Abstract

This brief book surveys the theories of four German psychologists/philosophers, Wolff, Tetens, Wundt, and Brentano, in order to describe the transition in rationalistic psychology from a static to a dynamic concept of thought. Rappard presents this notion as a valuable corrective to the positivistic approach which has tended to predominate: for "sensory immediacy," the direct evidence of the data of the senses, these thinkers substitute "nonsensory immediacy," the direct evidence of the primordial activity of knowledge, which is only later differentiated into inner and outer, self and other. This immediacy is self-knowledge, since the primary object of knowledge must first be the activity of knowing itself, prior to the separation from it of "activity centre" and "activity object". This nonsensory immediacy is in fact identified with the cogito, though it is not clear why the subject-side of such an original unity should thus be stressed.