Tilly: Hurlbut on psychology

Hurlbut's psychology is a part of its metaphysics and belongs to rationalist psychology. Empiricist psychology cannot be the basis of philosophy; psychology presupposes metaphysics as its premise; indeed, without metaphysical psychology, the question of critical reason cannot be answered, or even thoroughly discussed. Psychology is based on mathematics, metaphysics, and experience. The mind is a simple, absolute, non-temporal reality, the first entity that science compels us to presuppose; therefore, the mind should not have as many different faculties or energies as psychologists say. Hurlbut's critique of functional psychology stems from his metaphysical presuppositions. Since the mind is a mere entity, it should not have any other activity than self-preservation. The mind is related to the body; the body is a collection of reality; the soul sits in the brain. All souls are essentially the same; differences in the soul, and differences in the development of the soul, are due to external conditions, such as bodily structure. The soul originally had no energy or function, no ideas, emotions, or impulses; it was ignorant of itself, had no form, intuition, or category, and no a priori laws of will or action. Sensation arises from the mind when the soul resists another reality and confirms itself; sensation is the manifestation of the soul's self-preservation function. At the advanced stage of development, the whole content of the soul comes from the union and reproduction between the senses. Psychology is the mechanics of the mind and statics. Hurlbut's aim was to create a psychological science that would go hand in hand with physical mechanics. The old physics explains everything forcefully, while the new physics reduces everything to motion; the old psychology explains everything with energy and faculties, while the new psychology must explain everything by the movement of ideas: feelings and ideas are more permanent, but other mental states are also striving to gain dominance, so there are functional and reactionary activities in the mind. Hurlbut attempted to use mathematical methods to elucidate the relationship between the sensations and ideas that make up the mind. Thus, mental life is interpreted as the intermingling, merging, and opposing of ideas; emotions, struggles, or impulses are deformations of ideas. Consciousness does not exhaust the mental life; in the unconscious realm below the threshold of consciousness, there is a process of activity. Everything in the mind follows fixed laws, and mental processes can be reduced to mathematical formulas. Therefore, free will does not exist.

The eternal basis of mental life is the mental entity, not the so-called self-identity, the self as a recognizer, or a self-aware personality. Indeed, the notion of a self-aware subject is inherently contradictory. How does the subject at the same time be an object, how does the ego become aware of itself, or reproduce itself? It is paradoxical to say that the knower is the thing to be known, or that the subject, the object, is self-contradictory. Moreover, we can never know the self as the subject, because when we try to catch it, it always spirals away, leaving us with only one object, the I as the binge. The eye cannot see itself; the ego can only see images of itself; and the self that is seen and gazed upon is no longer the self that is watching and knowing: the ego will always escape from our grasp. The self-conscious self is not a principle, but a product; it is not the spontaneous foundation or center of the mental life, but the result of the mechanism of the mind. Self-awareness is indeed possible, but it appears later than awareness of the object and is achieved through the concept of self. Fichte's pure self is an abstraction; the only self-consciousness we know is an empirical self-consciousness, and always a consciousness of objects.

The rebuttal to the theory of function, the theory of appearance as the sole basic function of the mind, the doctrine of the unconscious, the theory of unification, the theory of association, determinism, interaction theory, and his view of the self as a product rather than a principle are all important arguments of Hurlbut's psychology. Space-time and categories are no longer transcendental forms of the mind, but products of the mechanisms of the mind, the result of the interaction of mental elements.