ve it at the first superficial view a
certain appearance of truth; but it will not be difficult to detect its
want of truth. According to our whole experience, the human mind is bound
to the body; its proper activity, its whole communication with the material
and immaterial world outside of it, even its whole mutual intercourse with
the minds of fellow-beings, is performed by means of bodily functions
which, as such, are subordinate to mechanism. Therefore "physiological
psychology" certainly belongs to the most interesting of the branches of
science which at present enjoy special care, and works in this realm, like
those of Wundt, are worthy of the greatest attention. Now if these points
of contact once exist between the material and the psychical and spiritual
processes, so that material functions causally influence psychical and
spiritual ones, and psychical and spiritual functions similarly influence
material ones, there must also exist between the laws of material processes
and those of psychical and spiritual functions a relation which makes
possible such a mutual effect, and we must be able to abstract from it the
existence of a common higher law of which on the one side the material
laws, and on the other the psychical and spiritual, are but partial laws.
Precisely here lie the indications which appear to favor materialism in
psychology. But it is only an appearance. For, from the acknowledgment
{155} and scientific investigation of a reciprocal action, to an
identification of the two factors which act upon one another, is still an
infinite step. If science is not even able to identify material motion and
sensation, still less can it identify material motion and the spiritual and
ethic activities. When this is done, it is done only in consequence of the
same confounding of condition and cause which we had to expose on the
occasion of the assertion of the possibility of explaining the origin of
life or of sensation, and of consciousness or of self-consciousness. But we
here also willingly admit that the realm in which causality reigns in the
form of mechanism, aims at being the support, foundation, and instrument of
another realm where causality still reigns, but mechanism ceases. How far
investigation may still proceed in the direction of those interesting
points and lines where both realms touch one another in causal reciprocal
action, we do not know. We are hardly able to indicate the direction in
which the inves