ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the distinction between empirical psychology and phenomenological epistemology. Metaphysical solutions, such as the ingenious one of psychophysical parallelism proposed by Leibniz, seem ridiculous in the eyes of modem man as they fly in the face of common experience and make a mockery out of life. If there is no true connection between the two realms at all as Leibniz suggested, but only a concomitant variation, the lives of men seem a shamble of meaningless events. Any metaphysical solution that reduces one of the terms to some form of an illusion makes a mockery either out of science on the one hand or the demands of the spirit on the other. If both are reduced to forms of an illusion, then both scientific needs and spiritual needs are again mocked and the problems that beset everyday life have been offered no form of a solution.
