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Theplace of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 13
tiers are constantly shifting and that the sciences are always infinitely ‘open’.
For instance, introspection by the subject himself into his own consciousness
was considered inadmissible by Comte and classified under metaphysics (hence
the absence of psychology from Comte’s classification of the sciences). A little
over half a century later, the Wiirzburg school in Germany and A. Binet in
France made systematic use of induced introspection to demonstrate that
thought cannot be reduced to mental images but consists in acts in the truest sense.
This opened the way to a linking of intelligence and action and to a psychol-
ogy of conduct which, although it assigns a limited r6le to introspection, does
so after a long series of systematic experiments which furnish ‘objective’
grounds for these limitations instead of purely arbitrary decisions.
The second basic conclusion is that, while frontier shifts between philosophy
and the sciences do not depend on an a priori division of problems, precise
reasons can be given for these progressive delimitations, along the following
lines. Since philosophy attempts to encompass the whole of reality, it necessarily
bears two characteristics which constitute its true originality. The first consists
in not dissociating questions one from another, since its specific purpose is to
aim at the whole. The second is that, in the attempt to co-ordinate all human
activities, each philosophical position implies evaluation and commitment,
which excludes the possibility of any general meeting of minds to the extent
that the values involved are unshakable (e.g. spirituality or materialism, etc.).
It is from this point of view that the spiritualist introspection of Maine de
Biran and Victor Cousin was unacceptable to Comte, who was therefore right
to regard it as a metaphysical problem, since its avowed purpose was to justify
concepts such as liberty, i.e. beliefs on which agreement could not be, or had
not been, reached. Science, on the other hand, begins as soon as a problem can
be isolated in such a way as to relate its solution to investigations that are univer-
sally accessible and verifiable, dissociating them from questions of evaluation
or conviction. This does not mean that these definable problems are known in
advance, since only experience wil show whether the attempt can succeed.
However it does imply an effort to find a demarcation which may meet with
general agreement : by using introspection to determine the relations between
judgement and a mental image, and by setting to one side the problems of
liberty or the nature of the soul, the Wiirzburg school and Binet were using a
clearly-defined and hence scientific method. The records show that they were
in agreement, which is all the more striking when one considers that at the be-
ginning there was no contact between the German and French scholars.
In short, sciences such as psychology, sociology and logic became detached
from philosophy not because their problems were established once and for all as
scientific and of no concern to philosophy, or even less with a view to gaining
for themselves a sort of advance guarantee of greater accuracy; but simply be-
cause progress towards greater knowledge requires that problems should be
identified and that those on which no agreement is possible at a given moment
should be set aside and all attention focused on subjects in which joint in-
vestigation and verification are possible. Separation or differentiation from the
initial common trunk may be achieved peaceably, as in the case of logic which,