Laurens Perseus Hickok

Empirical Psychology, Or, the Science of Mind from Experience Laurens Perseus Hickok

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882. Excerpt: ... FOURTH DIVISION. A COMPLETE EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY GIVES AN OPEN DOOR FOR A UNIVERSAL PHILOSOPHY. THE Psychology now completed is a classified system of all the powers and activities of the human Mind, but this could not have been effected except as the mind's endowment of rational spirit had been acknowledged, since the more important facts of ethical and theistic emotions in the susceptibility, and the aesthetic, philosophic, ethic, and religious executives of a will in liberty, all originate in the recognition of this high faculty of human reason. But this acknowledged attainment of reason in psychology is of still greater import in the completion of empirical science in general. Not only could not the most important facts in psychology have been otherwise attained, but the connection of all physical and psychical facts of experience, if attained, could not have been so effected as to make of the whole an exact and consistent universal system. Scientific experiment might classify the facts ascertained in experience, but science without reason must ever remain incompetent to compass and expound experience itself. Section I.: The Proper Province Of Philosophy. We have now a Psychology which recognizes man's spiritual endowment, and which enables us intelligibly to use the facts and function of the reason in the full exposition of the common experience. In this an effectual door is opened to a Philosophy, no other234 wise attainable, which may bring the tested facts of common experience not only into assorted classes, but may also put all the classes into an exactly ensphered universality; the philosophy finishing the science which had else, as ever before, remained an utterly insoluble problem. This reason-philosophy is the sure and safe authority for a sc...