has become itself nothing but nature.

It is mental nature, nature of psychical stuff, but each part of it is
nothing but a mental element, a mental atom without any meaning and
without any value; nothing but a link in the chain, nothing but a factor
in the explanation of the whole, nothing to which any ethical or
aesthetic or logical or religious significance can any longer be
attached. The psychical sensations and the physical atoms are equally
material for naturalistic explanation. To understand causally a certain
effect, for instance the creation of a work of art, of a discovery or a
thought or a deed as the product of psychical processes, is thus in no
way more dignified or more valuable than to understand it as the product
of physiological brain processes. The one is not more dignified than the
other because both alike have nothing whatever to do with dignity. Both
alike are the necessary results of the foregoing processes, and to
attach a kind of sentimental preference to the explanation through
conscious factors is nothing but a confused reminiscence again of the
entirely different purposive view of life. And surely nothing is gained
for the higher values of life if this confusion sets in, because if the
popular mind becomes unable to discriminate between the secondary,
causal, artificial aspect of science and the primary, purposive aspect
of life, the opposite effect lies still nearer: the values of the real
life suffer and are crowded out by the knowledge of the scientific
facts. Man's moral freedom is then wrongly brought in question, as soon
as it is learned that every action is the product of brain processes.
Life and science alike will gain the more, the more clearly the
purposive and the causal point of view are separated and the more it is