§ 171. We have seen already, in Chapter XXVI, that feeling may be considered as the embryonic form of both will and intellect. On the side of desire, feeling moves toward the will; on the side of sensuous impressions, feeling relates itself to intellect. It is evident that feeling can not be educated directly in itself, but only mediately through the intellect and the will. The will is trained by forming habits; the intellect is trained by developing higher orders of knowing. When a habit is formed, and a theoretical view is reached by the intellect which corresponds to that habit, it will happen soon that feeling will come to contain the contents of the willing and knowing in the form of immediate impulse or unconscious tendency. Therefore the feeling can be cultivated, and is cultivated, in fact, by producing the growth and development of the intellect and will. § 172. This progressive series of stages of knowing, arising from the action of the will upon the intellect, would at first be supposed to lead away from reality toward abstraction; or, in other words, from the concrete to the abstract. But, in fact, it is otherwise. The higher members of the series of knowing are more adequate, and reach the concrete truth, while that kind of knowing which merely knows impressions, without taking cognizance of relations, is an abstract knowing, because it deals with mere dependent things, properties, and qualities, without seizing them in their true relations, whereas the reflective knowing seizes things in their causal relations, which make them possible and sustain them in being (compare 158). It is a more concrete kind of knowing, therefore. But the kind of knowing which I call insight (Oewpeîv)—which explains the dependent things by the independent whole-is philosophic or theologic knowing. Its aim when realized enables one to see each thing in God's final purpose in the universe. Hence what we call insight, or the knowing of the Reason, deals with moral purposes. § 173. It is true that the psychological theory of these kinds of knowing is apart from and unnecessary to the realization of the kinds of knowing themselves. That is to say, a person may be engaged in analysis without knowing that it is analysis, and without any special information regarding the nature of analysis. Physiology and hygiene give one an insight into the processes of digestion and respiration, but are not necessary for the performance of those functions. One breathes and digests quite as well without a scientific knowledge of the nature of the process; but such scientific knowledge is indispensable to the pathologist. So, too, one pays attention, analyzes, reflects, and reasons without knowing scientifically what is involved in such acts; but the science of psychology is necessary for settling all questions of educational criticism. To see the complexity of the physiological process of digestion or breathing astonishes us. Still more does it astonish the psychologist when he for the first time traces out the complexity of the most ordinary mental processes. The accumulation of one act upon another, each higher one acting upon a lower one, is a continued process of involution which seems at first wholly incomprehensible. But complete selfknowledge implies this knowledge of mental pro cesses. Psychology explains; it does not make. To explain the purposive movements of life is not to say that these are conscious. The actions of a plant indicate the adaptation of means to end, but not a conscious adaptation. So the greater part of the movements of animals are purposive, but not conscious. The animal does not reflect upon them. It is a shallow, first thought of the reader of psychology to suppose that his author undertakes to give an account only of conscious processes. Fichte was the first among thinkers to trace out these subtle evolutions, and his works form the classics of psychology, defective though they are in ontology. Attention to an object, analysis of its properties, reflection upon its relation to other things, are very ordinary intellectual activities, but they differ widely in significance. The lower activity never comprehends the higher; it is limited, but knows not its limit. Things seem to it impossible which are perfectly easy to the stages of thinking above it. |