HKB
Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.
Allusion has already been made to the question of the boundaries between logic and psychology, between logic and ethics, ethics and psychology, and psychology and epistemology. Each of these occasionally comes to cover ground that seems more appropriate to the others. Logic is sometimes restricted to denote the study of the conditions of derivative knowledge, of the canons of inference and the modes of proof. If taken more widely as the science of thought-form, it is supposed to imply a world of fixed or stereotyped relations between ideas, a system of stable thoughts governed by inflexible laws in an absolute order of immemorial or eternal truth. As against such fixity, psychology is supposed to deal with these same ideas as products—as growing out of a living process of thought—having a history behind them and perhaps a prospect of further change. The genesis so given may be either a mere chronicle-history, or it may be a philosophical development. In the former case, it would note the occasions of incident and circumstance, the reactions of mind and environment, under which the ideas were formed. Such a psychological genesis of several ideas is found in the Second Book of Locke’s Essay. In the latter case, the account would be more concerned with the inner movement, the action and reaction in ideas themselves, considered not as due to casual occurrences, but as self-developing by an organic growth. But in either case, ideas would be shown not to be ready-made and independently existing kinds in a world of idea-things, and not to form an unchanging diagram or framework, but to be a growth, to have a history, and a development. Psychology in this sense would be a dynamical, as opposed to the supposed statical, treatment of ideas and concepts in logic. But it may be doubted how far it is well to call this psychology: unless psychology deals with the contents of the mental life, in their meaning and purpose, instead of, as seems proper, merely in their character of psychic events. Such psychology is rather an evolutionist logic,—a dialectic process more than an analytic of a datum.