Chapter 7 The Three Divisions of Practical Sciences

The three divisions which still lie before us represent Practical Knowledge. Have we a logical right to put them on an equal level with the four large divisions which we have considered so far? Might it not rather be said that all that is knowledge in those practical sciences must find its place somewhere in the theoretical field, and that everything outside of it is not knowledge, but art? It cannot be denied indeed that the logical position of the practical sciences presents serious problems.

That the function of the engineer or of the physician, of the lawyer or of the minister, of the diplomat or of the teacher, contains elements of an art cannot be doubted. They all need not only knowledge, but a certain instinct and power and skill, and their schooling thus demands a training and discipline through imitation which cannot be substituted by mere learning. Yet when it comes to the classification of sciences, it seems very doubtful whether practical sciences have to be acknowledged as special divisions, inasmuch as the factor of art must have been eliminated at the moment they are presented as sciences. The auscultation of the physician certainly demands skill and training, yet this practical activity itself does not enter into the science of medicine as presented in medical writings. As soon as the physician begins to deal with it scientifically, he needs, as does any scholar, not the stethoscope, but the pen. He must formulate judgments; and as soon as he simply describes and analyzes and explains and interprets his stethoscopic experiences, his statements become a system of theoretical ideas.

We can say in general that the science of medicine or of engineering, of jurisprudence or of education, contains, as science, no element of art, but merely theoretical judgments which, as such, can find their place somewhere in the complete systems of the theoretical sciences. If the physician describes a disease, its symptoms, the means of examining them, the remedies, their therapeutical effects, and the prophylaxis, in short, everything which the physician needs for his art, he does not record anything which would not belong to an ideally complete description and explanation of the processes in the human body. In the same way it can be said that if the engineer characterizes the conditions under which an iron bridge will be safe, it is evident that he cannot introduce any facts which would not find their logical place in an ideally complete description of the properties of inorganic nature; and finally, the same is true for the statements of the politician, the jurist, the pedagogue, or the minister. Whatever is said about their art is a theoretical judgment which connects facts of the ideally complete system of theoretical science; in their case the facts of course belong in first line to the realm of the psychological, historical, and normative sciences. There never has been or can be practical advice in the form of words, which is not in principle a statement of facts which belong to the absolute totality of theoretical knowledge. Seen from this point of view, it is evident that all our knowledge is fundamentally theoretical, and that the conception of practical knowledge is logically unprecise.

But the opposite point of view might also be taken. It might be said that after all every kind of knowledge is practical, and our own deduction of the meaning of science might be said to suggest such interpretation. We acknowledged at the outset that the so-called theoretical knowledge is by no means a passive mirror picture of an independent outside world; but that in every judgment real experience is remoulded and reshaped in the service of certain purposes of will. Here lies the true core of that growing popular philosophy of to-day which, under the name of pragmatism, or under other titles, mingles the purposive character of our knowledge and the evolutionary theories of modern biology in the vague notion that men created knowledge because the biological struggle for existence led to such views of the world; and that we call true that correlation of our experiences which has approved itself through its harmony with the phylogenetic development. Certainly we must reject such circle philosophies. We must see clearly that the whole conception of a biological development and of a struggle of organisms is itself only a part of our construction of causal knowledge. We must have knowledge to conceive ourselves as products of a phylogenetic history, and thus cannot deduce from it the fact, and, still less, the justification of knowledge. Yet one element of this theory remains valuable: knowledge is indeed a purposive activity, a reconstruction of the world in the service of ideals of the will. We have thus from one side the suggestion that all knowledge is merely theoretical, from the other side the claim that all knowledge is practical activity. It seems as if both sides might agree that it is superfluous and unjustified to make a demarcation line through the field of knowledge and to separate two sorts of knowledge, theoretical and practical. For both theories demand that all knowledge be of one kind, and they disagree only as to whether we ought to call it all theoretical or all practical.

Yet the true situation is not characterized by such an antithesis. If we say that all knowledge is ultimately practical, we are speaking from an epistemological point of view, inasmuch as we take it then as a reconstruction of the world through the purposive activity of the over-individual subject. On the other hand it is an empirical point of view from which ultimately all knowledge, that of the physician and engineer and lawyer, as well as that of the astronomer, appears theoretical. But this antithesis can, therefore, not decide the further empirical question, whether or not in the midst of theoretical knowledge two kinds of sciences may be discriminated, of which the one refers to empirical practical purposes and the other not. Such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the epistemological problem of pragmatism; it would be strictly non-philosophical, just as the separation of chemistry into organic and inorganic chemistry. This empirical question is indeed to be answered in the affirmative. If we ask what causes bring about a certain effect, for the sake of a practical purpose of ours,-for instance, the curing a patient of disease,-no one can state facts which are not in principle to be included in the complete system of physical causes and effects and thus in the system of physical sciences. And yet it may well be that the physical sciences, as such, have not the slightest reason to mention the effect of that special drug on that special pathological alteration of the tissues of the organism. The descriptions and explanations of science are not a mere heaping up of material, but a steady selection in the interest of the special aim of the science. No physical science describes every special pebble on the beach; no historical science deals with the chance happenings in the daily life of any member of the crowd. And we already well know the point of view from which the selection is to be performed. We want to know in the physical and psychical sciences whatever is involved in the object of our experience, and in the historical and normative sciences whatever is involved in the demands which reach our will. But whether we have to do with the objects or with the demands, in both cases we have systems before us which are determined only by the objects or demands themselves, without any relation to our individual will and our own practical activity. Theoretically, of course, our will, our activity, our organism, our personality is included in the complete system; and if we knew absolutely everything of the empirical effects of the object or of the consequences of these demands, we should find among them their relation to our individual interests; but that relation would be but one chance case among innumerable others, and the sciences would not have the slightest interest in giving any attention to that particular case. Thus if our knowledge of chemical substances were complete, we should certainly have to know theoretically that a few grains of antipyrine introduced into the organism have an influence on those brain centres which regulate the temperature of the human body. Yet if the chemist does not share the interest of the physician who wants to fight a fever, he would have hardly any reason for examining this particular relation, as it hardly throws light on the chemical constitution as such. In this way we might say in general that the relation of the world to us as acting individuals is in principle contained in the total system of the relations of our world of experience, but has a strictly accidental place there and can never be in itself a centre around which the scientific data are clustered, and science will hardly have an interest in giving any attention to its details.

This relation of the world, the physical, the psychical, the historical, and the normative world, to our individual, practical purposes can, however, indeed become the centre of scientific interest, and it is evident that the whole inquiry receives thereupon a perfectly new direction which demands not only a completely new grouping of facts and relations, but also a very different shading in elaboration. As long as the purpose was to understand the world without relation to our individual aims, science had to gather endless details which are for us now quite indifferent, as they do not touch our aims; and in other respects science was satisfied with broad generalizations and abstractions where we have now to examine the most minute details. In short, the shifting of the centre of gravity creates perfectly new sciences which must be distinguished; and if we call them again theoretical and practical sciences, it is clear that this difference has then no longer anything to do with the philosophical problems from which we started.

The term practical may be preferable to the other term which is sometimes used: Applied Science. If we construct the antithesis of theoretical and applied science, the underlying idea is clearly that we have to do on the practical side with a discipline which teaches how to apply a science which logically exists as such beforehand. Engineering, for instance, is an applied science because it applies the science of physics; but this is not really our deepest meaning here. Our practical sciences are not meant as mere applications of theoretical sciences. They are logically somewhat degraded if they are treated in such a way. Their real logical meaning comes out only if they are acknowledged as self-dependent sciences whose material is differentiated from that of the theoretical sciences by the different point of view and purpose. They are methodologically perfectly independent, and the fact that a large part or theoretically even everything of their teaching overlaps the teaching of certain theoretical sciences ought not to have any influence on their logical standing. The practical sciences could be conceived as completely self-dependent, without the existence of any so-called theoretical sciences; that is, the relations of the world of experience to our individual aims might be brought into complete systems without working out in principle the system of independent experience. We might have a science of engineering without acknowledging an independent science of theoretical physics besides it. To be sure, such a science of engineering would finally develop itself into a system which would contain very much that might just as well be called theoretical physics; yet all would be held together by the point of view of the engineer, and that part of theoretical physics which the engineer applies might just as well be considered as depracticalized engineering. If this logical self-dependence of the practical science holds true even for such technological disciplines, it is still more evident that it would cripple the meaning and independent character of jurisprudence and social science, or of pedagogy and theology, to treat them simply as applied sciences, that is, as applications of theoretical science.

This point of view determines, also, of course, the classification of the Practical Sciences. If they were really merely applied sciences it would be most natural to group them according to the classification of the theoretical sciences which are to be applied. We should then have applied physical sciences, applied psychological sciences, applied historical sciences, and applied normative sciences. Yet even from the standpoint of practice, we should come at once into difficulties, and indeed much of the superficiality of practical sciences to-day results from the hasty tendency to consider them as applied sciences only, and thus to be determined by the points of view of the theoretical discipline which is to be applied. Then, for instance, pedagogy becomes simply applied psychology, and the psychological point of view is substituted for the educational one. Pedagogy then becomes simply a selection of those chapters in psychology which deal with the mental functions of the child. Yet as soon as we really take the teachers' point of view, we understand at once that it is utterly artificial to substitute the categories of the psychologist for those of immediate practical will-relations and to consider the child in the class-room as a causal system of psycho-physical elements instead of a personality which is teleologically to be interpreted, and whose aims are not to be connected with causal effects but with over-individual attitudes. In this way the historical relation and the normative relation have to play at least as important a r?le in the pedagogical system as the psycho-physical relation, and we might quite as well call education applied history and applied ethics.

Almost every practical science can be shown in this way to apply a number of theoretical sciences; it synthesizes them to a new unity. But better, we ought to say, that it is a unity in itself from the start, and that it only overlaps with a number of theoretical sciences. If we want to classify the practical sciences, we have thus only the one logical principle at our disposal: we must classify them in accordance with the group of human individual aims which control those different disciplines. If all practical sciences deal with the relation of the world of experience to our individual practical ends, the classes of those ends are the classes of our practical sciences, whatever combinations of applied theoretical sciences may enter into the group. Of course a special classification of these aims must remain somewhat arbitrary; yet it may seem most natural to separate three large divisions. We called them the Utilitarian Sciences, the Sciences of Social Regulation, and the Sciences of Social Culture. Utilitarian we may call those sciences in which our practical aim refers to the world of things; it may be the technical mastery of nature or the treatment of the body, or the production, distribution, and consumption of the means of support. The second division contains everything in which our aim does not refer to the thing, but to the other subjects; here naturally belong the sciences which deal with the political, legal, and social purposes. And finally the sciences of culture refer to those aims in which not the individual relations to things or to other subjects are in the foreground, but the purposes of the teleological development of the subject himself; education, art, and religion here find their place. It is, of course, evident that the material of these sciences frequently allows the emphasis of different aspects. For instance, education, which aims primarily at self-development, might quite well be considered also from the point of view of social regulation; and still more naturally could the utilitarian sciences of the economic distribution of the means of support be considered from this point of view. Yet a classification of sciences nowhere suggests by its boundary lines that there are no relations and connections between the different parts; on the contrary, it is just the manifoldness of these given connections which makes it so desirable to become conscious of the principles involved, and thus to emphasize logical demarcation lines, which of course must be obliterated as soon as any material is to be treated from every possible point of view. It may thus well be that, for instance, a certain industrial problem could be treated in the Normative Sciences from the point of view of ethics; in the Historical Sciences, from the point of view of the history of economic institutions; in the Physical Sciences, from the point of view of physics or chemistry; in the Mental Sciences, from the point of view of sociology; in the Utilitarian Sciences, from the point of view of medicine or of engineering, or of commerce and transportation; and finally in the Regulative Sciences, from the point of view of political administration, or in the Social Sciences, from the standpoint of the urban community, and so on. The more complex the relations are, the more necessary is it to make clean distinctions between the different logical purposes with which the scientific inquiries start. Practical life may demand a combination of historical, sociological, psychological, economical, social, and ethical considerations; but not one of these sciences can contribute its best if the consciousness of these differences is lost and the deliberate combination is replaced by a vague mixture of the problems.