mere singular, as a mere incident or as a world by itself. Differently it may be treated, but always on grounds of common well-being, as part of an embracing system.
There is probably another sense, however, in which psychology comes into close relation with ethics. If we look on man as a microcosm, his inner system will more or less reproduce the system of the larger world. The older psychology used to distinguish an upper or superior order of faculties from a lower or inferior. Thus in the intellectual sphere, the intellect, judgment, and reason were set above the senses, imagination, and memory. Among the active powers, reasonable will, practical reason and conscience were ranked as paramount over the appetites and desires and emotions. And this use of the word “faculty” is as old as Plato, who regards science as a superior faculty to opinion or imagination. But this application—which seems a perfectly legitimate one—does not, in the first instance, belong to psychology at all. No doubt it is psychically presented: but it has an other source. It springs from an appreciation, a judgment of the comparative truth or reality of what the so-called psychical act means or expresses. Such faculties are powers in a hierarchy of means and ends and presuppose a normative or critical function which has classified reality. Psychically, the elements which enter into knowledge are not other than those which belong to opinion: but they are nearer an adequate rendering of reality, they are truer, or nearer the Idea. And in the main we may say, that is truer or more real which succeeds in more completely organising and unifying elements—which rises more and more above the selfish or isolated part into the thorough unity of all parts.
The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs off no less abruptly into the unknown. Knowledge, on the contrary, is unified: and its unity gives it its strength and superiority. The powers which thus exist are the subjective counterparts of objectively valuable products. Thus, reason is the subjective counterpart of a world in which all the constituents are harmonised and fall into due relationship. It is a product or result, which is not psychologically, but logically or morally important. It is a faculty, because it means that actually its possessor has ordered and systematised his life or his ideas of things. Psychologically, it, like unreason, is a compound of elements: but in the case of reason the composition is unendingly and infinitely consistent; it is knowledge completely unified. The distinction then is not in the strictest sense psychological: for it has an aesthetic or normative character; it is logical or ethical: it denotes that the idea or the act is an approach to truth or goodness. And so, when Butler or Plato distinguishes reason or reflection from appetites and affections, and even from self-love or from the heart which loves and hates, this is not exactly a psychological division in the narrower sense. That is to say: these are, in Plato’s words, not merely “parts,” but quite as much “kinds” and “forms” of soul. They denote degrees in that harmonisation of mind and soul which reproduces the permanent and complete truth of things. For example, self-love, as Butler describes it, has but a partial and narrowed view of the worth of acts: it is engrossing and self-involved: it cannot take in the full dependence of the narrower interest on the larger and eternal self. So, in Plato, the man of heart is but a nature which by fits and starts, or with steady but limited vision, realises the larger life. These parts or kinds are not separate and co-existent faculties: but grades in the co-ordination and unification of the same one human nature.
(i.) Psychology and Epistemology.