1072 EDMUNDHUSSERL
realm of a priori.There will be no psychical existence whose “style” we shall not know.
Psychological phenomenology must rest upon eidetic phenomenology.
The phenomenology of the perception of bodies, for example, will not be an
account of actually occurring perceptions, or those which may be expected to occur, but
of that invariable “structure,” apart from which no perception of a body, single or
prolonged, can be conceived. The phenomenological reduction reveals the phenomena
of actual internal experience; the eidetic reduction, the essential forms constraining
psychical existence.
Men now demand that empirical psychology shall conform to the exactness
required by modern natural science. Natural science, which was once a vague, inductive
empiric, owes its modern character to the a priorisystem of forms, nature as it is “con-
ceivable,” which its separate disciplines, pure geometry, laws of motion, time, etc., have
contributed. The methods of natural science and psychology are quite distinct, but the
latter, like the former, can only reach “exactness” by a rationalization of the “essential.”
The psycho-physical has an a prioriwhich must be learned by any complete psy-
chology, this a prioriis not phenomenological, for it depends no less upon the essence
of physical, or more particularly organic nature.
II. TRANSCENDENTALPHENOMENOLOGY
Transcendental philosophy may be said to have originated in Descartes, and phenome-
nological psychology in Locke, Berkeley and Hume, although the latter did not grow up
primarily as a method or discipline to serve psychology, but to contribute to the solution
of the transcendental problematic which Descartes had posed. The theme propounded
in the Meditationswas still dominant in a philosophy which it had initiated. All reality,
so it ran, and the whole of the world which we perceive as existent, may be said to exist
only as the content of our own representations, judged in our judgments, or, at best,
proved by our own knowing. There lay impulse enough to rouse all the legitimate and
illegitimate problems of transcendence, which we know. Descartes’ “Doubting” first
disclosed “transcendental subjectivity,” and his “Ego Cogito” was its first conceptual
handling. But the Cartesian transcendental “Mens” became the “Human Mind,” which
Locke undertook to explore; and Locke’s exploration turned into a psychology of the
internal experience. And since Locke thought his psychology could embrace the tran-
scendental problems, in whose interest he had begun his work, he became the founder
of a false psychologistical philosophy which has persisted because men have not
analysed their concept of “subjective” into its twofold significance. Once the transcen-
dental problem is fairly stated, the ambiguity of the sense of the “subjective” becomes
apparent, and establishes the phenomenological psychology to deal with its one mean-
ing, and the transcendental phenomenology with its other.
Phenomenological psychology has been given the priority in this article, partly
because it forms a convenient stepping-stone to the philosophy and partly because it is
nearer to the common attitude than is the transcendental. Psychology, both in its eiditic
and empirical disciplines, is a “positive” science, promoted in the “natural attitude” with
the world before it for the ground of all its themes, while transcendental experience is
difficult to realize because it is “supreme” and entirely “unworldly.” Phenomenological
psychology, although comparatively new, and completely new as far as it uses intentional