Not long ago there went
abroad a certain doctrine called Positivism, which did much good and
much ill. And among other ills that it wrought was the introduction of a
method of analysis whereby facts were pulverized, reduced to a dust of
facts. Most of the facts labelled as such by Positivism were really only
fragments of facts. In psychology its action was harmful. There were
even scholastics meddling in literature--I will not say philosophers
meddling in poetry, because poet and philosopher are twin brothers, if
not even one and the same--who carried this Positivist psychological
analysis into the novel and the drama, where the main business is to
give act and motion to concrete men, men of flesh and bone, and by dint
of studying states of consciousness, consciousness itself disappeared.
The same thing happened to them which is said often to happen in the
examination and testing of certain complicated, organic, living chemical
compounds, when the reagents destroy the very body which it was proposed
to examine and all that is obtained is the products of its
decomposition.
Taking as their starting-point the evident fact that contradictory
states pass through our consciousness, they did not succeed in
envisaging consciousness itself, the "I." To ask a man about his "I" is
like asking him about his body. And note that in speaking of the "I," I
speak of the concrete and personal "I," not of the "I" of Fichte, but of
Fichte himself, the man Fichte.
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