b. OBSERVATION OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS IN ITS PURE FORM AND IN ITS RELATION TO EXTERNAL REALITY-LOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS

[[Translator's comments: Observation can be directed upon the self-conscious process of mind in two ways: it may consider the mind's thinking relation to reality, and it may consider the mind's active or biotic relation to reality. The result of observation here, as in the foregoing cases, finds expression in a number of laws, which it "frames". The "laws" in the first case are "laws of thought" or connected logical laws: in the latter case we have laws of psychic events, "psychological" laws.

The analysis in this section shows the inadequacy of observation as such to deal with its material in both cases. It fails in the first case because (1) "laws of thought" have no meaning apart from the reality with which thought is necessarily concerned; laws of thought are laws of "thinking", and thinking is both form and content: (2) observation gives each law an absolute being of its own, as if it were detached from the unity of self-consciousness, whereas this unity is the fundamental principle of each and al the laws, which only exist in and by the single process of that unity. Hence a type of logic confined to "observing" laws of thought is necessarily untrue. Observation again fails in the second case because it is impossible to separate mind from its total environment. Observational or empirical psychology therefore is incapable of giving an adequate account of mind the constitution of the environment enters into and in part determines the constitution of the psychic events, and the latter cannot be explained even as events without interpreting the former at the same time.]]