Update for 76881HEADmain

50 files changed, 58198 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/76881-0.txt b/76881-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..012bf51
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,27479 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76881 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                                THE MONIST
+
+                                     A
+                            QUARTERLY MAGAZINE
+
+                                 VOL. III.
+
+                                 CHICAGO:
+                       THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
+                                 1892-1893
+
+                             COPYRIGHT, 1893,
+                                    BY
+                       THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.
+
+
+                                                                      PAGE
+
+                                ARTICLES.
+
+  Auta, The Doctrine of. By C. Lloyd Morgan                            161
+
+  Cruelty and Pity in Woman. By Guillaume Ferrero                      220
+
+  Doctrine of Auta, The. By C. Lloyd Morgan                            161
+
+  Education, Nationalisation of, and the Universities. By H. von
+    Holst                                                              493
+
+  Evolutionary Love. By Charles S. Peirce                              176
+
+  Foundations of Theism, The. By E. D. Cope                            623
+
+  Founder of Tychism, The: His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.
+    Editor                                                             571
+
+  Fourth Dimension, The By Hermann Schubert                            402
+
+  Hindu Monism. By Richard Garbe                                        51
+
+  Insects, The Nervous Ganglia of. By Alfred Binet                      35
+
+  Intuition and Reason. By Christine Ladd Franklin                     211
+
+  Issues of “Synechism,” The. By G. M. McCrie                          380
+
+  Love, Evolutionary. By Charles S. Peirce                             176
+
+  Man’s Glassy Essence. By Charles S. Peirce                             1
+
+  Meaning and Metaphor. By Lady Victoria Welby                         510
+
+  Mental Mummies. By Felix L. Oswald                                    30
+
+  Modern Science, Religion and. By F. Jodl                             329
+
+  Monism, Hindu. By Richard Garbe                                       51
+
+  Nationalisation of Education and the Universities. By H. von Holst   493
+
+  Necessitarians, Reply to the. By Charles S. Peirce                   526
+
+  Necessity, The Idea of: Its Basis and Its Scope. Editor               68
+
+  Necessity, The Superstition of. By John Dewey                        362
+
+  Panbiotism, Panpsychism and. Editor                                  234
+
+  Panpsychism and Panbiotism. Editor                                   234
+
+  Reason, Intuition and. By Christine Ladd Franklin                    211
+
+  Religion and Modern Science. By F. Jodl                              329
+
+  Religion of Science, The. Editor                                     352
+
+  Renan: A Discourse Given at South Place Chapel, London. By Moncure
+    D. Conway                                                          201
+
+  Reply to the Necessitarians. By Charles S. Peirce                    526
+
+  Science, The Religion of. Editor                                     352
+
+  Superstition of Necessity, The. By John Dewey                        362
+
+  “Synechism,” The Issues of. By G. M. McCrie                          380
+
+  Theism, The Foundations of. By E. D. Cope                            623
+
+  Thought in America, The Future of. By E. D. Cope                      23
+
+  Tychism, The Founder of: His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.
+    Editor                                                             571
+
+  Universities, Nationalisation of Education and the. By H. von Holst  493
+
+  Woman, Cruelty and Pity in. By Guillaume Ferrero                     220
+
+                         LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+  France. By Lucien Arréat                                        111, 258
+
+  France, The Religious Outlook in. By Theodore Stanton                450
+
+  Germany. By Christian Ufer                                      264, 640
+
+  New French Books. By Lucien Arréat                                   456
+
+  Recent Evolutionary Studies in Germany. By Carus Sterne               97
+
+                       CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
+
+  A Letter from Mr. Herbert Spencer                                    272
+
+  Comte and Turgot. By Louis Belrose, Jr.                              118
+
+  Is Monism Arbitrary? Editor                                          124
+
+  James’s Psychology, Observations on Some Points of. By W. L.
+    Worcester                                                          285
+
+  Logic as Relation Lore. By F. C. Russell                             272
+
+  Mathematics a Description of Operations with Pure Forms. Editor      133
+
+  Reply to a Critic, A. By Edward T. Dixon                             127
+
+  Sensation, Prof. Ernst Mach’s Term                                   298
+
+  Some Remarks Upon Professor James’s Discussion of Attention. By
+    Hiram M. Stanley                                                   122
+
+                              BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+  _Acht Abhandlungen, Herrn Professor Dr. Karl Ludwig Michelet zum
+    90. Geburtstag_                                                    478
+
+  Arréat, Lucien. _Psychologie du Peintre_                             142
+
+  Baets, l’Abbé Maurice de. _L’école d’anthropologie criminelle_       649
+
+  Becker, George F. _Finite Homogeneous Strain, Flow, and Rupture
+    of Rocks_                                                          480
+
+  Berendt, M. and J. Friedländer. _Der Pessimismus im Lichte einer
+    höheren Weltauffassung_                                            477
+
+  Binet, Alfred. _Les Altérations de la Personnalité_                  145
+
+  Blackwell, Antoinette Brown. _The Philosophy of Individuality, or
+    the One and the Many_                                              649
+
+  Cattell, James McKeen, and George Stuart Fullerton. _On the
+    Perception of Small Differences_                                   141
+
+  Delbœuf, J. _L’Hypnotisme devant les Chambres Legislatives Belges_   318
+
+  Dessoir, Max. _Ueber den Hautsinn_                                   319
+
+  Dixon, Edward T. _An Essay on Reasoning_                             138
+
+  Dreher, Eugen. _Der Materialismus, eine Verirrung des menschlichen
+    Geistes, widerlegt durch eine zeitgemässe Weltanschauung_          479
+
+  Edinger, L. _Vergleichend-entwickelungsgeschichtliche und
+    anatomische Studien im Bereiche der Hirnanatomie. 3.
+    Riechapparat und Ammonshorn_                                       648
+
+  Engel, Gustav. _Die Philosophie und die sociale Frage_               478
+
+  Eucken, Rudolf. _Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart_                    650
+
+  Friedländer, J. and M. Berendt. _Der Pessimismus im Lichte einer
+    höheren Weltauffassung_                                            477
+
+  Fullerton, George Stuart, and James McKeen Cattel. _On the
+    Perception of Small Differences_                                   141
+
+  George, Henry. _A Perplexed Philosopher_                             482
+
+  Gutberlet, Constantin. _Die Willensfreiheit und ihre Gegner_         646
+
+  Hiller, H. Croft. _Against Dogma and Free-Will_                      649
+
+  Hirth, Georges. _Physiologie de L’Art_                               143
+
+  Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. _Hand-Commentar zum neuen Testament.
+    IV. Evangelium, Briefe und Offenbarung des Johannes_               643
+
+  Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. _Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen
+    Einleitung in das neue Testament_                                  150
+
+  Janet, Pierre. _État mental des hystériques les stigmates mentaux_   648
+
+  Joël, Karl. _Der echte und der Xenophontische Sokrates_              480
+
+  Jones, E. E. Constance. _An Introduction to General Logic_           314
+
+  Lindemann, Ferdinand. _Vorlesungen über Geometrie_                   314
+
+  Lotze, Hermann. _Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion_               140
+
+  Lubbock, John. _The Beauties of Nature_                              323
+
+  Meynert, Theodore. _Sammlung von populär-wissenschaftlichen
+    Vorträgen über den Bau und die Leistungen des Gehirns_             151
+
+  Mik, J. _Graber’s Leitfaden der Zoologie für die oberen Classen
+    der Mittelschulen_                                                 322
+
+  Münsterberg, Hugo. _Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie_        304
+
+  Oelzelt-Newin, Anton. _Ueber sittliche Dispositionen_                323
+
+  Offner, Max. _Ueber die Grundformen der Vorstellungsverbindung_      479
+
+  Paszkowski, Wilhelm. _Wie steht es jetzt mit der Philosophie, und
+    was haben wir von ihr zu hoffen?_                                  478
+
+  Paulsen, Friedrich. _Einleitung in die Philosophie_                  466
+
+  Rolfes, Eugen. _Die Aristotelische Auffassung vom Verhältnisse
+    Gottes zur Welt und zum Menschen_                                  311
+
+  Royce, Josiah. _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_                     306
+
+  Royer, Clémence. _Recherches d’optique physiologique et physique_    320
+
+  Salter, William M. _First Steps in Philosophy_                       470
+
+  Schellwien, Robert. _Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche_            311
+
+  Schmidt, Johannes. _Die Urheimath der Indogermanen und das
+    europäische Zahlsystem_                                            149
+
+  Schmidkunz, Hans. _Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfasslicher Darstellung_  317
+
+  Sharp, Frank Chapman. _The Æsthetic Element in Morality_             650
+
+  Sidgwick, Alfred. _Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs_         312
+
+  Spencer, Herbert. _Social Statics and Justice_                       136
+
+  Sterne, Carus. _Natur und Kunst_                                     323
+
+  Topinard, Paul. _L’Homme dans la Nature_                             146
+
+  Topinard, Paul. _L’Anthropologie du Bengale_                         322
+
+  Tufts, James Hayden. _The Sources of Development of Kant’s
+    Teleology_                                                         312
+
+  Verworn, Max. _Die Bewegung der lebendigen Substanz_                 321
+
+  Williams, C. M. _A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on
+    the Theory of Evolution_                                           474
+
+  Wundt, Wilhelm. _Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele_      300
+
+  Wundt, Wilhelm. _Hypnotismus und Suggestion_                         315
+
+  Wundt, Wilhelm. _Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie_          648
+
+  PERIODICALS                          153-160; 325-328; 488-492; 651-658.
+
+  APPENDIX.
+
+  Plates belonging to the article “The Nervous Ganglia of Insects.”
+    (In No. 1 of this volume.)
+
+
+
+
+                VOL. III.      OCTOBER, 1892.      NO. 1.
+
+                                THE MONIST.
+
+
+
+
+MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE.
+
+
+In _The Monist_ for January, 1891, I tried to show what conceptions
+ought to form the brick and mortar of a philosophical system. Chief
+among these was that of absolute chance for which I argued again in last
+April’s number.[1] In July, I applied another fundamental idea, that of
+continuity, to the law of mind. Next in order, I have to elucidate, from
+the point of view chosen, the relation between the psychical and physical
+aspects of a substance.
+
+The first step towards this ought, I think, to be the framing of
+a molecular theory of protoplasm. But before doing that, it seems
+indispensable to glance at the constitution of matter, in general. We
+shall, thus, unavoidably make a long detour; but, after all, our pains
+will not be wasted, for the problems of the papers that are to follow in
+the series will call for the consideration of the same question.
+
+All physicists are rightly agreed the evidence is overwhelming which
+shows all sensible matter is composed of molecules in swift motion and
+exerting enormous mutual attractions, and perhaps repulsions, too.
+Even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who wishes to explode action at
+a distance and return to the doctrine of a plenum, not only speaks of
+molecules, but undertakes to assign definite magnitudes to them. The
+brilliant Judge Stallo, a man who did not always rightly estimate his
+own qualities in accepting tasks for himself, declared war upon the
+atomic theory in a book well worth careful perusal. To the old arguments
+in favor of atoms which he found in Fechner’s monograph, he was able to
+make replies of considerable force, though they were not sufficient to
+destroy those arguments. But against modern proofs he made no headway
+at all. These set out from the mechanical theory of heat. Rumford’s
+experiments showed that heat is not a substance. Joule demonstrated that
+it was a form of energy. The heating of gases under constant volume, and
+other facts instanced by Rankine, proved that it could not be an energy
+of strain. This drove physicists to the conclusion that it was a mode of
+motion. Then it was remembered that John Bernoulli had shown that the
+pressure of gases could be accounted for by assuming their molecules to
+be moving uniformly in rectilinear paths. The same hypothesis was now
+seen to account for Avogadro’s law, that in equal volumes of different
+kinds of gases exposed to the same pressure and temperature are contained
+equal numbers of molecules. Shortly after, it was found to account for
+the laws of diffusion and viscosity of gases, and for the numerical
+relation between these properties. Finally, Crookes’s radiometer
+furnished the last link in the strongest chain of evidence which supports
+any physical hypothesis.
+
+Such being the constitution of gases, liquids must clearly be bodies in
+which the molecules wander in curvilinear paths, while in solids they
+move in orbits or quasi-orbits. (See my definition _solid_ II, 1, in the
+“Century Dictionary.”)
+
+We see that the resistance to compression and to interpenetration between
+sensible bodies is, by one of the prime propositions of the molecular
+theory, due in large measure to the kinetical energy of the particles,
+which must be supposed to be quite remote from one another, on the
+average, even in solids. This resistance is no doubt influenced by finite
+attractions and repulsions between the molecules. All the impenetrability
+of bodies which we can observe is, therefore, a limited impenetrability
+due to kinetic and positional energy. This being the case, we have
+no logical right to suppose that absolute impenetrability, or the
+exclusive occupancy of space, belongs to molecules or to atoms. It is
+an unwarranted hypothesis, not a _vera causa_.[2] Unless we are to give
+up the theory of energy, finite positional attractions and repulsions
+between molecules must be admitted. Absolute impenetrability would amount
+to an infinite repulsion at a certain distance. No analogy of known
+phenomena exists to excuse such a wanton violation of the principle of
+continuity as such a hypothesis is. In short, we are logically bound
+to adopt the Boscovichian idea that an atom is simply a distribution
+of component potential energy throughout space, (this distribution
+being absolutely rigid,) combined with inertia. The potential energy
+belongs to two molecules, and is to be conceived as different between
+molecules _A_ and _B_ from what it is between molecules _A_ and _C_. The
+distribution of energy is not necessarily spherical. Nay, a molecule may
+conceivably have more than one centre; it may even have a central curve,
+returning into itself. But I do not think there are any observed facts
+pointing to such multiple or linear centres. On the other hand, many
+facts relating to crystals, especially those observed by Voigt,[3] go to
+show that the distribution of energy is harmonical but not concentric.
+We can easily calculate the forces which such atoms must exert upon one
+another by considering[4] that they are equivalent to aggregations of
+pairs of electrically positive and negative points infinitely near to one
+another. About such an atom there would be regions of positive and of
+negative potential, and the number and distribution of such regions would
+determine the valency of the atom, a number which it is easy to see would
+in many cases be somewhat indeterminate. I must not dwell further upon
+this hypothesis, at present. In another paper, its consequences will be
+further considered.
+
+I cannot assume that the students of philosophy who read this magazine
+are thoroughly versed in modern molecular physics, and therefore it
+is proper to mention that the governing principle in this branch of
+science is Clausius’s law of the virial. I will first state the law,
+and then explain the peculiar terms of the statement. This statement is
+that the total kinetic energy of the particles of a system in stationary
+motion is equal to the total virial. By a _system_ is here meant a
+number of particles acting upon one another.[5] Stationary motion is a
+quasi-orbital motion among a system of particles so that none of them are
+removed to indefinitely great distances nor acquire indefinitely great
+velocities. The kinetic energy of a particle is the work which would
+be required to bring it to rest, independently of any forces which may
+be acting upon it. The virial of a pair of particles is half the work
+which the force which actually operates between them would do if, being
+independent of the distance, it were to bring them together. The equation
+of the virial is
+
+    (Transcriber’s Note: Italics have been removed from the
+    formulæ for readability.)
+
+    ½Σmv² = ½ΣΣRr.
+
+Here _m_ is the mass of a particle, _v_ its velocity, _R_ is the
+attraction between two particles, and _r_ is the distance between them.
+The sign Σ on the left hand side signifies that the values of _mv_²
+are to be summed for all the particles, and ΣΣ on the right hand side
+signifies that the values of _Rr_ are to be summed for all the pairs of
+particles. If there is an external pressure _P_ (as from the atmosphere)
+upon the system, and the volume of vacant space within the boundary of
+that pressure is _V_, then the virial must be understood as including
+³⁄₂_PV_, so that the equation is
+
+    ½Σmv² = ³⁄₂PV + ½ΣΣRr.
+
+There is strong (if not demonstrative) reason for thinking that
+the temperature of any body above the absolute zero (-273° C.), is
+proportional to the average kinetic energy of its molecules, or say _aθ_,
+where _a_ is a constant and _θ_ is the absolute temperature. Hence, we
+may write the equation
+
+    aθ = ½m̅v̅²̅ = ³⁄₂PV̅ + ½ΣR̅r̅
+
+where the heavy lines above the different expressions signify that the
+average values for single molecules are to be taken. In 1872, a student
+in the University of Leyden, Van der Waals, propounded in his thesis for
+the doctorate a specialisation of the equation of the virial which has
+since attracted great attention. Namely, he writes it
+
+    aθ = (P + (c⁄V²))(V-b).
+
+The quantity _b_ is the volume of a molecule, which he supposes to
+be an impenetrable body, and all the virtue of the equation lies in
+this term which makes the equation a cubic in _V_, which is required
+to account for the shape of certain isothermal curves.[6] But if the
+idea of an impenetrable atom is illogical, that of an impenetrable
+molecule is almost absurd. For the kinetical theory of matter teaches
+us that a molecule is like a solar system or star-cluster in miniature.
+Unless we suppose that in all heating of gases and vapors internal
+work is performed upon the molecules, implying that their atoms are at
+considerable distances, the whole kinetical theory of gases falls to the
+ground. As for the term added to _P_, there is no more than a partial
+and roughly approximative justification for it. Namely, let us imagine
+two spheres described round a particle as their centre, the radius of
+the larger being so great as to include all the particles whose action
+upon the centre is sensible, while the radius of the smaller is so large
+that a good many molecules are included within it. The possibility of
+describing such a sphere as the outer one implies that the attraction
+of the particles varies at some distances inversely as some higher
+power of the distance than the cube, or, to speak more clearly, that
+the attraction multiplied by the cube of the distance diminishes as the
+distance increases; for the number of particles at a given distance
+from any one particle is proportionate to the square of that distance
+and each of these gives a term of the virial which is the product of
+the attraction into the distance. Consequently unless the attraction
+multiplied by the cube of the distance diminished so rapidly with the
+distance as soon to become insensible, no such outer sphere as is
+supposed could be described. However, ordinary experience shows that such
+a sphere is possible; and consequently there must be distances at which
+the attraction does thus rapidly diminish as the distance increases. The
+two spheres, then, being so drawn, consider the virial of the central
+particle due to the particles between them. Let the density of the
+substance be increased, say, _N_ times. Then, for every term, _Rr_, of
+the virial before the condensation, there will be _N_ terms of the same
+magnitude after the condensation. Hence, the virial of each particle will
+be proportional to the density, and the equation of the virial becomes
+
+    aθ = PV̅ + c⁄V̅.
+
+This omits the virial within the inner sphere, the radius of which
+is so taken that within that distance the number of particles is
+not proportional to the number in a large sphere. For Van der Waals
+this radius is the diameter of his hard molecules, which assumption
+gives his equation. But it is plain that the attraction between the
+molecules must to a certain extent modify their distribution, unless
+some peculiar conditions are fulfilled. The equation of Van der Waals
+can be approximately true therefore only for a gas. In a solid or
+liquid condition, in which the removal of a small amount of pressure
+has little effect on the volume, and where consequently the virial must
+be much greater than _PV̅_, the virial must increase with the volume.
+For suppose we had a substance in a critical condition in which an
+increase of the volume would diminish the virial more than it would
+increase ³⁄₂_PV̅_. If we were forcibly to diminish the volume of such
+a substance, when the temperature became equalised, the pressure which
+it could withstand would be less than before, and it would be still
+further condensed, and this would go on indefinitely until a condition
+were reached in which an increase of volume would increase ³⁄₂_PV̅_ more
+than it would decrease the virial. In the case of solids, at least, _P_
+may be zero; so that the state reached would be one in which the virial
+increases with the volume, or the attraction between the particles does
+not increase so fast with a diminution of their distance as it would if
+the attraction were inversely as the distance.
+
+Almost contemporaneously with Van der Waals’s paper, another remarkable
+thesis for the doctorate was presented at Paris by Amagat. It related
+to the elasticity and expansion of gases, and to this subject the
+superb experimenter, its author, has devoted his whole subsequent life.
+Especially interesting are his observations of the volumes of ethylene
+and of carbonic acid at temperatures from 20° to 100° and at pressures
+ranging from an ounce to 5000 pounds to the square inch. As soon as
+Amagat had obtained these results, he remarked that the “coefficient of
+expansion at constant volume,” as it is absurdly called, that is, the
+rate of variation of the pressure with the temperature, was very nearly
+constant for each volume. This accords with the equation of the virial,
+which gives
+
+    dp⁄dθ = a⁄V̅ - dΣR̅r̅⁄dθ.
+
+Now, the virial must be nearly independent of the temperature, and
+therefore the last term almost disappears. The virial would not be
+quite independent of the temperature, because if the temperature (i.
+e. the square of the velocity of the molecules) is lowered, and the
+pressure correspondingly lowered, so as to make the volume the same,
+the attractions of the molecules will have more time to produce their
+effects, and consequently, the pairs of molecules the closest together
+will be held together longer and closer; so that the virial will
+generally be increased by a decrease of temperature. Now, Amagat’s
+experiments do show an excessively minute effect of this sort, at least,
+when the volumes are not too small. However, the observations are well
+enough satisfied by assuming the “coefficient of expansion at constant
+volume” to consist wholly of the first term, _a_/(_V_). Thus, Amagat’s
+experiments enable us to determine the values of _a_ and thence to
+calculate the virial; and this we find varies for carbonic acid gas
+nearly inversely to (_V_)⁰˙⁹. There is, thus, a rough approximation to
+satisfying Van der Waals’s equation. But the most interesting result of
+Amagat’s experiments, for our purpose at any rate, is that the quantity
+_a_, though nearly constant for any one volume, differs considerably with
+the volume, nearly doubling when the volume is reduced fivefold. This
+can only indicate that the mean kinetic energy of a given mass of the
+gas for a given temperature is greater the more the gas is compressed.
+But the laws of mechanics appear to enjoin that the mean kinetic energy
+of a moving particle shall be constant at any given temperature. The
+only escape from contradiction, then, is to suppose that the mean mass
+of a moving particle diminishes upon the condensation of the gas. In
+other words, many of the molecules are dissociated, or broken up into
+atoms or sub-molecules. The idea that dissociation should be favored
+by diminishing the volume will be pronounced by physicists, at first
+blush, as contrary to all our experience. But it must be remembered
+that the circumstances we are speaking of, that of a gas under fifty
+or more atmospheres pressure, are also unusual. That the “coefficient
+of expansion under constant volume” when multiplied by the volumes
+should increase with a decrement of the volume is also quite contrary
+to ordinary experience; yet it undoubtedly takes place in all gases
+under great pressure. Again, the doctrine of Arrhenius[7] is now
+generally accepted, that the molecular conductivity of an electrolyte is
+proportional to the dissociation of ions. Now the molecular conductivity
+of a fused electrolyte is usually superior to that of a solution. Here is
+a case, then, in which diminution of volume is accompanied by increased
+dissociation.
+
+The truth is that several different kinds of dissociation have to be
+distinguished. In the first place, there is the dissociation of a
+chemical molecule to form chemical molecules under the regular action of
+chemical laws. This may be a double decomposition, as when iodhydric acid
+is dissociated, according to the formula
+
+    HI + HI = HH + II;
+
+or, it may be a simple decomposition, as when pentachloride of phosphorus
+is dissociated according to the formula
+
+    PCl₅ = PCl₃ + ClCl.
+
+All these dissociations require, according to the laws of
+thermochemistry, an elevated temperature. In the second place, there is
+the dissociation of a physically polymerous molecule, that is, of several
+chemical molecules joined by physical attractions. This I am inclined to
+suppose is a common concomitant of the heating of solids and liquids;
+for in these bodies there is no increase of compressibility with the
+temperature at all comparable with the increase of the expansibility.
+But, in the third place, there is the dissociation with which we are now
+concerned, which must be supposed to be a throwing off of unsaturated
+sub-molecules or atoms from the molecule. The molecule may, as I have
+said, be roughly likened to a solar system. As such, molecules are able
+to produce perturbations of one another’s internal motions; and in this
+way a planet, i. e. a sub-molecule, will occasionally get thrown off and
+wander about by itself, till it finds another unsaturated sub-molecule
+with which it can unite. Such dissociation by perturbation will naturally
+be favored by the proximity of the molecules to one another.
+
+Let us now pass to the consideration of that special substance, or
+rather class of substances, whose properties form the chief subject
+of botany and of zoölogy, as truly as those of the silicates form the
+chief subject of mineralogy: I mean the life-slimes, or protoplasm.
+Let us begin by cataloguing the general characters of these slimes.
+They one and all exist in two states of aggregation, a solid or nearly
+solid state and a liquid or nearly liquid state; but they do not pass
+from the former to the latter by ordinary fusion. They are readily
+decomposed by heat, especially in the liquid state; nor will they bear
+any considerable degree of cold. All their vital actions take place at
+temperatures very little below the point of decomposition. This extreme
+instability is one of numerous facts which demonstrate the chemical
+complexity of protoplasm. Every chemist will agree that they are far more
+complicated than the albumens. Now, albumen is estimated to contain in
+each molecule about a thousand atoms; so that it is natural to suppose
+that the protoplasms contain several thousands. We know that while they
+are chiefly composed of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, a large
+number of other elements enter into living bodies in small proportions;
+and it is likely that most of these enter into the composition of
+protoplasms. Now, since the numbers of chemical varieties increase at
+an enormous rate with the number of atoms per molecule, so that there
+are certainly hundreds of thousands of substances whose molecules
+contain twenty atoms or fewer, we may well suppose that the number of
+protoplasmic substances runs into the billions or trillions. Professor
+Cayley has given a mathematical theory of “trees,” with a view of
+throwing a light upon such questions; and in that light the estimate of
+trillions (in the English sense) seems immoderately moderate. It is true
+that an opinion has been emitted, and defended among biologists, that
+there is but one kind of protoplasm; but the observations of biologists,
+themselves, have almost exploded that hypothesis, which from a chemical
+standpoint appears utterly incredible. The anticipation of the chemist
+would decidedly be that enough different chemical substances having
+protoplasmic characters might be formed to account, not only for the
+differences between nerve-slime and muscle-slime, between whale-slime
+and lion-slime, but also for those minuter pervasive variations which
+characterise different breeds and single individuals.
+
+Protoplasm, when quiescent, is, broadly speaking, solid; but when it is
+disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even spontaneously without
+external disturbance, it becomes, broadly speaking, liquid. A moner
+in this state is seen under the microscope to have streams within its
+matter; a slime-mould slowly flows by force of gravity. The liquefaction
+starts from the point of disturbance and spreads through the mass. This
+spreading, however, is not uniform in all directions; on the contrary it
+takes at one time one course, at another another, through the homogeneous
+mass, in a manner that seems a little mysterious. The cause of
+disturbance being removed, these motions gradually (with higher kinds of
+protoplasm, quickly) cease, and the slime returns to its solid condition.
+
+The liquefaction of protoplasm is accompanied by a mechanical
+phenomenon. Namely, some kinds exhibit a tendency to draw themselves
+up into a globular form. This happens particularly with the contents
+of muscle-cells. The prevalent opinion, founded on some of the most
+exquisite experimental investigations that the history of science
+can show, is undoubtedly that the contraction of muscle-cells is due
+to osmotic pressure; and it must be allowed that that is a factor in
+producing the effect. But it does not seem to me that it satisfactorily
+accounts even for the phenomena of muscular contraction; and besides,
+even naked slimes often draw up in the same way. In this case, we seem
+to recognise an increase of the surface-tension. In some cases, too, the
+reverse action takes place, extraordinary pseudopodia being put forth,
+as if the surface-tension were diminished in spots. Indeed, such a slime
+always has a sort of skin, due no doubt to surface-tension, and this
+seems to give way at the point where a pseudopodium is put forth.
+
+Long-continued or frequently repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm
+results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we call
+fatigue. On the other hand repose in this state, if not too much
+prolonged, restores the liquefiability. These are both important
+functions.
+
+The life-slimes have, further, the peculiar property of growing. Crystals
+also grow; their growth, however, consists merely in attracting matter
+like their own from the circumambient fluid. To suppose the growth
+of protoplasm of the same nature, would be to suppose this substance
+to be spontaneously generated in copious supplies wherever food is
+in solution. Certainly, it must be granted that protoplasm is but a
+chemical substance, and that there is no reason why it should not be
+formed synthetically like any other chemical substance. Indeed, Clifford
+has clearly shown that we have overwhelming evidence that it is so
+formed. But to say that such formation is as regular and frequent as the
+assimilation of food is quite another matter. It is more consonant with
+the facts of observation to suppose that assimilated protoplasm is formed
+at the instant of assimilation, under the influence of the protoplasm
+already present. For each slime in its growth preserves its distinctive
+characters with wonderful truth, nerve-slime growing nerve-slime and
+muscle-slime muscle-slime, lion-slime growing lion-slime, and all the
+varieties of breeds and even individual characters being preserved in the
+growth. Now it is too much to suppose there are billions of different
+kinds of protoplasm floating about wherever there is food.
+
+The frequent liquefaction of protoplasm increases its power of
+assimilating food; so much so, indeed, that it is questionable whether in
+the solid form it possesses this power.
+
+The life-slime wastes as well as grows; and this too takes place chiefly
+if not exclusively in its liquid phases.
+
+Closely connected with growth is reproduction; and though in higher
+forms this is a specialised function, it is universally true that
+wherever there is protoplasm, there is, will be, or has been a power
+of reproducing that same kind of protoplasm in a separated organism.
+Reproduction seems to involve the union of two sexes; though it is not
+demonstrable that this is always requisite.
+
+Another physical property of protoplasm is that of taking habits. The
+course which the spread of liquefaction has taken in the past is rendered
+thereby more likely to be taken in the future; although there is no
+absolute certainty that the same path will be followed again.
+
+Very extraordinary, certainly, are all these properties of protoplasm;
+as extraordinary as indubitable. But the one which has next to be
+mentioned, while equally undeniable, is infinitely more wonderful. It
+is that protoplasm feels. We have no direct evidence that this is true
+of protoplasm universally, and certainly some kinds feel far more than
+others. But there is a fair analogical inference that all protoplasm
+feels. It not only feels but exercises all the functions of mind.
+
+Such are the properties of protoplasm. The problem is to find a
+hypothesis of the molecular constitution of this compound which will
+account for these properties, one and all.
+
+Some of them are obvious results of the excessively complicated
+constitution of the protoplasm molecule. All very complicated substances
+are unstable; and plainly a molecule of several thousand atoms may be
+separated in many ways into two parts in each of which the polar chemical
+forces are very nearly saturated. In the solid protoplasm, as in other
+solids, the molecules must be supposed to be moving as it were in orbits,
+or, at least, so as not to wander indefinitely. But this solid cannot
+be melted, for the same reason that starch cannot be melted; because
+an amount of heat insufficient to make the entire molecules wander is
+sufficient to break them up completely and cause them to form new and
+simpler molecules. But when one of the molecules is disturbed, even
+if it be not quite thrown out of its orbit at first, sub-molecules of
+perhaps several hundred atoms each are thrown off from it. These will
+soon acquire the same mean kinetic energy as the others, and therefore
+velocities several times as great. They will naturally begin to wander,
+and in wandering will perturb a great many other molecules and cause
+them in their turn to behave like the one originally deranged. So many
+molecules will thus be broken up, that even those that are intact will no
+longer be restrained within orbits, but will wander about freely. This is
+the usual condition of a liquid, as modern chemists understand it; for in
+all electrolytic liquids there is considerable dissociation.
+
+But this process necessarily chills the substance, not merely on account
+of the heat of chemical combination, but still more because the number
+of separate particles being greatly increased, the mean kinetic energy
+must be less. The substance being a bad conductor, this heat is not at
+once restored. Now the particles moving more slowly, the attractions
+between them have time to take effect, and they approach the condition of
+equilibrium. But their dynamic equilibrium is found in the restoration of
+the solid condition, which therefore takes place, if the disturbance is
+not kept up.
+
+When a body is in the solid condition, most of its molecules must be
+moving at the same rate, or, at least, at certain regular sets of rates;
+otherwise the orbital motion would not be preserved. The distances of
+neighboring molecules must always be kept between a certain maximum and
+a certain minimum value. But if, without absorption of heat, the body be
+thrown into a liquid condition, the distances of neighboring molecules
+will be far more unequally distributed, and an effect upon the virial
+will result. The chilling of protoplasm upon its liquefaction must also
+be taken into account. The ordinary effect will no doubt be to increase
+the cohesion and with that the surface-tension, so that the mass will
+tend to draw itself up. But in special cases, the virial will be
+increased so much that the surface-tension will be diminished at points
+where the temperature is first restored. In that case, the outer film
+will give way and the tension at other places will aid in causing the
+general fluid to be poured out at those points, forming pseudopodia.
+
+When the protoplasm is in a liquid state, and then only, a solution of
+food is able to penetrate its mass by diffusion. The protoplasm is then
+considerably dissociated; and so is the food, like all dissolved matter.
+If then the separated and unsaturated sub-molecules of the food happen
+to be of the same chemical species as sub-molecules of the protoplasm,
+they may unite with other sub-molecules of the protoplasm to form new
+molecules, in such a fashion that when the solid state is resumed, there
+may be more molecules of protoplasm than there were at the beginning.
+It is like the jack-knife whose blade and handle, after having been
+severally lost and replaced, were found and put together to make a new
+knife.
+
+We have seen that protoplasm is chilled by liquefaction, and that this
+brings it back to the solid state, when the heat is recovered. This
+series of operations must be very rapid in the case of nerve-slime and
+even of muscle-slime, and may account for the unsteady or vibratory
+character of their action. Of course, if assimilation takes place, the
+heat of combination, which is probably trifling, is gained. On the
+other hand, if work is done, whether by nerve or by muscle, loss of
+energy must take place. In the case of the muscle, the mode by which
+the instantaneous part of the fatigue is brought about is easily traced
+out. If when the muscle contracts it be under stress, it will contract
+less than it otherwise would do, and there will be a loss of heat. It is
+like an engine which should work by dissolving salt in water and using
+the contraction during the solution to lift a weight, the salt being
+recovered afterwards by distillation. But the major part of fatigue has
+nothing to do with the correlation of forces. A man must labor hard to do
+in a quarter of an hour the work which draws from him enough heat to cool
+his body by a single degree. Meantime, he will be getting heated, he will
+be pouring out extra products of combustion, perspiration, etc., and he
+will be driving the blood at an accelerated rate through minute tubes at
+great expense. Yet all this will have little to do with his fatigue. He
+may sit quietly at his table writing, doing practically no physical work
+at all, and yet in a few hours be terribly fagged. This seems to be owing
+to the deranged sub-molecules of the nerve-slime not having had time to
+settle back into their proper combinations. When such sub-molecules are
+thrown out, as they must be from time to time, there is so much waste of
+material.
+
+In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and firmly
+assimilated into a broken molecule of protoplasm, it is necessary not
+only that it should have precisely the right chemical composition, but
+also that it should be at precisely the right spot at the right time
+and should be moving in precisely the right direction with precisely
+the right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled, it will
+be more loosely retained than the other parts of the molecule; and
+every time it comes round into the situation in which it was drawn in,
+relatively to the other parts of that molecule and to such others as
+were near enough to be factors in the action, it will be in special
+danger of being thrown out again. Thus, when a partial liquefaction of
+the protoplasm takes place many times to about the same extent, it will,
+each time, be pretty nearly the same molecules that were last drawn in
+that are now thrown out. They will be thrown out, too, in about the same
+way, as to position, direction of motion, and velocity, in which they
+were drawn in; and this will be in about the same course that the ones
+last before them were thrown out. Not exactly, however; for the very
+cause of their being thrown off so easily is their not having fulfilled
+precisely the conditions of stable retention. Thus, the law of habit is
+accounted for, and with it its peculiar characteristic of not acting with
+exactitude.
+
+It seems to me that this explanation of habit, aside from the question
+of its truth or falsity, has a certain value as an addition to our
+little store of mechanical examples of actions analogous to habit. All
+the others, so far as I know, are either statical or else involve forces
+which, taking only the sensible motions into account, violate the law
+of energy. It is so with the stream that wears its own bed. Here, the
+sand is carried to its most stable situation and left there. The law of
+energy forbids this; for when anything reaches a position of stable
+equilibrium, its momentum will be at a maximum, so that it can according
+to this law only be left at rest in an unstable situation. In all the
+statical illustrations, too, things are brought into certain states
+and left there. A garment receives folds and keeps them; that is, its
+limit of elasticity is exceeded. This failure to spring back is again an
+apparent violation of the law of energy; for the substance will not only
+not spring back of itself (which might be due to an unstable equilibrium
+being reached) but will not even do so when an impulse that way is
+applied to it. Accordingly, Professor James says “the phenomena of habit
+... are due to the plasticity of the ... materials.” Now, plasticity
+of materials means the having of a low limit of elasticity. (See the
+“Century Dictionary,” under _solid_.) But the hypothetical constitution
+of protoplasm here proposed involves no forces but attractions and
+repulsions strictly following the law of energy. The action here, that
+is, the throwing of an atom out of its orbit in a molecule, and the
+entering of a new atom into nearly, but not quite the same orbit, is
+somewhat similar to the molecular actions which may be supposed to
+take place in a solid strained beyond its limit of elasticity. Namely,
+in that case certain molecules must be thrown out of their orbits, to
+settle down again shortly after into new orbits. In short, the plastic
+solid resembles protoplasm in being partially and temporarily liquefied
+by a slight mechanical force. But the taking of a set by a solid body
+has but a moderate resemblance to the taking of a habit, inasmuch as
+the characteristic feature of the latter, its inexactitude and want of
+complete determinacy, is not so marked in the former, if it can be said
+to be present there, at all.
+
+The truth is that though the molecular explanation of habit is pretty
+vague on the mathematical side, there can be no doubt that systems of
+atoms having polar forces would act substantially in that manner, and
+the explanation is even too satisfactory to suit the convenience of an
+advocate of tychism. For it may fairly be urged that since the phenomena
+of habit may thus result from a purely mechanical arrangement, it is
+unnecessary to suppose that habit-taking is a primordial principle of the
+universe. But one fact remains unexplained mechanically, which concerns
+not only the facts of habit, but all cases of actions apparently
+violating the law of energy; it is that all these phenomena depend upon
+aggregations of trillions of molecules in one and the same condition and
+neighborhood; and it is by no means clear how they could have all been
+brought and left in the same place and state by any conservative forces.
+But let the mechanical explanation be as perfect as it may, the state of
+things which it supposes presents evidence of a primordial habit-taking
+tendency. For it shows us like things acting in like ways because they
+are alike. Now, those who insist on the doctrine of necessity will for
+the most part insist that the physical world is entirely individual.
+Yet law involves an element of generality. Now to say that generality
+is primordial, but generalisation not, is like saying that diversity
+is primordial but diversification not. It turns logic upside down. At
+any rate, it is clear that nothing but a principle of habit, itself
+due to the growth by habit of an infinitesimal chance tendency toward
+habit-taking, is the only bridge that can span the chasm between the
+chance-medley of chaos and the cosmos of order and law.
+
+I shall not attempt a molecular explanation of the phenomena of
+reproduction, because that would require a subsidiary hypothesis, and
+carry me away from my main object. Such phenomena, universally diffused
+though they be, appear to depend upon special conditions; and we do not
+find that all protoplasm has reproductive powers.
+
+But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness
+belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to
+be accounted for? The slime is nothing but a chemical compound. There
+is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the
+laboratory, out of its chemical elements; and if it were so made, it
+would present all the characters of natural protoplasm. No doubt,
+then, it would feel. To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and
+ultra-puerile. By what element of the molecular arrangement, then, would
+that feeling be caused? This question cannot be evaded or pooh-poohed.
+Protoplasm certainly does feel; and unless we are to accept a weak
+dualism, the property must be shown to arise from some peculiarity of
+the mechanical system. Yet the attempt to deduce it from the three laws
+of mechanics, applied to never so ingenious a mechanical contrivance,
+would obviously be futile. It can never be explained, unless we admit
+that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical
+events. But once grant that the phenomena of matter are but the result
+of the sensibly complete sway of habits upon mind, and it only remains
+to explain why in the protoplasm these habits are to some slight extent
+broken up, so that according to the law of mind, in that special clause
+of it sometimes called the principle of accommodation,[8] feeling becomes
+intensified. Now the manner in which habits generally get broken up is
+this. Reactions usually terminate in the removal of a stimulus; for the
+excitation continues as long as the stimulus is present. Accordingly,
+habits are general ways of behavior which are associated with the removal
+of stimuli. But when the expected removal of the stimulus fails to occur,
+the excitation continues and increases, and non-habitual reactions take
+place; and these tend to weaken the habit. If, then, we suppose that
+matter never does obey its ideal laws with absolute precision, but that
+there are almost insensible fortuitous departures from regularity, these
+will produce, in general, equally minute effects. But protoplasm is
+in an excessively unstable condition; and it is the characteristic of
+unstable equilibrium, that near that point excessively minute causes may
+produce startlingly large effects. Here then, the usual departures from
+regularity will be followed by others that are very great; and the large
+fortuitous departures from law so produced, will tend still further to
+break up the laws, supposing that these are of the nature of habits.
+Now, this breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity will,
+according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of
+feeling. The nerve-protoplasm is, without doubt, in the most unstable
+condition of any kind of matter; and consequently, there the resulting
+feeling is the most manifest.
+
+Thus we see that the idealist has no need to dread a mechanical theory
+of life. On the contrary, such a theory, fully developed, is bound to
+call in a tychistic idealism as its indispensable adjunct. Wherever
+chance-spontaneity is found, there, in the same proportion, feeling
+exists. In fact, chance is but the outward aspect of that which within
+itself is feeling. I long ago showed that real existence, or thing-ness,
+consists in regularities. So, that primeval chaos in which there was
+no regularity was mere nothing, from a physical aspect. Yet it was not
+a blank zero; for there was an intensity of consciousness there in
+comparison with which all that we ever feel is but as the struggling of a
+molecule or two to throw off a little of the force of law to an endless
+and innumerable diversity of chance utterly unlimited.
+
+But after some atoms of the protoplasm have thus become partially
+emancipated from law, what happens next to them? To understand this, we
+have to remember that no mental tendency is so easily strengthened by the
+action of habit as is the tendency to take habits. Now, in the higher
+kinds of protoplasm, especially, the atoms in question have not only long
+belonged to one molecule or another of the particular mass of slime of
+which they are parts; but before that, they were constituents of food of
+a protoplasmic constitution. During all this time, they have been liable
+to lose habits and to recover them again; so that now, when the stimulus
+is removed, and the foregone habits tend to reassert themselves, they do
+so in the case of such atoms with great promptness. Indeed, the return is
+so prompt that there is nothing but the feeling to show conclusively that
+the bonds of law have ever been relaxed.
+
+In short, diversification is the vestige of chance-spontaneity; and
+wherever diversity is increasing, there chance must be operative. On the
+other hand, wherever uniformity is increasing, habit must be operative.
+But wherever actions take place under an established uniformity, there
+so much feeling as there may be takes the mode of a sense of reaction.
+That is the manner in which I am led to define the relation between the
+fundamental elements of consciousness and their physical equivalents.
+
+It remains to consider the physical relations of general ideas. It may
+be well here to reflect that if matter has no existence except as a
+specialisation of mind, it follows that whatever affects matter according
+to regular laws is itself matter. But all mind is directly or indirectly
+connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less regular way; so
+that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter. Hence, it
+would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects
+of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the
+outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other
+things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its
+immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. These two
+views are combined when we remember that mechanical laws are nothing
+but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind, including the
+tendency to take habits, itself; and that this action of habit is nothing
+but generalisation, and generalisation is nothing but the spreading
+of feelings. But the question is, how do general ideas appear in the
+molecular theory of protoplasm?
+
+The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each action of
+that habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and replaced by
+others. Upon all the different occasions it is different atoms that are
+thrown off, but they are analogous from a physical point of view, and
+there is an inward sense of their being analogous. Every time one of the
+associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less vague sense that
+there are others, that it has a general character, and of about what this
+general character is. We ought not, I think, to hold that in protoplasm
+habit never acts in any other than the particular way suggested above. On
+the contrary, if habit be a primary property of mind, it must be equally
+so of matter, as a kind of mind. We can hardly refuse to admit that
+wherever chance motions have general characters, there is a tendency for
+this generality to spread and to perfect itself. In that case, a general
+idea is a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any
+regularity or general relation between chance actions.
+
+The consciousness of a general idea has a certain “unity of the ego,”
+in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It
+is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a person is
+only a particular kind of general idea. Long ago, in the _Journal of
+Speculative Philosophy_ (Vol. III, p. 156), I pointed out that a person
+is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea; but my views were,
+then, too nominalistic to enable me to see that every general idea has
+the unified living feeling of a person.
+
+All that is necessary, upon this theory, to the existence of a person
+is that the feelings out of which he is constructed should be in
+close enough connection to influence one another. Here we can draw a
+consequence which it may be possible to submit to experimental test.
+Namely, if this be the case, there should be something like personal
+consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely
+sympathetic communion. It is true that when the generalisation of
+feeling has been carried so far as to include all within a person, a
+stopping-place, in a certain sense, has been attained; and further
+generalisation will have a less lively character. But we must not
+think it will cease. _Esprit de corps_, national sentiment, sympathy,
+are no mere metaphors. None of us can fully realise what the minds of
+corporations are, any more than one of my brain-cells can know what
+the whole brain is thinking. But the law of mind clearly points to the
+existence of such personalities, and there are many ordinary observations
+which, if they were critically examined and supplemented by special
+experiments, might, as first appearances promise, give evidence of the
+influence of such greater persons upon individuals. It is often remarked
+that on one day half a dozen people, strangers to one another, will take
+it into their heads to do one and the same strange deed, whether it be
+a physical experiment, a crime, or an act of virtue. When the thirty
+thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor were in New
+York, there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion of sweetness and
+light. If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere, it should
+be in the church. The Christians have always been ready to risk their
+lives for the sake of having prayers in common, of getting together and
+praying simultaneously with great energy, and especially for their common
+body, for “the whole state of Christ’s church militant here in earth,”
+as one of the missals has it. This practice they have been keeping up
+everywhere, weekly, for many centuries. Surely, a personality ought to
+have developed in that church, in that “bride of Christ,” as they call
+it, or else there is a strange break in the action of mind, and I shall
+have to acknowledge my views are much mistaken. Would not the societies
+for psychical research be more likely to break through the clouds,
+in seeking evidences of such corporate personality, than in seeking
+evidences of telepathy, which, upon the same theory, should be a far
+weaker phenomenon?
+
+                                                             C. S. PEIRCE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] I am rejoiced to find, since my last paper was printed, that a
+philosopher as subtle and profound as Dr. Edmund Montgomery has long
+been arguing for the same element in the universe. Other world-renowned
+thinkers, as M. Renouvier and M. Delbœuf, appear to share this opinion.
+
+[2] By a _vera causa_, in the logic of science, is meant a state of
+things known to exist in some cases and supposed to exist in other cases,
+because it would account for observed phenomena.
+
+[3] Wiedemann, _Annalen_, 1887-1889.
+
+[4] See Maxwell on Spherical Harmonics, in his _Electricity and
+Magnetism_.
+
+[5] The word _system_ has three peculiar meanings in mathematics. (_A._)
+It means an orderly exposition of the truths of astronomy, and hence
+a theory of the motions of the stars; as the Ptolemaic _system_, the
+Copernican _system_. This is much like the sense in which we speak of the
+Calvinistic _system_ of theology, the Kantian _system_ of philosophy,
+etc. (_B._) It means the aggregate of the planets considered as all
+moving in somewhat the same way, as the solar _system_; and hence any
+aggregate of particles moving under mutual forces. (_C._) It means a
+number of forces acting simultaneously upon a number of particles.
+
+[6] But, in fact, an inspection of these curves is sufficient to show
+that they are of a higher degree than the third. For they have the line
+_V_ = 0, or some line _V_ a constant for an asymptote, while for small
+values of _P_, the values of (_d_²)_P_/(_dV_)² are positive.
+
+[7] Anticipated by Clausius as long ago as 1857; and by Williamson in
+1851.
+
+[8] “Physiologically, ... accommodation means the breaking up of a
+habit.... Psychologically, it means reviving consciousness.” Baldwin,
+_Psychology_, Part III ch. i., § 5.
+
+
+
+
+THE FUTURE OF THOUGHT IN AMERICA.
+
+
+History teaches us the nature of the degenerative and destructive
+agencies in national life. These are of various kinds, but they may be
+generally included under the heads of Physical Vices, Superstitions,
+and Selfish Ambitions. These have become possible through excess of
+emotional, and deficiency of rational states of the mind. When a large
+part of a population is influenced by emotional rather than by rational
+modes of thought, unethical conduct has full opportunity, and suffering
+and destruction are sure to follow. All races and nations are subject to
+such disorders, if only in some cases during their periods of infancy and
+of degeneracy.
+
+The peoples of Europe have difficulties and dangers which are due to
+their own peculiar situation. The people of North America have to meet
+certain risks of a somewhat different character, owing to our peculiar
+position. In Europe we see an accumulation of many races who reached
+their _Ultima Thule_ at the coast of the Atlantic, and who have had
+to accommodate themselves to each other as best they could. Speaking
+different languages and having different political organisations, they
+have consolidated into separate nations. This result has only been
+reached after many conflicts, and the result has been the combination and
+absorption of smaller states into greater, such as we find them to-day.
+This result has not terminated conflicts; it has reduced their frequency
+but has increased their scope and importance. To-day the antagonisms of
+these nations impose great burdens upon them, but they are at the same
+time productive of great good.
+
+With men as with other animals excellence is the result of use and
+exercise. With animals this exercise has been compulsory, and has been
+due largely to the pressure of hunger. Among men intellectual and ethical
+excellence may be due to compulsion, or it may result from the capacity
+to develop lofty ideals. In the former case man is driven; in the latter
+case he is led. Now the organisation of human society is such, that if
+man will not be led, he is driven. The “mills of the Gods” are ever ready
+for those who lag behind in the progress of the race. But there are
+mills and mills, and no mill has yet appeared in human history better
+calculated to grind out a good grist from an intellectual point of view,
+than western Eurasia, or Europe. The emulations and antagonisms of so
+many nations have stimulated men to do their best, and have stimulated
+governments to aid them in doing it, for several centuries. The result
+has been modern art, modern science pure and applied, and modern
+philosophy. To produce all this however, Europe has been under pressure,
+and the pressure has been in some, if not all of its countries, more or
+less galling.
+
+The European, in order to escape local tyranny, political, social, or
+theological, or to better his chances of physical living, has come to
+America. He has taken possession, and has bettered his condition from a
+physical point of view, most successfully. The question that interests
+us now, is whether he has bettered himself in any other way, and whether
+he is going to continue the mental progress which has so distinguished
+his history in Europe. Population is rapidly increasing, and the
+increasing severity of the “struggle for existence” which will follow,
+will stimulate men to increased excellence in their methods of obtaining
+a livelihood, but will it develop the mind in any other direction? We
+have before us in the case of China, the effect of close industrial
+competition in a dense population, without corresponding intellectual
+development. What is the outlook for the American? Will the process of
+natural selection only, the “devil-take-the-hindmost” doctrine of Darwin,
+be sufficient to develop the higher mental faculties, or having developed
+them, to enable them to survive and to become general, or not?
+
+In the first place we lack in America the great stimulus to mental
+progress already referred to, international jealousy and emulation. In
+this respect we are situated very much like the Chinese, but if anything
+less favorably. We practically own the continent. We have no fear of
+Tartar invasions from the west nor Japanese from the north east. The
+Canadians are of identical race with ourselves, and are almost certain
+to become identical in nationality with us. We are accustomed to boast
+ourselves of this, and to look with great satisfaction on our isolated
+position among nations. But our self-gratulation must be greatly tempered
+by the reflection that such isolation is only beneficial so long as we
+can maintain our ideals without external stimulus. And this is something
+that few nations have so far been able to accomplish. It is true,
+however, that the Atlantic ocean is not so wide as it was formerly, and
+we are truly one of the family of the Indo-European nations. But we will
+miss the effect of the daily stimulus which they afford each other, and
+the daily contact which transmits so much from man to man.
+
+What is our present intellectual rank among these nations to-day; meaning
+by this our status in actual production of intellectual work, and leaving
+aside history? Without any great competence to speak on many branches
+of such work, I may be not far from correct; if I summarise as follows:
+In music and sculpture unproductive; in painting and literature (as an
+art) good, but weak in quantity in comparison with our population. In
+sciences, feeble in many branches, but very productive in some others. I
+refer to pure science. In applied science we stand high. In philosophy as
+a nation, weak.
+
+But we have the future before us. If there is a demand for the products
+of pure thought in this country, the supply will come. Much may be
+expected of our race. We will hope that the demand will grow, for at
+present it is not as large as it ought to be. It is of course easy for
+thought to “run in accustomed channels,” and many people there are in
+this as in all other countries, who believe that sufficient is already
+known, and that he who would disturb current opinions is a “disturber of
+the peace.” Strange as it may seem, in this comparatively new country we
+have one special inducement to this habit of mind. This is to be found
+in our political system, which requires an unhesitating submission to the
+will of the majority.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here is our second danger. We are apt to confuse mental submission with
+physical submission. Physical submission to the will of the majority
+is generally necessary for physical reasons, with which we are all
+familiar. Ballots are simply a peaceful representation of bullets, and
+we anticipate the submission to the latter by submission to the former.
+But the mind should be free. Current or popular opinions are not always
+correct. In fact if they were, reform or progress would be unnecessary.
+A proposal for change always begins with a minority, and much time may
+often elapse before such change becomes acceptable to the majority.
+Before the majority accepts a new step of progress the progressive idea
+cannot govern physically. It must be content to be unpopular for a
+greater or less time. Now the politician naturally dreads unpopularity,
+for it is political death. And just in proportion as we are politicians
+do we share in this unfortunate mental attitude. And how many Americans
+are not politicians? It is the prevalent ethical disease of Americans. If
+it becomes general, the progress of this country is ended, and her fate
+among nations is sealed. Her manhood is gone, and woman may well feel her
+hand itch to
+
+    “Defeat their dirty tricks
+    Confound their politics.”
+
+The prevalence of the habit of submission to what we know to be wrong
+in this country is simply detestable. Herbert Spencer has given us
+some excellent advice on this subject, and we will do well to heed
+it. The habit extends all the way through political, scientific, and
+domestic economy. The unpopularity of the reformer is expressed in the
+term “kicker,” which is applied to him among the lower classes in this
+country. As one of its advocates once said to me, it is the “American
+System,” and there was a strong element of truth in his assertion. With
+such people, criticism is identical with quarrelling, for they cannot
+conceive of any motive for endeavoring to reform some abuse or correct
+some error, but personal rancor. Such an attitude is a sure mark of
+intellectual mediocrity and ethical incapacity, and it infinitely
+increases the pains of the reformer, and readily converts him into a
+martyr. However, there are a good many men left in this country, and
+there are agencies at work which will probably keep up the supply.
+
+In the absence of compulsion in the form of external or civil wars and
+other disasters, the churches are doing a good work in keeping ideals
+before the people, and in inviting corresponding practical life. It is
+true that their efforts are more or less retarded by the insistence
+on erroneous and even absurd opinions about some things, but they do
+infinite service in teaching that “man shall not live by bread alone,”
+nor by the mere display of physical possessions. They teach that there
+are ideals of truth and beauty better worth living for, and that the
+mind is the greater part of man. It is the churches which make the
+majority of scientists and philosophers, as they formerly did of
+painters. Then let the churches flourish. Like the nations of Europe,
+their emulations and antagonisms bring out the truth. The Presbyterians
+have to solve the knotty questions of biblical inspiration and divine
+order. The Methodists will have to study the nature and value of human
+emotions. The Friends will know what is to be known of immediate divine
+influence. The Catholics have learned how to restrain in some measure
+the most thoughtless of mankind. The Unitarians and Ethical Culturists
+are proving that man may retain and live up to high ideals without much
+or any theology. So long as there is no philosophy or none to speak of
+in America, the evolution of thought will come from the conflicts of
+the theologies; a peaceful war which is far less wasteful than physical
+wars. Theology has been generally in Europe the parent of philosophy,
+and so it will be here. From the various stages and conditions of the
+agitation will spring science and art. By this method man is led into
+progress by measures which involve the best attributes of his nature,
+instead of being driven by appeals to his lower motives, or by physical
+force. In this progress moral courage is not lost, but it is developed;
+and criticism is truth’s best weapon, and is not a cause of offense.
+That this progress in the churches is real, is proven by our Woodrow,
+McQueary, Briggs, and others, and it will go on as long as the love of
+truth and moral courage exist in those organisations.
+
+It is interesting to remember that this struggle of opinions has passed
+through the same stages in Europe wherever the love of truth has had an
+abiding place. This is especially true of Germany, where also philosophy
+has had so large a development in relatively modern times. But we need
+something more than opinions to counteract the dangers which threaten
+earnestness of character in this country, which I have pointed out.
+Active organisations are necessary, which shall resist tendencies
+to crystallisation from both sides. Non-theological people must be
+stimulated to maintain ethical ideals; and theological people must be
+restrained from smothering them under useless and obstructive dogmas and
+practices. It is too true that while some theological dogmas include
+high ethical ideals, other dogmas discredit them by deriving them from
+incredible sources, and seeking to sustain them by incredible sanctions.
+Where such dogmas are sincerely held, true thought is suppressed,
+knowledge makes slow progress, and ethical life is more difficult.
+
+As already remarked, we cannot yet claim to be, as a nation,
+distinguished for profound thinking on the subjects of highest human
+interest; nor yet are we the most thoughtless. Ignorance of the
+possibilities of mind is not so general as in some parts of Europe, but
+it is greater than in others. Material objects and interests occupy
+almost as exclusively the minds of the majority of our citizens whom we
+are accustomed to consider “intelligent,” as among the unintelligent.
+Hence our proneness to boast of our material greatness, instead of our
+intellectual conquests. Hence that weakest of all forms of self-praise,
+the publication of the dimensions of our country and its rapid growth,
+as though these were indications of our superiority as a people or
+as a race. This is repeated _ad nauseam_, while our real merits, our
+contributions to the stock of the world’s progress in thought, knowledge,
+and mental power, are passed by in silence. Our newspaper press reflects
+this state of affairs, since they generally think it their best policy to
+follow rather than lead public opinion. There are, however, noteworthy
+exceptions to this character of the press both in the east and the west,
+which we owe to the superiority of the men who edit and direct them.
+
+In the conduct of our schools and of our scientific organisations, we
+have a corresponding exhibition of mediocrity or worse, with a few noble
+and distinguished exceptions. A mere interest in education and research
+does not confer competency to direct and sustain them; yet an interest
+in such matters is generally the only qualification demanded of the
+directors of such institutions, provided they understand how to buy,
+sell, and invest money. It is to be hoped that this state of affairs will
+some day pass away, and that men who are influential in such matters
+will some time know enough themselves to distinguish between the false
+and the true, and between men of ability and adventurers who are after
+the money and position with which our institutions of learning and our
+scientific enterprises can endow them. This reform will progress exactly
+in proportion as it is understood how much human happiness depends on
+true research and on correct thinking, and how little on revelation and
+on ancient dogma.
+
+It is not, I repeat, sufficiently understood, how much human conduct
+depends on correct thinking. How much financial dishonesty would be
+averted by a rational thought as to the inevitable consequences? How much
+social irregularity would be prevented by a similar treatment of the
+subject? How much hatred and wasteful antagonism would the world lack, if
+the ordinary conditions of living were understood and acted on! So the
+cultivation of the rational mind is of incalculable importance, and if
+we wish to prosper as a nation we must bend our energies to the pleasant
+task this problem presents to us. Neglect of our mental powers means
+degeneracy and decay; while their cultivation means power and happiness.
+Wealth, except as a means of attaining this end, after physical
+necessities are supplied, is simply useless.
+
+                                                               E. D. COPE.
+
+
+
+
+MENTAL MUMMIES.
+
+
+If we should name the most important factor in the changes which
+have gradually widened the contrast between modern science and the
+scholasticism of the Middle Ages, we might define it as a “progressive
+recognition of hereditary influences.”
+
+There was a time when each individual of the human race was considered
+a separate accident, called into existence by an act of unlimited,
+arbitrary power, and apt to be as suddenly changed, even unto a complete
+inversion of his former moral being, by a merciful, or revengeful,
+caprice of the same power.
+
+Biology has since taught us to apply the doctrine of evolution to the
+problems of our own moral and physical nature, to trace the tendencies of
+bygone times to their effects in the present age, to consider individuals
+the outcome of a long series of precedent influences, and to recognise
+the truth that the length of those influences is proportioned to the
+persistence of the result.
+
+Intelligent statesmen were the first to appreciate the practical value
+of those facts. The advisers of Alexander II. did not waste their time
+in a hopeless attempt to convert the freedom-worshipping natives of the
+Caucasus into devotees of Muscovite despotism, but at once confronted
+them with the alternative of exile or death. Our Indian commissioners
+early realised the impossibility of turning the descendants of a long
+ancestry of deer-hunters into tillers of the soil, and transferred the
+survivors of the long race-war to a territory where they could for
+better or worse, indulge their incurable penchant. The Groot Fontein
+penitentiary of the Transvaal Republic became the grave of so many
+Caffirs that the managers at last abandoned the plan of inuring nomads to
+the restraints of sedentary occupation, and saved the lives, if not the
+souls of their convicts by sending them about in chain-gangs to mend the
+irrigation ditches of the border settlements.
+
+Hereditary influences cannot be obliterated by force of rhetoric or of
+government edicts and it would solve many riddles if we would apply that
+principle to phenomena of ethical and religious evolution. How else
+shall we explain the fact that in less than sixty years the doctrine of
+Protestantism spread from central Germany to the highland hamlets of
+Scotland and Scandinavia, while in Spain, Portugal, and Italy a very
+decided progress in general intelligence has failed to lead to a similar
+result? How shall we account for the success of Christian missionaries in
+Tasmania and Otaheiti and their utter failure in Burmah and Hindostan?
+How for the persecution-proof vitality of Judaism, the ready collapse of
+Mormonism, or the revival of crass mystic delusions in the midst of our
+realistic civilisation?
+
+There is no doubt that the average Spanish sailor, or village-shopkeeper
+of to-day possesses a larger stock of general information than the
+average Brunswick school-teacher of the sixteenth century. Yet one of the
+least learned of those school-teachers could, by instinct, sufficiently
+appreciate the significance of the Protestant revolt to celebrate its
+triumph by a big bonfire and what our western friends would, call a
+“grand war-dance,” on a height near the little town of Wolfenbüttel. Why
+does Pedro Gonzales still cross himself at the mention of a heretic,
+while Peter Jansen would as soon return to the pig-sty hovels of the
+mediæval serfs as crawl back under the yoke of Jesuitry? How could the
+bogs of foggy Ireland and the vegas of sunny Spain nourish equally
+imperishable roots of a plant that failed to get a firm foot-hold in the
+sands of Brandenburgh?
+
+The solution of those enigmas can be found in the circumstance that the
+doctrine of anti-naturalism had extended its influence to the character
+of many European nations, and that the character-traits of a race are
+less amenable to rapid changes than its intellectual standards. On the
+soul-organism of the Latin races the thousand years influence of monastic
+tyranny has left traces which the light of science will fail to efface
+for centuries to come. The propaganda of a manlier creed has thus been
+defeated, not only by their ignorance, but by their aversion to mental
+efforts, by their habitual reliance on miracles, by their incurable
+indifference to the claims of truth and the merits of intellectual
+independence, by their hereditary mistrust in the competence of their
+natural instinct. To their moral palate a doctrine which nauseates their
+northern neighbors has become a pleasant narcotic; they have been forced
+to swallow the opium of pessimism till a craving for the repetition of
+the mind-enervating dose has become a second nature; they hug the cross
+that has proved a symbol of death to their noblest reformers.
+
+Against that influence of perverted instincts the logic of mental
+revelations avails but little. “Propositions which would appear
+self-evident to certain mental constitutions,” says Dr. Carpenter,
+“are apt to be very differently received by others, according to their
+conformity or discordance with that _aggregate of preformed opinion_
+which has grown up in the minds of each. For just as we try whether a
+new piece of furniture which is offered us does or does not fit into a
+certain recess in our apartment, and accept or decline it accordingly,
+so we try a new proposition which is offered to our mental acceptance.
+If it either at once fits in or can by argument or discussion be brought
+to fit in to some recess in our fabrics of thought, we give our assent
+to it by admitting it to its appropriate place. But if it neither fits
+in the first instance nor can by any means be brought to fit, the mind
+automatically rejects it.”
+
+It is true that logical demonstrations may become complete enough to defy
+dissent, but even from facts which force themselves upon the acceptance
+of every rational human being, different individuals will draw widely
+different inferences. That the mind of man may become a receptacle for
+irreconcilable doctrines is strikingly illustrated, by the simultaneous
+acceptance of the Old and New Testament of our heterogeneous scripture,
+and in the same way obstinate bigots manage to associate scientific truth
+and dogmatic absurdities. Darwin and Moses may occupy adjoining quarters
+in the fabric of the same cosmogony; the rule of three may become a
+passive concomitant of Trinitarian dogmas. The torch of truth may be
+permitted to flicker in a secluded recess of souls which refuse it the
+privilege of throwing its rays in certain directions. Education may fail
+to reclaim hereditary bigotry. In the winter of 1559 the rabble of Madrid
+assembled to witness the death of Don Carlos de Seso, a Spanish nobleman
+whose ancestors had fought at Granada and Toledo. His brother had been
+the favorite hunting-companion of Charles V.; one of his uncles had
+sacrificed his life in deciding the victory of Pavia; Don Carlos himself
+had acquired renown both as a soldier and a scholar, but in the latter
+capacity he had confessed his sympathy with certain doctrines of Martin
+Luther, and the Holy Inquisition had sentenced him to anticipate his doom
+in the flames of the stake. King Philip II. honored the _auto da fé_
+with his presence, and frowned in a way which the condemned freethinker
+mistook for a disapproval of his sentence. “O King! can you thus witness
+the torture of your subjects?” exclaimed De Seso. “Deliver us from so
+cruel a death which even our enemies admit we have not deserved.” “I
+would help carrying faggots to burn my own son,” replied the King, “if
+he had incurred your unspeakable guilt.” Yet Philip the Second was one
+of the best-educated princes of his century. In mathematics, astronomy,
+ancient and modern languages, geography, and history, he was far better
+informed than Landgraf Philip of Hessen, who would have risked his own
+life to save that of a loyal cavalier.
+
+There are mental mummies who cannot be revived by removing their
+grave-shrouds and clothing them in modern drapery; the principle of
+conservatism has penetrated their very veins and the marrow of their
+bones. It is by no means unconceivable that a popular leader like
+Garibaldi or Porfirio Diaz should succeed in persuading a million of his
+countrymen to renounce the yoke of Rome and build Protestant chapels, but
+the result would be largely limited to a change of nomenclature. Before
+long the dissenters would march in procession with a wonder-working tooth
+of John Wesley or kiss a shred from the petticoat of the Holy Maid of
+Kent. They would groan at the mention of Rome, but exorcise spooks with
+the initials of Ulric Zwingli, and abstain from work on the anniversary
+of every Protestant martyr. They would try to redeem drunkards by
+sprinkling them with consecrated water from the holy rivers of Kansas,
+and celebrate Arbor Day only by invoking the spirit of Prof. G. P.
+Marsh, as a patron-saint of climate-improving forests. Under the stimulus
+of industrial influences, they might transfer the cross from way-side
+shrines to telegraph-poles, but they would persist in the worship of
+sorrow.
+
+The creed which has turned the happiest countries of our globe into
+a grave of their former prosperity, is a medley of miraculism and
+anti-naturalism, and the experience of the last century has proved that
+both can survive the repudiation of Rome and even of Galilee. The mania
+of renunciation, after the abolishment of monasteries and nunneries,
+continued its dismal rites in Quaker-garb and Shaker temples of celibacy.
+The miracle-hunger of millions who have learned to scorn the clumsy
+tricks of the cowled exorcist, gratifies its appetite in the mystic gloom
+of the dark cabinet. Rustic supernaturalists, deprived of such luxuries,
+indemnify themselves by retailing the marvels of the serpent-charm and
+joint-snake superstition.
+
+A curious psychological problem suggests itself in the question how
+far the charm of the “sour-grape philosophy” may contribute to the
+persistence of certain forms of moral nihilism. Condemned criminals
+almost invariably “renounce the vanities” of a life which the Court
+of Appeals has refused to save, and in a scaffold-speech, quoted in
+Galignani’s _Messenger_ of May 6th, 1837, the English murderer Joseph
+Greenacre expressed his conviction that his crime had been the means
+of saving his soul, because “death on the gibbet was one of the surest
+passports to heaven.”
+
+For similar reasons degenerate nations, after realising the doom of their
+national welfare, are apt to renounce the glory of a forfeited world,
+and to consider misery, poverty, and shame so many stepping-stones to
+the bliss of a better life beyond the grave. After habitual sins against
+the health-laws of nature have avenged themselves in cureless diseases,
+decrepit bigots may find solace even in that most insane tenet of their
+dualistic creed which teaches them to despise the body as the enemy of
+the soul.
+
+A natural effect of pessimism may thus, in course of time, become one of
+its perpetuating causes.
+
+                                                          FELIX L. OSWALD.
+
+
+
+
+THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.
+
+
+I.
+
+Although the internal structure of the brain of insects has been the
+object of numerous and important investigations, among which we must
+place those of Dietl, Flögel, Bellonci, and Viallanes (who have applied
+the method of sections to the study of this organ), no attention has as
+yet been paid to the other nerve-centres of insects, and in particular
+to the ganglia of the ventral chain. Writers have contented themselves
+with describing the external form of these ganglia, and their anatomical
+relations to the other organic parts; but nothing has been done to throw
+light upon their inward structure. All the knowledge which we have on
+this subject is very meagre and dates far back to the works of the old
+writers, who, like Newport, had at their disposal no other means of study
+than the microscopic examination of organs viewed either transparently
+or in dilacerated preparations. A method so defective could render but
+incomplete results, and indeed in many cases erroneous ones.
+
+We have sought to supply this much to be regretted lack of entomological
+knowledge, by applying to the ventral ganglia of insects the admirable
+method of sectional cutting, which has brought about such marked advances
+in contemporaneous zoölogy.
+
+I need hardly insist on the interest of this research. We shall only
+remark that all anatomical study bears an unfinished aspect, up to the
+moment at which we grasp the meaning of the organs which we describe;
+physiology is a necessary complement of anatomy, it is that which gives
+to it a meaning. Therefore, when we dissect an organ, which, as in the
+case of an insect’s brain, is endowed with the most complex psychical
+properties of which these animals are capable, we find ourselves in the
+presence of parts whose functions almost entirely escape us. What is,
+for example, that peculiar organ to which we have given the name of the
+“pedunculate” body? Anatomists have described with the greatest care its
+connections and portrayed its external contour; but we cannot discover,
+or even conjecture its uses. It would be necessary to understand the
+habits of thought and the feelings of an insect, to be able to assign a
+rôle to parts so complex and so delicate as those contained within its
+brain.
+
+The study of the ventral ganglia seems to us to be capable of
+conducting us to a better result, for in everything that concerns these
+nerve-masses, physiology is more advanced, and, in all cases, clearer.
+The ganglia of the thorax, for example, are in the main motory centres;
+the principal nerves that are sent out from them are to be found in the
+wings and in the feet; the study of the terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial
+locomotion of insects has already formed the subject of quite a number
+of important scientific works; we are now upon well-known ground, and we
+may hope that it will be possible to establish some connection between
+the anatomical structure of ventral ganglia and the functions which these
+ganglia control.
+
+This hope appears to us to be the more legitimate, because we can make
+use of all the resources of comparative anatomy to work out the problem.
+If we consider any particular function, for example, that of flying,
+we notice that in species which resemble each other this function is
+exercised under totally different conditions; the same organ acquires
+different uses, and these variations become singularly instructive
+when we can trace their relationship to the particular structure of a
+nerve-ganglion. Thus, one of the large wings of the dragon-fly, which
+is almost like a bird in the range and power of its flight, becomes
+the elytrum of the beetle; the elytrum is a stiff wing covered by
+chitinised matter and serving as a protection to a part of the thorax
+and abdomen. Sometimes the elytrum is used in flying, as in the case
+of the cockchafer. In other lamellicorn insects, in the _Cetonia_ for
+instance, the elytrum is not used in flight; it merely moves aside so
+as to allow the second pair of wings to unfold. Its rôle becomes still
+less active in the golden carabus, in _Procrustes_, in _Blaps_, and many
+other _Coleoptera_, whose two elytra are found on one vertical line,
+and form but one single and immovable portion; then the second pair of
+wings disappear; from the physiological point of view, the animal becomes
+apterous. In another and different order, the order _Diptera_, it is the
+second pair of wings that undergo an important modification; they cease
+to be used in flying, and are transformed into an organ of equipoise:
+they are used for maintaining equilibrium.
+
+All these physiological variations, taking place in the self-same organ,
+must in all probability have their counterpart in the internal anatomy of
+the ganglion that governs the organ, and the comparative study of this
+ganglion in different species will enable us perhaps to discover the
+functions of some of its parts. Thus, if we consider by hypothesis, as
+the nerve-centre of flight, some small lobe which is found occupying this
+or that place in a thoracic ganglion, the disappearance or modification
+of this lobe in species not possessing the faculty of flying, might serve
+to throw additional light upon such an interpretation.
+
+What we have just said with regard to flight is equally applicable to
+terrestrial locomotion, which also represents in itself many varieties.
+The typal insect possesses three pairs of feet, whence the name of
+hexapods, but there are particular species which drop a pair of feet,
+for instance, the _Lepidoptera_ of the genus _Vanessa_; in others,
+the physiological function of the foot varies; in the case of the
+carrion-beetle (a necrophagus coleopter) it serves as an instrument of
+tillage, to dig with; for the cricket, the third pair of feet are used
+for the purpose of leaping; for the _Dytiscus_, it serves as an oar, and
+so on. We must also bear in mind the curious fact that there exists in
+the larvæ of certain insects what are called supplementary feet, having
+only a transient existence and disappearing at maturity; the caterpillar,
+the larva of the butterfly, has five pairs of supplementary feet. These
+notable facts demonstrated by comparative anatomy, cannot fail to furnish
+us with valuable information concerning the functions of the complex
+organs found in the ganglia of the thorax.
+
+But this is not all. We have not enumerated all the contributions of
+comparative anatomy to the problem which we are now about to consider; we
+may make use of the method of comparison without bringing the different
+types into juxtaposition, but by viewing the nervous system of only
+a single animal in its entirety. We know in fact that the body of an
+insect is formed by a definite number of segments, all constructed on
+the same fundamental plan and arranged in a linear series. Each one of
+these segments is joined to a nerve-ganglion, which is all its own and
+supplies it with sensibility and motility, the two elementary properties
+of nervous activity. In the course of development, these ganglia have the
+power of changing their positions; and it is not uncommon to find that
+the greater number of the abdominal ganglia move up into the thorax; each
+one, nevertheless, retaining its nerve-relationship to its own segment.
+Now all the segments of an insect’s body are not called upon to play the
+same rôle; a division of labor has been effected among them with regard
+to the functions which they are found to exercise: as we have already
+seen, the ganglia of the thorax are essentially centres of locomotion;
+in the head, one of the ganglia, the sub-œsophageal, furnishes the
+nerves of the buccal portions; the other one, the brain, is connected
+with particular nerves and becomes the centre of the highest form of
+psychical activity of which the creature is capable. We have here a
+number of modifications superadded to the original plan. Yet the original
+plan should again be met with in the ganglia that have been least
+differentiated, such as those in the abdominal region; and the comparison
+between an abdominal and a thoracic ganglion, for instance, is well
+calculated to show what are the primal and fundamental structures, and
+what are the secondary ones which have been superadded and have become
+necessary for the execution of the more complex functions. The study
+of embryonic and larval forms so easily observed in insects, will most
+probably conduct us to the same result. And thus perhaps by continuous
+efforts, all guided by the same governing idea, we shall ultimately
+arrive at the analogies that exist between the cerebroid ganglia and the
+humblest ganglia belonging to the ventral chain, and thus finally be
+able to understand the action of the nerve-substance.
+
+The importance of this object, which, be it clearly understood, can
+never be attained except by the united effort of many workers, is well
+calculated to command our strenuous exertions and to encourage us in
+surmounting the difficulties of a study which is as yet almost entirely
+new.
+
+
+II.
+
+We shall restrict ourselves in this article to the consideration of one
+particular case; we shall describe a single ganglion of the insect. The
+type we have chosen, for reasons too lengthy to enumerate, is a Coleopter
+of the family of _Melolonthidæ_; the _Rhizotrogus solstitialis_, a small
+beetle very commonly found in the southwest of France. We will now
+proceed to the consideration of the first thoracic ganglion.
+
+The prothoracic ganglion in the rhizotrogus is joined by very short
+connective filaments to the second thoracic ganglion, and also to the
+sub-œsophageal ganglion; this latter ganglion, we must note _en passant_,
+being situated in the thorax. If with a pair of scissors we sever the
+head of the rhizotrogus, we find that the remainder of the body contains
+not only the thoracic ganglia, but also the sub-œsophageal; a peculiarity
+which, from a physiological point of view, is very interesting.
+
+The ganglion of the pro-thorax, which is greater in width than it is in
+length, bears a vague resemblance to a cone the base of which is turned
+towards the sub-œsophageal ganglion, whilst the apex points towards the
+second ganglion of the thorax. From the lower part spring two large
+nerves, their starting-point being nearer the ventral than the dorsal
+surface, a fact clearly comprehended when we find that the fibres of
+these nerves extend for the most part into the first pair of feet, that
+is to say, into those organs that lie underneath the horizontal plane
+of the ganglion. The connective filaments which penetrate the ganglion
+anteriorly enter it nearer the dorsal surface than the ventral, this last
+being extremely convex. Dissection throws no additional light upon the
+anatomy of the ganglion. But by means of a series of sections, we find
+that it is composed of a mass of fibrillar substance which occupies its
+centre portion and of a layer of nerve-cells surrounding the fibrillar
+substance. This fibrillar mass is, owing to its great volume, far the
+most important, and constitutes in itself alone about four-fifths of the
+organ. The fibrillary structure can only be satisfactorily analysed by
+using on it osmic acid, or other equivalent reagents which dissociate
+it and admit of its being reduced to a certain number of clearly
+differentiated elements. Whenever osmic acid or a similar reagent has not
+been employed, or has not sufficiently penetrated the ganglion, owing
+to the obstacle presented by a thick conjunctival covering or envelope,
+the fibrillar substance takes on a homogeneous aspect that effectually
+renders all analysis of it impossible. Everything depends on the
+employment of a good method of preparation.
+
+When the ganglion has been properly prepared, we perceive a very material
+difference in the appearance of the fibrillar substance when we compare
+the dorsal with the ventral region of the ganglion. We can do this
+very satisfactorily by a longitudinal section, extending through both
+regions. In such a section close to the median line but not confounded
+with it (see Cut 16)[9] we perceive that the ventral region is occupied
+by a cord or string of substance which owing to the action of the osmic
+acid has become very black, and which is formed of so dense a tissue,
+that we can with difficulty separate it into fibres and fibrillæ. This
+cord, which, by reason of its position and shape, I propose naming the
+_ventral column_, extends over the ventral surface of the ganglion in a
+longitudinal direction; at both its anterior and posterior extremities it
+is carried on by fibres extending into the ventral columns of the other
+ganglia, in such a manner that the entire series of ganglia are united by
+one continuous ventral cord.
+
+If we look at a transverse section (see Cut 26), the cord, which is
+recognised by its dark color and by its position near the ventral surface
+of the fibrillar substance, will be seen to have the form of two almost
+perfect circles. The ventral column thus presents a circular section, is
+duplex and symmetrical: there exist two separate and distinct ventral
+columns, separate at least for a certain length; a fact which must be
+considered in connection with the primitive duality of the ganglion.
+
+In every section where the columns remain distinct from each other, they
+are separated either by fibres and conjunctival cells, or by nerve-fibres
+emanating from the cells of the ventral region and proceeding in an
+upward direction between the two columns. At the other points, the two
+columns join on the median line. This union is effected in different
+ways, either by the two columns coming directly together, thus merging
+into a single mass, or by a commissure which describes the arc of a
+circle underneath the two columns, or else by the inferior ventral lobule.
+
+We give the name of inferior ventral lobule to a small lobule of
+fibrillar substance, situated beneath the ventral column. When looked
+at in a horizontal section not passing through the median line (see Cut
+17), this lobule presents the appearance of a rounded protuberance,
+breaking the almost rectilinear contour of the ventral column. As this
+characteristic peculiarity is repeated in the internal structure of
+all the ganglia, we may use it to ascertain the number of the ganglia,
+whenever these present the appearance of being fused into one compact
+mass; we may see the practical application of this remark by observing
+the sub-œsophageal ganglion.
+
+In a succession of horizontal sections, the starting point of which is
+the ventral region, the first mass of fibrillar substance met with by the
+knife is the inferior ventral lobule, which is formed (see Cut 1) by two
+rounded fasciculi, placed symmetrically on either side of the median line
+and joined together by a transverse commissure.
+
+In these sections, we also perceive fibres of the crural nerve, which,
+after having extended over a certain length of the ganglion, penetrate
+into the substance of the inferior ventral lobule (Cut 2). In transverse
+sections (Cut 23) we find the two ventral lobules placed beneath the two
+columns which they help to support, and into which they gradually merge;
+and we also perceive the transverse commissure which joins the two.
+We shall call this the _transverse commissure of the inferior ventral
+lobule_.
+
+Let us now pass on to the examination of the upper surface of the
+ventral column. This surface is covered by a cluster of very fine fibrils
+rather sparsely disposed; we can clearly follow their course by means
+of a longitudinal section (Cut 17); we see them again in a horizontal
+section (Cut 5). To continue the general description of the ganglion we
+must now consider the dorsal region. It is, as we have previously stated,
+occupied by a fibrillar substance not so dense as that which composes the
+ventral column, and we will give the general name of dorsal lobe to this
+region, reserving the name ventral lobe for the region which embraces the
+ventral column and its adjoining parts. The dorsal lobe presents as its
+distinctive characteristic the feature that it is crossed longitudinally
+by a succession of connective filaments clearly seen in the longitudinal
+section of Cut 16.
+
+We have already stated that the ventral column receives fibres issuing
+from the ganglion in front and sends out others to the ganglia in the
+rear. We shall call the totality of these fibres _the connective ventral
+filaments_, and shall call the totality of those that traverse the dorsal
+lobe _the dorsal connective filaments_.
+
+The connective filaments which join the sub-œsophageal to the first
+thoracic ganglion, and which, between these two ganglia, are composed of
+a dense fasciculus of fibres, distribute these fibres, at the point at
+which they enter the prothoracic ganglia, in different directions; one
+set of fibres proceeds towards the ventral column, these are the ventral
+connective filaments; a second set traverses the dorsal lobe, and are the
+dorsal connective filaments.
+
+Whilst the ventral connective filaments soon merge into the very dense
+substance of the ventral column, the dorsal connective filaments, on
+the contrary, remain distinct from the organs which they traverse, and
+preserve their individuality throughout. They take directions in three
+different planes (see Cut 16), consequently they can be subdivided into
+superior, medial, and inferior dorsal connective filaments.
+
+Newport seems to have observed this distinction of fibres; and he has
+given the name of sensory column to this first division, and that of
+motor column to the second. Unfortunately the drawings and figures he has
+published, though schematically correct, are not clear. We do not adopt
+his terminology, in the first place because he designates the organs
+after their supposed functions, and we have made it a rule never to use
+controvertible physiological suppositions to designate anatomical organs;
+and besides, though the name of column is applicable to the connective
+ventral filaments, we cannot apply it to the connective dorsal filaments,
+which are subdivided into three pairs of fibrous fasciculi and do not in
+the least resemble a column.
+
+In the study of _Melolontha vulgaris_, we have been able to establish in
+the most absolute manner that there exists a considerable histological
+difference between the connective filaments of the ventral region and
+those of the dorsal. Though we have not yet noticed this difference in
+_Rhizotrogus_ in any marked degree, nevertheless it has seemed to us
+needful to point it out here, because the fact is of such vast importance
+that it cannot fail to be general. The dorsal connective filaments,
+whilst they preserve their individuality in their passage across the
+dorsal lobe of the ganglion, penetrate nevertheless into some small
+masses of dotted substance which are found in the path of their entrance
+into the ganglion. The mass annexed to the inferior dorsal connective
+filament, is above all very important and is directly connected with
+the ventral column. As the connective filaments are in pairs, each of
+these possesses a distinct mass of fibrillar substance and both the
+masses attached to the same pair of connective filaments are joined by a
+commissure.
+
+Let us now say a few words about the nerves which proceed toward the
+prothoracic ganglion. There exists here but one single pair of nerves,
+extremely important and very extensive. This is the crural nerve. To
+this nerve are attached the organs which are superadded to the primary
+structure of the ganglion, such as we have described it, and which in
+consequence renders the primitive structure more complex. We shall
+perceive the importance attached to the idea of a _superadded_ organ,
+when we study the abdominal ganglia, where the organs we are about to
+describe are either completely wanting or are but imperfectly developed.
+
+If now we examine a transversal section taken a little in front of the
+place from whence the crural nerves emerge (Cut 19), we shall notice
+that the central part of the ganglion is occupied by the ventral column
+and the upper part by the dorsal lobe. In addition to this, in the
+lateral regions of the ganglion we find two important masses of fibrillar
+substance. At this point these two masses remain distinct from the parts
+we have just mentioned, and on the other hand they are in connection with
+the crural nerves. The latter send a part, and unquestionably the greater
+part, of their fibres into the lateral lobes. In a section slightly
+posterior to the preceding one, also transversal, a very important change
+has taken place; the two lateral lobules, always connected with the
+crural nerves, have also established connections with the centre of the
+ganglion, and in the sections further on the fusion is complete. As these
+lateral lobules possess the characteristics mentioned, only at the point
+at which the crural nerves emerge, we shall call them the _crural lobes_.
+Thus we find in the prothoracic ganglion three principal lobes: (1) the
+crural lobe, which is double, symmetrical, and lateral, (2) the dorsal
+lobe, (3) the ventral lobe. These two last, in contradistinction to the
+crural lobe, will be classed together under the common term _central
+lobe_.
+
+And now to finish this summary description of the prothoracic ganglion,
+we will point out an important disposition of the connective tissue which
+divides the ganglion into two halves, one anterior, the other posterior.
+We can easily understand this disposition by looking at a longitudinal
+section passing exactly through the median line. From the dorsal surface
+of the ganglion, may be seen descending a bundle of cells and connective
+fibres, which, in the form of a column, are directed toward the centre
+of the ganglion; these cells and fibres do not meet any important organ
+on their way, the dorsal connective filaments always taking a lateral
+course. A fasciculus, similarly composed of cells and conjunctival
+fibres, starting from the ventral surface of the ganglion, appears
+to meet this conjunctival column (Cut 18). This curious disposition
+appears to be, as M. Henneguy has ingeniously suggested to me, a trace
+of the anterior development of the ganglion which had been formed of two
+distinct portions that have been naturally _welded_ together along the
+median line; the connective fasciculi corresponding to the point where
+the welding has been incomplete, and representing the survival of a
+portion of the walls of the two ganglia.
+
+
+III.
+
+As the ganglion which we have just described contains some structural
+difficulties not easy of comprehension, let us proceed with our
+description under another form, following the order of our illustrations.
+
+Figure 1 is the first horizontal section, cut through the ventral region
+of the ganglion; the knife has here met the lower ventral lobule, which
+at this point shows itself double; the two halves being joined by a
+double transversal commissure. Section 2, made at a point a little higher
+than the preceding one, shows us at the centre the lower ventral lobule
+as increased in size; and in the lateral part of the figure appears a new
+organ, the crural lobule, which is here entirely merged into the lower
+ventral lobule. The crural lobule is traversed by fibres from the crural
+nerve, which instead of being entirely lost in its substance, proceed
+still further, passing into the lower ventral lobule. Section 3 merely
+brings into prominence an important transversal commissure. In Section
+4, the inferior ventral lobule is replaced by the ventral column, which
+appears double, is symmetrical, and united by a transversal commissure;
+this commissure being formed of fibrillar substance. The ventral column
+is closely connected on each side with the crural lobule; it is besides
+crossed by the ventral connective fibres, which can be seen emerging
+from its anterior and posterior extremities. Section 5 allows us to
+examine thoroughly the disposition of those ventral connective fibres; we
+see that while they penetrate the ganglion, they also pass through two
+symmetrical masses of fibrillar substance; these two masses, which we
+name the anterior ventral lobules, are joined together by a transversal
+commissure. After having traversed the anterior ventral lobules, to which
+it appears they give a portion of their fibres, the ventral connective
+filaments pass through the ganglion in an antero-posterior direction, and
+we see them penetrating the two posterior ventral lobules. The last named
+lobules, which remind us by their position and appearance of the anterior
+lobules, receive in addition fibres issuing from the crural lobules; but
+they do not receive them all, because we notice quite a number of these
+fibres advancing directly into the second thoracic ganglion. After
+emerging from the posterior ventral lobules, the ventral connective
+filaments pass into the second thoracic ganglion, where we see them
+penetrate into the anterior ventral lobules.
+
+With Figure 6, we leave the ventral lobe of the ganglion and come
+to the lower portions of the dorsal lobule. The important filaments
+crossing this section from the front to the back are called lower dorsal
+connective filaments. We notice as they proceed some small masses of
+dotted substance, and, in addition to these, dark colored dots which are
+the result of the knife having cut crosswise through several fascicles of
+ascending fibres. We shall find out by means of the sections taken from
+different parts and placed so as to allow of our better observation, what
+these ascending fibres are. The crural lobule, always exhibits the same
+characteristics. We have given it a homogeneous aspect in our drawing. As
+a fact it presents in its sections a vast number of structural details.
+But these details being very difficult to understand, we prefer not to
+dwell upon them.
+
+Section 7 passes through the very midst of the lower dorsal connective
+filaments; these filaments being in two pairs, one external and the
+other internal. The external pair, situated somewhat lower, has here
+disappeared, and the inner pair is the only one to be seen. Some
+transversal fibres, whose direction appears to me difficult to follow,
+divide the inside dorsal connective filaments at two different points,
+and assume the figure of a square; this square has two black dots,
+produced by the section of the ascending fibres.
+
+A little higher, in Figure 8, the lower connective filaments have
+disappeared and the fibrillar substance of the ganglion is furrowed by
+long transversal fibres, of which a part seems to serve the function
+of joining the two crural lobules, whilst the remainder, proceeding
+towards the black dots before mentioned, continue their progress with
+the fasciculi of ascending fibres. These are no other than ascending
+fibres which, having changed their direction at the plane of the section,
+proceed almost in a horizontal plane. In Section 9 we follow the course
+of the medial dorsal connective filaments, separated from the lower
+connective filaments by the fibres having a transverse direction, seen
+in Figure 8. The medial dorsal connective filaments are four in number,
+an outer pair and an inner pair. At the moment when they leave the
+prothoracic ganglion, they cross a region where the fibrillar substance
+is both thicker and darker. In Figure 10 the medial connective filaments
+are on the point of disappearing; they receive certain fibres coming from
+the crural lobules, which are now reduced in dimensions. Section 11 shows
+us the lower dorsal connective filaments, which are the slenderest of all
+and of which there are but one pair; the crural lobule now disappears. In
+the middle of the figure, we observe a small collection of conjunctival
+cells which, as we have supposed, indicates the point where in the course
+of development the two symmetrical portions of the ganglion have not been
+perfectly fused together. Finally Section 12 shows two lateral masses of
+fibrillar substance, separated by a strip of conjunctival membrane.
+
+We will now take up the series of longitudinal sections, the study of
+which will demand very special attention. We shall there meet again with
+the organs which we have already examined in the horizontal sections;
+and we shall perceive that the alterations and modifications presented
+to us by the difference in our point of observation, bring out very
+important changes in the appearance of those organs. The sectional method
+of examination is also one of analysis. In order to reconstruct an organ
+in its complete form and to conceive of it in space, our mind must bring
+into a single focus what the sections have represented in a fragmentary
+manner: we must, in short, substitute synthesis for analysis.
+
+Figure 13 represents the first and exterior longitudinal section; it
+hardly touches the ganglion; in the front we see the starting point of
+the crural nerve, and also a portion of the periphery of the crural
+lobule. The crural nerve exhibits several roots, the most important of
+which occupy the ventral region. Figure 14, though very elementary,
+brings out many important points; we see here the crural lobule, which
+has increased in size and extends from the ventral to the dorsal region;
+a fact which has already been indicated in the horizontal sections, the
+crural lobule having been shown in them at all points. This lobule is
+almost circular in form. Along its ventral region, we perceive some of
+the fibres of the crural nerve which do not penetrate into the lobule;
+these are the ones we met with in the figures 2 and 3: they are the
+fibres which pass directly into the lower ventral lobule. With Section
+15, we leave the lateral regions of the ganglion and come to the dorsal
+and ventral regions; we must notice that the crural lobule is continuous
+with the central fibrillar mass and has no precise limits. In Section
+15 the ventral column appears, reduced in size. In the front of it
+we observe an incisure through which certain nerve-cells send their
+prolongations into the fibrillar substance.
+
+Figure 16 shows us the complete junction of all the connective filaments
+traversing the ganglion; first the ventral column, with the connective
+ventral filaments starting from both its extremities; and then the three
+dorsal connective filaments, which preserve their individuality distinct,
+while they cross the dorsal lobe of the ganglion. The lower dorsal
+connective filament is distinguished from the others by a small compact
+mass of fibrillar substance through which it passes. We must note that
+the fibrillar substance becomes thicker at the point where the whole
+series of connective filaments enter the ganglion, and the same thing
+is repeated at the place where they leave the first thoracic ganglion
+to enter into the second. The ventral column is distinguished from the
+other parts of the ganglion by the dark color which it assumes through
+the action of the osmic acid; it presents black granules which, examined
+with a strong lens, show small fasciculi of fibres running in a parallel
+direction. The cells which line the lower surface of the ventral column
+do not throw out any prolongations; they are exceedingly small, but do
+not otherwise present any special feature.
+
+Figure 17 is but very slightly different from the preceding one: the
+ventral column is simply strengthened on its lower surface by the lower
+ventral lobule. The position of this lobule is interesting to note. We
+have already mentioned that each ganglion is divided into two halves by
+a column of conjunctival tissue, one anterior and the other posterior.
+In Section 17 we see the granulated projection of the ventral portion
+of this conjunctival column. In order to simplify it we have shown no
+conjunctival tissue in our illustration. We may nevertheless notice,
+that the nerve-cells at the point marked _c. c._ seem to separate one
+from the other, and show a triangular space between them, filled with
+conjunctival cells. If the segment had not been cut so obliquely, (and
+this obliqueness in the sections is almost unavoidable when dealing with
+such very small organs,) we should also perceive on the dorsal line
+of the section the projection of the dorsal part of the conjunctival
+column; in fact we shall see this projection in the figure which follows.
+The presence of the conjunctival column separates, as we have said,
+each ganglion into two parts, one anterior the other posterior. These
+portions are not at all symmetrical. We see in Section 17 that the lower
+ventral lobule is found only in the anterior part. Finally from the
+ventral column rises an important fasciculus of ascending fibres, which
+we have already seen in the horizontal diagrams; it is difficult for
+us to ascertain what these fibres are. In the 18th and last section we
+approach nearer the median line. The ventral column at this level has
+the appearance of being divided into two trunks. The ventral connective
+filaments are clearly seen upon its upper surface. Among the dorsal
+connective filaments the middle one alone remains visible and receives a
+certain number of fibres from the ascending fasciculus.
+
+To complete our description let us glance at the series of transverse
+sections. In Figure 19 the two crural lobules have not yet united and
+are not yet merged into the dorsal-ventral lobe. This junction does not
+take place until we come to Figure 20. Here, at this level, we see in
+addition the circular segment of the two ventral columns, which by their
+dark color are sharply outlined against the remainder of the fibrillar
+substance. To the right and left of these two columns we perceive small
+masses of dotted substance; we merely call attention to them and shall
+not describe them. Figure 21 furnishes no noteworthy modifications of
+the preceding. We simply see a few cells of the periphery sending out
+their prolongations into the fibrillar substance. The point at which they
+thus penetrate it has already been indicated in Figure 15. In Figure 22
+we have a section of several dorsal connective filaments; among others
+a lower root of the crural nerve is here seen to pass along the ventral
+surface of the fibrillar substance without penetrating into the crural
+lobule. Does there exist an upper root of the same nerve, which follows
+the upper surface of the dotted substance? We do not dare to decide the
+question. One thing is certain, and that is that if the nerve does exist
+it is accompanied along its path by a great number of widely ramified
+tracheæ, of which we see a drawing in _tr._ In the three figures which
+follow (23, 24, 25) the ventral column presents an interesting series of
+modifications. First of all, in Figure 23, it is surrounded by the lower
+ventral lobule, of which the two masses are in a lateral position, and
+whose commissures pass underneath the column. We see in the same Figure
+23 the two lower roots of the crural nerve, advancing towards the column.
+In the 24th section the two roots have reached the column, and two other
+nerves cross the crural lobule; doubtless their destination is the lower
+dorsal connective filaments, but of this we have no clear indication.
+In the 24th section two other crural roots also enter the lower ventral
+lobule. This section is very favorable for the examination of the
+ascending fasciculus which we have already noticed in the longitudinal
+sections. It seems to us certain that this fasciculus terminates in the
+middle dorsal connective filament. Its origin is more uncertain. It seems
+to spring from the ventral column, or else to come from crural roots
+which, after having traversed the crural lobule, reascend towards the
+dorsal lobe of the ganglion, describing a curve exteriorily concave. It
+is possible that this ascending fasciculus has both these origins. The
+26th and last section shows us the ventral column on a larger scale;
+the two columns being distinct from each other, though united at the
+lower extremity by a commissure. The _ensemble_ of the figure strikingly
+reminds one of a section of the abdominal ganglion.
+
+Here our description ends. We have not sought to follow up every fibre in
+all its details, nor to describe completely the anatomy of each organ.
+Our intention has merely been to give a synthetic notion of a nervous
+ganglion. Subsequent studies made on other ganglia will demonstrate the
+general application of this idea.
+
+                                                             ALFRED BINET.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[9] For the cuts, see the plates in the Appendix of this number.
+
+
+
+
+HINDU MONISM.
+
+WHO WERE ITS AUTHORS, PRIESTS OR WARRIORS?
+
+
+Among all the forms of government class government is the worst. Carthage
+was governed by merchants, and the mercantile spirit of its policy led
+finally to the destruction of the city. Sparta was governed by warriors,
+and in spite of the glory of Thermopylæ it was doomed to stagnation.
+India was governed by priests, and the weal of the nation was sacrificed
+with reckless indifference to their interests. It appears that for the
+welfare of the community the harmonious co-operation of all classes is
+not only desirable but also indispensable.
+
+Yet it is often claimed that mankind is greatly indebted to nations or
+states ruled by class government, for having worked out the particular
+occupation of the ruling class to a perfection which otherwise it would
+not have reached. This is at least doubtful.
+
+Carthage was eager to establish monopolies, but she contributed little to
+the higher development of commerce and trade among mankind.
+
+Sparta raised brave men, but was not progressive, even in the science
+of war, and was worsted by so weak an adversary as Thebes. Modern
+strategists could learn something from Epaminondas, but little, if
+anything, from the Lacedæmonians.
+
+Priestcraft has attained to a power in India unparalleled in the history
+of other nations, and it is no exaggeration to say that priest-rule
+was the ruin of the country. Yet the wisdom of the Brahmans has become
+proverbial. Their philosophy is praised as original and profound, and it
+is well known that the first monistic world-conception was thought out
+in ancient India. But we shall see later on what the real share of the
+Brahmans in this great work has been.
+
+In the very earliest ages of Hindu antiquity, revealed to us in the songs
+of the Rig-veda, we meet with priests who claimed the power of making
+sacrifices to the gods in a manner especially acceptable to them, and
+who thus rose to great power, influence, and wealth. To this ancient
+period of Hindu history we can trace the origin of the Hindu castes,
+essentially a result of priestly egotism, and which up to this day has
+weighed down the Indian people like a nightmare. The organisation of
+the priestly class into an exclusive, privileged body, as well as the
+final development of the castes, did not, however, take place until the
+time represented by the second period of the ancient Hindu literature;
+by the literature, that is to say, of the Yajur-vedas or the Vedas of
+the sacrificial formulæ, and the Brâhmanas and Sûtras, both of which
+describe the sacrificial ceremonies, the former with, the latter without
+theological comments. The contents of these works illustrate the origin
+of the Hindu hierarchy and castes; but it is often necessary to read
+between the lines. The greatest authority on this rich literature, Prof.
+A. Weber, of Berlin, in the tenth volume of the series “Hindu Studies”
+which he edits, has published his inquiries concerning this subject in a
+very learned treatise, entitled “Collectanea über die Kastenverhältnisse
+in der Brâhmana und Sûtra,” of which I have made considerable use in the
+following pages.
+
+In these books the Brahmans assert their claims with startling candor. In
+several passages—to begin with the most striking feature—they announce
+themselves as real gods wandering on earth. “There are two kinds of
+gods,” it is said, “the true gods and the learned Brahmans, who recite
+the Veda.” “The Brahman represents all gods.” “He is the god of gods.”
+This is perhaps the most remarkable instance of priestly arrogance in all
+history. Thus it cannot at all surprise us that the Brahmans, as earthly
+gods, placed themselves above king and nobility; but it appears rather
+strange that the kings and warriors should have allowed to them the first
+place in the government. But as a matter of fact, they did do so and were
+compelled to do so. From mysterious legends in the great Hindu epic poem
+we infer, that bloody wars have been waged for supremacy, in which the
+nobility was defeated.
+
+The legends of this epos are thus important additions to the sources
+with which we are concerned. This struggle, which the Brahmans in all
+likelihood caused to be fought out for them by the great masses of the
+people, has been ascribed to the warriors having robbed the priests
+of the treasures which the latter had acquired by the performance of
+the sacrifices; and this part of the legend is so highly probable
+that we cannot treat it as a pure myth, especially if we take into
+consideration the circumstances of those times. It was the first attempt
+at secularisation in the history of the world, and the results were very
+disastrous to those who were then in secular power.
+
+The Brahmans did not establish a social hierarchy or ecclesiastical
+ranks, nor did they participate in the government, except that the king
+was bound to employ a Brahman as Purohita or house-priest, who occupied
+as such the position of prime minister. If, however, they succeeded in
+dominating the nobility and the whole people, it was principally on
+account of their greater knowledge, of which they boasted, and especially
+on account of the sacrificial arts, by the proper exercise of which in
+those times, all favors could be obtained from the gods. For a duly
+performed sacrifice, which would last weeks, months, nay, years, the
+Brahmans charged of course a high fee. A fee of ten thousand oxen was
+prescribed for a certain ceremony, a hundred thousand for another one,
+and a later teacher of ritualism charged 240,000 for the same service.
+And this was not yet the climax of priestly avarice, which—to use an
+expression of Professor Weber—indulges in veritable orgies in these
+books. After one has gone through the endless description of a ceremony,
+one finds at the end the remark that the whole sacrifice has no effect,
+unless the proper fee be paid to the priest. And—to use a term of modern
+life—lest competition should reduce the prices or spoil the business, a
+rule was established, that no one should take a fee which another one had
+refused. (Weber, p. 54.)
+
+The sacrificial rituals, so trying and tedious for us, are the only
+literary production of these dull centuries before the rising of
+philosophical speculation, and the great historical importance they
+possess is simply due to the light they throw on the moral depravity of
+the Brahmans as a class.
+
+The following fact will fully show to what extent sexual debaucheries
+were indulged in. The priest was enjoined, by a special rule, not to
+commit adultery with the wife of another during a particularly holy
+ceremony. But he who could not practice continence, was allowed to
+expiate his sin by an offering of milk to Varuna and Mitra.
+
+Numerous passages in the books on ritualism furnish us interesting
+illustrations of the great indulgence which the Brahmans had for each
+other’s weaknesses. The officiating priest is taught how to proceed
+during the sacrifice, if he wants to wrong the man who employs and pays
+him, or how to deviate from the prescribed rules, if he wants to rob
+his employer of his seeing, hearing, children, property, or position.
+The lack of confidence that resulted is best illustrated by a ceremony,
+the introduction of which, at the beginning of the sacrifice, became
+gradually necessary. By a solemn oath the officiating minister and the
+client bound themselves not to injure each other during the performance
+of the holy act. Consequently, the strange notions of right, which the
+Brahmans had in those times, will not surprise us. “Murder of any one
+but a Brahman is no murder.” “An arbitrator must decide in favor of
+the Brahman and not in favor of his opponent, if the latter is not a
+Brahman.” Such maxims are laid down in the texts with shameless insolence.
+
+It is plain that the caste system greatly contributed to increase the
+power and influence of the priests, because in a country where the people
+are divided into classes, the priest always succeeds in inciting at his
+wish the one against the other.
+
+After the Brahmans came as second caste the Kshattriyas (literally: the
+ruling class, i. e., king, nobility, soldiers); and as third caste the
+Vaisyas (the bulk of the people: farmers, merchants, etc.). The conquered
+non-Aryan aborigines were foreordained by the gods to serve the Aryan
+castes and especially the Brahmans. They were called Súdras (serfs) and
+had neither civil nor religious rights. “The Súdra is the servant of
+others; he can be cast out or killed.” By this humane maxim were the
+Brahmans guided in their conduct towards the aborigines.
+
+With such a state of things, as it appears in the old books, the
+priesthood ought to have been well pleased. But the Brahmans were not;
+they desired still greater advantages and carried out the caste system
+to a most absurd extent. The result is embodied in the famous law-book
+of Manu, the exact date of which we do not yet know, but which must be
+placed at the beginning of our era. The condition of things of which I
+shall now speak, was accordingly developed during the last centuries
+before Christ. Though we may suppose that some rules of this code have
+remained a mere theory and have never been carried out, there remains
+enough to show the social life of those times in a poor light. Köppen,
+in the first chapters of his book on Buddhism, has severely but justly
+judged the social organisation, as it appears in Manu’s law-book; but
+as the age of this code was overrated at his time, he was led to one
+erroneous conclusion: he attributes the historical process, of which we
+speak, to the period before Buddha, while it really took place after
+Buddha: L. von Schröder, in his work “Indian Literature and History,” in
+the twenty-ninth lecture, gives us a good view of those times.
+
+Different passages in Manu’s code show us that the claim of the Brahmans
+to divinity had not decreased in the course of the centuries. “The
+Brahmans are to be venerated at all times, as they are the highest
+divinity.” “By his very origin the Brahman is a god, even to the gods.”
+
+The many practical privileges they enjoyed were of still greater value.
+They were exempt from taxation under all circumstances, “even if the king
+should starve.” For the greatest crimes they could not be executed or
+chastised, nor was their property liable to confiscation, while at the
+same time the criminal law was very harsh towards the other castes and
+especially towards the Súdras. The penalties increased proportionately:
+the lower the caste to which the criminal belonged, the higher the
+punishment; and the fines also increased in proportion to the rank of the
+caste to which the injured man belonged. The money-lender was allowed
+to exact (monthly) two per cent. of a Brahman, three of a Kshattriya,
+four of a Vaisya, five of a Súdra. All these laws show how the Brahmans
+understood the art of advancing their interests. The Súdra was by the
+code deprived of all rights. “The Brahman may consider him as a slave and
+is therefore entitled to take his property, as the property of the slave
+belongs to the master.” “The Súdra shall not acquire wealth, even if he
+be in a position to do so, as such conduct gives offense to the Brahman.”
+
+But all these things are harmless when compared with the principles by
+which the Brahmans reduced to the most miserable of lives numberless
+human creatures who had committed no wrong except that their origin did
+not agree with the political scheme of the priests. Formerly it had been
+lawful for the members of the three Aryan castes, after having married
+a girl of the same caste, to take other wives of a lower caste besides,
+and no disgrace attached to their children. The son of a Brahman and a
+Vaisya—or even of a Súdra woman—was therefore a Brahman. But this was no
+longer the case under the code of Manu.
+
+If the parents belonged to different castes, the children did not follow
+either father or mother, but they formed a mixed caste and the law
+distinctly regulates their occupations and trades. This theory gave birth
+to a great number of mixed castes, who were more or less despised. And
+the social standing of many of them grew still worse on account of an
+absurd maxim which degraded the Indian people to the level of grass and
+plants. Good seed in a bad soil gives of course a poorer return than in
+good soil; still the crop is endurable. But weed introduced into good
+soil produces weed abundantly. According to this theory of the Brahmans
+the children were below the father, if he had married a wife of a higher
+caste. The lowest and most execrable creature therefore is the son of
+a Súdra and a Brahman woman. The destiny of a Súdra was of course hard
+and unhappy, but the misery of the offspring of such a marriage, of the
+Chandâla, defies all description. “He shall live far from the abodes of
+other men and bear signs by which everybody can recognise and avoid him,
+as his contact pollutes. Only in daytime shall he be admitted into the
+villages, as then people can avoid him. He shall possess but common
+animals like dogs and donkeys, eat out of broken plates, put on the
+dresses of the dead, etc. They were compelled to serve as executioners.
+To the utmost degree of contempt and misery has the proud Brahman reduced
+these poor creatures.” (Schröder, pp. 423-424.)
+
+But the Chandâla was not the last in the Brahmanic scale, which
+suppressed all dignity in human nature; his offspring, though he had
+only a wife of the Súdra caste, was necessarily still below him. Thus
+originated a great number of mixed castes, one more despised than the
+other, and despising one another. Most of these outcasts take their names
+from the Indian aborigines and are thus placed on the same level with
+the most contemptible tribes. Some of the things I have cited about the
+mixed castes, may have been merely a theory of the Brahmans; however, the
+actual existence of classes of people reduced by the clergy to a sort of
+animal life, has been sufficiently verified by foreign travellers.
+
+In modern times the separation of the people has been going on very
+rapidly; so much so, that nearly every trade or profession now forms
+a caste of its own, having no social intercourse with, nor patriotic
+feelings for the other castes. This condition of things is due to the
+influence of the Brahmans, for it has grown out of the social order they
+have founded.
+
+It is not my task to arraign the Brahmans for the sins they have
+committed; but simply to illustrate to my readers, how little they cared
+for and had at heart the interests of their people. One will, upon the
+whole, feel inclined to denounce the selfishness and immorality of the
+Brahmans, but on the other hand will acknowledge with admiration the
+intellectual work they have done, and forgive them much for the profound
+thoughts with which they have enriched their country and the whole world.
+Is it not the wisdom of the Brahmans that has given to the word India a
+sound that stirs the hearts of all to whom the struggle for the highest
+truth appears as the highest phenomenon in the history of civilisation?
+But suppose it can be shown that the greatest of all the wisdom of the
+Brahman, the monistic doctrine of the All-in-One, which has had the
+greatest influence on the intellectual life of modern times, was not
+discovered by them?
+
+Before I enter on this question, of the greatest importance from an
+historical point of view, I will give a short sketch of the period of
+Indian history in which this doctrine was established.
+
+For centuries the Brahmans had heaped sacrifice on sacrifice and
+multiplied symbolical explanations without end. All this distinctly
+bore the stamp of priestly sophistry. Suddenly higher thoughts arise.
+The learning handed down by tradition and the sacrificial system are,
+it is true, not altogether abandoned; the mind, however, is no longer
+satisfied with the mysteries of the sacrifices, but aims at higher and
+more sublime truth. The age of intellectual darkness is followed by a new
+era, the characteristic of which is the ambition to solve the problems of
+life and to understand the relation of the individual to the absolute.
+All the efforts of the human mind are now bent on solving the question
+of the eternal Unity, from which all phenomena have emanated and which
+every one perceives within his own self. It is the age of the Upanishads,
+those famous books, which, as soon as they were known in Europe, filled
+all scholars with wild enthusiasm and admiration. I refer only to the
+old Upanishads, that date from the eighth to the sixth century B. C.,
+not to the great number of books of the same name, but not of the same
+value—there are over 200 of them—which appeared after the Christian era.
+The Upanishads reveal the struggle of the mind to reach the highest
+truth. Though they indulge occasionally in strange speculations, still
+the idea of Brahma, of the universal soul, of the absolute, of the
+thing in itself, is the ever-recurring subject of their thoughts, which
+culminate in the idea that the Atman, the inner self of man, is naught
+but the eternal and endless Brahma. A wonderful pathos animates the
+language of the Upanishads and testifies to the sublime feelings in which
+the thinkers of those times sought the great mystery of existence. They
+look for all kinds of expressions, metaphors and figures, in order to
+couch in words what cannot be described by words. We read for instance
+in the venerable Brihadâranyaka Upanishad: “That which lives on the
+earth, but is different from the earth, that which is the moving power
+of the earth, that is your Self, the inner immortal ruler.” The same
+is predicated of water, fire, ether, wind, sun, moon, and stars; and
+then the chapter ends as follows: “Unseen, he sees; unheard, he hears;
+unminded, he minds; unknown, he knows. There is none that sees but he;
+there is none that hears but he; there is none that minds but he; there
+is none that knows but he. He is thy soul, the inner ruler. Whatever is
+different from him, is perishable.”
+
+In the same celebrated Upanishad appears a woman, named Gârgî, and moved
+by thirst of knowledge she inquires of the wise Yâjnavalkya: “That which
+is beyond the sky and beneath the earth, and between sky and earth, that
+which is, was, and shall be, in what and with what is it interwoven (that
+is: in what does it live and move)?” Yâjnavalkya, in order to try the
+intellectual power of the woman, gives an evasive answer: “In the ether.”
+But Gârgî, perceiving that this answer did not contain the final truth,
+asks: “In what is the ether woven?” And Yâjnavalkya replied: “O Gârgî,
+that is what the Brahman calls the Eternal; it is neither big, nor small,
+nor large, nor short, without connection, without contact; by the Eternal
+are ruled heaven and earth, sun and moon, days and nights; the power of
+the Eternal directs the rivers south or west or to any other point of
+the compass. Whoever parts from this world without having understood the
+Eternal, is miserable.”
+
+In the Chândogya Upanishad, a book of no less importance, the same wisdom
+is taught by a man named Uddâlaka to his son Shvetaketu in the form of
+several parables. We see them standing in front of a Nyagrodha tree, that
+kind of fig-tree that everywhere sends roots from the branches down to
+the ground, thus producing new trunks, until in the course of time _one_
+tree resembles a green pillared hall. And in front of such a tree, the
+most beautiful symbol of ever-youthful nature, the following conversation
+takes place between father and son: “Get me a fruit of this tree.”—“Here
+it is.”—“Break it.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in it?”—“I see quite
+small kernels.”—“Break one of them.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in
+it?”—“Nothing.”—Then the father said: “The fine matter that you cannot
+see has produced this big tree, and believe me, my dear son, this same
+matter, of which the earth is composed, is the Absolute, the Universal
+Soul,—it is you.”
+
+The eternal ground of all existence which every one carries in himself,
+Being as it is in itself, and as it is immediately perceived in thinking,
+was, accordingly recognised as the sole reality, and all the manifold
+changes of the phenomenal world were called Maya, a sham, a delusion, a
+mockery of the senses. We see, it is a consistent monism which is taught
+in the Upanishads.
+
+I do not intend here either to criticise the Brahman conception of
+monism or to contrast it with modern forms of monism. All monisms have
+at least one thing in common, viz. they all recognise the paramount
+importance of consistency of thought as a basic principle in philosophy.
+And to have propounded a monism for the first time is a feat which
+cannot be overestimated. What remains of this essay will be devoted to
+the investigation of the question, whether this feat is duly or unduly
+credited to the Brahmans.
+
+It may first be mentioned, that a few scholars like Weber, Max Müller,
+Regnaud, Deussen, and Bhandarkar, pointed out, a long time ago, certain
+facts which show that another class of the Hindu nation founded the
+monistic doctrine of the old Upanishads. But the attention of the great
+public has never been called to this subject, which deserves to be known
+by all interested in Indian history.
+
+In the second book of the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, of which I have
+already cited two passages, is found the following story, of which also
+the fourth book of Kaushîtaki Upanishad gives a slightly different
+version.
+
+The proud and learned Brahman Bâlâki Gârgya comes on his journey to
+Ajâtashatru, prince of Benares, and says to him: “I will announce you
+the Brahma.” The king, highly pleased, promises him a great reward, a
+thousand cows. The Brahman begins to expound his wisdom: “The Spirit
+(that is the power) in the sun I venerate as the Brahma.” But the king
+interrupted him, saying that he knew that already. Then the Brahman
+speaks about the Spirit in the moon, in lightning, ether, wind, fire,
+water, but the king knows all that. And whatsoever the Gârgya might say,
+is not new to the king. The Brahman became silent. But Ajâtashatru asked
+him: “Is that all?” and Gârgya answered: “Yes, that is all.” Then the
+king said: “Your little knowledge is not the Brahma;” whereupon Gârgya
+declared that he should like to be one of the king’s pupils. Ajâtashatru
+replied: “It is against nature, that a Brahman should learn from a
+warrior and depend on him for the understanding of the Brahma, but I will
+show it you nevertheless.” The king took him to a sleeping man and spoke
+to the latter; but he did not get up. When the king touched him with his
+hand, he arose. The king then asked the Brahman: “While this man was
+sleeping where was his mind, and whence did it return now?” Gârgya could
+not give an answer. Then the king explained to him, that the mind or the
+Self of the sleeping man was wandering around in dream, that all places
+were open to him, that he could be a great king or a great Brahman; but
+that there was still a higher condition of felicity, that is, absorption
+in dreamless sleep, without consciousness. In this condition the Self of
+man, not affected by the outside world, reposes in his true essence and
+knows no difference between Atman and Brahma.
+
+Another story, reported in the fifth book of Chândogya Upanishad and in
+the sixth book of Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, is perhaps of still greater
+importance.
+
+The young Brahman Shvetaketu comes to a convention, where the King
+Pravâhana Jaivâli asks him: “Has your father instructed you?”—“Yes,
+sir.”—“Do you know to what place the dead go?” And three more questions
+he put to the young Brahman, who was compelled to admit that he knew
+nothing about them. Discouraged, he returned to his father and reproached
+him: “Although you have not imparted any knowledge to me, you claim that
+you have instructed me. A _simple king_ has asked me three questions and
+I could not answer a single one.” The father replied: “You have known me
+sufficiently to understand that I taught you all I knew. Come, let us
+go to the king and learn from him.” The king received the Brahman with
+great honors and requested him to select a present. But Gautama refuses
+all earthly gifts, gold, cows, horses, female slaves, and asks the king
+to answer the questions he had put to his son. At first the king was
+unwilling, but after a while he agreed to it and said, that no one on
+earth could give information on those subjects, except a warrior. And the
+following words of the king’s are very significant: “Would that neither
+you nor your ancestors had trespassed on us, that this truth might never
+have set up her residence among Brahmans. But to you, since you are so
+inquiring, I will communicate our wisdom.”
+
+Substantially the same story is found at the beginning of the Kaushîtaki
+Upanishad, except that the king appears under the name Chitra.
+
+Omitting points of less importance, I shall only give in a brief form
+the contents of the eleventh and the following chapters of the fifth
+book of the Chândogya Upanishad, where again a man of the warrior caste,
+Ashvapati, prince of the Kekaya, is shown in possession of the highest
+wisdom. A number of highly learned Brahmans were speculating on the
+following problems: “What is our Self? What is the Brahma?” and they
+decided to go to Uddâlaka Aruni, who, as they knew, was investigating
+the “Omnipresent Self.” But Aruni said to himself: “Now, they will ask
+me and I am not able to answer all their questions”; consequently he
+requested his visitors to go with him to Ashvapati. The latter receives
+them with great honors, invites them to stay with him, promising them
+presents as high as their fees for sacrifices. But they replied: “A man
+must communicate what he knows. You are just now seeking the ‘Omnipresent
+Self’; disclose to us what it is?” The king, said: “I will answer you
+to-morrow.” The following day, without having received them among his
+pupils, that is, without a ceremonial reception as was usual, he asked
+them: “What do you venerate as the Self?” They replied: “Heaven, sun,
+wind, ether, water, earth.” The king reminded them that they were all
+mistaken in considering the Omnipresent Self as a finite and limited
+being; it was the infinite, the infinitely small and the infinitely great.
+
+The weight of these stories is very plain. Whether they refer to real
+facts or merely reflect the views of those times in the form of legends,
+cannot be decided. However, the question of the historical truth of these
+stories has no bearing whatever. The fact that they are to be found in
+genuine Brahmanic writings, in books which are considered in India as
+the basis of the Brahman caste, speaks a plain language. It shows, that
+the thought of claiming the monistic doctrine of the Brahma-Atman as
+the inheritance of their caste, did not occur to the authors of the old
+Upanishads, or that they dared not claim it; it may be that they did not
+yet realise the great importance of the same. Of course in the following
+ages this science became the exclusive property of the Brahmans and was
+cultivated and developed by them during twenty centuries—but this does
+not do away with the fact that it originated among the warrior caste. The
+men of this caste recognised at once the hollowness of the sacrificial
+system and its absurd symbolical character; and to them is due the credit
+of having disclosed a new world of thought and of having accomplished a
+revolution in the intellectual life of Ancient India. When we learn that
+the Brahmans continued the sacrificial system, even after having adopted
+the new creed, and by representing religious ceremonials as the first
+step to knowledge, thus combined two wholly heterogeneous elements; we
+may justly conclude that things have taken the same course in Ancient
+India as in other countries. Progressive ideas are first opposed by the
+priesthood, their born enemy, until they have become so powerful that
+they cannot be opposed any longer, whereupon the priest adopts them and
+tries to harmonise them with his superstitions.
+
+But the ideas mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, the substance of
+what is commonly called “Hindu wisdom,” are not all that the warriors
+have done for the religion and philosophy of the people. The noble
+Gautama of Kapilavastu, the best known of all Hindus, who established
+Buddhism about 500 years before Christ, was also a Kshattriya, and
+according to the more recent tradition, which alone was formerly known,
+the son of a king; but according to the earlier sources, disclosed
+by Oldenberg, he was the son of a landed proprietor. Buddha, “the
+Enlightened,” under which name he is known all over the world, most
+strenuously opposed the sacrificial system and the superstitions of the
+Brahmans. The ceremonies and the science of the priesthood seemed to him
+a perfect fraud, and the caste system an absurd institution; he taught
+that the final beatitude is within the reach of the lowest man, as well
+as of the Brahman and the king; that every one, without distinction of
+birth, can attain to “salvation” by contempt of the world, self-denial,
+and devotion to the welfare of his fellow beings.
+
+Oldenberg’s excellent book on Buddha, the newest standard work on this
+subject, makes it unnecessary for me to dwell at length on the doctrine
+of the greatest of all Hindus; only in regard to one important point,
+which has a direct bearing on the subject under consideration, do I
+differ from his opinion. According to the oldest sources, Buddha’s
+method of teaching is, to a great extent, beyond the understanding of
+the bulk of the people; not a popular, but an abstract philosophical
+one. For intrinsic reasons, I believe that the old sources do not give
+a correct report of this matter, and we must not forget that centuries
+separate them from Buddha. Oldenberg himself raises the point, whether
+the dry and tedious ecclesiastical style, in which Buddha’s thoughts are
+clothed by those sources, truly reflects the spoken word. He says on
+page 181: “Whoever reads the words which the sacred books attribute to
+Buddha will doubt that the form in which Buddha taught his precepts is
+to be identified with that abstract and sometimes abstruse metaphysical
+language. A youthful, invigorating spirit, pervading alike teacher and
+disciples, is the true picture of those times, admitting of no unnatural
+or artificial features.”
+
+In spite of this, he comes to the conclusion that “the solemn and stern
+way of speaking, peculiar to Buddha, has been better expressed by
+tradition than by what we would feel tempted to substitute.” I am not of
+this opinion. In India a great success could not have been obtained but
+by overpowering eloquence and a popular method, intelligible to all, and
+proceeding by parables and metaphors.
+
+If Buddha had only appealed to the intellect of his nearest surroundings,
+consisting merely of aristocratic elements, if he had not found his way
+to the heart of the people, his monastery would very likely have shared
+the destiny of the other religious congregations of his age, which have
+all disappeared, except one. As the doctrines of these monasteries or
+their founders do not substantially differ from each other, and as it
+cannot be ascribed to mere chance that Buddha’s doctrine has developed
+into a universal religion, having the greatest number of adherents,
+there remains but one hypothesis to account for this fact, and that
+is the superiority of Buddha’s way of teaching. The erroneousness of
+the generally prevailing opinion that Buddha was in his time the only
+founder of a new religion, and that he suddenly revolutionised the social
+organisation of the Indian people, has been clearly established by recent
+investigations. In fact, he was a “primus inter pares,” one of those
+numerous ascetics who were striving for and preaching “liberation” from
+the eternal transmigration.
+
+Besides Buddha’s, only one congregation has survived: the Jaina, having
+numerous members in the western part of India. The principles of the
+Jaina are very similar to those of Buddha; so much so that until recently
+it was considered merely as a sect of Buddhism, while it is really a
+religion of its own, founded by a contemporary or a predecessor of
+Buddha, named Vardhamâna Jnâtaputra—in the language of the people,
+Vaddhamâna Nâtaputta—in the same part of the country where Buddha rose.
+The only difference between the two religions is this: Vardhamâna lays
+great stress on castigation; while the more progressive Buddha declares
+it useless—nay, pernicious. The important point in regard to the object
+of our essay is this: that the founder of Jaina, which occupies a high
+place in the history of Hindu culture, was also a member of the Warrior
+Caste.
+
+We shall now have to consider another production of the Indian mind,
+the very name of which is unknown to most of our readers, although it
+offers the most interesting religious problems. I refer to the doctrine
+of the Bhâgavatas or Pâncharâtras. These names, of which the former
+is the earlier and original one, designate a religious sect in North
+India, whose existence in the fourth century B. C. is authentically
+proved, but which can be placed with great probability in the time
+before Buddha. They professed a common-sense monotheism, independent of
+the traditions of the old Brahmans, and venerated God under different
+names: Bhagavant, “The Sublime,” whence their name is derived; Nârâyana,
+“Son of Man;” Purashottamma, “The Supreme Being”; but generally under
+the name Krishna Vâsudeva, “Son of Vâsudeva”. The character of their
+worship produced feelings identical with the Christian love and devotion
+to God. The Hindu word for this feeling is Chakti, and for him who was
+penetrated by the same, Chakta. As the word Chakti cannot be found or has
+not been found in the Hindu literature earlier than the era of Christ,
+several scholars are inclined to attribute the Chakti to the influence
+of Christianity, especially Professor Weber, who deserves the highest
+praise for his researches concerning Krishna worship. Weber has proved
+in several of his books, especially in a highly interesting treatise
+on Krishna’s birth, that numerous Christian notions have entered into
+the later Krishna legends (the similarity of the names, Krishna and
+Christ, accounts for it): for instance, the birth of Christ among the
+shepherds, the story about the stable, and others of the same kind. In
+spite of this, I cannot embrace the opinion that the Chakti has been
+brought from a foreign country, because its first appearance belongs
+to a period in which Christian influences cannot be found. As I cannot
+go into details without discussing very difficult points, requiring a
+great deal of erudition, I will only say that whoever is familiar with
+the old Hindu civilisation will easily understand that the Chakti is of
+genuine Hindu origin. Monotheistic notions can be traced to the oldest
+periods of Hindu antiquity, and the Hindu mind has always been animated
+by a high aspiration towards God; so that it should not surprise us that
+this feature of the Hindu character has produced a religion popular and
+independent of philosophical speculation, consisting in love and devotion
+to God. The founder of this religion was Krishna Vâsudeva, afterwards
+raised to divine dignity, or rather identified with the deity; from his
+name and from the legends attached to his name, he was a member of the
+Warrior Caste. As early as the epoch of the Mahâbhârata, the great Indian
+epic poem, the Brahmans appropriated to themselves the name and work of
+Krishna, and transformed the venerated hero into the God Vishnu; thus
+increasing their strength by adopting a doctrine not of Brahmanic origin.
+
+We have thus found that the profound philosophical monism of the
+Upanishads, the highly moral religions of Buddha and Jaina, and last,
+not least, the creed of the Bhâgavatas, based on pure devotion to God,
+did not originate among the Brahmans.
+
+However favorably we may judge of the achievements of the Brahmans in all
+branches of science, and I am far from vilifying their merits, still it
+is certain that the greatest intellectual performances of India, nay, all
+such in India that have been beneficial to mankind, were accomplished by
+men of the Warrior Caste.
+
+                                                            RICHARD GARBE.
+
+
+
+
+THE IDEA OF NECESSITY, ITS BASIS AND ITS SCOPE.
+
+
+The idea of necessity, although a fundamental concept in philosophy
+and science, has not as yet been so clearly defined that all thinkers
+would agree as to its meaning and significance. Necessity is frequently
+identified with compulsion, and thus it is supposed to be incompatible
+with freedom of will. It is also identified with fate, as if it were a
+destiny that existed above the will of man and the powers of nature,
+similar to the Moira of the ancients. It is said to exclude chance in
+every possible conception of the term and to cause the evolution of the
+world to proceed by a predetermined arrangement, like the mechanism of a
+clock.
+
+We cannot endorse Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s objection to the doctrine
+of necessity, but we side with him when he denounces the mechanical
+philosophy for considering minds as “part of the physical world in such a
+sense that the laws of mechanics determine everything that happens.” Mr.
+Peirce is right when he rebukes the mechanical philosopher for “entering
+consciousness under the head of sundries as a forgotten trifle.” In some
+sense minds are parts of the physical, i. e. the natural, world, but they
+are not parts of that province of nature which constitutes the special
+domain of physics and mechanics. Ideas are not motions and cannot be
+explained by mechanical laws.
+
+Having criticised in a former article of ours Mr. Peirce’s position, and
+having rejected the indeterminism proposed by him, we shall discuss in
+the following pages the basis and scope of the idea of necessity.
+
+The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness, and we
+find that the existence of samenesses is a feature of the world in which
+we live. The existence of samenesses is a fact of experience, and upon
+the presence of this fact depends the possibility of the origin, the
+being, and the development of the thinking mind itself.
+
+Necessity, as we understand it, must be carefully distinguished from
+the idea of fate. Although we accept without reserve the doctrine of
+determinism, we do not mean to deny the important part that chance plays
+in the world—not absolute chance, which according to Mr. Peirce is exempt
+from law, but that same chance of which the throw of a die is a typical
+instance. And bearing in mind that necessity is not a power outside
+of nature and above the will of man, but that it resides in them as
+the quality of sameness, we abandon the view that identifies necessity
+with compulsion; recognising thus, that freedom of the will is not
+incompatible with our view of necessitarianism.
+
+
+I. THE BASIS OF NECESSITY.
+
+The standpoint from which we shall treat this subject is that of monistic
+positivism,—the method which accepts no doctrine, theory, or law unless
+it be a formulation of facts. Facts are the bottom-rock to which we can
+and must dig down. At the same time, wherever facts appear contradictory
+to one another, we should not be satisfied, but continue to investigate
+until they are systematised so as to form a unitary entirety.
+
+Before we begin our inquiry into the existence or non-existence of
+necessity, it is advisable to define the meaning of the term.
+
+The Latin word _necesse_ is most probably a compound of the negative _ne_
+and the supine _cessum_ from _cedere_ to yield, to move. “Necessary,”
+according to this etymology, would mean that which does not yield but
+abides. Thus it is the inevitable; it is that which is or will be.
+
+It is in this sense that the word is still used, or at least ought to be
+used, and in this sense we shall also use it.
+
+Every word naturally acquires by a more or less appropriate application
+a series of meanings. So “necessary” means also that which is needful,
+that which is essential, that which is indispensable and requisite; it
+also means that which is done under compulsion. It is understood that
+we exclude all the other meanings of necessary except the original one,
+which is its properly philosophical meaning.
+
+The idea of necessity is closely allied to the idea of sameness. In order
+to understand the former we must be clear concerning the meaning of the
+latter.
+
+
+THE IDEA OF SAMENESS.
+
+There exist a number of synonyms often used indiscriminately; they are:
+identity, sameness, equality, congruity, similarity, and likeness. By
+“identity” we generally understand a sameness in every respect, absolute
+sameness; by “equality”, a sameness that can be expressed in figures.
+Equality is always a measurable sameness, and refers to quantity, mass,
+size, length, height, age, etc. Likeness and similitude are samenesses
+of form or of proportion, albeit not of size. It is often used as a
+partial sameness of impressions, not so much as they are in themselves,
+but as they appear to the mind. Congruity is a synonym of sameness in the
+province of geometry, denoting the coincidence of figures when laid upon
+one another.[10]
+
+The logical principle of identity, so-called, it appears to me, ought
+to be named the principle of sameness, for it has not reference to the
+absolute sameness of a thing with itself.[11] The statement _A_ = _A_
+does not mean that this particular thing _A_ is itself and that therefore
+the one _A_ is one and the same thing. It is a general statement and
+means that all _A_, in so far as they are _A_, are the same. The
+statement _A_ = _A_, as I take it, presupposes the existence of a
+number of _A’s_; otherwise it would have no sense, and it would not only
+be empty, (as we know from Kant that all formal statements are,) but
+meaningless and useless. It would be of no avail either in logic or in
+science.
+
+In consideration of the fact that the idea of sameness is a fundamental
+concept in our scientific, logical, and philosophical reasoning, it is
+astonishing that no satisfactory definition of it is to be found. To
+define “same” as “one in substance; not other, ... of one nature or
+general character, of one kind, degree, or amount,” as is done in the
+“Century Dictionary,” is no improvement upon “Webster,” who defines it
+as “not different or other; identical. Of like kind, species, sort,
+dimensions or the like; not different in character or in the quality
+or qualities compared; ... like.” However, dictionaries are not
+encyclopædias; and they have perhaps a right to define same as identical,
+and identical as same.
+
+Mr. James Ward, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” (XVI, 81, in his
+excellent article on “Psychology,”) incidentally complains about
+the ambiguity of the word “same”; he proposes a distinction between
+“material identity” and “individual identity,” but this does not solve
+the difficulty. Flemming’s “Vocabulary of Philosophy” (4th ed. edited by
+Calderwood) contains several articles on “identical” and on “identity”
+without discussing in any one of them the meaning of “same” or of
+“identical.”
+
+What then is the meaning of same?
+
+Let us first consider the etymology of the word. The root of “same”
+is found in almost all Indo-European languages; it is preserved in
+the first syllable of the Latin “similis” and “simul,” in the second
+syllable of the German “Zu_samm_en”; in the Greek “ἅμα” and “ὅμοιος,”
+and the Sanskrit “sama,” all of which denote a togetherness. Thus the
+etymological meaning seems to signify what is classed in one category.
+Accordingly, the present meaning as defined by the dictionaries, as
+being that which is “of one nature or not different in character,” has
+not changed; at any rate if there is any change, it is slight. Yet it is
+desirable to bring out and set in a clear light the purport of the word
+and its essence.
+
+What, then, is the economic service and function of the idea of
+“sameness” in the household of thought?
+
+“Sameness” is that feature in two things or states of things, in two
+processes or modes of action, which brings it to pass that the one may
+be replaced by the other without altering for a certain purpose the
+state of things or affecting the result of the entire process. Popularly
+expressed, sameness is the capability of one thing’s being substituted
+for another.
+
+There is no need of discussing or proving the truism, that, properly
+speaking, there is no absolute sameness, no identity in the strict sense
+of the term. This was the meaning of Heraclitus’s idea of the perpetual
+flux of things, expressed in his πάντα ῥεῖ. There are no two moments in
+time, no two points in space, no two atoms of matter actually identical,
+and we cannot enter into the identical river twice.
+
+Cratylus tried to outdo Heraclitus, by saying that we cannot even enter
+once into the identical river, for while entering, not only the river
+changes but also we ourselves; and Cratylus is perfectly right.
+
+We have purposely substituted in Heraclitus’s proposition “identical” for
+“same,” because this change is needed to bring out the truth of the idea.
+Heraclitus and Cratylus cease to be right if we use the word same as
+above defined. We enter indeed the same river twice. The river of to-day
+is, for a certain purpose, quite the same as the river of yesterday, in
+so far namely as the river of to-day and the river of yesterday serve a
+certain and the same purpose: for other purposes this same river will
+perhaps not be the same. The geographer and historian speak of the Rhine
+as that stream of water which since time immemorial has flowed down from
+the St. Gotthardt to the North Sea. Accordingly, if we stand on the bank
+of the Rhine, it is quite correct to say that this is the same river
+that was crossed by Cæsar. Let the purpose of our thoughts be changed,
+and we shall no longer be permitted to speak of sameness. Suppose we had
+seen the Rhine for the first time in its beautiful emerald coloring, and
+had come again after a rainy day to admire its beauty, should we not be
+justified in exclaiming: This is not the same river!
+
+Sameness, accordingly, depends upon a special purpose. If in a chemical
+combination a metal is wanted, it may be all the same whether we use
+iron, zinc, lead, or gold. That is to say, it is all the same for
+bringing about a special result; yet it is not all the same in other
+respects. The weight and certain other qualities of the metals are
+different, and also the cost.
+
+
+SAMENESS AND MIND.
+
+Sameness depending upon a special purpose, the question arises, Is there
+any objective sameness in the world, or is sameness a mere subjective
+addition to things? Is sameness something “real” or is it purely mental?
+
+This is the old quarrel between the Nominalists and Realists among
+the Schoolmen. It lies at the bottom of the problem of universals
+and particulars, and we should say, it is only a special form of the
+question, “Are relations objective qualities of existence or are they
+products of the mind?” which was discussed in a former number (_The
+Monist_, II, 2, pp. 240-42). The idea of sameness represents the most
+important relation that exists; and if any relation is real, the relation
+of sameness must be real also.
+
+If sameness depends upon a special purpose, it appears that there can be
+no sameness without that purpose; and the purpose being purely mental,
+the sameness also would seem to be purely mental. But this is not so.
+Sameness is an idea, and it is no exception to other ideas. All ideas
+are mental symbols formed for a special purpose; but, being symbols of
+something, ideas are representative of some reality, or of some feature
+of a reality, or of some relation between two or several things. Every
+idea stands for something; and this quality of the significance of ideas
+is called their meaning or their import.
+
+The question now is, How does the idea of sameness originate in the world
+where, as we stated above, there is no absolute sameness, no identity?
+Our answer is that sameness, not identity, is a general feature of this
+world of reality, which impresses itself upon every mind from the very
+beginning of the mind’s origin.
+
+We can go farther in our statement and make it more emphatic: Mind
+originates and grows only on the ground of the fact that sameness is a
+feature of the world, and is recognised as such by feeling substance.
+
+Two points or two congruent geometrical figures being in different places
+are not identical. But they are of such a nature that, so far as regards
+the purposes of geometry, one serves the purposes in question just as
+well as the other, or one can be replaced by the other; and this quality
+is called their sameness.
+
+Now as a matter of fact there are no two concrete things in the world in
+which there cannot be found some sameness. Both somehow affect sentiency;
+we say they consist of matter. Both can be measured in size, breadth,
+and height: we say, they are extended. Both are at any given moment in a
+certain relation to other things: we say, they are in space. Both have a
+definite form and consist of one or several special structures (i. e.,
+so to say, inside-forms). All things can in some way or other be classed
+together under one heading. These samenesses of things go along with
+differences, and the degree of sameness in the different things varies
+greatly. Whether there is any sameness and difference at all in the
+world, cannot be decided _a priori_, but is a problem which can be solved
+only on the ground of, first, an _a posteriori_ statement of the facts,
+second, a systematical arrangement of the facts. If this is accomplished
+we can venture into a methodical investigation as to the nature of the
+samenesses as well as the differences that obtain in the universe, and
+having arranged them in a system, we can apply _a priori_ this system to
+facts with which we are not as yet acquainted.
+
+The many samenesses which are experienced are not purely mental
+additions; they are not mere subjective imputations transferred upon
+objective existence. They are real; i. e. there are in the objective
+things actual features which allow of certain substitutions. A ray of
+light awakens in some feeling substance the traces left by former rays of
+light; and this reawakening is called memory. The perception of sameness
+is the beginning of mind, and it involves the perception of difference as
+a natural consequence.
+
+Suppose that the stuff of which the world consists were capable of
+acquiring feeling, but there were no samenesses whatever; which would
+mean that every smallest piece of the world-stuff were a particular
+thing by itself and in every respect unlike every other piece, of a
+different material or of no material at all, of different size or of
+no size at all, and also possessed of a different number of space
+dimensions. In such a world all the impacts made upon a sentient being
+would be different; not one would be like the other, and all feelings
+would present a chaos without uniformities, worse than the most complex
+crazy-quilt. Under such circumstances mind would be impossible: it would
+neither originate nor could it develop.
+
+On the other hand suppose again that the stuff of which the world
+consists were capable of acquiring feeling in some certain formation, and
+that there were samenesses in the world and in the events of the world.
+Would not mind necessarily originate in such a world? Given feeling
+substance in a world of samenesses and differences, these samenesses will
+produce analogous samenesses of impression upon the feeling substance,
+which will be perceived as samenesses of feeling. The preservation of the
+traces left in the feeling substance (supposing this substance to live
+on indefinitely) will in the long run result in the formation of special
+sense-organs. It will later on, with the aid of word-symbolism, lead to
+the formation of universals, for universals are nothing but samenesses
+perceived. It will then create with the assistance of abstraction the
+realm of scientific thought, representing the uniformities of the events
+of the world in exact formulas.
+
+
+THE EXISTENCE OF SAMENESSES A FACT.
+
+The question whether there are samenesses at all in the world, is in our
+opinion settled. It is a fact that there are samenesses. The uniformities
+of the world are a matter of indubitable experience—indubitable because
+our very existence as thinking beings, as minds, is conditioned by this
+fact. We see the mind of every child develop out of his perception of
+samenesses. Our scientists teach us that the race-soul, like a great
+immortal individual, is the product of the accumulated experience
+of samenesses; and all future progress, in science as well as in
+civilisation, in mechanical invention as well as in ethics, depends upon
+the trustworthiness of the samenesses stated to exist in the objective
+world.
+
+The question of the ultimate _raison d’être_ of the samenesses and
+differences, is another question; and it would lead us too far here
+to discuss it. In several details the problem is not as yet ripe for
+solution. A full solution of the problem would be tantamount to the
+exposition of a complete knowledge of the world. Suffice it here to
+say that we have reasons to think of the world-stuff as being of the
+same nature throughout. The chemical elements seem to be different
+configurations of one and the same substance. In this way all difference
+would have to be explained as a difference of form.
+
+The form of reality possesses sameness and difference in all its parts.
+Space in its sameness is by experience found to be tri-dimensional, which
+means, it is determinable throughout by three coördinates; while its
+differences are due to the position of the points considered. For the
+purpose of the geometrician space is uniform, but for the purpose, say
+of the architect, it is not uniform. To the geometrician two congruent
+triangles, whether they are in the cellar or in the garret, are the same.
+However, to the architect the position of two congruent triangles in his
+design of a house is by no means the same. Every single point of space
+has its special and individual qualities.
+
+The whole business of science is to systematise the samenesses of
+experience, and to present them in such convenient formulas that they can
+be used for guidance in our actions.
+
+The most comprehensive formulation of the sameness of the universe as
+a whole has found its expression in the law of the conservation of
+matter and energy. This law rests upon the experience, corroborated by
+experiments, that causation is transformation. It states that the total
+amount of matter and the total amount of energy remain constant. There is
+no creation out of nothing and no conversion of something into nothing.
+
+
+EINDEUTIG BESTIMMT.
+
+After this sketch of the importance of sameness, (a subject which we have
+by no means exhausted,) we return to the idea of necessity. The ideas
+of sameness and necessity are closely related. A world of sameness is a
+world in which necessity rules, and necessity means regularity and order.
+
+German scientists have a very good expression to denote the formulation
+of events in a manner which describes them in their necessary course. If
+they have succeeded in finding the sameness in the instances of a certain
+class of events, they say that it is _eindeutig bestimmt_, which means,
+the sameness is determined in a way that admits of no equivocation; it is
+complete, representing solely and purely that feature upon the presence
+of which the result depends. Whatever is thus _eindeutig bestimmt_, is
+recognised in its necessity. The presence of that feature which makes it
+_eindeutig bestimmt_, determines the event to take place; and this being
+determined, its inevitableness, the _it will be_ of the process, is all
+there is to necessity.
+
+All natural phenomena that can be _eindeutig bestimmt_ are necessary in
+their happening. A world which with regard to the total amount of its
+matter and energy is the same to-day and yesterday and will be the same
+to-morrow, a world whose laws of form possess a sameness throughout, so
+that it allows of formulating and applying them in their rigidity to all
+facts present, past, and future, a world in which all the changes are
+transformations determinable with the assistance of formal laws, can be
+relied upon and the course of its events can be computed.
+
+Such _is_ the world in which we live; and taking this ground I say, the
+world is a cosmos, it is no chaos; and noticing that being possessed
+of sameness is an intrinsic and inalienable feature of the world, I
+am inclined to add the world never was and never will be a chaos. And
+this, if it be true at all, is true not only in general and as it were
+wholesale, but in its minutest details. If there were deficiencies of
+this order in the unobservable details, they would not be diminished
+by being summed up in large and ever larger amounts; on the contrary,
+they would increase; they would grow in proportion. This not being
+the case, we have not the slightest reason to doubt that in those
+realms of minutest existence into which, from the grossness and the
+lack of precision of our organs and instruments of observation, we
+cannot penetrate, the same order and regularity obtains as in those
+regions which lie open to our investigation. In other words: From this
+standpoint, existence is, so to say, permeated by law throughout; every
+event is determined and any kind of absolute chance is excluded.
+
+Following Kant’s etymology we understand by _a posteriori_ the sensory
+elements, and by _a priori_ the formal elements of our experience. The
+queer expression “a priori” is in so far justified as formal truths (such
+as geometrical, arithmetical, logical rules) are formulas expressing the
+universal samenesses of the form of existence. They contain the laws of
+form in a shape that is _eindeutig bestimmt_, so that an experimenter
+will know them _a priori_ to be so. _A priori_ means beforehand. An
+experimenter knows certain things even before he makes his experiments.
+The _a priori_ elements of experience are by no means innate truths; nor
+are they the historical beginning of experience. On the contrary. In
+their abstract purity they appear as a very late product of man’s mental
+evolution.
+
+The _a priori_ systems of thought are not arbitrary constructions; they
+are constructions raised out of the recognition of the formal, i. e. the
+relational, samenesses that appear in experience. All possibilities of a
+certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated in theorems.
+As such they can be used as references to assist in the explanation and
+determination of new experiences. We know some part of any new experience
+with which we are confronted even before we have investigated it. We know
+certain laws of its form, and by reference to these known laws we are
+enabled to reduce the unknown to the known, to analyse the process and
+set forth that feature of it which makes _eindeutig bestimmt_.
+
+
+II. THE SCOPE OF NECESSITY.
+
+Mr. Peirce objects to necessitarianism, and classes it together with
+materialism and the mechanical philosophy, speaking of the latter as
+the most logical form of necessitarianism. In consonance with the
+dictionary-definitions of these words, he contrasts them to the doctrine
+of the freedom of the will and also to miracles—the latter, we must
+confess, being a dangerous concession to certain theological conceptions.
+
+The “Century Dictionary” defines “necessitarianism” as
+
+    “The theory that the will is subject to the general mechanical
+    law of cause and effect.”
+
+And “necessitarian” as
+
+    “One who maintains the doctrine of philosophical necessity,
+    in opposition to that of the freedom of the will: opposed to
+    libertarian.”
+
+The word “determinism” is regarded as a synonym of necessitarianism. Its
+first definition in the “Century Dictionary” reads as follows:
+
+    “A term invented by Sir William Hamilton to denote the doctrine
+    of the necessitarian philosophers, who hold that man’s actions
+    are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character,
+    and that he has not the power to choose to act in one way so
+    long as he prefers on the whole to act in another way.”
+
+Hamilton’s definition as here presented is puzzling. If the words
+“choose” and “prefer on the whole” are _not_ meant to be tautological,
+there is no sense in it; for no determinist denies that a man might “upon
+the whole” prefer to act this way, while he has the power to choose,
+and for special considerations perhaps does choose, to act in another
+way. However, if the words “choose” and “prefer on the whole” are meant
+to be tautological, the self-contradictoriness of the statement is too
+palpable for a Hamilton. Is there anybody who would maintain that a man
+who chooses to act in one way can at the same time, under the very same
+circumstances, and he remaining the very same man of the same character
+and intentions, choose to act in another way?
+
+While we accept determinism and also necessitarianism in the sense that
+all events (the actions of willing beings included) are determined, we
+cannot accept either the mechanical philosophy or materialism as the
+terms are commonly understood.
+
+We find materialism defined as
+
+    “The metaphysical doctrine that matter is the only substance,
+    and that matter and its motions constitute the universe.”
+    (“Century Dictionary,” 2d sense.)
+
+The mechanical philosophy is explained _sub voce_ “atomic” as
+
+    “[The view that] from the diverse combination and motions of
+    ... atoms all things, including the soul, were supposed to
+    arise.” _Ibid._
+
+Determinism is simply the negation of absolute chance. It does not
+exclude chance in the original sense of the word as an unexpected event,
+as something that befalls one without his seeking it or making the
+event—chance being derived from ML. _cadentia_, i. e. the falling, as in
+a throw of dice.
+
+The “Century Dictionary” defines “chance” in sense 9, as
+
+    “Fortuity; especially the absence of a cause necessitating an
+    event.”
+
+This is absolute chance, the existence of which we deny. The “Century
+Dictionary” adds the following little note:
+
+    “Absolute chance, the (supposed) spontaneous occurrence of
+    events undetermined by any general law or by any free volition.
+    According to Aristotle, events may come about in three ways:
+    first, by necessity or an external compulsion; second, by
+    nature or the development of an inward germinal tendency; and
+    third, by chance, without any determining cause or principle
+    whatever, by lawless, sporadic originality.”[12]
+
+We understand chance as being, from certain premisses, an incalculable
+coincidence, either not intended to be calculated, or, for certain
+reasons, from a given standpoint with a limited and definite amount of
+knowledge, not capable of calculation. Determinism, as we understand
+the term, does not imply as the “Century Dictionary” has it in its
+definition of necessitarianism, that “the law of cause and effect” is
+“mechanical.” It simply asserts that the law of cause and effect holds
+good universally, and that there is no effect that is not definitely
+determined, according to the nature of the things in action, by causes
+and all their circumstances.
+
+
+NECESSITY AND CHANCE.
+
+Mr. Peirce says:
+
+    “_All_ the diversity and specificalness of events is
+    attributable to chance—diversification, specificalness, and
+    irregularity of things, I suppose is chance—and this diversity
+    cannot be due to laws that are immutable.” (P. 332.)
+
+Our world-view leads us to other conclusions; we say:
+
+Every specificalness or particularity is such by possessing a certain
+form and standing in a definite relation (in time as well as space) to
+all other things of the universe. Of every concrete thing we can say it
+is now and here, or it was then and there. It is or was made up in this
+special way, and it stands or it stood in these special relations to its
+surroundings. Proportions, relations, forms—these are what account for
+the diversification and specificalness of all things in the universe;
+they are what explain the irregularities of individual cases and of all
+those events which appear as chance to him who, although he may be well
+informed about the nature of a thing, does not know the relation of
+its complex surroundings, exercising according to law their disturbing
+influence upon its actions which otherwise would be uniform.
+
+And since no two spots of space and no two instances of time are the
+same, since the relations of every atom are different in every position
+and at every moment of its existence, we need not be astonished to find
+diversity and specificalness in this world of samenesses.
+
+We do not believe in absolute chance, but we believe in chance.
+
+What is chance?
+
+Chance is any event not especially intended, either not calculated, or,
+with a given and limited stock of knowledge, incalculable.
+
+Gunpowder was, according to the legend, invented by chance. Berthold
+Schwartz intended to make gold, yet when the mixture was ignited, he
+began to understand that it was an explosive. When I say that I met
+a friend by chance, I mean that the meeting was unintentional. I had
+not foreseen it and perhaps could not foresee it. When we call a throw
+of dice pure chance, we mean that the incidents which condition the
+turning up of these or those special faces of the dice have not been or
+cannot be calculated. We do not mean that the law of cause and effect is
+suspended; we mean that we are unable to determine the effect. That which
+would make this or that throw _eindeutig bestimmt_ is either not known to
+us, or, if it were known, is of such a nature that we cannot produce the
+desired effect with any certainty. Matters are so arranged in the game of
+dice that the slightest incident changes the result, and these incidents
+are either not within our ken or not within the range of our power.
+Chance, accordingly, as we understand it, is no exception to necessity;
+it does not happen contrary to law, and is in each case the strict result
+of a definite cause under definite circumstances.
+
+Absolute chance is something quite different. Absolute chance is that
+which is incalculable because of the absence of law. Mr. Peirce says:
+
+    “Another argument, or convenient commonplace, is that absolute
+    chance is _inconceivable_. This word has eight current
+    significations. The ‘Century Dictionary’ enumerates six. Those
+    who talk like this will hardly be persuaded to say in what
+    sense they mean that chance is inconceivable.”
+
+Absolute chance is “inconceivable” as the word is defined by the “Century
+Dictionary” in the second sense: It is
+
+    “unacceptable to the mind because involving a violation of laws
+    believed to be well established by positive evidence.”
+
+Absolute chance is not unthinkable in the sense of unimaginable. We can
+very well depict a case of absolute chance in our imagination, just as
+we can tell and describe in minutest details the fairy tale of Alladin’s
+lamp; just as we can in our imagination depict a creation out of nothing.
+But he who accepts that the world is in its innermost nature a cosmos,
+that its events are strictly and throughout regulated by law, cannot
+at the same time think that there are nooks and crevices in which the
+law does not operate. Absolute chance actually involves the idea of a
+creation out of nothing; and thus it stands in contradiction to the law
+of the preservation of matter and energy. Absolute chance which means
+that the very same thing under the very same conditions can act in this
+or in some other way, that it need not act in exactly the same way,
+involves a belief in either the creation of a not existing quality out
+of nothing, or the disappearance of existing qualities into nothing.
+
+Mr. Peirce says:
+
+    “It seems to me that every throw of sixes with a pair of dice
+    is a manifest instance of chance.”
+
+Yes, of chance; but not of that chance the existence of which Mr. Peirce
+maintains—not of absolute chance. Every throw of dice, every toss of head
+or tail, are exactly determined by circumstances. We call it chance only
+in so far as we cannot calculate and predetermine the result.
+
+Suppose you take two large silver coins between your thumb and the first
+two fingers, one coin parallel to and a little above the other. Suppose
+tails are up in both. Drop the lower coin without an effort just as it
+would fall, about twenty inches, and you may be sure that, in spite of
+yourself, it will turn up head. Then drop the upper one and it will not
+turn, but plump right down showing tail. There are certain mechanical
+reasons for the one case as well as for the other. As soon as we know the
+law and can apply it, the case ceases to be an instance of chance.
+
+Dice, the roulette, and other games of chance are so arranged, that
+the determinating circumstances are too numerous and also too complex,
+one interfering with and being disturbed by the others, to admit
+of any adequate calculation or predetermination. An arrangement of
+conditions which in this way eludes the calculation of a definite set of
+possibilities, is called by Professor Kries _gleiche Spielräume_ or equal
+chances. And the province of equal chances is and will remain the proper
+sphere of the calculus of probabilities.
+
+Professor Nitsche objects to Kries’s proposition, saying that absolutely
+equal chances are impossible and an equal chance (_ein gleicher
+Spielräume_) is nothing but the objectification of a judgment of equal
+value.[13] We find no fault with Nitsche’s objection; there are no
+absolutely equal chances; and what is called “equal chance” means that
+the strength of two or several anticipations is of the same degree; that
+our belief and doubt as to the turning up of one, two, three, four, five,
+or six spots of a die are equally justified. The objective conditions
+which justify such equality of several expectations is what Kries (if
+we understand him correctly) calls _gleiche Spielräume_. But _gleiche
+Spielräume_ do not imply absolute chance. We might as well expect that
+all the six faces of a die should turn up simultaneously in one throw, as
+that any one of them should turn up by absolute chance.
+
+While absolute chance cannot be admitted, partly because we are not in
+need of it, (since the irregularities of nature can be sufficiently
+explained otherwise,) and partly because the idea of absolute chance if
+it were needed, is incompatible with our world-conception, we shall,
+nevertheless, have to concede to chance, as we understand the term, a
+very important rôle in the evolution of life. The formation of worlds and
+the history of mankind depend to a great extent upon chances similar to
+the throws of dice. There are many possibilities, and now this, now that,
+will, according to the circumstances, be realised—of course in each case
+with strict necessity.
+
+Let us illustrate this idea by an example.
+
+The formation of about seventy elements out of the original
+world-substance, which may be supposed to be homogeneous, does not appear
+to depend upon chance. Their universal appearance in all parts of the
+universe suggests the hypothesis that their formation is the inevitable
+result of a gradual condensation of nebular substances. We find
+everywhere, according to the stage of condensation, a gradual appearance,
+first of the lighter, then of the heavier elements. There seems to be
+no possibility of the formation of other elements than those known to
+us (including here the hypothetical elements which are still missing in
+the Mendeljeff series and at the same time, at least, not excluding a
+further continuance of the series). These elements or none, it appears,
+must be formed out of the original substance of our world. Let us here
+assume, for argument’s sake, that it were so beyond question, and that we
+knew the nature of the world-substance to be such as to condense, if it
+condenses at all, into no other but these forms, which we call chemical
+elements. This would be a limitation of possibilities. Exactly so the
+throws Of dice are limited. With the dice commonly in use we cannot throw
+fractions; nor can we throw either zero, or seven, or any other higher
+number. We can throw only whole numbers, integrals from one up to six.
+But while we thus assume that the formation of the elements is limited
+to those actually existing, the proportion in which the elements may be
+distributed in the different nebulæ and solar systems, is apparently
+very different. Suppose we had a full knowledge of the intrinsic nature
+of the world-substance and were standing outside the universe observing
+the process of world-formations; we could not from this knowledge alone
+predict all that would happen. We should on our assumption be able to
+predict _a priori_ that such elements would be formed. But whether the
+different elements would be generated in these or in other proportions
+appears to depend upon the presence of certain conditions, perhaps the
+rapidity of motion, the heat produced by friction, the temperature of
+the surrounding cosmic space, any knowledge of which is not included in
+our knowledge of the nature of the world-substance. These conditions
+may vary, nay, so far as we can judge they actually do vary; and any
+apparently slight variation of them, or even one of them, will result in
+different effects of great consequence. Without a detailed knowledge of
+all these special conditions, simply from a supposed _a priori_ knowledge
+of the world-substance, the idiosyncrasy of this or that particular
+solar system could not be _a priori_ determined. Here it will be such,
+and there, under perhaps slightly different circumstances, it will be
+entirely other. Here the centre of gravity may be in one great mass,
+there again it may be divided in two, so that the planets circle around
+two suns.
+
+From this point of view we have to call these results products of chance.
+
+To a being who not only might be supposed to know the intrinsic nature
+of existence, but could have present before his mind every event of the
+great interacting cosmos in its entire complexity, this kind of chance
+would, of course, also disappear. To him all states of things would
+appear throughout as _eindeutig bestimmt_. Yet, although in this way
+necessity permeates all events that take place, we do not intend to deny
+the irregularity of detail,[14] the specificalness of the particulars,
+the diversity of individual incidents and existences. According to our
+conception of nature they must remain, and we need not attribute them
+to absolute chance. To attribute irregularities to absolute chance (as
+Mr. Peirce does) is actually an abandonment of explaining them. The
+specificalness and particularity of nature can be said to be due to
+chance in so far only as they do not depend upon and are not determinable
+by the nature of the things under consideration, but result (with strict
+necessity of course) from the ever-changing conformations of surrounding
+circumstances.
+
+Thus the fate of a man depends mainly upon his character,—the proverb
+says, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune”—but not entirely.
+There are sometimes coincidences determining the fates of men, and
+through them the fates of whole nations. And these coincidences do not
+result from their character.
+
+Let everybody think of his own fate. Part of his life has been what it
+was because he is such a man as he is; and we can, within certain limits,
+predict the fate of a youth with whose character we are familiar. But how
+much of our lives depends upon circumstances which could be foreseen only
+by an omniscient being, and which, as we might properly say, if we do not
+misunderstand the term, is due to chance!
+
+
+FREE WILL.
+
+Compulsion is generally considered as a synonym of necessity. But the
+usage of the term necessity in the sense of compulsion is, in our
+opinion, very inappropriate, because misleading. Necessity and compulsion
+should not be confounded; for compulsion excludes free will and
+“necessity” does not.
+
+A government compels its citizens to obey certain unpopular laws; the
+victorious army compels the enemy to surrender. The obedience of the
+citizens and the surrender of the enemy are acts done under compulsion;
+they are not acts of free will. But a man of a certain character wills,
+under given circumstances and in the absence of compulsion, _necessarily_
+in the way in which he does. The determination of a free will is not a
+matter of chance but of necessity. Yet the determining factors are not
+outside but inside; they are not due to compulsion, not to the pressure
+of a foreign power, but to the nature of the willing being himself.
+
+This, then, is the definition of “free”: A being is free if it is
+unrestrained, so that it acts according to its own nature. As is its
+nature, so it wills; as it wills, so it acts. If we know the character
+of a man and the situation in which he is placed, we can predict his
+choice as the necessary result of his nature. His decision, although it
+is free and not under compulsion, is not an outcome of chance which might
+under the same conditions be different, but is the inevitable result of
+necessity.
+
+If by free will we had to understand that the decisions of the will
+are the result either of chance or of absolute chance, the foremost
+duty of the educator would be to make man unfree, to insert certain
+dominant ideas into his mind, destined to determine his will. The free
+man according to this definition of free will as being due to chance,
+would be a person whose actions are more whimsical than the fancies of
+lunatics. We reject this conception of the freedom of the will.
+
+In our opinion a will is free if it is unrestrained so that it can act
+according to its nature. Our conception of free will does not stand in
+contradiction to the doctrine of “determinism” as defined by the “Century
+Dictionary” in its second sense:
+
+    “In general, the doctrine that whatever is or happens is
+    entirely determined by antecedent causes.”
+
+
+THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY.
+
+We distinguish between (1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4)
+physiological, and (5) psychical events.
+
+A mechanical phenomenon is a change of place which does not involve a
+change of the constitution of the parts moved. E. g., a stone is pushed;
+its position is altered, but the stone remains the same.
+
+A physical phenomenon is an event in which the molecular state of the
+bodies in action is altered. Water heated becomes steam, frozen it
+becomes ice. The three states have different molecular configurations.
+
+Chemical phenomena are such in which the constitution of the atoms is
+altered. The characteristic qualities of hydrogen, for example, are
+different when combined with different elements or when isolated. Each
+combination is a peculiar substance with peculiar qualities and not a
+mixture or combination of the qualities of the isolated elements.
+
+Physiological processes are all those changes that take place in the
+living irritable substance of plants and animals, such as nutrition,
+growth, and propagation. Its characteristic features are (1) hunger or
+thirst, i. e. the want of certain materials (food), (2) the reception of
+the wanted materials by suction or other means, which in some cases are
+a quite mechanical or physical process, not unlike the afflux of oxygen
+caused by a burning candle or the suction of water by a sponge, and (3)
+the assimilation of food. The materials received are distributed in the
+places wanted, thus adding to the building up of the living substance
+according to the nature of its structure. This produces as a natural
+result (4) the phenomenon of growth with a preservation of form. (5)
+Propagation is a special kind of growth; it is the growth of a part that
+at some stage of its development becomes an independent individual.
+
+Psychical phenomena are such in which feelings and the meanings of
+feelings are the determinant factors.
+
+It is apparent that all these terms, mechanical, physical, chemical,
+physiological, and psychical, are mere abstracts. In describing a
+mechanical phenomenon, we limit our attention to the mechanical change.
+We do not mean to say that the body moved does not possess chemical,
+physical, perhaps physiological, or even psychical qualities. The
+calculation of the curve of a jump is a mechanical problem, although the
+jumping body may be a human being. However, the question why did the man
+jump, is a psychical question. The motive of the jump is an idea in that
+class of mental activity characterised as purpose. The man had an end in
+view. And this idea of an end to be realised is the combined result of
+special conditions and of the character of the man.
+
+The different spheres of mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological,
+and psychical actions being abstractions, it is obvious that science when
+dealing with so-called purely mechanical phenomena, has to do with a
+fiction. There are no purely mechanical phenomena. There are features of
+reality which are purely mechanical; and these we call motions. But the
+world does not consist of motions only. It also possesses other qualities.
+
+The mechanical philosopher assumes that the world consists of matter
+and motion only, and so he feels warranted in the hope that every event
+that takes place, the actions of man included, can be explained by the
+laws of motion. Yet the premiss is wrong, and we may anticipate that the
+conclusion also will prove erroneous. And so it is.
+
+The laws of motion are applicable to and will explain all motions; but
+they are not applicable to that which is not motion.
+
+It is inconceivable how we can hope to explain a feeling by the laws of
+motion; and so the fond hope of explaining the problems of the nature of
+the soul by mechanics is preposterous. No objection can be made to the
+possibility of explaining the delicate motions in the nervous substance
+of the brain by the laws of molar or molecular mechanics. But these
+explanations would throw no light upon the causation that takes place
+in the mind. The properly psychical phenomena, the properly intelligent
+action of thought, could not be explained in this way. For the world of
+mentality introduces quite a new factor into the sphere of being.
+
+What is this new factor?
+
+The nature of mental activity consists in the symbolism of feelings.
+Feelings, being different under different conditions and the same under
+same conditions, become representative of their corresponding causes, and
+thus the objects of experience are depicted in feeling symbols.
+
+Representativeness, accordingly, is the nature of mind.
+
+The question, How certain brain-structures operate, is a question of
+the mechanics of nervous substance, and further, the question, How
+thought-operations take place, is a question, so to say, of logical
+mechanics. But the question, Why a certain idea responds to certain
+stimuli and not to others, does not admit of a mechanical explanation or
+formulation. The answer to this question will be a description of the
+nature of the idea; and the nature of the idea is not a motion: it is the
+meaning of which the idea is possessed.
+
+The action of a mind depends upon the meaning of certain symbols. A
+written or spoken word has a special meaning, and this meaning becomes
+the determinant factor of mind action. The meaning of a word is not a
+piece of matter, neither is it a motion. It is something _sui generis_.
+I do not say that there is any inexplicable mystery connected with it.
+On the contrary, wonderful as the fact is, it is not mysterious; it does
+not stand in contradiction to any other fact of nature. Symbols stand for
+something; they indicate, denote, or signify something. This significance
+is called their meaning; and mind is a system of symbols in states of
+awareness.
+
+Now, neither states of awareness are mechanical, nor is the meaning of
+words anything mechanical. How can we hope for a mechanical explanation
+either of the soul or the mind or of any mental action?
+
+Suppose, for instance, a general receives a message containing a few
+words. He opens the paper, he reads it, and all on a sudden, his mind is
+in a tumult of excitement. What is it that produces the excitement? Is it
+any motion? Yes! In a certain sense, it is a motion: it is the reading
+of the paper. This is the cause. Yet not the reading as such excites his
+consternation. He might read other messages all the day long without any
+such an effect. Plainly, the causative element of the cause is not the
+reading, not the motions of which the reading consists, not the shape of
+the written characters and their combinations in groups, called words. It
+is something more subtle even than that. It is the significance of the
+writing. It is the meaning of the written characters. It is the purport
+that is attached to the word-symbols.
+
+The origin of mind accordingly introduces a factor which has nothing
+to do with mechanics; and the simplest psychical reflexes, including
+those physiological reflexes which we must suppose to have originated by
+conscious adaptation and then been submerged into unconsciousness, cannot
+be explained from mechanical or physical laws alone.
+
+
+SPONTANEITY.
+
+While we thus reject the conception of the mechanical philosophy and also
+of materialism, we do not say that there are motions either in the brain
+or anywhere else which form exceptions to the laws of mechanics. The
+laws of mechanics hold good for all motions. The laws of mechanics are
+formal laws: they do not explain why bodies gravitate; but they describe
+how they gravitate; and the latter is much more useful to know than the
+former. There is (as we conceive it) no deep secret in the problem why
+bodies gravitate; they gravitate because they possess a quality which
+attracts them to each other with a force directly as their masses and
+inversely as the squares of their distances. In a word, gravity is the
+intrinsic nature of masses, it is an inalienable part of their existence.
+Thus whenever bodies gravitate, we are confronted with an act of
+spontaneity.
+
+Attempts have been made to explain gravitation without the assumption
+of spontaneity, by the pressure of an atom-surrounding ether. But that
+only defers the question; for the spontaneity, in that case, would have
+to be placed in the ether. Whatever be the merits of the explanations
+of gravitation by a _vis a tergo_, we must recognise the fact that no
+motion can take place in the world, no pressure can be exercised, without
+there being somewhere some spontaneous something that moves or presses.
+Spontaneity is a universal feature of nature.
+
+Mr. Peirce uses the term “spontaneity” in a different sense from ours.
+He identifies spontaneity with absolute chance. He means by it the
+irregularities that arise without cause, thus producing departures
+from law. We call that action spontaneous which is not due to external
+influence but springs from the nature of the things in action.
+
+Spontaneous is derived from the Latin _spons_, “will,” which as a noun
+was obsolete at the classical period of Roman literature and occurred
+only in such forms as _sponte_, “of one’s own will, of one’s own accord.”
+If a man acts of his own will, free from and not biassed by the influence
+of other men, his action is spontaneous. A free man’s action is not
+arbitrary, unless arbitrariness[15] be the character of the man; it is
+not an exception to law; it is, if the character of the man is known,
+calculable in advance, for every free action is spontaneous: it springs
+immediately from the character of the man; it is the direct expression of
+his will; it reveals the nature of his very being, thus showing the man
+himself, and not something beyond or outside of him.
+
+Taking the word spontaneity in this sense, we say: Masses gravitate
+spontaneously; they are self-moving; their motion is due to their
+gravity, and gravity is their intrinsic nature.
+
+Exactly as the laws of mechanics explain the “how” of motions but not
+why there is motion at all, the “why” depending upon the nature of
+each moving body, so the “how” of the brain-motions is explicable by
+mechanical laws, but the “why” depends upon the nature of the moving
+material. The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as the
+atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there is present an additional feature;
+there are present states of awareness, and these states of awareness
+possess meaning, both of which are items which the chemist cannot find
+by chemical analysis. Neither states of awareness nor their meanings
+can be weighed on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they
+determinable in foot-pounds.
+
+Yet while mechanics is not applicable to mental facts, the realm of
+mentality is by no means to be surrendered to indeterminism. Mr. Peirce
+describes the domain of mind as the absence of law and the prevalence of
+absolute chance, of an indetermined and indeterminable sporting. This is
+not so. While the fact must be recognised that the nature of the mind
+is not something mechanical, its action is nevertheless determined by
+laws—not by mechanical laws, but by psychical and mental laws. These
+psychical and mental laws are in one respect of exactly the same nature
+as mechanical laws; they describe the samenesses of certain facts of
+reality. And the facts of the ideal domain of thought, the facts of
+subjectivity, are no less real than the grosser facts of mechanical
+motion, which are the facts of objectivity.
+
+The term mechanical is often used in the sense of “lacking life or
+spirit” (“Century Dictionary,” p. 3679). This is justifiable in so far
+only as when we speak of mechanical phenomena we do not mean psychical
+or any other phenomena. It is true that that which makes this or that
+idea respond to a certain stimulus is not a mechanical but a mental
+quality, but the action itself, in so far as it is a motion, is and
+remains mechanical. Thus it happens that the laws of mechanics, far from
+being anti-spiritual, are the means by which we learn to understand and
+objectively to represent the action of mental phenomena.
+
+In this connection attention may be called to the efforts of modern
+logicians to construct thinking machines which will perform the work of
+mental operations in a purely mechanical way. You propose the problem by
+adjusting certain indicators; then you turn the crank, and the machine
+does the rest. The results will come out with unfailing exactness.
+
+The attempt made to construct thinking machines cannot as yet be called
+successful. Nevertheless they are not impossibilities. Calculating
+machines of various constructions are in practical use and doing
+satisfactory work, not only in addition and subtraction but also in
+multiplication and division, and even in extracting roots and in raising
+numbers to higher powers. Calculations are undoubtedly one kind of
+thought, and if calculations can be performed by machines, there is
+no theoretical reason why we should not be able to construct logical
+machines, which shall perform the operations of deductive and even of
+inductive thought with perfect accuracy.
+
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+Determinism does not make freedom impossible and natural laws do not
+suppress the spontaneity of nature.
+
+Natural laws are not a power forcing a certain mode of action upon
+things; they are not an oppression of nature. Natural laws are simply a
+description of nature as nature is. There is no “must” in nature in the
+sense of compulsion, as if there were two things, (1) a master (i. e. the
+law) giving a command, and (2) a slave (i. e. the single facts) obeying
+the command. The situation is not dualistic, but monistic. There is an
+“is” in nature, and this “is” is constant. There is a certain sameness in
+nature. In spite of all changes it remains the same; and thus even the
+apparent irregularities preserve throughout an unvarying consistency. The
+facts of nature express the character of nature; they are nature herself.
+Briefly, the “is” of nature (if we are permitted to personify her) does
+not describe that which nature must do, but that which nature wills to
+do; it describes how she acts spontaneously, of her own free will, in
+conformity with her innermost being and consistently with her permanent
+character.
+
+The main difference that obtains between the actions of inanimate
+nature so-called and rational beings is not the absence and presence of
+spontaneity, (for spontaneity is in both,) but the absence and presence
+of mind: and mind is not only the subjectivity of existence; mind is
+not merely sentiency, i. e. the awareness of feelings; mind is the
+representative symbolism of subjectivity.
+
+There are sufficient reasons to assume that all objective existence,
+which appears to us as matter in motion, possesses a subjectivity, the
+nature of which depends upon the mode of the interaction of its elements.
+This subjectivity appears in organised substance as feeling and develops
+naturally into mind.
+
+The essence of nature, accordingly, is not materiality, but spirituality.
+Materiality is the character of nature as it affects sentient beings; but
+its innermost self, as it were, its subjectivity, its psychical aspect is
+revealed in the appearance of the spirit-life of rational beings—of minds.
+
+While we fully recognise the spirituality of nature as nature’s
+innermost essence and as an ineradicable feature of reality, we cannot
+with Mr. Peirce place mind at the beginning of the world. There is a
+great difference between spirituality and mind. One is the source and
+condition of the other. One is permanent, the other is transient. One
+is the abstract view of a universal quality of the world, eternal and
+everlasting, as much indestructible as matter and energy; the other is an
+individual formation that originates, grows, and develops; that can be
+broken and built again; that dies with the body and rises again in new
+generations; that decays, as the foliage of the trees falls in winter,
+yet reappears, as the verdure reappears in spring; for the life of nature
+is immortal.
+
+Mr. Peirce, regarding determinism as that view which does not recognise
+the freedom of will, has an original and in our conception a wrong
+view on the one hand of natural laws, which are to him mere habits
+acquired by the world, and on the other hand of chance, or arbitrary
+sportiveness, (i. e. that which is not determinable by law,) which he
+identifies with mind and with the spontaneity of freedom. Mind is to
+him the beginning of all. Mind remains mind, according to his view, so
+long as it is irregular, producing out of its own undetermined being
+sporadic effects without order or consistency. As soon as mind takes to
+habits, it grows mechanical; by creating regularity it disappears; and
+the result is matter in motion according to mechanical laws. Matter,
+accordingly, is said to be “effete mind.” Law in our view is the divinity
+of nature; according to Mr. Peirce it is the termination of nature’s
+irregularities: it comes to suppress her freedom and to supplant her
+mentality by mechanicalism. An element of pure chance, however, survives,
+which, appears in the free will of man, in miracles, and in nature’s
+irregularities, and this element of pure chance will remain until in the
+infinitely distant future, mind becomes crystallised into an absolutely
+perfect, rational, and symmetrical system. Such is in brief Mr. Peirce’s
+view of the rôle played by mind in the world-process.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s views of chance and law seem to come to the rescue of
+certain theological dogmas, which represent the world-order as the
+product of a divine mind. We doubt very much whether Mr. Peirce’s
+position be tenable even from the standpoint of the scientific
+theologian. For the order of the world, as it appears in natural laws,
+must be, and is recognised even by the theist, as part and parcel
+of God’s eternal being. The scientist who formulates _sub specie
+aeternitatis_ certain facts of nature, say the “how” of gravitating
+bodies, describes a certain quality of God himself; he describes
+something that is immutable, eternal, everlasting; it is not the whole of
+God, but it is certainly one feature of Jahveh, of that which is, was,
+and will be as it is.
+
+In contradistinction to Mr. Peirce, we recognise, that the regularity
+of the whole is preserved in the specificalness of its individual
+particulars, that there are samenesses in this world of changes and
+diversities, and that if all reality is regarded as being essentially
+the same throughout, all the diversities and apparent irregularities can
+very well be explained as resulting from peculiar forms, combinations,
+and relations. Furthermore, we recognise that natural laws are compatible
+with the spontaneity of nature and that the necessity with which a free
+man acts according to his character, does not reverse his freedom of will.
+
+Nature is self-acting throughout; nature is free; even inanimate nature
+is spontaneous. But a higher freedom rises with the appearance of mind.
+And there are degrees of this higher freedom which can be determined
+with great exactness, for they correspond to the range of the mentality
+of each creature. Mentality develops by the observation of samenesses,
+and it reaches rationality by the recognition of natural laws. The
+recognition of natural laws is a view of some natural phenomena in their
+eternal aspect, and we call them truths. So much is natural law and
+freedom interconnected that the recognition of natural laws widens the
+range of freedom; and obedience to them raises man out of his dependence
+upon his surroundings to a state of dominion over the creation in which
+he becomes the master of natural forces.
+
+What a deep significance lies in the saying of the apostle: “The truth
+shall make you free!”
+
+                                                                   EDITOR.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] The adjective “like” is an abbreviation of “alike”; and “a-like”
+(M.E. _alyke_, A.S. _gelic_, O.H.G. _galih_, M.H.G. _gelich_, M.G.
+_gleich_) is a compound of the prefix a with _lic_ body, shape, figure.
+
+[11] I am satisfied that logical identity is intended to mean sameness. I
+suppose that the word identity, being Latin and a kind of international
+term, appeared to logicians preferable to the Saxon word “sameness” or
+the German “Gleichheit.” We need not look for any deeper reason for the
+adoption of the term.
+
+[12] Knowing that Mr. Peirce is one of the most prominent contributors to
+the _Century Dictionary_, I may be pardoned for surmising that, perhaps
+with the exception of the parenthesised word “(supposed)” he is the
+author of this passage and very likely of most of the other quotations of
+philosophical terms we have adduced from the same source.
+
+[13] _Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung_ by Johannes von
+Kries. See also Meinong’s review of the book (in _Gött. gel Anz._,
+No. 2, p. 56 et seqq.) and Ad. Nitsche’s article on the subject (in
+_Vierteljahrsschrift für wiss. Phil._ of 1892. XVI. 1, p. 26).
+
+[14] By irregularity of detail we understand simply a lack of uniformity,
+but not exceptions to law. If irregularity be defined as exception to
+law, we should say, There is no irregularity in the world, while at the
+same time nothing is uniform: for every particle of the world is in
+its time and space relations and otherwise different from every other
+particle.
+
+[15] Arbitrary, as used here, means capricious, uncertain, unreasonable.
+A man’s action is capricious if he is biassed by the present motive
+alone, without considering other motives which he would have under other
+circumstances. A deliberate man equalises, as it were, his actions by
+forming rules of conduct. An arbitrary man does not recognise rules or
+laws, made either by himself or by others.
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+RECENT EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN GERMANY.
+
+
+Since Darwin’s death, his theory, which in Germany more than elsewhere
+received its development, has but few decisive steps in advance to
+point to, even though the circle of its adherents has been enlarged and
+though in many respects and in special directions it has been rendered
+more complete and placed upon a firmer foundation. It is a gratifying
+fact, that most, if not all, of the recent discoveries in zoology,
+palæontology, and particularly in developmental history, are easily and
+completely reconcilable with the principles originally established; so
+that the views which we have reached on this subject have lost more and
+more the characters of a purely hypothetical fabric.
+
+But the accurate investigations of developmental history have
+unquestionably furnished the most important material in proof of the
+theory in question, and the principles established in this department,
+in the main the results of the labors of German investigators (E. von
+Baer, Fritz Müller, E. Haeckel), have been verified in a truly surprising
+manner.
+
+It is true that Darwin himself in no way undervalued the importance
+of the results of the studies in question, but how little the facts
+known at the time of the enunciation of his theory of natural selection
+sufficed, is most clearly proved by the fact that E. von Baer and Louis
+Agassiz, who at that time were perhaps the greatest authorities in
+embryology, assumed a hostile attitude towards the new Darwinian theory.
+Agassiz’s combination of the points of agreement of palæontology and
+embryology, his explanation of extinct forms as “prophetic types,” proved
+a veritable hindrance to the perception of the truth, and Carl Vogt, who
+was his co-worker at that time, appears to have been the last to set
+up any opposition to the “fundamental biogenetic principle,” that the
+development of the individual repeats in an abbreviated form the history
+of his race. Vogt, formerly the champion of advanced views, appears
+to-day as the leader of the small band of the opposition.
+
+If we compare the recently published fourth edition of Haeckel’s
+_Anthropogeny_, 1891, and the eighth edition of his _History of
+Creation_, with the early editions, we cannot help remarking, with
+considerable astonishment, despite the enormous increase of fresh
+material, the fact that little in the old plans and principles of the
+work needs correction. Even the bold generalisations, the inference
+as to the identity of form of the original beginnings of all of the
+middle or higher classes of animals, the “Gastræa Theory” of Haeckel,
+at first so violently opposed, the stress laid upon the equivalence of
+the blastoderms in the various orders of animals, nay, even many of
+the animal genealogies, really only asserted as a working hypothesis,
+have stood the test beyond all expectation; although Du Bois-Reymond
+insinuated that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer were more worthy
+of credit. To appreciate the complete victory of these ideas one need
+but refer to the discourse _On Recapitulation in Embryology_ with which
+A. Milnes Marshall opened the meeting of the Biological Section of the
+British Natural History Society at Leeds, September, 1890.
+
+The very conspicuous irregularities in the formation of organised bodies,
+which formerly were regarded as monstrosities, or as the freaks and
+riddles of the formative instinct, the hare-lips, the cleft palates,
+cases of microcephaly, etc., or the conspicuous want of symmetry in the
+physical structure of the plaice and sole, formerly made use of by Mivart
+and Schimper as unassailable counterproofs of Darwin’s doctrines, have
+shaped themselves into the most decisive verifications of his theory;
+as in fact, generally, a number of the most splendid evidences of the
+correctness of the theory have, as the result of exact investigations
+in organic evolution, proceeded from the most obstinate of its supposed
+difficulties. Thus, for example, as proof that birds are far removed
+from the other classes of vertebrates, the circumstance had been cited
+that certain parts connected with the visual organs are in them situated
+at the side of the brain, instead of on the dorsal surface, as is the
+case with the other vertebrates. But a more exact observation has shown
+that this variation in formation is a secondary result, since in each
+previous period of development these same organs in the young birds
+lie, exactly as in the case of the other vertebrates, on the dorsal
+surface, and only shortly before leaving the egg do they move downward
+to the sides. In many cases where the development of parts preservable
+in fossil conditions is under consideration, as for instance portions of
+the skeleton, the hard integuments, and the teeth, a direct proof may, by
+comparison, be furnished of the truth of the fact of the correspondence
+of the embryological formations of living animals with the final and
+permanent forms of their extinct representatives, a fact which was indeed
+acknowledged by Agassiz and Vogt, but completely misunderstood. We need
+only to recall to mind the exact parallelism which Alexander Agassiz and
+Neumayer have demonstrated to exist in the case of echinoderms, Huxley,
+Marsh, and others in the formation of the wings of birds, the pelvis of
+birds, or the hoofs of horses, in order to stamp this view as one that
+cannot be refuted.
+
+Nevertheless, those opposed to this view, as Carl Vogt, His, Heufen,
+and others, have not abandoned their position as a hopeless one,
+and in recent years have relied particularly upon those cases which
+Haeckel, and before him, Fritz Müller, characterised as a falsification
+(cenogenesis[16]) or a supplementary alteration and abbreviation of the
+natural process of development. “Nature is no falsifier,” these opponents
+proclaim with emphasis, and everything it does is correct and true, and
+“this false heart alone brings untruth and deceit into the true heaven,”
+they cry with Wallenstein. People who rely on verbal sophistries merely
+betray thereby their want of valid counter-arguments. A _mala fides_
+on the part of nature can of course never be the subject of discussion
+among reasonable beings, but a deviation in the process of development
+of certain varieties from the typical path of the development of the
+remaining varieties of the species, is _felt_ as a falsification by
+every investigator who has thoroughly studied the regular processes,
+for the reason that it has a tendency to _obscure_ the original facts.
+Thus, for example, in the embryos of certain vertebrates the æsophagus
+is temporarily completely closed, as Balfour has observed in young
+sharks, Bles and Marshall in frogs; and this state of affairs may well
+be considered as a falsification, since an animate being with a closed
+æsophagus is a natural contradiction, which can never have existed and
+here happens as a supplementary and temporary process.
+
+As a rule such deviations from the normal course may be classified as
+consequences of a prolonged residence of the animal germs in the egg
+or in the womb, the result of which is that owing to the presence of
+an abundant quantity of nourishing yolk, or through direct connection
+with the circulatory system of the mother, they in the early stages of
+their development are relieved of the necessity of acquiring nourishment
+through their own efforts, and therefore all the contrivances necessary
+to that purpose may be dispensed with. For this reason we find the
+primitive processes of development, as Professor Sollas has lately shown,
+most frequently preserved in marine animals which have never changed nor
+abandoned their element in the course of the history of their species,
+in the case of which, therefore, no occasion could ever have arisen
+for supplementary changes in the process of their development. Much
+more frequently do we meet with this change in the case of fresh-water
+animals, for often the rapid currents of their elements, for example a
+river, will not suffer these to leave the egg in any very helpless larval
+condition, and in addition fresh water is subject to other unfavorable
+changes, as the drying up of streams. Also the larvæ of carnivorous
+animals, which from the very beginning of independent life need more
+strength to acquire their means of existence, are so completely developed
+in the richly provisioned eggs in which they take their form, that they
+emerge therefrom in an almost perfected state of being, as, for example,
+young sharks and cephalopods. In this kind of animal life, as well as in
+the case of forms which are brought forth alive from the parent, although
+they see the light of day much later, comparatively, there takes place
+not only a great abbreviation of the first stages of existence in the
+entering upon a more direct path of development, but also changes occur
+in the form of the original designs because of the limitation of room
+due to the presence of yolk in the egg, the reason for which is easy
+to perceive. In many other cases the mechanical cause of the change in
+development can be directly recognised; for example, in the case of, the
+tree-toad of the Antilles (_Hylodes marticinensis_), which, owing to the
+absence of pools lasting through the dry season, is obliged of necessity
+to remain in the egg during its tadpole stage, that is to say, to skip
+this stage, as it were; for which reason the formation of external gills
+in its case is entirely omitted.
+
+The explanation of the origin of new organs seemed at first to afford
+an insuperable difficulty to the Darwinian theory, since, as Mivart
+objected, it was not possible to perceive how natural selection could
+be able to effect the formation of new organs unless they executed
+corresponding functions from the very beginning. This difficulty,
+however, has been completely overcome by the theory of altered
+functions (_Functionswechsel_) which was first proposed by Dorhn, and
+particularly in recent years by Kleinenberg. According to this theory,
+in all these cases we have simply to deal with a gradual change in form
+of already existing organs, which, originally being used to perform
+one set of functions, are modified so as to perform another. Thus the
+later developed organs of mastication and the feelers of insects were
+originally organs of locomotion, legs; and these in the still earlier
+stages of creeping motion performed appropriate functions as the
+crooked appendages of the body-rings. The wings of birds were, in their
+progenitors, forelegs; the tongue of air-breathing vertebrates originated
+from the fish-bladder, which before that was chiefly an organ of swimming.
+
+The knowledge thus acquired of the natural connection of the processes
+of evolution also explains, according to Kleinenberg, why organs which
+are at present completely useless, must yet necessarily appear in the
+formation of the embryo; for example, the gill-openings in the higher
+classes of vertebrates, which have no functions to perform at any stage
+of vertebral development, and which furnished Meckel the first intimation
+of the fundamental biogenetic law. But as soon as it was explained
+that the gill-openings furnished the foundation of the development of
+later-appearing organs with actual functions to perform, it was rendered
+clear why they should continually recur; namely, because they form the
+indispensable links of a chain which extends from the dim past of the
+type in question down to the present time.
+
+There is no doubt that profounder researches in evolutionary history will
+furnish still more important results: for instance, the more perfect
+elucidation of the pedigree of mammals; for in this province even our
+domestic animals are not sufficiently investigated. Every new effort in
+this direction, for example the recent work of Klever on the evolution
+of the teeth of the horse, and other investigations concerning the
+formation of special organs, has invariably shown that much in this field
+yet remains to be discovered. We have only to recall to mind the recent
+investigations relating to the development of the pineal gland, which
+in the last decennium have also led to the discovery of a rudimentary
+occipital eye, which seems to have actually existed and performed
+functions in numerous early representatives of the vertebrates, but
+to-day is simply a fact of history, and has given rise to an organ which
+Descartes considered as the seat of the soul. We may here also refer to
+the recent investigations concerning the earlier developmental stages of
+the duckbills, which have completely confirmed what the theory asserted
+in advance and required; namely, that they fill the vacancy between the
+egg-laying reptiles and the mammalia which bring forth their young alive.
+
+Only a few years ago Carl Vogt vehemently opposed the opinion of
+the duckbills being transitional types, and sought to explain their
+inferior stage of organisation, which is also evidenced in their low
+blood temperature, as the results of a stunting process (degeneration,
+so called). They formed a degenerated branch of marsupials, nothing
+more. Later, the remarkable yet long anticipated fact was revealed by
+Haacke and Caldwell, 1884, that the duckbills are egg-laying mammals,
+a character which certainly could not have been acquired through
+degeneration, but which simply shows that they are closely related to
+extinct reptilian forms. In one other respect, namely, with regard
+to their supply of teeth, the process of degeneration must indeed be
+admitted. On this point, Poulton and Thomas discovered a few years
+ago that in their early stages they really do possess true teeth,
+which, however, just as in the case of certain carnivorous cetacea,
+later completely disappear, and are replaced by a sort of horny teeth.
+This, however, is really not a true degeneration, but rather a special
+adaptation, doubtless beneficial to the animal in some way or other;
+and with as little reason as we may regard birds as a degenerated
+race in comparison with their progenitors, because they have lost
+the numerous teeth which these possessed, with just as little reason
+can we hold that the duckbills, in their general organisation, have
+suffered any retrogression worth mentioning. On the contrary, the
+recent investigations of Marsh and Lemoine concerning the mammals of
+the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods point more and more distinctly to
+the conclusion, that there existed among these mammals a very large
+number which possessed the same degree of organisation as the duckbills
+of to-day, now represented by only a few species; a supposition which
+the adherents of the theory of evolution made twenty-five years ago. I
+do not know that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer have been so well
+preserved!
+
+In many other directions, however, speculation of late years in Germany
+has considerably digressed from the facts of experience and from all
+probability; especially with reference to the questions of propagation,
+variation, and heredity. Here, first of all, are to be mentioned the
+works of Weismann, _Ueber die Continuität des Keimplasmas_ (1885),
+_Die Bedeutung der sexuellen Fortpflanzung für die Selectionstheorie_
+(1886), _Der Rückschritt in der Natur_ (1886), _Die Bedeutung der
+Richtungskörperchen für die Vererbungstheorie_ (1887), _Die Hypothese der
+Vererbung von Verletzungen_ (1889), and _Ueber Amphimixis_ (1891).
+
+If we revert to the beginnings of this movement we shall find that it
+is intimately connected with the more exact study of the processes of
+fecundation as perfected through the researches of Strassburger, the
+Hertwigs, and other investigators. In connection with the ideas of
+Nägeli concerning the so-called idioplasm, the notion was reached that
+the matter determinative of heredity was contained in the nucleoli, and
+that by the union of the paternal and maternal nucleoli the sum-total of
+the parental hereditary tendencies is transmitted to the offspring. This
+view was to a certain degree verified by the experiments of the brothers
+Hertwig in removing the nucleoli of the eggs of the sea-urchin; the
+result being that eggs containing the nucleoli alone, furnished, through
+artificial impregnation, results resembling the female parent, whereas
+eggs from which the nucleoli had been removed, furnished germs completely
+corresponding to the traits of the male parent.
+
+Other processes of fecundation, to which we shall soon recur, had since
+1876 produced the impression in the minds of a number of naturalists that
+the germ-material led an independent life in the bodies of organisms,
+that it possessed only an internal development, and required from the
+body nothing but nourishment in order to multiply itself, and to develop
+its internal powers uninfluenced by the various vicissitudes of the
+body. In the year 1876 Gustav Jaeger in Germany, and Francis Galton, a
+cousin of Darwin, almost at the same time in England, called attention
+to the observation made some time previously, that in certain animals,
+particularly in insects, the development of the egg into the young
+offspring begins with the withdrawal of a small portion of the germ from
+the component substance of the embryo, which remains at first unchanged
+and only later multiplies. This observation was generalised and accepted.
+At the commencement of every sexual multiplication the germ-substance,
+after impregnation, is divided into two parts, according to its future
+purpose; an ontogenetic or personal part, out of which the body is built
+up, and a phylogenetic or germinal part, which at first is stored up
+unused in the individual, but later furnishes new germ-cells. This idea
+led Weismann to his view of the continuity of the germ-plasm, which forms
+an unbroken line of descent from the first beginnings of the species and
+which is simply nourished by the organisms in which it has its temporary
+abode. From this germ-plasm spring _secondarily_ the cells that go to
+make up the body (soma); but from these soma-cells no new _germ_-cells
+can originate, and consequently none of its inherent or adscititious
+qualities are capable of transmission. The somatic cells make up the
+mortal and perishable forms of life, while the germ-cells alone insure
+the further existence and immortality of the race.
+
+It is easy to perceive that these views, if they could be maintained,
+would completely transform the Darwinian theory. Since, if the somatic
+cells, that is, the body-parts of animals and plants, with all their
+adaptations to soil and climate, to definite modes of life, etc., are
+to be deprived of every power to transmit hereditary characters, then
+the so-called Lamarckian theory, which should really bear the name of
+Erasmus Darwin, would be deprived of every foundation which it possesses.
+Neither the increase in strength of the members of the body, acquired
+by use and practice, nor their weakness created by their non-use could
+be inherited; and in just as small a degree could changes caused by
+external influences, bodily injuries, sickness, entail consequences which
+were inheritable. This being the case, then also all those views would
+be untenable which seek to explain the important effects of time as the
+result of the accumulation and augmentation of the minute impressions of
+the external environment. If the variations which are generated by means
+of external influences are not capable of transmission, then the direct
+adaptation must commence at the beginning in the case of every following
+generation; an accumulation is impossible.
+
+We can observe, however, in every particular case, the complete harmony
+in which every living being exists with its surroundings and mode of
+life; and observe in closely related species the most various adaptations
+to the elements in which they live: climate, food, nay, even to the
+particular companions with which they associate; with the result that
+many plants have shaped the structure of their flowers to conform to
+the physical anatomy of the insect which ordinarily effects their
+fertilisation, and that animals assume the figure and form of some
+associate who is safe from hostile assaults, or even completely adopt
+different modes of life where it is necessary to enter a life-partnership
+with a strange animal or plant. But, granting that the most widely
+extended capability of adaptation is a thing of daily experience, there
+still arises the question how we shall explain this quality, which can
+only be brought about by slow degrees, without taking into account the
+factor of heredity in the transmission of acquired qualities. The theory
+of Weismann attempts this, in that it takes for granted an infinite
+variability in the germ-formative materials, and guides the new forms and
+variations thus begotten into the really true path, that is, into the
+most successful paths, through the process of natural selection (that
+is, through the survival of the fittest as regards environment and all
+other things). According to this doctrine, external circumstances have
+no direct influence whatever upon the variation of species, as Erasmus
+Darwin, Lamarck, and the founder of the theory of natural selection and
+all his followers up to that time supposed, but we have to have recourse
+to a pure theory of natural selection, and call to our aid an, even
+now, rather obscure phenomenon, occurring in connection with sexual
+impregnation, which has been called “the expulsion of the polar bodies,”
+an extrusion of minute qualities of germ-plasm from the germ-cells while
+in union. By the processes of crossing, which continually recur, a vast
+number of the most manifold hereditary tendencies are united in the
+germ-material. Then certain of these are ejected, so that others acquire
+supremacy; and in this manner the way is opened for the origination of a
+vast number of possible combinations. In this way the path is clear to a
+theory of perfect mechanical variability, in which the germ-material has
+only to transmit the characters which spontaneously arise in it, and yet
+affords an investigator endowed with any imagination the possibility of
+understanding the origin of the great variety and final purpose of the
+world. It is Frohschammer’s “principle of the imagination as the creator
+of the world” translated into comprehensible formulæ. The simplicity
+thus reached by the elimination of all direct influences from the
+external world, has won the adherency of many investigators following in
+Darwin’s steps, particularly in England; but whilst Wallace, Galton, Ray
+Lankester, and others have expressed their full assent to it, other and
+not less eminent authorities, as Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, Fritz Müller,
+and Virchow, have emphatically rejected it.
+
+The reasons in favor of this assumption are, as is indeed the whole view
+itself, mainly of a theoretical nature; the arguments of the opposition
+are divided into philosophical and experiential propositions. The
+philosophical opposition is mainly based on the fact that, from the very
+beginning, there is assigned to the germ-material, as it unceasingly
+continues its existence, an infinite variety of capacities which the
+external world cannot affect, and that all progress and advancement takes
+place as the result of the _loss_ of the originally endowed powers and
+tendencies. On this theory a family of acrobats or race-horses would
+not acquire their powers through the gradual augmentation by practice
+of their feats of skill and endurance, but because these powers were
+originally resident in them, and every factor incompatible with them
+was gradually eliminated. On the other hand, these views approach in a
+dangerous degree to the theories of predestination and preformation,
+the overthrow of which has been justly regarded as one of the greatest
+advances of science.
+
+Still more important must be considered the objections of empirical
+science, which up to this time was completely convinced of the heredity
+of acquired qualities. Popular experience, as well as that of physicians,
+universally speaks of inherited disease-germs, and in certain cases,
+particularly in mental diseases, physicians are so thoroughly convinced
+of their inheritability that the first question put to the relatives of
+such sufferers usually is whether the disease has ever appeared in the
+parents or family of the patient. This fact is so deeply grounded in the
+general belief, that the modern naturalistic school of novelists, the
+school of Zola, Ibsen, and their associates, are wont to devote their
+main efforts to the problem of inherited evils. Now the inheritability
+of certain evil conditions, even though proved, would not by any means
+be an absolute disproof of Weismann’s theory; for, inclined as much as
+we may be to derive diseases from mistakes and sins against a natural
+mode of life, such as colds, drunkenness, dissipation, mental and
+bodily over-exertion, we yet cannot deny _a priori_ that blastogenic
+diseases, or diseases originating in the germ-plasm, may exist, which
+without any doubt would then be transmissible. It also does not lie
+beyond the realms of possibility that congenital malformations, such as
+hare-lips, supernumerary fingers, and the defects which show a remarkable
+disposition to heredity, fall into this category. These blastogenic germs
+of disease would then, of course, have to be distinguished from the
+somatogenic diseases (or the diseases produced in the body by external
+causes), which never could be inherited.
+
+From this point of view the question as to the hereditary consequences of
+external injuries has given rise to great efforts to prove experimentally
+the truth of this belief, which has existed for centuries. In almost
+every part of the globe we meet with the assertion that hornless cattle,
+such, for example, as are bred in South America, or the tailless cats of
+the Isle of Man, or other domestic animals with similar deficiencies,
+are descended from a progenitor which lost its horns or its tail through
+disease or other mishap. Since now, recently, similar assertions have
+again been put forward to the effect that tailless cats are found
+among the descendants of feline progenitors who have been robbed of
+their posterior ornaments by an act of violence, and these cases have
+been discussed in connection with the pangenesis theory of Darwin,
+according to which each part of the body is believed to supply material
+contributions to the germ-plasm, Weismann determined to institute
+experiments on this point. He started the breeding of white mice whose
+tails were regularly cut off, without finding as a result, from among 840
+young ones derived from such mutilated progenitors, a single one having
+a malformation or missing tail. However, even this experiment cannot
+be regarded as an absolute proof, as it at first view might seem, and
+the negative result was foreseen by the writer of these lines. It is a
+clear conclusion that if in the case of many vertebrates, for example,
+salamanders and lizards, as well as in the case of most invertebrates,
+missing limbs and tails are renewed in the course of their lifetime, it
+would indeed be very remarkable if their renewal should not take place,
+at least in the case of the complete rejuvenation of new birth.
+
+Darwin himself had concluded, from his own experience and that of
+others, that injuries and similar inflicted acts of violence are the
+cause of hereditary consequences only in cases where they bring about
+some long-continued and wasting disease, and thus produce some permanent
+effect on the bodily constitution. For this reason, especially injuries
+to main nerve-tracts in parts near the centres are readily accompanied
+by hereditary consequences, because they interfere with the nutrition
+of the members supplied by them. Brown-Séquard has observed in a great
+number of cases of guinea pigs whose nerve-roots he had severed, that the
+offspring of the animals operated upon developed diseases of the eyes,
+ears, and other organs which conformed regularly to the character of the
+operation, and could therefore be predicted; and also noted malformations
+and deficiencies, amounting even to the complete disappearance of the
+eye-balls, such as never arise or have been observed in these animals
+without violent interference. His positive results regarding the
+hereditability of the evil consequences of disturbing operations have
+a decided advantage in numbers and scope over the negative results of
+Weismann; and it is not clear how the belief in the non-hereditability of
+somatic conditions will accommodate itself to them.
+
+But if conditions of the body produced by such sudden interferences
+have under certain circumstances entailed hereditary consequences,
+how much more should we expect this same result from slowly
+effected constitutional changes, which external influences, working
+uninterruptedly for hundreds of years, bring about in an organism which
+has been transported into a new element, into new surroundings, or into
+a different climate. Not at all infrequently does the coming together
+and union of two new organisms beget hereditary changes which can be
+explained only through the direct influence of the one upon the other.
+Thus, for example, in the case of plants in hot countries which are
+protected against the assaults of leaf-devouring ants by body-guards
+of smaller ants, and also in species of quite different families, as,
+for example, in _Cecropia_ of the order _Euphorbiaceæ_, and in some
+_Triplaris_ species among the _Polygonaceæ_, we find little chambers,
+approachable through small openings in the stems, which serve the
+ants protecting the plants as dwelling and breeding places. Are we to
+believe now, in regard to this fact, that these plants, so different
+in their nature, have produced through voluntary variations the stems
+which contain these openings, or are we to believe we have to deal here
+with openings acquired through inheritance which originally were bored
+in the stems by the ants at the most appropriate points? Surely the
+first conclusion, which would uphold Weismann’s theory, has but a very
+slight degree of probability in its favor, whilst the latter, which would
+overthrow his view, is very highly probable. And such examples could be
+cited in great numbers.
+
+It is also to be remembered that the power of variation is not exhibited
+solely in sexually created individuals, as it should be according to
+Weismann’s theory, but frequently also in non-sexual multiplication,
+where no amphimixis (mingling) occurs. It is well known that the majority
+of the sporting varieties of our trees, for example, _Fagus sanguinea_,
+and the so-called weeping varieties, that is, abnormal varieties with
+pendent twigs, forms with split, spotted, or white leaves, are wont first
+to appear on single branches of old trees, in which the continuity of
+the protoplasm unquestionably existed, but no amphimixis or extrusion of
+the polar bodies took place. It is also the generally received opinion
+of naturalists that the lowest classes of animal and plant life are
+universally multiplied by non-sexual means. And if this is so, it is
+not clear how higher forms which sexually propagate can be derived from
+them, if the latter have originally to furnish the fundamental conditions
+of variation. The adherents of Neo-Darwinism will, accordingly, have to
+furnish many additional facts if they wish to invest their theory with
+any degree of probability.
+
+                                                             CARUS STERNE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[16] _Cenogenesis_, from κενός, empty, fruitless (and γένεσις, birth);
+not from κοινός, common, the derivatives of which are sometimes written
+“c_e_no.”—ED.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+FRANCE.
+
+
+The study of personality, from the point of view of pathological
+psychology, has already supplied us with numerous books. M. ALFRED BINET,
+in his fine work, _Les Altérations de la Personnalité_, has undertaken to
+present systematically to us these alterations in their entirety, while
+restricting himself to ascertained results, and avoiding disputed points.
+He exhibits to us the “dismemberment of the ego” in diseased states, the
+frequent rupture of that “unity of consciousness” which is the principal
+attribute of the normal individual.
+
+Clinical observation has established the existence in certain subjects
+of successive personalities, and in others that of co-existing
+personalities; the experiences of suggestion have at last allowed of
+analogous morbid phenomena being provoked, in such a manner that cases
+may be varied and rendered still more instructive. The simple movements
+provoked in normal persons in states of distraction, of which many very
+curious examples may be found in M. Binet’s book, are the recognised
+mark of a subconsciousness; but it is often possible, under the same
+conditions and with the same processes, to provoke in a hypnotisable
+hysteric individual an actual sub-personality, that is to say, to augment
+the phenomena which attentive observers have long since remarked in
+every-day life.
+
+It cannot be doubted that, on the one hand, it is possible to produce
+in an insensible limb a great variety of subconscious actions, and all
+sorts of reactions; and when they are recorded by the graphic method, it
+is perceived that with the fingers of his insensible hand, the subject
+has made movements the form of which varies according to the receiving
+apparatus (the dynamograph, drum, pencil, etc.). These movements thus
+exhibit the truly psychological marks of adaptation, and seem to reveal
+the existence of an intelligence which is other than that of the ego of
+the subject, and which acts without his assistance and even unknown to
+him.
+
+On the other hand, numerous experiences of very different kinds show
+that the subject whose anæsthetic arm, for example, is pricked, can
+have an idea of the stimulation, although he does not perceive it. He
+does not feel the prickings, but the excitation calls forth the idea of
+their number: he counts them as a normal individual would do; “only,
+in hysterical individuals, the first part of the process occurs in one
+consciousness, and the second in another.”[17]
+
+It can hardly be denied that these different consciousnesses are
+distinct; since experience proves that each can have its own perceptions,
+its own memory, and even a moral character. However, their relative
+value with respect to each other matters little. We are compelled to
+consider, with M. Ribot, the ego as a “coördination” of states of
+consciousness, admitting of infinitely variable groupings. According to
+the old conception of the ego, the personality, with respect to secondary
+consciousnesses, was compared to a coachman who had ceased to have
+control over his horses. This comparison is now insufficient, since it
+may happen that the coachman falls asleep on the box, and that one of
+the horses then governs the set, regulating, more or less perfectly, the
+pace of the others by its own gait. Spiritualists, however, will never
+consent to put the ego in the place of the coachman. “A stone detached
+from the complex structure of the personality,” M. Binet now tells us,
+“can become the starting point of a new structure, which rises rapidly
+by the side of the old. Whereupon a disaggregation of the psychological
+elements is produced.” This comparison is certainly more precise and more
+in accordance with facts.
+
+Moreover, there remains to be explained how the mental compound which
+constitutes the ego has been constructed from its elements. M. Binet
+shows, _à propos_ of this question, that the association of ideas is
+powerless to explain the genesis of personality; associations alone,
+as proved by the experiences of suggestion, are not sufficient to
+restore forgotten memories. Neither is memory the sole factor in
+personality; since, in certain conditions a person may, while preserving
+the consciousness and the memory of certain of his mental states,
+nevertheless repudiate these mental states and consider them as foreign
+to himself.
+
+This question is still an open one. But there exist certainly some
+grounds for our seeking in the division of consciousness the key to
+certain psychological facts, like unconscious cerebration. Such a key
+would be the action of detached consciousnesses and detached memories,
+that afterwards immediately enter the current of general consciousness.
+Finally, “it is possible,” as M. Binet says in conclusion, “that
+consciousness may be the privilege of certain of our psychic acts; it is
+possible also that it exists everywhere in our organism, and it may be
+even that it accompanies every manifestation of life.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In his new work, _Agnosticisme_, M. DE ROBERTY studies with special
+care the position of modern doctrines with regard to the unknown, the
+great _x_ of philosophic speculations—God, Idea, Matter, Noumenon or
+Unknowable. Although perhaps a little hastily written, and somewhat
+obscure, his book nevertheless enforces conviction. “Our conception of
+the world,” says M. de Roberty, “embraces solely the things that we
+_know_ (feel, perceive, imagine, analyse, compare, etc.), and does not
+comprise the least jot or tittle of what we _do not know_. _For us_,
+therefore, there can be no question of any relations except between
+two classes of _known_ elements: that which constitutes the object of
+scientific research, and that which is outside of science. The latter
+class represents _our_ unknown, which is always _relative and purely
+human_.” Here, indeed, we have the true point of view, that which we
+shall all reach, though perhaps at first unknown to ourselves; and I
+shall be much surprised if the philosophers do not at last decide to wipe
+out the formidable _Unknowable_ set up by Spencer as the ultimate entity.
+We shall speak no more of the fathomless universe, but of the still
+unexplored universe; of the unknown, not of the unknowable.
+
+There is, however, another aspect of the question. Let us suppose the
+unknown got rid of; or to be more precise,—and if we regard with M. de
+Roberty the psychic centres as special receivers in which the cosmical
+energy empties itself, resolving itself into sensation and idea, and
+from whence it spreads itself anew as motion,—let us suppose that we
+have summed up all the energies received and emitted, and verified the
+law which reduces memory to the conservation of energy; let us suppose
+in fine that philosophy shall have found in the ego the synthesis of the
+non-ego, expressed “in symbolic abbreviations and in signs,” and shall
+have realised the “logical monism” which reduces things to their ideas:
+would the intellect—and would the sensibility—even then be completely
+satisfied? Can we conceive a state in which the curiosity of man as to
+all that concerns himself will be at rest, and when he will cease to
+be disquieted about the cause of suffering and of life? Kant long ago
+propounded this question. But, according to M. de Roberty, the thinker
+who is “a prey to the afflux of emotion referred to by Kant,” the man
+“given over to the desire for another kind of knowledge than that of
+experience,” are, in the category of intellectual emotions, diseased
+and “perverted” persons. “The sentiments, so varied in aspect and in
+strength, which inspire us,” writes he, “the contemplation of the
+unknown, determine the mental illusion which materialises, so to say, our
+ignorance and transforms the unknown into the unknowable.”
+
+Would it be inconsistent, however, to preserve the emotion of the unknown
+without “materialising” it, without pronouncing any dangerous scientific
+_ignorabimus_? M. de Roberty does not accept this situation,—which
+was that of Littré. I do not know whether any one will discover the
+“vaccine,” as he calls it, “of the pessimist emotion which has produced
+agnosticism or latent religiosity.” If this constitutes a mental malady,
+I fear much that it will be incurable. As long as there is unhappiness in
+life, there will also be unsatisfied curiosity, and for a very long time
+to come, inquietude.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The last publication of LOMBROSO and LASCHI, _Le Crime politique et les
+Revolutions, par rapport au droit, à l’anthropologie criminelle et à
+la science du gouvernement_ (Political Crime and Revolutions, in their
+Relation to Law, Criminal Anthropology, and the Science of Government)
+of which we here have a French translation, is, I will not say, the
+worst written, but the most confused work imaginable. Its arrangement is
+clear, but its examples are given without any order whatever. The facts
+presented are abundant, but they are taken rather too much at haphazard,
+and often too uncritically. The worst is that its very thesis is weak,
+badly formulated or elusive in places. What a pity it is that so much
+erudition should be expended, and so many valuable data be brought
+together without better success in displaying to the best advantage
+these riches, and also, let me say, without so many times having had
+occasion to appear so clearly in the wrong! M. Lombroso remains unmoved,
+unfortunately, in his high sounding and unqualified hypothesis of
+“diseased genius.” He continues to develop it and to defend it in this
+latest book of his, which is replete with instructive details, and
+which is undoubtedly the first considerable attempt at an etiology of
+revolutions and of political crime.
+
+The complex doctrine of Lombroso could be sufficiently summed up, if I
+am not mistaken, by uniting word to word—by the mathematical sign of
+equality—philoneism (or the love of novelties) with the revolutionary
+spirit, the revolutionary spirit with genius, genius with insanity,
+insanity with criminality, and criminality, finally, with progress. But
+what a detestable thing progress would then be! We should have to protect
+ourselves against it as we do against a pestilence. The evolution of
+societies does not take place without great waste and loss, as we all
+know. It should be carefully shown what these losses are. The study of
+the conditions of social progress ought to be made in greater detail
+than is here found. The terms of the imagined equation, which here
+hovers before our eyes, should in fine, if any comparison is to be
+effected between them, be subjected to a much more exact quantitative and
+qualitative analysis.
+
+For example, let us take genius. Of what kinds of genius does Lombroso
+speak? It seems to be sufficient for him that a man has attracted
+attention, and made himself talked about, to entitle him to be called
+great, while perhaps he is only a blusterer, a braggart, a servile
+imitator, a mere _homunculus_. In this way the quantity of geniuses and
+talented individuals he has unearthed is something extraordinary. The
+result of this is a radical error in his tables of the distribution of
+geniuses. The superiority that he attributes, in this respect, to certain
+of our southern departments, as compared with the Norman departments,
+for example, would have to be reversed if we considered the relative
+quality and kind of the genius involved. For the same reason, the
+relation established between genius and republican modes of government is
+undoubtedly not so precise and simple as is stated. But the worst of it
+is that in thus augmenting the number of men of genius, it is found that
+we have, in consequence of the above mentioned equation, also increased
+the number of the demented and the degenerate!
+
+If, moreover, it is true that the conservative mind, with less genius,
+insanity, and criminality, is evidence of the senility of the race, how
+can we accept the thesis that genius and the spirit of innovation are
+also absolute evidence of a neurasthenic condition? Shall we deny sound
+nerves to robust and vigorous youth? This, indeed, is not what Lombroso
+wished to assert. Yet the famous thesis always confronts us: _Latet
+anguis in herba_. The least sign of degeneracy is enough for him to brand
+a man, and not only are all geniuses in his eyes unbalanced, but even
+the insane are without any ado baptised geniuses; with the result that
+all is heaped together in one great mass—genius, insanity, and spirit of
+revolution.
+
+I shall not dwell any longer on these criticisms. They are simply
+intended as an admonition to the learned M. Lombroso against the
+allurements of a badly founded theory, and against the dangers arising
+from a too hasty preparation of his books. Whatever may be its defects,
+he has at least brought together in his present book many ideas. I advise
+all to read with care what he says about women (and how many will find
+him misoneistic on this point!), concerning their great influence in
+_rebellions_, which are always barren of results, and their impotence in
+_revolutions_, which are always productive of good. In the second part
+of his work, namely, in the section entitled _Juridical and Political
+Applications_, nearly all he says is to be commended. I agree with the
+authors—or I do not wish to forget M. Laschi—as to what they tell us
+in relation particularly to pettifogging parlementarianism and public
+instruction. Their conclusions are perhaps not connected with the thesis
+in any very intimate manner. But this is not of much consequence, as they
+possess an independent value of their own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a previous communication I referred to the work of Savvas-Pacha on
+Musulman jurisprudence. I have now to announce a work entitled _Souvenirs
+du Monde musulman_, by M. CH. MISMER, (published by Hachette,) the
+fourth and last volume of a valuable series which is greatly deserving
+of attention. M. Mismer, who has lived a long time in the East—at
+Constantinople, in Crete, and in Egypt—and was acquainted with the
+leading personages of the Empire, does not hesitate to return here to
+the theory which he set forth more than twenty years ago in his _Soirées
+de Constantinople_, his theory, namely, of the social advantages, and
+even the superiority, of Islamism over Christianity; subject however to
+the special worth of the races which belong to either of these two forms
+of religion. This opinion is not lightly uttered, and it will appear
+the more striking in view of the present crisis of social and moral
+decomposition which is now spreading throughout the western nations.
+
+In the work of M. Mismer will be found some of the great and striking
+qualities of the observing and thoughtful mind. In connection with a
+special problem of great importance in public instruction, that of
+heredity, I shall call to the attention of my readers the following
+statement, made with reference to the young men of the “Egyptian Mission”
+in France, directed by M. Mismer for ten years. “The capacity of a
+pupil,” says he, “was always found to be intimately connected with the
+cerebral culture of his ancestors and the faculties constituting the
+superiorities of his race.” “It was the same,” adds he, “from the moral
+standpoint.” Undoubtedly, if M. Mismer had taken the pains to make a note
+of the facts summed up in his statement, and to present the full case of
+the numerous pupil’s that he has had under his care, he would have been
+able to furnish science with data of the greatest value. Let us at least
+receive his lessons as he offers them to us. They are the fruit of the
+experience of a “man of action,” and it speaks well for an observation
+that it has rendered good service in practice.
+
+                                                            LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] The hypothesis of the division of consciousness explains,
+consequently, much better than that of the motive force of mental images,
+the facts of automatic writing (spiritism). [The works of Binet, Roberty,
+and Lombroso are published by Alcan.]
+
+
+
+
+CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
+
+
+
+
+COMTE AND TURGOT.
+
+
+_To the Editor of The Monist_:
+
+Your “note of inquiry” mentioned on p. 611 of the last _Monist_ is
+answered in full by Littré in _Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive_,
+where Turgot’s name heads the third chapter. He shows that the latter
+discovered the law of the three stages, theological, metaphysical, and
+positive, by the following quotation from his _Histoire des progrès de
+l’esprit humain_.
+
+“While the connection between physical effects was yet unknown, nothing
+was more natural than to suppose that they were produced by intelligent
+beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else could they have
+resembled? Everything that happened without the intervention of man, had
+its god, whose worship was soon established by fear or hope, and this
+worship was conceived in accordance with the deference accorded powerful
+men; for the gods were only more powerful men and more or less perfect
+according as they were the product of an age more or less enlightened as
+to the true perfections of humanity. When philosophers had recognised
+the absurdity of these fables, without however having obtained true
+light upon natural history, they imagined an explanation of the causes
+of phenomena by abstract expressions, such as essences and faculties:
+expressions that nevertheless explained nothing and that were reasoned
+about as if they had been beings, new divinities substituted for the old
+ones. These analogies were followed out, and faculties were multiplied
+to account for each effect. It was only very late, in observing the
+mechanical action that bodies have upon one another, that other
+hypotheses were drawn from this mechanics, (_de cette mécanique_) which
+mathematics could develop and experience verify.”
+
+Littré calls attention to “the great sureness of judgment” that led
+Turgot to cite only physical phenomena when he spoke of those that had
+ceased to be interpreted either theologically or metaphysically. “When he
+wrote this passage, positivity (I use this word, a necessary creation of
+M. Comte’s) was only beginning to reach chemical phenomena and had not
+yet attained those of biology and sociology.”
+
+But, says Littré, “after reserving the rights of priority for this
+eminent thinker, there is nothing to prevent M. Comte from keeping
+all the part that he had made himself and that belongs to him. Three
+principal points mark Comte’s independence of Turgot. The latter saw
+in the conception nothing more than an idea to meditate upon; Comte
+saw in it a sociological law; Turgot did not attach to it a sketch
+of human development; Comte developed with the aid of this law the
+whole historical series; Turgot did not perceive that he held one of
+the necessary elements of a philosophy; Comte, in the same flight of
+thought, went from history become science to philosophy become positive.
+The sociological law, isolated in Turgot, makes part, in Comte, of a
+vast whole: there were therefore two independent creations. Either M.
+Comte had not read Turgot, or, more probably, he had read him at a time
+when this passage, which to-day awakens attention, had no particular
+significance.”
+
+The fourth chapter in Littré’s Life of Comte has for heading the names
+of Kant and Condorcet. The whole of the former’s remarkable sketch of
+general history is given and reference is made to the letter in chap.
+viii, where Comte, in 1824, being twenty-six years old, says to M.
+d’Eichthal, his former pupil, “I have read and reread with infinite
+pleasure Kant’s little treatise; it is prodigious for the epoch, and if
+I had known it six or seven years sooner it would have saved me trouble.
+I am delighted that you have translated it; it can contribute very
+efficaciously to preparing minds for positive philosophy. Its general
+conception or at least its method is still metaphysical, but the details
+show the positive spirit at every instant. I had always regarded Kant not
+only as a very strong head, but as the metaphysician that approaches the
+nearest to positive philosophy. But this reading has greatly fortified
+and especially given precision to my conviction in that regard. If
+Condorcet had had knowledge of this writing, which I do not believe,
+very little merit would remain to him, since he can pretend only to that
+of the conception, which is almost as firm and, in some respects, even
+clearer in Kant. As for me, after this reading I can find in myself, up
+to the present time, no other value than that of having systematised and
+fixed the conception that had been sketched by Kant unknown to me, which
+I owe chiefly to a scientific education; and even the most positive and
+distinct step that I have taken after him, seems to me only the discovery
+of the law of the passage of human ideas through the three stages,
+theological, metaphysical, and scientific; a law that appears to me to
+be the foundation of the work whose execution Kant has counselled. I
+thank my lack of erudition to-day; for if my work, such as it is now, had
+been preceded by a study of Kant’s treatise, it would have lost much of
+its value in my eyes. I conceive now, as you said, that, for the German
+philosophers that are familiar with this treatise, my work will really
+have a great effect only with the second part.” This work was a short
+one reprinted in Saint-Simon’s _Catéchisme des industriels_ and called
+“A System of Positive Politics.” It had been inserted two years before,
+under the title of “A Plan of the Work Necessary for the Reorganisation
+of Society,” in a pamphlet of Saint-Simon’s, without Comte’s name, and it
+was because the latter insisted, this time, upon an acknowledgment of his
+authorship that Saint-Simon broke with him. The “second part,” which was
+to produce the great effect upon the German philosophers, never appeared;
+or rather, it soon grew to be the _Course of Positive Philosophy_,
+begun on the 2d of April, 1826, before Humboldt, Blainville, and other
+celebrated listeners.
+
+The term _positive philosophy_ had long been used by Saint-Simon and his
+school, Comte among the rest, not in the special sense that the latter
+now gave it, but as a “generic name for the whole of science.” The first
+use of the words as we now understand them is in a letter from Comte
+to M. d’Eichthal, dated Aug. 5, 1824. “I cannot help recalling your
+judicious reflection upon the influence that social physics, once formed,
+will have upon scientific philosophy. I go even further than you, for
+I think that it will be only then that a veritable philosophy of the
+sciences can exist. All the philosophical ideas that are there to-day,
+although very precious up to that time, appear to me to have nothing
+more than a simply provisory (provisoire) character. I shall speak a
+little about this relation in the general preface that I announce to you,
+where I shall explain that the true title of my work would be _positive
+philosophy_, and that if I preferred _politics_, it is because that is
+the most urgent philosophical application and the one that is to found
+the science, but that later I or you or others will complete this system
+of ideas by the encyclopedic re-coinage of all our positive cognitions
+(connaissances), which ought really to be conceived as a single mass,
+although, for good culture, it is indispensable to preserve and to push
+even, in one sense, further than it is, the division of labor, so that
+each special savant can always, subsequently, conceive the relation of
+his branch and even of his twig to the universal trunk.”
+
+In a letter of about this date Comte refers to his habit of never
+rewriting anything. His memory permitted him to look upon a volume as
+finished when it had been thought out and before a line had been written.
+But even in his letters we notice some of the disadvantages of this
+procedure, which, while conducive to unity, sacrifices literary form.
+
+It is true that Comte studied under Saint-Simon; but, according to
+Littré, his purely philosophical dependence was very slight, while his
+influence upon his master was important. “What forms the distinguishing
+characteristic of Saint-Simon at the epoch when he lived, is the social
+destination that he assigns without hesitating to the ideas that
+preoccupy him. He has, as we have seen, only the most confused notion
+of what this philosophy will be; but, no matter what it is to be, he
+consecrates it in advance to the reorganisation of society.”
+
+As regards Condorcet, Comte enthusiastically acknowledges his
+indebtedness to the “Sketch of an Historical Table of the Progress of the
+Human Mind,” and even goes beyond the facts, as he did in his praise of
+Kant.
+
+Littré makes a fair division of credit among others as well as those
+already named, and concludes as follows: “Turgot had discovered that
+human conceptions, at first theological, afterwards become metaphysical
+and end by being positive. Kant had known that history is a natural
+phenomenon, subjected to a determinate course, and Condorcet, pushed
+harder than his predecessors by advancing time,” (he had been condemned
+to death) “had attempted to trace a table that should put in evidence
+the enchainment of the progresses of civilisation. These are great
+things, but they are still only rudiments; for neither Turgot nor his
+successors make use of the discovered law to found upon this general
+fact evolution; Kant, who perceives clearly the necessity of conceiving
+history as regulated by the conditions inherent to humanity, is unable to
+base this important notion on anything better than an _à priori_ idea”
+(the metaphysical principle that nature does nothing in vain, and that as
+human faculties do not reach their development in the individual, who is
+ephemeral, they must do so in the species, which is durable) “and thus he
+leaves it incapable of fixing the attention of a century whose tendencies
+were more and more positive; lastly Condorcet has no other guide than the
+negative philosophy of the eighteenth century in a work to which it could
+bring only contradiction.”
+
+John Stuart Mill says of Comte that “far from pretending to originality
+when he had really no right to do so, he was eager to attach his most
+original thoughts to every germ of a similar idea that he met with among
+his predecessors.”
+
+Speaking for himself, Littré says of the law of the three stages, “I do
+not reject it, I restrain it. As long as we remain in the scientific
+order and consider the conception of the world first theological,
+then metaphysical, finally positive, the law of the three stages has
+its full efficacy in directing the speculations of history.... But in
+history all is not comprised in the scientific order. M. Comte, who has
+said somewhere that it is necessary to suppose, at the beginning of
+humanity, certain notions that were neither theological nor metaphysical,
+has indicated the germ, I will not say of my objection, but of my
+restriction. In fact this law of the three stages comprehends neither
+industrial, nor moral, nor æsthetic development. It has however, the
+excellent character of being relative to the speculations in which
+evolution by filiation is most manifest and consequently of giving a
+positive notion of the march of history.”
+
+Is it true, as stated on p. 565 of _The Monist_ for July, that Stuart
+Mill adopted Hume’s “erroneous conception of causality” to the extent
+implied in the following passage? “This idea of ‘sequence’ however
+was exactly Hume’s mistake, adopted by Mr. Mill, and through Mr. Mill
+popularised among English thinkers. If the nature of cause and effect
+were really constituted by invariable sequence, then the night might be
+called the effect of the day because night is invariably consequent upon
+day.”
+
+The only authority at hand on the island from which I write is
+Clemenceau’s translation of Mill’s “Auguste Comte and Positivism,” where,
+on p. 61, I read as follows, “The succession of day and night is just as
+much an invariable succession as the alternate exposition of the earth’s
+two opposite sides to the sun. Yet day and night are not the cause of
+each other; why? Because their succession, although invariable, according
+to our experience, is not so unconditionally: these phenomena succeed
+each other only upon the condition that the presence and the absence
+of the sun succeed each other; and if this alternation were to cease,
+day and night would not follow each other. There are thus two kinds of
+uniformities of succession, one without conditions, the other dependent
+on the former: laws of causation, and other successions which depend on
+these laws.”
+
+In a note Mill refers to his _System of Deductive and Inductive Logic_.
+
+                                                        LOUIS BELROSE, JR.
+
+
+
+
+SOME REMARKS UPON PROFESSOR JAMES’S DISCUSSION OF ATTENTION.
+
+
+In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses
+in an interesting and suggestive way the relation of ideation to
+attention, maintaining that “ideational preparation ... is concerned
+in all attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory imagination” or
+“preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience.
+Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates
+in imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of
+the striking.
+
+It is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant,
+where we are awaiting _some given impression_, there is a representing,
+antedating experience, which may be a preparatory preperception. But with
+a wrong imaging of what is to be experienced there is hindrance, as when
+in a dark quiet room we are led to expect sensation of light but actually
+receive sensation of sound. Very often, indeed, our anticipations make us
+unprepared for experience. Further, the experiments adduced by Professor
+James from Wundt and Helmholtz are in the single form of expectant
+attention, and we must remark that in these experiments the reagent is
+also experimenter, and this introduces a new attention, consciousness of
+consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind, which complicates an already
+complex consciousness. In general we may say that experimentally incited
+consciousness is artificial, at least as far as it feels itself as such,
+and for certain points like simple attention this tends to vitiate
+results. Self-experimentation or experiment on those conscious of it
+as such may mislead in certain cases, and must, so far as this element
+of consciousness of experiment is not allowed for. In physical science
+things always act naturally whether with observation or experiment, but
+in psychology observation, other things being equal, is more trustworthy
+than experiment.
+
+In all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the
+attention does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as
+such, but it is merely the will effort concerned in these operations.
+Yet as we may expect without effort, and preconceive without volition,
+attention is necessarily involved in neither. A perception or a
+preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with effort,
+but only an unattention when purely involuntary. Professor James’s
+use of attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea
+of attention, as any consciousness which cognises something. This is
+so inbred in thought and language that it is most difficult to avoid
+using the term in this sense. Many psychologists like Mr. James and Mr.
+Sully frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon but they do
+not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition
+meaning. Höffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will.
+Attention as the exercise of will in building up and maintaining
+cognitive activity, is naturally treated under cognition; but it is on
+the whole safer and better to discuss attention under will so as to keep
+it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which it vitalises.
+I have endeavored to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is not
+unlikely I may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common confusion,
+but trust the instances will be few.
+
+When we have, then, a case of expectant attention we must distinguish
+the attention in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognising.
+It is, indeed, true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain
+without immediate realisation is incentive to ideating. In listening
+in the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination many sounds,
+and we form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear. Sense-adjustments
+call up a train of sensations in ideal form. But it is obvious that low
+intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet really
+attend. The very first cognitions and all early cognitions by their very
+newness and difficulty were attentions long before ideation was evolved.
+With low organisms, as cognitive power extends only to the present in
+time and space, immediacy of reaction is imperatively demanded, and
+every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately directive of motor
+apparatus so that suitable motion is at once accomplished. The cognition,
+though dim and evanescent factor, is yet powerfully energised, and so a
+true attention. Always with lowest sentiencies, and often with higher,
+pain is suddenly realised without anticipation, followed quickly by
+attention as strong effort to cognise the nature and quality of the
+pain-giver and so to effectually get rid of pain-giver and pain.
+
+Preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late
+attentions it is by no means necessary. It is said that we see only
+what we look for, but it must be answered that seeing commonly happens
+without any looking for. The kindergarten child, Professor James to the
+contrary notwithstanding, is not confined in his seeing to merely those
+things which he has been told to see and whose names have been given
+him. A child continually asks, What is that? and is quick to discern
+the absolutely new and strange. He accomplishes a wide variety of
+attentions without ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate
+presentations.
+
+To be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is
+made possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his own
+pre-experience and the experience of his ancestors, but this does not
+signify ideation. Every cognising is conditioned by the past, but this
+does not call for a reawakening and projecting in ideal form at every
+instance of cognitive effort, before any real cognition is reached.
+
+In fact, many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely
+intensifyings of some present cognition, of some cognitive psychosis
+which has simply come or happened. Take the instance of attention
+to marginal retinal images, this certainly does not always imply
+preperception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see, though
+in the cases mentioned by Professor James it may. For example, I was
+writing the above seated with my profile to the window when I became
+suddenly aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of
+a moving object to my right. This perception of bare undefined object was
+spontaneous, a pure given; I exercised no will in attaining it, and so
+the state of cognition was not an attention. However, by attending, by
+intensifying the cognition by will effort, I perceive that the indefinite
+object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain height,
+clothed in a certain way, etc. I do not trace the least ideation in the
+whole process, the slight attending as act of will did not imply any
+anterior or posterior idea or representation. The reason for the will
+act was the intrinsic interest of movement, and this intrinsic interest
+arises in the fact that moving objects have had for all life a special
+pleasure-pain significance, the moving object is the most dangerous, and
+so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a special stimulant
+of attention. This habit of attentiveness to things in motion survives
+and continues for cases where it is of no use and even of harm; thus,
+in the present instance, it diverts me from my work. It is obvious
+that attention often occurs in the same way for other senses without
+preliminary idea.
+
+On the whole we must conclude that attention is a much abused term, and
+it is to be hoped that psychologists will for the future keep to the
+definite and best use of the term; namely, to denote cognitive effort in
+all its degrees and modes.
+
+                                                         HIRAM M. STANLEY.
+
+
+
+
+IS MONISM ARBITRARY?
+
+
+In Vol. II, No. 3, of _The Monist_, a very kind criticism appeared from
+the pen of Mr. Francis C. Russell of the doctrine of a double-faced unity
+of mind and matter. It was said that this doctrine is very far from
+inducing that final satisfaction which we rightly expect of a competent
+theory, and the critic propounded as a possible explanation of mental
+phenomena the postulate of a conservation of spirit. He calls spirit the
+elementary basis of consciousness considered as a quality. Spirit would
+be the subjectivity of nature, the elements of feeling, or as Professor
+Morgan calls it metakinesis; and consciousness would originate in the
+same way as electricity, i. e., by rending spirit asunder into positive
+and negative spirit so as to produce a tension. This would account for
+the appearance and disappearance of consciousness in that spiritual
+“dynamo” which is called the nervous system.
+
+This proposition seems to be highly acceptable because it stands upon the
+principle of a conservation of substance and attempts to represent the
+phenomenon of consciousness as due to a transformation. But does it for
+that reason remove the difficulties of the doctrine of a double-faced
+unity of nature, which, as Mr. Russell says, “is open to the charge of
+being arbitrary and brings no access of insight”? Is not perhaps the term
+double-faced unity (which is none of my invention, and which I have been
+careful to avoid) a misleading and unsatisfactory term? Why should nature
+be double-faced? Why are feeling and motion the only two attributes of
+natural phenomena? Is this not arbitrary? Could nature not be just as
+well a treble or quadruple-faced unity. Nature might possess, as Spinoza
+actually declares, infinite attributes of which these two only, viz.
+extension and thought, i. e. motion and feeling, happen to be known to us.
+
+It is this apparent arbitrariness which bars our insight and deprives us
+of the satisfaction that ought to attend the real solution of a problem.
+But let us avoid the term double-faced unity; let us speak of the
+subjectivity and the objectivity of nature, and the clouds will disappear.
+
+The doctrine of a double-faced unity has been criticised as dualism,
+and the proposition that nature consists of two radically different
+attributes—exactly of two, not more and not less—must most decidedly
+appear as dualism. But is it dualistic to say that every subject appears
+to its objects not as a subject but as an object among other objects?
+Certainly not.
+
+The relativity of the terms subject and object affords us the key to
+a comprehension of the situation. This world of ours is a world of
+relations. The phenomena of nature exhibit an unceasing activity; they
+consist of constant changes, and every change, every motion, has a whence
+and a whither. Every transformation is a series of events among which any
+prior one is called cause and any subsequent one effect.
+
+If we regard feeling and motion as two attributes of nature, we are
+actually on the brink of dualism, and we shall understand how Spinoza,
+in order to escape from dualism and arrive at a monistic view, assumed
+without any plausible argument the existence of an infinite number of
+attributes. This assumption however is of no avail, for the problem would
+arise: How is it that we know only two of all these infinite attributes?
+Why do we not know any other? and why are we unable to form even a dim
+notion of any other? If they exist why do they exhibit no effects upon
+us? Perhaps because we ourselves and this world of ours consist only
+of two! And if they exhibit no effects upon us and upon our world, can
+they be said to exist at all? Might we not, in that case, consider them
+as non-existent and count the two known attributes alone as actual
+realities? Thus the dualism would remain; and Spinoza’s monism is only
+apparent.
+
+The same objection cannot be made if we remain conscious of the fact that
+feelings are as much abstracts as motions. Subjectivity and objectivity
+are correlative terms. There is as little a duality in the idea, that
+subjects presuppose objects as that effects presuppose causes. There
+are not causes in the world which are nothing but causes, nor are there
+effects which are nothing but effects. Take for instance an historical
+event. Was Cæsar’s death a cause or an effect? Plainly, this depends upon
+the view we take. As the sequence of the wounds which Cæsar received
+from his assassins it was an effect; as the beginning of the civil war
+consequent thereupon it was a cause. If I look at you, you are the object
+and I am the subject. If you look at me, it is the reverse. Thus the
+relation of a certain thing to its surroundings makes of it a subject,
+while the surroundings are its objects.
+
+Subject and object being correlatives, we can very well understand why
+there are no “subjects in themselves”; every subject is at the same time
+an object in the objective world. We can further understand, why every
+subjectivity except our own withdraws itself from direct observation.
+We can observe the movements of organisms like ourselves and judge by
+way of analogy that they feel pain or enjoy pleasure. We see their
+motions which betray certain feelings, but we can never see the feelings
+themselves; and even supposing that we could enter into the brain of a
+man and that the whole mechanism of brain-action were laid open to our
+inspection in its minutest details, we should see motions, combinations
+and separations, integrations and disintegrations, we should see the
+oxydation of the gray substance, which would appear as a great turmoil
+and excitement, but we should see (as Leibnitz says) no thoughts, no
+perceptions, no feelings. That it cannot be otherwise is obvious when
+we consider that our objects will always present to us the character of
+objectivity.
+
+But suppose We were an atom of oxygen and entered into the process of
+brain-action as an active factor, our subjectivity would soon become
+absorbed and welded into a higher unity with the subjectivity of the
+other atoms. We should then, as a part of that brain’s consciousness,
+feel these feelings, perceptions, and thoughts; we should, then, _be_ the
+subject which we could not see and which we were searching for in vain in
+the world of objectivity.
+
+This conception of the correlation of subjectivity and objectivity
+does not only convincingly explain the unity of feeling and motion, it
+does not only establish a satisfactory monism, it throws light also on
+some other of the questions that puzzle us. How is it that we do not
+feel our brain-motions to be brain-motions? We feel our feelings only;
+and when feeling our feelings we do not so much feel _that_ we feel as
+_what_ we feel. In other words, we feel the contents of our feelings; we
+feel their import, their meaning; we are aware of their significance;
+our consciousness is conscious of the object, the presence of which is
+indicated by this special feeling. Our attention is concentrated upon the
+messages conveyed by and contained in the different feelings.
+
+These messages of certain feelings are the interpretations given either
+to certain sense-impressions or they are the thought-symbols representing
+some abstracts, representing certain features of sense-impressions.
+
+How little we feel our brain-motions when we think, can be learned
+from the fact that some nations place the seat of thinking in the
+heart, others in the stomach or even the bowels, while even so great a
+naturalist as Aristotle regarded the brain as cold and insensible; he
+made the observation that man is in possession of the relatively largest
+brain, but he understood its function so little that he thought it served
+to cool the warmth rising from the heart.
+
+It is strange that every subjective feeling so long as it remains within
+itself can neither be localised nor determined. We know nothing whatever
+of the brain-motion that thinks a certain idea. We can fairly assume
+that every idea is in its objective existence a peculiar kind of brain
+motion taking place in a particular part of the brain, but we are not
+conscious of the brain-motion as a special and localised motion. We are
+quite unable to tell the difference that we must suppose to exist between
+the forms of the brain-structures or combinations of brain-structures and
+their motions when we think say for instances of virtue and of vice. We
+are conscious only of the idea and not of their objective correlates.
+
+Whatever we know of our body, we know only through sensation; i. e.,
+by the same means by which we know of other things. Our body is to us,
+and is represented with the assistance of the senses, as an object in
+the objective world. As such it is localised and all its relations and
+activities are determined. Whatever subjective feeling we have concerning
+any state of ourselves, remains indistinct until with the help of the
+senses it is made an object to our observation. Who has not as yet made
+the experience that he was unable to localise a toothache. The pain
+itself gives no information either as to its nature and cause or as to
+the seat of the suffering. The pain itself is purely subjective. All the
+objective facts have to be localised with the assistance of the senses.
+The suspected regions must be made the object of experiments and if any
+irritation of a certain spot increases the ache, it will be assumed to be
+the seat of the pain. And even then how often is a patient mistaken not
+only almost always as to the nature but often also as to the seat of the
+pain.
+
+These facts appear strange, but they cease to be strange, when we
+consider that the nature of subjectivity is feeling. Subjectivity can as
+little become directly conscious of its own objectivity as an eye can
+look at itself. However, an eye can look at its image in the mirror. So
+the complex of subjective existence, which is through the interaction of
+an organism united in what we call a soul, can and does turn the channels
+of its own senses back upon itself and thus forms an opinion concerning
+its own objectivity. Man’s knowledge of his own objective existence is
+not due to any internal and direct perception of self, but solely to the
+same experience through which he receives information concerning the rest
+of the world.
+
+                                                                     P. C.
+
+
+
+
+A REPLY TO A CRITIC.
+
+WITH A DISCUSSION OF NECESSARY TRUTHS.
+
+
+_To the Editor of The Monist_:
+
+I hope it is not a breach of etiquette to ask you to forward to your
+reviewer the following remarks in reply to his criticism of my work (_The
+Foundations of Geometry_, reviewed in Vol. II, No. 1, of _The Monist_).
+If he is good enough to review my second book also, I think they will
+clear up some misunderstandings.
+
+Your reviewer commences with some general remarks, against which I have
+nothing to say. He then proceeds to consider my “requirements for a
+logical definition.” Here he seems to find a difficulty—which may be
+due to my not having expressed myself clearly. If so I hope he will
+read what I say on the same subject in my _Essay on Reasoning_, which
+I cannot believe he will find “indefinite” or not well “issuable.” But
+indeed I cannot see where his difficulty comes in with my old statement
+of the case. I state perfectly clearly that requirements (3) and (4) are
+not _logically_ necessary for a definition, but are only required if
+that definition is intended to give a _particular meaning_ to the word.
+He tries to reduce my argument _ad absurdum_ by giving a definition
+of “troft.” But so far from being absurd his definition is perfectly
+good. According to it “troft” would include in its denotation all
+our percepts and concepts. When however he goes on to say “... These
+significant names must be so used that the intellectual sensibility shall
+be excited to perceive that which is intended to be defined,” I differ
+from him entirely. This is only required for a _description_, not for a
+_definition_ (see _Essay on Reasoning_, p. 53).
+
+Your reviewer’s only solid objection to my “requirements” seems to be
+that the fourth includes all the rest. This is only true if the term
+proposed for definition has an import which has already been determined;
+but even in such a case it is better to consider the requirements
+separately, as I have given them. For the force of objections under the
+different headings varies enormously. An objection under heading (1),
+if established, would be fatal to any definition whatever. One under
+heading (2) so far from being fatal would only be a suggestion for the
+improvement of the definition. Objections under either of the headings
+(3) and (4) would only be to the effect that the term as defined meant
+something different from what it was desired that it should mean. It
+is however convenient to consider (3) and (4) separately as it would
+generally be possible to decide (3) at once, whereas if a doubt were
+raised under heading (4) it might lead to a prolonged discussion before
+it could be laid. I do not however pretend that the “requirements” are
+laid down in my _Foundations of Geometry_ in the best possible form.
+Indeed I have altered the form in my second essay. There is moreover
+one requirement for a logical definition which is not included in my
+heading (1) in the _Foundations of Geometry_, though it is included in
+(4). This defect is remedied in the _Essay on Reasoning_ (p. 55). It is
+curious that your reviewer should have missed this point, as it is the
+very one on which he attacks my definition of “direction.” It is that
+the assertions in a definition must not be _independent_ of the meaning
+of the term defined. If they were, the assertion would be equally true
+(or false) whatever meaning the term might have. The _import_ of the
+term would therefore be unlimited. In the case of explicit definitions a
+similar error is called _circulus in definiendo_.
+
+When your reviewer goes on to attack my definition of “direction”
+why does he change his front all at once, and disregard all the
+considerations he has just been discussing? Why does he not apply
+my, or his own, requirements for a definition to the case in point?
+The criticism he actually does put forward will not bear a moment’s
+investigation. If my definition is “circular,” the assertion must be
+equally true whatever meaning is ascribed to the term. Well, then, let
+us try the effect of giving to it the meaning we ordinarily ascribe
+to “cheese.” Is it equally true that “a cheese may be conceived to be
+indicated by naming two points, as the cheese from one to the other”?
+Clearly not. But not only does this one assertion out of my definition
+exclude the import of “cheese” from the meaning of “direction,” but, more
+particularly, it distinguishes between the “three distinct but closely
+associated notions” which your reviewer quite rightly says “become
+confused in thought and expression unless the most solicitous care is
+taken to distinguish them.” This is exactly the care which I _have_
+taken, by framing my definition.
+
+I need not say much about the rest of the criticism. Your reviewer’s
+remarks on my definition of “angle” are simply due to the fact that he
+has not read the definition carefully, and probably has not read the note
+on the top of page 36 at all. It may make it clearer to him if I point
+out that if “we imagine a northeast-southwest line cutting an east-west
+line,” we imagine _four_ different directions and therefore (4⋅3)/(1⋅2)
+= 6 angles. Two of these are the straight angles between the opposite
+directions of each of the two lines. The other four are what Euclid calls
+“the angles between the lines.” As an angle, according to my definition,
+has no local habitation in space, it is, _prima facie_, meaningless to
+talk of the “right hand upper angle.” But if this is only an abbreviation
+for “the angle between the directions upwards and to the right,” then
+“the right hand upper angle” means the same as it would in Euclid.
+
+With the remarks about the nature of the challenge I have thrown down I
+heartily agree. May I however suggest that I have a right to expect that
+criticism should be, not only “competent and candid,” but careful? It
+is a difficult subject, and _I_ at least am not always able to express
+myself in such a way that my meaning cannot be misunderstood by any one.
+I think if your reviewer looks at what I have said again, with the aid
+of what I say further in my _Essay on Reasoning_, he will see that his
+criticisms have really originated in misunderstandings, and perhaps he
+will alter his judgment that I have “come short of the high result to
+which I aspired.”[18]
+
+But my chief object in writing to you to-day is to bring specially to
+your notice my ideas on the nature of so-called “necessary truths.”
+I am not quite clear how far you will find my views harmonise with
+your own. To a great extent I am inclined to think they are simply a
+further analysis of the views you express in _The Monist_ and in your
+_Fundamental Problems_. I will briefly sketch my own ideas and you can
+then judge whether they are yours also or not.
+
+In my _Essay on Reasoning_ I classify assertions as Truisms (assertions
+whose truth depends solely on the definitions of their terms) and Real
+Assertions, which convey some real subjective or objective information.
+I show that the validity of all purely formal knowledge depends on the
+fact that it is deduced from definitions alone, which are laid down
+_arbitrarily_ and that the supposed peculiar certainty of the theorems
+of pure mathematics is merely due to the fact that they are all truisms.
+Thus, I think it a misnomer to call such theorems “necessary” truths. It
+would be nearer the mark to call them “arbitrary” truths.
+
+There is no _necessity_ whatever about the theorem “twice two is four.”
+“Two” is defined as 1 + 1; “twice,” as the operation of adding a thing to
+itself. It follows from this that “twice two” is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; and this,
+by _definition_, is “four.” If “four” were defined as 1 + 1 + 1, (and
+there is no “necessary” reason why it should not be,) then “twice two”
+would _not_ be “four.” The assertion “twice two is four” conveys no real
+information whatever—at best it could only tell us what one of its terms
+meant if they had not all been previously defined.
+
+I cannot insist too strongly on the importance of a proper understanding
+and use of logical definition. If you desire to know whether a given
+assertion is true or false, _a priori_ or _a posteriori_, the first step
+in the investigation MUST be to find out how its terms were defined.
+If it turns out that the truth (or falsehood) of the assertion can
+be formally deduced from these definitions, then the assertion is a
+truism (or contradiction in terms): in either case it can give no real
+information, and even if true cannot be a “necessary” truth. Only if the
+definitions of the terms are both independent and consistent is it open
+to discussion how we might come to a knowledge of the fact it expresses.
+
+I may briefly indicate here how I think the problem ought to be
+attacked. “Objective facts” can only be established by induction. I do
+not mean by that term necessarily the process described by Mill, but
+some similar process, based ultimately on _inductio per enumerationem
+simplicem_. Now no such process can ever lead to a necessary truth. The
+most fundamental and certain induction which can be made, that which
+induces us to believe in the objectivity of our environment, does not
+lead to a “necessary truth”; and much less can any other induction based
+upon this one do so. “Objective facts” then may be established with
+greater or less probability, but can never be _necessarily_ true. But
+all inductions are based on our perceptions, that is ultimately on our
+subjective sensations. And a man can, nay, must be, absolutely certain
+of the reality of his own sensations though he cannot be certain of the
+interpretations he puts upon them. If I have a toothache I cannot be
+absolutely certain that I have a tooth, but, at least while the pain
+lasts, I am _absolutely_ certain that I have an ache. And so of any
+subjective sensation.
+
+I can similarly be absolutely certain that I entertain a given concept,
+while that concept is before my mind; though of course it is possible
+that if I assert the possession of that concept I may do so in language
+which may be misunderstood by the person I am addressing. If then a
+man has certain concepts which he can call up at will, the reality of
+those concepts, _qua_ concepts, is to him a _necessary truth_. He may
+lay down such necessary truths as axioms, and by their aid he may give
+real subjective import to a symbolic argument, and so obtain new and
+complicated assertions which are also to him necessary truths. This is
+what I do in my subjective theory of geometry. That theory might be
+regarded as purely symbolic—the axioms might have been left out, and
+all its conclusions looked upon as mere truisms. The conclusions of
+geometry of four or more independent directions can perhaps _only_ be
+regarded as truisms. But by the aid of the axioms, geometry of two and
+three independent directions can be given real subjective import, and its
+conclusions therefore regarded as necessary truths, as long as they are
+only taken subjectively. They may further be applied objectively by the
+aid of objective facts established by induction, but in this case their
+validity is no greater than that of the primary facts, the counterparts
+of the subjective axioms, which are employed to give the theory objective
+import.
+
+I confess I have not studied Kant sufficiently to say that his views
+differ, materially from mine, though I always thought they did until I
+read your interpretations of them. Perhaps I misunderstood the sense
+in which Kant used the term _a priori_. The term has been used in so
+many different senses that I prefer myself to drop it altogether. If it
+merely refers to priority in time there can be no practical doubt that,
+whether in the case of the human race or of an individual thinker, a
+large amount of sense-experience must have preceded even so simple an
+_a priori_ judgment as “twice two is four.” If the term merely refers
+to priority in logical validity it seems to me better to say that “such
+and such assertions are not dependent upon experience.” But Kant says
+of the assertion “7 + 5 = 12” that it is not only “_a priori_” but
+“synthetic”. By the latter term he means that its truth was _not_ deduced
+from definitions alone, and that the assertion therefore conveys real
+information. In this I believe he was wrong, and though he afterwards
+declares that “all knowledge _a priori_ is empty and cannot give
+information about things,” unless the true nature of _a priori_ knowledge
+is made more clear, people will inevitably continue to believe the
+contrary—and to believe moreover that Kant taught so.
+
+Any language which seems to imply that there is some dread necessity
+about mathematical truths—that they could not be otherwise if they
+would—is very misleading. Of course it is necessarily true that _if_ you
+have seven objects and add five more to them you will have in all twelve
+objects. But the whole objective difficulty is begged by the supposition.
+“Much virtue in if!”
+
+As I understand it the essence of the “laws” of pure mathematics is that
+they are verbal, that is they are only abbreviated expressions of the
+results of certain verbal processes. If the processes are repeated and
+the results similarly expressed, the results must always be the same.
+Our reason cannot “inform us about the form of existence” unless it is
+first given, as the _data_ or facts which correspond to the definitions
+of our symbolic arguments. It is only because our reasoning faculties
+are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at all—that it is
+not evident to us at once that the conclusions of the most intricate
+mathematical calculations are given to us along with the _data_. Given
+the data, then in all possible worlds the conclusions must indeed follow,
+but only because they really are already _in_ the data which were given.
+
+It may be that you will not only agree with all I have said, but have
+already said much of it yourself. But there are some passages in your
+_Fundamental Problems_ which seem to imply otherwise. I think the great
+objection I have to urge against Kant, and also perhaps against you, is
+that you do not distinguish as clearly as I could wish between symbolic
+argument and real, though subjective, knowledge. And the only way to
+distinguish between them is by inquiring into the definitions of the
+terms.
+
+For example, on p. 165 of _Fundamental Problems_ you say that to
+four-dimensional beings Kepler’s third law “would most probably appear as
+‘the cubes of their times of revolution being proportional to their mean
+distances to the fourth power.’”
+
+Now what sort of assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be? Originally
+it was a purely empirical law obtained by pure induction. If the
+four-dimensional people obtained their law the same way why should
+the result appear different to them? Or do you conceive the law to be
+deduced from Newton’s theory of gravitation? But even so the law of the
+inverse square was obtained empirically. If you think that law can be
+explained (as the analogous law for the distribution of light can) by the
+supposition that the integral of the force over all points at a given
+distance from the origin is constant, still this supposition is purely
+gratuitous unless established by induction from experience. If you grant
+any one of these suppositions you can by symbolic argument obtain the law
+corresponding to Kepler’s for a four-dimensional space. But I may mention
+that in no case does the result you anticipate come out. On the first
+two suppositions the law would be unaltered. On the last supposition the
+law of gravity would be changed to the inverse cube; but after that the
+solution of the problem has nothing to do with four dimensions—it is
+a two-dimensional problem only. The result is that in general planets
+could not move in closed orbits at all. They might conceivably revolve in
+circles, but such a condition would be unstable, and if it obtained their
+periodic times would vary as the squares of their distances.
+
+Again you say (p. 74) “the doctrine of the ‘conservation of matter
+and energy,’ although it has been discovered with the assistance of
+experience, can be proved in its full scope by pure reason alone.”
+I should very much like to see your proof (which I cannot find in
+_Fundamental Problems_). How do you define the terms of the doctrine?
+Do you deduce the proof from these definitions—that is do you make it a
+truism? Or do you base it upon subjective axioms as I do my geometry? Or
+if you base it on objective facts, how do you prove those facts by pure
+reason alone? And if it is purely a subjective proof, how, can you say
+the doctrine is proved “in its full scope”? Surely objective applications
+come within its scope?
+
+It would not be fair in me to ask you to publish my reply to your
+reviewer’s criticisms, though if that reply is justified the criticism
+must have done the prospects of my book some injury, seeing from what
+a quarter it comes. But I hope you will see your way to publishing the
+latter part of this letter in _The Monist_, together with your reply to
+it, if you think it worthy of such a distinction.
+
+I have just come across, in this month’s _Nineteenth Century_, another
+remarkable instance of reasoning which seems to be rendered entirely
+nugatory by the want of proper definitions. It is asserted that
+conceptual thought is impossible without language. At first sight this
+would certainly appear to be a real assertion. It follows from it that
+since dogs have no language they have no “conceptual thought.” But it
+may be plainly shown that dogs do entertain “general notions,” which
+in ordinary English would be included under the head of “conceptual
+thought.” The apparent contradiction is however explained when it appears
+that the author distinguishes general notions as “concepts” or “recepts,”
+according as they _are_ or _are not named_. This being his definition of
+“conceptual thought” as opposed to other thought, it appears that the
+assertion is only a truism after all, and conveys no real information
+whatever. To discuss it further is then mere waste of time. The author of
+the assertion doubtless _wished_ it to convey some information, but he
+did not attend to his definitions and so failed to attain his object.
+
+                                                          EDWARD T. DIXON.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[18] The reviewer of Mr. Dixon’s book has read these remarks on his
+criticism (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 1, p. 126) and has given them what
+seems to him full consideration. He confesses that he misunderstood
+what Mr. Dixon meant by “a direction.” (See the article “Logic as
+Relation-Lore” to be published in a subsequent number.) In regard to the
+requirements for a logical definition he must still abide by his former
+opinion. The need of a definition arises either from the inaccuracy in
+the application of a term or from a supposed lack of knowledge as to its
+signification. Hence to use the term itself in its own definition is to
+import into the definition the same vagueness or ignorance which it is
+the very office of a definition to correct. When Mr. Dixon says that it
+is requisite for a logical definition that the defining assertions “must
+not be _independent_ of the meaning of the term defined,” what is that
+but to say that the same must be _dependent_ upon that meaning? which,
+unless the reviewer again misunderstands the author, is to say that we
+must understand the meaning of the term before we can understand the
+definition.
+
+                                                                      ρσλ.
+
+
+
+
+
+MATHEMATICS A DESCRIPTION OF OPERATIONS WITH PURE FORMS.
+
+IN REPLY TO MR. EDWARD DIXON.
+
+
+It is true, as Mr. Dixon says, that “Any language which seems to imply
+that there is some dread necessity about mathematical truths is very
+misleading.” But to say, as Mr. Dixon does in another passage, that
+the truisms of mathematics are arbitrary truths, is more misleading
+still. The theorems of the formal sciences are not “assertions whose
+truth depends solely on the definition of their terms.” They are “real
+assertions which convey some real subjective or objective information.”
+
+Mr. Dixon objects to Kant’s assertion that 7 + 5 = 12 is not only _a
+priori_ but also synthetic. He declares, in contradistinction to Kant,
+that it is deduced from definitions alone; that therefore it is empty,
+and cannot give any information about things. This latter proposition,
+which is a phrase of Kant’s, appears in this context as an inconsistency
+of Kant’s. And it would be an inconsistency, if it had to be understood
+in the sense in which Mr. Dixon quotes it. We construe Kant’s phrase that
+“the _a priori_ is empty, and cannot give information about things,” in
+a different way. We think that Kant intends to say that the _a priori_
+imparts real information concerning relations and forms; but that it does
+not impart real information concerning substances or the materiality
+of things. It is apparent that the assertion 7 + 5 = 12 cannot be
+derived from the definitions of 7 or 5. Similarly, the ideas of higher
+mathematics are not deduced from the few definitions of elementary
+mathematics that tell what points, lines, parallels, etc., are. Of what,
+then, are these complex theorems of mathematics, products? They are not
+derived from sense-experience, nor from the definitions of their ultimate
+elements.
+
+Is their origin mysterious? Here Kant leaves us in the lurch; he simply
+declares that formal truth is _a priori_ and transcendental; and those of
+his disciples who call themselves, with preference, transcendentalists,
+have ample occasion to introduce in this _lacuna_ of Kantian thought, all
+the mysticism they please.
+
+The problem of the origin of the truths of formal sciences is not
+so difficult as it is sometimes represented. The theorems of higher
+mathematics are the products of certain _operations_ performed with
+the elementary forms described in the definition with which the
+mathematician starts. These operations are not arbitrary; they are not
+merely verbal processes; they are realities of highest importance. Not
+material realities, but realities, nevertheless. They are functions,
+and mathematics deals with the products of functions. It is true that
+we might call twice two by any other name than four; we might call
+it _vier_, or _quatre_, but the operation 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 would remain
+the same, by whatever name we call its result. Mathematical truths,
+accordingly, are not empty in the sense that they are meaningless; for
+they are significant in the highest degree. They give real information,
+not about things, but about certain relations that obtain among things.
+They describe certain operations in which formal relations are traced.
+And they describe them exhaustively, so that the result is, as the
+Germans call it, _eindeutig bestimmt_, and the result will, under all
+circumstances, be the same. Twice two _will always be_ the same as 1 + 1
++ 1 + 1. This “it will always be,” is called necessary. There is nothing
+dreadful about it, nor is there any mystery connected with it. It is not
+an awful fate that decrees it, but it is the nature of sameness, that the
+same is and will be the same, so long as it remains the same.
+
+It is often overlooked that every number in arithmetic is the result
+of an operation which is symbolised by a certain figure. Numbers are
+not concrete things; and as soon as we forget that they are products
+of a function, we are liable to lapse into mistakes. This happens most
+frequently with the numbers “zero” and “infinite.” The latter of these
+two symbols is often looked upon as a concrete thing; and because the
+infinite, with actual reality, is, in its completeness, inconceivable, it
+has made, of every one who stumbled over this stone of offence, a mystic,
+and many a radical, fearless thinker bows down to worship before the idea
+of infinitude-function as it would be if it were a real thing.
+
+Says Mr. Dixon, “Our reason cannot inform us about the form of existence,
+unless it is first given.” This is very true. The form is given, and
+formal systems such as the numerical system and the lines and figures of
+mathematics are mental constructions built of the stones quarried out of
+the relational given in experience.
+
+Form being given, we can reason about the form of existence in general.
+We can have ready in our minds systems of pure forms to apply to all the
+various cases of our experience. And this will help us in unravelling
+the problems of reality, and in extending our knowledge in those fields
+with which we are little acquainted. Far be it from us to consider the
+definitions, the operations, and the results of the formal sciences
+as purely verbal; if they were, mathematics would lose all the great
+importance which it undeniably possesses, and become mere verbiage.
+
+I confess that I do not understand Mr. Dixon when he says: “It is only
+because our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments
+are necessary at all.” In my opinion all mental activity is symbolic.
+Every idea is a symbol that signifies something. It is not because our
+reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary
+at all, but symbolism is the nature of our mind, and symbols are the
+elements with which our reasoning faculties have to deal. In this sense,
+every argument is symbolic. If it symbolises sense-experience, it
+represents our knowledge of what may be called the materiality of things.
+If it symbolises operations with pure forms, it represents the purely
+formal relations of mathematics logic, algebra, etc.
+
+The doctrine of the conservation of matter and energy in reality means
+nothing more or less than that there is no increase or decrease in the
+world at large. Nothing originates out of, and nothing disappears into,
+nothing. It means that twice 1 + 1 is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, neither more nor
+less; or, in other words, it means that all events are transformations.
+New things originate, but their newness consists in their forms. In this
+sense the law of the conservation of matter and energy would have to
+be called, from Mr. Dixon’s standpoint, other differences neglected, a
+truism. It is not a truism, in the sense of being arbitrary, but in the
+sense of being a purely formal truth, as are all mathematical theorems.
+
+Mr. Dixon refers to a passage in _Fundamental Problems_, in which I say
+that “To four-dimensional beings, Kepler’s third law would most probably
+appear as the cubes of the times of revolutions of the planets being
+proportional to their mean distances to the fourth power.” His questions,
+“What sort of an assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be?” and “Why
+should the result appear different to them?” show that Mr. Dixon has
+overlooked the condition on which this proposition was made. The first
+sentence of this paragraph begins with the words, “If space inhered, as
+Kant maintains, in the thinking subject only, spatial relations and laws
+would appear different to four-dimensional beings.” Space relations are
+not subjective, in my opinion, but objective. Therefore, since space
+relations do not inhere in the thinking subject only, because they are a
+feature of the objective world, and inhere in the thinking subject in so
+far as it is at the same time an object in the objective world, Kepler’s
+law would appear to four-dimensional beings, if they could exist at all,
+just the same as it does to us three-dimensional beings.
+
+                                                                     P. C.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+
+SOCIAL STATICS. Abridged and Revised; together with THE MAN VERSUS THE
+STATE. By _Herbert Spencer_. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892.
+
+JUSTICE. Being Part IV of the Principles of Ethics. By _Herbert Spencer_.
+New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1891.
+
+Among Mr. Spencer’s most important books are those entitled _Justice_ and
+_Social Statics_. The latter, which first appeared in 1850, has just been
+republished in about one-half of the original size, some parts having
+been transferred to the book on _Justice_, and others omitted altogether.
+“One difference,” as he says, “is that what there was in my first book of
+supernaturalistic interpretation has disappeared, and the interpretation
+has become exclusively naturalistic—that is, evolutionary.” Another
+change is that a demonstration of the injustice of socialism is
+substituted for his former arguments, plainly repudiated in _Justice_,
+against private ownership of land. Equally important is the omission of
+the chapter asserting “The Right to Ignore the State.”
+
+The demand for Woman Suffrage has also been withdrawn from the new
+edition of _Social Statics_, though it retains the original protest
+against “the reign of man over woman,” and asserts an “equality of
+rights in the married state.” Here again, Spencer’s final position must
+be sought in his _Justice_ where it is urged that women cannot justly
+have equal powers with men unless they have equal responsibilities. They
+cannot serve their country as men do; and if they take an equal share
+in the government, “their position is not one of equality but one of
+supremacy.” Even in time of peace, they are, he thinks, too impulsive
+to vote judiciously, too sympathetic to oppose “fostering the worse at
+the expense of the better,” and too fond of “a worship of power under
+all its forms” to protect individual liberty against the encroachment of
+authority. This objection seems particularly strong, because there is
+still great danger of the growth of state despotism at the expense of
+personal freedom, even in republics. Many recent instances are given by
+Spencer in “The Man versus the State,” now reprinted in the same volume
+with _Social Statics_; and it is urged in _Justice_, that even in the
+United States “universal suffrage does not prevent an enormous majority
+of consumers from being heavily taxed by a protective tariff for the
+benefit of a small minority of manufacturers and artisans.”
+
+Our voters are much too ready to follow hasty impulses and unscrupulous
+leaders; and both faults are most common among the most ignorant. How
+strongly education encourages independence was acknowledged by those
+slave-holders who said, “Our negroes shall not learn to read, for that
+makes them run away.” Public schools have found their worst enemies among
+Popes and Czars, and their best friends in the statesmen most honored by
+republics. There is no other institution for whose advantages Americans
+are practically unanimous. The necessity of popular education at the
+public cost is acknowledged by Huxley, Mill, and other advanced thinkers
+so generally, that Spencer’s exceptionally hostile opinion ought not to
+be taken as a self-evident truth.
+
+Mr. Spencer’s examination of this subject does not appear to have been
+so thorough as the occasion demands. In denying that education prevents
+crime, he relies mainly on Joseph Fletcher, who, as stated in both
+editions of _Social Statics_, “has entered more elaborately into this
+question than perhaps any other writer of the day,” and who admits that
+there is a “superficial evidence against instruction.” Spencer takes
+no notice of Fletcher’s having succeeded completely in breaking down
+this superficial evidence. In elaborate papers, published in the tenth,
+eleventh, and twelfth volumes of _The Journal of the London Statistical
+Society_, and illustrated by many tables and maps, Fletcher shows that
+the proportion to the population, in various parts of England, of people
+unable to sign their names, corresponded everywhere to the proportion
+of illegitimate births as well as of commitments for crime. Separating
+these latter into classes according to degree of guilt, he proves that
+the worst crimes are most common where there is the most ignorance.
+Thus he is enabled to say, “The conclusion is therefore irresistible
+that education is essential to the security of modern society.” That
+this testimony of Spencer’s principal witness is really the truth can
+be further proved by the statistics in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,
+showing that between 1841 and 1876, while the percentage of illiterates
+to population in England and Wales was reduced one-half, that of
+criminals was reduced to one-third of what it was originally. (Vol. VIII,
+pp. 221 and 249-251.)
+
+Spencer also refers to the fact that schools have sometimes been carried
+on in the interest of despotism; but most kinds of food are easily
+adulterated; and education is valuable, notwithstanding, as food for
+liberty. This last consideration disposes completely of his comparison of
+state-churches with state-schools; and the fact, mentioned in the revised
+but not in the original edition of _Social Statics_, that opinions differ
+about the best methods of education, is really an additional instance of
+the encouragement given by our system of public schools to independence
+of thought.
+
+Spencer’s chief objection to this system is that it does not fit his
+theory that “the liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of
+all, is the rule in conformity with which society must be organised,”
+(p. 45). Such a “law of right social relationships,” (p. 55) would, he
+admits, require us to repeal our laws against indecency, abolish our
+Boards of Health, and close our poorhouses, postoffices, banks, and
+lighthouses, except in so far as these institutions, like our streets and
+roads, might be cared for by benevolent individuals. He does not tell us
+how a government, thus limited to managing the police, army, and navy,
+could keep up a fire-department, nor how new streets, roads, railways,
+or canals could be opened, in case the owners of land put their prices
+too high for the projectors; but the most unfortunate application of his
+theory would be to close our public schools.
+
+There is no danger of this, however; and the principal evil likely to
+result from his pushing his theory so far, is that he prevents people
+from seeing its real value, as indicating the direction in which our
+race has advanced and must make all further progress. We shall keep on
+diminishing the power of the state over the man, as well as that of
+the man over the child, but neither authority will ever be abolished
+entirely. We shall dispense, sooner or later, with some of the public
+institutions which Spencer condemns; but our common schools will, I
+think, last as long as government itself. The abolitionists helped the
+slave to freedom by pointing out the North Star; but they did not advise
+him to quit solid earth. This mistake, although we grant that Spencer
+shows us our North Star, is sometimes made in _Social Statics_.
+
+Timely help, too, is given by him, in a thoroughly practical way, to
+those reformers who are passing out from under the cloud with a silver
+lining into a Cleveland summer and a fair prospect of a Harrison fall.
+Among the words best worth putting into actions at once, are these: “The
+right of exchange is as sacred as any other right, and exists as much
+between members of different nations as between members of the same
+nation. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries.” ... “Hence,
+in putting a veto upon the commercial intercourse of two nations, or in
+putting obstacles in the way of that intercourse, a government trenches
+upon men’s liberties of action, and by so doing directly reverses its
+function. To secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his
+faculties, compatible with the like freedom of all others, we find to be
+the state’s duty. Now trade prohibitions and trade restrictions not only
+do not secure this freedom, but they take it away. So that in enforcing
+them the state is transformed from a maintainer of rights into a violator
+of rights.” ... “Whether it kills, or robs, or enslaves, or shackles
+by trade regulations, its guilt is alike in kind, and differs only in
+degree.” (_Social Statics_, ed. of 1850, pp. 326, 327; ed. of 1892, p.
+137).
+
+                                                                  F. M. H.
+
+
+AN ESSAY ON REASONING. By _Edward T. Dixon_. Cambridge (Eng): Deighton,
+Bell, & Co. 1891. Pp. 88.
+
+Some years ago the author of this essay made public certain views of his,
+on “Geometry of Four Dimensions.” He was surprised to find that though
+his arguments were received with incredulity they were not refuted.
+This result appeared to him to be due to the fact that he was not
+understood, that his views on geometry of even two and three dimensions
+being different from those commonly entertained, he had failed of being
+understood, because he had not begun his explanation at the beginning.
+
+He therefore set to work to analyse those views and ultimately published
+a book on the subject. This book, _The Foundations of Geometry_, was
+reviewed by us in _The Monist_ of October, 1891. But now again the author
+regards himself as not understood. He rested the positions and arguments
+of his book upon certain views of logic and especially of definition,
+which depart from the orthodox views, and he misjudged the fullness of
+explanation that would therefore become needful. Hence this little essay.
+
+The proper approach to the views of the author is through his doctrine of
+definition. Usually definition is regarded as finding its main motive and
+utility in the convenience of social converse. The meaning of any term is
+regarded as resting not in the choice of him who utters it, but in the
+suppositions of those who are addressed. It is true that a license is
+accorded to any one upon a sufficient occasion to give a special intent
+to some word, but only upon condition that that intent shall be made
+sufficiently express, in other words well understood by those addressed.
+Hence definition is usually taken to mean the recital or the precision of
+the meaning of a term by means of language naturally apt for that end.
+There is no good sense in pretending to effect either one of these ends
+by language that lacks natural ability on that behalf.
+
+Now Mr. Dixon holds, if we understand him, that conventional usage is
+of very subordinate consequence in this matter, that it pertains to
+the prerogative of an author to throw upon those whom he addresses the
+task of gathering his meanings as best they can; that even when he
+professes to explain his meanings he need not seek and employ any plain,
+direct speech, but may supply his instruction indirectly: may ask his
+audience to solve a problem, or to rightly guess what certain hints
+mean; may require them to extract the meaning in question out of a set
+of assertions that involve the same in a collateral way only. This he
+calls “implicit definition.” It is analogous, he tells us, to an unsolved
+equation or set of equations in algebra. So far as we are aware no one
+can claim priority of the author in respect to this expedient. He seems
+to regard it as of great importance, and proposes by its aid to overcome
+the difficulties that environ the fundamentals of geometry.
+
+We think that the author is led to put undue confidence in his implicit
+definition, by his peculiar views upon propositions. He holds that all
+propositions can, without loss or gain in the meanings as originally
+stated, be reduced to statements of strict identity. This done,
+propositions can, as he thinks, be operated upon after the fashion usual
+with equations. But we submit that between a logical proposition and an
+algebraic equation there is a difference that is in general irreducible.
+For example take this proposition, Every parent loves children. To alter
+this to, Every parent is identical with some [or every] person that loves
+children, as is, we think, the prescription of Mr. Dixon, will not
+serve; for by reading our identity in the reverse order we have: Some [or
+every] person that loves children is identical with every parent.
+
+Mr. Dixon’s views in respect to terms and to the doctrine of denotation
+and connotation depart as widely from the suppositions usually held,
+as do his views regarding propositions and definition. To follow out
+the consequences of his proposed innovations in any adequate fulness is
+forbidden to us by lack of space. We feel sure that further reflection
+will lead him to much modification of his doctrines.
+
+                                                                      ρσλ.
+
+
+OUTLINES OF A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. By _Hermann Lotze_. Edited by _E.
+C. Conybeare_, M.A. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, & Co. New York: Macmillan
+& Co. 1892. Pp. 176.
+
+This book is an excellent translation of one of the most important works
+of a prominent philosopher, who made an unusually strong impression
+upon the minds of his contemporaries. Almost every line of this clean,
+accurate, and charming translation betrays the translator’s devotion to
+the subject, for he has taken the utmost care to bring out the ideas
+of the author in the same brilliant style for which Professor Lotze is
+justly famous.
+
+The translator says in the preface: “I have completed and venture to
+publish the following translation of Hermann Lotze’s _Lectures upon the
+Philosophy of Religion_ in the same hope in which it was undertaken by
+my late wife, that it may be of use to some who cannot read the German
+original, and yet desire a concise statement of the form in which one
+of the clearest-minded of our later thinkers put to himself those great
+questions—as to the origin and destiny of the spirit of man, as to life
+in general, and the meaning of the material universe—which occupy us
+all at some time or another, many of us as soon as we have won food and
+shelter for our bodies.”
+
+We do not share Mr. Conybeare’s and his deceased wife’s enthusiasm for
+the author. Although we are not blind to the great deserts of Professor
+Lotze, his amiable personality, the depth of his religious and emotional
+nature, the breadth of his scholarly erudition, and the brilliancy of his
+ingenious, not to say poetical, presentation of philosophical subjects,
+we cannot conceive that his work is come to abide. On the contrary, we
+consider his philosophy as antiquated in many respects. He considers
+problems that originate from a mere confusion of ideas, as being
+insolvable in their nature, and attempts the solution of other problems
+with inadequate methods. His thoughts still remind us of the ontological
+spirit of past philosophies, and his principles are not in agreement with
+positivism and the methods of scientific research.
+
+As an instance, we quote the following passage: “We must ever set aside
+any attempt to describe in positive terms, or to construct in thought,
+the process by which this absolute being came to be not only one, and
+that unconditionally, but at the same time a many of things which
+condition one another reciprocally.”
+
+Lotze still believes in an “absolute unity” as something prior to the
+world of reality, and he declares that “We cannot Know or Explain how
+this Absolute Unity is also Many” (Sec. XXI); and even if an unconscious
+being could be a Many-in-One, yet it could not, according to Lotze,
+generate consciousness (Sec. XXV). We do not believe that this problem
+is insolvable, and do not, as does Lotze, feel constrained to fall back
+on idealism. In fact, our position is so different from Lotze’s that in
+spite of the full recognition of his genius, we feel as much severed from
+him as if he belonged to ages long gone by.
+
+Mr. Conybeare’s translation is most certainly an invaluable work and is
+indispensable for any English student of Lotze’s philosophy.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+ON THE PERCEPTION OF SMALL DIFFERENCES, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE
+EXTENT, FORCE, AND TIME OF MOVEMENT. By _George Stuart Fullerton_ and
+_James McKeen Cattell_. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
+1892. Pp. 159.
+
+This volume of the Philosophical Series of Publications of the University
+of Pennsylvania gives an account of a large number of experiments
+made for the purpose of testing the perception of small differences
+of movement, of weight, and of light. The most noticeable conclusion
+arrived at by the authors, is that they cannot accept any of the received
+explanations of Weber’s law. They found from their experiments, by the
+method of estimated amount of difference, that “we tend to estimate
+the intensity of sensation as directly proportional to the intensity
+of the stimulus; consequently, in so far as any deduction concerning
+quantitative relations in sensation can be made from such estimation,
+the sensation increases as the stimulus and not as its logarithm,”
+thus invalidating Fechner’s law. The authors believe also that Weber’s
+law does not hold for the perception of movement, as they find that
+the error of observation usually increases “as the stimulus is taken
+greater but more slowly,” and that it is proportional to the square
+root of the stimulus. Accordingly, they substitute for Weber’s law the
+following: “The error of observation tends to increase as the square
+root of the magnitude, the increase being subject to variation, whose
+amount and cause must be determined for each special case.” It is proper
+to add, that Professor Fullerton gives only a qualified assent to these
+conclusions, on the grounds that mathematicians are not agreed as to the
+soundness of the theory upon which the law is based, and that the errors
+in question may not be independent errors. He considers, however, the
+results obtained by the authors “as sufficiently in accord with the laws
+to justify them in holding it tentatively, and subject to criticism.”
+
+As Fechner’s law rests on that of Weber, and on assumptions which appear
+to be incorrect, it also fails, and it follows that the psycho-physical,
+physiological, and psychological theories put forward to account for
+the supposed logarithmic relation between mental and physical processes
+are superfluous. From these conclusions we may judge of the importance
+of the experiments made by Professors Fullerton and Cattell, whose work
+requires to be carefully studied by all those interested in the special
+questions to which it relates.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+PSYCHOLOGIE DU PEINTRE. By _Lucien Arréat_. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892. Pp.
+LIX, 264. Price, 5 fr.
+
+The author of this interesting work informs us that it does not aim
+at being a natural history of society, nor is it even a study in
+professional psychology. This is hardly correct, however, as such a
+study must be based on that of individuals, and a writer of M. Arréat’s
+reputation cannot treat of a large group of individuals without throwing
+light on the psychology of the whole class to which they belong. He
+very aptly likens artists as a whole to a large family, the artist in
+design to a genus of this family, and painters to a species. This has
+its varieties, and it is by the study of these that the author seeks to
+arrive at a knowledge of the psychology of the painter.
+
+Believing that there exists a relation between the temperament and the
+qualities of the mind and that this is influenced by heredity, he devotes
+the first part of the work to questions of physiology and heredity. The
+second part deals with the painter’s vocation, his æsthetic sentiments,
+his professional memory, and, as the evolution of art is connected with
+the progress of visual analysis, with his sense of sight. Then comes
+an examination of the general mental qualities of the painter, his
+intellectual character, his various phases of memory and aptitudes, and
+the influences which affect his work. The fourth part of the book treats
+of the painter’s character, his egoistic and sympathetic traits, his
+will, and his moral and social traits. And finally reference is made
+to questions of pathology, particularly defects of vision, and to “the
+miseries of genius.”
+
+On all these subjects M. Arréat has many acute remarks supported by
+numerous facts, often derived from painters themselves, who thus, says
+the author, will be found “living and speaking on each page, just as
+they are, and making themselves known by their works, sympathetic or
+disagreeable, indifferent or superior, but always interesting.” It is
+noticeable, in connection with the important subject of heredity, that
+in a list of about three hundred painters almost two-thirds are sons of
+painters or of workers in art, and M. Arréat thinks that if more complete
+information were obtainable the proportion would be increased.
+
+In the chapter on the miseries of genius, the author takes exception to
+the view expressed by M. Lombroso that the creative inspiration of genius
+is, at least in some cases, the equivalent of epileptic convulsion.
+That genius may lead to insanity is true; and M. Arréat admits that
+remarkable aptitudes have often appeared in a family at the beginning of
+its degeneracy. But he adds that painters are for the most part healthy,
+and they show hardly any more singularity than other men may have. He
+concludes his work with the following words: “Genius makes use of, as
+we have sufficiently shown, faculties which are common to nearly all
+men, if they are unequally strong and variously distributed with each.
+Genius, moreover, in the most elevated sense that it can be understood,
+is an exception among artists themselves, and even in genius, the meeting
+together of several happy gifts is exceptional. But it is willingly
+attributed to all those, whatever may be their art, whose works are able
+to touch the human cords that vibrate the most profoundly. Painters
+appear to us to compose a well-marked type among such. The reader
+has seen the characters of it brought together and discussed in this
+volume: he will preserve its living image after having closed the book.”
+This in itself furnishes a sufficient recommendation for the perusal
+of M. Arréat’s work, which apart from its psychological value, is a
+perfect mine of gracefully written information about painters and their
+peculiarities.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+PHYSIOLOGIE DE L’ART. By _Georges Hirth_. Traduit de l’Allemand et
+précédé d’une Introduction par _Lucien Arréat_. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892.
+Pp. 247.
+
+We have now occasion to review a work on a subject much akin to the
+preceding—a work which has been translated from the German by the same
+author, M. Lucien Arréat, and supplied by him with a very interesting
+introduction. This Introduction is in reality a résumé by M. Arréat of
+a series of studies by M. Hirth on physiological optics. These studies
+are of great importance and are classed by the French editor under the
+three heads of Form, Illumination, and Movement. The first of these
+comprises the subjects of monocular and binocular vision, the depth and
+the bilateral enlargement of the visual field, perspective and identical
+points. Under the head of illumination the effect of the “double bath of
+light” through the two eyes, the “luminous equation,” and the problems
+connected with optical measurement are considered.
+
+We have not space to exhibit fully the author’s ideas on these topics,
+but we can state what are regarded by M. Arréat as the two principle
+propositions which give to them their life and unity. One of these
+propositions is, that the first function of our dioptric apparatus
+consists in furnishing to our central visual organ, which M. Hirth terms
+the _internal eye_, material which the latter has to interpret. The other
+is that it is necessary to get rid of mathematical concepts, which are
+much too rigid to be applied to the delicate problems of vision, and to
+fall back on visual sensation such as it is. These propositions imply,
+moreover, the admission of an electro chemical process, “without which
+the properties of the eye and the marvels of vision remain inexplicable.”
+This last conclusion has a bearing on the nature of memory, or the
+recollection of the impressions received by the nerves and brain after
+the original excitation has disappeared. Thus, M. Hirth suggests that
+when we know the physiological procedure in the impregnation of cerebral
+molecules, or in their electric charging, memory will be found to be only
+the prolongation of the duration of consecutive images.
+
+The inquiries of M. Hirth throw great light on the difference between
+monocular and binocular vision, for information as to which and other
+details of his optical theory we must refer our readers to M. Arréat’s
+Introduction. This concludes with a consideration of the perception of
+light-movement, the reproduction of which is said to require a special
+exercise of attention, direct or indirect. Here we have the third degree
+of attention, according to the views of M. Hirth, who regards it as
+artistic apperception, having its end in itself and capable of being
+reproduced through co-ordination of the movements perceived.
+
+A considerable portion of the second and principal part of this work is
+occupied with the psychology of attention and of the related subject
+memory. The latter is defined by M. Hirth as “a sum of states of
+perception gradually accumulated by the various organs of sense,” and it
+is thus not a special faculty of the mind. The mental condition which
+results from the action of memory is what is known as _disposition_. This
+disposition is transmitted from one generation to another, and becomes
+innate as the memory of the species. But it is intimately connected
+with the nervous system, and with the brain regarded as the electric
+storehouse of memories. It is in accordance with these ideas that the
+author explains the transmission of hereditary qualities, the problem
+which is at present engaging so much attention. The innate organisation
+is a conservation of nervous quality or temperaments associated with the
+anatomical disposition of the nervous system, and a certain condition
+of electrical tension among the cerebral molecules. The transmission of
+ancestral qualities depends, however, on the vigor and good condition of
+the germ, and as the organisation received from our earliest ancestors
+is the most persistent, the primitive “disposition” will subsist even
+without exercise whilst nutrition and circulation assure the continuance
+of molecular growth.
+
+It is with the visual memory that the author is chiefly concerned, and he
+affirms that the optical phenomena referred to in the Introduction compel
+us to admit the existence in the brain of a central organ, which he terms
+the internal eye. In order to determine the position of this organ, which
+is the real seat of visual perception, to the exclusion of the retina,
+whose function has been overestimated, M. Hirth considers the anatomical
+and physiological aspects of the question, and he accepts the conclusion
+arrived at by H. Munk in his _Functions de l’écorce cerebrale_, that
+perception is the function of a particular portion of the cerebral
+cortex. There thus exist two visual centres or “internal eyes,” one
+in each convexity of the occipital lobes, as shown in Plate V. of the
+present work. Munk’s researches would seem to prove, moreover, that not
+only is there a general localisation of visual memories, but that each
+memory is fixed in a precise and determined place. The centres of memory
+and the centres of perception, which M. Hirth supposes to be simply a
+phase of memory, are the same. Moreover attention is connected with
+perception, but it is an imperfect state of memory. Attention requires
+the expenditure of force, while perfect memory acts spontaneously; and it
+is only in this form, “exempt from fatigue, that it becomes the passive
+servant of our instincts and sensations, of our voluntary acts, of our
+labor.” Memory when perfect is automatic, and according to the theory
+of M. Hirth, who does not accept M. Ribot’s monoideistic theory, it is
+accompanied with automatic attention, which is the result of a gradual
+transformation of “energetic” attention, and attains in a normal adult
+an incredible development both in quantity and quality. This _latent_
+attention is required by the existence of latent memory, which is
+properly spoken of by M. Hirth as an organic attribute of the highest
+moment, seeing that it forms the basis of all individual acquirements.
+It would seem to answer, however, to what is often spoken of as the
+subconsciousness.
+
+We can understand how this doctrine of latent memory and latent attention
+can have an important bearing on the question of the origin of the
+artistic sense, especially as each brain centre may be supposed to have
+its own memory, and each fundamental memory its special temperament.
+The activity of such centres is due in great measure, as pointed out by
+M. Ribot, to nutrition and blood-circulation but M. Hirth adds a third
+factor, electrical tension. According to his theory, cerebral activity
+rests ultimately on electricity, the invisible currents of which,
+maintaining the whole system in a state of tension, are “the inferior
+currents of the latent memory,” the brain centres being electrical
+accumulators. This idea, which the author applies also to the explanation
+of colored visual memories, is open to strong critical objections. In
+relation to the particular subject of art, the author shows that the
+hereditary transmission of talent depends on the active maintenance
+of the special temperament of certain fundamental memories and their
+associations, and talent itself therefore depends on the existence of
+such a temperament. We here come in contact with M. Lombroso’s theory
+of the physiological degeneracy of genius, which M. Hirth opposes with
+much force, and we think on the whole with success. This discussion
+occupies the last chapter of a work that, as our readers will be able to
+judge from the glance given here at some of its leading topics, has a
+scientific value quite apart from the special subject of art which it is
+intended to illustrate, and which it goes far towards establishing on a
+physiological basis.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+LES ALTÉRATIONS DE LA PERSONNALITÉ. By _Alfred Binet_. Paris: Félix Alcan
+1892. Pp. 323. Price, 6 fr.
+
+In the present work, the accomplished director of the laboratory of
+physiological psychology at the Sorbonne has brought together and
+systematised all the most reliable phenomena bearing on one of the most
+curious subjects of inquiry now engaging attention. Notwithstanding the
+disagreement between different experimenters as to particular facts,
+all have arrived at the conclusion that, under special conditions, the
+normal unity of consciousness may be broken, and that then there is
+the production of several distinct consciousnesses “each of which can
+have its perceptions, its memory, and even its moral character.” No
+one is better fitted than M. Binet to perform the eclectic work he has
+undertaken of discussing the recent researches on the alteration of
+personality, without regard to the special views of particular schools.
+
+The subject is considered by him under the three heads of Successive
+Personalities, Coexisting Personalities, and The Alterations of
+Personality in the Experiences of Suggestion. The two first parts deal
+chiefly with phenomena presented by somnambulic and hysteric subjects.
+In the third part M. Binet applies the fact of the duplication of
+personality to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritism, the term he
+very properly gives to so-called spiritualism. He regards the supposed
+spirit agent as the subconscious personality of the medium acting under
+the influence of suggestion, a view which undoubtedly meets most of the
+actual facts of spiritism.
+
+Notwithstanding the divisibility of the ego, there can be no doubt of
+the unity of the personality under normal conditions. The question is
+as to the nature of this unity, and the author follows M. Ribot in
+affirming that it consists in the coördination of the elements which
+compose it. He repudiates the idea that memory is the sole foundation of
+consciousness, as not only may one memory embrace different states, but
+the same individual may have several memories, several consciousnesses,
+and several personalities. For the opinion of M. Binet on other points
+we must refer our readers to the work itself, which forms an important
+addition to the International Scientific Library.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+L’HOMME DANS LA NATURE. By _Paul Topinard_. With 101 Illustrations in the
+text. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1891. Pp. 350. Price, 6 fr.
+
+The present is the third work in which Dr. Paul Topinard, the well-known
+pupil and successor of M. Broca, the founder of French Anthropology,
+has given to the public his general ideas in relation to the science
+of which he has made so profound a study. In 1876 he published his
+_Anthropologie_, which reflected in great measure the teaching of his
+master, Broca. Ten years later, in 1886, appeared his larger and more
+important work, _Eléments d’anthropologie générale_, which treated of
+the history and methods of anthropology, with various other subjects.
+Now Dr. Topinard gives us his matured ideas on “Man in Nature,” by which
+is meant physical nature, the object of the present work being to show
+the place that man occupies physically among animals, and his probable
+origin or descent. It is not surprising that a writer who was the pupil
+of Professor de Quatrefages as well as of Professor Broca should declare
+himself a supporter of the principle of unity of composition, formulated
+by M. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, from which flows that of evolution,
+that is the natural derivation of beings from one another. As to the
+means by which this is brought about, the author reserves his opinion
+until the publication of a further work which he has in preparation.
+
+Dr. Topinard devotes the second chapter of the present work to a
+consideration of the position to be accorded to anthropology in relation
+to the other sciences. He declares it to be a pure, concrete science,
+essentially anatomical and observatory, and thus distinguishes it from
+ethnography, which has to do with peoples under all their aspects.
+Both alike are branches of the science of man in its broadest sense.
+If anything can be added to the author’s explanation, it is that
+anthropology has to do with mankind as a series of _individuals_, while
+ethnography is concerned with the _groups_ into which such individuals
+are collected. This is not inconsistent with Dr. Topinard’s definition
+of anthropology as the science “which studies human races, the human
+species, and the place of man in the classification of animals.” For
+all the facts on which it is based are derived from the observation
+of individuals, and when races are compared with each other, they are
+compared as ideal individuals, formed by a generalisation of certain
+prevailing qualities, just as mankind by a similar process becomes an
+ideal individual, a scientific Adam, who is compared with other animals.
+There is an apparent difficulty in relation to psychology which Dr.
+Topinard claims entirely for anthropology, but it disappears when we
+see how closely he associates psychology with physiology. He says, and
+we quite agree with him, that “characters of a psychological nature,
+reduced to their most simple expression, whether attributed to human
+races, or to the general human type, belong to ordinary physiological
+characters; the corresponding anatomical part takes its place by the side
+of other physical characters; the theory and explanation of intellectual
+operations, of feelings and volitions, belong to the special physiology
+of man and to the application of the ideas of general physiology.”
+
+While accepting as correct the division of anthropology, in its
+restricted sense into general and special, as proposed by Broca and
+Bertillon, the author thinks it does not conform to the plan which
+should be adopted if it is desired to proceed, by the method of analysis
+and synthesis, from the known to the unknown. The plan adopted by Dr.
+Topinard is, by analogy with the procedures of general zoölogy, to
+begin by recalling the general notions applicable to his subject as to
+the distribution of animals by groups of varying values, the choice
+of characters on which they repose, and the differences between the
+race, the species, the family, and the order, these last forming the
+pivoting point of his views as to the place of man in classification.
+Then commences the study of characteristics, the mode of ascertaining
+them, of putting them to use and of appreciating their value, accompanied
+by examples, drawn from special anthropology, proper to illustrate the
+methods employed. Finally, a parallel is drawn between man and animals,
+that a conclusion may be arrived at as to the place of man in the series
+of beings, and his probable genealogy.
+
+All these points are carefully considered by the author, who has framed
+a canon of the medium adult man of the European type, a figure based
+on which forms the frontispiece to the work. The proportions of this
+figure are derived from a comparison of all the most authentic published
+measurements, and the canon framed from them conforms closely to that
+recognised in artists’ studios, except that in the latter the arm is too
+short and the neck too long.
+
+The most generally interesting subjects discussed by the author are
+those connected with the relationship of man to other animals, and
+particularly the structure of the brain. Dr. Topinard makes a careful
+comparison of the cerebral convolutions of various animals and man,
+with numerous illustrations, and he arrives at the conclusion that none
+of the characters said to distinguish man from the anthropoid apes are
+absolute; all are reducible to a question of degree of evolution, the
+superior degree being sometimes found among the anthropoids, and the
+inferior degree with man. The cerebral type of the anthropoids is a human
+type not completely developed, or the cerebral type of man is a developed
+simian type. Man thus undoubtedly belongs to the order of the Primates.
+After considering the form and volume of the simian and human brains,
+the author remarks that “man alone has a frontal lobe developed in all
+its parts, and filling up a large, concave, and deep frontal shell which
+externally gives place to the forehead, one of the characteristics of
+man.”
+
+Connected with the form and volume of the brain is the transformation
+of the animal skull into the human skull, and the relation of this
+transformation to the facial characteristics of man. These points,
+and also various questions connected with the bipedal or quadrupedal
+attitude, and with the attitude and function of prehension, are treated
+in detail, as are certain other distinctive simian and human characters.
+A chapter is devoted to a consideration of the important subject of
+retrogressive anomalies and rudimentary organs. In his concluding chapter
+Dr. Topinard points out the place of man in animal classification, and
+refers to the questions of his single or multiple origin, his genealogy
+and his future. In connection with the subject of classification, the
+author dwells on the fact that man is not the only relatively perfect
+animal, and yet that none of the mammalia, which we admire for their
+beauty or for their usefulness, equal the monkeys in the possession of a
+brain approaching the human type. The brain, the hand, and the attitude
+are the three characteristics which especially connect man with the
+monkey, and particularly with the anthropoids, and the question has long
+been agitated whether in these particulars the last named is allied more
+closely to man or to the other monkeys. Dr. Topinard affirms that in
+all these particulars the anthropoids should be classed with the other
+monkeys, and therefore that man stands alone.
+
+As to the descent of man, the French anthropologist would seem to agree
+with M. Vogt that the type from which man has developed was also the
+source of the monkey and anthropoid types, and that it first appeared
+at the commencement of the Miocene period, when the earliest monkeys
+succeeded to the Lemurian of the preceding Eocene epoch. Dr. Topinard
+remarks that this conclusion is agreeable to that of the eminent American
+palæontologist, Professor Cope, who makes man descend directly from the
+Lemurian without passing through the monkeys and the anthropoids, basing
+his opinion chiefly on dentition. The question of the descent of man is
+connected with that of the singleness or multiplicity of his origin,
+and on this point the author does not express a decided opinion. He
+says that all existing types of humanity could be reduced to three, the
+Europo-Semitic, the Asiatico-American, and the Negro; if not to two, the
+White and the Negro. He adds that, nevertheless, “in losing oneself in
+the depths of time, we can conceive the Negro, born the first, giving
+birth successively to the Australoid with frizzled hair, to one of the
+forms of the Brown stock with straight or wavy hair, and finally to the
+white European.” Probably his actual opinion is to be gathered from his
+final statement when comparing the order of the Primates to a tree, that
+the Lemurians are its roots giving birth to several stems, of which one
+is that of the monkey, from which branched the anthropoids, and another,
+whose point of contact with the first is unknown, gives the actual human
+branch, which runs parallel to that of the anthropoids without being
+connected with it, and goes beyond it.
+
+As to the future of the human race, Dr. Topinard affirms that the volume
+of the brain will notably increase, that dolichocephaly will give place
+to a universal brachycephaly, and that the cellules of the brain will
+be perfected in quality. As the human brain is being thus perfected,
+the animals nearest to the human type will disappear, and then man will
+really think himself the centre round which the universe gravitates, the
+sovereign for whom nature has been created. But even then the anatomist
+will bring him to himself by uttering the words of Broca, “Memento te
+animalium esse.” This work, which forms volume seventy-three of the
+International Scientific Library, is sure to be widely read, and it will
+be indispensable to the student of anthropology, who will find in it all
+the information he requires on the methods of the science.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+DIE URHEIMATH DER INDOGERMANEN UND DAS EUROPÄISCHE ZAHLSYSTEM. By
+_Johannes Schmidt_. Berlin, 1890. Pp. 56.
+
+This essay is an important contribution to the problem of the place of
+origin of the Indo-Germanic languages. The author is confident that
+while nothing certain was known before, he has established at least one
+fact which will give us a clue to the solution of the problem. This fact
+is the interference of the duodecimal system with the decimal system.
+The former is of Babylonian origin, but its effects are noticeable upon
+almost all the Aryan tongues. The duodecimal system is not original with
+the Goths or with any of the Teutons, which can be proved by the fact
+that 60 or a _Schock_ was a round number, but not twelve, the etymology
+of twelve (_twa-lif_) being two above a _lif_, which latter means a
+certain set. Thus when the Gothic hundred as a rule meant 120, when for a
+long time they distinguished between great hundreds (i. e. 120) and small
+hundreds (i. e. 100), this was due to foreign influence. For if twelve
+had been the basis of their number system, a _lif_ would have meant
+twelve and the numerical arrangement would have progressed not in 10 × 12
+but consistently in 12 × 12 or 144. Everything points to the supposition
+that the Babylonian _sossos_ is still preserved in the German _Schock_
+(60). Accordingly, says Schmidt, the Europeans must have been exposed to
+a strong influence of the sexagesimal system; they must have been nearer
+to the centre of Babylonian civilisation than are the valleys of the
+Indus and the Eastern Iran. Professor Schmidt considers Penka as refuted
+and also all those who regard Europe as the home of Indo-Germans.
+
+We have to add that the eminent philologist when, discussing the problem
+of the cradle of the Indo-Germanic languages does not touch upon the
+other problem of the home of the Aryans, the latter being mainly an
+anthropological question. Schmidt says (p. 13): “I do not intend to enter
+into the problematic domain of anthropology. The original race-characters
+of the Indo-Germanic nations, their causes and the home in which they
+were moulded, also the physical conditions and mixtures of the races
+which speak our languages, undoubtedly can be treated with success
+only by the representatives of physical anthropology. But exactly so
+the problem of the cradle of the original Indo-Germanic speech and the
+evolution of its several languages, as they are known in history, can be
+solved only by philologists.”
+
+This is very true. Perhaps we shall approach the subject with better
+success if we learn to distinguish between the anthropological problem
+of the origin of the Aryan race and the philological one of the origin
+of the Aryan languages. A European origin of the one might not exclude
+an Asiatic origin of the other, and it still remains possible, that
+European Aryans when migrating south and east developed through their
+intercourse with semitic and other races the beginning of a civilisation
+which powerfully affected all the Aryans, since there is ample evidence
+that even in olden times a lively commerce took place between them.
+When Prussian amber is found in Pelasgian graves, why should not the
+sexagesimal system of the wealthy nations of the south have spread over
+northern countries?
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+LEHRBUCH DER HISTORISCH-KRITISCHEN EINLEITUNG IN DAS NEUE TESTAMENT. By
+_Heinrich Julius Holtzmann_. Dritte verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage.
+Freiburg, i. B.: J. C. B. Mohr. 1892. Pp. 508. Price, 9 M.
+
+It has been said that the scientific purpose of an academical text-book
+should be to educate the student to scientific independence, and its
+practical purpose to make it available for the adherents of all parties
+and denominations; and these two purposes are the surer attained the
+less the author represents his own conception as that which alone can be
+justified. This is the principle according to which Professor Holtzmann’s
+_Lehrbuch_ has been written. That he has fully attained his aim, will
+not be doubted by those who know his previous and painstaking labors, in
+which he proves himself as a theologian fully imbued with the spirit of
+science and scientific critique.
+
+The first edition of this work appeared in 1885, the second in 1886, and
+the present and third edition can make the just claim of being carefully
+revised and perfected in every respect, so that it is to be regarded as
+a comprehensive, concise, and clear review of the critical materials of
+the New Testament. There is no doubt that the work as it now stands will
+remain the best book for reference of its kind.
+
+Professor Holtzmann in a brief introduction of seventeen pages sketches
+the history and literature of New Testament criticism. The book is
+divided into two parts, the first treating the subject in a general way,
+the second entering into its several details. In the first part the
+author presents us with a history of the text and of its traditions,
+explaining the causes of the alterations that were introduced either
+unintentionally or by mistake; he reviews the critical apparatus for
+text-revision and also the history of the printed and revised editions
+up to the present attempt at emendation. Then a history of the canon
+is given, from the oldest Christian literature down to the radical
+criticisms of the present time. In the second and special part we find
+a careful compilation of all the criticisms concerning the single books
+and epistles of the New Testament. The first chapter treats of St.
+Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, Romans,
+to Philemon, the Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, the pastoral
+epistles; further, the epistle to the Hebrews, which is non-Paulinian,
+the two epistles of St. Peter, the epistle of St. Jude, and that of St.
+James. The second chapter introduces us into the historical books of the
+synoptic gospels and the Acts, where, in a brief review of fifty-seven
+pages, we find the same data presented which are more fully explained in
+another publication of our author, reviewed in _The Monist_, Vol II, No.
+2.
+
+A new period in the development of Christian literature begins with
+all those writings which go under the name of St. John. A discussion
+of these books is contained in the third chapter, which treats of the
+apocalypse, the fourth gospel, and St. John’s epistles. Not the least
+interest attaches to the fourth chapter, the subject of which is the
+vast domain of the apocryphal books of the New Testament, the number of
+which has, of late, been greatly increased by several new discoveries.
+The subject divides itself naturally into apocryphal gospels (Chap. II),
+apocryphical stories about the lives and deeds of the apostles (Chap.
+III), apocryphical epistles (Chap. IV), and apocryphical apocalypses
+(Chap. V).
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+SAMMLUNG VON POPULÄR-WISSENSCHAFTLICHEN VORTRÄGEN ÜBER DEN BAU UND DIE
+LEISTUNGEN DES GEHIRNS. By Professor _Theodor Meynert_. Vienna and
+Leipsic: Wilhelm Braumüller. 1892. Pp. 253.
+
+This latest publication of Professor Meynert’s was mentioned in the last
+number of _The Monist_ by Mr. Christian Ufer, in the department “Literary
+Correspondence.” Since its appearance Professor Meynert has died. His
+name has stood foremost for a great number of years in the ranks of
+psychiatrical investigators, and his contributions to the science to
+which he was devoted, have, perhaps more than those of any other, tended
+to its permanent advancement. The activity of his life has extended
+over a great number of years, and his labors have not only been applied
+to the theoretical interests of his science alone, but have also been
+directed—and this is the most important part of every scientist’s work—to
+bringing the results of his investigations into connection with the great
+body of knowledge at large, and especially to putting in popular form,
+and bringing within the reach of the general reader, the facts of the
+science which he contributed so much to establish.
+
+The present lectures date from the year 1868. They owe their origin to
+the identification in later years of the interests of medicine with
+the interests which every human being has at heart, of resolving the
+mysteries of mental operations generally. Their main subject is the
+description and investigation of the structure of the cerebral organs;
+and the elucidation in the light of such description of the psychical
+operations of the brain. The fundamental facts of this province are
+not difficult. The main thing required is to free ourselves from the
+impediments which artificial thought on this subject has at all times
+imported into the consideration of intellectual facts. Our knowledge
+in this domain is founded on observation and introspection; not upon
+dialectics. Phenomena, simply, are presented to observation, and not
+the ultimate essences of forces. So, too, the apparatus of observation
+and introspection give only their own phenomena. Their contents are
+the animated external world as it affects conscious beings, and
+involves, besides intuition, the facts of memory. Unpersonal inherited
+memories, which take the form of instinct, are not forthcoming. The
+present lectures do not pretend to give instruction in the anatomy of
+the brain _per se_, but simply in so far as it is necessary to the
+understanding of the brain’s mechanism. All things viewed, all things
+intuited are contents of consciousness, which in its limitations to the
+sense-impressions of the individual being, we term the ego, or _I_. In
+so far as the external world is the intuited contents of consciousness,
+the extent of the latter is increased, the ego, the _I_, expands into
+the secondary ego, or _I_. In this doctrine of a secondary ego the
+problems which grow out of the behavior of individuals towards the
+external world are resolved in the single explanation that the ego of
+each particular group of things seeks to preserve itself by internal
+and external motions. The ego is simply in the possession of itself
+in every extension which it acquires; if such extension consists of a
+common possession, its desire and tendency to preserve such is simply
+explained by the fact that such possession is the ego itself. Amongst the
+intuited objects of the ego are to be classed also as component parts of
+the secondary ego of every individual, the other living individualities
+of the world. From the point of view of this fact, the ego appears
+in its social rôle. The present lectures consequently extend to the
+consideration of the interactions of brains in society, to culture and
+civilisation, and seek to establish the phenomena of these domains as
+facts of physical knowledge. The method of physical inquiry is that of
+comparison by the alteration of the attendant circumstances in which
+the psychical mechanism acts. Physiology bases it on experiment. Nature
+also supplies experiments with the results that also embrace phenomena
+of culture. In the directions indicated here, the diseases of the mind
+afford a comparative means for the investigation of the phenomena
+of consciousness, a doctrine of natural cerebral experiments, and a
+foundation for a knowledge of the phenomena of mind.
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+
+
+PERIODICALS.
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 5.
+
+    UEBER EIN OPTISCHES PARADOXON. By _Franz Brentano_.
+
+    “FLATTERNDE HERZEN.” By _Adolf Szili_.
+
+    UEBER BEGRÜNDUNG EINER BLINDENPSYCHOLOGIE VON EINEM BLINDEN. By
+    _Friedrich Hitschmann_.
+
+    BEMERKUNGEN ÜBER DIE VON LIPPS UND CORNELIUS BESPROCHENE
+    NACHBILDERSCHEINUNG. By _Otto Schwarz_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 6.
+
+    BEITRÄGE ZUR DIOPTRIK DES AUGES. By _M. Tscherning_.
+
+    OPTISCHE STREITFRAGEN. By _Th. Lipps_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 1 and 2.
+
+    UEBER DIE SCHÄTZUNG KLEINER ZEITGRÖSSEN. By _E Schumann_.
+
+    ZUM BEGRIFF DER LOKALZEICHEN. By _C. Stumpf_.
+
+    ZUR KENNTNISS DES SUCCESSIVEN KONTRASTES. By _Richard Hilbert_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT.
+
+The first article is on an optical paradox. Let two equal parallel lines
+be drawn, as in the cut below; then let two small straight lines be drawn
+from the extremities of these in such a way that in the first they form
+acute angles with the line and in the second, obtuse angles. The first,
+it will be seen, appears shorter than the second. What is the explanation
+of this phenomenon?
+
+[Illustration: Cut 1.]
+
+[Illustration: Cut 2.]
+
+[Illustration: Cut 3.]
+
+[Illustration: Cut 4.]
+
+[Illustration: Cut 5.]
+
+The author’s answer is, that this phenomenon is a consequence of the
+well-known fact that we overestimate small angles, and underestimate
+large ones. The presence of the lines has nothing to do with the optical
+illusion, as the inserted cut, in which the lines are omitted, shows.
+(Cut 2.) The optical illusion is also not present when the lines are
+rectangularly attached, as is Cut 3. These facts prove that angular
+_inclination_ is the decisive factor. The following cuts show this, the
+first in a more and the second in a less marked degree. (Cuts 4, 5.)
+The simplest case in which the explanatory factor of this phenomenon
+is involved, is that of the estimation of the distance of an isolated
+point from the extremities of a short straight line. The estimation of
+this distance is dependent upon our estimation of the angle made by
+lines drawn from the point to the extremities of a short line. If this
+estimation is false, it produces by an exact trigonometrical law, an
+error in the estimation of the corresponding distance. This explains all.
+In our first figure the factor of illusion is eight times presented:
+hence its marked character.
+
+The second article consists of a rather long series of experiments on the
+so-called “flatternde Herzen” by Adolph Szili.
+
+The third article is on the foundations of a psychology of the blind,
+by a blind man, Friedrich Hitschmann, of Vienna. This article contains
+a number of interesting facts concerning the sensory, intellectual, and
+emotional life of blind people, and affords a great many valuable hints
+for the development of the special psychology which the author has in
+view.
+
+The first article of No. 6 of the _Zeitschrift_ is a very exhaustive
+one, some sixty pages in length, filled with special and technical
+investigations concerning the dioptrics of the eye. When light passes
+from one refracting medium into another it is partially reflected at the
+dividing surface, and transmits by reflection the objects from which it
+has proceeded. This is also the case with the human eye, which is itself
+a lens. The refracted pictures are the only pictures of importance to
+the possessor of the eye; but just as in the construction of optical
+instruments, the reflected or “lost” images are of supreme importance to
+the optician in the determination of the properties of his productions,
+so these same pictures in the human eye are of supreme importance to
+the physiologist and the psychologist. This is the subject of Dr.
+Tscherning’s researches.
+
+In the second article Dr. Th. Lipps discusses some mooted questions of
+optics. The first part of the article is a reply to Schwarz’s criticism
+in the preceding number of the _Zeitschrift_. The second part is a
+review of Franz Brentano’s explanation of the optical paradox, discussed
+in the second paragraph of this notice. Lipps declares, that, though
+there is some truth in Brentano’s explanation, it is nevertheless an
+error to believe that acute angles, _as such_, are overestimated, and
+obtuse angles, as such, are underestimated. On the contrary, every time
+such errors in estimation occur, there exist particular reasons for it,
+the character of which renders the attempt impossible to derive the
+estimation of distance directly from the estimation of angles. Lipps
+supports his position by actual facts. His chief and most philosophical
+remark is, that it is a perilous and improper thing to do to explain
+isolated optical illusions by isolated and independent hypotheses;
+optical illusions are not exceptions: they constitute a class of
+phenomena in themselves, and they should be considered in their natural
+and logical connection. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.).
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Vol. XVI. No. 3.
+
+    UEBER REAL- UND BEZIEHUNGS-URTHEILE. By _J. v. Kries_.
+
+    WAS IST LOGIK? By _A. Voigt_.
+
+    ZUR PSYCHOLOGIE DER LANDSCHAFT. By _R. Wlassak_.
+
+    DES NIC. TETENS STELLUNG IN DER GESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE. By
+    _M. Dessoir_.
+
+The articles of this magazine are usually very rigorous and learned; and
+the contents of the present number are in keeping with its reputation.
+Prof. J. v. Kries discusses in an essay, evoked by the recent articles
+of Riehl, the subject of “real and relational judgments”; his object
+is to establish a classification, and display the logical connection,
+of judgments generally. Real judgments are predications concerning
+reality or actual facts; relational judgments predicate simple relations
+of concepts, etc. The first requisite of a scientific exactness of
+thought, says Kries, is the distinction and determination in any given
+case of judgments which are real and judgments which are relational. In
+the second article, which is long and exhaustive, Dr. Voigt endeavors
+to determine the characters and functions of the different kinds of
+logic. In view of the great prominence into which algebraical logic
+of late years has come, this article is one of considerable interest.
+Voigt defines the pretensions and powers of the two opposing systems
+of philosophical and algebraical logic, and attempts to set forth the
+justification of each. Voigt, as opposed to Husserl, cordially recommends
+the study of algebraical logic to philosophers, that both disciplines may
+profit by the intercourse. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE. Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 5 to 8.
+
+CONTENTS: Nos. 5 and 6.
+
+    DIE WIRKLICHKEIT ALS PHÄNOMEN DES GEISTES. (Concluded.) By _A.
+    Rosinski_.
+
+    WESEN UND BEDEUTUNG DER IMPERSONALIEN. By _R. F. Kaindl_.
+
+    ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUM PROBLEM DER AESTHETIK. By _E. Kühnemann_.
+
+CONTENTS: Nos. 7 and 8.
+
+    UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG.
+    Psychologische Studie. By _M Offner_.
+
+    ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUM PROBLEM DER AESTHETIK. (Concluded) By
+    _E. Kühnemann_.
+
+    WERKE ZUR PHILOSOPHIE DER GESCHICHTE UND DES SOCIALEN LEBENS
+    (Second Article: _G. de Greef, Introduction à la sociologie_).
+    By _F. Tönnies_.
+
+    RECENSIONEN.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT.
+
+A. Rosinski’s contribution is a metaphysical essay on reality viewed as a
+phenomenon of the mind. The results of his discussion are these: that the
+world of experience, with all its laws and phenomena, and all we assume
+to exist _per se_, is referable wholly to ourselves; that the primal
+source and cause of all reality is not a something which lies absolutely
+outside us, but is simply our own self, or ego. In what sense reality is
+reality, the author proposes to discuss in future articles.
+
+Dr. Raimund Friedrich Kaindl discusses, in the second article, the
+character and meaning of the impersonal verbs. The discussion is made
+both from the psychologico-logical point of view, and from the point of
+view of comparative philology.
+
+The _Philosophische Monatshefte_ contain, in each issue, a very
+exhaustive bibliography of all the works which have appeared during
+the month in the provinces connected with philosophy. This department
+is conducted by Dr. Ascherson, the librarian of the Berlin University
+library, and forms a very important and valuable feature of this
+magazine. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 100. Nos. 1
+and 2.
+
+This well-known magazine, formerly edited by Dr. J. D. Fichte and Dr.
+Ulrici, is now presided over by Dr. Richard Falckenberg, of Erlangen.
+It has reached its hundredth volume, and with the present two numbers
+begins a new series. Its reviews and lists of newly published works
+are comparatively complete. Its articles, though generally tinged
+with scholasticism and chiefly treating of philosophico-historical
+subjects, deal, nevertheless, with some modern and living questions; for
+example, Dr. Max Schasler’s discussion of the proceedings on the recent
+Prussian school law; Dr. Eugene Dreher’s consideration of the law of
+the conservation of force; and Dr. Nikolaus von Seeland’s discussion
+of the deficiencies of the current theory of force. The other articles
+are contributed by A. Wreschner, G. Frege, J. Zahlfleisch, and Robert
+Schellwien. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. August, 1892. Vol. IV. No. 4.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    THE EXTENT OF THE CORTEX IN MAN, AS DEDUCED FROM THE STUDY OF
+    LAURA BRIDGMAN’S BRAIN. By _Henry H. Donaldson_.
+
+    SOME INFLUENCES WHICH AFFECT THE RAPIDITY OF VOLUNTARY
+    MOVEMENTS. By _F. B. Dresslar_.
+
+    EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH UPON THE PHENOMENA OF ATTENTION. By
+    _James R. Angell_ and _Arthur H. Pierce_.
+
+    SOME EFFECTS OF CONTRAST. By _A. Kirschmann_.
+
+    REPORT ON AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS. By
+    _Benjamin Ives Gilman_.
+
+    PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE. (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University.)
+
+
+MIND. New Series. No. 3. July, 1892.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    LOTZE’S ANTITHESIS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND THINGS. (I.) By _A.
+    Eastwood_.
+
+    THE FESTAL ORIGIN OF HUMAN SPEECH. By _J. Donovan_.
+
+    THE LOGICAL CALCULUS. (III.) By _W. E. Johnson_.
+
+    THE FIELD OF ÆESTHETICS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. (I.) By _H.
+    R. Marshall_.
+
+    DISCUSSIONS: The Influence of Muscular States on Consciousness.
+    By _Edmund B. Delabarre_; Dr. Münsterberg and his Critics. By
+    _E. B. Titchener_. The Definition of Desire. By _Henry Rutgers
+    Marshall_. Feeling, Belief, and Judgment. By _J. Mark Baldwin_.
+
+    CRITICAL NOTICES. (London: Williams & Norgate.)
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. July, 1892. Vol. II. No. 4.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    NATURAL SELECTION IN MORALS. By _S. Alexander_.
+
+    WHAT SHOULD BE THE ATTITUDE OF THE PULPIT TO THE LABOR PROBLEM?
+    By _W. L. Sheldon_.
+
+    ETHICS OF THE JEWISH QUESTION. By _Charles Zeublin_.
+
+    MACHIAVELLI’S PRINCE. By _W. R. Thayer_.
+
+    ON THE FOUNDING OF A NEW RELIGION. By _B. Carneri_.
+
+    AN ANALYSIS OF THE IDEA OF OBLIGATION. By _Frank Chapman Sharp_.
+
+    REVIEWS.
+
+Prof. S. Alexander, in his lecture delivered before the Ethical Societies
+of Cambridge and London, here reproduced, points out that the growth
+and change of moral and social ideals are the result of a process of
+mental conflict. Professor Sheldon thinks only a partial solution of the
+labor problem is possible until the second coming of men somewhat of
+the type of St. Francis of Assisi, “who will sacrifice their personal
+opportunities, abandon their station in the world, and go down to
+apply their gifts and acquirements to the cause of the lower stratum
+of society.” The religious as well as economic opposition to Judaism,
+according to Mr. Charles Zeublin, is caused by the exclusiveness of
+the Jew, and his ultimate welfare and that of his neighbors requires a
+humanitarian treatment within and without Judaism. Mr. William R. Thayer
+shows that Machiavelli merely described things as they were in his time,
+and deduced the laws which actually controlled the public deeds of
+rulers; and that it is now “the duty of all men to sweep away the old
+falsehood that rulers and governments are absolved from paying heed to
+those ethical principles to which every individual is bound.” According
+to Mr. B. Carneri, the living at peace with oneself and one’s fellow-men
+is possible only without religion, “because there is no morality without
+contentment, and it is the highest degree of discontent to strive for
+something beyond this world.” Mr. Frank Chapman Sharp concludes that when
+the element of _the good_ is taken out of the conception of obligation,
+this degenerates into mere submission to an arbitrary imperative; the
+foundation for the distinction between right and wrong must be sought in
+something that appeals to us as good, and its ultimate criterion can be
+given only by our chosen ideal. (Philadelphia: _International Journal of
+Ethics_, 118 S. Twelfth Street.)
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. July, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.
+
+    INHIBITION AND FREEDOM OF THE WILL. By _Dr. James H. Hyslop_.
+
+    A CLASSIFICATION OF CASES OF ASSOCIATION. By _Mary W. Calkins_.
+
+    THE ORIGIN OF PLEASURE AND PAIN. By _Dr. Herbert Nichols_.
+
+    ON PRIMITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. By _Hiram M. Stanley_.
+
+    REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
+
+    SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
+
+The confusion incident to the old controversy about freedom is due, says
+Dr. James H. Hyslop, to a failure to distinguish between the _proof_
+of freedom and the _conditions_ of it, that is, “the circumstances
+that are necessary to it, or the characteristics that constitute it.”
+Freedom consists in “self-initiative and independence of external
+causes, whether there be any choice between alternatives or not,” and
+inhibition and deliberation bring about both of these circumstances.
+Miss Mary W. Calkins rejects the ordinary division into association by
+contiguity and association by similarity, and gives detailed summaries
+of the fundamental characteristics of consciousness on which association
+depends and of the characteristics of association proper; the ultimate
+fact of association, whether it be psychical or physical or both, we do
+not understand. Dr. Herbert Nichols, in the first part of his article on
+the “Origin of Pleasure and Pain,” considers the phenomena of pleasure
+and pain associated with the action of the senses, and concludes that
+there is no “tangible evidence indicating that pleasures and pains
+are inseparable attributes of other senses or polar complements of
+each other,” and that separate sensations of pain and of pleasure are
+probable. Mr. Hiram M. Stanley regards pure pain as primitive mind,
+and pleasure as the polar opposite to it, although they are neither
+absolutely essential one to the other, pleasure being traced to “an
+intermediary feeling between pain as produced by excess, and pain from
+lack as differentiated form.” Consciousness is fundamentally pain and
+pleasure as serving the organism in the struggle for existence. (Boston,
+New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+THE NEW WORLD.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.
+
+    THE SOCIAL PLAINT. By _E. Benjamin Andrews_.
+
+    RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION. By _Minot J. Savage_.
+
+    THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE STORY OF SODOM. By _T. K. Cheyne_.
+
+    THE FOUNDATION OF BUDDHISM. By _Maurice Bloomfield_.
+
+    IMAGINATION IN RELIGION. By _Francis Tiffany_.
+
+    THE NEXT STEP IN CHRISTIANITY. By _S. D. McConnell_.
+
+    THE IMPLICATIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. By _Josiah Royce_.
+
+    HOW I CAME INTO CHRISTIANITY. By _Nobuta Kishimoto_.
+
+    NEW FORMS OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. By _Mrs. Humphry Ward_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.
+
+    THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. By _Otto Pfleiderer_.
+
+    ECCLESIASTICAL IMPEDIMENTA. By _J. Macbride Sterrett_.
+
+    NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. By _Orello Cone_.
+
+    THOMAS PAINE. By _John W. Chadwick_.
+
+    SOCIAL BETTERMENT. By _Nicholas P. Gilman_.
+
+    THE RÔLE OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS IN MODERN RELIGIOUS
+    EDUCATION. By _Jean Réville_.
+
+    A POET OF HIS CENTURY. By _E. Cavazza_.
+
+    DIVINE LOVE AND INTELLIGENCE. By _James C. Parsons_.
+
+    BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+    SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Company.)
+
+
+REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
+
+CONTENTS: June, 1892. No. 198.
+
+    EXISTENCE ET DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. I. Existence de la
+    Volonté. By _A. Fouillée_.
+
+    SUR QUELQUES IDÉES DU BARON D’HOLBACH. By _A. Lalande_.
+
+    ESSAI SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PROUDHON. By _G. Sorel_.
+
+    TRAVAUX DU LABORATOIRE DE PSYCHOLOGIE PHYSIOLOGIQUE.
+
+CONTENTS: July, 1892. No. 199.
+
+    L’INCONNAISSABLE DANS LA PHILOSOPHIE MODERNE. By _G.
+    Fonsegrive_.
+
+    LA MUSIQUE D’APRÈS HERBERT SPENCER. By _J. Combarieu_.
+
+    ESSAI SUR LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PROUDHON (concluded). By _G. Sorel_.
+
+CONTENTS: August, 1892. No. 200.
+
+    ÉTUDE CRITIQUE SUR LE MYSTICISME MODERNE. By _Rosenbach_.
+
+    LE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. By _A. Fouillée_.
+
+    LA BEAUTÉ ORGANIQUE: ÉTUDE D’ANALYSE ESTHÉTIQUE. By _A.
+    Naville_.
+
+    ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
+
+According to M. Fouillée, the principle which tends to dominate
+psychology and physiology is the ubiquity of will and of feeling, and
+consequently of consciousness. Psychology will end by recognising the
+continuity and the transformation of modes of psychical energy, as
+physics recognises the continuity and the transformation of modes of
+physical energy, and philosophy will see in physical energy the external
+expression of will.
+
+M. Fonsegrive maintains that the rejection of metaphysics as science,
+which marks the modern theory of the unknowable, is the consequence of
+Kant’s _a priori_ theory as to the origin of our knowledge. The laws of
+the mind have no real existence prior to experience, and universal and
+necessary notions can be discovered only by mental analysis. In this
+manner the existence, and even the essence, of metaphysical beings may
+be known, but only of such as experience puts in communication with
+ourselves. Thus we know God as the necessary first cause, although our
+notion of God is one of negation, of experimental notions.
+
+After showing that Spencer’s theory of music had numerous antecedents,
+and that its conclusions are unacceptable on various grounds, M.
+Combarieu affirms that the secret of the musical art is the identity of
+the musical idea with the imitation or expression of the real world. All
+music contains a double verity; it is the meeting place of the senses
+and of the rational world confounded in a unity which is the work of
+art, as man is the combination of a soul and a body confounded in the
+real unity of life. Spencer is an excessive simplifier, and does not
+see the complexity of certain questions, which he seeks to resolve by
+undervaluing them. But he has thrown light on one of the aspects of the
+musical problem.
+
+In this final essay on the philosophy of Proudhon, M. Sorel considers the
+theory of justice by the light of the notion of free will. He differs
+somewhat from Proudhon, and affirms that “the just man is the upright
+man such as our ideal conception of antiquity represents him to us,
+but transformed by our consciousness as refined by the influence of
+Christianity.” In dealing with the real organisation of societies it is
+necessary to distinguish between matters of justice and those of right,
+which includes that of force, of which war is an application. After
+showing the connection of the economic _contradictions_ of Proudhon with
+the state of war, and the value of education for the realisation of
+equilibrium in the state. M. Sorel affirms that education ought to be
+based on manual labor, for the explanation of which science should be
+taught; and that instruction should endure throughout life, so that men
+can elevate themselves and that an equilibrium may be obtained between
+knowledge and industrial needs. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX.
+
+PLATES BELONGING TO THE ARTICLE “THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.”
+
+
+KEY TO THE PLATES.
+
+    col. ven.—ventral column.
+    lob. dors.—dorsal lobe.
+    lob. ven.—ventral lobe.
+    lob. v. inf.—inferior or lower ventral lobule.
+    lob. cr.—crural lobule.
+    con. dors. sup—superior (or upper) dorsal connective filaments.
+    con. dors. moy.—medial dorsal connective filaments.
+    con. dors. inf.—inferior (or lower) dorsal connective filaments.
+    con. v.—ventral connective filaments.
+    n. cr.—crural nerve.
+    n. al.—alary nerve.
+    lob. al.—alary lobule.
+    rac. sup—upper (or superior) root.
+    rac. moy.—medial root.
+    rac. inf.—lower (or inferior) root.
+    fa. as.—ascending fasciculus.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE I.
+
+_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Horizontal
+sections.)]
+
+[Illustration: PLATE II.
+
+_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Horizontal
+sections.)]
+
+[Illustration: PLATE III.
+
+_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Longitudinal
+sections.)]
+
+[Illustration: PLATE IV.
+
+_Rhizotrogus solstitialis._ First thoracic ganglion. (Transversal
+sections.)]
+
+
+
+
+                VOL. III.      JANUARY, 1893.      NO. 2.
+
+                                THE MONIST.
+
+
+
+
+THE DOCTRINE OF AUTA.
+
+
+In the “Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society” (Vol. VI,
+Part IX, p. 475, 1890), Dr. Johnstone Stoney, F. R. S., published an
+interesting and carefully-reasoned paper “On the Relation between Natural
+Science and Ontology.” The same author had previously (1885), in a Friday
+evening discourse at the Royal Institution of London, discussed the
+problem, “How Thought Presents Itself Among the Phenomena of Nature.”
+Dr. Stoney’s communications have not (I venture to think) received the
+consideration to which they are entitled alike on the score of their
+logical consistency, if his premisses and assumptions be granted, and by
+reason of the author’s scientific eminence as a physicist. I therefore
+propose, first, to endeavor to set forth his monistic _Doctrine of
+Auta_; and secondly, to offer some criticisms thereon. Unfortunately Dr.
+Stoney’s pages bristle with new technical terms, which, though no doubt
+they have been serviceable to him in the attainment of precision of
+thought, make his paper hard reading. Some of these I shall introduce;
+others which seem less essential to the argument I shall omit. It would
+be scarcely fair on the reader’s teeth or on the author’s store to
+transfer all these hard nuts from Dublin to Chicago.
+
+No philosophical discussion of a problem involving perception can be
+regarded as complete without the introduction of an orange. Dr. Stoney,
+indeed, substitutes a fire; but this, though it shows philosophical
+independence, cannot for a moment be sanctioned by any good Berkeleyan.
+An orange then, as such, is a phenomenal object formed, in a way we need
+not now consider, by the synthesis of perceptions. These perceptions,
+themselves synthetic, Dr. Stoney calls “tekmeria,” since they are signs
+within my mind that events are happening in a part of the universe
+that is distinct from my mind. The phenomenal object is supposed by
+men untrained in inquiries relating to the mind to have a non-egoistic
+existence—that is, an existence independent of the percipient mind. But
+this supposition is found on careful scrutiny to be an error. It is a
+product of mental synthesis, and is therefore termed by Dr. Stoney a
+“syntheton.” It is also termed a “protheton” in contradistinction to an
+“antitheton,” which we shall come to shortly.
+
+Now if the phenomenal orange is a “syntheton”—that is, a product of
+perceptual synthesis—it clearly cannot be regarded as the _cause_ of the
+perceptions, through and by means of which it is constructed in mental
+synthesis. Here popular thought and ordinary language are apt to mislead
+us. For ordinary language is throughout built upon the popular belief
+that the objects of the phenomenal world are non-egoistic or independent
+_existences_, and, moreover, that they are the cause of the perceptions
+which come into existence when we exercise our senses. This is, however,
+“to put the car before the horse.” It is to imagine that a structure
+built up out of the effects of a thing can be the cause of those effects.
+The phenomenal orange is built up of perceptions instead of being the
+cause of them. Their cause is therefore to be sought elsewhere than in
+the phenomenal world of objects. The orange, _qua_ orange, is therefore
+a “syntheton,” and cannot as such be the cause of the perceptions or
+“tekmeria,” which go to its synthesis.
+
+Let us now look at these perceptions or “tekmeria” from another point of
+view. They are states of consciousness: they are _thoughts_, if we use
+this word in its widest extension to embrace everything of which I or my
+fellow-men or the lower animals are conscious. But my own thoughts are,
+so long as they last, things that exist. They may be representative of
+something outside me, but they _are_ also _real existences_. While they
+last they constitute a part of the universe of existing things. They are,
+in Dr. Stoney’s terminology, _auta_ (τά ὄντα αὐτά), the very things
+themselves. An _auto_ (we shall throughout _italicise_ all that belongs
+to this autic order of existence) is a _thing which really exists_, and
+in no wise depends on the way we, human minds, may happen to regard it.
+Our impressions or beliefs about it may be correct or may be erroneous;
+but the term _auto_ means the _thing itself_.
+
+Perceptions, then, inasmuch as they are thoughts, are _auta_. They
+belong, moreover, to that class of real existences which, since they are
+woven into the tissue of _minds_ (my mind and the minds of my fellow-men
+and of the lower animals) are termed _egoistic auta_. They do not remain,
+however, persistent and unchanged; for perceptions come and go and are
+modified as they pass like waves over the surface of consciousness. What
+causes this coming and going, and these changes in the _egoistic auta_ we
+call perceptions? Not, as we have already seen, the world of phenomenal
+objects! What then, but other _auta_, which, since they produce effects
+upon men’s minds through their senses, may be termed _sense-compelling
+auta_? The phenomenal orange is thus a “syntheton” produced through a
+synthesis of the effects wrought upon my _mind_ by an autic existence,
+called by Mr. Stoney the _onto-orange_. The phenomenal orange is, as we
+have seen, a “protheton”; the _onto-orange_ is its _antitheton_ in the
+universe of real existences.
+
+We are now beginning to open up Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s conception of the
+relation of the autic _universe_ to phenomenal Nature. Nature is the
+totality of phenomenal objects; but corresponding with each phenomenal
+object or “protheton” there is an _onto-object_ or _antitheton_; and the
+totality of _antitheta_ constitute the _universe_. _Minds_, mine and
+those of other beings, constitute the egoistic part of the universe; the
+rest of the universe is constituted by _sense-compelling auta_.
+
+We may liken the _sense-compelling universe_ to a great machine in
+motion, and the _tekmeria_ or perceptions which it produces within our
+minds to shadows cast by it. The laws of the movements of the machine
+are the real laws of the universe—laws of nature are but the laws of
+the changes which the shadows in consequence undergo. It is these
+shadow laws alone which natural science can reach: the real laws of
+the _universe_ of which these are shadows are beyond its grasp. In
+Nature the reflective eye of science sees not only phenomenal objects,
+but the relations which they bear to each other. But such relations are
+themselves phenomenal; they are protheta of which the _onto-relations_ of
+the real _universe_ are the _antitheta_. Every space-relation, therefore,
+in Nature—for instance, that my foot is at present three yards from the
+fender—has a real autic relation in the sense-compelling _universe_,
+which is its _antitheton_; an _onto-relation_ between the _onto-foot_
+and _onto-fender_, meaning by these terms the _auta_ which send men the
+tekmeria which, when synthesised, furnish these two phenomenal objects.
+The space-relations of Nature are but the shadows cast by the _autic
+relations_ within the _minds_ of men, and perhaps some other animals.
+
+But among these shadows there can be no efficient causation. When a
+change takes place in the sense-compelling _universe_, the mighty
+machine will cast one shadow before the change and another after. The
+second shadow will accordingly succeed the first in orderly sequence,
+but the relation between the shadows is not the relation of cause and
+effect. Accordingly, in the laws of Nature which have been discovered
+by scientific investigation, we find abundant instances of unfailingly
+concomitant events and of uniformities of sequence, but not one single
+instance of cause and effect. There is nothing competent to cause one
+body to exclude another from the space it occupies. A statement of
+the fact is one of the laws of Nature. If a stone be allowed to drop
+in the vicinity of the earth, its downward speed is accelerated by a
+perfectly definite law. This law is one of the Uniformities of Nature
+which scientific inquiry has brought to light. But within the domain of
+Physics there is no cause of acceleration. The facts as to what occurs in
+Nature can be observed; the circumstances under which they occur can be
+investigated; similar cases can be compared; and the laws to which the
+simultaneous or successive events conform may be brought to light. But
+here our knowledge ends. Physical science has said its utmost.
+
+Now all this is changed when we turn to the only field of observation
+accessible to us in which we are dealing directly with _auta_. The
+_thoughts_ of which _I_ consist, the thoughts which are my _mind_, are
+_auta_; a very small group of _auta_, no doubt, in the mighty _Universe_,
+but still an actual sample, though a very special and one-sided sample
+of what _auta_ really are. Now in the operations that go on in my mind I
+do find instances, some few instances, of causes producing effects. The
+familiar case of a geometrical demonstration producing in a man’s mind
+a belief in the truth of the conclusion is a case in point. Here the
+understanding of the proof is the efficient cause of the belief in the
+conclusion which accompanies that understanding. A wish to accomplish
+something, and a knowledge of how to go about it, both of which are
+_thoughts_ in the _mind_, are a part of the efficient cause of subsequent
+events, unless counteracted by other causes. A few other examples can be
+obtained from the same small field of observation; and this is all that
+man, in his isolated position, has any right to expect; for the bulk of
+his thoughts are due, at least in large part, to autic causes which lie
+outside his mind, and it is there also that those of his thoughts that
+are known to be causes, usually exhibit their effects. When perceptions
+arise in my mind, the effect indeed is within my mind, but the cause is
+beyond it; and when I move my muscles the cause is within my mind, but it
+is outside the mind that it operates. The instances are indeed few where
+the causes and the effects are both within my tiny group of _auta_, and
+it is only in these cases that I can have the process of causes producing
+effects under my inspection.
+
+But since cases can be cited, however few, they suffice to establish the
+fact that the relation of cause and effect, in its full sense, does exist
+in some instances in the autic _universe_; whereas it has nowhere any
+place within the domain of physical science. The relation of cause and
+effect among other _auta_ cannot from the nature of the case be proved.
+But from its occurrence in that small part of the _universe_ which
+we do know, we may fairly assume its occurrence in all parts of that
+_universe_. Such an assumption is at any rate justifiable by scientific
+method.
+
+We must now pass to another point. The scientific analysis of Nature
+by the physicist has led to an hypothesis which may be regarded as the
+utmost simplification of which the shadows cast within the human mind by
+the sense-compelling autic _universe_ are susceptible. This Dr. Stoney
+calls the Diacrinomenal Hypothesis; according to which Nature is made
+up of objects each of which consists of almost inconceivably minute and
+swift motions. The phenomenal orange is a group of molecular motions; and
+if I bowl it across the table the visible molar motion is a secondary
+motion of that group of primary molecular motions which constitutes the
+phenomenal object as such. And not only is the phenomenal object a group
+of minute and swift motions, but all the steps between that object and
+our brain, all that takes place in the air or æther, in our organs of
+sense and nerves, can also be represented in terms of motion. And finally
+a change consisting of motions takes place in the brain itself, whereupon
+we become conscious of thought. That change which would be appreciated
+as motions by a bystander who could search into our brains while we are
+thinking, we should experience to be _thought_. Thus we find that in
+certain cases the _autic existence_ that corresponds with motion, namely
+in the motions of our own brain molecules, is _thought_. And the most
+probable hypothesis as to the true relation of phenomenal Nature and the
+autic _universe_ is that what we have found to be true in some cases is
+always true, and that in every case it is _thought_ (or rather a change
+in the causal relation in which thought stands to thought) which is the
+_antitheton_ of motion; so that the totality of all actual existences,
+the _universe_, is in fact identical with the totality of existing
+_thought_. Of course all this _thought_, with the exception of that tiny
+group that is my _mind_, is as much outside my consciousness as are the
+thoughts of my fellow-men and of the lower animals.
+
+Under this view the _minds_ of men and of other animals are specialised
+specks, as it were, of a vast ocean of _thought_, to which they bear a
+like inconspicuous proportion to that borne by the few brain motions of
+which they are the _antitheta_, to the totality of motions throughout
+Nature. Under this view the laws of the _universe_ are the laws of
+_thought_. This is a very different thing, be it noted, from saying that
+they are the laws of human thought. The laws of human thought bear to
+them the same small proportion which the laws of the action of the wheels
+of a watch upon one another bear to the entire science of dynamics. The
+science of dynamics could never be evolved from a study of these laws.
+But perhaps it may not be hopeless for man to attain some sound knowledge
+of the laws of cosmic _thought_, inasmuch as we have some few instances
+of the way _thought_ acts upon _thought_ open to our investigation in
+our own minds, and since this is supplemented by our knowledge of the
+physical laws of nature, which are a shadow, a probably complete shadow,
+of all the laws of causation which operate throughout the _universe_,
+throughout the all-embracing _Mind_ of the great _Autos_.
+
+Such is Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s conception of the relation of Natural
+Science to Ontology. I have presented it partly in his own words, partly
+in mine. It has been my conscientious endeavor to put it in as strong and
+favorable a light as possible, and not in any way to weaken the strength
+of its logical consistency. The main thesis may now be briefly summarised
+in the following propositions:
+
+    The phenomenal object is a syntheton or product of mental
+    synthesis.
+
+    Its efficient cause is a _real existence_ or _antitheton_.
+
+    Nature is the totality of phenomenal syntheta.
+
+    The _universe_ is the totality of autic _antitheta_.
+
+    There is no causation in Nature; but the Uniformities of Nature
+    are the shadows of the causal Laws of the Universe.
+
+    _Thought_ has no place in Nature: it is part of the autic
+    _universe_.
+
+    The syntheton of which _thought_ is the _antitheton_ is the
+    motion of brain molecules.
+
+    It is a probable hypothesis that the _antitheta_ of which the
+    motions of Diacrinomenal Nature are the syntheta, are _thought_.
+
+    This is the monistic hypothesis, that there is but one kind
+    of existing thing, viz. _thought_; in contradistinction to
+    the dualistic hypothesis that there are two kinds of existing
+    things, _thought_ and _motion_.
+
+I now pass from the attitude of expositor to the attitude of critic. And
+first I will attack a quite outstanding position, namely Dr. Stoney’s
+assumption that Clifford’s hypothesis which he supports and extends is
+_the_ monistic hypothesis, and by implication that it is the _only_
+monistic hypothesis. In opposition to this I venture to affirm that there
+are several forms or phases of monism. I have not space to discuss the
+matter; and must content myself with a bare enumeration of some of the
+logically possible forms of Dualism and of Monism.
+
+    1) DUALISM.
+
+        _A._ _Synthetic Dualism_: according to which there are two
+        entities, the mind and the body; and these
+
+            _a_) either work side by side, without interaction, in
+            pre-established harmony (_philosophic dualism_),
+
+            _b_) or interact the one on the other (_empirical
+            dualism_).
+
+        _B._ _Analytic Dualism_: according to which there are two
+        elements as the result of analysis; _motion_ (with or
+        without a material basis) and _consciousness_; the two
+        elements being related in such a way that consciousness is
+        inseparably associated with certain complex modes of motion.
+
+    2) MONISM.
+
+        _A._ _Synthetic monism_: according to which there is but
+        one entity. And this entity may be:
+
+            _a_) The body, of which consciousness is a product
+            (_materialistic or physical monism_);
+
+            _b_) The mind, of which the body in common with the
+            world of phenomena is a fiction (_idealistic monism_);
+
+            _c_) The conscious organism, exhibiting certain
+            transformations of energy which are felt as psychical
+            states (_scientific monism_).
+
+        _B._ _Analytic monism_: according to which analysis
+        discloses but one element; and this may be
+
+            _a_) _motion_, of which (or of one phase of which)
+            consciousness is merely the psychical aspect (_analytic
+            materialism_);
+
+            _b_) _consciousness_, of which motion is merely the
+            phenomenal aspect (_analytic psychism_);
+
+            _c_) _x_ (_the unknowable_) of which motion is the
+            physical aspect and consciousness the psychical aspect
+            (_monistic agnosticism_).
+
+Such are some of the forms or phases of monism as compared with those of
+dualism. It will be seen that Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s speculations fall
+under the head of what I have termed analytic psychism, according to
+which the sole ultimate reality disclosed by analysis is consciousness
+or thought. So far I have only reminded my readers that this, though
+one form of monism, is not the only form. To which Dr. Stoney may very
+possibly reply that it matters not to him whether there are five or
+fifty-and-five monistic heresies besides the true creed of which he is
+the prophet. He is only concerned with the establishment of the true
+monistic faith. And as herein I should very heartily agree with him, I
+will pass on without delay to criticise an assumption that lies close to
+the heart and centre of his hypothesis.
+
+On the first page of Dr. Stoney’s essay we read: “Let us, for
+convenience, call these real existences _auta_—the very things
+themselves. An _auto_ is a thing that really exists, and in no wise
+depends on the way we, human minds, may happen to regard it.” And on
+the second page we read: “My own thoughts are, at all events, things
+that exist: they at least are _auta_ so long as they last. They are,
+accordingly, while they last, a part of the _universe of existing
+things_.” No proof is offered of this latter assumption that my thought,
+human thought, is part of the universe of _auta_. I venture to call this
+assumption in question. I demand proof of its validity. Nay, I am ready
+to go further and roundly assert that my thoughts are not _auta_, and
+furnish no evidence whatever as to the nature of such _auta_. I am quite
+aware that I may seem to be giving the lie to a direct deliverance of
+consciousness; and that it will be said that it is obviously impossible
+to deny the existence of thought without at the same time exercising
+that, the existence of which is denied—a dictum which contains a very
+pretty play upon two different uses of the word “existence.”
+
+I go back to the orange, without which as a philosopher I am lost. I hold
+it in my hand, look steadfastly at it, and drink in with my nostrils
+its fragrant aroma. What says consciousness? That the phenomenal object
+I call an orange exists. It says nothing about independent existence,
+nothing about _auta_. The direct deliverance of consciousness is that
+an object-in-consciousness exists. If a “plain man” says that the
+orange has a real existence, as such, independent of consciousness, he
+is going beyond the direct deliverance. And if a philosopher says that
+consciousness has a real existence, as such, independent of the object,
+he too is going beyond the direct deliverance. And if, as would seem
+to be the case, Dr. Stoney relies on the deliverance of consciousness
+for the justification of his statement that “perceptions, while they
+last, are _auta_, real existences,” I submit that he is relying on a
+misinterpretation of the deliverance of consciousness.
+
+The existence of the object-in-consciousness is the datum from which
+plain man and philosopher alike must start. On this foundation we must
+base all our reasonings and speculations. Physical science directs its
+attention to the “object” side of the given relation. And it reaches
+its “diacrinomenal” result that the orange may for physical purposes
+be represented as a group of swift and rapid molecular motions. But
+can physics at any stage of its analysis shake itself free from the
+“consciousness” side of the relation? Assuredly not. All that it can do
+is to represent the object-in-consciousness we call an orange in terms
+of other objects-in-consciousness we term molecular motions. Psychology
+directs its attention to the “consciousness” side of the given relation.
+It analyses the object-in-consciousness into percepts, sensations, and
+so forth. But can psychology at any stage of its analysis shake itself
+free from the “object” side of the relation? Assuredly not. All that it
+can do is to represent the consciousness-of-the-object we call an orange,
+in terms of the objects-in-consciousness we term sensations, relations
+between sensations, and so forth.
+
+The relation of the consciousness-of-an-object to the
+object-in-consciousness may be made clear by the analogy, which is
+something more than an analogy of vision and the visual field. For
+clear and distinct vision, a well-illuminated object of vision, and a
+healthy organ of vision are necessary as coöperating factors. So, too,
+for distinct consciousness a definite object-in-consciousness and a
+well-defined consciousness-of-the-object are necessary as coöperating
+factors. More than this. Unless there be some object of vision, however
+vague, and some organ of vision, however dim, no vision at all is
+possible. The coöperation of the two factors is essential. So, too,
+unless there be some object-in-consciousness, however vague, and some
+consciousness-of-the-object, however dim, no consciousness at all, in
+anything like the human sense of the word “consciousness,” is possible.
+Here, again, the coöperation of the two factors is essential. _And
+neither factor is ever given in experience without the other._
+
+Writing as I am, for readers of _The Monist_, I need hardly turn aside to
+explain what I mean by an object-in-consciousness. And yet perhaps a few
+words on the subject may not be out of place, and may prevent possible
+misunderstanding. An object-in-consciousness is not necessarily a
+tangible, visible object, like an orange. The yellowness, the sweetness,
+the weight, the bare existence of the orange, may each in turn be an
+object in consciousness. For the physicist the tangible orange may be
+represented in terms of swift, infinitesimal motions; and these, not less
+than the phenomenal orange, are objects in consciousness. A conception of
+consciousness itself, an imperfect conception, but the best we can frame,
+may be an object of consciousness, just as a reflected image of the eye
+may be to the eye an object of vision.
+
+It is generally believed by modern psychologists that all
+objects-in-consciousness are derivable by processes of abstraction,
+generalisation, and so forth, from the primitive datum of a perceptual
+object. And it must be remembered that it is only in abstraction
+that we distinguish between the object-in-consciousness and the
+consciousness-of-the-object. The two terms of this, for us, inevitable
+relation are given in inseparable coördination. But in abstract thought
+we can distinguish the inseparable terms; distinguish in thought, that
+is to say, what is inseparable in actual experience. To continue the
+analogy of vision, we can make the one term focal, while the other term
+remains marginal in the field of view. And we can neglect, for the
+purposes of our thought and reason, the marginal term. But we cannot
+get rid of it. We may deal, as in physics, with motion, neglecting the
+consciousness in and through which it is appreciated; but we cannot
+get rid of this consciousness. Or we can deal, as in psychology,
+with the consciousness, neglecting the object-in-consciousness; but
+we cannot get rid of this object. The object-out-of-consciousness and
+the consciousness-without-an-object, are alike unknown—or, if the
+reader prefers it, unknowable, which he may write with as many capital
+letters as seemeth to him good. The common-sense realist believes in
+the existence of objects-out-of-consciousness. The analytical psychist
+believes in the existence of consciousness-without-an-object. Both are,
+if the views here advocated be sound, attributing independent existence
+to that which, so far as human knowledge is concerned, has only dependent
+or relative existence.
+
+It is unfortunate that the terms “real” and “reality” should
+ever have been applied to the independent existence of so-called
+things-in-themselves. I think such terms as Dr. Stoney’s “autic” and
+“autic existence” would be far preferable. For the word “real” has a
+meaning and force which is quite definite. The orange that I hold in my
+hand and see with my eyes is as real as real can be. And if a philosopher
+steps in and says, “My dear sir, _that_ is not real! The real reality
+is, according to some, mind-stuff or consciousness; according to others,
+motion of—well I don’t quite know what, so let us simply call it motion;
+and according to others this real reality is unknowable”—I say if a
+philosopher steps in and talks like this, one is reminded of Lamb’s
+remark on Coleridge. Coleridge had been maundering on, as was his wont,
+on “subject” and “object” and all the rest of his second-hand German
+metaphysics, when Lamb broke in, with his forcible stammer, in a stage
+whisper: “N-n-n-never mind C-c-c-coleridge; it’s only his f-f-f-fun.”
+
+I repeat that the orange I hold in my hand and see with my eyes
+is as real as real can be; and that we have here the standard and
+criterion of reality not only for plain men but for philosophers.
+In the perceptual object we have reality given in its clearest,
+fullest, and most forcible form. Every step in the analysis of the
+perceptual object-in-consciousness; every step in the analysis of the
+consciousness-of-the-object takes us so far further from reality at its
+best. The orange as an object-in-consciousness is far more real to me
+than either the swift infinitesimal motions of the physicist, or the
+“syntheton” of related and integrated sensations of the psychologist.
+And when we reach the autic existence which is supposed to underlie both
+motion and consciousness, we seem to get just as far as it is possible
+for the human mind to get from the real orange with which we started.
+And yet it is to this autic existence that metaphysicians apply the term
+“real” in a different sense. For so far I have used the word “real” for
+that which is given in experience. But metaphysically the word “real”
+is used to indicate independence of experience. I repeat that for this
+independent existence some such word as Dr. Stoney’s “autic” would be far
+better and less misleading. It would emphasise the distinction between
+_real_, that is to say given in direct experience, and _autic_, that is
+to say independent of experience.
+
+Accepting at any rate for our present purpose this distinction, we
+have as coördinate realities the object-in-consciousness and the
+consciousness-of-the-object. And these two are only different aspects of
+the one great reality, the reality of experience. Of these two aspects
+neither is more real than the other. The object-in-consciousness is every
+bit as real as the consciousness-of-the-object; the orange as real as our
+perception thereof. Both are intensely and vitally real; but—here I am in
+opposition to Dr. Stoney—_neither is autic_. I can find no warranty for
+such autic existence in direct experience or the so-called deliverance of
+consciousness. Nor am I aware of any process of reasoning by which it can
+be demonstrated.
+
+But, it may be said, is it not in accordance with scientific method to
+make an assumption and then see how far such assumption is justified by
+the results it enables us to reach? Assuredly such procedure is allowable
+and often fruitful. It is not on such grounds, however, that Dr. Stoney,
+if I rightly understand him, bases his doctrine of the psychical nature
+of _auta_. Let us, nevertheless, pay a moment’s attention to this
+assumption and the correlative assumption of analytic materialism.
+Consciousness and matter-in-motion (or bare motion perhaps) are the
+ultimate elements reached by the psychologist on the one hand and the
+physicist on the other. Neither, if he knows his business, pretends by
+this analysis to have reached autic existence. But it is open to each
+to make an assumption. The materialist says: I assume that motion is
+the true autic existence, of which, under appropriate conditions, human
+consciousness is merely a psychical aspect. The psychist says: I assume
+that consciousness is the true autic existence, of which motion is
+merely the phenomenal aspect. I confess that if I were forced to choose
+one of these two, (which fortunately I am not,) I should elect to throw
+in my lot with the materialists. For if justification by results is
+to be the criterion, I hold that the results the materialists have to
+show far outweigh any results which the analytic psychists can produce.
+But the fact of the matter is that in neither case do the results flow
+from the autic assumption. All the results are equally valid for the
+student who holds fast to the relativity of object-in-consciousness
+to consciousness-of-the-object. Since therefore the assumption is
+valueless so far as practical results are concerned, and since it is
+somewhat repugnant to sound reason to assume that either term of a given
+relationship is the same out of relationship as it is in relation to its
+fellow, I contend, as against both materialist and psychist, that it
+fails to make good its claim to acceptance.
+
+What shall we say then of _auta_ or _things in themselves_? Simply that
+we do not know anything about them—that they are outside the pale of
+human knowledge. If we even say they exist we are using the word “exist”
+in an autic and unreal sense. It is phenomenal Nature which constitutes
+the real Universe; of its autic _shadow_, supposing that there be such a
+_shadow_, we know nothing. Need we then stay to criticise this unknown
+_shadow_?
+
+Even if we take Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s hypothesis as it stands we
+find a marked distinction between the sense-compelling _auta_ and the
+egoistic _auta_, or between the sense-compelling aspect of _auta_
+and the egoistic or perceptive aspect. How is this distinction to be
+explained and accounted for? I can see no answer to this question save
+that the distinction is a matter of experience. Why not, then, trust
+experience fully? Why go beyond it at all? Why not say that both the
+sense-compelling aspect and the perceptive aspect are part of the
+relation which is given in experience? If Dr. Stoney could only see his
+way to this concession and could be led to adopt scientific monism, which
+is based on relativity, he would still secure all that is valuable in
+his hypothesis, and at the same time get rid of the difficulties which as
+it stands encumber it. But it would no longer be a doctrine of _auta_.
+
+For scientific monism is not a doctrine of _auta_ but a doctrine of
+phenomena—phenomena regarded not only in their physical but also in their
+psychological aspect. Unifying these two diverse aspects, it contends
+that the conscious organism is one and indivisible; that it is a product
+of evolution; that in its physical or material aspect this evolution has
+given rise to the body and brain; that in its psychical or immaterial
+aspect it has given rise to the mind and human consciousness; that these
+two aspects, though distinguishable in analytic thought, are inseparable
+in phenomenal existence; that just as the complex modes of energy of
+the human brain have been evolved from the simpler modes of energy that
+are found throughout organic and inorganic nature, so too the complex
+modes of consciousness of the human mind have been evolved from the
+simpler modes of infra-consciousness[19] that are associated with merely
+organic and inorganic modes of energy. The last clause is admittedly
+hypothetical. But it is submitted that the hypothesis is one that is
+founded on strictly scientific and in no sense metaphysical or autic
+analysis.
+
+                                                          C. LLOYD MORGAN.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[19] See _Mental Evolution_ in _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 2 (Jan. 1892),
+p. 161.
+
+
+
+
+EVOLUTIONARY LOVE.
+
+
+AT FIRST BLUSH. COUNTER-GOSPELS.
+
+Philosophy, when just escaping from its golden pupa-skin, mythology,
+proclaimed the great evolutionary agency of the universe to be Love. Or,
+since this pirate-lingo, English, is poor in such-like words, let us say
+Eros, the exuberance-love. Afterwards, Empedocles set up passionate-love
+and hate as the two coördinate powers of the universe. In some passages,
+kindness is the word. But certainly, in any sense in which it has an
+opposite, to be senior partner of that opposite, is the highest position
+that love can attain. Nevertheless, the ontological gospeller, in whose
+days those views were familiar topics, made the One Supreme Being, by
+whom all things have been made out of nothing, to be cherishing-love.
+What, then, can he say to hate? Never mind, at this time, what the scribe
+of the apocalypse, if he were John, stung at length by persecution into
+a rage unable to distinguish suggestions of evil from visions of heaven,
+and so become the Slanderer of God to men, may have dreamed. The question
+is rather what the sane John thought, or ought to have thought, in order
+to carry out his idea consistently. His statement that God is love
+seems aimed at that saying of Ecclesiastes that we cannot tell whether
+God bears us love or hatred. “Nay,” says John, “we can tell, and very
+simply! We know and have trusted the love which God hath in us. God is
+love.” There is no logic in this, unless it means, that God loves all
+men. In the preceding paragraph, he had said, “God is light and in him
+is no darkness at all.” We are to understand, then, that as darkness
+is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect
+stages of ἀγάπη and ἀγαθόν, love and loveliness. This concords with
+that utterance reported in John’s Gospel: “God sent not the Son into the
+world to judge the world; but that the world should through him be saved.
+He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been
+judged already.... And this is the judgment, that the light is come into
+the world, and that men loved darkness rather than the light.” That is
+to say, God visits no punishment on them; they punish themselves, by
+their natural affinity for the defective. Thus, the love that God is, is
+not a love of which hatred is the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a
+coördinate power; but it is a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect
+stage of it, an Anteros—yea, even needs hatred and hatefulness as its
+object. For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he
+loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that
+which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It
+is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in
+another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing
+can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose
+tenderness _ex vi termini_ must be reserved only for what intrinsically
+is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” This is from “Substance
+and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation.” It is a pity he had
+not filled his pages with things like this, as he was able easily to do,
+instead of scolding at his reader and at people generally, until the
+physics of creation was well-nigh forgot. I must deduct, however, from
+what I just wrote: obviously no genius could make his every sentence as
+sublime as one which discloses for the problem of evil its everlasting
+solution.
+
+The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting
+creations into independency and drawing them into harmony. This seems
+complicated when stated so; but it is fully summed up in the simple
+formula we call the Golden Rule. This does not, of course, say, Do
+everything possible to gratify the egoistic impulses of others, but
+it says, Sacrifice your own perfection to the perfectionment of your
+neighbor. Nor must it for a moment be confounded with the Benthamite, or
+Helvetian, or Beccarian motto, Act for the greatest good of the greatest
+number. Love is not directed to abstractions but to persons; not to
+persons we do not know, nor to numbers of people, but to our own dear
+ones, our family and neighbors. “Our neighbor,” we remember, is one whom
+we live near, not locally perhaps, but in life and feeling.
+
+Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an
+evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love,
+from—I will not say self-_sacrifice_, but from the ardent impulse to
+fulfil another’s highest impulse. Suppose, for example, that I have an
+idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my creature; for as
+shown in last July’s _Monist_, it is a little person. I love it; and I
+will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice
+to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing
+and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we
+draw from John’s gospel is that this is the way mind develops; and as
+for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it
+capable of further evolution. Love, recognising germs of loveliness in
+the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is
+the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay “The Law of
+Mind,” must see that _synechism_ calls for.
+
+The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all
+begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to
+bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians.
+It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political
+economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity
+than has any other science. Well, political economy has its formula of
+redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures
+the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct
+of all the dealings between men, and leads to the _summum bonum_, food
+in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master
+of intelligence. I do not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate
+conclusions of political economy, the scientific character of which I
+fully acknowledge. But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will
+often temporarily encourage generalisations extremely false, as the study
+of physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that
+the great attention paid to economical questions, during our century has
+induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the
+unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy
+which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the
+elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe.
+
+I open a handbook of political economy,—the most typical and middling one
+I have at hand,—and there find some remarks of which I will here make a
+brief analysis. I omit qualifications, sops thrown to Cerberus, phrases
+to placate Christian prejudice, trappings which serve to hide from author
+and reader alike the ugly nakedness of the greed-god. But I have surveyed
+my position. The author enumerates “three motives to human action:
+
+The love of self;
+
+The love of a limited class having common interests and feelings with
+one’s self;
+
+The love of mankind at large.”
+
+Remark, at the outset, what obsequious title is bestowed on greed,—“the
+love of self.” Love! The second motive _is_ love. In place of “a limited
+class” put “certain persons,” and you have a fair description. Taking
+“class” in the old-fashioned sense, a weak kind of love is described. In
+the sequel, there seems to be some haziness as to the delimitation of
+this motive. By the love of mankind at large, the author does not mean
+that deep, subconscious passion that is properly so called; but merely
+public-spirit, perhaps little more than a fidget about pushing ideas. The
+author proceeds to a comparative estimate of the worth of these motives.
+Greed, says he, but using, of course, another word, “is not so great an
+evil as is commonly supposed.... Every man can promote his own interests
+a great deal more effectively than he can promote any one else’s, or than
+any one else can promote his.” Besides, as he remarks on another page,
+the more miserly a man is, the more good he does. The second motive “is
+the most dangerous one to which society is exposed.” Love is all very
+pretty: “no higher or purer source of human happiness exists.” (Ahem!)
+But it is a “source of enduring injury,” and, in short, should be
+overruled by something wiser. What is this wiser motive? We shall see.
+
+As for public spirit, it is rendered nugatory by the “difficulties in
+the way of its effective operation.” For example, it might suggest
+putting checks upon the fecundity of the poor and the vicious; and “no
+measure of repression would be too severe,” in the case of criminals.
+The hint is broad. But unfortunately, you cannot induce legislatures to
+take such measures, owing to the pestiferous “tender sentiments of man
+towards man.” It thus appears, that public-spirit, or Benthamism, is
+not strong enough to be the effective tutor of love, (I am skipping to
+another page,) which must therefore be handed over to “the motives which
+animate men in the pursuit of wealth,” in which alone we can confide, and
+which “are in the highest degree beneficent.”[20] Yes, in the “highest
+degree” without exception are they beneficent to the being upon whom all
+their blessings are poured out, namely, the Self, whose “sole object,”
+says the writer in accumulating wealth is his individual “sustenance and
+enjoyment.” Plainly, the author holds the notion that some other motive
+might be in a higher degree beneficent even for the man’s self to be a
+paradox wanting in good sense. He seeks to gloze and modify his doctrine;
+but he lets the perspicacious reader see what his animating principle
+is; and when, holding the opinions I have repeated, he at the same time
+acknowledges that society could not exist upon a basis of intelligent
+greed alone, he simply pigeonholes himself as one of the eclectics of
+inharmonious opinions. He wants his mammon flavored with a _soupçon_ of
+god.
+
+The economists accuse those to whom the enunciation of their atrocious
+villainies communicates a thrill of horror of being _sentimentalists_. It
+may be so: I willingly confess to having some tincture of sentimentalism
+in me, God be thanked! Ever since the French Revolution brought this
+leaning of thought into ill-repute,—and not altogether undeservedly, I
+must admit, true, beautiful, and good as that great movement was,—it has
+been the tradition to picture sentimentalists as persons incapable of
+logical thought and unwilling to look facts in the eyes. This tradition
+may be classed with the French tradition that an Englishman says _godam_
+at every second sentence, the English tradition that an American talks
+about “Britishers,” and the American tradition that a Frenchman carries
+forms of etiquette to an inconvenient extreme, in short with all those
+traditions which survive simply because the men who use their eyes and
+ears are few and far between. Doubtless some excuse there was for all
+those opinions in days gone by; and sentimentalism, when it was the
+fashionable amusement to spend one’s evenings in a flood of tears over
+a woeful performance on a candle-litten stage, sometimes made itself a
+little ridiculous. But what after all is sentimentalism? It is an _ism_,
+a doctrine, namely, the doctrine that great respect should be paid to
+the natural judgments of the sensible heart. This is what sentimentalism
+precisely is; and I entreat the reader to consider whether to contemn
+is not of all blasphemies the most degrading. Yet the nineteenth
+century has steadily contemned it, because it brought about the Reign
+of Terror. That it did so is true. Still, the whole question is one of
+_how much_. The reign of terror was very bad; but now the Gradgrind
+banner has been this century long flaunting in the face of heaven, with
+an insolence to provoke the very skies to scowl and rumble. Soon a flash
+and quick peal will shake economists quite out of their complacency, too
+late. The twentieth century, in its latter half, shall surely see the
+deluge-tempest burst upon the social order,—to clear upon a world as
+deep in ruin as that greed-philosophy has long plunged it into guilt. No
+post-thermidorian high jinks then!
+
+So a miser is a beneficent power in a community, is he? With the same
+reason precisely, only in a much higher degree, you might pronounce
+the Wall Street sharp to be a good angel, who takes money from
+heedless persons not likely to guard it properly, who wrecks feeble
+enterprises better stopped, and who administers wholesome lessons to
+unwary scientific men, by passing worthless checks upon them,—as you
+did, the other day, to me, my millionaire Master in glomery, when you
+thought you saw your way to using my process without paying for it,
+and of so bequeathing to your children something to boast of their
+father about,—and who by a thousand wiles puts money at the service of
+intelligent greed, in his own person. Bernard Mandeville, in his “Fable
+of the Bees,” maintains that private vices of all descriptions are
+public benefits, and proves it, too, quite as cogently as the economist
+proves his point concerning the miser. He even argues, with no slight
+force, that but for vice civilisation would never have existed. In
+the same spirit, it has been strongly maintained and is to-day widely
+believed that all acts of charity and benevolence, private and public, go
+seriously to degrade the human race.
+
+The “Origin of Species” of Darwin merely extends politico-economical
+views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable life. The
+vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the opinion that the
+true cause of those exquisite and marvellous adaptations of nature for
+which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom is that
+creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to
+have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations
+unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the
+age of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is
+vastly reënforced as a power making for good by the animal’s ruthless
+greed. As Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for
+existence; and he should have added for his motto: Every individual for
+himself, and the Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the
+Mount, expressed a different opinion.
+
+Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes
+from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his
+neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is
+that progress takes place by virtue of every individual’s striving for
+himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever
+he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of
+Greed.
+
+Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could not
+conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession will probably
+shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I
+think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of
+evolution,—so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of
+the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were possible to believe in agapasm
+without believing it warmly, that fact would be an argument against the
+truth of the doctrine. At any rate, since the warmth of feeling exists,
+it should on every account be candidly confessed; especially since it
+creates a liability to one-sidedness on my part against which it behooves
+my readers and me to be severally on our guard.
+
+
+SECOND THOUGHTS. IRENICA.
+
+Let us try to define the logical affinities of the different theories
+of evolution. Natural selection, as conceived by Darwin, is a mode
+of evolution in which the only positive agent of change in the whole
+passage from moner to man is fortuitous variation. To secure advance in
+a definite direction chance has to be seconded by some action that shall
+hinder the propagation of some varieties or stimulate that of others.
+In natural selection, strictly so called, it is the crowding out of the
+weak. In sexual selection, it is the attraction of beauty, mainly.
+
+The “Origin of Species” was published toward the end of the year 1859.
+The preceding years since 1846 had been one of the most productive
+seasons,—or if extended so as to cover the great book we are considering,
+_the_ most productive period of equal length in the entire history of
+science from its beginnings until now. The idea that chance begets order,
+which is one of the corner-stones of modern physics (although Dr. Carus
+considers it “the weakest point in Mr. Peirce’s system,”) was at that
+time put into its clearest light. Quetelet had opened the discussion
+by his “Letters on the Application of Probabilities to the Moral and
+Political Sciences,” a work which deeply impressed the best minds of that
+day, and to which Sir John Herschel had drawn general attention in Great
+Britain. In 1857, the first volume of Buckle’s “History of Civilisation”
+had created a tremendous sensation, owing to the use he made of this same
+idea. Meantime, the “statistical method” had, under that very name, been
+applied with brilliant success to molecular physics. Dr. John Herapath,
+an English chemist, had in 1847 outlined the kinetical theory of gases
+in his “Mathematical Physics”; and the interest the theory excited had
+been refreshed in 1856 by notable memoirs by Clausius and Krönig. In
+the very summer preceding Darwin’s publication, Maxwell had read before
+the British Association the first and most important of his researches
+on this subject. The consequence was that the idea that fortuitous
+events may result in a physical law, and further that this is the way
+in which those laws which appear to conflict with the principle of the
+conservation of energy are to be explained, had taken a strong hold upon
+the minds of all who were abreast of the leaders of thought. By such
+minds, it was inevitable that the “Origin of Species,” whose teaching
+was simply the application of the same principle to the explanation of
+another “non-conservative” action, that of organic development, should
+be hailed and welcomed. The sublime discovery of the conservation of
+energy by Helmholtz in 1847, and that of the mechanical theory of heat
+by Clausius and by Rankine, independently, in 1850, had decidedly
+overawed all those who might have been inclined to sneer at physical
+science. Thereafter a belated poet still harping upon “science peddling
+with the names of things” would fail of his effect. Mechanism was now
+known to be all, or very nearly so. All this time, utilitarianism,—that
+improved substitute for the Gospel,—was in its fullest feather; and was
+a natural ally of an individualistic theory. Dean Mansell’s injudicious
+advocacy had led to mutiny among the bondsmen of Sir William Hamilton,
+and the nominalism of Mill had profited accordingly; and although the
+real science that Darwin was leading men to was sure some day to give a
+death-blow to the sham-science of Mill, yet there were several elements
+of the Darwinian theory which were sure to charm the followers of Mill.
+Another thing: anæsthetics had been in use for thirteen years. Already,
+people’s acquaintance with suffering had dropped off very much; and
+as a consequence, that unlovely hardness by which our times are so
+contrasted with those that immediately preceded them, had already set
+in, and inclined people to relish a ruthless theory. The reader would
+quite mistake the drift of what I am saying if he were to understand me
+as wishing to suggest that any of those things (except perhaps Malthus)
+influenced Darwin himself. What I mean is that his hypothesis, while
+without dispute one of the most ingenious and pretty ever devised, and
+while argued with a wealth of knowledge, a strength of logic, a charm
+of rhetoric, and above all with a certain magnetic genuineness that was
+almost irresistible, did not appear, at first, at all near to being
+proved; and to a sober mind its case looks less hopeful now than it
+did twenty years ago; but the extraordinarily favorable reception it
+met with was plainly owing, in large measure, to its ideas being those
+toward which the age was favorably disposed, especially, because of the
+encouragement it gave to the greed-philosophy.
+
+Diametrically opposed to evolution by chance, are those theories which
+attribute all progress to an inward necessary principle, or other form of
+necessity. Many naturalists have thought that if an egg is destined to
+go through a certain series of embryological transformations, from which
+it is perfectly certain not to deviate, and if in geological time almost
+exactly the same forms appear successively, one replacing another in the
+same order, the strong presumption is that this latter succession was as
+predeterminate and certain to take place as the former. So, Nägeli, for
+instance, conceives that it somehow follows from the first law of motion
+and the peculiar, but unknown, molecular constitution of protoplasm,
+that forms must complicate themselves more and more. Kölliker makes one
+form generate another after a certain maturation has been accomplished.
+Weismann, too, though he calls himself a Darwinian, holds that nothing
+is due to chance, but that all forms are simple mechanical resultants
+of the heredity from two parents.[21] It is very noticeable that all
+these different sectaries seek to import into their science a mechanical
+necessity to which the facts that come under their observation do not
+point. Those geologists who think that the variation of species is due
+to cataclasmic alterations of climate or of the chemical constitution of
+the air and water are also making mechanical necessity chief factor of
+evolution.
+
+Evolution by sporting and evolution by mechanical necessity are
+conceptions warring against one another. A third method, which supersedes
+their strife, lies enwrapped in the theory of Lamarck. According to
+his view, all that distinguishes the highest organic forms from the
+most rudimentary has been brought about by little hypertrophies or
+atrophies which have affected individuals early in their lives, and have
+been transmitted to their offspring. Such a transmission of acquired
+characters is of the general nature of habit-taking, and this is the
+representative and derivative within the physiological domain of the
+law of mind. Its action is essentially dissimilar to that of a physical
+force; and that is the secret of the repugnance of such necessitarians
+as Weismann to admitting its existence. The Lamarckians further suppose
+that although some of the modifications of form so transmitted were
+originally due to mechanical causes, yet the chief factors of their first
+production were the straining of endeavor and the overgrowth superinduced
+by exercise, together with the opposite actions. Now, endeavor, since it
+is directed toward an end, is essentially psychical, even though it be
+sometimes unconscious; and the growth due to exercise, as I argued in
+my last paper, follows a law of a character quite contrary to that of
+mechanics.
+
+Lamarckian evolution is thus evolution by the force of habit.—That
+sentence slipped off my pen while one of those neighbors whose function
+in the social cosmos seems to be that of an Interrupter, was asking me
+a question. Of course, it is nonsense. Habit is mere inertia, a resting
+on one’s oars, not a propulsion. Now it is energetic projaculation
+(lucky there is such a word, or this untried hand might have been put to
+inventing one) by which in the typical instances of Lamarckian evolution
+the new elements of form are first created. Habit, however, forces them
+to take practical shapes, compatible with the structures they affect, and
+in the form of heredity and otherwise, gradually replaces the spontaneous
+energy that sustains them. Thus, habit plays a double part; it serves to
+establish the new features, and also to bring them into harmony with the
+general morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they
+belong. But if the reader will now kindly give himself the trouble of
+turning back a page or two, he will see that this account of Lamarckian
+evolution coincides with the general description of the action of love,
+to which, I suppose, he yielded his assent.
+
+Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the
+continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution takes
+on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can achieve
+almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one’s
+stature, as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by
+merely straining for it, before it is ready to come. We haunt in vain
+the sacred well and throne of Mnemosyne; the deeper workings of the
+spirit take place in their own slow way, without our connivance. Let but
+their bugle sound, and we may then make our effort, sure of an oblation
+for the altar of whatsoever divinity its savor gratifies. Besides this
+inward process, there is the operation of the environment, which goes
+to break up habits destined to be broken up and so to render the mind
+lively. Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit
+makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens
+the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is
+the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and
+sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open,
+but slumbering when it is closed. Few psychologists have perceived how
+fundamental a fact this is. A portion of mind abundantly commissured to
+other portions works almost mechanically. It sinks to the condition of
+a railway junction. But a portion of mind almost isolated, a spiritual
+peninsula, or _cul-de-sac_, is like a railway terminus. Now mental
+commissures are habits. Where they abound, originality is not needed and
+is not found; but where they are in defect, spontaneity is set free.
+Thus, the first step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting
+of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play. As to
+growth by exercise, I have already shown, in discussing “Man’s Glassy
+Essence,” in last October’s _Monist_, what its _modus operandi_ must be
+conceived to be, at least, until a second equally definite hypothesis
+shall have been offered. Namely, it consists of the flying asunder of
+molecules, and the reparation of the parts by new matter. It is, thus, a
+sort of reproduction. It takes place only during exercise, because the
+activity of protoplasm consists in the molecular disturbance which is
+its necessary condition. Growth by exercise takes place also in the mind.
+Indeed, that is what it is to _learn_. But the most perfect illustration
+is the development of a philosophical idea by being put into practice.
+The conception which appeared, at first, as unitary, splits up into
+special cases; and into each of these new thought must enter to make a
+practicable idea. This new thought, however, follows pretty closely the
+model of the parent conception; and thus a homogeneous development takes
+place. The parallel between this and the course of molecular occurrences
+is apparent. Patient attention will be able to trace all these elements
+in the transaction called learning.
+
+Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us; evolution by
+fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution
+by creative love. We may term them _tychastic_ evolution, or _tychasm_,
+_anancastic_ evolution, or _anancasm_, and _agapastic_ evolution,
+or _agapasm_. The doctrines which represent these as severally of
+principal importance, we may term _tychasticism_, _anancasticism_, and
+_agapasticism_. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute
+chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love, are severally
+operative in the cosmos, may receive the names of _tychism_, _anancism_,
+and _agapism_.
+
+All three modes of evolution are composed of the same general elements.
+Agapasm exhibits them the most clearly. The good result is here brought
+to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon
+the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch
+the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general
+purpose. In order to express the relation that tychasm and anancasm bear
+to agapasm, let me borrow a word from geometry. An ellipse crossed by a
+straight line is a sort of cubic curve; for a cubic is a curve which is
+cut thrice by a straight line; now a straight line might cut the ellipse
+twice and its associated straight line a third time. Still the ellipse
+with the straight line across it would not have the characteristics of a
+cubic. It would have, for instance, no contrary flexure, which no true
+cubic wants; and it would have two nodes, which no true cubic has. The
+geometers say that it is a _degenerate_ cubic. Just so, tychasm and
+anancasm are degenerate forms of agapasm.
+
+Men who seek to reconcile the Darwinian idea with Christianity will
+remark that tychastic evolution, like the agapastic, depends upon a
+reproductive creation, the forms preserved being those that use the
+spontaneity conferred upon them in such wise as to be drawn into harmony
+with their original, quite after the Christian scheme. Very good! This
+only shows that just as love cannot have a contrary, but must embrace
+what is most opposed to it, as a degenerate case of it, so tychasm is
+a kind of agapasm. Only, in the tychastic evolution progress is solely
+owing to the distribution of the napkin-hidden talent of the rejected
+servant among those not rejected, just as ruined gamesters leave their
+money on the table to make those not yet ruined so much the richer.
+It makes the felicity of the lambs just the damnation of the goats,
+transposed to the other side of the equation. In genuine agapasm, on the
+other hand, advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among
+the created springing from continuity of mind. This is the idea which
+tychasticism knows not how to manage.
+
+The anancasticist might here interpose, claiming that the mode of
+evolution for which he contends agrees with agapasm at the point at which
+tychasm departs from it. For it makes development go through certain
+phases, having its inevitable ebbs and flows, yet tending on the whole to
+a foreordained perfection. Bare existence by this its destiny betrays an
+intrinsic affinity for the good. Herein, it must be admitted, anancasm
+shows itself to be in a broad acception a species of agapasm. Some forms
+of it might easily be mistaken for the genuine agapasm. The Hegelian
+philosophy is such an anancasticism. With its revelatory religion, with
+its synechism (however imperfectly set forth), with its “reflection,”
+the whole idea of the theory is superb, almost sublime. Yet, after all,
+living freedom is practically omitted from its method. The whole movement
+is that of a vast engine, impelled by a _vis a tergo_, with a blind and
+mysterious fate of arriving at a lofty goal. I mean that such an engine
+it _would_ be, if it really worked; but in point of fact, it is a Keely
+motor. Grant that it really acts as it professes to act, and there is
+nothing to do but accept the philosophy. But never was there seen such an
+example of a long chain of reasoning,—shall I say with a flaw in every
+link?—no, with every link a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a
+dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard model of a philosophy that in reality
+does not exist. If we use the one precious thing it contains, the idea
+of it, introducing the tychism which the arbitrariness of its every step
+suggests, and make that the support of a vital freedom which is the
+breath of the spirit of love, we may be able to produce that genuine
+agapasticism, at which Hegel was aiming.
+
+
+A THIRD ASPECT. DISCRIMINATION.
+
+In the very nature of things, the line of demarcation between the three
+modes of evolution is not perfectly sharp. That does not prevent its
+being quite real; perhaps it is rather a mark of its reality. There is
+in the nature of things no sharp line of demarcation between the three
+fundamental colors, red, green, and violet. But for all that they are
+really different. The main question is whether three radically different
+evolutionary elements have been operative; and the second question is
+what are the most striking characteristics of whatever elements have been
+operative.
+
+I propose to devote a few pages to a very slight examination of these
+questions in their relation to the historical development of human
+thought. I first formulate for the reader’s convenience the briefest
+possible definitions of the three conceivable modes of development
+of thought, distinguishing also two varieties of anancasm and three
+of agapasm. The tychastic development of thought, then, will consist
+in slight departures from habitual ideas in different directions
+indifferently, quite purposeless and quite unconstrained whether by
+outward circumstances or by force of logic, these new departures being
+followed by unforeseen results which tend to fix some of them as habits
+more than others. The anancastic development of thought will consist
+of new ideas adopted without foreseeing whither they tend, but having
+a character determined by causes either external to the mind, such
+as changed circumstances of life, or internal to the mind as logical
+developments of ideas already accepted, such as generalisations. The
+agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental
+tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly
+by the mere force of circumstances or of logic, as in anancasm, but by
+an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined
+before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by
+virtue of the continuity of mind; and this mental tendency may be of
+three varieties, as follows. First, it may affect a whole people or
+community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated
+to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with
+the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable
+of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps
+of consciously apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person
+directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or
+to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his
+neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of
+thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what
+is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently of his human
+affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even
+before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been
+well called the _divination_ of genius; for it is due to the continuity
+between the man’s mind and the Most High.
+
+Let us next consider by means of what tests we can discriminate between
+these different categories of evolution. No absolute criterion is
+possible in the nature of things, since in the nature of things there is
+no sharp line of demarcation between the different classes. Nevertheless,
+quantitative symptoms may be found by which a sagacious and sympathetic
+judge of human nature may be able to estimate the approximate proportions
+in which the different kinds of influence are commingled.
+
+So far as the historical evolution of human thought has been tychastic,
+it should have proceeded by insensible or minute steps; for such is the
+nature of chances when so multiplied as to show phenomena of regularity.
+For example, assume that of the native-born white adult males of the
+United States in 1880, one fourth part were below 5 feet 4 inches in
+stature and one fourth part above 5 feet 8 inches. Then by the principles
+of probability, among the whole population, we should expect
+
+          216 under 4 feet 6 inches,         216 above 6 feet 6 inches.
+           48  ”    4   ”  5   ”              48   ”   6  ”   7   ”
+            9  ”    4   ”  4   ”               9   ”   6  ”   8   ”
+  less than 2  ”    4   ”  3   ”     less than 2   ”   6  ”   9   ”
+
+I set down these figures to show how insignificantly few are the cases in
+which anything very far out of the common run presents itself by chance.
+Though the stature of only every second man is included within the four
+inches between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 8 inches, yet if this interval
+be extended by thrice four inches above and below, it will embrace all
+our 8 millions odd of native-born adult white males (of 1880), except
+only 9 taller and 9 shorter.
+
+The test of minute variation, if _not_ satisfied, absolutely negatives
+tychasm. If it _is_ satisfied, we shall find that it negatives anancasm
+but not agapasm. We want a positive test, satisfied by tychasm, only. Now
+wherever we find men’s thought taking by imperceptible degrees a turn
+contrary to the purposes which animate them, in spite of their highest
+impulses, there, we may safely conclude, there has been a tychastic
+action.
+
+Students of the history of mind there be of an erudition to fill an
+imperfect scholar like me with envy edulcorated by joyous admiration,
+who maintain that ideas when just started are and can be little more
+than freaks, since they cannot yet have been critically examined, and
+further that everywhere and at all times progress has been so gradual
+that it is difficult to make out distinctly what original step any given
+man has taken. It would follow that tychasm has been the sole method of
+intellectual development. I have to confess I cannot read history so; I
+cannot help thinking that while tychasm has sometimes been operative, at
+others great steps covering nearly the same ground and made by different
+men independently, have been mistaken for a succession of small steps,
+and further that students have been reluctant to admit a real entitative
+“spirit” of an age or of a people, under the mistaken and unscrutinised
+impression that they should thus be opening the door to wild and
+unnatural hypotheses. I find, on the contrary, that, however it may
+be with the education of individual minds, the historical development
+of thought has seldom been of a tychastic nature, and exclusively in
+backward and barbarising movements. I desire to speak with the extreme
+modesty which befits a student of logic who is required to survey so
+very wide a field of human thought that he can cover it only by a
+reconnaisance, to which only the greatest skill and most adroit methods
+can impart any value at all; but, after all, I can only express my own
+opinions and not those of anybody else; and in my humble judgment, the
+largest example of tychasm is afforded by the history of Christianity,
+from about its establishment by Constantine, to, say, the time of the
+Irish monasteries, an era or eon of about 500 years. Undoubtedly the
+external circumstance which more than all others at first inclined men
+to accept Christianity in its loveliness and tenderness, was the fearful
+extent to which society was broken up into units by the unmitigated greed
+and hard-heartedness into which the Romans had seduced the world. And yet
+it was that very same fact, more than any other external circumstance,
+that fostered that bitterness against the wicked world of which the
+primitive Gospel of Mark contains not a single trace. At least, I do
+not detect it in the remark about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,
+where nothing is said about vengeance, nor even in that speech where the
+closing lines of Isaiah are quoted, about the worm and the fire that
+feed upon the “carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me.”
+But little by little the bitterness increases until in the last book
+of the New Testament, its poor distracted author represents that all
+the time Christ was talking about having come to save the world, the
+secret design was to catch the entire human race, with the exception of
+a paltry 144000, and souse them all in brimstone lake, and as the smoke
+of their torment went up for ever and ever, to turn and remark, “There
+is no curse any more.” Would it be an insensible smirk or a fiendish
+grin that should accompany such an utterance? I wish I could believe
+St. John did not write it; but it is his gospel which tells about the
+“resurrection unto condemnation,”—that is of men’s being resuscitated
+just for the sake of torturing them;—and, at any rate, the Revelation is
+a very ancient composition. One can understand that the early Christians
+were like men trying with all their might to climb a steep declivity of
+smooth wet clay; the deepest and truest element of their life, animating
+both heart and head, was universal-love; but they were continually, and
+against their wills, slipping into a party spirit, every slip serving
+as a precedent, in a fashion but too familiar to every man. This party
+feeling insensibly grew until by about A. D. 330 the lustre of the
+pristine integrity that in St. Mark reflects the white spirit of light
+was so far tarnished that Eusebius, (the Jared Sparks of that day,) in
+the preface to his History, could announce his intention of exaggerating
+everything that tended to the glory of the church and of suppressing
+whatever might disgrace it. His Latin contemporary Lactantius is worse,
+still; and so the darkling went on increasing until before the end of the
+century the great library of Alexandria was destroyed by Theophilus,[22]
+until Gregory the Great, two centuries later, burnt the great library of
+Rome, proclaiming that “Ignorance is the mother of devotion,” (which is
+true, just as oppression and injustice is the mother of spirituality,)
+until a sober description of the state of the church would be a thing
+our not too nice newspapers would treat as “unfit for publication.” All
+this movement is shown by the application of the test given above to
+have been tychastic. Another very much like it on a small scale, only a
+hundred times swifter, for the study of which there are documents by the
+library-full, is to be found in the history of the French Revolution.
+
+Anancastic evolution advances by successive strides with pauses between.
+The reason is that in this process a habit of thought having been
+overthrown is supplanted by the next strongest. Now this next strongest
+is sure to be widely disparate from the first, and as often as not
+is its direct contrary. It reminds one of our old rule of making the
+second candidate vice-president. This character, therefore, clearly
+distinguishes anancasm from tychasm. The character which distinguishes
+it from agapasm is its purposelessness. But external and internal
+anancasm have to be examined separately. Development under the pressure
+of external circumstances, or cataclasmine evolution, is in most cases
+unmistakable enough. It has numberless degrees of intensity, from the
+brute force, the plain war, which has more than once turned the current
+of the world’s thought, down to the hard fact of evidence, or what has
+been taken for it, which has been known to convince men by hordes. The
+only hesitation that can subsist in the presence of such a history is
+a quantitative one. Never are external influences the only ones which
+affect the mind, and therefore it must be a matter of judgment for which
+it would scarcely be worth while to attempt to set rules, whether a
+given movement is to be regarded as principally governed from without
+or not. In the rise of medieval thought, I mean scholasticism and
+the synchronistic art developments, undoubtedly the crusades and the
+discovery of the writings of Aristotle were powerful influences. The
+development of scholasticism from Roscellin to Albertus Magnus closely
+follows the successive steps in the knowledge of Aristotle. Prantl
+thinks that that is the whole story, and few men have thumbed more
+books than Carl Prantl. He has done good solid work, notwithstanding
+his slap-dash judgments. But we shall never make so much as a good
+beginning of comprehending scholasticism until the whole has been
+systematically explored and digested by a company of students regularly
+organised and held under rule for that purpose. But as for the period we
+are now specially considering, that which synchronised the Romanesque
+architecture, the literature is easily mastered. It does not quite
+justify Prantl’s dicta as to the slavish dependence of these authors
+upon their authorities. Moreover, they kept a definite purpose steadily
+before their minds, throughout all their studies. I am, therefore, unable
+to offer this period of scholasticism as an example of pure external
+anancasm, which seems to be the fluorine of the intellectual elements.
+Perhaps the recent Japanese reception of western ideas is the purest
+instance of it in history. Yet in combination with other elements,
+nothing is commoner. If the development of ideas under the influence of
+the study of external facts be considered as external anancasm,—it is on
+the border between the external and the internal forms,—it is, of course,
+the principal thing in modern learning. But Whewell, whose masterly
+comprehension of the history of science critics have been too ignorant
+properly to appreciate, clearly shows that it is far from being the
+overwhelmingly preponderant influence, even there.
+
+Internal anancasm, or logical groping, which advances upon a predestined
+line without being able to foresee whither it is to be carried nor to
+steer its course, this is the rule of development of philosophy. Hegel
+first made the world understand this; and he seeks to make logic not
+merely the subjective guide and monitor of thought, which was all it had
+been ambitioning before, but to be the very main-spring of thinking,
+and not merely of individual thinking but of discussion, of the history
+of the development of thought, of all history, of all development.
+This involves a positive, clearly demonstrable error. Let the logic in
+question be of whatever kind it may, a logic of necessary inference or
+a logic of probable inference, (the theory might perhaps be shaped to
+fit either,) in any case it supposes that logic is sufficient of itself
+to determine what conclusion follows from given premises; for unless it
+will do so much, it will not suffice to explain why an individual train
+of reasoning should take just the course it does take, to say nothing of
+other kinds of development. It thus supposes that from given premises,
+only one conclusion can logically be drawn, and that there is no scope
+at all for free choice. That from given premises only one conclusion can
+logically be drawn, is one of the false notions which have come from
+logicians’ confining their attention to that Nantucket of thought, the
+logic of non-relative terms. In the logic of relatives, it does not hold
+good.
+
+One remark occurs to me. If the evolution of history is in considerable
+part of the nature of internal anancasm, it resembles the development of
+individual men; and just as 33 years is a rough but natural unit of time
+for individuals, being the average age at which man has issue, so there
+should be an approximate period at the end of which one great historical
+movement ought to be likely to be supplanted by another. Let us see if we
+can make out anything of the kind. Take the governmental development of
+Rome as being sufficiently long and set down the principal dates.
+
+  B. C.  753, Foundation of Rome.
+  B. C.  510, Expulsion of the Tarquins.
+  B. C.   27, Octavius assumes title Augustus.
+  A. D.  476, End of Western Empire.
+  A. D.  962, Holy Roman Empire.
+  A. D. 1453, Fall of Constantinople.
+
+The last event was one of the most significant in history, especially
+for Italy. The intervals are 243, 483, 502, 486, 491 years. All are
+rather curiously near equal, except the first which is half the others.
+Successive reigns of kings would not commonly be so near equal. Let us
+set down a few dates in the history of thought.
+
+  B. C.  585, Eclipse of Thales. Beginning of Greek philosophy.
+  A. D.   30, The crucifixion.
+  A. D.  529, Closing of Athenian schools. End of Greek philosophy.
+  A. D. 1125, (Approximate) Rise of the Universities of Bologna and Paris.
+  A. D. 1543, Publication of the “De Revolutionibus” of Copernicus.
+                Beginning of Modern Science.
+
+The intervals are 615, 499, 596, 418, years. In the history of
+metaphysics, we may take the following:
+
+  B. C.  322, Death of Aristotle.
+  A. D. 1274, Death of Aquinas.
+  A. D. 1804, Death of Kant.
+
+The intervals are 1595 and 530 years. The former is about thrice the
+latter.
+
+From these figures, no conclusion can fairly be drawn. At the same time,
+they suggest that perhaps there may be a rough natural era of about 500
+years. Should there be any independent evidence of this, the intervals
+noticed may gain some significance.
+
+The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be
+distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the
+development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic
+comprehension and recognition of it, by virtue of the continuity of
+thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of thought
+has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my paper on the
+“Law of Mind” in _The Monist_ of last July. Even if those arguments are
+not quite convincing in themselves, yet if they are reënforced by an
+apparent agapasm in the history of thought, the two propositions will
+lend one another mutual aid. The reader will, I trust, be too well
+grounded in logic to mistake such mutual support for a vicious circle in
+reasoning. If it could be shown directly that there is such an entity
+as the “spirit of an age” or of a people, and that mere individual
+intelligence will not account for all the phenomena, this would be proof
+enough at once of agapasticism and of synechism. I must acknowledge
+that I am unable to produce a cogent demonstration of this; but I am, I
+believe, able to adduce such arguments as will serve to confirm those
+which have been drawn from other facts. I believe that all the greatest
+achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals;
+and I find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic
+considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements,
+direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their
+occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of individuals
+of no extraordinary general powers. The pointed Gothic architecture in
+several of its developments appears to me to be of such a character. All
+attempts to imitate it by modern architects of the greatest learning and
+genius appear flat and tame, and are felt by their authors to be so.
+Yet at the time the style was living, there was quite an abundance of
+men capable of producing works of this kind of gigantic sublimity and
+power. In more than one case, extant documents show that the cathedral
+chapters, in the selection of architects, treated high artistic genius as
+a secondary consideration, as if there were no lack of persons able to
+supply that; and the results justify their confidence. Were individuals
+in general, then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high
+intellect? Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.
+
+How many times have men now in middle life seen great discoveries made
+independently and almost simultaneously! The first instance I remember
+was the prediction of a planet exterior to Uranus by Leverrier and Adams.
+One hardly knows to whom the principle of the conservation of energy
+ought to be attributed, although it may reasonably be considered as the
+greatest discovery science has ever made. The mechanical theory of
+heat was set forth by Rankine and by Clausius during the same month of
+February, 1850; and there are eminent men who attribute this great step
+to Thomson.[23] The kinetical theory of gases, after being started by
+John Bernoulli and long buried in oblivion, was reinvented and applied to
+the explanation not merely of the laws of Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro,
+but also of diffusion and viscosity, by at least three modern physicists
+separately. It is well known that the doctrine of natural selection was
+presented by Wallace and by Darwin at the same meeting of the British
+Association; and Darwin in his “Historical Sketch” prefixed to the
+later editions of his book shows that both were anticipated by obscure
+forerunners. The method of spectrum analysis was claimed for Swan as well
+as for Kirchhoff, and there were others who perhaps had still better
+claims. The authorship of the Periodical Law of the Chemical Elements is
+disputed between a Russian, a German, and an Englishman; although there
+is no room for doubt that the principal merit belongs to the first. These
+are nearly all the greatest discoveries of our times. It is the same with
+the inventions. It may not be surprising that the telegraph should have
+been independently made by several inventors, because it was an easy
+corollary from scientific facts well made out before. But it was not so
+with the telephone and other inventions. Ether, the first anæsthetic,
+was introduced independently by three different New England physicians.
+Now ether had been a common article for a century. It had been in one of
+the pharmacopœias three centuries before. It is quite incredible that
+its anæsthetic property should not have been known; it was known. It had
+probably passed from mouth to ear as a secret from the days of Basil
+Valentine; but for long it had been a secret of the Punchinello kind. In
+New England, for many years, boys had used it for amusement. Why then had
+it not been put to its serious use? No reason can be given, except that
+the motive to do so was not strong enough. The motives to doing so could
+only have been desire for gain and philanthropy. About 1846, the date
+of the introduction, philanthropy was undoubtedly in an unusually active
+condition. That sensibility, or sentimentalism, which had been introduced
+in the previous century, had undergone a ripening process, in consequence
+of which, though now less intense than it had previously been, it was
+more likely to influence unreflecting people than it had ever been. All
+three of the ether-claimants had probably been influenced by the desire
+for gain; but nevertheless they were certainly not insensible to the
+agapic influences.
+
+I doubt if any of the great discoveries ought, properly, to be considered
+as altogether individual achievements; and I think many will share this
+doubt. Yet, if not, what an argument for the continuity of mind, and for
+agapasticism is here! I do not wish to be very strenuous. If thinkers
+will only be persuaded to lay aside their prejudices and apply themselves
+to studying the evidences of this doctrine, I shall be fully content to
+await the final decision.
+
+                                                        CHARLES S. PEIRCE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[20] How can a writer have any respect for science, as such, who is
+capable of confounding with the scientific propositions of political
+economy, which have nothing to say concerning what is “beneficent,” such
+brummagem generalisations as this?
+
+[21] I am happy to find that Dr. Carus, too, ranks Weismann among the
+opponents of Darwin, notwithstanding his flying that flag.
+
+[22] See _Draper’s History of Intellectual Development_, chap. x.
+
+[23] Thomson, himself, in his article _Heat_ in the _Encyclopedia
+Britannica_, never once mentions the name of Clausius.
+
+
+
+
+RENAN.
+
+A DISCOURSE GIVEN AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, LONDON, OCTOBER, 9, 1892.
+
+
+“Be calm and resigned,” said Renan to his weeping wife. “We undergo
+the laws of that nature of which we are manifestations. We perish, we
+disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and the march of time goes on for
+ever.”
+
+It is hard to-day to respond to these last words of the dying
+philosopher. Heaven and earth remain, but they seem cold and grey when
+the great heart in which they were united has ceased to beat, and when
+our sweet English singer has gone silent. By the passing away of the two
+highest-mounted minds in Europe this society is especially bereaved. The
+earliest welcome given to the genius of young Tennyson came from the pen
+of William Johnston Fox, the first Minister of this Chapel; here has his
+spiritual pilgrimage been followed, and its songs here sung as hymns.
+But for their magnitude Tennyson and Renan might have been considered
+together. They were children of the same spiritual epoch; the son of the
+Catholic Church, and the English Rector’s son, were fellow-pilgrims on
+the painful road of scepticism; they encountered the same phantoms, were
+attended by the same mighty shades, and found no altar but such as their
+own genius could raise and their glowing hearts kindle in the wilderness
+of doubt and denial. Alike they distrusted democracy, and dreamed of the
+ideal monarch,—as of Arthur, “flower of kings,” whom ancient legends of
+Britain and Brittany said would some day return to lead up the Golden
+Year. Renan loved to tell the story of how Tennyson, roaming in Brittany,
+stopped at an inn in Lannier, birthplace of Renan’s mother. In the
+morning the poet demanded his account, but the hostess said, “There is
+nothing to pay, Monsieur. It is you who have sung of our King Arthur.”
+
+But the people have a greatness of their own. They enshrine Tennyson
+in Westminster Abbey, Renan in the Pantheon. The career of Renan is a
+triumph of republican France. Under the Empire he was deprived of his
+professorship, and of his office in the Imperial Library, for writing the
+“Life of Jesus.” But the Republic made him President of the College of
+France, gave him every honor, in life as in death. The national homage to
+that ex-priest, that outspoken rationalist, who flattered not the masses
+nor fawned on power, is a high water-mark of civilisation. For it marks
+the rise of a steady tide of liberty, and not the mere leap of waves
+under some tempest of momentary emotion. The great fact is that this
+unique heretic, thinker, and scholar, has been able, without compromising
+his independence, without help of any sect or school, to live his life,
+think his thought, and round out his life-work with completeness, on the
+scene of a thousand martyrdoms.
+
+In Renan’s “Feuilles Détachées,” which appeared last spring but is not
+yet translated, there are outbursts of gratitude to his time, which,
+he says, has been good to him, and pardoned many faults. He had just
+finished, he says, his “History of the People of Israel”—“the serious
+work of my life.”
+
+    “The bridge which it remained to me to build between Judaism
+    and Christianism is built.... In the ‘Life of Jesus’ I tried
+    to exhibit the majestic growth of the Galilean tree from the
+    stock of its roots to the summit, where sing the birds of
+    heaven. In the volume just finished I have sought to make
+    known the subsoil in which shot the roots of Jesus. Thus my
+    principal duty is accomplished. At the Academy the work on the
+    Rabbins also nears conclusion, and the _Corpus Inscriptionum
+    Semiticorum_ is in excellent hands. So that now, having paid
+    all my debts, I am free enough to amuse myself a little,
+    and without scruples to indulge myself with the pleasure of
+    gathering these leaves, often light enough.”
+
+So radiant was the author, at sixty-nine, having achieved the main
+schemes of a life which, at forty, was threatened with ruin by
+intolerance. Of course it was but a small part of what he would fain have
+accomplished. Last year (September 11) there was a festival, in the
+Island of Bréhat, where Renan was the chief speaker. In the course of his
+address he said:
+
+    “Every year I used to come hither with my mother to visit
+    my aunt Périne, who loved me much, for she thought me like
+    my father. Here on your rocks, and in your paths, I formed
+    plans and dreamed dreams, of which I have realised a third
+    or a quarter. That is much; I consider myself fortunate; I
+    hold myself among the privileged ones of life. I have been
+    more sad than now, for I feared I might die young (misfortune
+    notably not arrived) and never produce what was in my mind.
+    Oh certainly, could I live a long time yet, I would know what
+    to do. I have schemes of work for three or four lives. I
+    would write a history of the French Revolution, showing it an
+    attack of fever, grand, strange, horrible, and sublime; the
+    foundation, let us hope of something better. I would compose
+    a history of Athens, almost day by day; also a history of
+    science and freethought, telling by what steps man has come
+    to know something of how the world is made; I would write a
+    history of Brittany in six volumes. I would study Chinese,
+    and review critically all the problems of Chinese history and
+    literature. Of all that I would make nothing. There is a crowd
+    of things I wish to know and shall never know. But why reproach
+    nature for refusing me? Let us recognise what she has given
+    us. I have traversed the world at an interesting moment in its
+    development, and, after all, have seen enough. After my time
+    humanity will do surprising things: I can rest content during
+    eternity.”
+
+The happiness of this venerable author, conscious that his life is
+closing, his work ended,—a happiness not derived from any hope of future
+reward, or even existence,—is a salient testimony of our time. In one of
+these recent addresses Renan says: “Let us die calmly, in the communion
+of humanity, the religion of the future.” The dying Voltaire was fed with
+a wafer, even while he ridiculed it. Renan partakes the communion of
+humanity, the religion of the future. It may appear cold comfort to the
+superstitious, for they comprehend not that to such a man the communion
+of humanity implies an eternal life.
+
+In one sense Renan lived not quite threescore years and ten; in another
+he lived ages on ages. By his mastery of Eastern and Oriental languages
+and literatures, by his studies of ancient and modern systems, he had
+familiarly dwelt among primitive tribes, with them set up their sacred
+dolmens, knelt at their altars, travelled with their migrations in India,
+Persia, Egypt, Syria, shared their pilgrimages from lower to higher
+beliefs, listened to their prophets, visited the home of Mary and
+Joseph, walked with the disciples, conversed with Jesus, witnessed the
+crucifixion, journeyed through the middle ages, reached the Renaissance,
+passed through Protestantism, gathered every spiritual flower of the
+nineteenth century. Such long experience of the past, such knowledge
+of the attractions of humanity,—predicting its fulfilments,—carry the
+thinker equally far into the future. Knowing the angles of convergence in
+time’s rising pyramid, he can calculate the apex, and look down from it.
+He is able to rejoice in realisations of ideals now mere tendencies. His
+immortality is present. Such to Renan meant that communion of humanity,
+into which he entered by patient studies, and by the devotion of his life
+to the spiritual essence of the world. And this vision sustained him in
+his last hour.
+
+And let me here say, that Renan’s optimism was not based in any belief
+in a superhuman providence, or any dynamic or compulsory destiny in
+nature. It was his faith in the heart and brain of man. In his last work
+he reminds youth that their efforts at new abstractions and theologies
+are idle: the new notions will follow the old into extinction. “Dear
+children,” he says—
+
+    “Dear children, it is useless to give yourself so much
+    headache to reach only a change of error. Let us die calm,
+    in the communion of humanity, the religion of the future.
+    The existence of the world is assured for a long time. The
+    future of science is guaranteed, for in the great scientific
+    book everything adds itself and nothing is lost. Error is not
+    deep; no error lasts long. Be tranquil. Before a thousand
+    years, let us hope, the earth will find means to supply its
+    exhausted coal, and, in some degree, its diminished virtue. The
+    resources of humanity are infinite. Eternal works accomplish
+    themselves without loss to the fountain of living forces, ever
+    rising again to the surface. Science, above all, will continue
+    to astonish us by its revelations, substituting the infinite
+    of time and space for a poor creationism that can no longer
+    satisfy the imagination of a child. Religion also is true to
+    the infinite. When God shall be complete, he will be just. I am
+    convinced that virtue will find itself one day clearly to have
+    been the better part. The merit is in affirming duty against
+    the apparent evidences. [As for the future] denying not,
+    affirming not, let us hope. Let us keep a place at our funerals
+    for the music and the incense.”
+
+It will be seen that Renan’s deity is the brother of man’s divinity.
+God is as dependent on man as man on God. Natural evil is God’s
+incompleteness: when man is complete God will be complete: there will be
+no more injustice.
+
+But I must warn you that while this is the way in which Renan impresses
+me, he is not a man to be caught or held in any one theory. He is the
+many-sided man of our time. When I heard his lectures in his college, two
+years ago,—his French was so clear and expressive that even a limping
+listener could follow him tolerably,—he impressed me as a sort of Buddha.
+Buddha is supposed by some to have got his large form by sitting so long
+in contemplation, by others his size is regarded as a protest against
+the meagreness of ill-fed ascetics. The unfurrowed serenity of Buddha’s
+face, his infantine smile, were those of Renan, also the remembered music
+of his voice. This association has been extended to Renan’s spiritual
+nature by a letter of his to a friend, in his “Feuilles Détachées.” He
+is fascinated by the legends of Buddha and Krishna which describe them
+as multiplying themselves. When Buddha was born into this world, ten
+thousand women entreated to be his nurses, and Buddha multiplied himself
+into ten thousand babies. Each woman believed that she alone had nursed
+the true Buddha. In the legend of the god Krishna, he first appeared to
+some shepherdesses who were dancing. The beautiful god multiplied himself
+into as many forms as there were maidens, so that each believed, that she
+alone had danced with Krishna, and through life kept her heart sacred to
+him. Writing of these legends, Renan says:
+
+    “The ideal loses nothing by dividing itself: it is entire
+    in each of its parts. We live that part of Krishna which we
+    assimilate according to our genius. The ideal is for all
+    partakers, like morsels modified to each taste. Each creates
+    his divine dancer. One refinement I would introduce into
+    the legend of Krishna, should I ever make it into a drama,
+    or, better, a philosophic ballet: at the time when the
+    shepherdesses believed they were singly dancing with Krishna,
+    he should find that they were in reality dancing with different
+    Krishnas. Each had made her Krishna to her fancy, and when
+    they came to describe to each other their heavenly lover, they
+    should find their visions in nowise alike; and nevertheless to
+    each it was always Krishna.”
+
+The legend which thus charmed Renan has many correspondences in religious
+history; in Christianity, for instance, where we to-day find a hundred
+and fifty sects, each believing that it alone has the true Christ for
+partner. But it applies to all great personalities, and to all spiritual
+influences. The finest spirits frame no systems, found no schools. They
+are akin to the sun and rain which nourish and paint innumerable and
+diverse growths. It was so with Emerson. Dean Stanley said that he heard
+many different preachers in America, but their sermons were generally
+by Emerson. It was preëminently the case with Renan. The Catholic, the
+Protestant, the idealist, the sceptic, the man of the world, the mystic,
+the conservative, the radical, provided they are unsophisticated like
+the shepherdesses, not champions of some sect or party, find that Renan
+has spoken better for them than they can for themselves; he knows their
+secret heart, is their partner by unbounded sympathies. Yet it is always
+the same Renan, full and entire in each and all of his manifestations.
+
+Some time ago, when his friend Littré, the Positivist, was buried by his
+family with Catholic rites, the aspersoir passed round the grave, and
+came to Renan, who, like the rest, sprinkled holy water on the coffin.
+There were cries of “Shame” among the freethinkers present; but really it
+was the act of a man less sectarian than themselves. The same tenderness
+that could not wound the family parting for ever from their beloved, is
+visible in the gentleness with which he treats old beliefs, when it is
+a question of affection or sentiment, not of dogma and authority. They
+have died out of his mind utterly; he sees the creeds already in their
+graves; he no longer fears them, but is glad to soothe those who cling
+to their lifeless forms by speaking kindly of their virtues in the past.
+His “Life of Jesus” is, in large part, a wreath of immortelles laid on
+the tomb of a faith to him utterly dead,—that is, faith in a supernatural
+Christ. He once told me of a little island on the coast of his native
+Brittany, from which some medieval saint was supposed to have driven
+monstrous serpents, or worms. To that island the peasants still repair
+to get a little of the soil to use as a—vermifuge. To similarly small
+size had shrunk, in Renan’s view, the greatest dogmas and superstitions
+of Christendom. Others might still compliment them with fear and wrath,
+but Renan was tender to them because of their smallness. He was endlessly
+good-natured with his ignorant opponents, from whom he often received
+warning letters. Of one who wrote him simply the words, _Remember, there
+is a Hell_, he said that this monitor did not terrify him as much as he
+may have supposed. He (Renan) would be rather glad to know for certain
+that there was beyond the grave even a hell. And if he should go there
+he felt certain that he would be able to address to the deity such
+subtle arguments to prove that he ought not to remain there, but to be
+transferred to paradise; (only he feared his exhorter’s paradise would be
+very dull,) that he would presently be released.
+
+One purpose of the “Life of Jesus” has been mentioned, but that work had
+also another and a higher aim. With a love like that of Mary Magdalene,
+in whose rapt vision Jesus rose from the tomb, to be transformed into
+a supernatural Christ, Renan sought to raise out of the grave of that
+supernatural Christ the human Jesus. He had travelled through Palestine,
+visited every spot associated with the great teacher, and drew the most
+realistic portraiture he could of the parents, home, friends, disciples,
+and daily life of Jesus. The outcry against that book was a confession
+by theology of its utter loss of the human personality of Jesus. There
+had been a time when the religious heart loved to dwell on the sweet
+humanities of Jesus. In the seventeenth century the poet, Thomas Dekker,
+wrote:
+
+                                “The best of men
+    That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
+    A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
+    The first true gentleman that ever breathed.”
+
+And such remembrance of Jesus, in his life among the people, his
+friendships, smiles and tears, are found in the sermons of Tillotson,
+South, Jeremy Taylor. But the descended God gradually consumed the
+humanity. In the last century it became a heresy to consider Jesus as a
+man. The man was crucified on a cross of dogmas; he lay dead and buried
+under a stony theology, until Renan rolled away the stone, raised him
+to life, clothed him with flesh and blood, invested him with beauty,
+and said once more to the Pharisee, the sceptic, the scoffer—_Behold
+the man!_ For writing that book,—just after Strauss had shown the
+Christ of Christendom a mythological figure,—the churches should have
+clasped Renan’s knees. But for it they heaped him with abuse, declared
+that Jewish bankers had bribed him to write it, drove him from his
+professorship of Hebrew, reduced him to poverty. The Pope denounced
+him as “The European Blasphemer.” He has been terribly avenged in his
+own country, where every educated man has abandoned the church. And he
+lived to see the Christianity of England striving to gain a new hold
+on the people by following his brave gesture,—rationalising away the
+supernatural Christ, and exalting the humanity of Jesus as the sign of
+his divinity. The criticism of that work is not at all so destructive
+as that of many who have written in the generation that has elapsed
+since its appearance,—of Dr. Martineau, for instance, on whom Oxford
+has conferred a doctor’s degree. Indeed, in reading Renan’s “Life of
+Jesus” now, one is surprised by its concessions. He accepts the four
+Gospels as coming from the first century, a belief which even the learned
+theologians have abandoned. Some newspaper has said that Renan borrowed
+from Strauss; on the contrary, the fault of the book is that it did not
+borrow from Strauss, and from English authors, who had proved that the
+Gospels are all of the second century. That would have relieved him of
+the necessity of apologising for Jesus in some matters of which Jesus
+never heard, of which Paul in the first century knew nothing, as when he
+intimates that Jesus may have once lent himself to an amiable deception.
+No miracle was ever ascribed to Jesus by any writer of his own century.
+In several other respects Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” on its negative side,
+is behind the advance of research and criticism. But those are small
+details compared with the spirit and general purpose of the work. In
+this moment, when we are celebrating the discovery of a western world,
+we may well pay homage to the scholar who rediscovered and exhumed an
+eastern world, long buried under débris of mythology and rubbish of
+superstitions. This Renan has done in his series of works on the “Origins
+of Christianity,” beginning with the “Life of Jesus,” dealing with the
+“Apostles,” with “St. Paul,” with “Antichrist,” and other studies,
+leading up to his “History of the People of Israel.”
+
+In all these works there is not a line that is not interesting, alike
+to learned and unlearned. As some one has said, Renan could make Hebrew
+roots blossom with roses and lilies. But that super-fine art of his was
+carrying the cause of intellectual and religious emancipation. For these
+works concerned the constitution of Europe. This Great Britain, with all
+its physical freedom, is religiously a mere dependency of Judea. Here
+men were formerly burnt, until lately imprisoned, and even now denied
+equal advantages, not in accordance with what Englishmen think, but
+with the opinions of some ancient Jews. The voice of the Jews was the
+voice of God. But Judea, like the Grand Llama, could rule only while
+veiled. Renan unveiled it. He did it all the more effectually because
+in the literary and philosophic spirit. All the ages of Judea, from the
+first tribal groups to the movement of John the Baptist and Jesus, are
+assigned their exact place as successive chapters of human history, the
+natural origin of their mythology is explained, Jehovah takes his seat
+beside Jupiter and Brahma, Jesus is revered with Buddha and Zoroaster;
+and all this is done, not by mere opinion, but by impregnable facts,
+unwearied researches, inflexible veracity. It was also done lovingly.
+A superstition can survive combat, but not explanation. Renan did much
+to remove Christianity from the field of militant camps to the quiet
+province of literary investigation. In the Republic of Letters there is
+no arbitrary authority. The combat is left to salvation armies,—“theirs
+not to reason why.”
+
+There is a large Renan literature. More than three hundred works
+represent the efforts of theology to get the resuscitated human Jesus
+back into his grave again. Renan’s accessible life-work is represented
+by about twenty-five volumes, of which some are philosophic diversions
+written amid the heavy labours of his College, and while collecting
+and preserving for scholars the whole body of Semitic inscriptions.
+For more than twenty years Renan has been training the young scholars
+of France—those who are to fashion France in the future, and influence
+mankind. Those acquainted with his larger works can realise his immense
+service in elevating the standard of criticism, and establishing the
+method of exact research and exact thought. But there are other works of
+Renan, notably his _Philosophic Dramas_, not yet translated, from which
+may be better gathered the great variety of his ability, the poetic play
+of his genius, and the charm of his personality, which some of us have
+personally felt, and which so won all hearts that even the priesthood
+have not raised discordant notes in the homage and emotion with which
+his nation has laid him in an honored grave.
+
+Farewell, great heart, and great leader! On your coffin I laid a wreath
+of immortelles for friendship, for the homage of America, and for the
+sake of this free English Society. For your victory is ours also: your
+triumph is that of every independent mind on earth.
+
+                                                        MONCURE D. CONWAY.
+
+
+
+
+INTUITION AND REASON.
+
+
+The question whether we act more frequently from intuition or reason,
+and the question that follows it, which faculty is the more noble
+guide to conduct, would have no more interest for the general public
+than any other of the subjects which the metaphysician exercises his
+ingenuity upon,—than the question, for instance, whether we execute a
+greater number of analytic or of synthetic judgments in the course of
+the day,—were it not that there is an ancient opinion to the effect that
+reason and intuition are marks respectively of the manner of working of
+men’s and of women’s minds. The opinion is wholly unfounded, and could
+only have had its origin at a time when the psychology of the working of
+the human mind was thoroughly misunderstood. As the very terms in which
+the opinion is expressed make plain, it dates from the period when it
+was the custom to speak of the human mind as having a lot of separate
+“faculties” under its control, and of calling up now one and now another
+of them to do its bidding. It is time that the belief in the different
+quality of men’s and of women’s minds should follow the whole antiquated
+machinery of “faculties” into the limbo of old and worn-out fashions of
+thought and of speech.
+
+This illusion, however, like most of the illusions that have had a firm
+foot-hold in their day, has a perfectly comprehensible reason for its
+existence. It is not true that men’s minds and women’s minds have a
+different way of working; but it is true that upon certain occasions
+(and by far, the greatest number of occasions) we all—men, women, and
+negroes alike—act from intuition, and that the circumstances of women’s
+lives have hitherto been such as to make their interests lie somewhat
+more exclusively in those regions in which conduct is intuitive than in
+those in which it is long thought out. It is not true that the Creator
+has made two separate kinds of mind for men and for women; but it is true
+that society, as at present constituted, offers two somewhat separate
+_fields of interest_ for men and for women, and that the nature of their
+conduct is of necessity determined by the character of the action which
+is demanded of them.
+
+What is the difference for the psychologist, between the mental state
+of a being who acts from reason, and of one who acts from intuition?
+It is not a difference of the _kind of mind_ which controls him, but
+of the _kind of knowledge_ upon which his present conduct is based. If
+one individual has got at his command a lot of general propositions
+bearing upon the case in hand, and if his familiarity with them is not
+such that they flow together without conscious effort, then he must
+laboriously piece them together, and think out the conclusions which they
+necessitate. If another individual, having led a different life, has had
+a lot of experiences which cover just such cases as this, and if he has
+been taught by thousands of instances that under these circumstances a
+certain course of conduct will nearly always lead to good results, then
+he can trust to his hands or his feet to execute that course of conduct
+without a moment’s aid from conscious reflection; he can go on with his
+novel, or whatever other pleasant occupation engages his attention,
+without the wear and tear of mind which is involved in consciously
+thinking about the circumstances in question.
+
+Now the differences in the mental processes of men and women are exactly
+of this nature. They are differences dependent upon the fact that the
+_knowledge_ at their command—that is, the stored up premises upon which
+action is based—is, to a certain extent, of a different kind, and got
+from different sources. So far as the knowledge is not of a different
+kind, the character of the action is not of a different kind. There is
+an immense number of conclusions which men and women alike “jump at,”
+every hour in the day; and some of them represent reasoning so fixedly
+instinctive, that even the closest attention does not enable us to drag
+it up into the light of consciousness. How many people know that a
+certain feeling of strain in the muscles which move the eyes is a sign of
+a certain distance of an object looked at, and a different feeling of
+strain, a sign of a different distance; and that when the eyes are fixed
+upon one point, objects in the lateral field of view are judged to be
+nearer or farther away than that point, according as the two disparate
+images which they cast upon the two retinas are, the right-hand one or
+the left hand one, the brighter? The common man _knows_ that one object
+is near and the other far, but he is not _conscious_ even of the feeling
+of strain, nor of the existence of double images; the physiological
+psychologist knows the unconscious syllogism by which he _must_ reach
+his conclusion, but even he cannot, by any possibility, make it cease
+to be instinctive,—that is, make himself conscious of its different
+steps. On the other hand, no one, whether man or woman, can pass from
+one proposition in geometry to another by a process which is in any
+sense unconscious, though one person may be obliged to give a much more
+strained attention to what he is doing than another.
+
+Now it is very possible that a greater _number_ of the actions of women
+have their ground in unconscious causes than of the actions of men.
+The subjects upon which action is of vital concern to them have been
+different subjects, and hence their stored-up stock of knowledge is
+knowledge about different subjects. To the woman of the past, who was to
+a great extent confined to her own home, the temper of her house-mates
+was what her happiness depended upon more than anything else in the
+world. It was impossible that she should not acquire a keen intelligence
+in interpreting every slightest shade of expression upon the human face.
+But this sort of knowledge is always instinctive, whether it is practised
+by men or by women. If the eyes of the most reasonable man in the world
+should chance to show him a certain curve of the lip and a certain
+elevation of the posterior angle of the alæ of the nostrils on the face
+of the fair lady to whom he was talking, would he try to call to mind the
+pictures in Sir Charles Bell’s great work on expression and the general
+theorems in Darwin’s book on the same subject, and piecing this and that
+laboriously together, would he try to arrive at some just conclusion
+regarding the contents of the fair lady’s mind? Would he not, rather,
+instinctively change the subject of conversation, or even discreetly
+beat a retreat, long before he had time to _think_? Women’s interests
+have been so exclusively social that they have developed a sense for the
+physical expression of emotion which makes society for them a matter of
+complicated relations, of delicate susceptibility to play of feeling,
+which—except in the hyper-sensitive period of courtship—is not common
+among men. But there are men who are quite the equals of women in this
+respect; and if any man is markedly deficient in these qualities, we
+recognise him as belonging to a low and brutal type which is in process
+of extinction. If a woman on the other hand, goes into business, she does
+not fix the prices of her straw hats each morning in accordance with the
+feelings which straw hats awaken in her when she first looks at them,
+but in accordance with the fluctuations of the market. The President of
+a New Hampshire Street Railway did not carry through her improvements by
+her intuitions, but by a plain, common-sense weighing of reasons. Nor are
+all masculine occupations under the guidance of the reasoning faculty. If
+you go to a stove-man and ask him to mend your smoking chimney, does he
+do it by reason? Not a bit of it! There may be stove-men who have enough
+knowledge of the laws which regulate the movements of masses of hot air
+to be able to apply general principles to particular instances, but in
+the course of a long and checkered experience with stove-men, it has not
+been my lot to fall in with them. Their knowledge of chimneys, such as it
+is, is got by experience and applied by intuition, and nothing is farther
+from their minds than any trace of deductive reasoning. It is not that
+there are men’s minds and women’s minds, but that there are theoretical
+subjects and practical subjects, and that knowledge is not the same kind
+of knowledge in both.
+
+Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male and
+female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions
+which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience ingrained
+from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those which we perform
+automatically, or by individual experience become so familiar that
+it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious reflection. The
+relative distances of objects looked at we know instinctively; the
+trained musician with mind intent upon expression, reads his notes
+automatically; the beginner at the piano goes through a painful process
+of syllogism before each key is struck. All is, at bottom, reason; in one
+case it is conscious; in another it is unconscious, but can be forced
+into consciousness; in another, it is unconscious and cannot by any
+effort be made conscious. Because a woman’s interests lie more than a
+man’s in regions in which thought is instinctive and automatic, it does
+not follow that she has developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor
+is there any possibility that mothers should occasionally transmit their
+powers of intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of
+his apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested; some men
+have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry and art mental
+activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different with powers
+of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted from mother to
+son, but that is merely saying metaphorically that a good firm texture of
+mind may be transmitted. Hume and James Mill are two men who are supposed
+to owe much to their mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually
+considered to lie in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an
+intuitive mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the
+higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician
+leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had jumped at his
+conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his thorough knowledge
+of this particular subject, the intermediate steps have seemed to him too
+easy to set down. If his book is hard to read, it is simply because he
+has assumed a greater amount of learning in his readers than they are in
+possession of.
+
+The question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty is an
+exceedingly meaningless question. All knowledge which finds frequent
+occasion to be put in practice has a tendency to become first automatic
+and then instinctive. Human progress consists in making conscious
+action automatic as soon as it can be done with safety, and in setting
+free consciousness to attend to more and more complicated combinations
+of circumstances. After the musician has learned to read his notes
+mechanically, shall we urge him to go back to the period of conscious
+linking of note to key, because reason is a diviner gift than intuition?
+Is it desirable to turn the act of walking into a conscious fitting of
+muscular tension to variations in the position of the centre of gravity
+in order to distinguish ourselves the more effectually from the brutes
+that perish? Reason is merely intuition in its formative stage, and
+the sooner all our present reasoned convictions become mechanical, and
+conscious thought is set free to bring in more and more far reaching
+considerations to bear upon our actions (including in that term our
+conclusions), the sooner will a higher form of life be reached.
+
+Wundt’s students have made some experiments in his laboratory in the
+last two or three years, which throw a great deal of light upon this
+question,—they have caught automatism in the very act of formation. It
+has been noticed that different observers differed very much in the
+reaction time which they assigned to the several senses,—that is, the
+time required, for instance, to hear the tap of a bell, and to press a
+button in response. Wundt’s students found that there are two different
+reaction times,—in one, time is taken to bring the tap of the bell into
+the focus of consciousness and to decide consciously what to do in
+response; in the other, the process is unconscious. The first is nearly
+twice as long as the second, and both are very constant quantities, for
+the same sense. The exact figures are, in seconds:
+
+             FULL.   SHORT.
+    Sound    .216     .127    N. Lange
+      ”      .235     .121    Belkin
+      ”      .230     .124    L. Lange
+    Light    .290     .172    L. Lange
+      ”      .291     .182    Martius
+
+It may be inferred from this that, even in the simplest matters intuition
+is very nearly twice as valuable a “faculty” as reason, as far as
+economy of time is concerned. (It would be interesting to determine
+the difference in fatigue.) But the interesting point is that the
+experimenter can teach himself to give either reaction time at his
+pleasure. If he thinks of his ears, he has a feeling of strain in them,
+and a long reaction time; if he directs his attention to his fingers (or
+if he thinks of indifferent matters) he is unconscious of what is going
+on, and his reaction time is short. It is plain that the more of these
+educated brain-reflexes we can produce, the fuller and more complicated
+lives we shall be capable of carrying on. It may also be assumed that
+the ideal human being is the one who has many brain-reflexes, but who
+is capable of bringing them all into consciousness upon occasion.
+Connections that we cannot make conscious are a frequent source of
+illusion. When we move the eye-ball about by the will, objects seem to
+remain stationary; but when, putting the finger on the under eyelid, we
+push the eye-ball up and down in the socket, we cannot help _perceiving_
+that objects are moving up and down. Prof. William James suggests as
+a good experiment that some one who has eyes that he is not afraid of
+injuring should do this pushing several hours a day, and see if he cannot
+force conscious reason to do her work and to make him _see_ that the
+objects are not moving.
+
+For perfectly regular circumstances,—that is, for the world of nature
+or of human character so far as is governed by fixed laws,—reflex
+action presents an immense economy of time and work. To provide against
+extraordinary emergencies, it would seem to be desirable that we
+should have the power of interposing consciousness in the chain which
+begins with stimulus and ends in action. Whenever a large number of
+considerations, or considerations of an abstract character, have to be
+weighed and balanced, then reason is the only sufficient guide.
+
+That women have no deficiency in the power of putting this and that
+together, when _this_ and _that_ are pieces of knowledge which are in
+their possession, is absolutely proved by a single circumstance. Geometry
+is a branch of learning which is entirely built up out of abstract
+reason, pure and undefiled. Geometry is studied, in the United States, in
+high schools, and it must not be forgotten that there are in this country
+(according to the Report of the Bureau of Education) _three times_ as
+many girls as boys who take the high school course. It cannot be said,
+therefore, (as is said of girls who go to college) that the girls who go
+to the high school are a selected lot; they are the very bone and fibre
+of the women who make up the country. Now if women could not reason, we
+ought to hear a great hue and cry from the teachers of the geometry
+classes about the difficulty of teaching that subject to girls, and the
+girls ought to lament and moan over the impossibility of getting safely
+through with their demonstrations. Is this the case? I have never met
+with a teacher of geometry who thought his boys did better than his
+girls,—I have met with several who thought the reverse. As long ago as
+1865, Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, after travelling through this
+country, said: “The teachers all tell me that the girls do fully as well
+as the boys in mathematics,—fully.” Nor are any sad effects noticeable
+upon health or spirits. Day after day an army of girls goes smiling into
+the class-room and comes smiling out, utterly unaware that an unnatural
+wrench has been given to their delicate minds, and that they are being
+rapidly transformed into monstrous products of over-reason.
+
+If girls show no defect in reason in the class-room, neither do boys show
+any defect in intuition,—in fact, their intuition about stretched strings
+and lines on balls are usually better than those of girls. I have kept
+a record for many years of errors committed by boys and by girls, and I
+have not been able to detect any difference in their character. It is
+true that it was a boy who once failed to get a problem in trigonometry
+for a week, because it was not expressly stated in the book that the
+milestones to which the problem related were a mile apart. My intimate
+acquaintance with the character of his mind prevented me, however, from
+attributing this failure in intuition to his superior reasoning powers.
+
+The simple matter is that a good _mind_ has good reasons and good
+intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive popular
+phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in full possession of
+your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when you must; to your
+acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger; and to your reason,
+when the question requires debate. It would be greatly for the good of
+the race if the common virtues should become more instinctive in men;
+and if women should be put into a position in which they can reflect
+more wisely upon the virtues which are only just in process of getting
+known to be such. The only reason that women do not guide themselves by
+far-reaching principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have
+not made themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy
+and of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher
+education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice,
+so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted that
+it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions merely
+learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely convinced
+of, it may leave one side, but not what it really _knows_. Nor is
+there any danger that woman will lose her powers of intuition. The
+knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social matters will not
+desert her because she has made herself familiar with the speculations
+of philosophers, and can turn to them for guidance in the intricate
+questions of conduct which the complexities of modern life give rise to.
+So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master,
+her task was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider
+responsibilities. They are now aware that it is their highest duty _to
+be_ the best possible kind of a human being, and _to do_ whatever lies
+within their strength towards making the world the best possible kind of
+a world to live in. For this end they have urgent need of _all_ the gifts
+that God has given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the
+ground that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a
+grievous wrong.
+
+                                                  CHRISTINE LADD FRANKLIN.
+
+
+
+
+CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN.
+
+
+I.
+
+CRUELTY.
+
+Spencer says[24] that among savage nations the women are as perverse as
+the men, and that if they do not work so much evil it is because they
+are less able to do so. This is not entirely true; doubtless women among
+savages are much more inclined to cruelty than to pity, but, generally
+speaking, woman even at the very beginnings of human evolution is less
+cruel than man.
+
+
+WOMAN AND WAR.
+
+Woman, even among savage nations, is rarely a warrior. In the Antilles,
+the women watched over the safety of the islands whenever their husbands
+went to war with the neighboring islands; they were brave, strong,
+courageous, nearly equalling the men in their cleverness in handling
+weapons.[25] Amongst the ancient Bretons, armies were always commanded by
+women. In Dahomey, the élite of the army is composed of a troop of six
+or seven thousand Amazons, who are very ferocious, particularly in the
+mutilation of dead bodies; women then become tigers, is a popular saying.
+Among the ancient Scots, women followed the army, and cruelly mutilated
+the prisoners. Among the Botocudos, when war breaks out between the
+tribes, the men fight the men with sticks, and the women fight the women,
+by scratching and by tearing the _botoques_ (cylinders of wood) from
+their ears and lips.[26] But these are all exceptional cases. Generally
+speaking, the savage woman plays a secondary part in war; she acts as an
+auxiliary, picks up arrows, throws stones from a distance, and carries
+the provisions etc.
+
+
+REVENGE.
+
+It is above all in revenge, that feminine cruelty shows itself the most
+terrible. Man is capable of destroying whole families or nations, to
+satisfy a particular revenge; but nothing equals the ingenuity of woman,
+in slowly tormenting her victim, in gloating over his sufferings and
+lengthening them out in order that her enjoyment of vengeance may endure
+as long as possible.
+
+In Tasmania, when the _black war_ broke out between the English and the
+aborigines, the Tasmanian women terribly tortured the prisoners, in order
+to avenge their companions who had been carried off by the English. We
+must also attribute to the desire for vengeance, the torments inflicted
+by the women upon prisoners of war among the Red Indians.
+
+Elizabeth of Russia, betrayed by her lover, obliged him to marry a
+deformed dwarf, and to pass his wedding night in an ice palace, where
+the furniture and the bed were all of ice. The next morning, attended by
+her Court, she went to present the newly wedded pair with a bouquet. She
+found them, stretched out upon their bed of ice, nearly frozen. She then
+banished her rival to Siberia first causing her ears and nose to be cut
+off.
+
+A wealthy Russian Prince, in love with a very beautiful peasant girl of
+fifteen, took her to live with him for five years; at the end of which
+time, wishing to contract an alliance, he paid her a sum of money in
+dower and obliged her to marry a peasant. The young girl made no sign
+for ten years, until the death of her husband; but after the lapse of
+that period, a rising having taken place among the peasantry against the
+nobles, she excited them and led a body of peasants to the castle of her
+ancient lover, had him taken and dragged into his _izba_, harnessed him
+to the plough instead of the oxen, and for three days obliged him thus
+to work, lashing him with the whip each time that he fell to the ground.
+At night she led him to the stable and made him lie down with the oxen;
+compelling him to eat fodder with the beasts and making merry over his
+sorry plight. This amusement lasted for three days, at the end of which
+time, the man fell dead in one of the furrows he was ploughing.[27]
+
+A Russian, an idle and worthless fellow who had let his wife suffer
+hunger, proposed to her that she should be sold as a slave to the
+Sultan. After some hesitation, she accepted and they started off; but
+when they had gone about half the way, the husband having fallen asleep
+intoxicated, the idea came into her mind to sell him for a slave, in her
+place. She then tied him on the horse, started off again on the road and
+arriving at the place of rendezvous, she delivered her husband to the
+merchant, and remained to watch the Turk push the half-awakened man into
+the boat, laughing whilst he showered blows upon him.[28]
+
+A young Russian peasant woman lived with a small land-owner, who betrayed
+her; at last she took refuge with a band of brigands, who treated her
+like a queen. One day she caused two of them to capture her old lover,
+and had him brought to the camp where she used him as a kind of living
+foot-stool: when she sat down she covered him with a carpet and put her
+feet upon him, and when she wanted to go out she made him carry her on
+his shoulders.
+
+
+CRUELTY TO THE HELPLESS.
+
+Woman sometimes displays the same amount of ingenuity in tormenting
+the helpless creatures who may be in her power. I do not know, says
+Bourgavel, any one more perfidious, immoral, or perverse than the New
+Caledonian woman. In certain portions of Australia women are mortal foes
+to each other. When the men wish to punish any one of them, they turn
+her over to her companions, who inflict upon her horrible tortures.[29]
+Sitting on her body, they cut her flesh with sharpened stones.
+
+In Tasmania, as amongst the ancient Saxons, the unfaithful wife was
+punished by her companions; she was not killed, but she was tortured for
+a long time with sharp pointed stones or knives, in all parts of her body.
+
+Women have often been cruel mistresses to their slaves. A lady in Guiana,
+being envious of a very handsome mulatto slave, had her branded on the
+mouth, cheeks and forehead. In the case of another slave, who was also
+very beautiful, she had the tendon of Achilles cut thus causing her to
+become a deformed and crippled monster.[30]
+
+It is a notorious fact that Roman and Greek ladies often inflicted most
+terrible punishments on their slaves, and that it was more particularly
+towards the female slaves, the _ancillæ_, that the cruelty of their
+mistresses was shown. The Roman ladies, if, while they were having their
+hair dressed, they were vexed with their attendants, used to thrust pins
+into their arms and breasts. Darwin relates that at Rio Janeiro, an old
+lady possessed a kind of thumb screw which she had had made expressly to
+crush the fingers of her slaves.
+
+
+EPIDEMIC CRUELTY.
+
+During periods of great national excitement, such as revolutions,
+feminine cruelty shows how far it can go.
+
+The women, writes M. Du Camp, were the fiercest heroines of the Commune;
+it was a woman who incited the assassination of the Dominicans. When the
+hostages were shot, they surpassed the men in cruelty; they taunted them
+with not knowing how to kill. When employed to seek out the insurgents
+they were implacable; when acting as infirmarians, they killed the
+wounded by giving them brandy to drink.
+
+At the time of the French Revolution, on the days of execution, writes
+M. Legouvé,[31] the front rows nearest the guillotine were reserved
+for the women of the political clubs. They even hung on to the boards
+of the scaffold, in order the better to witness the death throes of
+the condemned, and drowned the cries of the victims by their peals of
+laughter.
+
+
+II.
+
+PITY.
+
+But again we find a series of contradictory facts, which bear witness
+that the sentiment of pity also is much keener in woman than in man.
+
+Even with animals, we observe this phenomenon. Hens often separate two
+young cocks who are fighting together. Sir George Le Grand Jacob has
+observed females of the wild goat (Steinbock) raise with their heads
+he-goats that had been shot, support them and help them to escape.
+Romanes relates, that sometimes the female gibbon, takes great care of
+all the members of the troop when they are wounded, even if they are not
+related.[32]
+
+The savage woman also is very often kind and good. It is notorious that
+the explorers of savage countries have often escaped serious perils,
+thanks to the kindness of the native women. Australasian women have
+often revealed to European travellers the plots laid against them by
+the men of their tribe: they have even risked their own lives for that
+purpose.[33] Stanley, at the island of Bambyrch, on the Nyanza, was
+roughly greeted by the natives, who were desirous of exterminating his
+expedition; but a woman came to warn him and to advise him to perform
+a certain ceremony with the King Shekka by which he would acquire his
+friendship. In Senegambia an old woman, meeting Mungo Park, who was half
+dead of starvation and had just been despoiled by a negro king, gave
+him food, and went away without waiting to be thanked. Another time the
+same traveller, being left with nothing but his saddle, was hospitably
+entertained by some women, whom he heard chant these words as he fell
+asleep: “The winds roared and the rain beat, the poor white man came
+and sat down under our tree, he had no mother to give him milk, no wife
+to grind him corn. Let us take pity on the white man, he has no mother,
+etc., etc.”[34] Michelet says that woman was the first physician;
+and certainly she fulfils the office of infirmarian among many savage
+peoples, the Esquimaux, the Mincopies, etc. etc.
+
+In war the Samoan woman often interferes to make peace between the
+belligerents. Among the Khonds, also, when two tribes quarrel, the women
+sometimes make peace, calling in the intervention of a third tribe.
+Quite recently, among the Montenegrins and Albanians, fierce strife
+broke out between different families, but in these fights, if a man took
+refuge with a woman and she covered him with her apron, he was safe.
+Among the Bedouin Arabs a woman can save the life of the condemned man
+who implores her protection. So it also was among the Roman Vestals,
+when in the streets they accidentally met a man condemned to death; it
+was required, however, that the meeting should be evidently a chance
+one, for it was feared that the privilege might be carried too far.
+Among civilised nations this sentiment of pity becomes naturally more
+developed. Christianity owed a great deal of its success among women
+to the fact, that it knew how to make use of their pity, by organising
+those associations of women which are its greatest ornament. From the
+earliest years after the death of Jesus, in the cenobitic form of society
+lived by the disciples of the Messiah, they made use of the charitable
+sentiment of childless widows and created the order of Deaconesses, which
+was devoted to the care of the poor and the sick.[35] Legouvé says:
+“Women offered their services to Christianity like a volunteer battalion
+consecrated to charitable work. In the Apostles’ time their mission was
+one of sympathy and watchfulness, a mother’s vocation; in the time of the
+Martyrs they remained womanly in their modesty, while exhibiting a manly
+courage; in the time of the Doctors, whilst orators speak and learned men
+write, women continue to love and console.”[36]
+
+This Christian tradition has survived and is still powerful, thanks to
+the deeply laid sentiment of pity in the heart of woman. “Private charity
+in Paris,” writes M. du Camp,[37] “is almost entirely in the hands of
+women. There are in Paris women of the world, young and beautiful, born
+for pleasure, accustomed to every luxury, who visit the poor, nurse
+the sick, rock little motherless children, and all this they do simply
+without a word of self-praise.”
+
+The society of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” in Paris, is composed of widows,
+who, without binding themselves by religious vows, engage to nurse the
+sick gathered into the hospitals of the association, poor outcasts
+attacked by loathsome diseases—cancer, for example. Women of wealth and
+belonging to great families often obtain admission to this society.
+Female religious orders are rarely contemplative; they are nearly always
+charitable in aim. “The Daughters of Charity” possess establishments all
+over the known world; they migrate, says M. du Camp, “like benevolent
+birds, carrying with them the principle of self-sacrifice and the love
+of those that suffer. In all countries I have visited, among sects most
+antagonistic to their religion, I have beheld them at work; their faces
+shadowed by the immense cap, which resembles the wings of a white swan;
+instructing children, visiting the sick, caring for the plague-stricken,
+blessed by our sailors whom they nurse in the French hospitals in foreign
+lands.”[38]
+
+Pity in woman is sometimes so powerful a sentiment that it supplies the
+place in her of a higher faculty, intelligence. It was thus that a humble
+servant-maid, without learning, who could neither read nor write, founded
+one of the most prominent nursing sisterhoods in France, “Les petites
+Soeurs des Pauvres,” which to-day numbers 3,400 sisters, and possesses
+207 houses, where more than 25,000 old men are received and cared for.
+In the first half of this century there was such misery in Brittany that
+the old men were literally abandoned by all. Jeanne Jugau, whose earnings
+hardly sufficed to maintain herself, took in one, then two, then a number
+of them, without a thought of her own poverty, slaving might and main for
+their support. Two women, Virginie Tredaniel and Marie Catherine, helped
+her; a priest, Le Pailleur, took the direction of their work, and in a
+short time the order was founded, and grew apace. There, where genius
+might have failed, the love and pity of a servant-maid succeeded.
+
+Another heroine of charity, though of a different type, was Jeanne
+Garnier. She was perpetually haunted by a desire to do good, to help
+and succour the unfortunate. M. du Camp has portrayed her character
+in a most graphic manner: impulsive, prone from childhood to adopt
+extreme measures, while in the convent she was given to rebellious and
+untractable conduct, for which she was sent away. When she was twenty
+years old she married; the love she bore her husband and two sons was
+deep and ardent. Three years after her marriage she had the unspeakable
+grief of losing both husband and sons at one fell stroke. After this
+occurrence her life had but one aim, ceaselessly and untiringly to
+succour and help the sorrowful. One day she was told that a woman,
+disfigured by a cutaneous disease, was lying in an attic in Lyons,
+abandoned by every one. She went at once to her, ministered to her, and
+every day went to wash her sores. Thus was suggested to her the founding
+of the association of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” of which we have already
+spoken, and the idea of pressing into the service of the sick, widows
+who found themselves in the same position as herself. She was not rich,
+but being an untiring and determined worker, capable of attacking the
+same person ten times a day, she obtained money. When they had to convey
+the sick to the new hospital, there was among them one woman so horribly
+disfigured by burns that no conveyance could be found whose driver was
+willing to take her. Jeanne Garnier then took her on her own shoulders
+and carried her there herself. The association of “Les Dames du Calvaire”
+was not the only charitable work which owes its existence to her. She
+conceived a great many other plans, of which many were carried out, for
+she never ceased working, up to the moment of her death, which occurred
+at forty-two years of age, of exhaustion.
+
+In the United States, where woman enjoys much greater freedom than
+in Europe, she makes an excellent use of her liberty. In fact, all
+associations of women have a charitable end in view; and these societies
+not being subjected to the severe rules of Catholic religious orders,
+and not requiring from their members so absolute a renunciation of the
+pleasures of life, exhibit the most perfect and most modern form of
+charitable associations, which have been known up to the present day. The
+first woman’s club that was founded in that country, the Sorosis, has for
+its object the amelioration of the condition of shop-girls: it has also
+founded asylums for homeless children. The Temperance Union, founded by
+women, seeks to stem the tide of intemperance. The Women’s League has
+obtained the admission of women on commissioners boards for schools and
+hospitals. The College Settlement Girls, composed of female graduates
+from universities, carry help into the purlieus of the city.[39]
+
+
+CRUELTY, PITY, AND THE MATERNAL SENTIMENT.
+
+Is woman kind or cruel? Can we reconcile these two series of facts, so
+contradictory in themselves? That is the question which now comes before
+us. Let us seek, first of all, the origin and the genesis of feminine
+cruelty. We have seen women exhibiting great ingenuity in torturing; she
+does not wish to destroy her enemies, but to torment and torture them;
+she seeks to protract their pain as long as possible, and to lengthen
+out her enjoyment of vengeance. On this point woman goes much further
+than man: for among savages men do not amuse themselves by prolonging the
+miseries of their enemies; they rather wreak their vengeance by killing
+them at one stroke. Savages often make a wholesale carnage, massacring
+whole tribes and nations. But it is always the woman who practices the
+art of killing a man by inches, over a slow fire, as it were. Thus we
+find that the redskins give their prisoners of war over to their women.
+Notice, even at the present day, the difference between the quarrels of
+men and women. Women scratch each other, tear out the hair, fly at the
+eyes of their adversaries, trying to inflict some painful wound: men
+give blows and stabs; they strive to disable or stun their enemy, or to
+destroy him. There is the same difference but on a smaller scale. This
+aptitude in inflicting pain is an outgrowth of weakness. We know from
+the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and from the struggle for
+life, that every living being must be provided with a certain number of
+means of defense and offense, and amongst these means must be classed
+many instincts and sentiments which spring from natural selection,
+adaptation, and heredity. The cruelty of woman is one of these instincts
+and sentiments. Woman not being powerful enough to destroy her enemies,
+had to seek for the means of defending herself, by wounding their more
+delicate organs, by inflicting such acute pain as would serve to disable
+them. This tendency to protect one’s self by such means has become
+instinctive by heredity; and so much the more since the woman who was
+able thus to defend herself, had at the outset of man’s evolution a far
+better chance of survival.
+
+All this is so true, that we find other weak creatures also to be cruel.
+Children take pleasure in tormenting insects, birds, or little dogs, and
+are very cruel to each other. I knew a child who used to cut his nails
+like the teeth of a saw, in order to inflict more painful scratches on
+his companions. Humming birds, says Brehm, are the smallest and the
+cruelest of birds. When they are attacked by a more powerful enemy they
+try to peck out his eyes with their long, sharp beaks. The struggle for
+life and natural selection has provided their weakness with this means of
+defense, and they are even cruel to each other when they fight, to such
+an extent has the sentiment of cruelty in them become instinctive.
+
+And now we must seek for the genesis of the other phenomenon, pity. It
+is a notorious fact, that maternity being the great function of woman,
+through the whole order of animal life, with the exception of some few
+fishes, it is always the female who is thus the benefactress of the race.
+Maternity is always an altruistic function; in the inferior orders this
+altruism is a purely physical act, and consists merely in a material
+sacrifice; (the detaching of a portion of the maternal body, under
+the form of bud, or egg;) in the higher orders, this altruism becomes
+psychical and consists in a conscious sacrifice of self and of vitality
+in the interests of the race.
+
+What then is the essential nature of these altruistic sacrifices?
+Maternity is protection given to weakness; for the infant is above all
+other created things a being requiring succour.
+
+It is thus that, the images relating to the state of weakness being in
+great numbers strongly impressed on the mind of woman, when one of them
+presents itself to her, by the law of association it awakens all those
+maternal sentiments whose function it is to help the weak. At first,
+motherhood only extends from a woman’s own children to those of others;
+this is the first stage of pity, such as we find it in the animals and
+among many undeveloped savage peoples. Afterwards in a region of higher
+psychical development the sentiment of pity broadens till it embraces a
+wider group, the sick, the aged, those condemned to death; for all those
+unfortunates who claim the pity of woman are the weak appealing for help
+to the strong. It is only the weak who can inspire pity. Thus pity, in
+woman, is but the outgrowth of the maternal sentiment applied to a larger
+class of helpless people. “Woman,” says M. du Camp, “may bind herself
+by the religious vow of chastity; but she is a born mother and remains
+a mother, even though circumstances may have broken the physical law of
+her sex. The Little Sisters of the Poor, call their pensioners ‘the good
+little old men,’ and themselves ‘the good little sisters,’ their superior
+‘the good little mother.’ With them everybody is good and little; all
+these expressions are the reflection of maternal love.”
+
+We must mention also, that one cause of a livelier sense of pity in
+woman, is her own weakness and her lower intellect. “Anger,” writes A.
+Bain, “the passion for war, are bound up with activity and strength;
+conditions of weakness and of repose are favorable to the softer
+sentiments.” Strong men who display great muscular or mental activity,
+and who often experience the satisfactions arising from power, only
+realise with extreme difficulty the feelings of the weak; for, as H.
+Spencer remarks,[40] “to feel pity for any suffering which we witness,
+we must have experienced it ourselves to the same extent or in an
+approximate degree.” Thus healthy persons become, after a serious
+sickness, more feeling than they formerly were for those who are
+suffering; women are continually in a state of ill-health.
+
+Besides which women have not been involved in the struggle for life,
+as have men during the whole process of evolution: this struggle for
+life implying, as it does, the necessity of pursuing one’s own object
+irrespective of the ills which it may entail on the unhappy competitors,
+and often rendering a man insensible to the sorrows of those around him.
+To this we add, that love for man has not been without influence in
+developing the sense of pity in woman. The main characteristic of the
+love of woman towards man, is self-abnegation and devotion; woman finds
+her happiness in devotion to the man she loves and in making for him
+the most painful sacrifices. Read the “Letters of Heloise,” the “Life
+of Carlyle,” or the “Life of Mme. de Lespinasse.” Each woman, carries
+hidden in her heart, an inexhaustible treasure of devotion which heredity
+has added to through all the centuries, during which woman has lived in
+contact with man and sought to win his good-will, displaying an affection
+and an ardent zeal in his behalf; nothing then is easier than to spend
+this treasure on the unhappy, when she has not found the man on whom to
+lavish it.
+
+The close relationship between pity, maternity, and love, is also shown
+by this fact, that the heroines of charity are almost always widows
+without sons, or unmarried women. When a woman has a husband or sons
+to love and cherish, she does not feel the same tenderness towards
+the suffering; this goes to prove that if these two sentiments are
+interchangeable, they are but two different forms of the same thing.
+
+
+PITY AND CRUELTY.
+
+We are now in a position to answer the question: Is woman kind or cruel?
+Pity and cruelty coexist together in her; we might call this state in
+woman a state of unstable equilibrium; to-day she is kind, divinely
+good, charitable; to-morrow she will be perverse and cruel. On one side
+her feebleness renders her cruel, and her impulsive nature prevents her
+from repressing the outbursts of anger and of vengeance; on the other
+hand, the gentle habits of maternal affection, her lower intelligence,
+and even the weakness of her nature develop in her kindly sentiments.
+Woman may experience the strongest feelings of maternal affection at the
+sight of a helpless creature; but that will not prevent her from cruelly
+persecuting a rival, especially if she has been wounded in her sentiments
+of wife or mother. Thus woman, who is the natural protector of the weak,
+treats them oftentimes with a cruelty of which man is totally incapable.
+Woman loves, hates, consoles, inflicts pain, according as she finds
+herself in the presence of a friend, an enemy, a helpless being, or of a
+rival.
+
+Many of the fiercest heroines of the Paris Commune, had been trained
+nurses during the war, and distinguished for their devotion to the sick.
+There is nothing astonishing in this, for contradiction in feeling is so
+often a psychical law that a great Italian philosopher, Robert Ardigò,
+has said that man is not a logical being.
+
+We have noticed before that weakness is in part the cause of cruelty and
+partly also of pity, and this accounts for the co-existence of the two
+contrary sentiments. They coexist because they have a common origin.
+But this instability of equilibrium is lessened by evolution, and pity
+becomes stronger than cruelty. Among civilised nations the cruelty of
+women has become merely a moral attitude: the civilised woman, less
+powerful than her savage sister, no more subjects her enemies to physical
+pain, does not shed their blood; she contents herself with slandering
+them, turning them into ridicule, and humiliating them. The diminution
+of muscular strength is in itself favorable to the softening of female
+character.
+
+Furthermore, sexual selection also helps in this; in the human race
+as civilisation advances the male assumes more and more the right of
+selection, and man shrinks instinctively from meeting in a woman a high
+development of the qualities which he himself possesses, for he wishes
+to dominate her and to be her superior. This explains to us the singular
+fact, which we notice every day, that of a _savant_ marrying a stupid
+or unintelligent wife; this is why the normal man, as also the vicious,
+choose gentle and good women when they desire to found families. If
+sometimes the choice falls on a wicked woman, it is because the man
+desires to form a criminal co-partnership, such as was perhaps the normal
+condition of family life during the early days of human evolution. Many
+of the domestic tragedies which we witness to-day can be traced to no
+other cause than this _penchant_ of the male, even of the vicious, to
+choose the woman who appears to be the most gentle. Women with their
+clear penetration and sure instincts have seized upon this inclination
+in man and made capital out of it with infinite ability: do we not see
+many young women simulate a gentleness, a sweetness, and kindness which
+they do not naturally possess in order to capture the good-will of men?
+Women have thus practised the habit of repressing their evil _penchants_,
+through interested motives, because they saw that men chose the most
+gentle among them as wives.
+
+Besides sexual selection, physical grace plays a conspicuous part, as
+well as those psychical qualities which are associated with it. Man
+having set a high value on graceful demeanour, woman sought and still
+seeks with all her strength to adorn herself with it.
+
+We know that by the law of association between the emotional states and
+their outward expression, which mutually correspond, each gesture, each
+attitude, and each graceful expression of the countenance has a tendency
+to throw the mind into some sweet and peaceful condition; this is why the
+culture of physical grace has been for woman an exercise of goodness.
+This fostering of physical beauty has had a beneficial influence on her
+moral character. We might say that as woman grew in beauty, she became
+better. Finally woman being in the present day more respected than in
+former times, she has less often the occasion to exercise her instinctive
+cruelty, which on this account is being gradually obliterated. Pity each
+day becomes more and more the normal state of the feminine mind, and
+cruelty the exception. In order to be cruel, a woman’s character must
+be perverted, as is the case in female criminals, whose vice exceeds
+that of man in similar circumstances. Or she must have received some
+deep provocation, wounding her profoundly in her deepest and tenderest
+sentiments, which has awakened the original cruelty slumbering latent in
+the depths of her heart.
+
+We may thus predict that in the ages to come, woman will become entirely
+good.
+
+                                                        GUILLAUME FERRERO.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] Spencer. _Principles of Sociology_, II., p. 361.
+
+[25] Irving. _Hist. of the Life and Voyages of Chris. Columbus_, II., p.
+15.
+
+[26] Hovelacque. _Les débuts de l’humanité_.
+
+[27] Sacher-Masoch. _Rev. des Deux Mondes._
+
+[28] Sacher-Masoch. Ibid.
+
+[29] Letourneau. _Evolution de la Morale_, p. 122.
+
+[30] Mantegazza. _Fisiologia etc._ Milan. 1889.
+
+[31] _Histoire morale des femmes._
+
+[32] Romanes. _Animal Intelligence_, Vol. II.
+
+[33] Hovelacque. _Op. cit._
+
+[34] Letourneau. _La Sociologie d’après l’ethnographie._ Paris, 1884.
+
+[35] Renan. _Les Apôtres._
+
+[36] Op. cit.
+
+[37] _La charité privée à Paris_, 1887.
+
+[38] Op. cit.
+
+[39] _The Forum._ 1891.
+
+[40] Spencer. _Principles of Psychology_, II, p. 648.
+
+
+
+
+PANPSYCHISM AND PANBIOTISM.
+
+
+I. PROFESSOR HAECKEL’S PANPSYCHISM.
+
+Professor Haeckel, in his article “Our Monism,”[41] propounds the theory
+of Panpsychism, which he considers as an essential feature of Monism. He
+says:
+
+    “One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be
+    that I regard _all_ matter as _ensouled_, that is to say, as
+    endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain) and with motion, or,
+    better, with the power of motion. As elementary (atomistic)
+    attraction and repulsion these powers are asserted in every
+    simplest chemical process, and on them is based also every
+    other phenomenon, consequently also the highest developed
+    soul-activity of man.
+
+    “Simplest example: sulphur and quicksilver rubbed together form
+    cinnabar, a new body of entirely different properties. This is
+    possible only on the supposition that the molecules (or atoms)
+    of the two elements if brought within the proper distance,
+    mutually _feel_ each other, by attraction move toward each
+    other; on the decomposition of a simple chemical compound the
+    contrary takes place: repulsion. (Empedocles’s doctrine of ‘the
+    love and hatred of atoms.’)”
+
+Not being able to accept Professor Haeckel’s doctrine of Panpsychism, I
+propose what might best be called Panbiotism, briefly set forth in the
+maxim πᾶν βιωτόν; that is, everything is fraught with life; it contains
+life; it has the ability to live.
+
+The word βιωτός is mostly used by Greek authors in the negative, as in
+the phrase βίον οὐ βιωτόν, an unlivable life, in the sense of a life
+unendurable or not worth living. Thus Sophocles and others. The word
+βιωτός is embodied in the term Panbiotism in its etymological sense of
+“livable.”
+
+I am willing to concede to Professor Haeckel that all nature is alive.
+Indeed, I have most emphatically insisted on the doctrine that there is
+a spontaneity pervading all nature. (See “Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed.,
+pp. 110 et seqq.)
+
+By spontaneity is to be understood that kind of activity which springs
+from the nature of the being or thing which is active. A motion that is
+caused by pressure or push is not spontaneous; but a motion, the motive
+power of which resides in the moving object, is spontaneous. Thus a cart
+rolling down a hill by its own weight performs a spontaneous motion,
+but when drawn by horses moves, or rather is moved, by pull without any
+spontaneity.[42] Now everything that exists is possessed of certain
+qualities; its existence is of some definite, peculiar kind, and this
+its peculiar kind is the character of the thing. In the character of
+a thing lies the source of its spontaneous actions. The spontaneous
+actions of the chemical elements depend upon their qualities, which
+always react under certain circumstances in a definite way, and under the
+same conditions in the same way. The action of sulphur and quicksilver
+lies in the nature of these elements. Their union is not passive, but
+active. They _are_ not combined, but they _do_ combine. He who observes
+and studies nature cannot be blind to the fact that an inalienable,
+intrinsic power is resident in every thing that exists. This is true not
+only of organised life, but also of the chemical elements as well as of
+gravitating masses. The motion of a falling stone can, no more than the
+actions of oxydising substances, be considered as ultimately due to an
+extraneous pressure that makes them move by push, or to a _vis a tergo_
+acting upon inert matter. These motions must be spontaneous; they are due
+to powers inherent in the nature of reality. They are self-motions, and
+in this sense we say that all nature is alive.
+
+The term “life” is here used in a broader sense than ordinarily. It means
+spontaneity or self-motion, while in its common signification the term
+“life” is restricted only to the spontaneous action of organised beings,
+i. e. of plants and animals. In order to distinguish life in the broader
+sense from the narrower or common acceptance of the term, we call the
+latter “organised life.”
+
+It is not impossible, and I consider it even as most probable, that the
+difference between Professor Haeckel and myself rests on a different
+usage of the term soul. But a vague or inconsistent usage of the term,
+unless we are especially careful in so defining it as to prevent
+misunderstandings, will inevitably beget errors. Thus the doctrine of
+Panpsychism is liable to lead to fantastic ideas, and to cause great
+confusion concerning the activity of what is generally called inanimate
+nature.
+
+Soul (as I understand the term) is a system of sentient symbols.
+
+The problem of the origin of the soul is solved as soon as we understand
+how feelings can acquire meaning.
+
+Suppose we have some sentient substance exposed to the impressions of the
+surrounding world. The sense-impressions of the surrounding world leave
+traces in the sentient substance; these traces, which are structures of
+a certain form corresponding exactly to the various impressions, are
+preserved and constitute a predisposition to being very easily revived
+by impressions of the same kind. The revival of feeling in traces left
+in the sentient structure from former impressions is called memory. If a
+new impression of the same kind as the traces of the former impressions
+affects a sentient being, the new impression already finds a convenient
+path for its reception prepared. Its peculiar vibration fits in the old
+trace and thus runs along very easily in the memory-grooves of former
+impressions, reviving at the same time the feelings perceived at their
+original formation. The feeling thus caused is composed of several
+elements, which naturally melt into one: first, there is that kind of
+feeling which is produced by the present impression; secondly, there is
+the revival of former feelings or memory-sensations; and thirdly, there
+is a feeling of congruence resulting from the combination of these two.
+This third element is a new and a very important feature. We suppose that
+it is extremely insignificant in the beginning, but being a constantly
+growing factor, it rapidly increases in importance. The stronger and the
+more independent the memory-structures become, the more clearly will
+their congruence with fresh sense-impressions be felt as a congruence.
+
+This feeling of congruence is the simplest form of what psychologists
+generally call “recognition.”
+
+The recognition of a sense-impression, as being the same as some former
+sense-impression, adds to the feeling a new quality; it imparts meaning
+to it. This feeling of a special kind will now stand for something. In
+this way impressions upon sentient substance will, in the course of
+their natural development, simply by the repetition of similar and same
+impressions, come to indicate the presence of certain conditions that
+cause the impression. This act of indicating something, of symbolising
+the presence of a reality, of possessing meaning, is the birth of soul.
+Sense-impressions that have acquired meaning are called sensations. A
+sensation standing for a special object symbolises that object. Abstract
+ideas are symbols of a higher degree, but they remain symbols just the
+same. And it is the sentient symbols which constitute the soul.
+
+Those actions which are regulated by the meanings of sentient symbols of
+which a soul consists should alone, according to a strict terminology,
+be called “psychical.” The falling stone, the chemical elements, when
+combining or separating, etc., are alive; there is a spontaneously acting
+power even in unorganised nature; but the actions of unorganised nature
+are not determined by the meaning of feelings, and, in truth, we have
+no reason to believe that their feelings—granting that they really do
+possess feelings of some kind—are freighted with even so much as the
+slightest inkling of significance. In a word, there is no soul in the
+stone; there is no mind in the water-fall; and there is nothing psychical
+in either oxygen or hydrogen. But there is soul wherever meaning can be
+found as the regulating motive of actions; there is purpose. And wherever
+purpose is, there is mind.
+
+
+II. PLEASURE AND PAIN.
+
+Professor Haeckel goes still farther in the application of his theory
+of Panpsychism: he speaks of the atoms not only as feeling each other,
+but also as having pleasure and pain. This indicates either that he
+is serious in his belief in the psychical nature of all things, or it
+proves how dangerous it is to introduce an allegorical expression the
+allegorical character of which is from the beginning lost sight of.
+
+What are pleasure and pain?
+
+Pleasure and pain are known to us by experience; they are feelings.
+Pleasure is an agreeable, pain a disagreeable feeling.
+
+Pleasure and pain are different from sensation. Sensations are
+representative of certain somethings called objects. Pleasures and pains,
+however, are not representative, they are purely subjective states.
+There may be pleasurable or painful sensations, and there may be pain
+indicating the presence of pain-producing objects, but that does not
+concern us now. When speaking of pleasure and pain we do not refer to
+the representative value of feelings, but consider a merely subjective
+aspect, pleasure being the agreeableness, pain the disagreeableness of
+feeling.
+
+Accordingly pleasure and pain presuppose the existence of an organised
+system of feelings. An isolated feeling, we have learned, is meaningless;
+it is still less pleasurable or painful. In order to agree or disagree,
+there must be something with which to agree or disagree. Therefore,
+although pleasure and pain are not symbols indicative of some objective
+presence, they can take place only in sentient organisms, in systems of
+feelings, in souls. Where these complex conditions, indicative of the
+presence of a soul, are absent, we have no right to speak of the presence
+of pleasure and pain.
+
+We cannot interpret the phenomena of unorganised nature as being endowed
+with feelings of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are psychical
+phenomena, and psychical phenomena can take place in souls only.
+
+We might as well speak of the presence of positive and negative
+electricity in the cataract, the water-power of which is employed
+to produce electricity. Electricity is, in such a case, transformed
+water-power; but can we, for that reason, say that the motion of water is
+either positive or negative electricity?
+
+All the motions of the objective world must be supposed to have their
+subjective correlates; but the simplest forms of objective phenomena
+cannot have those subjective correlates which, according to our
+experience, appear and have their conditions of appearance only in the
+most complex and highest developed forms of existence—in organised nature.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The physiological conditions of pleasure and pain are now just beginning
+to be investigated (see Goldscheider’s article in Dubois-Reymond’s
+_Archiv_, 1891), and most philosophical theories concerning the nature
+of pleasure and pain are mere assumptions. Almost all the views that are
+now current attempt an explanation by generalising the idea of pleasure
+and pain so as to regard the feelings of pleasure and pain as a universal
+feature of nature. This vicious method of generalisation at the cost
+of discrimination has produced much confusion in the world; and its
+influence is the more pernicious as average minds are easily satisfied
+with generalities.
+
+Now, the theory of making pleasure and pain universal features of
+existence is a palpably erroneous theory; it is a wrong generalisation.
+It is true that sentient beings naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain.
+But are we allowed, according to the laws of logic, to transfer the
+special feature of the case to the whole class of all processes where a
+seeking and an avoiding can be observed? Certainly not. Because sentient
+beings are repelled by pain and attracted by pleasure, we cannot say
+that every repulsion is due to pain and that every attraction is due to
+pleasure.
+
+The theory according to which pleasure and pain alone are the causes of
+attraction and repulsion we may fairly consider as a poetical license
+justifiable within certain narrow limits, and actually justified in so
+far as there is in every natural process some peculiar feature that is
+analogous to the feelings of sentient beings. This peculiar feature—viz.
+its subjectivity—is, as we have seen, not visible, not observable; yet it
+exists: it is that something which in the course of evolution becomes, in
+special combinations, first feeling and then consciousness. But for that
+reason it is not as yet either consciousness or feeling.
+
+While on the one hand the theories of pleasure and pain that regard
+pleasure and pain as universal features of natural phenomena, are
+arrived at by a wrong method of generalisation, we find on the other
+hand they do not agree with facts. They neither explain nor account for
+the appearance or disappearance of real pleasures and pains such as take
+place in animal life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Starting from merely theoretical considerations, Kant defines pleasure as
+a feeling of furtherance, pain, as a feeling of hindrance of life; and
+so prominent a physiologist and psychologist as Alexander Bain says that
+“States of pleasure are connected with an increase, states of pain, with
+an abatement of some or of all the vital functions.”
+
+A consideration of the actual causes of our pleasures and pains will
+prove the incorrectness of these views, which are also due to wrong
+generalisations. An increase of the vital functions and a further growth,
+either of the organs or of the whole organism, is very often accompanied
+with pain. A growing tooth causes, as a rule, as much pain as a decaying
+tooth. And if by some drug the decay is hastened and the nerve is killed,
+there is, connected with the suppression and sometimes with the mere
+abatement of the vital function, an abatement of the pain also.
+
+Feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose that habits have been formed in
+a sentient organism.
+
+Pain is not always a hindrance of life, nor is every hindrance of life
+painful. Pain is not an abatement of the functions of life, not a decay,
+nor a destruction. But pain is always a disturbance of life and of the
+habits that have been formed.
+
+Growth is, under certain circumstances, as much a disturbance as is
+decay. And decay, if it is simply an abatement or cessation of function,
+is not accompanied with pain.
+
+While pain is always a disturbance of the functions of an organism,
+pleasure is simply the gratification of wants; functions and wants being
+formed by habits, we may briefly say that pleasure is agreement, pain
+disagreement, with habits.
+
+There are natural wants and unnatural wants. There are habits beneficial
+to the furtherance of life, and there are habits injurious to the
+furtherance of life. The pleasure connected with the gratification of
+wants does not depend on its being a furtherance or a hindrance of life,
+but solely on the intensity of the want. And the intensity of the want,
+again, depends on the degree to which a habit has become inveterate.[43]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The theory of pleasure and pain which regards pleasure as indicative
+of the growth, and pain, of the decay of life, leads ultimately to the
+ethics of hedonism, which identifies the good with the pleasurable.
+However, if our view of pleasure and pain be correct, it is apparent
+that the pleasure theory in ethics is wrong in its very foundation. The
+pleasurable would cease to be a criterion of goodness; for many things
+are pleasurable that are bad, and many things are painful that are good.
+Growth, development, progress, evolution have often been, nay must mostly
+be bought with great pain, tribulation, anxiety, and also with the
+renunciation of pleasures. On the other hand the fulness of pleasure is
+always a very dangerous symptom for any state of existence.
+
+The seeking of pleasure and the avoiding of pain are certainly very
+questionable guides in determining what right conduct is. In adopting
+pleasure and pain as the principles of ethics, we adulterate the nature
+of morality; for morality exists and has been called into being simply
+to counteract the dangerous allurances of that which promises to produce
+pleasure and to avoid pain. Ethics has to teach us how to live, how to
+develop, how to grow, how to make our lives useful and serviceable. If
+ethics were simply a method of how to obtain the greatest amount of
+pleasure, we might better openly confess that there is no moral goodness
+but only pleasurableness, and consequently that morality is a chimera and
+ethics a farce.
+
+A defender of the pleasure theory in ethics writes in reply to this
+criticism of his view: “To seek pleasure and to avoid pain is not wrong.
+Why shall we deprive men of their enjoyments?” Certainly, everyone has
+a right to enjoy himself; every one has a right to seek pleasure and to
+avoid pain. But seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is not as yet ethical.
+Under ordinary circumstances it is right enough to follow the natural
+impulses of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. But there are cases
+where seeking pleasure, be it for ourselves or for others, and avoiding
+pain, be it for ourselves or for others, become actual wrongs; not
+because present pleasures will lead to future pains, but because certain
+pleasures are a hindrance to the higher evolution of the soul.
+
+It is often said that the renunciation of pleasures is richly made up for
+by the pleasures which are afforded in a more fully developed life. But
+this, in my opinion, is not true. The adult has rather less pleasures
+than the child, and the civilised or highly cultured man does not enjoy
+himself as much, as easily, and as cheaply as does the savage, the
+uncultured, the fool.
+
+
+III. MR. THOMAS A. EDISON’S PANPSYCHISM.
+
+Some time ago Mr. Thomas A. Edison was interviewed on the question, “What
+is life?” Mr. Edison answered the question; and his view is quite in
+accord with Professor Haeckel’s idea of panpsychism. The article appeared
+first in a daily newspaper. Being remarkable for its coincidence with the
+views of a great scientist, and coming from the pen of so interesting
+a man as the famous inventor of the phonograph, we deem it best to
+republish it in full, with Mr. Edison’s permission, who, at the same
+time, acknowledged the copy we sent him as correct.
+
+This is the article:
+
+                            INTELLIGENT ATOMS.
+
+                           BY THOMAS A. EDISON.
+
+    My mind is not of a speculative order, it is essentially
+    practical, and when I am making an experiment, I think only of
+    getting something useful, of making electricity perform work.
+
+    I don’t soar; I keep down pretty close to earth. Of course
+    there are problems in life I can’t help thinking about, but I
+    don’t try to study them out. It is necessary that they should
+    be studied, and men fitted for that work are doing it. I am not
+    fitted for it. I leave the theoretical study of electricity to
+    the physicists, confining my work to the practical application
+    of the force. It is my belief, however, that every atom of
+    matter is intelligent, deriving energy from the primordial
+    germ. The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the
+    intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed. Every atom
+    has an intelligent power of selection and is always striving to
+    get into harmonious relation with other atoms. The human body
+    is, I think, maintained in its integrity by the intelligent
+    persistence of its atoms, or rather by an agreement between
+    the atoms so to persist. When the harmonious adjustment is
+    destroyed the man dies, and the atoms seek other relations.
+
+    I cannot regard the odor of decay but as the result of the
+    efforts of the atoms to dissociate themselves; they want to get
+    away and make new combinations. Man, therefore, may be regarded
+    in some sort as a microcosm of atoms agreeing to constitute his
+    life as long as order and discipline can be maintained. But, of
+    course, there is dissatisfaction, rebellion and anarchy leading
+    eventually to death, and through death to new forms of life.
+    For life I regard as indestructible.
+
+    All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses
+    intelligence. Consider growing corn, for example. An atom
+    of oxygen comes flying along the air. It seeks combination
+    with other atoms and goes to the corn, not by chance, but by
+    intention. It is seized by other atoms that need oxygen, and is
+    packed away in the corn where it can do its work. Now carbon,
+    hydrogen and oxygen enter into the composition of every organic
+    substance in one form of arrangement or another. The formula
+    _CHO_, in fact, is almost universal.
+
+    Very well, then, why does a free atom of carbon select any
+    particular one out of 50,000 or more possible positions unless
+    it wants to? I cannot see how we can deny intelligence to this
+    act of volition on the part of the atom. To say that one atom
+    has an affinity for another is simply to use a big word. The
+    atom is conscious if man is conscious, is intelligent if man is
+    intelligent, exercises will-power if man does, is, in its own
+    little way, all that man is. We are told by geologists that in
+    the earliest periods no form of life could exist on the earth.
+
+    How do they know that? A crystal is devoid of this vital
+    principle, they say, and yet certain kinds of atoms invariably
+    arrange themselves in a particular way to form a crystal. They
+    did that in geological periods antedating the appearance of any
+    form of life and have been doing it ever since in precisely
+    the same way. Some crystals form in branches like a fern. Why
+    is there not life in the growth of a crystal? Was the vital
+    principle specially created at some particular period of the
+    earth’s history, or did it exist and control every atom of
+    matter when the earth was molten? I cannot avoid the conclusion
+    that all matter is composed of intelligent atoms and that life
+    and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic
+    intelligence.
+
+    Of course there is a source of energy. Nature is a perpetual
+    motion machine, and perpetual motion implies a sustaining and
+    impelling force.
+
+    When I was in Berlin I met Du Bois-Reymond, and, wagging the
+    end of my finger, I said to him, “What is that? What moves
+    that finger?” He said he didn’t know; that investigators have
+    for twenty-five years been trying to find out. If anybody could
+    tell him what wagged this finger, the problem of life would be
+    solved.
+
+    There are many forms of energy resulting from the combustion
+    of coal under a boiler. Some of these forms we know something
+    about in a practical way, but there may be many others we don’t
+    know anything about.
+
+    Perhaps electricity will itself be superseded in time, who
+    knows? Now, a beefsteak in the human stomach is equivalent to
+    coal under a boiler. By oxidisation it excites energy that
+    does work, but what form of energy is it? It is not steam
+    pressure. It acts through the nerve-cells, performs work that
+    can be measured in foot pounds, and can be transformed into
+    electricity, but the actual nature of this force which produces
+    this work—which makes effectual the mandate of the will—is
+    unknown.
+
+    It is not magnetism, it doesn’t attract iron. It is not
+    electricity—at least such a form of electricity as we are
+    familiar with. Still, here it is necessary to be guarded,
+    because so many different forms of electricity are known to
+    science that it would be rash to say positively that we shall
+    not class vital energy as a form of electrical energy. We
+    cannot argue anything from difference in speed. Nerve-force
+    may travel as fast as electricity, once it gets started.
+    The apparent slowness may be in the brain. It may take an
+    appreciable time for the brain to set the force going.
+
+    I made an experiment with a frog’s leg that indicates something
+    of the kind. I took a leg that was susceptible to galvanic
+    current. The vibration produced a note that was as high as a
+    piccoto. While the leg was alive it responded to the electrical
+    current; when it was dead it would not respond. After the
+    frog’s leg had been lying in the laboratory three days I
+    couldn’t make it squeal. The experiment was conclusive as
+    to this point: The vital force in the nerves of the leg was
+    capable of acting with speed enough to induce the vibration of
+    the diaphragm necessary to produce sound.
+
+    Certainly this rate of speed is greater than physiologists
+    appear to allow, and it seems reasonable that there is a close
+    affinity between vital energy and electricity. I do not say
+    they are identical; on the contrary I say they are very like.
+    If one could learn to make vital energy directly without fuel,
+    that is without beefsteak in the stomach, and in such manner
+    that the human system could appropriate it, the elixir of life
+    would no longer be a dream of alchemy. But we have not yet
+    learned to make electricity directly, without the aid of fuel
+    and steam.
+
+    I believe this is possible; indeed, I have been experimenting
+    in this direction for some time past. But until we can learn
+    to make electricity, like nature, out of disturbed air, I am
+    afraid the more delicate task of manufacturing vital energy so
+    that it can be bottled and sold at the family grocery store
+    will have to be deferred.
+
+    Electricity, by the way, is properly merely a form of energy,
+    and not a fluid. As for the ether which speculative science
+    supposes to exist, I don’t know anything about it. Nobody
+    has discovered anything of the kind. In order to make their
+    theories hold together they have, it seems to me, created the
+    ether. But the ether imagined by them is unthinkable to me. I
+    don’t say I disagree with them, because I don’t pretend to have
+    any theories of that kind, and am not competent to dispute with
+    speculative scientists. All I can say is, my mind is unable to
+    accept the theory. The ether, they say, is as rigid as steel
+    and as soft as butter. I can’t catch on to that idea.
+
+    I believe that there are only two things in the universe—matter
+    and energy. Matter I can understand to be intelligent, for
+    man himself I regard as so much matter. Energy I know can
+    take various forms, and manifest itself in various ways. I
+    can understand also that it works not only upon, but through,
+    matter. What this matter is, what this energy is, I do not know.
+
+    However, it is possible that it is simply matter and energy,
+    and that any desire to know too much about the whole question
+    should be diagnosed as a disease; such a disease as German
+    doctors are said to have discovered among the students of their
+    universities—the disease of asking questions.
+
+
+THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE.
+
+Mr. Thomas A. Edison’s article is full of suggestions which invite
+further discussion. We must here limit ourselves solely to those which
+touch the problem of Panpsychism and Panbiotism.
+
+Any one who has read Mr. Edison’s article will be struck with the strange
+coincidence that obtains between his and Professor Haeckel’s views. The
+famous naturalist considers what he calls panpsychism as the corner-stone
+of his monism: he says that atoms possess souls; and in a similar way
+the famous inventor believes in the intelligence of atoms, he declares
+that atoms are endowed with minds. There is certainly a deep truth in
+this conception of nature; and yet we cannot accept it in the way it is
+presented by either Professor Haeckel or Mr. Edison.
+
+With reference to Professor Haeckel’s views we have explained why atoms,
+the actions of which are not endowed with meaning, have no soul, and also
+why they cannot feel pleasure and pain. It remains for us to explain why
+atoms are not in possession of intelligence.
+
+What is intelligence?
+
+That reaction upon a stimulus which takes place in the way it does
+because of the presence of meaning, is called mental, or intelligent
+action; and the ability to adjust action to mental representations is
+intelligence.
+
+Intelligence is a psychical quality, and the psychical process which is
+preparing to act with intelligence is called deliberation. Deliberation
+is the successive revival of several soul-structures, either of memories
+of former experiences, or of rules derived therefrom, or of advice
+formerly received, including also new combinations of these mental
+structures, and keeping in view the probable results of the intended
+action. In a word, deliberation is thought, and thought is an interaction
+among meaning-freighted feelings.
+
+Among these ideas, which in so far as they can influence action (i. e.
+purposive motions) are called “motives,” the strongest one will determine
+the result. Now, any atom of non-organised matter, say an atom of
+hydrogen, acts (as we said above) with spontaneity. It is in this sense
+as much alive as is any ever so complex vegetable or animal substance. It
+is self-acting, and its action reveals the innermost nature of its being
+just as much as the action of the man shows the character of the man.
+
+There is, however, a great difference between the action of animal
+beings whose action is regulated by the meanings of their feelings,
+which in their totality we call the soul, and the actions of inorganic
+matter, of crystals, minerals, gases, chemical elements, and gravitating
+masses, all of which we comprise under the name “inanimate nature.”
+The stone’s fall does not depend upon any representative feeling; it
+depends solely upon that quality of the stone which we popularly call
+its weight. Nor has the falling stone any choice whether to fall or
+not to fall. Under certain circumstances it falls. There is no act of
+deliberation preceding the fall. Nor has it any choice concerning the
+direction of its fall. The surrounding conditions, viz., its position
+with regard to the centre of the earth together with its mass, determine
+the process. The stone’s action can satisfactorily be explained without
+attributing to it psychical qualities. The stone possesses no soul;
+it is void of mentality; and although we believe that everything,
+organised or unorganised, is endowed with subjectivity (by which we
+understand the conditions of psychical life, or the potentiality of
+feeling and consciousness), this subjectivity can only be analogous
+to the blind impulse of the stone’s mass. If some other, psychical or
+mental, subjectivity were present, we should say that it apparently does
+not enter as a factor in the determination of the event. Accordingly
+such an assumption is gratuitous. There is subjectivity, but there
+is no intelligence. There is potentiality of feeling, but there is
+no consciousness. There is present the elementary condition of that
+something which is going to develop into mind, but there is no mind;
+there is no meaning-freighted awareness of the surrounding conditions.
+
+Says Mr. Edison:
+
+    “The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the
+    intelligences of the atoms of which he is composed.”
+
+The sum total of the intelligences of the atoms in a human body (if,
+in this connection, for the sake of argument, we grant that atoms are
+intelligent) would not as yet make up the intelligence of man. Suppose we
+are contemplating a mosaic picture or inscription. Are such compositions
+really only the sum of the little stones? Are they not rather a certain
+peculiar form in which these colored stones are arranged? It is not
+the sum of the stones that makes the picture, but the form of their
+composition. The picture is not contained in any single one of them, nor
+is it the whole number of all the single stones: it originates through
+their peculiar combination and consists of the form in which they are
+combined.
+
+Mr. Edison’s explanation of the soul, applied to this example of a mosaic
+picture, would be as follows: Every little stone is in itself a little
+mosaic picture. The whole picture of the mosaic is the sum of the little
+pictures of the stones of which it is composed.
+
+The intelligence of the soul, however, is not even as yet the form in
+which feeling structures combine; it originates with the representative
+faculty of the feeling structures. The soul is the organised totality of
+a set of images and abstract mental symbols representing the qualities,
+the influences, and the interactions of the different objects of the
+surrounding world, the thinking subject included.
+
+Says Mr. Edison:
+
+    “Every atom has an intelligent power of selection, and is
+    always striving to get into harmonious relation with other
+    atoms.”
+
+The latter is true; the former is an error. Every atom “is always
+striving to get into harmonious relation with other atoms”; this is its
+nature; and its nature being stable, consisting of certain inalienable
+and intrinsic qualities, the atom acts with consistency. Certain
+atoms, say atoms of hydrogen, are of such a nature as to combine with
+certain other atoms, say atoms of oxygen, into molecules that form a
+certain substance of peculiar properties, which, if each atom of oxygen
+combines with two atoms of hydrogen, would be _H₂O_, or water. This
+substance again, having certain definite qualities, will in a temperature
+below freezing point crystallise at a definite angle. The angle of
+crystallisation being the same for all molecules _H₂O_, the result will
+necessarily be one of most marvellous regularity. And not being able to
+observe the atoms in their secret activity, not knowing all the details
+of nature’s marvellous laboratory, we are astonished to find such a
+wonderfully harmonious relation. And yet, considering the nature of
+things, we are urged to confess that it is the result of an inevitable
+necessity, which takes place according to strict mathematical laws.
+
+Although every atom strives, according to its nature, to get into
+harmonious relation with other atoms, we do not see any “intelligent
+power of selection” in the province of inorganic nature. Every atom of
+inorganic substances acts according to its nature in one and the same
+way throughout. There is no choice, no selection, allowed. Choice and
+selection are faculties that are reserved for the higher domains of
+psychical life, which originates in the domain of animal existence when
+meaning, conditioned by the presence of sentiency, rises into being and
+creates the soul.
+
+Supposing that through some combination of atoms their subjectivity be
+combined in such a form as to produce sentiency or feeling, we can very
+easily understand how this feeling will in time become representative of
+the conditions by which it is affected. The soul does not consist of the
+atoms of its organism, nor of the sum of the qualities of the atoms. The
+soul consists of something more subtle than matter: the soul consists of
+the meaning that is attached to the different forms of the feelings which
+obtain in living organisms.
+
+
+THE PROBLEM OF THEISM.
+
+The problem as to whether or not there is an element of feeling present
+in the unorganised realm of nature, is connected also with the problem
+of theism. The monistic view of the world, which considers nature as
+alive throughout, can neither accept the old supernaturalism, nor the
+materialistic theory of atheism. Theism, as it is usually conceived,
+believes in a personal creator and ruler of the world. Materialism denies
+the existence of any God; it regards matter and its actions as the only
+reality.
+
+Monism does not regard mental phenomena as an incidental by-play of
+blindly operating forces. It regards mind as a necessary product of
+reality. Mind and the peculiar qualities of mind are characteristic of
+the world-tree, of which it is the highest efflorescence we know. From
+the fruit we can know the root, from the product we can judge of the
+factors, in the creature we see the creator.
+
+That great something which has produced us, the All-power in which we
+live and move and have our being, and obedience to the laws of which are
+the conditions of life, of welfare, and of an advance to higher life, is
+called with a popular religious name “God.”
+
+Let us comprise under the name “theism” all those views which recognise
+any conception of God, and reserve the term anthropotheism for that view
+which regards God as a person, a mind, a conscious being, or a world-ego.
+Atheism in that case will be a negation of the existence of God in any
+form, a negation of the All-power of which we are parts and to which we
+have to conform; and accordingly atheism will be also a negation of any
+authority of moral conduct.
+
+We call attention to the fact that many who call themselves atheists,
+simply because they do not believe in anthropotheism, are according to
+this definition not to be classed among the atheists.
+
+What has monism to say, on the problem of the existence of God?
+
+Prof. George J. Romanes, in an article which appeared some time ago in
+the _Contemporary Review_ under the title “The World as an Eject,”
+declares that monism has left the problem of theism in the same state it
+was in before. He says:
+
+    “The views of the late Professor Clifford concerning the
+    influence of monism on theism, are unsound. I am in full
+    agreement with him in believing that monism is destined to
+    become the generally accepted theory of things, seeing that it
+    is the only theory of things which can receive the sanction
+    of science on the one hand, and of feeling on the other. But
+    I disagree with him in holding that this theory is fraught
+    with implications of an anti-theistic kind. In my opinion,
+    _this theory leaves the question of theism very much where
+    it was before_.[44] That is to say, while not furnishing any
+    independent proof of theism, it likewise fails to furnish any
+    independent disproof.
+
+    “As a matter of methodical reasoning it appears to me that
+    monism alone can only lead to agnosticism. That is to say,
+    it leaves a clear field of choice as between theism and
+    atheism.”[45]
+
+Clifford says in the passage referred to by Professor Romanes:
+
+    “Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex
+    which is made up of elements themselves not rational, not
+    intelligent, not conscious.”
+
+Rational, intelligent, conscious beings, so far as their material
+existence is concerned, are made up of elements not rational, not
+intelligent, not conscious. But mind, reason, intelligence are not at
+all made up of material elements; they are neither latent nor germinal
+and least of all fully developed properties of the single atoms. Reason
+can in our conception never be explained as a complex result of the
+interaction of absolutely irrational elements. The material elements of
+the world, it is true, are not intelligent, not conscious; but the world
+as a whole (although _not_ conscious and _not_ endowed with purposive
+volition) is at least _not ir_rational and not void of determination. On
+the contrary the world as a whole is the prototype of all rationality,
+and human reason is a mere image of the world-order. What is the reason
+of a rational being but an incarnation of this world-order?
+
+Reason is not a thing of matter; exactly so the world-order is not a
+thing of matter. But it exists none the less; it is a reality. On the
+other hand, the world-order need neither be a personal being nor the
+work of a personal being. The order that prevails in the real world and
+in the laws of nature appears also in the ideal world, in the laws of
+formal thought, in mathematics, and its kindred sciences; and the same
+rationality that obtains in the ideal domain permeates the realms of
+reality, the universe of objective existence.
+
+The idea that God created the world-order and dictated its laws is a
+fanciful and poetical allegory; it is as such a pagan notion which
+belongs in the same category with Hesiod’s Cosmology, but it is
+scientifically and philosophically unthinkable. For God is eternal and
+God’s being is eternal. God has not created his own attributes and the
+world-order is simply an attribute of God; it is part and parcel of his
+nature. Or can you think of God without that attribute of irrefragable
+order that appears to science as necessity, to religion as holiness, to
+ethics as justice, to art as the law of beauty, to the mystic as the key
+to all the wonders of existence which though solving all the problems
+remains most wonderful itself?
+
+The world as a whole, the cosmos, God, or whatever we call the One and
+All, is the prototype of all reason, but he is not a mind; he is not a
+system of sentient symbols; he is not a soul. Minds are a special kind of
+God’s creatures; but God is not a creature: he is the condition of the
+existence of creatures, he is the creator.
+
+The objection is made from materialistic quarters: “What is the world
+as a whole but the sum of all atoms!” This is an error. The world is
+not merely the sum of all its atoms; the universe does not consist of
+innumerable little particles which in their combination form the All. On
+the contrary: the world as a whole, existence in its oneness, or speaking
+religiously God, is alone the only true reality; all other things and
+beings are parts of him. Atoms are abstract concepts; the existence of
+an atom and of its actions presupposes the existence of the great whole
+of which it is a part, and without which it would have no reality. There
+are no atoms in themselves. Atoms regarded as things in themselves are a
+scientific superstition.
+
+Professor Romanes advances the proposition, that cosmical events, being
+as highly complex as nervous phenomena, might be possessed of a similar
+subjectivity. The nervous phenomena which constitute the physiological
+action of mind in the province of objectivity are, it is true, very
+complex, but complexity does not constitute that characteristic feature
+on the presence of which depends the origin of mind.
+
+Professor Romanes says:
+
+    “Both mind and matter in motion admit of degrees: first as to
+    quantity, next as to velocity, and lastly as to _complexity_.
+    But the degrees of matter in motion are found, in point
+    of observable fact, not to correspond with those of mind,
+    save in the last particular of complexity, where there is
+    unquestionably an evident correspondence.
+
+    “Now, if we fix our attention merely on this subject-matter
+    of complexity, and refuse to be led astray by obviously false
+    analogies of a more special kind, I think that there can be
+    no question that the macrocosm does furnish amply sufficient
+    opportunity, as it were, for the presence of subjectivity, even
+    if it be assumed that subjectivity can only be yielded by an
+    order of complexity analogous to that of a nervous system. For,
+    considering the natural and dynamical system of the universe as
+    a whole, it is obvious that the complexity presented is greater
+    than any of its parts. Not only is it true that all these parts
+    are included in the whole, and that even the visible sidereal
+    system alone presents movements of enormous intricacy, but we
+    find, for instance, that even within the limits of this small
+    planet there is presented to actual observation a peculiar
+    form of circumscribed complex, fully comparable to that of the
+    individual brain, and yet external to each individual brain.
+    For the so-called ‘social organism,’ although composed of
+    innumerable individual personalities, is, with regard to each
+    of its constituent units, a part of the objective world—just as
+    the human brain would be, were each of its constituent cells
+    of a construction sufficiently complex to yield a separate
+    personality.”
+
+The so-called social organism which is composed of innumerable
+personalities undoubtedly yields a peculiar spiritual existence, which
+cannot be explained solely as the sum of the parts and actions of its
+constituent individuals. The relations in which the members of society
+stand to each other are of an analogous importance to the relations of
+the cells and organs in an organism. It is the form that constitutes this
+or that kind of an organism, not the sum of atoms, nor the intricacy or
+complexity of their combinations. Different forms of perhaps the same
+material amount, and of the same intricacy of combination, yield quite
+distinct types of individuality, and every state, every nation, every
+society possesses, as it were a personality of its own.
+
+Mind is not constituted by complexity. Mind is a system of sentient
+symbols. Wherever we find organisms acting in such a way that their
+actions depend upon the _meanings_ of certain stimuli, we have to
+attribute to them that characteristic feature which we call mind, or
+soul. The action of a falling stone is explainable without attributing
+to it any mentality. There is no representative value, no meaning in
+that quality of the stone which, under certain conditions, makes the
+stone fall. However, if a man acts, the motive of his action does not
+consist in the gravity of certain material particles of his brain. It
+consists in the meaning that resides in certain feelings. Without taking
+into consideration the meaning that dominates the man’s motives, we
+cannot explain his action, and it is the meaning of feelings that the
+soul consists of. Only where and when we can discern the presence of
+meaning as the raison d’être of actions, are we justified in calling
+phenomena mental. When the action that takes place in response to a
+stimulus depends solely upon the significance of a symbol, the inference
+is legitimate, nay, it is inevitable and conclusive, that we have to
+deal with a mind. The motion of a comet, which depends perhaps not only
+upon the gravity of its mass, but also upon the chemical actions and
+explosions of its constituent elements during its approach to the sun,
+may be ever so intricate; but this does not in the least justify the
+assumption of the presence of mind in the comet.
+
+The assumption of mind in inorganic nature is not only fantastical, it is
+also needless. Facts are better explained without this speculation.
+
+The world as a whole is not bare of subjectivity. In this we agree
+with both Clifford and Romanes. But we do not identify subjectivity
+and mind, the latter being a special and indeed a very complex form
+of subjectivity. We suppose that subjectivity pervades also all the
+processes of unorganised nature, and no less the cosmic events; but be
+they ever so much more complex than nervous phenomena, there is present
+only a non-mental subjectivity.
+
+Yet although the phenomena of so-called inanimate nature, be they motions
+of celestial bodies or physical and chemical processes, are non-mental,
+there is in every one of them present that grand feature which is as
+it were the breath of God. This feature appears in all the phenomena of
+nature, but in none of them more gloriously than in the soul of man. Even
+the cosmical events of marvellous sublimity appear as a mere prelude to
+the appearance of soul-life, for in soul-life is focused all the divinity
+of nature. Reason is the reflex of the world-order and thus a rational
+being is made in the likeness of God.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Professor Romanes presents the problem of the subjectivity of existence
+by the adjoined diagram, which he explains as follows:
+
+    “Following Clifford, I will call these inferred subjectivities
+    by the name of ‘ejects,’ and assign to them the symbol _Y_.
+    Thus in the following discussion _X_ = the objective world,
+    _Y_, the ejective world, and _Z_, the subjective world. Now,
+    the theory of monism supposes that _X_, _Y_ and _Z_ are all
+    alike in kind, but presents no definite teaching as to how far
+    they may differ in degree. We may, however, at once allow that
+    between the psychological value of _Z_ and that of _X_, there
+    is a wide difference of degree, and also that while the value
+    of _Z_ is a fixed quantity, that of _Y_ varies greatly in the
+    different parts of the area _Y_.”
+
+The deep shading of _Z_ indicates consciousness, and consciousness is
+that form of subjectivity which constitutes our mind. _Z_ is not,
+as Professor Romanes asserts that it is, a fixed quantity; it varies
+greatly, as every one knows from his own experience. It is lowest
+in trance or swoon or profound sleep. It is highest in the state of
+concentrated attention. The ejective element, which we assume to be
+present as a correlative concomitant in the objective world, we assume,
+with Professor Romanes, varies greatly in the different parts of the
+area _Y_. Like Professor Romanes, we also do _not_ assume the existence
+of any unshaded _X_. There is no objectivity without its subjective
+correlate. But, according to the theory of monism, the nature of the
+concomitant subjectivity is not unknowable: it can be inferred from the
+nature of objective existence. The subjectivity of the falling stone
+is most elementary, and _not mental_; its action is not prompted by
+meaning. That something which impels the stone to fall, and which science
+calls gravity, does not possess any representative element. There is no
+symbolism involved in gravity. There is no soul in the stone. The stone
+is not incited to falling by any purpose; it has no end in view. Purpose
+originates with and through the presence of representative symbols.
+According to the theory of monism the shading of the surrounding zones is
+not a matter concerning which we have to suspend our judgment. If monism
+is true, we know very well how deeply we have to shade the different
+phenomena of objective nature.
+
+Taking this view, we object to Professor Romanes’s conclusion when he
+says:
+
+    “Without in any way straining the theory of monism, we may
+    provisionally shade _X_ more deeply than _Z_, and this in some
+    immeasurable degree.
+
+    “Monism sanctions the shading of _X_ as deeply as we choose;
+    but the shading which it sanctions is only provisional.”
+
+While the presence of mind in the phenomena of the stellar universe and
+of inorganic nature must decidedly be denied, I would not, for that
+reason, declare that monism is atheistic.
+
+Monism is decidedly theistic although not anthropotheistic. It is
+monotheistic in so far as it recognises that the all-existence in which
+we live and move and have our being is the ἙΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΝ, the One and All.
+But there is not the slightest reason for the theory, and there are
+sufficient reasons against it, that the universe is possessed of a huge
+world-ego, that it is a person or a mind.
+
+We maintain on the one hand that the laws of nature are not designs
+arranged With consciously preconceived purposes. Yet on the other hand,
+we do not forget, that the world-order possesses quite definite features
+and that the course of evolution runs in a very unmistakable direction.
+We can plainly decipher its character, and the great religious teachers
+of mankind have with a truly prophetic instinct proclaimed the ethical
+injunctions to be derived therefrom—injunctions which, millenniums after
+them, science has discovered to be founded in the nature of things.
+
+God is no mind, yet God is mentality, the source of all mind: God is not
+a spirit, but he is spirituality. The subjectivity of the universe from
+which all consciousness rises is part of his being, and whatever that
+subjectivity, considered as a whole, be or be not, that much is certain,
+that in grandeur it corresponds to the objectivity of the world. It does
+not think in symbols as a man does; it is not a mind: but it exists
+nevertheless. Whatever it is like we learn from the revelation of its
+appearance in objective existence, from the cosmic order, the laws of
+nature, and the moral ideas of mankind.
+
+Knowledge of nature means knowledge of God, for nature is God as he
+appears and the objectivity of being is the revelation of God.
+
+We would not limit God to the subjectivity of nature: God is both
+subjectivity and objectivity combined. He is that All-power that is, was,
+and will be, thus being the ultimate authority of conduct.
+
+God is not a mind, he is more than a mind; God is not a system of
+symbols, he is the reality symbolised in mind. He is not a person, he is
+super-personal.
+
+He who does not see that the God of monism is greater than the God
+of anthropotheism, had better believe in a personal God, until he
+appreciates the truth that God is not personal but super-personal. For
+after all anthropotheism is nearer the truth than atheism, for atheism
+(well understood, the atheism of our definition above) is a moral
+nihilism devised to shake off all ethical obligation so as to make the
+lust of the moment and the pleasure of the individual the supreme rule of
+action.
+
+Monism, accordingly, does not leave the problem of theism where it was
+before. Monism proves that God is not to be conceived in the likeness
+of man, but the reverse: man, being a system of symbols representing
+the world, is to be conceived as having been made or rather as having
+originated in the likeness of God. God is the original, man is the copy.
+God is the whole, man is the part, in which the whole finds a more or
+less correct representation. The picture is not perfect, but the grandest
+duty a man has is the constant approach to a greater perfection. Man is
+the temporal, God is the eternal. Man is limited, God is the infinite.
+
+                                                                   EDITOR.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[41] _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 4.
+
+[42] Spontaneous motion (as here defined) does not mean action without
+a cause; nor does the spontaneity of the cart exclude the co-operation
+of other spontaneities (_e. g._ the attraction of the earth) entering as
+factors in bringing about the final result.
+
+[43] This theory of pleasure and pain was first set forth in an editorial
+article of No. 120 of _The Open Court_, which has been republished in
+the chapter “Pleasure and Pain,” pp. 338-345, of _The Soul of Man_. A
+correct view of the nature of pleasure and pain is of great importance,
+especially in ethics. Notwithstanding the palpable erroneousness of the
+old view, several articles written by prominent authors have appeared
+of late, that continue in the old strain without taking notice of the
+criticism that overthrows the basis of their theories.
+
+[44] _Italics are ours._
+
+[45] This same position is maintained with equal vigor in Professor
+Romanes’s latest work _Darwin and After Darwin_, pp. 412-442. The Open
+Court Publishing Co., 1892.
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+FRANCE.
+
+
+Dr. Paul Sollier has just published, in the Bibliothéque
+Charcot-Debove,[46] a new and excellent work, _Les troubles de la
+memoire_. This work is not identical in its purpose with that of
+M. Ribot; it corrects the latter in certain points, completes and
+corroborates it in others. M. Sollier set out to discuss this question
+solely from a medical standpoint, which was intentionally passed over
+by M. Ribot, but he has also necessarily touched upon its psychological
+aspects, and, as he informs us himself, he was obliged on the whole to
+make a medico-psychological study of the question.
+
+The subject is a vast one; one could include in it aphasia and all the
+weaknesses resulting from the destruction of the brain-centres, whether
+those of motion or of sensation. M. Sollier has taken the pains to reduce
+it, however, to definite limits. He studies especially the subject of
+acquired amnesia (diminutive changes and disaggregations of the memory).
+He does not consider the subject of congenital amnesia, which is an
+absence and not a loss of memory. Strictly considered, the only cases
+of true amnesia, or _organic_ amnesia, are those which result from the
+destruction of the nerve-centres, since in this case there is an absolute
+loss of the power of forming mental images, and not simply an enfeebling
+or forgetting of them, which is characteristic of _functional_ amnesia.
+From a clinical standpoint amnesia exists only in the last case. Though
+the effect may be the same in both cases, the causes are not identical.
+
+Clinical investigation cannot, however, overlook the diminutive changes
+which take place in the memory and which, as early as 1817, were called
+by Louyer-Villermay dysmnesia, and which are always closely allied
+to organic modifications of the brain. As regards amnesia itself, it
+is important to distinguish simple amnesia from retrogressive and
+progressive amnesia. M. Sollier explains the motive causes of these
+different conditions with great lucidity, and renders them easy of
+comprehension by means of ingenious illustrations.
+
+I call attention to the information he gives us as to the conditions
+under which a revival of mental images takes place, p. 30; to his
+criticism of Ribot’s opinion, according to which the power of correctly
+locating events in the scale of time is the true characteristic of
+psychical memory: it is quite enough if it reproduces events as in
+the past, that is to say if there exists a conscious knowledge which
+shows that the mental conception belongs to the past, or is, simply, a
+remembrance, p. 35 and 40; to his remarks on the strengthening of mental
+images due to the repetition of remembrances, the necessary sequence of
+which is that a weakening of old memories follows the destruction of
+accumulated mental images, p. 48; to his explanation of the processes
+of retrogressive amnesia (coming suddenly after an attack of vertigo,
+a blow, etc.) which he bases upon a supposition of a group of mental
+conceptions in touch with one another, in such a way that the loss of
+one leading conception in a group deprives this group of sufficient
+consistency to form a conscious synthesis, p. 70.
+
+As regards the classifications of amnesia M. Sollier censures that of M.
+Ribot as being neither openly psychological nor openly clinical, and of
+taking successively as bases the extent of an observed phenomenon, its
+evolution, its location in time. Moreover, from a clinical standpoint
+it has led to a joining together of totally incongruous disorders. M.
+Sollier therefore rejects it, and contents himself with adopting first of
+all, with M. Falret, the natural classification of general amnesia and of
+partial amnesia. Moreover, in taking account of the systematising of lost
+remembrances, he proposes to make a distinction as to the two varieties
+of systematised (functional) and of non-systematised (organic) amnesia,
+considered from the purely psychological standpoint, p. 59. We should
+thus have, firstly, the classification of general amnesia, including
+(A) true organic amnesia (destruction of the centre of mental images),
+and, under the classification of the systematised, (B) functional,
+or apparent, amnesia (imperfect performance of the functions of the
+centres): this latter subdividing into two groups, (_a_) amnesia with its
+varieties (_a´_) simple, (_b´_) retrogressive, (_c´_) progressive, and
+(_b_) paramnesia: (_a´_) that of locality, (_b´_) that of exactness; to
+which it is proper to add (_c_) dysmnesia, which is organic-functional.
+Secondly, the classification of partial amnesia whether systematised or
+not, which may be either organic or functional. M. Sollier abandons,
+moreover, every pathological or etiological classification as being
+exceedingly unsatisfactory. In the presence of a patient, he justly
+remarks, the physician can only employ semiology.—I will not enter
+here into the details of the inquisitor-like investigation entered
+upon by the author. I must even proceed without stopping through the
+observations intended for medical men, which form the second part of the
+work, but I judge that every reader will also find therein many facts
+which may prove of interest. After having read it, one is more impressed
+than ever with the importance and delicacy of the motive forces of the
+memory, in noting the frequency and the varieties even of its sources of
+weakness. M. Sollier has the credit of pointing them out—in the shape
+of “defects in synthetical power” and in “will power”—in the sources of
+weakness where one had not been accustomed to look for them. It would be
+interesting, he thinks, to find out what part amnesia may perhaps take in
+the pathogeny of certain nervous disorders, and the influence which it
+has on their evolution. Specialists for the insane might find therein a
+new subject of study, and psychology will profit, on the other hand, by
+that which clinical experience offers it. Is not its main object to learn
+to understand life as a unit at the same time that it analyses it as a
+diversity?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When one passes from a book like that of M. Sollier to the work of M.
+l’Abbé MAURICE DE BAETS, _Les bases de la morale et du droit_,[47]
+one is impressed by the change of method. It has become impossible
+for us to consider pathology as unallied to questions of morality; and
+we have accomplished this great object of studying matters pertaining
+to the moral world, the evolution of law, without seeking our base of
+support in a religious faith or in a metaphysical affirmation. Even M.
+l’Abbé de Baets himself declares emphatically that he desires to adopt
+only one starting point from among those we are acquainted with,—the
+verification of facts,—and truly he shows a good will and knowledge;
+nevertheless the ground which he considers so firm has, as we believe,
+no stability. All seems strange to us, if I may so speak, in books of
+this description. The tone which is peculiar to them, the nature of the
+facts cited, the progress of the reasoning, impeach them just as surely
+as the blue color of his costume reveals afar off an inhabitant of the
+Celestial Empire. I am not an impassioned adversary of the clergy; far
+from it. I appreciate their intentions and esteem their persons as one
+should, but I am unable to share their opinions, and I consider indeed
+that they deceive themselves when they think that faith has ever given to
+the world an absolute assurance. It has not given it because it has not
+proved sufficient. Mankind, variable and vacillating though it may be,
+does not change its beliefs because of fickleness of heart: its mental
+evolution takes place too slowly for that, and is also too painful. The
+Catholic church of to-day has adopted as its watch-word the return to
+St. Thomas of Aquinas; it will gain by this unity of effort, without
+succeeding however in leading back the minds of men to its point of view.
+The diverse ways we follow tend doubtless as a matter of fact toward the
+same objective point, and run more or less in the same direction; but
+humanity scarcely ever passes back again over the paths which it has once
+traversed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have another little volume by M. LOMBROSO, _Les applications de
+l’anthropologie criminelle_; a sequel to _Nouvelles recherches_, which
+I have mentioned before. We find here interesting pages in regard to
+transportation and reform schools, and a criticism of the new theories
+of the penal code (Garofalo, Tarde, Sighele, Onanoff and Blorg, Ferri)—a
+part of the question considered in the Congress. A chapter indeed is
+devoted to the subject of criminal anthropology in modern literature,
+in regard to which it seems to me M. Lombroso always makes more of
+a question than is desirable, but which he well understands how to
+criticise. Then follow several pages on the criminal type in art, after
+a work of Dr. Edward Lefort; then comes a description of anthropological
+instruments and methods. I will not affirm that this last work brings us
+much of novelty; it is chiefly a new and energetic presentation of his
+views, and M. Lombroso has no doubt whatever that by dint of striking the
+nail upon the head he will succeed in driving it into the wall of his
+adversaries.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The work of M. B. BOURDON, _L’expression des emotions et des tendances
+dans le langage_, is certainly one of the most curious books one can
+read. He treats in an original manner of phonetical questions, which
+are less rife in France than in England and Germany, as to what sounds
+signify, or speech; what is their worth in intensity, elevation, form or
+quality, duration; what phenomena are shown by successions of intensity,
+of elevation, of elementary articulation, of syllables, of words, etc.,
+of duration; what are the relations of these phenomena to versification
+and what comparison one can make between writing and speech: such are the
+problems particularly studied, at times with the aid of very simple but
+instructive facts culled from experience.
+
+These studies—I need scarcely add that they are comparative ones—are
+of interest for various reasons. They lead up to new ideas of grammar
+and of language, and furnish arguments for a reform in orthography of
+which M. Bourdon is a very warm partisan. His readers will not be slow
+to notice for the matter of that, that he is in regard to this frankly
+revolutionary; and it may seem paradoxical to say to them, for example,
+that “the distinction between analytical and synthetical languages is
+absolutely artificial, and could only be produced through our bad systems
+of writing.” Writing, M. Bourdon indeed remarks, introduces separations
+in places where spoken language makes no pause. The English write _I
+will go_, they pronounce it _Iwillgo_. The analysis which pertains to
+writing masks the true cohesion of the spoken language, and “if in the
+past all series of articulations had been written as a single word which
+were in fact pronounced as a single word, we should not have known the
+error which consists in opposing certain languages classed as synthetical
+to others which we class as analytical.” The argument is perhaps not
+a decisive one, and in the neo-Latin languages, for example, one can
+scarcely deny that the analysis of the written language has conformed to
+the work of decomposition of the antique forms, so as to adapt itself to
+the new groupings of their essential elements, groupings wherein these
+elements remain variable because speech separates them effectively, in
+many cases by interpolating governing words or others.
+
+But it is not my intention to enter into these detailed discussions.
+I leave M. Bourdon in further calling attention to his last chapter,
+_Ecriture_. Persons curious as to graphology will find in it some good
+ideas concerning this method of “character reading.” The author does not
+tell everything, and I have a suspicion that he greatly despises certain
+signs valued by the graphologists, and arrived at empirically, but we
+should note what he has actually said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Under the title, _Le monde physique, Essai de conception expérimentale_,
+M. Dr. JULIEN PIOGER offers to the public a sketch of a world-system.
+This system is summed up in the expression of “Universal Solidarity,”
+and is based on the idea of infinitely minute matter-particles, or
+“infinitesimals,” the mutual relations of which, and their equilibrium,
+constitute the machinery of the universe. The atomic-mechanical
+hypothesis, says M. Pioger, is wrong in resolving matter into perfected
+differential particles and in assigning to its atoms qualities which
+make of them either true material corpuscules or a real entity, “a thing
+in itself.” On the contrary, far from intending to assign a limit to
+materiality, the hypothesis of infinitesimals confines itself to limiting
+the conception which we may have of it. The infinitesimal corresponds
+to the infinitely small, that is to say to the non-perfected, to the
+non-differentiable, beyond our cognisance and our perceptivity; it
+expresses the most reduced condition of the affinities which constitute
+matter; it is the expression of the infinitesimal existence of that
+which we call motion, extension, ponderability, under the general name
+of matter. Now the most simple thing which can be conceived of in the
+physical world, is the _couple_ formed by the essential equipoise of two
+infinitesimals. In developing the couple it becomes possible to form the
+universe in all its great variety. The solidarity of the parts in the
+whole appears as the essential condition of existence of all that which
+Is—the necessary condition of all individuality.
+
+In conclusion I call attention to two new editions, one the well-known
+work of M. BERNARD PÉREZ, _Les trois premières années de l’enfant_, fifth
+edition, revised and supplied with an introduction by Mr. James Sully;
+the other _Les functions du cerveau_, by M. JULES SOURY, a work highly
+esteemed, embodying the most recent researches.
+
+                                                            LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[46] Rueff, publisher.
+
+[47] This book and the following ones are published by F. Alcan.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+GERMANY.
+
+
+One of our foremost psychiatrists, Professor v. Krafft-Ebing of Vienna,
+says in his celebrated text-book on psychiatry: “If Pedagogy made a
+more serious study of the character of man in his psychopathological
+relations, many of the mistakes and severities of our system of education
+would be removed, many an unsuitable choice of vocation would be left
+unmade, and thus many a psychical existence rescued.”
+
+Any one who is at all familiar with the most important doctrines of the
+diseased phenomena of mental life, and who knows how frequently psychical
+disturbances of a more or less serious nature occur during childhood,
+will fully agree with Krafft-Ebing, and will only regret that pedagogy,
+in this important direction, has completely neglected its task.
+
+Although lately the necessity of psychiatric knowledge for the pedagogue
+has been insisted upon in professional circles, for instance, by
+Professor STRUEMPELL in his _Pedagogic Pathology_ (comp. _The Monist_ II,
+106), yet instruction in this department occupies a wholly subsidiary
+place in pedagogic education, and has not been made as it should have
+been, an organic part of the same. The writer of these lines has
+accordingly discussed this subject in a special treatise, maintaining
+that the most important diseased phenomena of mental life might be
+treated as a part of pedagogic psychology (comp. _The Monist_ I, 619).
+
+The demands made were met in different ways. While the English and
+American press accepted these demands without reserve (for instance, in
+HALL’S _Pedagogical Seminary_, I, 297), in Germany there has been more
+caution displayed, inasmuch as the opposing difficulties were regarded as
+greater than they probably were (Professor REIN’S _Pädagogische Studien_,
+1892, Heft I).
+
+We have, however, simply to call to mind the doctrine which more than
+twenty years ago Maudsley in his “Physiology and Pathology of the Mind”
+laid such special emphasis upon, that psychic laws are the same in
+healthy and diseased phenomena, only that they do not operate under the
+same conditions and therefore produce different symptoms. Far from its
+being true, therefore, that the introduction of psychopathology into
+psychology can be opposed by any especially well-founded objections, such
+a procedure will, on the contrary, be found to be, just as Maudsley said,
+an appropriate and absolutely indispensable auxiliary of the study of
+this science. And that which was emphasised by Maudsley, and lately also
+by MUENSTERBERG in the treatise already discussed in _The Monist_ (II,
+289), _On the Problems and Methods of Psychology_ (Leipsic, 1891, Abel),
+Ziehen has done in his “Outlines of Physiological Psychology” in a manner
+which will be full of suggestions for the pedagogue (comp. _The Monist_
+I, 598).
+
+To be sure, the work of Ziehen is very far from supplying all that
+the pedagogue needs. We have in this work a vast mass of valuable
+observations, which will have to be elaborated in a manner that accords
+with the needs of pedagogy, if this science is to derive any material
+profit from psychiatry. For the bibliography of this subject we shall
+refer the reader to a former correspondence of ours (_The Monist_ II,
+103), and select at present for examination one province only,—a province
+which is deserving of especial consideration, inasmuch as the phenomena
+which occur in it are phenomena which most frequently confront the
+pedagogist, and are most likely to be overlooked by the untrained eye.
+We refer to the _psychopathic subsidiary phenomena_ of DR. KOCH, by which
+expression this author comprises all the psychical irregularities, be
+they natural or acquired, affecting the life of the human personality,
+which, though not even in the severest cases amounting to actual mental
+disorders, yet in the most favorable instances so affect the persons
+afflicted that they appear as lacking the full possession of mental
+normality and capacity. The second part of Koch’s work, mentioned in _The
+Monist_ in the place above cited, has just now appeared. (Ratisbon, 1892,
+Otto Maier). Having discussed in the first part of his work inherited
+and chronic psychopathic subsidiary phenomena, the author now proceeds
+to discuss acquired subsidiary factors, and holds out the prospect of a
+third part, on the appearance of which we shall have occasion again to
+discuss the entire work from a different point of view. For the present,
+only the pedagogic aspect of the question interests us. On many readers,
+Koch’s book must have made the impression,—to judge from his concluding
+remarks,—that the author shares Lombroso’s point of view, and to very
+many pedagogues such a position would be, from the very outset, a bad
+recommendation, for it would necessarily, in the very nature of the case,
+involve the pedagogue in great embarrassment, in the same way as it has
+involved the philosophical jurist. But embarrassment is no reason why
+we should close our ears to the truth, and if Lombroso should be right
+in all his teachings, pedagogy would also be obliged to accommodate
+its doctrines to his. Upon the whole, however, Koch is opposed to him.
+Thus when he says: “What I commend Lombroso for is that he has observed
+much, has collected rich materials, and has been the source of great
+incentives in many directions, and has worked suggestively in many ways;
+what I reproach him with is that he has confounded the healthy with
+the diseased, and has brought under one and the same category without
+sufficient and appropriate tests, psychotic phenomena and phenomena which
+are psychopathically merely of a subsidiary order; what I reject is his
+theory of degeneration and his peculiar views of philosophy.”
+
+Material, such as Koch and others offer, must first be elaborated
+into a pedagogic psychopathology—or better still into a pedagogic
+pathopsychology—before pedagogy, as a whole, can assume in this
+direction the proper form. Though we consider, now, this preparatory work
+as indispensable, we can, nevertheless, not think of denying the value
+of works which, without any profession of far-reaching psychological
+analysis, put in effective and available form for pedagogy the diseased
+phenomena of the mental life of children. The first German work of this
+kind, so far as we know, is from the pen of a Leipsic teacher, GUSTAV
+SIEGERT, and bears the title _Problematische Kindesnaturen_.[48] This
+little work is now followed by a more comprehensive treatise, published
+by a Bremen alienist, Dr. SCHOLZ, already known to the readers of _The
+Monist_ (II, 104), and bearing the title _Die Characterfehler des Kindes,
+eine Erziehungslehre für Schule und Haus_.[49] Such books are valuable
+not only for the observations they offer and the isolated explanations
+and pedagogic advice they present, but also for the suggestions which the
+attentive and psychologically cultivated reader can always receive from
+them.
+
+Like Siegert, Scholz principally shows us isolated child-types wherein
+diseased qualities play a more or less pronounced rôle. But while the
+former’s presentation is somewhat journalistic in style, that of the
+latter is more didactic; although this tendency is not an absolutely
+rigid one, as the author counts mothers as readers of his book. But
+if the form of presentation leads one to infer greater profundity in
+Scholz than in Siegert, this is in still higher degree the case with the
+arrangement of the material. While Siegert strings his child-pictures
+loosely together, Scholz arranges them according to real psychological
+points of view, so that (remarkable to say) the faults of children are
+discussed, first, in the province of feeling and sentiment, then in
+that of representation, and finally in that of volition and action. The
+introductory and concluding chapters show, also, that Scholz attempts
+to enter more profoundly into the subject than Siegert proposes, and we
+cherish the hope that, now that this popular work has appeared, Scholz
+will very soon present us with a strictly scientific book, in which he
+shall have occasion to deal with some particular points, such as, for
+instance, falsehood and unchastity, more comprehensively than was perhaps
+possible in a book intended for his present circle of readers.
+
+With respect, now, to all systematic presentations of pedagogy,
+psychopathology can, as we have before indicated, never attain in them
+its proper position, until the above-mentioned preparatory work has been
+completed. But this fact should not preclude one’s calling especial
+attention to the importance of this province, at least in some incidental
+manner.
+
+In such a work as the _Allgemeine Pädagogik_ of ZILLER,[50] for instance,
+the third edition of which has just been published by F. Mattes of
+Leipsic, there surely was abundant opportunity to do this—an opportunity
+which one might say almost amounted to obligation. For Ziller treats
+hereditary and acquired characteristics in great detail, and such
+treatment remains necessarily a one-sided one, if abnormal traits are
+not considered in it. Ziller, with Herbart, demands that individuality
+always be taken as the starting-point. But how many child-individualities
+are there, which, in the different periods of their development, may be
+regarded as fully normal!
+
+The reason of this omission must be looked for partly in the
+circumstance, that Ziller, as well as the new editor of this otherwise
+valuable work, belongs to the Herbartian school. If, namely, we
+compare the psychological literature of the Herbartian school with the
+publications of French, English, and American writers, or even with
+the works which in recent times have issued from other philosophical
+quarters of Germany, it will be unmistakably seen that the pathological
+conditions of the mind have been little considered by the followers of
+Herbart. Nor have voices been wanting, that would make Herbart himself
+responsible for this error. He did not, they say, sufficiently appreciate
+the importance of the pathological phenomena of mind, and his pupils
+were in this respect influenced by him. But this reproach will be found,
+on close examination, to be untenable. Herbart, it is true, did express
+himself repeatedly against the overestimation of “rare and curious
+phenomena,” unusual mental states and such things,[51] and his warning
+is applicable also to our epoch, which produces many psychological works
+in which remarkable things are to be read but which contribute nothing
+worth mentioning towards the explanation of even comparatively simple
+events. Herbart holds, that the psychology of the normal and ordinary
+states should be the first and principal object of scientific attention;
+the explanation of much that is extraordinary will then follow. With
+regard to this latter point, he remarks very positively: “I do not,
+however, wish by this, to gainsay the value of any real psychological
+observation. There must be a welcome place in science for every
+experience.” It will be seen, therefore, that Herbart is not at all far
+from the point of view of Maudsley and other investigators. We find, in
+fact, that he mentions repeatedly abnormal mental conditions, and also
+systematically treats them, even quoting such celebrated alienists as
+Reil and Pinel (_Text-book of Psychology_, §§ 142-149). The probability
+is, therefore, that psychopathology would have been properly employed in
+Herbart’s psychology, if it had been at all elaborated in his day, and
+its influence would through Herbart have been directly felt in pedagogy,
+as no pedagogist has made better or more careful use of psychology than
+he.
+
+But Herbart’s pupils have done no further work in the province pointed
+out by him. It is true, his psychology has been made use of by physicians
+like Griesinger and Spielmann, and recently also to some extent by
+Krafft-Ebing, but the works of these men have had no influence on the
+psychological text-books of the Herbartian school, and consequently the
+science has up to the present day exerted no noticeable influence on
+pedagogy, either in Waitz, in Stoy, or in Ziller. In other pedagogic
+schools, this has, it is true, also been the case; but in these, who make
+no pretensions of relying on the teachings of psychology, the sin is
+more easily pardoned. But this is not the only respect in which Ziller’s
+_Pedagogy_ is not up to the times. Ziller defined pedagogy as the
+influences, formed according to ethical points of view, which are brought
+to bear on the mind of the pupil, and would not admit influences brought
+to bear on the body, in so far as such should enter into the pedagogic
+system. This misconception also springs from Ziller’s adherence to the
+Herbartian school, which represents, as we well know, a metaphysical
+pluralism; but it is in a still higher degree due to the fact, that
+in Ziller’s day both the intimate relation between physiological and
+psychological processes had not been satisfactorily established, and also
+were not sufficiently known to him. If it were otherwise, his pluralism
+need by no means have necessarily led him into such one-sidedness, for
+this metaphysical pluralism does not exclude a monistic conception of
+_phenomena_; even assuming this doctrine, one may say that motion and
+feeling are two different but inseparable sides of the same phenomenon.
+The “real things” produce by their interaction, simultaneously and of
+necessity, both an inner side and an outer; for which reason one of our
+foremost psychologists, Volkmann of Volkmar, explicitly terms Herbart’s
+psychology monistic (_Text-book of Psychology_, second edition, I, 63).
+
+A psychologico-physiological work, from which the new editor of Ziller’s
+_Pedagogy_ might have extracted many valuable things, is the book of
+the Italian MOSSO, _On Fatigue_, which has just been translated into
+German,[52] and which will excite much attention owing to the present
+active discussion of the question of overwork.
+
+Supplementary to this work I will also mention a little tract by DR.
+BURGERSTEIN of Vienna, entitled _Die Arbeitskurve einer Schulstunde_.[53]
+This tract is a lecture, which the author gave at the Seventh
+International Congress for Hygiene and Demography at London, and in
+which he seeks to find by statistical methods, the duration of a
+“school-period”—a very laboriously composed treatise and one difficult
+to read, but possessed of high interest in psychological and pedagogic
+respects.
+
+From pedagogy to evolution is but a step, at least it is in Ziller’s
+development of Herbart’s ideas. It is true, Ziller has taken a decided
+stand against Darwinism, for Ziller works with two contradictory
+ideas; but his theory of education possesses points of resemblance
+and analogy to the Darwin-Haeckel theory of development. According
+to Ziller, each individual passes, also intellectually, through all
+the stages of development that mankind at large has passed through,
+only in a shorter time; and it is in conformity with such succession
+that the order of the various courses of a pedagogical system is to be
+arranged. Following Ziller’s precedent, PROFESSOR VAIHINGER, of Halle,
+in his treatise _Naturforschung und Schule_ (Science and the Schools),
+has taken up the school-reform initiated by Professor Preyer, and has
+expressly transferred the fundamental law of biogenesis to pedagogy.
+How instruction is to be arranged under this point of view, cannot be
+explained in this letter, which is already long enough. We shall simply
+remark that the idea has found in Germany a large number of both friends
+and opponents.
+
+The opponents have recently been joined by a natural scientist, DR.
+HAMANN, professor of zoology in Göttingen, who has just published a
+book under the title _Entwicklungslehre und Darwinismus_ (Evolution and
+Darwinism),[54] in which he does not combat the theory of evolution
+itself, but simply the Darwin-Haeckelian form of that theory, placing
+himself in the ranks of His and Hensen. The book appeared almost
+simultaneously with the fourth edition of HAECKEL’S _Anthropogeny_,[55]
+but the author, nevertheless, in his supplementary remarks, discusses
+the “apology” which Haeckel subjoined to his work. Haeckel’s book needs
+no recommendation in scientific circles; it will be sufficient to state
+that the work has been subjected to essential alterations, but that its
+fundamental features have remained the same.
+
+A new psychology, on the Darwinian basis, by Prof. FRITZ SCHULTZE of
+Dresden, is now in course of publication, entitled _Vergleichende
+Seelenkunde_ (Comparative Psychology[56]). The first part, which treats
+of the fundamental principles of physiological psychology, has already
+appeared. On the completion of the work we shall have occasion to return
+to it.
+
+                                                                CHR. UFER.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[48] _Problematic Child-natures._ Leipsic, 1890, Robert Vogtländer.
+
+[49] _Faults of Character in Children, A System of Instruction for School
+and Home._ Leipsic. Eduard Heinrich Mayer.
+
+[50] Compare also, _The Educational Review_ (New York), Vol. II, page 30.
+
+[51] _Psychologie als Wissenschaft_, § 5.
+
+[52] Salomon Hirzel, Leipsic.
+
+[53] Hamburg, 1891, Leopold Voss.
+
+[54] Jena, 1892, Hermann Costenoble.
+
+[55] Leipsic, 1892, Engelmann.
+
+[56] Leipsic, 1892.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
+
+
+
+
+A LETTER FROM MR. HERBERT SPENCER.
+
+
+_To the Editor of The Monist_:
+
+As I feel it a duty to reserve, for other purposes, the very small
+power of work now left to me, I am obliged to decline entering upon
+a controversy. I must leave readers to examine for themselves—little
+hoping, however, that they will do so.
+
+One point only I wish to note. The use of the expression “forms of
+thought,” instead of “forms of intuition,” was simply an inadvertence;
+as will be manifest on observing that though I have used the wrong
+expression in the note, I have used the right expression in the text
+(p. 203), as also throughout my criticism of Kant’s doctrine in _The
+Principles of Psychology_, Part VII, Chapter IV, “The Reasonings of
+Metaphysicians,” § 399.
+
+                                                          HERBERT SPENCER.
+
+
+
+
+LOGIC AS RELATION-LORE.
+
+
+In the French _Revue Philosophique_, in the August and September 1891
+numbers of the same, M. George Mouret has an essay entitled “Mathematical
+Equality” in the course of which and as though subsidiary to his
+ostensible purpose he discourses upon the topics of relations and
+concepts and upon the fundamental elements of logic in general. His essay
+is really more important as a contribution to logical doctrine than as a
+treatment of mathematical equality.
+
+The scope of his discourse will be seen by reference to his closing
+paragraphs in which he sums up what he considers to be the results
+achieved by him in his essay. Therein, he says that he has “treated of
+the general theory of the composition of concepts and relations and set
+the foundations of the logic of analysis and the logic of definition.”
+
+
+I. THE SPENCERIAN AXIOM.
+
+The determining factor of every philosophical dissertation is of course
+some very general supposition which is taken as established and which
+exercises a controlling influence over all the observations of its author.
+
+In this case this determining supposition is found in what M. Mouret
+calls his “_axiom_ of _symmetry_.” The same is thus stated by him “_Two
+things which have the same symmetrical relations to a third thing have
+between them that same relation._”
+
+M. Mouret is not one of those scholars that lack hospitality for
+other writings than those of their own nationality. From this fault
+so noticeable in the work of so many of the French scholars M. Mouret
+himself seems to be free. Indeed so far as regards the previous work done
+in the domain he sets himself to examine, he accords almost exclusive
+esteem to the writings of English thinkers. In fact he declares himself
+so far as regards his present topic a disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer
+and puts his “axiom of symmetry” as an adaptation of that maxim of his
+said master which is of the tenor as follows, viz: “_Things which have
+a definite relation to the same thing have a definite relation to one
+another._” This maxim, as Mr. Spencer tells us, was suggested to him by
+a remark of the late eminent author who is known to the world under the
+pseudonym of George Eliot, who herself stated it under the form “_Things
+that have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation
+to each other._”
+
+Those who are well acquainted with the psychology of Mr. Spencer will
+recognise that this maxim of his is made by him the very backbone of all
+his observations upon reasoning. If it has the validity which he imputes
+to it, it has an importance which it will be hard to overestimate, but if
+on the contrary, and as we shall submit, it is in every form in which it
+has been stated, certainly unsound and misleading, it is high time that
+its virtue should be brought into question.
+
+The _dicta_ of the masters whether they first enounce the same or whether
+they only give currency thereto by their ratification are always proper
+subjects for special scrutiny. There is always found a disposition to
+accept them on their mere _ipse dixit_ without any attempt at criticism
+or independent observation. This is decisively _not_ the scientific mood
+or mode. The spirit of that modern leaven that is currently referred
+to under the name of Science is characteristically a critical one, and
+one that is considerably irreverent in regard to the authority of mere
+personality. In this it is happily distinguished from the spirit that has
+marked the past history of what may be called the “regular” schools of
+philosophy.
+
+M. Mouret is not alone in his inadvertent esteem for the maxim in
+question. In the issue of _Mind_ for October 1891 Mr. L. T. Hobhouse
+publishes an article entitled “Induction and Deduction,” in which he
+gives an undue appraisal to the worth of the maxim under consideration,
+even though the author of the article seems to be well aware that said
+maxim stands in much need of qualification.
+
+We venture to say that this maxim in all its forms has gained whatever
+currency it has enjoyed in virtue alone of the incompetent comprehension
+that too generally prevails in regard to the nature and characteristics
+of that sort of things that are relations.
+
+A notable example of this lack of comprehension is supplied in the
+logical treatise of Mr. Carveth Read, a work ostensibly founded upon
+the significance of the category of relation and yet in which at the
+very start the author tells us that a relation is something which is
+indefinable.
+
+
+II. IMPORTANCE OF RELATION-LORE.
+
+This topic of relations is one that is neglected in a degree that
+reflects no credit upon the pretensions of those who undertake to
+instruct others in matters logical and philosophical. The thing itself
+is in the thinking of every one and the term and its derivations are
+in universal use. They are used as though they imported an idea that
+no one was liable to misapply or to misunderstand. The truth, however,
+is that of all the stock terms in our graver discourse this very word
+“relation” and its derivatives are the ones that are oftenest heard and
+read without any lucidity of mind concerning their proper intent as a
+part of their context. They are used with an assortment of meanings and
+non-meanings that are quite distracting to try to follow and quite vain
+to try and reconcile. In particular the difference between _relationship_
+and _relation_, between the _ground_ or _foundation_ of the relation
+and the relation itself, between the plural fact, whether of tendency,
+interaction, transition, or _status_, that is a co-condition with the
+relations, and the relations that co-condition that same plural fact, is
+constantly ignored in thinking and in the expression thereof, to the more
+or less confusion in, and inconsequence of, the whole discourse delivered.
+
+It is no slight commendation of the perspicacity of M. Mouret to observe
+that he has discovered that the way towards a resolution of the problems
+he sets himself to work out lies through what to him appears the
+altogether unexplored regions of relation-lore, for it is evident that he
+regards himself as a pioneer in this field.
+
+
+III. WORKS ON RELATION-LORE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
+
+In observing this we cannot but hold M. Mouret unfortunate in not having
+been put upon better lines of inquiry. He seems to have been wholly
+unaware of the treasures of investigation in this domain that exist in
+the English language and that for many years have been available for
+the student. His case in this respect is seen in the exaltation which
+he gives to the semi-popular discourses of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Read, as
+contrasted with the profound researches of DeMorgan and Boole and their
+disciples. It is evident that he has judged concerning the comparative
+quality of the various lines of English research not after an examination
+of his own, but after the current popular renown. For example, he speaks
+of the work of DeMorgan and Boole as presenting “only a simple mode of
+representing some of the logical laws” and as being “surrounded with a
+formidable and complicated apparel which disguises the value of their
+tentatives.”
+
+Since M. Mouret is manifestly an earnest student of the topic of
+relation-lore this language shows that he has at best only a second or
+third-hand knowledge of what DeMorgan and Boole really did. He ought
+to have known that in the recondite field of research in question all
+really competent treatment of the same would be very far from having
+any “popular” quality. For a man to discourse of relation-lore in
+ignorance of what DeMorgan, the very father of the “Logic of Relatives,”
+accomplished is like discoursing of Darwinism in ignorance of “The Origin
+of Species.”
+
+We opine that when M. Mouret shall have consulted the great memoir
+of DeMorgan in the tenth volume of the “Cambridge Philosophical
+Transactions” or better, when he shall have become acquainted with
+the more developed work of Mr. C. S. Peirce, to whom beyond question
+relation-lore is most indebted for its present state of progress, he
+will have a better esteem for the value of the “tentatives” of DeMorgan
+and Boole and their disciples. Mr. Peirce has published three principal
+papers on the subject in question. The first of these was published in
+1870 in the ninth volume of the “Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts
+and Sciences.” Then in 1880 and in 1884, while Mr. Peirce was lecturer
+on logic at Johns Hopkins University, he published in the _American
+Journal of Mathematics_ two papers dealing more or less extensively
+with relation-lore. One of these his “_Hauptwerk_” as it is called by
+Professor Schroeder of Carlsruhe, appears in the third volume of the
+journal mentioned and the other in the seventh volume of the same.
+Mr. Peirce was one of the contributors to our new American “Century
+Dictionary,” and in that work under the definitions of Relation and
+Relativity there appears a summary treatment of the subject which is as
+we take it the work of Mr. Peirce and which might have given to M. Mouret
+hints which he would have appreciated. Also the editor of this magazine
+in his article “Are there Things in Themselves?” in the January 1892
+number thereof incidentally touches upon the topic under consideration in
+such a way as to correct some of the more inveterate misconceptions.
+
+
+IV. M. MOURET’S THEORY OF RELATIONS.
+
+The article of M. Mouret is in so many points so excellent a discourse
+that the chief reflection one is inclined to make is that upon its own
+principles it ought to have been better. He seems to have been widely
+awake to the primordial nature of relations as philosophical data.
+He says: “Every notion or relation is a _function_ of relations more
+directly known and enters as a relational element into other relations
+less proximate to the common sources,” and also that “every concept or
+notion ought to resolve into a group of relations.”
+
+By such tokens as these we naturally look to see M. Mouret making it his
+very first concern to explain fully the nature of those primordial data
+that are relations. Indeed he seems himself to be fully aware of this
+natural expectation for he says: “What then is a relation; what is a
+concept or notion? To this double question an answer is necessary and a
+precise answer not consisting in the substitution of one form of words
+for another form of words bearing the same meaning or no meaning at all.”
+
+We cannot however find that he has done this. Instead of it and almost
+while saying that every concept and notion ought to resolve in a group
+of relations he announces, “What I have to examine is the constitution,
+the structure of these _relation-generating groups_.” Thus he starts with
+a synthesis when what is needed is analysis. He starts with supposing
+a group of relational elements indeterminate in number and proceeds to
+inquire as to the conditions that must subsist with regard to them,
+respectively and in combination, in order that a _definite_ relation may
+subsist as to a pair of the relational elements. These conditions he
+finds to be four in number. First, he finds that—
+
+“It is necessary that every one of the terms of the group should be
+connected one to the other by _definite relations_; that between any two
+terms there must always be intermediate terms that connect them in a
+continuous way.” This he calls the condition of “Solidarity.” Secondly,
+he finds that there must obtain the condition of _Co-Existence_. By
+co-existence he intends—
+
+“Not a definite co-existence in time, that is to say, a relation of
+simultaneity or concomitance, nor yet that established co-existence
+which constitutes the causal relation, but an indefinite co-existence
+independent of the order of its terms and of all consideration of time or
+duration.”
+
+Having thus supposed his group all well stocked with relations, he
+proceeds to relegate most of them to the limbo of inconsequence by
+invoking a _principle_ which he calls the principle of _indetermination_.
+By virtue of this principle in every particular case the _particular
+determinations_ of all the terms become indeterminate and those of the
+intermediate terms doubly so. Thus the supposed facts of the case become
+fit for the existence of the _Third_ condition, that of _Abstraction_,
+and for the arising of a general concept or notion.
+
+But corresponding to every concept or notion is its negative or opposite
+concept or notion. As this negative depends necessarily upon certain
+_particular determinations_ of the same terms that bear the _particular
+determinations_ and which being singly indeterminate admit of the
+positive concept or notion, there necessarily must obtain two systems
+of singly indeterminate _particular determinations_ relative to but
+incompatible with one another, and so relative that the negation of one
+set entails the obtaining of the other set, or in other words either
+set being negated entails the obtaining of the other set. These facts
+constitute what M. Mouret calls the _principle_ of _incompatibility_ and
+involve his _Fourth_ condition of _Relativity_ stated by him as follows:
+
+    “All the particular determinations of the extreme terms must
+    not be compatible with the system and the negation of certain
+    relations of the system must entail the negation of the
+    relation which they make between the extreme terms.”
+
+
+V. REFLECTIONS ON M. MOURET’S THEORY.
+
+Now we cannot regard this as a successful attempt to explain the nature
+and characteristics of relations, or to unfold the involutions of
+relation-lore.
+
+We fully realise that if every concept or relation resolves into a group
+of relations we must in some form or other take what are relations in
+reality as data to begin with, but this does not prevent us from taking
+our datum terms for our turn of explanation as not requiring at present
+any recognition other than as relational elements. What is needful as
+a prime requisite on the very start of any research in relation-lore
+is to obtain a clear idea of what is meant by a relation. Meanings are
+primarily matters of mental status. We have to determine the relation
+that subsists between the mind and the object through the mediating
+interpretation of a word, and the mental affection lies nearest and
+logically comes first. It may very well be that the mental affection
+requires correction, but this cannot take place until its faults are
+observed, and these cannot become evident until the mental affection is
+itself duly understood.
+
+The disciples of that school of logic in which DeMorgan and Boole,
+both eminent mathematicians, hold so exalted a rank as discoverers,
+regard cognition as arising in consequence of brain functioning or
+_mental operation_ and study the results of this operation as yielding
+their import in dependence upon and only in dependence upon the proper
+operation in virtue of which they arise.
+
+Now no cognition whatever, even of the most elementary sort, arises
+except in connection with and in consequence of that operation of the
+sensibility which is _distinction_. Distinction is of multitudinous and
+manifold aspects. In all its phases whether it be passive or active
+it is naught else than the arising or the assigning of relations. The
+attempt to posit an unqualifiedly absolute—that is, an unqualifiedly
+unrelated—universe of discourse must be futile and blank, necessarily
+and insuperably. Any form of notation that pretends to express such a
+universe of discourse, is only saved, if at all, from being unqualifiedly
+nonsensical, by standing as antithetical—that is, by being _related_
+to forms of notation that express relation and nothing else than
+relation. This rigorously prime operation of distinction is not only pure
+relation-ing but it is of that sort of relation-ing that is at once a
+distinguishing and a conjoining. The “One and the Many” are insuperably
+implicit therein. Distinction having operated to various extents, and
+thereby various relations having come into view, we become aware of those
+items of experience that are objects or facts. Each and every one of
+these objects or facts are in truth distinguished and are therefore in
+no strict sense _indiscernible_ from each other, but since no science
+can possibly obtain in relation to mere particulars we find it useful to
+disregard various points of distinction that obtain in respect to various
+objects and facts and to converge our regard upon the points wherein
+distinction, not absolutely vanishes, but _tends to vanish_.
+
+By this operation, which is _abstraction_, various objects and facts
+become in mental regard fit and useful to be taken as copies of one
+another and as indifferent for use in most of the turns of mental life.
+
+There are indeed various relations, objects, and facts, with respect to
+which no further operation or operations of distinction than the mere
+distinctions of the time, the place, or the occasion of their various
+manifestations have been applied nor can without great difficulty be
+applied. But we are therefore by no means entitled to say that such
+are in truth irresolvable. Contrarily, and reasoning inductively we are
+justified in concluding that every relation, object, and fact will under
+analysis of adequate power resolve without limit into other relations,
+objects, and facts.
+
+We are not yet prepared to see that the ultimate components of relations,
+objects, and facts resolve into relations, and nothing but relations,
+because we are not yet prepared with an explicit idea of the nature and
+characteristics of these elementary objects.
+
+The study of M. Mouret since it starts with relations combining them
+under the conditions of Solidarity Co-Existence, Abstraction and
+Relativity, (which are nothing else than other relations or compounds
+of relations,) does not seem to us to advance us at all in the most
+fundamental requisite. He says no more than to say that in order for the
+groups of relations to generate further definite relations the relations
+thus grouped together must be related to one another and then that most
+of these relations must be disregarded.
+
+M. Mouret distinguishes, with respect to a relation three factors, the
+_Matter_, or the relational elements grouped together, the _Form_, or the
+order in which the relational elements are arrayed, and the _Foundation_.
+
+As his study of the topic of relations is professedly for the purpose
+of enabling him the better to solve the nature of the relation of
+mathematical equality, his success may be estimated by reference to
+his conclusions in regard to that relation. These are as follows: “The
+relation of equality is formed of undetermined matter, it possesses a
+binary form, and has for a condition a relation of indiscernibility
+between the two elements.”
+
+Such conclusions appear to us to be impotent not to say erroneous. If
+two things obtain at all, they obtain as two and not one, in very virtue
+of being distinguished the one from the other. Except with regard to
+some more or less arbitrary distinctions, like the distinction between
+coincident points, all distinctions obtain only in virtue of some
+relation that can be nothing else than a point of _discernibility_.
+Numbers and other mathematical things are taken as not-different not
+because they are in truth indiscernible but because for the turn in hand
+their points of difference are irrelevant.
+
+Concerning the much mooted question of the proper field of logic as a
+science M. Mouret holds it to be the “science of relations and general
+concepts.” Although we hold that logic is particularly concerned with the
+lore that is more directly related to the phenomena of erroneous thinking
+and its correction, the view of M. Mouret is not unacceptable. “Reasoning
+consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain
+others are found,” as Mr. Peirce has remarked.
+
+
+VI. CONCERNING MEANINGS AND EXPLANATIONS.
+
+As preliminary to our account of relations we will make an observation
+which seems to us of considerable use in connection therewith. It is
+not without its bearing on the theory of definition or rather upon the
+broader theory of explanation. With M. Mouret we hold that every concept
+and relation resolves into a compound of relations. Since relations are
+data that are absolutely elementary at least so far as we are at present
+instructed they are of course not subsumable under any other sort of
+data that are better known. Moreover, whatever explanation we here make
+must needs be made by means of written words. Thus an important question
+arises as to what method is to be pursued in this special exigency. The
+theory of definition leads us to the same difficulty, for although the
+meanings of many words can be defined in terms that are more proximate
+to the elementary relations, we will always come at last to terms that
+admit of no improved explanation by such a method. There is no device
+of words that can evade or supersede the ultimate recourse to things.
+Now the significations of words are learned in most cases not so much by
+definitions and verbal descriptions as by _the observation of the various
+applications of the words_. Indeed this is the primitive way in which the
+meanings of words are found out. The child knows nothing of what, say,
+the word _horse_ means until some one shows it an actual horse and may
+be pointing to it says repeatedly, _horse_, in such a way as to excite
+the observation of the child to the intended application of the word to
+the thing. This is because the relation of every general sign to its
+object subsists only in consequence of a mental association, and until
+this mental association is created the sign has no meaning. The methods
+of evoking these mental associations are at present quite unmethodical
+and do not receive the attention which their importance merits. One
+feasible method is to present or to state a number of scenes that shall
+present the object in various ways in connection with the sign thereof,
+and thus to excite attention to the proper application of the sign. The
+geometer does this by means of his diagrams without which or their mental
+counterparts all his mere words would be in vain.
+
+Mr. Edward T. Dixon has lately published a work on the “Foundations of
+Geometry” in which he would introduce as a fundamental datum what is
+really an altogether new and exceedingly abstract conception which he
+calls by an old name, that of _direction_. The old term has never been
+as yet taken in any abstract universal sense because apart from definite
+right lines showing it as an attribute any abstract universal meaning
+is wholly unassignable. But the conception that Mr. Dixon would instal
+is removed in abstractness from such a universal yet one more step in
+universality. A three-fold infinity of right lines differing in direction
+can be drawn in ordinary space to each of which pertain two corresponding
+universals of direction, one converse to the other. Now the conception
+of direction that Mr. Dixon proposes for service as an elementary
+geometrical datum is the universal that subsumes all these lower ranking
+universals as particulars. Of course he has difficulty in even trying to
+explain what he means. Realising the impossibility of subsuming it in
+any way he takes a method which if it were more thoroughly applied, and
+wholly emancipated from the lingering notion of definition, might have
+been more successful. As he actually left the matter his real meaning
+can only be drawn from close study of the way in which he applies the
+term in his discourse in general.
+
+Owing to its excessive abstractness his conception is wholly unfit for
+service in elementary geometry. One has to become a good geometer before
+the conception can even be approached.
+
+
+VII. ANOTHER THEORY OF RELATIONS.
+
+We shall proceed to explain what we regard as a true and adequate notion
+of a relation by stating some scenes that display the same. We do not
+regard it as needful to state many of them and we take for our first one,
+the common transaction of making a donation. We have here for relational
+elements or terms as they are usually called a set of three. Separately,
+or as not yet brought into relation in virtue of the giving, there may
+be, say _G_ an owner of _W_ a watch and _R_ the intended beneficiary. The
+plural fact of the giving is the _relationship_ or the _foundation_ of
+the _relations_ that arise in virtue of said giving. This _foundation_
+becomes to be in virtue of the creation of such relations by the giving.
+Either one of the set of three may be taken as the datum of reference and
+according to the election in this respect, the relations may differ and
+the technical names we are about to give will vary in their application.
+Since simplicity will be gained thereby and also our present turn fully
+subserved we will take _G_ as the datum term of reference. So taking
+it _G_ is called the _relate_ and both _W_ and _R_ are called the
+_correlates_. For this present turn and in very virtue of the giving and
+only in virtue thereof _G_ becomes related to _W_ and _R_ in a certain
+relation one of the names of which is giver. When _W_ or _R_ are taken
+as relates certain other relations appear, some of the names of which
+are respectively _present_ and _recipient_. In relation to the relation
+of giver the relations of present and recipient are named _converse_
+relations, as are likewise the relations of present and giver to the
+relation of recipient and the relations of giver and recipient to the
+relation of present. Here are three distinct relations growing out of
+the same relationship or foundation. As each relational element has its
+corresponding negation, the true logical system of a set of three terms
+involves not less than eight relations.
+
+We take for our second scene the case of a boundary. This might be a
+surface or a point but we will take the special case of a line on a
+surface. Here we have again a set of three, the spread on one side, _A_,
+the opposite spread, _B_, and the line _L_. _A_ has a certain relation,
+say above, to _L_ and _B_, _B_ has the certain relation, below, to _A_
+and _L_, which relation is converse to the relation above: and _L_ has
+the certain relation, boundary, to _A_ and _B_ which relation is converse
+to the relations above and below.
+
+The two examples now given are cases of the _conjugative_ kind. The
+relationship is a conjugative one and the relations are conjugative
+relations. The distinguishing characteristic of a conjugative case is the
+fact essentially involved of the mediation between relational elements
+by another certain element, or in other words the bringing of diverse
+relational elements into relation by the function of another relational
+element. Without the mediation or function of this conjugating element
+neither the relationship nor the conjugative relations can exist. There
+is reason to believe that all conjugative cases can be certified as cases
+of three relational elements or as compounds of a number of such sets of
+three. To ordinary uncritical thought which is largely constrained by
+the trammels of ordinary language the most abundant sort of relations
+appears to be of that sort that are taken to involve only two relational
+elements. These are cases of what are called _dual_ relationships and the
+relations that arise out of them are called _dual_ relations. Such are
+those like father, son, husband, wife, etc. Strictly viewed they ought to
+be regarded as _degenerate_ relationships and relations just as a pair of
+lines is regarded as a degenerate conic.
+
+
+VIII. CAUTIONS AND APPLICATIONS.
+
+Now besides the error of confounding relations with relationship, it is
+a very common fault to think and speak of a relation as being _between_
+two or more terms. This imports into thought the thoroughly misleading
+idea of an intervening independent existence for relations. Relations are
+attributive predicates of terms and each one of them pertains strictly to
+its proper term or combination of terms, in the same sense for this turn
+(_pro hac vice_) that qualities are held to pertain to their so-called
+substances. And yet relations so pertain to their proper terms not in
+virtue of such terms separately but in virtue of their membership in
+the plural fact which obtains as the _relationship_ or _foundation_.
+The notion of a relation as a “betweenness” has perhaps been fostered
+by the exact coincidence of relations pertaining to the several members
+of the same relationship. When on contemplating the connection, say
+of two points, we observe that the distance of one from the other is
+apparently indistinguishable from the distance of the other from the one,
+we naturally overlook the fact that we are truly to regard the connection
+as the coincidence of two really distinct relations, and regarding the
+pair of relations as one thing and finding it not attributable to one
+point more than to the other we dissociate it from both. But when we
+consider a pair of relations that are converse to one another and that
+arise out of a dual relationship like that of husband and wife we may see
+that there is _no_ betweenness, no single relation that interlies, but
+two relations, one the relation of husband and the other the converse
+relation of wife.
+
+An interaction, say like that of approach under the influence of
+gravitation, is a relationship. Each body stands in the relation of a
+_puller_ of the other and the mediating term which we find impossible to
+argue out of the account we call the attraction of gravitation. In this
+case the relation of action of the one body is not usually distinguished
+from the relation of action of the other one. Indeed this is the case in
+all cases of mechanical action and we lay it down as a maxim that action
+and reaction are equal but they are not alike since their directions are
+opposite. Sensation is a relationship, since it is our interaction.
+The object interacts with the brain. As to the conjugating term we are
+as yet in the dark and so we are in the habit of regarding this case
+as a dual relation. The relation of the brain to the object is that of
+a _knower_ and that of the object to the brain that of a _stimulater_.
+Each character or mark of the object that becomes apparent gives rise to
+relations and their respective converses each correlative pair of which
+are respectively so many distinct interactions of detail in the entire
+interaction. Whatever an object as known to us is, it is in virtue of
+those relations of brain action and detailed object stimulation, which
+are relations and always relations. Since consciousness exists only
+by the arising of relations of distinction, supposably in consequence
+of internal brain interaction, is it presumptuous to allege that
+consciousness consists of relations or a complex of relations?
+
+
+IX. NATURE OF OBJECTS.
+
+With regard to the object no one can prevent whoever may be so disposed,
+from imputing to it various points of possession that do not and cannot
+interact with the brain. So far as such imputed points are regarded
+as merely not yet interacting but possible to interact with knowing
+substance such points in no wise differ in essential nature from the
+known attributes. They are potential relations and nothing else. But in
+so far as they are regarded as essentially impossible of ever interacting
+with knowing substance in any possible stage of its development such
+regard is pure nonsense and utterly without any assignable meaning. There
+is no occasion whatever for such an imputation, for the existence of
+interaction actual or potential is fully adequate to explain all that
+will ever present itself to be explained.
+
+At this point let us instruct ourselves with an example of the reasonings
+of a much and deservedly honored philosopher. He says:
+
+    “In the most general predicate which is determined Being
+    or existence—for all things in the universe are determined
+    beings—we have an evident two-foldness (a composite nature)
+    which allows of a further analysis into pure Being and
+    determination.”
+
+We will parallel this analysis. For the sake of simplicity we will take
+a limited right line. It has the determinations straight and long, not
+length in the sense of measure, for length is ambiguous in its intent,
+but length in its qualitative sense—its linearity so to speak. Now
+separate from it first its straightness without however giving to it
+any other determination, and then its quality of longness. We have then
+a _pure_ line, that is neither straight, nor long, nor anything else.
+Such is an example of “Pure Being.” _We_ say however that its very being
+as a line is absolutely dependent on its determination as a long line;
+that such a determination alone constitutes it a line, is at once its
+determination and its being, that there is no two-foldness at all but
+only two names, and that as one-fold its determination as long and its
+being vanish together. What is true of a line is true of all relations
+and compounds of relations whatever.
+
+Thus not only all knowledge but all existence so far as that term can
+ever have any meaning is relative; relative to all intents and for every
+possible turn.
+
+To those who accept the essentials of this account of relations it will
+be easy to see what is the nature of an object and that of a concept
+or notion. An object is a relation or some congeries of relations that
+usually present themselves as a coherent whole to our sensibility or to
+consciousness. This is primarily effected in virtue of some efficacy
+which we cannot appropriate to ourselves, and so we distinguish our own
+personality from that manifold that we call the objective world. It is
+pure self-stultification after having made this most useful distinction
+to try and abolish it. Nothing but an utter abolition of all useful
+thought can result from so taking the data of experience.
+
+
+X. NATURE OF A CONCEPT.
+
+But objects are individual and generally found with various points of
+distinction some of which are irrelevant to most of the turns of mental
+life. We therefore neglect the irrelevant points and take many objects
+as copies of one another. This process is _not_ the formation of the
+concept or notion but it suggests and prompts that formation. We cannot
+but regard it as an error to take a conception as a _sum_ of individuals.
+It seems to us to be rather in the nature of a _locus_. A curve contains
+an infinity of points and yet the curve is not any sum of points even
+though it is often allowable to speak of it as the sum of all its points.
+So any concept, say, man, is not all the men that now live nor yet all
+the men that eternity both backwards and forwards has contained and will
+contain. A concept is a manifold and strictly universal and infinite
+in respect to the particulars it subsumes. We speak of the infinitive
+mood of a verb because the meaning of the word as thus taken is not put
+under any modification. In like manner the meaning of any concept though
+subject to various limitations in its applications is as a concept merely
+to be regarded as obtaining in a purely infinitive sense. Professor
+Jevons found a difficulty in classifying what he called _material_
+terms, such as stone, sand, water, etc. Other logicians have put such
+terms as singular terms, while still others have classed them as general
+terms. There is a great variety of such terms. Potatoes, wheat, butter,
+ice, cattle, water, hydrogen, the names of all the elements, ether,
+electricity, time, space, love, virtue, etc., are instances. It seems to
+us that such terms are the normal types of general terms and that the
+canonical forms of our universal propositions ought to be unquantified
+not only as regards the predicates but also as regards the subjects. Why
+not “man is animal” just as “lard is grease” or “man is mortal” just as
+“butter is cheap”?
+
+Moreover the distinction between a general concept and one that is called
+singular is only one of degree and not of kind. Every so-called singular
+term is potentially at least only an individual instance under a possible
+general or universal concept. A striking example of this potentiality is
+furnished by the modern generalisations of that formerly singular term,
+space. If these observations are well founded, the universals of thought
+even though arising out of the facts of experience and rigidly beholden
+to experience for every last element out of which they are constructed,
+form nevertheless a Formal-Thought-World, and the mind of man in virtue
+of its powers of imaginative construction and generalisation has a
+constitution that enables it to subsume the actual objective universe as
+only one particular of a universality of a higher rank.
+
+Under such a conception of the objective world and the world of thought
+and their relations the old dispute of realism versus nominalism would
+take a new aspect. _Universals in re_ even though they were admitted
+to exist would become universals no longer in the higher universe of
+thought. True universals would only subsist as universals of the world
+of mind. The laws of Form and Formal Thought would thus become of chief
+moment in philosophy and no one could be recognised as properly laying
+claim to the title of philosopher without proficiency therein.
+
+
+XI. FALLACY OF THE SPENCERIAN AXIOM.
+
+Concerning the “axiom of symmetry” only a few examples of its fallacy are
+needful. Mutual friendship is certainly a “symmetrical” relation, but _A_
+and _C_ may be mutual friends and _B_ and _C_ mutual friends also, but it
+in no wise follows that _A_ and _B_ are friends. They may be decidedly
+unfriendly as we often see the case. Take a case of equilibrium the
+cases of which seem to be favorite ones with M. Mouret. We suppose that
+planets may be regarded as in a relation of equilibrium with the sun and
+yet these mere equilibrations with the sun do not make any equilibrium
+between them. They do not knock together it is true but this is due to
+their own direct relations and not their relations of equilibrium with
+the sun.
+
+The distances of points from each other is a “symmetrical” relation and
+yet point _A_ may be from point _C_ the very same distance that point _B_
+is from _C_, but the distance of points _A_ and _B_ from one another may
+vary from coincidence to double the distance _A C_-_B C_.
+
+
+XII. NATURE OF ARITHMETICAL EQUALITY.
+
+Concerning the relation of “mathematical equality” there is no single
+relation that obtains throughout mathematics as such. There is numerical
+equality upon which the equality in service in numeric algebra is
+founded, and there is geometric equality, the equality of vectors, etc.,
+all different from one another. M. Mouret seems to have only numeric
+equality in view. He claims this relation to be not only of a very simple
+nature but that it is the very foundation of the notions of magnitude and
+quantity. He even declares that mathematics could not exist without this
+relation. Did he lose sight of the usual proof of Fourier’s celebrated
+theorem?
+
+As we have explained, things that are distinguished are not really alike
+but only for certain turns taken to be so. This assimilation of things is
+of various grades. In arithmetic, meaning arithmetic in its most general
+sense, the only logical comprehension that the various numbers possess
+is respectively their greater or less partitionability; _m_ is the same
+as _n_ means in arithmetic that whatever has the numerical rank of _m_
+has also precisely the numerical rank of _n_ no matter what summations
+or other numerical operations _m_ or _n_ may represent. Identity of
+this sort is arithmetical equality. It seems a simple relation for the
+reason that its intervention very decisively simplifies our arithmetical
+comprehensions. It is however a coincidence of two relations that are
+converse to one another. These relations are “not less than” and “not
+greater than.” It is universally admitted that the more inclusive a
+notion or concept is in extension, the more simple and primary it is than
+any other notion or concept included as an instance under it. Now all
+equality is “not less than” but not all “not less than” is necessarily
+equality; hence, “not less than” is a wider and more primary notion than
+equality. On the same considerations “not more than” is in the same
+case. Equality is the limiting case between the variable and logically
+more simple cases of “not less than” and “not more than.” The notion of
+quantity emerges on comparison however vague between any two objects that
+have size, independently of the notion of equality. If this were not true
+how could we have the notions of infinitely large and infinitely small.
+
+It is indeed true that without the notion of equality the theory of
+numbers and the mathematical analysis could subsist in a rudimentary
+state only, but to say that they would not exist at all is rash and
+not maintainable. The relations “not less than” “not more than” would
+still allow of some truly mathematical propositions, operations, and
+calculations. In that essentially qualitative notation that is ordinary
+language the relation that corresponds to equality is of very limited
+range but a relation that is analogous to “not less than,” viz.,
+supersumption, is very efficient.
+
+With a theory of numbers and a mathematical analysis using only the
+relations “not less than” “not more than” in lieu of the relation of
+equality the fundamental operations, addition and substitution, would
+find some scope of application and hence the derivative operations,
+multiplication, powering, etc., and their inversions, subtraction,
+division, etc., would obtain in some fashion and to some extent. This
+can readily be seen by any one who is familiar with the way in which
+expressions of inequality are used in modern mathematical analysis.
+
+                                                       FRANCIS C. RUSSELL.
+
+
+
+
+OBSERVATIONS ON SOME POINTS IN JAMES’S PSYCHOLOGY.
+
+
+II. EMOTION.
+
+Nothing in Professor James’s work will be likely to strike the average
+reader as more paradoxical than his views on the subject of Emotion,
+which he must be allowed to state in his own words. After premising that
+he will limit his discussion, in the first instance, to what may be
+called the coarser emotions, as fear, grief, rage, love, in which every
+one recognises a strong organic reverberation, he goes on to say:
+
+    “Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is
+    that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental
+    affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of
+    mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the
+    contrary, _is that the bodily changes follow directly the
+    perception of the existing fact, and that our feeling of the
+    same changes, as they occur, is the emotion_. Common sense
+    says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear,
+    are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry
+    and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this
+    order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state
+    is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily
+    manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the
+    more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry,
+    angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not
+    that we strike, cry, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or
+    fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily state following
+    on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in
+    form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might
+    then see the bear and judge it best to run, receive the insult
+    and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually _feel_
+    afraid or angry.
+
+    “Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure
+    to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor
+    far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate its
+    paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of
+    its truth.
+
+    “To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be
+    inclined to doubt the fact that _objects do excite bodily
+    changes_ by a preorganised mechanism, or the farther fact
+    _that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle
+    that the entire organism may be called a sounding-board_
+    which every change of consciousness, however slight, may make
+    reverberate....
+
+    “The next thing to be noticed is this, that _every one of
+    the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or
+    obscurely, the moment it occurs_....
+
+    “I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory,
+    which is this: _If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try
+    to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of
+    its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind_, no
+    ‘mind-stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted, and
+    that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is
+    all that remains. It is true that, although most people when
+    asked say that their introspection verifies this statement,
+    some persist in saying that it does not. Many cannot be made
+    to understand the question. When you beg them to imagine away
+    every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their
+    consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to
+    tell you what the feeling of its ludicrousness would be like,
+    whether it be anything more than the perception that the object
+    belongs to the class ‘funny,’ they persist in replying that
+    the thing proposed is a physical impossibility and that they
+    always _must_ laugh if they see a funny object. Of course the
+    task proposed is not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous
+    object and annihilating one’s tendency to laugh. It is the
+    purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of
+    feeling from an emotional state supposed to exist in all its
+    fulness, and saying what the residual elements are. I cannot
+    help thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem
+    will agree with the proposition above laid down. What kind of
+    an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of
+    quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of
+    trembling lip nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor
+    of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible
+    for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture
+    no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no
+    dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no
+    impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles,
+    calm breathing and a placid face? The present writer, for one,
+    certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the
+    sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing
+    that can be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded
+    and dispassionate sentence, confined entirely to the judicial
+    realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit
+    chastisement for their sins. In like manner of grief: what
+    would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the
+    heart, its pang in the breast-bone? A feelingless recognition
+    that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing
+    more. Every passion in turn tells the same story. A purely
+    disembodied human emotion is a non-entity.” (P. 449 seq.)
+
+It is, of course, impossible for me to give all the arguments by which
+Professor James attempts to establish his position; the above quotations
+will make it clear what it is—namely, that all our “feelings” are
+sensations.
+
+Before proceeding to consider some of the objections to this view of the
+matter, it may be well to notice briefly what seems to be a gap in the
+author’s treatment of it. In adult human beings, very few, comparatively,
+of what are ordinarily recognised as emotions follow directly upon the
+perception of their objects, in the ordinary sense of the word. His
+theory might perhaps suffice, without further explanation for such cases
+as the “spitting” of blind kittens at the smell of a dog, or the rage
+of a bull at the sight of a red cloth, or the startled feeling that we
+experience at a loud and unexpected sound, if the latter should be called
+an emotion. But in the immense majority of instances the emotions of
+which he treats arise in a very different way.
+
+Some of his own illustrations will serve as well as any to show this. For
+instance, neither running nor any other of the symptoms of fear which he
+enumerates is the necessary result of seeing a bear. A chained or caged
+bear may excite only feelings of curiosity, and a well armed hunter might
+experience only pleasurable feelings at meeting one loose in the woods.
+It is not, then, the perception of the bear that excites the movements
+of fear. We do not run from the bear unless we suppose him capable of
+doing us bodily injury. Why should the expectation of being eaten, for
+instance, set the muscles of our legs in motion? “Common sense” would
+be likely to say it was because we object to being eaten, but according
+to Professor James, the reason we dislike to be eaten is because we run
+away. So, again, striking is not a reflex act, following on the hearing
+of an insult as sneezing does on taking snuff. Whether the muscular
+movements or the emotions are the primary thing, what both shall be
+depends on many things besides the words that are spoken. To be accused
+of drunkenness or unchastity, for instance, would dispose some persons to
+violence, but others might feel only the stirrings of pride at what they
+would consider a tribute to their manhood. In those who considered such
+a charge opprobrious, it might excite feelings of amusement, contempt,
+pity, or grief towards the one making it, according to the estimation in
+which he was held. To say that if it makes us strike we shall be angry,
+if it makes us laugh we shall be amused, if it makes us weep we shall
+be grieved, does not go to the bottom of the matter. According to the
+theory, the thought of the estimation in which we are held by others
+is, in itself, entirely indifferent to us, and only affects our feelings
+through the muscular movements it excites.
+
+In view of the variety of these movements in response to the same
+physical stimulus in a case like this, the statement that objects excite
+bodily changes by a preorganised mechanism explains nothing. We want to
+know why in one case a given perception excites one set of movements,
+and in another an entirely different set. Without attempting to decide
+whether or not a satisfactory explanation can be given on Professor
+James’s hypothesis, I will only say, that, so far as I can see, he
+nowhere attempts it. In his section on “The Genesis of the Various
+Emotions,” (pp. 477 seq.), he only discusses the question how the various
+feelings come to be associated with their respective movements. How the
+movements come to be associated with the perceptions, he does not discuss
+at all.
+
+Turning now to the considerations which Professor James urges in support
+of his theory, quoted above, the first two—that objects excite bodily
+changes and that these changes are more or less distinctly felt—may
+pass unchallenged. I am disposed to go as far with him as to admit
+that these feelings, in the cases which he describes, may properly
+be considered components of the emotional state. But when he affirms
+that there is nothing else—that if we subtract our consciousness of
+peripheral sensations there would be no emotion left—it seems to me that
+he is going very much too far. I should have no hesitation in saying
+that such a statement of the case is contradicted by my consciousness,
+but as that would be merely setting up my consciousness against his,
+without the possibility of an umpire, I will call attention to some other
+considerations which seem to me to render it improbable.
+
+In the first place, it is to be noticed that the cases he instances in
+illustration of his position are all of violent emotions. Admitting that
+we cannot have these emotions, in such degree, without movements such as
+he describes, nor even imagine how they would feel if such a thing were
+possible, it does not follow because they cannot be separated that they
+are identical. We do not reason in this way in regard to those feelings
+which are not commonly called emotions. I can no more imagine myself in
+intense bodily pain without a tendency to groan and writhe than deeply
+grieved without a tendency to weep, and yet no one, probably, would say
+that the pain consisted solely in my consciousness of the groaning and
+writhing. If grief is a kind of pain, it is to be expected that, in a
+high degree, it will produce bodily movements more or less similar to
+those excited by other sorts of pain. All these emotions, however, are
+capable of infinite gradations in intensity. The fear of losing one’s
+pocket handkerchief is an emotion of the same kind as the fear of losing
+one’s fortune. In Professor James’s description of fear, it is evident
+that he has abject terror in mind; I hardly think it probable that he
+has any such sensations, when he fears, for instance, that he will be
+late to dinner, and yet he must be differently constituted from many of
+his fellow-men if his state of mind in such a case is merely a cold,
+intellectual cognition of the fact that such a state of affairs would be
+undesirable.
+
+The same is true of the other emotions he mentions. The feeling of the
+ludicrous is, perhaps, the strongest case he cites, but in my own case
+slight degrees of amusement do not excite laughter, or even any conscious
+disposition to laugh. There is, at the most, in such cases, a tendency
+to smile, which may be overpowered by some other emotion, without in the
+least impairing my feeling of amusement. It seems to me certain that
+slight degrees of all the emotions mentioned may be unaccompanied by any
+distinct consciousness of reflex movements. In such cases it is only
+by a pretty strong effort of attention that we are able, if at all, to
+determine what the bodily changes are, although we are distinctly aware
+of the emotion.
+
+Again, it is to be noticed that many actions, similar in character to
+those we have been considering, are not associated with what are commonly
+called emotions. Laughing and sobbing, for instance, are spasmodic
+movements of the muscles of respiration, not strikingly different from
+hiccuping, and there seems no good reason why the consciousness of
+the former two should usually be felt as strong emotional excitement,
+while the latter is not. In some cases, movements identical with those
+accompanying particular emotions may occur entirely independently of
+them. Shivering from cold, for instance, is the same sort of a movement
+as may occur in violent fright, but it does not make us feel frightened.
+The laughter excited in children and sensitive persons by tickling of the
+skin is not necessarily accompanied by any mirthful feelings. The act of
+vomiting may be the accompaniment of the most extreme disgust, or it may
+occur without a trace of such emotion. Professor James himself gives an
+instance of this sort that can hardly be bettered:
+
+    “The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of
+    seven or eight, at fainting when he saw a horse bled. The
+    blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and if memory does
+    not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the
+    stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly
+    the world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz,
+    and he knew no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood
+    producing faintness or sickness, and he had little repugnance
+    to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger
+    from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, he
+    could not help wondering how the mere physical presence of a
+    pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in him such formidable
+    bodily effects” (p. 457).
+
+Here we have a condition such as is sometimes experienced in connection
+with the most extreme degree of fear or grief unaccompanied by any
+emotion except astonishment at its occurrence. I presume that if a person
+should faint on hearing bad news, Professor James would consider that one
+of the causes of his intense emotion. Why did it have no such effect in
+this case?
+
+Assuming that the emotions are the effects and not the causes of what
+are usually reckoned as their “expression,” it seems evident that a
+given movement or set of movements must uniformly, at least in the same
+subject, give rise to the same feeling, and that in the case of opposite
+emotions such as joy and grief, hope and fear, the more intense the
+emotion, the more unlike must be the actions from which it arises.
+Neither of these is the case. On the contrary, it would seem to be the
+fact that the actions accompanying emotion tend to become more alike in
+proportion to its intensity. It is not at all uncommon for people to
+weep from excess of joy as well as of grief. Pallor and trembling are
+frequent accompaniments of the extremes of hope as well as fear. The
+naturalist Wallace gives an account of his feelings on capturing a rare
+and beautiful butterfly, which is worth quoting in this connection:
+
+    “The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable,
+    and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement
+    I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out
+    of the net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to
+    beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt more
+    like fainting than I have done when in prospect of immediate
+    death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the
+    excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very
+    inadequate cause” (“Malay Archipelago,” p. 342).
+
+Here it is evident that a feeling of intense exultation gave rise to
+sensations very similar, to say the least, to those of extreme fear.
+
+One other argument brought forward by the author deserves special notice
+in this connection:
+
+    “The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is
+    a physical effect on the nerves is furnished by _those
+    pathological states in which the emotion is objectless_. One of
+    the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose, seems
+    to be that we can so easily formulate by its means pathological
+    cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In every
+    asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger,
+    melancholy, or conceit, and others of an equally unmotived
+    apathy, which persists in spite of the best of outward reasons
+    why it should give way. In the former cases we must suppose
+    the nervous machinery to be so ‘labile’ in some one emotional
+    direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate)
+    causes it to upset in that way, and to engender the particular
+    complex of feelings of which the psychic body of that emotion
+    consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to
+    draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar
+    epigastric change felt as ‘precordial anxiety,’ with an
+    irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching attitude and
+    to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral processes not now
+    known, all spontaneously occur together in a certain person;
+    his feeling of their combination is the emotion of dread, and
+    he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear” (p. 458).
+
+Now, it is evident, of course, in such a case as this, that such a
+combination of feelings as is here described is not a fortuitous
+coincidence of so many independent sensations. They must have a common
+starting-point, which cannot well be elsewhere than in the brain. But if
+this is the case, it seems to me to be begging the question to assume
+that the sensations and not the emotion are the primary thing. On the
+assumption that fear, in the normal condition, is the cause of the
+disturbances of respiration, circulation, and the like, which accompany
+it, it is as easy to formulate normal and pathological cases under a
+common scheme, by supposing it to be the cause of the like disturbances
+in cases of morbid fear, as on the theory of Professor James.
+
+It seems to me, then, that the theory does not satisfactorily account for
+the facts, so far as the involuntary, reflex accompaniments of motion are
+concerned.
+
+The difficulty is greatly increased when we consider the relations of
+emotion to voluntary action. We have seen that reflex acts, similar to,
+or identical with those in which Professor James believes emotion to
+consist, may occur independently of emotion, in the ordinary acceptation
+of the term, at least. Strictly voluntary acts, on the contrary, are
+always the concomitants of emotion of some sort. In the great majority
+of the ordinary actions of life, they are the only motor phenomena of
+which we are aware in this connection. Our whole daily conduct, in our
+business and pleasure, our incomings and our outgoings, our downsittings
+and uprisings, is inseparably associated with our likings and dislikings,
+our hopes and fears. What is the nature of this association?
+
+Under the theory we are considering, two relations of voluntary acts
+to emotion are possible. They may, like the involuntary reactions,
+constitute the emotion, or unlike them, result from it. Professor James
+does not express himself on the general question, but some of his
+illustrations seem to favor the former view. If the man who meets a bear
+is frightened because he runs, or the one who is insulted, angry because
+he strikes, the voluntary acts of running and striking must, in part, at
+least, constitute the emotions of fear and anger in these cases. Let us,
+then, consider this case first.
+
+If I see a shower coming up, and run for a shelter, the emotion is
+evidently of the same kind, though perhaps less in degree, as in the
+case of the man who runs from the bear. According to Professor James, I
+am afraid of getting wet because I run. But supposing that, instead of
+running, I step into a shop and buy an umbrella. The emotion is still
+the same. I am afraid of getting wet. Consequently, so far as I can see,
+the fear, in this case, consists in buying the umbrella. Fear of hunger,
+in like manner, might consist in laying in a store of provisions; fear
+of poverty, in shoveling dirt at a dollar a day, and so on indefinitely.
+Anger, again, may be associated with many other actions than striking.
+Shylock’s anger at Antonio’s insults induced him to lend him money.
+Did the anger, or revengefulness, or whatever we may call the passion,
+consist in the act of lending the money? I hardly think it necessary
+to multiply instances in illustration of the fact that the same act is
+often associated with the most contradictory emotions, and acts which
+are ordinarily indifferent with the most intense feeling; that, in fact,
+there is no such uniformity in the associations of emotion with voluntary
+conduct as the hypothesis would seem to require. I incline to think that
+most people will believe, in the cases cited by Professor James, that the
+running and the striking are the results, not the causes of the fear and
+anger.
+
+If we assume such to be the case, we are no better off under the
+hypothesis we are considering. Excluding voluntary movements, there
+is nothing left of the emotion, according to Professor James, but the
+consciousness of involuntary, reflex acts resulting from perception. The
+voluntary acts must, then, be directly caused by these. Now, in the
+first place, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to tell what these
+actions are. What are the involuntary muscular contractions that impel
+a day-laborer to go to the place of his work, and keep his voluntary
+muscular system in strenuous activity all day, enduring fatigue and all
+the discomforts of the summer’s heat or winter’s cold? It would probably
+puzzle him very much to tell, although he has a very clear idea of why he
+does it. I doubt if, on his own hypothesis, Professor James himself would
+find it easy to explain the constituents of the emotions which impel him
+to go to the class-room at the appointed hour and conduct a recitation.
+But even in cases in which we are distinctly conscious of involuntary
+action, there seems to be no connection between it and the voluntary acts
+accompanying the emotion. In the case of the man running from the bear,
+for instance, trembling lips, weakened limbs, goose-flesh and visceral
+stirrings have nothing to do with running, but, on the contrary, would
+rather tend to prevent it. In fact, it may be said, in general, that
+the two classes of emotional activities are mutually antagonistic. The
+more involuntary the action, the less efficient the voluntary activity
+is apt to be, as any one knows who has had an attack of the “buck ague.”
+We should have, therefore, diminution of the effect with increase of the
+cause.
+
+It seems, then, on the hypothesis, impracticable to account for the
+association of voluntary action with emotion either on the supposition
+that the former is the cause or the result of the latter. A third
+alternative—that there is no relation of cause and effect in the case,
+and that the phenomena of emotion and action, although constantly
+associated, are really independent, I will not discuss, as it does not
+commend itself to my mind, and Professor James, elsewhere, expressly
+repudiates it. It seems to me that the only reasonable conclusion is
+that emotion is something different from either involuntary or voluntary
+muscular activity, and which may be the cause of either or both.
+
+Professor James, after admitting that the view of the subject which
+he advocates is only a hypothesis, and that much is lacking to its
+definitive proof, goes on to say:
+
+    “The only way coercively to _dis_prove it, however, would be to
+    take some emotion and then exhibit qualities of feeling in it
+    which should be _demonstrably_ additional to all those which
+    could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the time.
+    But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of
+    feeling would obviously be a task beyond human power....
+
+    “A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be
+    given, if we could find a subject absolutely anæsthetic inside
+    and out, but not paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring objects
+    might evoke the usual bodily expressions from him, but who,
+    on being consulted, should say that no subjective emotional
+    affection was felt. Such a man would be like one who, because
+    he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, but who afterwards
+    confesses that he had no appetite at all.” (P. 455.)
+
+Whether the truth of the first of the above paragraphs is to be conceded
+or not, depends, I suppose, on the strength of proof necessary for
+coercion. The only way, for instance, coercively to disprove the once
+prevalent theory that “lunacy” is due to the influence of the moon would
+be to abolish the moon. Most intelligent people, however, at the present
+day, accept the fact that there seems to be no coincidence between
+the moon’s phases and the phenomena of insanity as sufficient proof
+for practical purposes of the incorrectness of that theory. It seems
+to me that the facts to which I have called attention show a somewhat
+similar lack of correspondence in the case we have been considering. I
+am, however, unable to see why a case of complete anæsthesia, such as
+is supposed in the second paragraph, would not answer nearly as well
+for one side of the question as the other, according to the presence or
+absence of emotion. To suppose that cutaneous and visceral sensations are
+preserved unimpaired for purposes of emotion, while absolutely abolished
+for all other purposes, would be putting a pretty severe strain on the
+faculty of belief.
+
+Such cases, as Professor James says, are hard to find. He refers to one,
+reported by Strümpell, in which a boy, anæsthetic within and without,
+with the exception of one eye and one ear, was stated to have manifested
+shame, grief, surprise, fear, and anger. He goes on, however, to say:
+“In observing him, however, no such theory as the present one seems to
+have been thought of; and it always remains possible that, just as he
+satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold blood, with no
+inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have been accompanied by
+a quite cold heart.”
+
+Since Professor James’s work was published, two cases have been reported
+by Berkley,[57] which, although not, perhaps, conclusive, are of interest
+in this connection. In the first, the patient, a woman of English
+birth, age not stated, had complete loss of sense of pain, heat and
+cold, pressure and equilibrium, of smell, taste, and sight. The sense
+of touch, although not completely abolished, was very greatly impaired.
+She recognised a hat, for instance, only after feeling of it for a long
+time and then seemed doubtful about it. Her sense of the position of the
+extremities was also very imperfect, although not entirely abolished; and
+there was some deafness, although not enough to render her incapable of
+conversation. With regard to her mental state, Dr. Berkley says:
+
+    “The psychical condition has undergone but slight change, she
+    is possibly a little apathetic, with some slight tendency
+    towards a melancholic tone, but when aroused and induced to
+    converse for some time, this in great measure passes away. The
+    memory is quite good.”
+
+Dr. Berkley was kind enough to give me the following additional
+information about this patient, who, at the time of writing, was still
+under observation:
+
+    “Since the coming on of the dullness in hearing there has been
+    a considerable degree of apathy manifest. She is no longer
+    conscious of the smaller noises that occur around her, but is
+    very readily aroused by the voice, and then takes a lively
+    interest in what is said to her: for instance a few days ago
+    the resident physician remarked to her that he was going to
+    obtain a pair of crutches for her use; she laughed heartily
+    at the idea, and said she would fall and break her leg at the
+    first step.”
+
+In response to further inquiries, he writes as follows:
+
+    “1) Visceral sensations. The clearest evidence of visceral
+    sensation I have noted in my article,” [warning of the
+    necessity of evacuating the bowels and bladder by a pricking
+    pain in the lower part of the abdomen,] “no others were
+    sufficiently definite to be described. For two years there has
+    been no feeling of hunger or thirst, and as the diet has only
+    been a few mouthfuls of milk at a time for nearly that period,
+    there has been no feeling of repletion.
+
+    “2) When the patient laughs at a joke, there is a slight
+    flushing of the face, besides the ordinary contraction of the
+    facial muscles; she is aware that she is laughing, but besides
+    acknowledging that she perceives no difference between the
+    act now, and some years ago, she is unable to describe the
+    sensation further.
+
+    “3) Anger. As I think I mentioned in my last letter, the
+    patient has been a person of unusually equal temper; an
+    outbreak of real passion has never been observed with her.
+    When annoyed or teased by some of the other women, there is
+    a distinct corrugation of the forehead, accompanied by an
+    exceedingly slight general movement as if of aversion, no
+    words, movement of the chest, clenching of the hands, etc. She
+    describes the sensation as one of repulsion.
+
+    “Like Strümpell’s case she shows definitely shame, grief,
+    surprise, fear, and substituting for anger, repulsion.
+
+    “My own impression derived from observation of the patient
+    is, that all mental emotional sensibilities are present and
+    only a little less vivid than in the unanæsthetic state; and
+    that emotions are approximately natural, and not at all coldly
+    dispassionate.”
+
+In the second case, that of a Russian woman, aged thirty-five, there was
+complete loss of cutaneous sensibility in all its qualities: the sense of
+position (“muscular sense”) was almost completely abolished; the sense of
+taste was absent in the anterior two-thirds of the tongue. Smell, sight,
+and hearing were preserved. She had left the hospital before the article
+was written. In regard to her case, Dr. Berkley writes:
+
+    “While in the most absolute state of anæsthesia (auditory
+    and visual excepted) there was no departure from a normal
+    psyche; the woman would sometimes be angered when she did not
+    understand a question, at others would smile or shake her head,
+    and would frequently laugh and talk with another Russian woman
+    in the same ward. There was never the slightest apathy manifest
+    after the first few days of febrile movement.”
+
+I give these cases for what they are worth. In the first, it is evidently
+impossible to entirely exclude the presence of sensations caused by the
+reflex acts, and the second, not having, apparently, been examined with
+special reference to the subjective side of her emotional manifestations,
+may be open to the same objection which Professor James makes against
+Strümpell’s case. To me it seems extremely unlikely that, if the theory
+under discussion is correct, such an amount of anæsthesia as existed in
+these cases would have produced no obvious effect on the emotions. The
+fact that voluntary acts were performed by both these patients as well
+as by Strümpell’s case, seems to me conclusive as to the existence of
+emotions of some sort in all of them.
+
+It seems clear to me, from the foregoing considerations, that there are
+serious difficulties in the way of accepting Professor James’s theory as
+an adequate explanation of all the phenomena of emotion. On the other
+hand, I think it contains an important truth, and that, by calling
+attention to it, he has rendered a real service to psychology. In order
+to make it clear how far I agree with him, it will be necessary to
+consider just what feelings are to be classed together under the head of
+emotion.
+
+If we touch our fingers to a live coal, we are conscious of a sensation
+of heat, and also of pain. If we take quinine into our mouths, it tastes
+bitter, and also disagreeable. So in regard to a very large proportion of
+our sensations, we recognise two elements—one which has to do with the
+qualities of the object, and, another consisting of the pleasurable or
+painful way in which those qualities affect us. The former may be called
+the objective element in sensation. We think of the heat as residing
+in the coal, whether we are touching it or not, but it never occurs
+to us to think of the coal as in pain. The pain is in us—an entirely
+subjective feeling. Doubtless there is no more reason to think of heat,
+as it is appreciated by our senses, as a property of the coal, than pain,
+but that is the way in which we naturally think of it. That these two
+elements are really distinct is evident from the fact that the different
+senses furnish them in different proportions. Comparatively few sights,
+for instance, give any such sensuous pain to the eye as the sensation
+produced by getting a grain of sand under the lid, which gives us very
+little information in regard to the qualities of the offending substance.
+In fact, it is generally true that intensity of pleasurable or painful
+sensation is a hindrance to exact knowledge of its object. It is further
+evident from the fact that, in disease, one form of sensibility may be
+abolished while the other is retained. A person may be able to feel the
+slightest touch, and to recognise perfectly the size, shape, and texture
+of the objects he handles, and yet feel no pain when cut, struck, nor
+burned, or he may have even heightened sensibility to painful impressions
+with loss of the power to recognise the sensible qualities of objects.
+
+Now, although we are accustomed to distinguish between emotions and
+purely sensuous pleasures and pains, there are some points, at least, at
+which it is not easy to draw the line. My pleasure in the anticipation of
+a good dinner is undoubtedly an emotion. Is not my pleasure in eating it
+entitled to the same name, and does not the latter consist in the reality
+of the sensations which in the former case were enjoyed in imagination?
+Is not the enjoyment we feel in the smell of mignonette, the tone of a
+sweet voice, the color and form of the rainbow, emotion? Yet it consists
+largely, if not entirely, in the agreeableness of the sensations. Most
+people would probably think it strange to hear hunger and thirst spoken
+of as emotions but would readily agree that desire of food or drink
+is as much an emotion as any other desire. Is the desire in this case
+anything more than the hunger or thirst?
+
+I am inclined to think that it is proper to call such pleasures and
+pains as I have instanced above emotions, and if so, I see no reason
+for denying the name to any sensuous pleasures and pains. If Professor
+James’s view is that all feeling is sensation, I should say that all
+feeling is emotion. Whether this view is correct or not, I do not see how
+Professor James can consistently refuse to accept it. On his theory, the
+emotions which he discusses must owe their pleasurable or painful quality
+to the pleasurable or painful nature of the sensations in which they
+consist. I can see no valid ground for saying that some such feelings are
+emotions and others are not. But the essence of emotion is pleasure or
+pain. Abstracting these qualities, it would be an indifferent emotion,
+which, I think all would agree, is a contradiction in terms. Possibly he
+might wish to limit the use of the term to those pleasurable and painful
+feelings, which arise not directly, but in a reflex way. He might say,
+for instance, that the disagreeableness to the ear of the creaking of an
+ungreased axle is not, but the shudder which it gives a sensitive person
+is, emotion. In that case, it must be admitted that a sneeze is emotion.
+His contention is that we have no other pleasures or pains than those of
+sensation. If this be true, a setting off of some sensations as emotions
+is, if not an arbitrary, a comparatively useless procedure.
+
+My own view, then, is that the elements of sensation which I have
+spoken of as objective and subjective might, with equal propriety, be
+characterised respectively as intellectual and emotional, and that in
+this direction the theory under discussion, although true as far as it
+goes, does not go far enough.
+
+However this may be, the admission or denial that these feelings are
+emotions does not necessarily affect the question whether or not this is
+the only origin, of pleasure and pain. As has already been said, those
+feelings to which no one will deny the name of emotions are not usually,
+in adult human beings, at least, direct reactions on sensation. If it
+be true that the start we give at the unexpected slamming of a door
+is a sort of fright, it is a very rudimentary sort compared with that
+which one feels when the cry of fire is raised in a crowded theatre. “A
+burnt child dreads the fire.” It is not the sight of the fire, but the
+thought of the burning, that arouses the emotion. When a man reads in the
+newspaper of the death of a friend, or a rise in the value of property
+in which he is interested, it is not the sight of the black marks on the
+white paper, but the beliefs which, through a long and intricate series
+of associations they call up, which move his feelings. If he could not
+read, he would see the same announcement without any emotion. The usual
+origin of the emotions _par excellence_ is by way of association.
+
+Suppose that I have taken a nauseous dose, and made a wry face over
+it. No one, I presume, would question that the disagreeableness lay in
+the unpleasant taste, and not in the distortion of the countenance.
+Now, suppose I have to repeat the dose, and my face takes on a
+similar expression at the anticipation to that which it wore when I
+took it originally. How does this come about? If I can trust my own
+consciousness, it is because the vivid reproduction, in memory, of the
+unpleasant taste is itself unpleasant. I do not see how it can well be
+otherwise. Professor James says (p. 649) that “the first element of
+memory is the revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original
+event.” How can I have a copy in my mind of a pain if it is not painful?
+Take away the painfulness of it and there would be nothing left. I might
+remember the circumstances under which it occurred, and judge from
+them that I must have suffered pain, but I could not, it seems to me,
+remember the pain itself. Whether that is possible or not, I feel sure
+that the fact, in my own case, is, that my memory of a pain resembles it
+in the same way that my memory of the circumstances in which it occurred
+resembles them. If this be the fact, what can be more natural than that
+it should excite the same sort of associated movements that were excited
+by the original sensation? I cannot make it seem any more credible, to
+return to the example mentioned above, that my repugnance to a repetition
+of the dose is due to my involuntary movements than that my discomfort in
+taking it originally was due to the similar movements that occurred then.
+
+Suppose that a child who has eaten and enjoyed an orange is offered
+another. The sight of it calls up the recollection of the agreeable
+taste, and the expectation of a repetition of the pleasant experience
+excites expressions of pleasure. If the fruit is snatched away, the
+disappointment at the loss of the expected pleasure is distressing, and
+very probably may result in his weeping. I hardly think that any one who
+will consult his own consciousness will say that the reason he likes the
+taste of an orange is that it makes him laugh or smile to get it. He
+likes it because it tastes good, and is sorry to lose it for the same
+reason. The laughing or weeping is, I think, unquestionably the result of
+the pleasure or grief, not of the mere perception of an object in itself
+indifferent.
+
+It is true that emotions of this sort do not always arise by way of
+personal association. Young children are apt to be afraid of strangers,
+of large animals, and of loud noises. I can remember being frightened
+at my first sight of a locomotive. Here we come upon the questions
+of inherited experience and natural selection, which can hardly be
+discussed in an article like this. The objects of which young children
+are instinctively afraid, as a rule, are either dangerous themselves, or
+more or less similar to dangerous objects. I see no more difficulty in
+supposing that mental pleasure and pain, on the sight of special objects,
+may be a matter of organisation than in the case of the analogous
+physical sensations.
+
+My view of the matter, then, is that emotion in the sense in which
+the word is commonly used bears the same relation to perceptions or
+beliefs that feelings of physical pleasure or pain do to the objective
+or intellectual quality of sensations. I am inclined to think it proper
+to class all pleasurable and painful feelings together as emotions.
+If this view is correct, it would, of course, include those feelings
+to which Professor James would confine the term. I should not at all
+hesitate to admit that the emotional state of a person who trembles and
+turns pale with fear is different from that of one who preserves his
+self-possession in the presence of a danger that he realises and dreads.
+I think it is true that the voluntary actions prompted by an emotion
+have some tendency to intensify it. But, so far as I can analyse my own
+feelings, the pleasures and pains of memory and imagination seem to me
+just as real as those of sensation, and not at all to be confounded with
+them. When I try to subtract all motor reactions and resulting sensations
+from the feeling of fear, for instance, there remains not merely the
+intellectual perception that the event dreaded is not desirable, but the
+perfectly distinct emotional consciousness that I do not desire it.
+
+This view seems to be favored by the analogy between the relations of
+sensation to reflex movement on the one hand, and of perception to
+voluntary movement on the other, which will, I think, be found to be very
+complete. We have reflex acts which are useful, such as breathing, the
+beating of the heart, swallowing and coughing; and others, like groaning,
+weeping, and trembling, which seem to be useless. In like manner,
+emotions of hope or fear may give rise to voluntary acts calculated to
+enable the subject of the emotion to secure or avoid its object. If I
+burn my fingers, my hand is involuntarily snatched away. Such would not
+be the case if the burn caused no pain. If I see that the house is on
+fire, I try to escape, either by extinguishing the fire or by getting
+out of the house. It seems to me evident that I should not do so if the
+thought of being burned were not painful. Such emotions may also occasion
+useless acts, more or less similar to those mentioned above. A person who
+saw no way of escape from a burning house might tremble, weep, or groan
+from fear.
+
+On the evolutionary hypothesis, it seems easy to understand how the
+reproduction, by memory or imagination, of certain feelings might bring
+about movements like those excited by the original feelings. Professor
+James would have us believe that this reproduction is always, in itself,
+indifferent, that is, merely intellectual; but that it is, nevertheless,
+capable of setting up the movements which, in the case of peripheral
+stimuli, are the results of pleasure and pain, and that the consciousness
+of these movements is, in such cases, the sole cause of the emotional
+condition. Such a reversal of relations seems to me highly improbable.
+Each one must decide for himself which view is more in accordance with
+the facts of his own consciousness.
+
+                                                          W. L. WORCESTER.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[57] _Two Cases of General Cutaneous and Sensory Anæsthesia, without
+Marked Psychical Implication._ By Henry J. Berkley, M. D., Baltimore.
+[Brain, Part IV. 1891.]
+
+
+
+
+PROFESSOR ERNST MACH’S TERM SENSATION.
+
+SUPPLEMENTARY TO HIS CONTROVERSY WITH THE EDITOR.
+
+
+_The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 3, contains a controversy between Prof. Ernst
+Mach and myself on some questions of psycho-physics in which Professor
+Mach, having reference to an editorial article on “Feeling and Motion,”
+regards sensations as the “elements of reality,” “while motion,” he says,
+“is a mere mental auxiliary, an artificial expedient.” “Physicists,” we
+are told, “have accustomed us to regard the motions of atoms as more real
+than the green of trees. In the latter I see a (sensory) fact, in the
+former a _Gedankending_, a thing of thought.”
+
+In contradistinction to Professor Mach I maintained that our scientific
+terms, although abstract concepts and things of thought, or noumena, are
+after all descriptive of actual facts; they are symbols representing
+features of reality. Motions, i. e., that which is meant by the term
+motion, is a reality, and what the chemist calls atoms is a definite
+quality of certain facts of experience. Atoms are not things in
+themselves, as the name seems to suggest, but rather proportional
+relations conveniently so expressed as if they were ultimate units or
+concrete little bodies of a definite mass or weight. What atoms are,
+aside from representing the proportions in which elements combine, we do
+not know. We may define “atom” as the minimal weight in which an element
+enters into chemical combinations, but such atoms have never been an
+object of observation. For aught we know, they may as little be discrete
+bodies as a curve consists of discrete straight lines, which, as such,
+would be unobservable only because infinitesimally small. The infinitely
+small straight line into which a curve is analysed by mathematicians is
+a fiction, wisely devised for calculating the path of the curve. This
+fiction is as Professor Mach says, an artifice only, not a reality, or
+as I say, an allegoric expression to characterise not whole concrete
+realities, but certain features of reality in their abstractness.
+
+Scientific terms are comparable to myths that contain deep religious
+truths. The fiction of the myth is only the vehicle of its meaning. The
+naked meaning in its abstract purity may be difficult to grasp. Thus
+our imagination steps in and completes the picture so as to render it
+concrete and easily thinkable.
+
+Now, when several months ago I met Professor Mach at Prague, our
+conversation naturally touched upon the problems which had formed the
+subject of our discussion. Professor Mach assented to my speaking of
+scientific terms as abstracts. That, accordingly, must be considered
+as the point of agreement. But when I proposed that the term sensation
+also was according to my terminology an abstract term representing one
+feature of reality only and excluding other features, Professor Mach took
+exception to it, saying that he understands by sensation reality itself.
+Very well then, this is the difference; and this difference is after
+all a difference of terms only. I understand by sensation the psychical
+feature of the data of experience only, to the exclusion of what may be
+called its physical aspect. Sensation accordingly, as I use the term, is
+not the whole of the given reality but only one of its qualities. If, as
+Professor Mach uses the term, sensation is another name for reality, the
+main difference between our views appears to be removed.
+
+                                                                 P. CARUS.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+
+VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DIE MENSCHEN- UND THIERSEELE. By _Wilhelm Wundt_. Zweite
+umgearbeitete Auflage. Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss. 1892.
+
+The new edition of Wundt’s _Menschen- und Thierseele_ is one of the
+best existing general introductions to psychology. It preserves nearly
+the just mean between the purely introspective and abstract treatment
+and the substitution of physiology for psychology with which recent
+treatises have familiarised us. The author has completely rewritten
+the edition of 1863, which he regards as a youthful indiscretion
+(_Jugendsünde_)—retaining only such chapters as could be brought into
+harmony with his maturer views and with the developed science of
+psycho-physics that has taken the place of the _Zukunftsprogramm_ of
+thirty years ago. He has wisely omitted all the superficial and diffuse
+chapters on comparative psychology and ethnology which cumbered the
+original work; has silently ignored the fantastic speculations as to
+the identity of electricity and nerve-force (one of the worst of the
+aforesaid youthful sins); and practically abandoned (perhaps as too
+esoteric for popular exposition) the elaborate reduction of sensations
+and perceptions to unconscious judgments and inferences.
+
+The first thirteen or fourteen chapters offer a very clear and
+interesting résumé of the chief doctrines of the _Physiologische
+Psychologie_ in regard to sensations generally, their measurements and
+qualities, Weber’s and Fechner’s laws, the special sensations of color,
+hearing, and the muscular sense, and the problem of space perception.
+Following the plan of the original work in these chapters, the author
+aims less at completeness of statement than to present clearly the
+distinctive doctrines of modern psychology. In the treatment of certain
+themes, e. g. Fechner’s law, and the perception of space, he neglects,
+for the sake of clearness, qualifications of detail which the special
+student must look for in the larger work. The last sixteen chapters deal
+with the feelings, the will, consciousness, attention, association and
+apperception, conception, abnormal and animal psychology and instinct,
+concluding with two notable lectures on the “Freedom of the Will” and
+the “Immortality of the Soul.” It is to these chapters that we must look
+for Wundt’s general psychological and philosophical system. Profiting
+by recent criticisms he has here set forth his characteristic doctrines
+in so clear and definite a final statement that further misconception
+of them is hardly permissible. The remainder of this notice will be
+devoted to what is perhaps the most interesting question thus suggested:
+Wundt’s relation to the associationist psychology of Spencer on the one
+side, and to the younger German school of experimental psychologists
+on the other. Wundt ignores the Spencerian form of the associationist
+psychology, and the young psychologists do injustice to Wundt, neither
+side apparently condescending to read with attention the writings of
+the other. The debate, so far as it is not merely verbal, springs
+from two real differences of method: (1) Wundt in his psychological
+analysis habitually takes account of the problems of the theory of
+knowledge (_Erkenntnisstheorie_), or ultimate metaphysics, which the
+young psychologists endeavor (not always with success) systematically
+to exclude. (2) Wundt, gifted with superior powers of introspection,
+is more aware than the young psychologists of the infinite complexity
+and subtlety of mental states. He prefers, therefore, to a schematic
+simplification of the phenomena a terminology and descriptive analysis
+that reflect in some measure their manifold diversity. And thus while
+Wundt finds the pure associationist psychology barren and tautologous,
+the young psychologists see in Wundt’s complicated terminology only a
+shamefaced reversion to the discarded psychology of a substantial soul
+endowed with autonomous “faculties.” But the analysis of our mental
+states which Wundt gives by means of this terminology is really only
+a subtler restatement of the analysis of Mill, Spencer, and Taine, to
+which the new psychology has not been able to add anything of moment.
+It is true that he proclaims the inadequacy of association, even when
+translated into the diagrams of a hypothetical cerebral anatomy, to
+“explain” fully our conscious active mental life. But in this he is at
+one with Spencer (ultimate scientific ideas), J. S. Mill (Examination of
+Hamilton), and Schopenhauer (_Epiphilosophie_). It is gross injustice
+to stigmatise as an abandonment of the scientific attitude of mind this
+occasional passing recognition of the seeming ultimate inexplicability
+of things. In no single concrete instance can it be shown that Wundt now
+sacrifices the recognised methods and postulates of modern scientific
+investigation to the psychological hypostisations which his opponents
+detect in his terminology.
+
+In confirmation of these statements I will give a brief summary of
+Wundt’s doctrine of association and apperception with an occasional
+indication of its relation to the psychology of Spencer. Wundt
+distinguishes the totality of mental states which are perceived from
+the presentation at the focus of consciousness which is apperceived. In
+this way (substituting everywhere _dunkel bewusst_ for _unbewusst_) he
+avoids the metaphysics of the unconscious, while getting the benefit
+of the entire analysis of its advocates. I do not think the ultimate
+difficulty can be evaded in this way, but will not stop to argue the
+point. A further advantage of this distinction is that it makes possible
+a dynamic treatment of mental states as “events” in place of the crude
+psychology that deals with the conditions of any mental state as so many
+ready-made parts externally dovetailed into the completed product. The
+active side of consciousness is taken into account from the outset. The
+mental state at any moment is described by indicating the presentation
+which is then at the focus of consciousness (apperceived) and the
+accompanying faintly conscious presentations that qualify its tone and
+total effect. The given mental state is “explained” by tracing out the
+dynamic readjustments that brought this particular presentation to the
+focus, and grouped the faintly conscious presentations about it. Now the
+bringing of a presentation to the focus of conscious attention is the
+primitive psychical activity, the elementary act of will,[58] and since
+Wundt places this at the beginning he rejects all evolution of will or
+instinct from reflex action, and thus, it will be said, here at least
+puts himself in distinct opposition to advanced scientific thought.
+Let us distinguish. So far as we are dealing with the developed minds
+we know, Wundt’s distinction is merely the expression of an observed
+psychological fact. External volition does go back to internal voluntary
+attention and this to a focussing of consciousness for which apperception
+is as good a term as another. Such focussing of the attention is for us
+now the primary reaction of the “self” on its received impressions. Out
+of a given group of presentations I apperceive by preference one and you
+another, because at the time my “self,” my mind, differs from yours.
+This self may be only a convenient shorthand expression for a passive
+product of external forces. The feeling of the reaction of the self may
+be an illusion, and its activity may be merely the mechanical action of
+a relatively coherent group of presentations when a new presentation is
+introduced among them, and the whole process may be explicable in terms
+of associations. But the feeling exists, and Wundt has described and
+analysed it better than any of his critics.
+
+On the other hand, if the question is of the hypothetical origin of
+mind, we are at once brought face to face with an ultimate metaphysical
+problem which the new psychology impatiently ignores, which Spencer
+grudgingly acknowledges, but which Wundt and Kantians like Riehl find
+confronting them at every stage of their analysis. Conscious mind cannot
+conceive of its own origin, and therefore all psychological theories of
+development must postulate in some form the elements of consciousness
+and will. Nothing that I could add to the dialectics of this question
+would influence those who feel no difficulty here. They require a long
+course of Kantian criticism or its equivalent. At any rate it is not fair
+polemic to class a thinker as unscientific merely because he recognises
+this difficulty and gives it expression in his psychology, instead of
+contemptuously relegating it to metaphysics.
+
+After thus laying the foundations in the doctrine of apperception for the
+psychology both of cognition and of the will, Wundt proceeds to restate
+the associationist analysis of Mill and Spencer in a more elaborate
+terminology but in substantial agreement with Spencer till he reaches
+the “concept,” when the introduction of apperception gives rise to a
+seeming difference. Spencer distinguishes simultaneous from successive
+association as carefully as Wundt. What Wundt, after Herbart calls
+“complications,” namely the joint reference to one object of a number
+of disparate presentations of sense, is clearly described by Spencer
+(“Principles of Psychology,” §§ 315-355); and Wundt’s “assimilations” do
+not differ appreciably from Spencer’s “still less conscious” processes
+of “organic classification” (“Principles of Psychology,” § 320). Into
+the metaphysics of the ultimate relations of contiguity and similarity
+as laws of association I cannot enter here. Similarity will always be
+recognised as ultimate by those who, like Spencer, approach the problem
+first from the psychical side, while a purely materialistic treatment in
+terms of nervous currents, such as we find in James, will endeavor to
+do away altogether with similarity, which simply cannot be expressed in
+terms of nerve-structure without reasoning in a circle. Wundt retains
+similarity but endeavors to coördinate it with contiguity. The problem is
+really identical with the final question of the relations of “mind” and
+“body,” and cannot be profitably discussed apart from that question.
+
+Coming now to the concept and the judgment, we find Wundt affirming
+that the different forms of simultaneous and successive association (as
+he has defined them) are not an exhaustive classification of mental
+processes—that they do not include the concept. Well, he is at liberty
+to define his own terms, and before we accuse him of hypostasising a
+new faculty to account for the concept, let us scrutinise his meaning.
+We shall find that he merely repeats, in a subtler terminology of his
+own, the analysis of Berkeley, Mill, Taine, Spencer, and Romanes.
+These writers treat the concept as a complicated associational group
+held together by the word. Now Wundt, while conceding the theoretic
+admissibility of this form of statement, holds that such groups present
+so many distinct characteristics that all delicacy of psychological
+discrimination is sacrificed by confounding them under one denomination
+with other associational complexes. He does not, like Professor James,
+bid introspective psychology “throw up the sponge” here, but wishes
+to carry his analysis into recesses which the instruments of the
+associationists are too clumsy to explore. In the interests of this
+analysis he limits the term association to combinations mediated by a
+limited number of elements. The (apperceived) concept, on the other
+hand, is the product of the reaction of the total mind. This distinction
+(whatever we may think of its absolute validity) expresses a finely
+observed psychological truth. The distinctive quality of a concept
+consists, Wundt says, “_in dem begleitenden Bewusstsein, dass die
+einzelne Vorstellung einen bloss stellvertretenden Werth besitze_.”
+This feeling he calls the _Begriffsgefühl_, meaning thereby exactly
+what Professor James means when he says that “the thoughts by which we
+know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed
+from each other,” and that “a polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a
+feeling of ‘Hollo! thingumbob again!’ ever flitted through its mind.”
+Only, instead of “throwing up the sponge,” Wundt goes on to give a very
+interesting account of this feeling in its various degrees of clearness
+between the conceptual polyp and the conceiving man. Apperception is
+invoked only to name and emphasise the feeling of activity of the self
+that enters into the _Begriffsgefühl_, distinguishing it as a reaction of
+the total consciousness from the relatively passive associations of what
+Romanes would call “recepts.” Psychologists, however, will continue their
+fruitless debates on questions of terminology and will still imagine that
+Wundt is a belated reactionist.
+
+                                                              PAUL SHOREY.
+
+
+BEITRÄGE ZUR EXPERIMENTELLEN PSYCHOLOGIE. By _Hugo Münsterberg_. Heft 4.
+Freiburg i. B. 1892.
+
+Münsterberg’s fourth _Heft_ begins with studies in association. If _a_
+and _b_ have been independently associated with _m_, can _a_ call up
+_b_ without the appearance in consciousness of _m_? The affirmative
+answer of common experience was confirmed by Scripture’s experiments.
+Associating five Japanese symbols with two series of five German words,
+he found that a word of one series tended (without conscious recollection
+of the Japanese symbol) to revive the particular word in the other
+series that had been associated with the same symbol. Münsterberg, after
+repeating and varying the experiment in a number of fields, denies that
+any such relation can be observed. He may very well be right on the
+question of facts. It is _a priori_ improbable that a transitory and
+arbitrary association of a meaningless symbol could modify appreciably
+the independent and accidental associative attractions of familiar
+words and presentations. The philosophic interpretation is another
+question. For our real knowledge it is a matter of indifference whether
+we fill out “missing links” with “_dunkel bewusst_,” “_unbewusst_,” or
+“cerebral processes that have no psychical correlates.” And yet how much
+of contemporary psychologising is a logomachy raging around just this
+question.
+
+Münsterberg’s second series of experiments show clearly the part played
+by such missing links in perception. A word is called out just before a
+complicated picture is exhibited to the subject. He will usually perceive
+first in the picture some object naturally associated with the word, even
+though the word has aroused no conscious associations.
+
+Similarly (III) a hastily seen misprinted word will be interpreted
+variously according to the associations of another word called out to the
+subject in advance.
+
+Another series of experiments has for result that even the most commonly
+associated word-couples, as table and chair, have no fixed, unconditional
+associative attraction for each other in the same or in different minds,
+but that the unit of attraction is the “associative constellation.”
+This is only common sense, and artificial experiments will never reveal
+anything in this field that we cannot learn quite as well in the class
+room. “Table” will suggest “logarithm” if the boy is fresh from the class
+in trigonometry.
+
+“The difference between men is in their principle of association” said
+Emerson long ago. Münsterberg, who has in his archives records of
+fifty thousand experiments in verbal associations, presents a table of
+the comparative frequency with which substantives are associated with
+superior (more general) or inferior class names, with adjectives or with
+verbs to which they stand in the relation of subject or of object. His
+chief result is that minds which associate a noun with its higher class
+name (_Ueberordner_) think of it as the subject of a verb and do not
+associate it with an adjective. The _Unterordner_ thinks of the noun as
+object of a verb and associates it with an adjective. The adjective,
+then, is not the higher class to which the substantive belongs, but a
+limitation of the substantive. The French, if they please, may use this
+conclusion to refute Spencer’s contention that “white horse” is a more
+natural order than _cheval blanc_.
+
+The first topic in “memory studies” is the persistence in the
+psycho-physical mechanism of the disposition to an acquired automatic
+movement, even after the memory of the nerve has been seemingly displaced
+by the habit of its contrary. The experiments were trivial, such as
+shifting the position of an inkstand from right to left in alternate
+months, or wearing a watch alternately in the right or left fob. The
+result, a progressive diminution of the mistakes made after every change,
+may plausibly be explained by the stimulated attention and consequent
+care of the experimenter. The second topic treats of the effect of a time
+interval on the exactness of our memory of sensations of movement in eyes
+and limbs. The section on “chain reactions” is a methodological study of
+the various applications of this experimental method. “The influence of
+nervous stimulants on psychic activities” is rather interesting reading,
+but yields no important results. Alcohol depresses, tea and coffee
+heighten the powers of memory and perception for an hour or two after
+absorption. But the harmful effect of the alcohol sometimes passes away
+after the first hour. _Grössenschätzung_ is a study of our estimates
+of distances on a surface, made by passing the hand over it at arm’s
+length, at half arm’s length, etc. From experiments as to the estimate
+of absolute tone-distances (as distinguished from musical intervals)
+Münsterberg concludes that pure measurements are not possible with three
+tones only. Experiments with four tones do not, he says, confirm the law
+that distances corresponding to equal differences of vibration are felt
+as equal.
+
+Physiologists have assumed that the symmetrical movement of the limbs
+as in swimming or rowing is the natural one; and the alternating or
+independent movements, as in walking or writing, are an acquisition
+involving inhibitions of the natural innervations. “Even in adult life,”
+says Professor James, “there is an instinctive tendency to revert to
+the bilateral movements of childhood.” Professor Münsterberg was led to
+doubt this view by observing the unsymmetrical motions of a baby in a
+warm bath, and experiment has confirmed his scepticism. Complicated joint
+motions of both hands (tracing circles or other geometrical figures on a
+surface) do not exhibit any tendency, when the attention is distracted,
+to assume the symmetrical form. They rather tend to compensate each other
+in such a way as to preserve equilibrium with the minimum strain on the
+other muscles of the body, and this law leads as often to alternating as
+to symmetrical movements of the arms or legs. The case is different of
+course with the muscles of the trunk, and may be different in birds, as
+it would in us if we spent our lives in swimming or rowing.
+
+A new method of attacking the problem of localisation is to observe
+the effect of altering the circulation in different parts of the
+brain. Tentative experiments on one subject seem to show that verbal
+associations are readiest when the victim lies on his left side, which
+is a happy coincidence with the localisation of the speech centres in
+the left frontal convolutions. If these statistics can be trusted, it is
+inadvisable to undertake hard mental labor with the head hanging back
+over the edge of a chair!
+
+In the last chapter, certain simple experiments in our estimates of
+voluntary movements in varying conditions of mind and body are made the
+basis of a far-reaching theory of pleasure, pain, and judgment, the
+elements of which can be found in Aristotle, Herbert Spencer, and James.
+Münsterberg found by repeated experiments that the accuracy of attempted
+reproduction of a fixed and familiar amount of centripetal or centrifugal
+movement of finger and thumb along a rod perpendicular to his waistcoat
+varied with his condition of fatigue, pleasure, or pain. In a pleasurable
+state of consciousness the centrifugal movement was exaggerated while the
+centripetal fell short. In pain the reverse relation obtained. Hence he
+infers a connection between pain and muscular flexion and pleasure and
+muscular extension, or rather, he distinguishes the mere sensation of
+pain (_Schmerz_) and pleasure (_Lust_) which may depend on integrations
+and disintegrations in the nerve-tissue, from the accompanying feelings
+of agreeableness (_Wollust_) or disagreeableness (_Unlust_) which are
+due to sensations aroused at the centres by movements of flexion and
+extension throughout the body. He thus attaches his special theory of
+pleasure and pain to Lange’s and James’s theory of the identity of the
+emotions with their bodily concomitants—though he protests against the
+metaphysical implications of the doctrine. The origin of the existing
+coördination of muscular flexions and extensions with pleasure and pain,
+he explains teleologically on the principles of the Spencerian psychology
+of evolution. He then proceeds, after Sigwart and Brentano, to revive
+the old idea of Aristotle (whom he does not mention) that the judgment
+(affirmative or negative) is rather the assumption of an attitude toward
+a presentation (_Stellungsnehmende Akte_) than a mere conjunction of
+presentations. The affirmative judgment is a faint incipient represented
+movement of the self towards a suggested conjunction of presentations.
+The negative judgment is a similar movement in the opposite direction.
+Ontogenetically these inchoate movements are later than the movements
+of acceptance or rejection called forth by a painful or pleasurable
+stimulus, and must therefore be treated as derivative phenomena. But the
+Kantians may derive some comfort from Münsterberg’s final assurance that
+he too believes that “_Erkenntnisstheoretisch das Urtheil primär ist_.”
+
+                                                              PAUL SHOREY.
+
+
+THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. By _Josiah Royce_, Ph. D. Boston and New
+York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
+
+We are told by Professor Royce in the preface to this book, that we are
+indebted for it to the lady friend to whom it is gracefully dedicated,
+who asked him “for some account of the more significant spiritual
+possessions of a few prominent modern thinkers,” to be related “in
+comparatively brief and untechnical fashion.” The larger portion of the
+work is taken up with that subject, exhibiting the general growth of
+modern philosophical thought beginning with Spinozism, and terminating
+with Monism as the outcome of the doctrine of Evolution. The author’s
+purpose is constructive, however, as well as expository. He has his own
+philosophical creed, suggested by what he knows of the progress and
+outcome of modern thought, and the second portion of the work is the
+expression of his thoughts on the world-conception which he regards as
+embodying the true spirit of modern philosophy. Professor Royce justly
+lays stress on the fact that the theory of evolution is the product
+of a genuine and continuous growth. He dwells particularly, moreover,
+on the distinction between the _epistemological_ sense of idealism,
+which “involves a theory of the nature of our human knowledge,” and
+its _metaphysical_ sense, in which it is “a theory as to the nature
+of the real world, however we may come to know that nature.” It is in
+accord with the latter sense that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their
+allies, as believing matter to be an expression of the world-spirit, are
+referred to as the idealistic school; and it is in the metaphysical and
+not the epistemological sense that the term idealism has been used since
+Hegel. The opposite of a metaphysical idealist is “one who maintains
+the ultimate existence of wholly unspiritual realities at the basis
+of experience and as the genuine truth of the world—such unspiritual
+realities for instance as an absolute ‘Unknowable,’ or, again, as what
+Hobbes meant by ‘Body.’” This is not, however, the view of the author,
+who thinks that the metaphysical idealist alone is in possession of a
+successful solution for the epistemological problem.
+
+Professor Royce divides modern philosophy into three great periods, of
+which the first was one of pure and simple naturalism. The supernatural
+had then only a secondary interest, and thought was governed by three
+ideas—“that nature is a mechanism, that human reason is competent to
+grasp the truth of nature, and that, since nature’s truth is essentially
+mathematical, geometry is the model science, whose precision and
+necessity philosophy, too, must imitate.” During the second period of
+modern philosophy there was a gradual change of thought objectivity.
+Reason was still the instrument, but it was employed on the mind itself.
+It came to be recognised that if man is part of nature’s mechanism,
+he is a knowing mechanism. The age was, however, more than one of
+self-analysis. Rousseau introduced a sentimental tendency from which came
+“a revival of passion, of poetry, and of enthusiasm, whose influence
+we shall never outgrow.” To it is traceable the French Revolution
+which overthrew all the mechanical restraints of civilisation, and
+“demonstrated afresh to the world’s outer sense the central importance of
+passion in the whole life of humanity.”
+
+The period of modern philosophy, which still continues, began with the
+publication of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the essential doctrine
+of which is that man’s nature is the real creator of man’s world, that
+visible nature is the expression of the human spirit, the inner structure
+of which is therefore the deepest truth for us. This idea is “as old as
+deeper spiritual faith itself,” and yet it is the very soul of all our
+modern life because it is “the essentially humane view of reality.” For
+fifty years Kant’s ideas ruled philosophic thought, and then, through the
+progress of science, the doctrine of evolution received formulation, and
+confirmation and “external nature has once more gained for us an imposing
+authority which makes us in many ways sympathise afresh with the pure
+naturalism of the seventeenth century.” We are compelled to omit any
+account of the author’s study of the philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and
+Berkeley, or the philosophic systems of Kant and his successors of the
+German School of Idealists. Nor can we say anything as to the doctrine of
+Evolution, which Professor Royce rightly regards as having had its rise
+long before Darwin or Herbert Spencer. Before proceeding to state his
+own views, the author takes a cursory glance at modern empirical monism
+which he affirms to be rather a suggestion than a philosophy. It is not
+surprising, therefore, that he is not content with it although he makes
+use of its ideas.
+
+Let us now see what are the “Suggestions” which Professor Royce offers
+as his contribution towards the formation of a world-conception. These
+occupy the last four chapters of the work, which are supplemented by a
+general summary in the appendix, to the book. For the sake of conciseness
+we will make use of this summary, according to which there are two
+phases of idealistic doctrine, the Analytic Idealism of Berkeley and the
+Synthetic Idealism of Kant and his successors. The former shows that if
+the world is to be knowable at all, it must be, in its deepest nature, a
+world of ideas, that is, it exists “only in so far as beings with minds
+actually _know it to be_.” The objection that nobody can _know_ any
+reality beyond his own self, is met by the synthetic phase of idealism
+which shows us that “there is but one self in the world, the logos or
+world-mind. The _finite_ self knows truth beyond its own limitations,
+just because it is an organic part of the complete Self.” What are the
+demands of idealism as thus stated? They have relation, first, to the
+interpretation of the facts of experience, which must be in terms of
+the doctrine of the world-mind, and, secondly, to experience itself,
+on which we depend “for the revelation of that truth which, for us
+finite beings, must remain a fast ‘outer’ truth, just because it is the
+content of other mind than our own bits of selfhood, and is universally
+true for all intelligences.” The philosophy of experience having to do
+with facts and with the interpretation of facts, it is necessary to
+distinguish between what is really “outer” and what is “inner” about our
+finite experience. The former embraces the world of facts, and a fact
+is something which must be describable in some sort of universal terms.
+The principle of ordinary realism, “that you must not be sentimental or
+otherwise emotional in your account of the truth of things, but rather
+_exact in your descriptions of what things are_,” has a thoroughly
+idealistic justification. Not appreciation, but description gives us
+outer truth, and this is the characteristic presupposition of all natural
+science, which is concerned with the universal aspects of things, as
+opposed to momentary and transient aspects. That presupposition involves
+the assumption that the world is _essentially describable_. But as only
+the well-knit, the orderly, that which conforms to law, can be described
+science assumes the universality and rigidity of the laws of nature.
+It assumes further, since the most exact descriptions are possible only
+in the case of processes in Space and Time, of a mechanical type, that
+everything including man himself, is a part of nature’s mechanism. A
+closer analysis, however, shows that, as one can only describe what has
+been first appreciated, there must be universal types of appreciation,
+and therefore, that “Ideals must be deeper than Mechanism, so that, in
+order to be relatively describable, nature must embody purposes, and so
+be possessed of worth.” The author’s conclusion is that the natural order
+is also a moral order, and that therefore “the world of absolute self
+must appear to us as having two aspects, one a temporal, the other an
+eternal aspect, one of law and one of worth. Man then turns out to be at
+once a part of nature’s mechanism, and a part of the moral order; at once
+temporally determined and morally free.”
+
+The final lecture presents the author’s views as to the solution of the
+problem of evil. Professor Royce believes that all evil is part of a good
+order, and hence he agrees with Hegel, who declared that life, however
+good, will always be restless, longing, suffering, and who gloried
+in the paradox as the very essence of spirituality; rather than with
+Schopenhauer, whose recognition, in another light, of the universality
+of the same truth led him to abandon all hope in life. The justification
+of the existence of an evil impulse comes just at the instant when it is
+hated and condemned. Thus “condemning and conquering the evil will, makes
+it part of a good will”; as pain and suffering have their compensation in
+their chastening effect on the spirit. But to the enlightened soul it is
+not so much the painfulness as “the blind irrationality of fortune that
+seems to drive God out of our thoughts when we look at our world.” It is
+the capriciousness of life, arising from human stupidity, that really
+makes it seem like an evil dream. What is the explanation of this caprice
+given by the author? It is to be found in the creed of his idealism,
+“This world is the world of the Logos.” It is “the suffering God, who is
+just our own true self, who actually and in our flesh bears the sins of
+the world, and whose natural body is pierced by the capricious wounds
+that hateful fools inflict upon him.” And as our defeats are his, so his
+triumph and his eternal peace are ours also.
+
+Prof. Royce in making “only one more effort to define a ‘double-aspect’
+theory of the relations of the physical and the moral and æsthetic
+worlds,” affirms that our philosophic insight teaches us that the world
+of matter in motion is simply an external aspect of the appreciable
+world, that is, of the world of the Logos. Of this, it is such an aspect
+“as can be expressed by finite consciousness in terms of the space and
+time forms, and of the categories of empirical science.... Consequently
+all its laws, all its necessity, its causation, its uniformity, belong,
+not to its inner nature as such, but to the external show of this
+nature.” That which actually appears to us is matter in motion, which
+furnishes the fact of the double aspect, the inner intelligibility of
+which fact is problematical to us, but not so for the Logos, who is our
+true Self, and who “completes the insight that for us is so fragmentary.”
+This true Self, the Logos, is the only Self, and with it the deeper self
+of man is identical. That this deeper self is “the self that knows in
+unity all truth,” is declared to be no hypothesis, and therefore the
+existence of the Infinite Self is perfectly sure. This Self “infinitely
+and reflectively transcends our consciousness, and therefore, since
+it includes us, it is at the very least a person, and more definitely
+conscious than we are; for what it possesses is self-reflecting
+knowledge.” Finally, the true world, that is the world of appreciation,
+is the system of the thoughts of the Logos, whose unity we know, just so
+far as we ourselves consciously and rationally enter into it and form
+part of it. Therefore “in so far as we have inner unity of thinking,
+in so far as we commune with our fellows, and in so far as we rightly
+see significance in the outer universe, we are in and of the world of
+appreciation that embodies the thought of the Logos.”
+
+Ingenious as this theory is, and notwithstanding the elements of truth it
+possesses, we cannot accept it as conclusive. Its weakness is revealed
+in the last line of the paragraph just quoted. If only the world of
+appreciation embodies the thought of the Logos, what becomes of the world
+of fact? The latter is said to be the outer aspect of the former, a
+notion which is apparently derived from the association with man of body
+and mind. But the existence of mind, which we must understand by the term
+Logos, in nature, although declared by Professor Royce to be the only
+thing certain, is a mere inference, and even if the analogy of the human
+organism justifies such an inference; it would require that if priority
+has to be given to mind or matter in the universe it must be allowed to
+the latter. At birth a human being has no mind, properly so-called, since
+it is the result of the activity after birth of the organism, through
+the agency of the brain. It is true that the human body possesses from
+the first the elements of the mind, or rather of the feeling which thus
+exhibits itself; or, better still, the organic structure of which feeling
+is the general function. The utmost that can be properly asserted of the
+universe, therefore, is that it possesses a certain organic arrangement
+of its parts, and therewith such a condition of feeling, or, what in
+this relation would be a better term, sensitiveness, as is required by
+its organic character. In relation to such a state of things the terms
+thought, consciousness, reflection, have no meaning so far as we can
+judge. That organic aspect of the universe, moreover, leaves no room for
+duality. Just as the human organism constitutes a perfect unity, although
+it is made up of various organs and exhibits the properties attributed
+to both mind and matter, so must the universe be such a perfect unity
+whatever its nature and attributes. The human organism may, however, be
+strictly described as matter under organic conditions, a description
+which is equally applicable to the universe, without determining what
+those conditions are. Professor Royce objects to the Unknowable of
+Herbert Spencer, but there is very little practical difference between it
+and his own true Self, which, as the Absolute, is unknowable, although
+he is known in the inner self of man, as Spencer’s Unknowable is known
+in the human consciousness. Both Absolute and Unknowable are, however,
+merely names for Organic Nature, which is seen in all things visible and
+is known by all her operations. These are governed by the laws of her
+very existence, and it is the uniformity of which those laws are the
+expression which constitutes the moral law of the universe, the breach
+of whose eternal order, whether this is established in the world of
+matter or in the human mind, must be attended with consequences that are
+designated by man as evil. We find only a world of description, which is
+nevertheless one of moral order.
+
+Widely as we disagree on the grounds stated with the conclusions of
+Professor Royce’s work, it is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the
+discussion of the world-problem. Its description of the characteristics
+of the philosophy of Kant and of the German idealists is clear, though
+not intended to do more than exhibit the spirit of their teaching, and
+it is written in a style which renders it easy reading. It is a pity,
+therefore, that it is disfigured with such colloquialisms as _you’ll_,
+_isn’t_, _can’t_, _don’t_, words which neither sound well, nor look well
+in print.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+DIE ARISTOTELISCHE AUFFASSUNG VOM VERHÄLTNISSE GOTTES ZUR WELT UND ZUM
+MENSCHEN. By _Dr. Eugen Rolfes_. Berlin: Mayer & Müller. 1892.
+
+This book is a scholastic “survival.” The author believes that Zeller’s
+interpretation of Aristotle is wrong, and in five formal theses he
+endeavors to prove _secundum artem_ that the philosopher was a theist who
+taught the creation of the world from nothing, and the immortality of
+the soul. In the defence of his theses he manifests some ingenuity and
+industry, but no criticism. The work has no scientific significance.
+
+                                                                     P. S.
+
+
+MAX STIRNER UND FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. Erscheinungen des modernen Geistes
+und das Wesen des Menschen. By _Robert Schellwien_. Leipsic: C. E. M.
+Pfeffer, 1892. Price 2 m 60 pf.
+
+Individualism is the spirit of the age, and among all the champions
+of individualism the most original, the most consistent, the boldest,
+are perhaps Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Robert Schellwien, in
+sketching their views in great outlines, partly admires these courageous
+thinkers who dare to draw the consequences of their principles to the
+very last even though they will appear absurd to the world, partly
+censures the rashness with which they arrive at, and the superciliousness
+with which they sometimes state, their opinions. Upon the whole the
+author succeeds in impressing the reader that there is in these two
+peculiar geniuses a gigantic strength, and that their views of truth,
+morality, and justice deserve a greater attention than they have
+received. The reviewer is no admirer of either Stirner or Nietzsche; he
+believes nevertheless that a careful analysis of their erratic minds and
+lives will be very instructive. It will be first of pathological and
+then even of more than pathological interest. The actual objective value
+of the ideals truth, morality, and justice, will be best illustrated by
+showing all the consequences of a consistent individualism. We hope that
+this pamphlet will grow into a more comprehensive work; and in that case
+we should advise the author to add short biographies of his heroes.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+THE SOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT OF KANT’S TELEOLOGY. By _James Hayden Tufts_.
+Chicago: University Press. 1892.
+
+This little tract is an inaugural dissertation presented by Mr. Tufts
+to the University of Freiburg for the attainment of the doctorate of
+philosophy. It is written in English. Mr. Tuft’s dissertation is wholly
+historical. He simply seeks to expound Kant’s true views. In this respect
+the work bears the marks of much research and of a thorough exploitation
+of Kant’s works. Mr. Tuft’s concluding words are that “with every new
+discovery of science, every advance in the ideals of art and of the
+conduct of life, every development in religious faiths, comes anew the
+task for philosophy to criticise, and through criticism to make a fresh
+attempt to interpret from the unity of reason the manifold of life.”
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+DISTINCTION AND THE CRITICISM OF BELIEFS. By _Alfred Sidgwick_. London:
+Longmans, Green, & Co. 1892.
+
+This work might be described as an inquiry into the conflict between
+philosophy and common sense, and its central idea as the continuity
+of nature. What bearing this idea has on the inquiry is shown by the
+statement, that the distinction between philosophy and common sense is
+only one of degree. And yet, regarded as methods, or attempts to follow
+ideals, they may be sharply contrasted. This implies the existence
+of distinctions, and hence arises the question how far distinction
+is consistent with continuity in nature. The recognition of such a
+continuity requires the admission of the unreality of distinctness, but
+this fact is not inconsistent with the use of rough distinctions, which
+give rise to what the author terms effective ambiguity. Here we have the
+field of the operation of common sense, which exhibits itself as tact in
+the use of rough distinctions, while, on the other hand, philosophy may
+be said to be concerned with the continuity which, from a superficial
+glance, might be supposed to stand in opposition to distinction.
+
+The ultimate result which Mr. Sidgwick has in view is the reconciliation
+of philosophy and common sense, although it is incidental to his main
+purpose, which is the discussion of the best way of dealing with
+ambiguity, that is, of using rough distinctions. The improvement
+suggested is the substitution of “reasoned discrimination” for “haphazard
+tact,” and it is based on the doctrine that “the validity of all
+distinctions is relative to the purpose for which they are used at the
+time.” This cannot mean that distinction is merely relative, as it is
+said that there is no distinction which is quite safe against being
+broken down. The implication is that a safe distinction is possible,
+although difficult to find, and consistently with that view, the doctrine
+has the double aim of repressing excessive belief in distinctions
+which are, at least for the moment, invalid, and, on the other hand,
+of “enabling us to justify for a passing purpose, distinctions which
+are faulty on the whole.” The justification here arises from the use,
+and not from the distinctions themselves, although it is evident there
+must be some basis for them, or they would be invalid. The element of
+truth is derived from the continuity of nature, with which philosophy is
+concerned, and hence the improvement in the method of common sense is to
+be effected through its regulation by the method of philosophy.
+
+The justice of this view may be tested by its consequences, which are
+stated by the author in reviewing the chief incidental aims of his
+book, as being those which have to do with controversy, the faults of
+language, and the conflict between the rival ideals, faith and doubt.
+“Philosophy,” we are told, “is doubt, just as science is knowledge,” (a
+description which like many other things in this book we cannot endorse,)
+and the true centre of philosophical interest in regard to rival ideals
+is “to harmonise the dispute by seeking how to limit each ideal by its
+opposite.” This is the aim of all real philosophy, which recognises that
+every ideal has an element of truth. Philosophy is thus explanation,
+and Mr. Sidgwick avers one of the great dividing forces in philosophy
+has always been “the rivalry between two opposite methods of general
+explanation—that which explains small things by great ones, the part by
+the whole, the many by the one (e. g. all earthly facts as related to
+their one cause and substance); and that which explains great things by
+small ones, the whole by its parts, the one by the many (e. g. the system
+of nature as a ‘concourse of atoms’).” Thus regarded, the distinction
+between philosophy and common sense is simply one of method; and it may
+be said to consist in the use by the former of rational doubt based on
+scientific knowledge, as distinguished from the belief founded on popular
+wisdom which distinguishes the latter. Both alike, however, are the fruit
+of observation, pushed further, nevertheless, in the one case than in the
+other, which is practically the view expressed by the author.
+
+In considering the nature of philosophy, we have given the gist of Mr.
+Sidgwick’s reflections on controversy, which is treated as the opposition
+of ideals. This conflict is kept alive chiefly by doubt as to how
+abstract notions should be applied in concrete cases, and largely owing
+to “the absence of that kind of sharp distinction which is applicable,
+not only to the notions themselves, but to the actual facts to which they
+pretend to refer.” This view is ably enforced, as well as the necessity
+of applying to the conflict between ideals the rule laid down as to the
+purposive validity of distinctions. The operation of this rule would be
+attended with concession instead of assumption, there being, however, the
+admission, which is equivalent to an assumption, that neither side of
+any ideal dispute is devoid of some truth as well as some error. This is
+really required, if not by the continuity of nature, yet by continuity in
+our interpretation of nature. This is continuity in thought, and hence
+arises the difficulties connected with language which it is one of the
+author’s incidental aims to point out. He supposes that language acts as
+a drag on the progress of knowledge, owing to the _clumsiness_ of words
+arising from the fact that “things spoken of are always more full of
+change and movement than the words we can use in speaking of them.”
+
+Mr. Sidgwick insists upon continuity, yet change itself may be evidence
+of at least partial discontinuity. Our author remarks, in an appendix
+note on the continuity of nature, that every change, as such, is a
+_saltus_, however small it may be, and that the same is true of any gap
+between the two extremes of nature and the intermediate region. That such
+an intermediate region exists, is required by the continuity of nature,
+which again is evidence of change, on the principle that every chain
+is made up of a series of links. But as in the chain there is no real
+gap between the links, so there is no actual discontinuity consequent
+on change in nature. The two extremes may be regarded as prolongations
+of the intermediate region, and the changes to which such prolongation
+is due may so occur that there may be discontinuity between certain
+parts, as between the fibres of which a hempen rope is made, and yet
+there be a perfectly continuous whole. We have an example of such a
+discontinuous _continuum_ in a beam of ordinary light, which presents not
+the slightest gap, and which yet is made up of numberless undulations
+in different ratios representing the six spectrum colors, each of which
+is, moreover, spread throughout the whole of the beam. Here we see that
+continuity is quite consistent with distinction. The latter may be
+regarded as discrimination of the various phases of the former, and the
+distinction remains valid or otherwise according to the accuracy of the
+discrimination or not. But constant change of distinction is required by
+progress in knowledge which may be regarded as a thought representation,
+by discontinuous steps, of the continuity of nature.
+
+As to the conflict between faith and doubt, the author considers the
+function of scepticism as the search for grounds of belief, and thus
+doubt is said to be “rather a friend than an enemy to those who remember
+that there is still some truth, on any subject, for fallible men to
+learn,” as well as to those who are more interested in the discovery of
+truth than in supporting their own beliefs.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+VORLESUNGEN ÜBER GEOMETRIE, unter besonderer Benutzung der Vorträge von
+Alfred Clebsch. By _Dr. Ferdinand Lindemann_. Leipsic: B. G. Teubner.
+1891.
+
+This first part of the second volume of Alfred Clebsch’s Lectures has
+been arranged and treated by Professor Lindemann in the same way as
+the first, except perhaps that the editor has extended his independent
+investigations rather further than before, owing mainly to the fact that
+he had in addition to his own notes when attending Professor Clebsch’s
+lectures in 1871-1872, only five folio pages of the late master’s
+manuscript at his disposal. The present volume is divided into three
+parts. I. The Point, Plane, and Straight Line. II. Surfaces of the Second
+Order and of the Second Class. III. Fundamental Conceptions of Projective
+and Metrical Geometry. Historical notices and references are added in
+foot-notes. Considering the prominence of the editor as a mathematician,
+it would be a presumption on our part to praise his work.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+AN INTRODUCTION TO GENERAL LOGIC. By _E. E. Constance Jones_. London:
+Longmans, Green, & Co. 1892.
+
+This work is another witness of the great interest now being taken in all
+that pertains to the methods of knowledge.
+
+Miss Jones, the author, is lecturer on logic at Girton College,
+Cambridge. During an experience of several years in teaching, certain
+difficulties have very forcibly pressed themselves upon her attention.
+She hopes by her book to aid in removing these difficulties.
+
+It is certainly a good augury for women when their intellectual
+representatives begin to show the disposition to turn towards the “dry
+light.” Logic and mathematics are “dry” to be sure; that is, they are
+very apt to be _found_ dry, very dry, by beginners, and always by those
+who lack that real intellectual robustness which is alone fit to meddle
+with fundamental problems. Hence these sober and severe disciplines find
+little favor among those who seek merely for “showy” attainments, those
+to whom whatever is “uninteresting” is intolerable, and those who regard
+obscurity as inseparable from profundity. When then we find scholarly
+women manifesting a real relish for this “dry light,” it gives promise of
+a coming day when the intellectual appetite will rise above the level of
+mere entertainment, the level of the playhouse and the circus, and take
+kindly, and perhaps zealously, to real edification.
+
+Miss Jones makes but very modest claims on behalf of her treatise. She
+has not undertaken to innovate to any great extent upon the regular
+scheme. If in her changes there is that which might especially provoke
+criticism, it is perhaps in the nomenclature which she adopts. The
+traditional logic forms a system which has its own proper merits and
+defects. It is of great historical interest, and its regular terminology
+is almost indispensable for the proper illustration of its doctrines.
+
+We think also that the author fails to state the case in all its
+amplitude, when, she lays it down as one of the most absolute and
+ultimate of all logical principles that the self-evident ought to be
+believed. The truth is, as we conceive it, that the self-evident is sure
+to be believed, and that in the face of any proposition that truly bears
+its own justification along with it, any doctrine of logic is either
+useless or impertinent.
+
+                                                                      ρσλ.
+
+
+HYPNOTISMUS UND SUGGESTION. By _W. Wundt_. Leipsic: Wilhelm Engelmann.
+1892.
+
+A Greek student translates κλεινός ‘small’; “You are thinking of the
+German _klein_,” says the teacher quickly. Another renders ἡμείς γὰρ
+ἁγνοί, ‘we are lambs,’ misled by a chance cross association with the
+Latin _agni_. Every careful self-observer knows that there is no
+combination of memories, images, and resultant incipient acts too absurd
+for some moments of confusion and mental fatigue. We account for such
+confusions of thought by citing parallel cases and adding generally
+that normal associations are liable to disintegration and abnormal
+recombination in fatigued or excited conditions of the brain. If we
+seek a causal scientific explanation, two methods are open to us: (1)
+we may attempt to map out in detail and describe for all similar cases
+the pathways of association, or (2) we may endeavor to define their
+physiological conditions and accompaniments in the nervous system. The
+first leads us at once into the metaphysics of the unconscious. The
+second method, when we attempt to pass from a general to a specific
+correspondence, leads to a hypothetical restatement of the observed
+psychological facts in terms of the latest cerebral anatomy and
+physiology Now all serious scientific thinkers are fast coming to the
+conclusion (on which Wundt’s book is based) that the phenomena of dreams
+and of hypnotism are to be explained by the general laws of association
+as revealed especially in the confused and obstructed associations of the
+normal state. The critical and destructive part of Wundt’s sensible and
+timely work has two aims: (1) to discriminate the attested phenomena of
+hypnotism from the alleged phenomena of thought-transference, telepathy,
+and “possession” on which no serious student will waste his words; and
+(2) to point out the confusions of thought in current explanations of
+hypnotic phenomena, which either confine themselves to restatements of
+the observed facts in terms of a hypothetical anatomy, or at any rate
+in Wundt’s opinion base their physiological hypotheses on an inadequate
+psychological analysis. His own constructive work is an attempt to
+supply the missing analysis and accompany it with the most plausible
+physiological theory that our imperfect science allows. Dreams and the
+illusions of the hypnotic subject are doubtless explicable generally
+as derangements of the associative machinery. But they are specific
+forms of abnormal association, the special characteristics of which we
+wish to define. Suggestion, Wundt says (with James), is association
+accompanied by a “limitation of consciousness to the images aroused by
+the association.” The scientific problem is: _Wie entsteht die Einengung
+des Bewusstseins?_ This narrowing of consciousness manifests itself in
+a diminished sensibility to all impressions outside of the suggestions.
+Dreams show the same features, accidental impressions of sense or changes
+in the nutritive processes here taking the place of direct suggestions
+from without. But in sleep and dreams the limitation of consciousness is
+conditioned by general fatigue of the nervous system. In the hypnotic
+state it results not from fatigue, but from neuro-dynamic and vaso-motor
+changes in the distribution of tensions in the brain. Hence the superior
+intensity and vividness of the presentations that are allowed to develop
+themselves. This altered equilibrium of the forces of the brain is
+brought about by the suggestions of the operator, which are generally
+guided by him to a more or less definite end. The resulting derangements
+of normal associations are consequently less lawless than is the case in
+dreams. On these principles Wundt explains the chief facts of hypnotism
+as follows: Automatic obedience to the commands of the operator results
+simply from the fact that every idea tends to realise itself in action,
+is an incipient act; and in the narrowed consciousness of the hypnotic
+subject the idea suggested by the operator finds no competitors in the
+struggle for existence as a reality. This explanation (which is really as
+old as Spinoza) accounts also for positive hallucinations—there are no
+reductors, as Taine would say. Negative hallucinations (the non-existence
+of an existing door) may be explained sometimes by a contradictory
+positive hallucination (as of a curtain covering the door) more often
+in the same way as hypnotic analgesia by the familiar analogy of our
+insensibility to the toothache when the attention is elsewhere strongly
+engaged. This is favored by the generally diminished sensibility of the
+hypnotic subject. Post-hypnotic suggestions are associations depending
+on partial memories, such as we have in the normal state when we merely
+recall an image or an object without time-and-circumstance localisation.
+The subject who is to execute a post-hypnotic suggestion at 7 o’clock
+is reminded by the striking of the clock of an image of a thing to be
+done which the original command of the operator associated with the
+stroke of seven. All else is forgotten. When the time limit is not thus
+definitely marked, the process must be analogous to that whereby some
+persons are able to waken at a predetermined hour in the morning. A
+latent association is aroused into full activity by naturally recurring
+conditions of internal physiological processes or external surroundings.
+Courtesy or prudence are perhaps all that prevent the best explanation of
+certain extreme cases being the old one: “the boy lied.” Wundt rejects
+the claim that suggestion is the experimental method in psychology
+_par excellence_, for the very sufficient reason that the phenomena
+experimented with are only very partially in the control of the operator
+and are furthermore mainly pathological. He is far from disputing the
+practical efficacy of hypnotic therapeutics in functional disorders,
+but he regards the hypnotic sleep as a dangerous remedy, the employment
+of which should be limited to trained practitioners. The subjection
+of the hypnotic subject to the will of the hypnotiser is _a priori_
+an immoral relation to obtain between man and man unless justified by
+superior medical necessities, but, quite apart from _a priori_ ethics,
+indiscriminate hypnotisation is to be discouraged as a direct cause of
+nervous degeneration. The book closes as it began With a dignified but
+severe reprobation of those thinkers who in the interests of occultism
+magnify the psychological significance of hypnotism and disseminate
+superstition in the name of science.
+
+                                                              PAUL SHOREY.
+
+
+DER HYPNOTISMUS IN GEMEINFASSLICHER DARSTELLUNG. By _Dr. Hans
+Schmidkunz_. Stuttgart: A. Zimmer (E. Mohrmann). 1892.
+
+This book (266 pp.) is a popular compendium of hypnotism. The author,
+beginning (I) with the hypnosis of common life, goes over the whole field
+as follows: (II) the phenomena of hypnosis, (III) its application, (IV)
+the “beyond” of hypnotism, (V) the conceptions of hypnotism, and (VI) its
+dangers. The seventh and last chapter is a short history of the subject.
+
+Dr. Schmidkunz, Docent of philosophy at the University of Munich, is one
+of the few who believe that there is a “beyond” in hypnotism. He says
+on p. 65: “A hypnotised person was led through a room while sleeping.
+The experimenter made a few passes over his head and then violently
+whirled his arm around in a vertical direction before his subject. When
+the subject approached the marked place, he recoiled from it crying with
+pain.” Our author asks, “what is this magnetic wall to be regarded as? As
+a charm, as an obstacle of occult power, from which the body recoils as
+from a wall of stone? If not, was it the subject’s soul that recoiled?
+Was it the hypnotised person’s belief which created the wall?” etc.
+The two interpretations, the one attributing the effect to a magnetic
+power, the other to suggestion are typical. The former is bolder: he goes
+“beyond” hypnotism.
+
+Our author is one of those who go beyond hypnotism, and is not satisfied
+with the theory that suggestion explains all. We may add that he regards
+telepathy as a sufficiently established fact. Telepathy finds little
+support among scientists in Germany, and Dr. Schmidkunz complains, in
+a circular letter to “Professor Wundt’s and other Savants’ Critical
+Saltomortales” of the cool and depreciative treatment which his book
+_Psychologie der Suggestion_ received at the hands of men of science.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+L’HYPNOTISME DEVANT LES CHAMBRES LEGISLATIVES BELGES. Par _J. Delbœuf_.
+Paris: Félix Alcan. Pp. 80.
+
+In a recent number of _The Monist_ Prof. J. Delbœuf gave the reasons
+which have induced him to come to the conclusion that “persons in an
+hypnotic condition preserve at least a sufficient portion of their
+intelligence, their reason, together with freedom of action, to prevent
+them from committing deeds that neither their conscience nor their habits
+approve of.” This opinion is entertained by many other hypnotists, but
+the more general opinion is that “suggestion” may be made use of for
+criminal purposes: Such is the case especially in France and in Belgium;
+and acting on that supposition the medical faculty of the latter country
+promoted in the legislative Chamber a law interdicting public hypnotic
+séances, and reserving the practice of hypnotism as a therapeutic measure
+exclusively to medical men, as well as the treatment of insane persons
+and those under twenty-one years of age. Professor Delbœuf, who is not a
+medical man, naturally objects when those who but a few years ago would
+have classed him and his fellow hypnotists as charlatans, seek without
+reason to reserve for themselves the promising field of labor opened up
+by the researches of others. He maintains that men are born hypnotisers
+as they are born artists, and therefore to exclude all but medical men
+from the application of the hypnotic power will often prevent its use
+for curative purposes. Moreover it is a serious question for those who
+possess this natural gift. They might perform the most praiseworthy
+actions and yet be subjected to a legal penalty. Professor Delbœuf states
+that by hypnotism he cured a youth eighteen years of age of a mania for
+stealing (_la manie du vol_), and thus saved him from unmerited dishonor.
+On another occasion he had charge of a young wife who was possessed with
+the idea of murdering her children, and after all other means had failed
+he was able to remove the idea by suggestion extending over a period of
+eight days. He properly asks whether the performance of such actions
+ought to be treated as criminal.
+
+The real question to be considered, however, is whether the practice
+of hypnotism is likely to be made use of for criminal purposes if it
+is permitted to every one. We much doubt whether any actual case of
+such an abuse has been legally established, or whether suggestion
+could lead to the perpetration of a criminal act unless there was a
+predisposition in that direction. Professor Delbœuf makes use, however,
+of an apparent paradox which would seem to render abortive any such law
+of prevention as that above referred to. It is that there is in reality
+no such thing as hypnotism. M. Bernheim writes in a letter given in the
+present work, “for my part, in the thousands of hypnotisations I have
+practised, I have never seen the least inconvenience result. Undoubtedly
+very impressionable subjects can, under the emotional influence of
+auto-suggestion, present certain nervous troubles; but these a prudent
+operator can always calm by suggestion.” Professor Delbœuf relates
+several cases of this kind within his own experience, which shows that
+severe nervous pain can be removed by simple assertion that it does not
+exist. He affirms that “the so-called hypnotic sleep is only a sign
+of suggestibility, and that it is not at all necessary to suggestive
+therapeutics.”
+
+We may conclude this notice of a very interesting contribution to the
+discussion as to the true nature and operation of hypnotism, by quoting
+the conclusions arrived at by the author as to the proper mode of
+regulating its practice. He suggests that representations of hypnotism
+should be permitted subject to the measures which regulate public
+spectacles; that any one should be allowed to become a hypnotiser, as he
+can become a shampooer or a truss-maker; that the hypnotist who gives
+remedies should be punishable, since he exercises the art of curing
+without a diploma; that he should not be allowed to hypnotise minors
+without the consent of the family; and that he should be forbidden to
+treat a sick person without the written authorisation of a medical
+man and under his direction. This rule Professor Delbœuf, although he
+disapproves of the law which forbids the practice of medicine to those
+who have not a diploma, has always acted on. He thinks that if medical
+men then studied hypnotism and practised it themselves, hypnotisers who
+had no diplomas would soon have nothing to do. This spirited defence
+by Professor Delbœuf of his views will be widely read. Not the least
+interesting portion of it is the criticism, with which it ends, of “the
+affair of the brothers Vandevoir,” where we read that he is designated by
+his opponent M. Masoin “_doux et bon vieillard_” and “_l’homme cheveu_”!
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+UEBER DEN HAUTSINN. By _Dr. phil. et med. Max Dessoir_, Privatdocenten
+an der Universität zu Berlin. Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und
+Physiologie. Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892.
+
+This pamphlet, a reprint from the _Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie_
+of 1892, is an elaborate and careful investigation into the _modus
+operandi_ of skin sensations. The first part is a discussion of the
+theory of sensation in general containing (1) an analysis of the ideas
+_Gefühl_, _Empfindung_, and _Wahrnehmung_, (2) a critique of Johannes
+Müller’s doctrine of specific energies, (3) an exposition of the
+objectification of sensations. Feeling (_Empfindung_), according to
+the author, is, no magnitude, its main feature is intensity, quality
+becomes important only in sensation (_Wahrnehmung_). For the psychology
+of skin-sensations, we have to note the great influence of accompanying
+feelings (_Mitempfindungen_). The second part is devoted to the author’s
+investigations of the sense of temperature. Dr. Dessoir rejects Blix’s
+point theory; he regards the idea of two different end-apparatuses for
+warm and cold sensations as an unfounded assumption, and claims that the
+temperature sense is one mode of sensation possessing two qualities. The
+intensity of temperature sensations depends not only upon the _vis viva_
+of the heat in the stimulus; but also upon five other factors (1) the
+size of the surface affected, (2) the duration of the affect, (3) the
+thickness of the epidermis, (4) its conductibility, and (5), last not
+least, its temperature.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+RECHERCHES D’OPTIQUE PHYSIOLOGIQUE ET PHYSIQUE. By _Clémence Royer_.
+Brussels Imprimerie Veuve Monnom. 1892.
+
+The first part of this brochure consists chiefly of an examination of
+the theories of M. M. Hirth and Chauveau on chromatic sensation. The
+talented authoress disagrees with the view entertained by M. Chauveau,
+that the sensations of contrast which are fused cerebrally, so as to
+give, when viewed with both eyes, a white image, are subjective in an
+intellectual sense. The result is purely physico-physiological, as it is
+even assuming the intervention of M. Hirth’s _interior eye_. Mad. Royer
+regards the eyes organised so as to effect a fusion of the colors and
+forms depicted on the two retinas, and she accepts the conclusion of M.
+Hirth, that they lessen the real polychromism of objects, the inability
+to perceive the infra-red and the ultra-violet rays concealing from us a
+considerable part “of the palette of nature and of its chromatic scale.”
+The authoress refers with approval to the theory of M. Charpentier that
+the complementary colors correspond to inverse undulatory phases, which
+are destroyed by interference in the field of vision.
+
+The second part of Mad. Royer’s pamphlet is devoted to a consideration of
+the photography of colors, and the theory of light. It points out that
+the photography of colors, which has been effected to some extent by M.
+Lippmann, must be a physical and not a chemical process. It is the result
+of the periodic compressions of the sensitised silver-surface, due to
+the shocks it receives from the light undulations of the ether, which
+so modify the surfaces of the silver atoms that they reflect colored
+rays identical with those received from the object photographed. With
+reference to the propagation of light, the authoress affirms that the
+atoms of matter, as well as those of the ether, which differs from matter
+only in being imponderable and without inertia, are centres of emanation
+of a continuous and impenetrable fluid, which is however indefinitely
+expansible or compressible. The size and form of atoms will thus depend
+on the compressions they receive, and they will be able to accommodate
+themselves to the spaces to which they are confined by the resistance
+of the atomic groups by which they are surrounded. But the world may be
+regarded as consisting of three sorts of atoms: (1) those of the ether
+which possess their primordial unity of expansive force and are endowed
+with perfect elasticity; (2) those of ponderable matter, which have lost
+a portion of their expansive force and elasticity; (3) those which are
+called vitaliferous, because they have regained their expansive force,
+and are thus capable of autonomous movements necessary to resist the
+compressions of the ether and to oppose the inertia of matter. They thus
+answer to the cell-souls of Haeckel.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+DIE BEWEGUNG DER LEBENDIGEN SUBSTANZ. Eine vergleichend-physiologische
+Untersuchung der Contractionserscheinungen. By _Max Verworn_, Dr. med.,
+Privatdocent der Physiologie an der Universität Jena. Mit 19 Abbildungen.
+Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1892.
+
+The mechanism of muscle contraction and expansion and the motions of
+amœboid substance have been recognised as one and the same problem; and
+several naturalists, foremost among them Hofmeister, Engelmann, and
+Edmund Montgomery have investigated it, fully aware of the enormous
+importance of the subject. The present pamphlet is small, it contains
+only 103 pages, but it contains the statement of the problem, a
+description of the author’s experiments, and his solution so lucidly that
+one cannot read it without great satisfaction. Both processes, expansion
+as well as contraction, are, according to Verworn, spontaneous motions,
+and both are to be explained by chemotropy. Expansion, i. e., in amœba
+the protrusion of pseudopodia, is due to the plasma’s hunger for the
+oxygen, which is contained in the surrounding medium. Every irritation
+(electric shocks, concussions, injuries etc.) causes a chemical
+decomposition of the oxygenised plasma; it loses carbon, hydrogen,
+oxygen, and nitrogen, (as we know from the waste products, carbonic
+acid, creatine, lactic acid,) and these substances are exactly those
+which are most prominent in building up living substance. Irritations
+without exception cause the plasma to return to the nucleus. The chemical
+change in the plasma makes it hungry for the nuclear substances. The
+vital process, accordingly, is an interaction between the nucleus, the
+plasma, and the medium, so that in the constant exchange of materials the
+old structure is preserved; and the fundamental features of the vital
+process are first the plasma’s chemotropy for oxygen, causing centrifugal
+motions, and then its chemotropy for nuclear substance, causing
+centripetal motions. The plasma saturated with nuclear substances, shows
+a chemotropy for the oxygen of the medium; it moves in a centrifugal
+direction, and the oxygenised plasma has become so unstable that it
+breaks down on the slightest provocation. The decomposed plasma exhibits
+a chemotropy for nuclear substance and thus returns in contripetal
+motions to the centre. Without entering into details we may mention that
+this accounts also for the fact that dying protoplasm always assumes a
+globular shape, until it crumbles to pieces. The _rigor mortis_ is the
+last vital action of living substance. The plasma seeks once more the
+nuclear substance, but not finding sufficient material for being built up
+again into a substance endowed with a chemotropy for oxygen remains rigid
+until it decays.
+
+The author finds his theory to hold good for the actions of the striated
+and nonstriated muscles, and also of ciliated tissues. Having shown
+that the vital functions are due to the same forces that are observable
+in the retort of the chemist, he adds: “The savage accordingly was not
+quite wrong when he drew no distinct line, considering everything moving
+as alive. Life is motion. That old poetical view of all nature being
+animated with life throughout was in possession of a germ of truth,
+and our proud civilisation has actually made a retrogressive step in
+abandoning this view.”
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+GRABER’S LEITFADEN DER ZOOLOGIE FÜR DIE OBEREN CLASSEN DER MITTELSCHULEN.
+Vienna and Prague: F. Tempsky. 1892. Price 1 fl. 60 kr.
+
+We had occasion in a recent number of _The Monist_ to review an
+excellent text-book of physics published by this same house. The present
+work on zoology is in its second edition, and is intended, like the
+above-mentioned work of Professor Mach’s, for high-school instruction.
+Professor Graber, its author, died before the completion of the second
+edition, and the work was finished by J. Mik.
+
+Graber’s Zoology is unique in its class; it covers, within the
+restricted limits of two hundred and sixty-one pages, the whole field
+of elementary biology, human physiology, and zoology, as it is usually
+exploited in such books, and thus combines in a single volume what
+is usually contained in two or three. The human organism (Part 1) is
+made the starting-point of study in the work, and the explication of
+the physiological and mechanical functions of animals are thus all
+grouped about this central figure. In a concise form (55 pages) this
+book contains about all of human anatomy and physiology that is usually
+learned in high-schools. Part 1 also contains, at the end of the
+discussions, brief dietetic suggestions. “Systematic Zoology” is taken
+up in the Second Part. This part is well analysed and arranged. The cuts
+are also excellent. Attached to the book is a “Picture-Atlas.” This atlas
+contains a number of colored plates, which depict various physiological
+and anatomical organs, and also four beautiful representations of scenes
+from the Naples Aquarium. Although this book will not be used by English
+school-students, it may be recommended to students of scientific German
+who wish a good introduction into the technical vocabulary of German
+biology and zoology, which to the foreigner is very difficult.
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+L’ANTHROPOLOGIE DU BENGALE. By _Paul Topinard_. Extracted from
+_L’Anthropologie_ for May-June, 1892. Paris: G. Masson.
+
+The present contribution to the science of Anthropology by the Editor
+of _L’Anthropologie_, is based on the anthropometric inquiries of Mr.
+H. H. Risley made under instructions from the government of Bengal. The
+conclusions deduced by Dr. Topinard from the large mass of material
+brought together by Mr. Risley, and which relates to members of all
+the castes to be met with in Bengal, are of great interest. He finds
+that the populations are much mixed, but that they may be divided into
+three types, one tall and dolichocephalic, that of the Aryans; another
+short and brachycephalic, derived from northern Asiatics; and the third
+short and dolichocephalic, or that of the native blacks. India is a
+world by itself, and most of its inhabitants belong to races of which
+there is no specimen in Europe. Dr. Topinard naturally attaches more
+importance to physical than to ethnographical characters as evidence of
+anthropological descent, and he is justified by Mr. Risley’s researches,
+of which he speaks very highly; although he thinks they would have been
+more fruitful if the anthropometrical instructions prepared by the French
+Anthropologist had been more strictly adhered to. That they were not so
+is the more surprising as Mr. Risley’s work is dedicated to Dr. Topinard
+himself.
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+UEBER SITTLICHE DISPOSITIONEN. By _Dr. Anton Oelzelt-Newin_, Privatdocent
+an der Universität in Bern. Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky. 1892. Price Mk. 2
+70 Pf.
+
+The main idea of this book is to prove that there are certain innate
+dispositions forming the elements of morality. The elements of morality
+are according to Dr. Oelzelt-Newin the attitudes of fear, anger, love,
+sympathy, shame, and pride. Conscience is a complex which has developed
+from these six dispositions. Having stated sufficient evidences for the
+heredity of moral dispositions and illustrated the parallel phenomena of
+bodily states in their reference to moral alienation, the author treats
+the six elements of morality in single chapters, explaining their causes
+and the influence of conditions under which they develop either into
+virtues or crimes. The essay (92 pp.) is a contribution to that ethical
+determinism which regards evil as the necessary result of given factors.
+“Religious people should say: Not Only the stone which falls from the
+roof and kills a just man, but also the will of a criminal and the
+punishment of the judge are inscrutable ordinances of God. That alone is
+a true theodicy.” As an optimist the author trusts that the evil of the
+world will be conquered with legal means and enjoins priests to revise
+in this sense their creed, jurists their law, and all men their love of
+mankind.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE. And the Wonders of the World We live in. By Sir
+_John Lubbock_. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1892. 429 pages. Price $1.50.
+
+NATUR UND KUNST. Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kunst. By _Carus
+Sterne_. Berlin: Verein für deutsche Literatur. 1892.
+
+The first of these two books is a delightful compilation by Sir John
+Lubbock. It is another addition to that series of popular works which
+this well-known naturalist is now giving to English-speaking peoples. It
+makes no pretension of being scientific: it simply takes the world which
+science has revealed and shows us its wonders and its beauties. Yet it
+insinuates many a scientific fact and inculcates many a moral lesson.
+No one will regret the few hours that can be spent in its perusal, and
+the stimulus derived from it will heighten the pleasure which every
+religiously-minded heart takes in the contemplation of natural grandeur
+and truth. In the main, it is intended for unscientific readers. It
+requires hardly any preparatory knowledge to be understood; yet it
+sometimes touches on a truth that even great thinkers overlook. Thus, _à
+propos_ of the capacity for intact divisibility which some life-forms
+possess, Sir John remarks that these considerations introduce “much
+difficulty into our conception of the idea of an Individual.” “In fact,”
+he says, “the realisation of the idea of an individual gradually becomes
+more and more difficult, and the continuity of existence, even among
+the highest animals, gradually forces itself upon us. I believe that
+as we become more rational, as we realise more fully the conditions of
+existence, this consideration is likely to have important moral results.”
+The work is divided into the following chapters: “Animal Life,” “Plant
+Life;” “Woods and Fields,” “Mountains,” “Water,” “Rivers and Lakes,” “The
+Sea,” “The Starry Heavens.”
+
+The second of the two books that head this review is by Carus Sterne.
+Few men possess the wide technical knowledge and the same command of the
+historical literature of his subject, that this investigator and writer
+possesses. Carus Sterne unites with a rigorous scientific training the
+rare qualities of philosophical insight and sound erudition. He possesses
+the scientific facts on which to base valid judgments, and he deduces
+from these facts the inferences that affect the most important problems
+of life—its culture and morality. We have had occasion before, to refer
+to these phases of Carus Sterne’s activity as an author.
+
+In the present work the author of _Werden und Vergehen_ discusses the
+relations which obtain between nature and art. Here is not the place to
+give even a synopsis of the great wealth of material which this book of
+395 pages contains; we are allowed simply to hint at its purport and
+methods. Carus Sterne defines the artistic impulse in man to be a longing
+of the mind to rise above the ordinary routine of physical existence.
+It is a lifting ourselves out of our every-day life. This cannot be
+accomplished by the simple reproduction of the things of nature; such
+reproductions have not in themselves an elevating effect. Art is not
+imitative, art is creative. It uses color, form, space, merely as a means
+to give “local habitation” to an idea. The imitation of actually existing
+things is the beginning of art; but it is its lowest stage. Nature must
+be our guide, our norm, not our model. Here the middle road is taken
+between the old and the new idea of art. That was ultra-idealistic,
+this is ultra-realistic. The author then proceeds to discuss the notion
+of beauty in art and nature (Part I) and finally takes up generally
+(Part II) the subject of the artistic contemplation and reproduction of
+the world. All these topics, with their many subdivisions, are treated
+in Carus Sterne’s best and most fascinating style. The work is well
+illustrated, and all interested in the natural history of art will find
+in it a storehouse of valuable material.
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[58] Cf. Ward, _Encyclopædia Britannica_, Vol. XX, p. 44.
+
+
+
+
+PERIODICALS.
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. IV. No. 3.
+
+    UEBER DIE SOGENANNTE CONSCIENCE MUSCULAIRE (DUCHENNE). By _A.
+    Pick_.
+
+    EINE NEUE THEORIE DER LICHTEMPFINDUNGEN. By _Christine
+    Ladd-Franklin_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
+
+Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin (a contributor to this number of _The
+Monist_) is one of those few women who have actually won a well deserved
+reputation as a thinker and scientific worker. She is an American by
+birth and the wife of an American savant. It is pleasant to find her
+name in a German periodical among whose editorial writers are men so
+prominent as Ebbinghaus, König, Exner, Helmholtz, Hering, Kries, Lipps,
+G. E. Müller, Pelman, Preyer, and Stumpf. Mrs. Ladd criticises Helmholtz
+and Hering, and thinks that the theories of Donders (in Gräfe’s “Archiv,”
+1884) and Göller (in Du Bois-Reymond’s “Archiv,” 1888) have not received
+sufficient attention. In accord with their propositions, she sets forth
+an exceedingly simple hypothesis which attempts an explanation of the
+three main colors by atomic motions in the three different dimensions of
+space.
+
+
+PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 9 and 10.
+
+    UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG.
+    Psychologische Studie. (Concluded.) By _M. Offner_.
+
+    DER BEGRIFF DER VERSCHMELZUNG UND DAMIT ZUSAMMENHÄNGENDES IN
+    STUMPF’S “TONPSYCHOLOGIE,” BAND II. By _Th. Lipps_.
+
+    WERKE ZUR PHILOSOPHIE DER GESCHICHTE UND DES SOCIALEN LEBENS
+    (Third Article: _J. S. Mackenzie_, An Introduction to Social
+    Philosophy; _J. H. Ferguson_, The Philosophy of Civilisation;
+    _W. A. Macdonald_, Humanitism). By _F. Tönnies_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XXIX. No. 1 and 2.
+
+    DIE MODERNE ENERGETIK IN IHRER BEDEUTUNG FÜR DIE
+    ERKENNTNISSKRITIK. By _K. Lasswitz_.
+
+    DIE SITTLICHE FRAGE EINE SOCIALE FRAGE (I). By _F. Staudinger_.
+
+    RELIGIONSPHILOSOPHISCHE THESEN. By _E. von Hartmann_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 101. No. 1.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    PSYCHOLOGISCHE APHORISMEN. By _Otto Liebmann_.
+
+    UNTERHALB UND OBERHALB VON GUT UND BÖSE. By _Eduard von
+    Hartmann_.
+
+    JAHRESBERICHT ÜBER ERSCHEINUNGEN DER ANGLO-AMERIKANISCHEN
+    LITTERATUR AUS DER ZEIT VON 1890-1891. By _Friedrich Jodl_.
+
+    ZUR BEGRÜSSUNG DES ZWEITEN HUNDERTS DER BÄNDE DIESER
+    ZEITSCHRIFT. By _Prof. Dr. Rud. Seydel_.
+
+    RECENSIONEN. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)
+
+
+THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. October, 1892. Vol. V. No. 1.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    DISTURBANCE OF THE ATTENTION DURING SIMPLE MENTAL PROCESSES. By
+    _Edgar James Swift_.
+
+    PSEUDO-CHROMESTHESIA, OR THE ASSOCIATION OF COLORS WITH WORDS,
+    LETTERS, AND SOUNDS. By _William O. Krohn_, Ph. D.
+
+    REPORT ON AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS. (Part
+    II.) By _Benjamin Ives Gilman_.
+
+The present investigation made by Mr. Edgar James Swift shows that
+a disturbance of the attention through sight is more effective in
+lengthening the reaction time than when the disturbance comes through the
+sense of hearing; but whenever the reaction follows a slight sensation,
+the time of choice is less affected by disturbances of the attention
+than if the excitation is a sound. Dr. William O. Krohn concludes, after
+carefully studying several hundred cases of pseudo-chromesthesia, that a
+greater per cent. of them arise from some sort of cerebral work due to
+the close relation of the cortical centres. Mr. Gilman concludes from
+experiments made with various persons, that musical expressiveness has
+been overestimated, and that on the emotional theory of its nature the
+importance of the art has also been overestimated. (Worcester: J. H.
+Orpha.)
+
+
+MIND. New Series. No. 4. October, 1892.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    THE FIELD OF ÆSTHETICS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED, II. By
+    _Henry Rutgers Marshall_.
+
+    LOTZE’S ANTITHESIS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND THINGS, II. By _A.
+    Eastwood_.
+
+    THE STUDY OF CRIME. By _Rev. W. D. Morrison_.
+
+    ON THE PROPERTIES OF A ONE-DIMENSIONAL MANIFOLD. By _Benj. Ives
+    Gilman_.
+
+In his present article Mr. H. R. Marshall finds a basis for the
+differentiation of Æsthetics from Hedonics, in “pleasure permanency
+in revival” as belonging particularly to the former. Mr. Eastwood
+criticises Lotze’s antithesis between thoughts and things which is
+closely connected with his erroneous opinion that time is a property of
+things in themselves. The study of crime by Mr. W. D. Morrison discusses
+crime under the three heads of the movement of crime, its causes, and
+its repression, of which the last deals with the theory, the methods,
+and the efficacy of punishment. In his discussion of the properties of a
+one-dimensional manifold, examples of which are time, the straight line,
+quantity, intensity, number, and pitch, Mr. B. I. Gilman, who was a pupil
+of Mr. C. S. Peirce, seeks to give a formulation of one-dimensionality in
+which the general notion of relation and converse relation is substituted
+for that of greater and less difference. This number of _Mind_ contains a
+voluminous note on the blind deaf-mute child, Helen Keller, by Prof G. C.
+Robertson, the late editor, whose death is announced in the same number.
+(London: Williams & Norgate.)
+
+                                                                        Ω.
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. October, 1892. Vol. III. No. 1.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    THE NATIONAL TRAITS OF THE GERMANS AS SEEN IN THEIR RELIGION.
+    By _Prof. Otto Pfleiderer_, D. D., University of Berlin.
+
+    PHILANTHROPY AND MORALITY. By _Father Huntington_.
+
+    INTERNATIONAL QUARRELS AND THEIR SETTLEMENT. By _Leonard H.
+    West_, LL. D., London University.
+
+    1792.—YEAR 1. By _David G. Ritchie_, Jesus College. Oxford.
+
+    UTILITARIANISM. By _A. L. Hodder_.
+
+    BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+    (Philadelphia: _International Journal of Ethics_, 118 S.
+    Twelfth Street.)
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 5.
+
+    PSYCHOGENESIS. By _President David J. Hill_.
+
+    THE PROBLEM OF EPISTEMOLOGY. By _Professor Andrew Seth_.
+
+    THE ORIGIN OF PLEASURE AND PAIN, (II.) By _Dr. Herbert Nichols_.
+
+    DISCUSSIONS: REALITY AND “IDEALISM.” By _F. C. S. Schiller_.
+
+    REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
+
+    SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 6.
+
+    GREEN’S THEORY OF THE MORAL MOTIVE. By _Prof. John Dewey_.
+
+    THOUGHT BEFORE LANGUAGE. By _Prof. William James_.
+
+    PLEASURE-PAIN, AND SENSATION. By _Henry Rutgers Marshall_.
+
+    REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
+
+    SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
+
+    (Boston. New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)
+
+
+THE NEW WORLD. December, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    THE BRAHMO SOMAJ. By _Protap Chunder Mozoomdar_.
+
+    THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY. By _William M. Salter_.
+
+    PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY. By _Egbert C. Smyth_.
+
+    MICHAEL SERVETUS. By _Joseph Henry Allen_.
+
+    THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. By _G.
+    Santayana_.
+
+    THE CHURCH IN GERMANY AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION. By _John Graham
+    Brooks_.
+
+    A WORLD OUTSIDE OF SCIENCE. By _Thomas Wentworth Higginson_.
+
+    THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS. By _Albert Réville_.
+
+    THE MONISTIC THEORY OF THE SOUL. By _James T. Bixby_.
+
+The last article is a criticism to the point, discriminating and fair.
+The author takes special notice of Dr. Carus’s position, whose views are
+recapitulated with accuracy, but not accepted as convincing. (Boston:
+Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.)
+
+
+REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
+
+CONTENTS: September, 1892. No. 201.
+
+    LA PERSONNALITÉ DANS LES RÊVES. By _J.-.M. Guardia_.
+
+    HISTOIRE ET PHILOSOPHIE RELIGIEUSES. By _M. Vernes_.
+
+    SUR LA TERMINOLOGIE PHILOSOPHIQUE. By _Durand (de Gros)_.
+
+    COMPTES RENDUS ET NOTICES BIBLIOGRAPHIQUES.
+
+CONTENTS: October, 1892. No. 202.
+
+    DU TROUBLE DES FACULTÉS MUSICALES DANS L’APHASIE. By _Dr.
+    Brazier_.
+
+    LE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE LA VOLONTÉ. (Concluded.) By _A. Fouillée_.
+
+    LE MOUVEMENT PÉDAGOGIQUE. By _E. Blum_.
+
+    ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
+
+    REVUES DES PÉRIODIQUES ÉTRANGERS.
+
+CONTENTS: November, 1892. No. 203.
+
+    LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES. By _L. Marillier_.
+
+    DE L’UNITÉ DE LA SCIENCE: LES GRANDES SYNTHÈSES DU SAVOIR. By
+    _E. de Roberty_.
+
+    SUR LES DIVERSES FORMES DU CARACTÈRE. By _Th. Ribot_.
+
+    VARIÉTÉS.
+
+    ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
+
+    REVUE DES PÉRIODIQUES ÉTRANGERS. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
+
+
+PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH. Vol. V. No. 4.
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+    DIE NEUESTE PHASE DES SCHOPENHAUERIANISMUS. (Concluded.)
+    _Bäumker._
+
+    DIE SPECULATIVEN GRUNDLAGEN DER OPTISCHEN WELLENTHEORIE.
+    (Concluded.) _S. J. Linsmeier._
+
+    RELIGION UND ENTWICKELUNGSTHEORIE. (Concluded.) _Schanz._
+
+    DER SUBSTANZBEGRIFF BEI CARTESIUS IM ZUSAMMENHANG MIT DER
+    SCHOLASTISCHEN UND NEUEREN PHILOSOPHIE. (Continued.) _S. J.
+    (C.) Ludewig._
+
+    RECENSIONEN UND REFERATE. (Fulda: Fuldaer Actien-Druckerei.)
+
+
+
+
+                 VOL. III.      APRIL, 1893.      NO. 3.
+
+                                THE MONIST.
+
+
+
+
+RELIGION AND MODERN SCIENCE.
+
+
+I.
+
+The ancient conflict between religion and science is now, at the close
+of the nineteenth century, more animated than ever before. This conflict
+has formed the intellectual pivot of civilisation ever since Christianity
+first afforded the western peoples of Europe the inconsistent spectacle
+of a religion which made abundant use in its dogmatic constructions
+of the theories of contemporary science, and yet assumed a hostile
+attitude towards the fundamental principle of all science, the spirit
+of research and unbiassed judgment generally. Rightly has one of the
+acutest modern critics of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach,[59] maintained,
+that the Christian sophistic philosophy is the necessary outcome of this
+inconsistency, which proclaims as absolute truth a definite, historical
+revelation, such as is found in the Bible, and simply assigns to the
+reason the subordinate and improper office of harmonising and defending
+what is there laid down.
+
+There are, it is true, a great number of people, who are not disposed to
+see the bitterness of the conflict now raging. It has become customary
+for us to look upon the nineteenth century as an age of the comprehension
+of religion, and to distinguish it from the eighteenth century, which
+is regarded as a period of mere religious criticism. We boast of
+having rediscovered religion, and of having secured to it a permanent
+province in the dominion of the mind. But the facts of our public life
+stand in curious contradiction to these assertions. In all civilised
+nations, in literature, in parliamentary procedures, in all questions
+that relate to religious and moral life or to education, the attentive
+observer will find that a profound chasm divides humanity. Every one
+feels the desirableness of bridging over this chasm, that the members of
+society may be united in common labor; but again and again we are made
+to experience how irreconcilable the respective claims of the opposed
+parties are. He who has studied the bulls and encyclical letters of the
+last two popes, Pius IX. and Leo XIII., and the commentaries on these
+utterances in the _Civiltà Cattolica_, the official organ of the curia;
+he who is acquainted with the polemical diatribes of the French Catholics
+against the positivists and freethinkers, and against the school and
+church legislation of the third republic; he who has any knowledge of
+that mass of controversial literature, which the proclamation of the
+doctrine of papal infallibility in the year 1870 evoked; he who has
+followed the eventful and varied history of the so-called “Culturkampf”
+in the German Empire, from the era of the minister Falk, down to the
+recent bill for a new School-law in Prussia, defeated amidst the greatest
+excitement in all parts of Germany; he who is the least bit at home in
+the literary feuds which are being fought out in the domain of historical
+theology concerning the validity and credibility of the original sources
+of Christianity; he, finally, who will place the writings of Cardinal
+Newman or of the Jesuits Pesch and Cathrein by the side of those of
+Huxley and Spencer, by the side of those of Du Bois-Reymond, Strauss,
+and Dühring: he, I say, who has gone through with a critical spirit all
+that I have cited in the preceding sentences, will surely not be apt
+to contradict this assertion of mine that civilised humanity to-day is
+separated into two groups which no longer understand each other, which do
+not speak the same language, and which live in totally different worlds
+of thought and sentiment—at least so far as this one critical point is
+concerned of man’s relation to religion.
+
+    “_Wie Ja und Nein sind sie,_
+    _Wie Sturm und Regenbogen._”
+
+Have we, then, learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the days of
+rationalism? The tremendous labors which our own century has devoted
+to the investigation of religion in all its forms, to the unfolding of
+its connection with racial mind and sentiment, and of its relation to
+civilisation generally, and finally to the elucidation of the origin and
+development of the great forms of religion: has all this had no other
+result than that we, after a century of the most laborious research,
+again find ourselves in the same attitude of unintelligent hostility
+towards religion and Christianity in which the eighteenth century
+revelled, and out of which we have only fought our way by the united
+efforts of a host of profoundly enlightened minds?
+
+This argument has been advanced in opposition to the leaders of the
+rationalistic movement and to the work of the eighteenth century in
+varying forms, by the party which seeks to ally the science of the
+present and the religion of the past. It is seriously said and enjoined
+that only they who are far behind the science of the times and hold aloof
+from the true spirit of the age can still assume the repugnant attitude
+toward religion which was characteristic of the mind of the eighteenth
+century.
+
+It is high time to point out the crude confusion of ideas which lies at
+the basis of this argument. It confounds the historical understanding
+of a thing with the philosophical approval of it. But these are two
+totally distinct things. We understand a phenomenon historically, when
+we are clear in our minds concerning the external conditions and habits
+of thought of humanity from which it sprung; when its main-springs of
+action and its purposes, as well as the effects which have proceeded
+from it, are distinctly traceable. The more closely our mental pictures
+of these things correspond to the facts as they actually were at the
+origin, and the more they conduct us from the mere surface of phenomena
+into the secrets of their psychological and sociological connection, and
+teach us to understand these things as products of mind and of society,
+the higher will our historical knowledge of them be rated. In this sense
+the knowledge which the eighteenth century had of religious phenomena
+was undoubtedly very imperfect. True, even here great advances beyond
+the age which preceded, are noticeable. People had ceased to regard
+the origin of the Jewish and Christian religion as a supernatural event
+and as the immediate work of God; all religions were placed upon the
+same footing, as species of the same kind; and efforts were made to
+discover their common characteristics and the law of their origin. But
+the people of that period were not yet able to arrive at the true essence
+of religious ideas and sentiments. They were hardly in a position to
+describe them properly, let alone to explain them. Of the hypotheses
+devised to throw some light into the darkness that hung over the
+beginnings of religions, not one proved itself competent to supply what
+was hoped for. All that they could derive from these fictions was that
+notable caricature of religion which their age had directly before its
+eyes, and to free themselves from which they strained every nerve. With
+the keen vision of hate they uncovered all the infirmities of religion,
+all the terrors and iniquities which have followed in its train, all
+the injurious effects to civilisation which have proceeded from it.
+They created a negative picture of religion, which has lost nothing of
+its partial historical truth by the fact that many of its features are
+farther withdrawn from our immediate experience than they were from that
+of the times in question.
+
+But it was the nineteenth century that first worked out the true
+psychology of religious man, and again came into possession of that
+spirit of congeniality which is absolutely necessary to our entering into
+the mental life of far-distant times. To the men of the rationalistic
+age the history of religion was simply the history of the obscuration
+of the pure, natural religion, which was supposed to be constituted of
+a rational idea of God and a system of humane ethics, and which was
+indistinctly conceived at times as the logical, and at times as the
+historical, antecedent of the concrete religions. The latter appeared as
+the corruption of the natural and simple order of things—a corruption
+produced by superstition, by the wily exploitation of human credulity and
+human needs, by the scheming machinations of the founders of religions
+and of priests, by human delight in the marvellous, by the falsification
+of the natural moral sentiments, and by the stirring into life of
+fanatical passions. We know to-day that this so-called natural religion
+is nothing more than a product of late abstraction and reflection; that
+the motives and selfish interests above cited have been abundantly
+at work in religious history, but are nevertheless unable to explain
+the internal motive force and tremendous vitality of these spiritual
+products. We know to-day that religions spring with the same necessity
+and in conformity with similar laws from the depths of the human mind
+as language and art, and that they form an integral constituent part of
+the structure of civilisation and an important weapon of humanity in
+the struggle for existence. In symbolical form they embody the highest
+treasures and highest ideals of national existence; in its gods humanity
+beholds the imaginative perfection and explanation of its view of the
+world; and in its religious practices, in its worship, in prayer, it
+strives to realise the wishes and aspirations which seem to lie beyond
+the reach of its powers.
+
+Many a riddle still remains to be solved, as is natural in a domain
+that extends into the most hidden recesses of the human soul, and whose
+obscurity is augmented by the fact that in the majority of cases the
+most important and significant elements must be collected with infinite
+pains from the rubbish of fantastic traditions. But upon the whole the
+active labors of a century which calls itself with pride “the historical
+century,” have borne their fruits. With respect to the intrinsic
+character and the significance of religion for civilisation, there is now
+every reason why a unity of opinion should prevail among all who take
+their stand on the common ground of modern scientific research, whether
+they be friends or opponents of religion.
+
+But how does a knowledge of what religion has been in the past affect
+our estimate of it in the present? Do we approve of an institution or
+phenomenon, because we understand how it was once possible, nay, must
+have existed, and what it signified? We understand to-day the Roman
+law, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the scholastic philosophy, feudalism, and
+absolute monarchy, thoroughly; we know the conditions which gave rise
+to them, the necessity of their appearance, and the measure of their
+performances; but does it occur to us, for these reasons, to perpetuate
+and make them immortal because they had once an historical significance?
+What an institution in its essence is, what in past times it has
+accomplished, is an inquiry that must be conducted with quite different
+means from that whether it is applicable to a definite present set of
+relations and necessities. The historian can render this task more easy
+by teaching us to understand the general laws and necessities of national
+life from the analogies of the past; but as a prophet he will always
+be one that looks backwards, and it is ever to be feared that he, too,
+will see the present in the light of the past. For to him alone does the
+past lift its obscuring veil, who, forgetful of self and unmindful of
+sacrifices, can listen to the voices of remote times and peoples, who
+with a mind of Protean cast has the power to transform his intellectual
+being into that to which, solely by description, he seeks to give new
+life and form. The past becomes a part of him; he loves it, he admires
+it. And from the reanimation of the past in historical pictures to the
+attempt of a renewal of it in life is but a single step.
+
+Innumerable are those who have succumbed to this temptation. The entire
+religious tendency of the nineteenth century exhibits this process on a
+grand scale. This tendency is based on profound antiquarian studies of
+the past—on that newly awakened historical interest, which aims not only
+to criticise but to understand religion and ecclesiastical institutions.
+Much that in the previous century seemed dead or destined to perish,
+had been restored to life by it. The whole historical structure of the
+Christian religion, which at the close of the age of rationalism only
+existed, it would seem, as an artificially preserved ruin, has received,
+through the instrumentality of these methods of thought, new supports,
+and has again been made habitable for the human mind. Unmindful of the
+complaints of churchmen, the future historian of civilisation will have
+to characterise the second half of the nineteenth century as a period
+of religious renaissance. And it is no accident, but a symptom of deep
+import, that this century has completed almost all the great cathedrals
+which were left unfinished and in partial ruins by the middle ages,
+and placed them in their colossal grandeur before the world as lasting
+monuments of its habits and tendencies of thought.
+
+Yet the spirit of science has also not been inactive. Political progress
+has freed it from the despotic police supervision which even in the
+eighteenth century heavily oppressed it. In principle at least, freedom
+of thought and inquiry are to-day acknowledged by all governments, with
+the single exception of the Roman curia, although in practice there are
+by no means few efforts made, by influencing its representatives, to have
+that proclaimed which it is desired should be proclaimed. Infinitely
+great has the number of workers grown, the instruments of inquiry, the
+confidence of the human mind in itself, and our power generally. And if
+formerly people could conceive of no other science than such as stood in
+the service of the church, to-day science claims it most emphatically
+and confidently as its privilege and duty to search and test the logical
+truth of the most sacred traditions, and thus to base the thought of
+future generations, not on the naïve faith of their fathers, but on the
+demonstrable truths of actual present knowledge.
+
+
+II.
+
+Between the two groups of modern humanity, of which the one seeks to
+retain the Christian religion in its historical form as the precious,
+heritage of the past, and the other to supplant it by a new Idealism
+formed in harmony with the spirit of science, a third class stands, which
+plays the part of a mediator. This class concedes that the traditional
+forms of religion are in great part unadapted to the modern mind, and
+that historical Christianity is in need of improvement, but contends
+that religion is an ineradicable constituent of all higher civilisation,
+and must remain so, and, particularly, that Christianity is the absolute
+religion, that is to say, that in Christianity as rightly understood and
+naturally developed all the necessary elements of the true religion of
+the future are contained.
+
+I should like, in the following pages, to subject the contentions of this
+mediatory group to a critical examination, and to discuss the question
+whether it is at all possible for one who resolutely takes his stand on
+the ground of modern scientific thought, logically to have religion in
+the historical sense at all.
+
+In effecting a mediation between the religious and scientific views
+of the world,—views which appear to be separated from each other by
+a profound intellectual abyss,—two ways may, generally speaking, be
+pursued. Both have been frequently trodden since the days of rationalism.
+I shall discuss each separately.
+
+The attempt may be made to resume, in a form more adapted to modern
+times, the work of the reformers of the sixteenth century; to go back
+even more thoroughly than they did to the original and simplest forms
+of Christianity, to remove _in toto_ the superstructure which has been
+reared upon it in the course of time, and to exhibit to humanity “the
+pure doctrine of Christ” as the source from which to-day, as a thousand
+years ago, true comfort may proceed, as the simplest, purest, and most
+exalted expression of the divine and human that has ever yet been
+discovered. Many of the most erudite workers in the field of critical
+theology which this century can show have placed themselves in the
+service of this idea, which is preached with particular enthusiasm by the
+so-called “free-religious” and Unitarian confessions, and which at times
+has also exhibited a noble and conciliatory activity in the homiletical
+work of some mild-minded and liberal clergymen in the evangelical
+churches. But our special inquiry here must be concerning the logical
+and scientific foundation of this modernised primitive Christianity, and
+on this point it must be frankly stated that the more faithfully such a
+Christianity reflects the biblical character, the remoter it is from our
+modern thought, and the more it is dominated by modern ways of thinking,
+the more unhistorical and hence the more unchristian it becomes.
+
+The “pure doctrine of Christ,” the genuine, primitive form of
+Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism. What we actually
+possess, in the form of historical documents, is that conception of the
+doctrines and life of Christ which was put in writing several generations
+after his death, and which, from amid a much greater number of
+contemporaneous attempts, met by preference with the approbation of the
+church. It is a hopeless task to attempt from these late records, which
+betray the most various intellectual influences, to derive the authentic
+doctrines of the oldest form of Christianity. No method, subjective
+prepossession only, can here render a verdict. The things that appear
+especially consistent and homogeneous to individual theologians and
+critics are stamped as the genuine utterances of the Master. As every
+time has done, so ours also constructs its picture of Christ to conform
+with its wishes and wants.
+
+But granting even that there is nothing objectionable in this, and that
+this procedure is perfectly justified, a number of difficulties still
+stand in the way of this movement which have stamped the procedure of
+even the most ingenious of its representatives as the outcome of pure
+subjective caprice. All the written sources which we possess of the
+life and teachings of Christ contain much that is in the highest degree
+repugnant to the modern mind. I refer particularly to the miracles. The
+difficulties which they present may be disposed of in various ways; as,
+to give an example, by the method of the early rationalistic thinkers,
+who accepted the miracles as facts, but sought to give them a rational
+explanation, or by that of Strauss, who held that they were the mythical
+and poetical raiment of religious ideas and sentiments. Yet no art of
+interpretation will banish from the world that fact which the poet
+expressed in the words:
+
+    “_Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind._”
+
+The fact that the entire cast of thought and sentiment of early
+Christianity is saturated with the belief in the marvellous, and with
+the expectations, nay, with the actual need of miracles, and that this
+is not an adscititious ornament which can be doffed at pleasure, like a
+dress which we have outgrown, but is of the very essence of Christianity.
+Here is rooted that childlike and simple belief in the limitless and
+God-coercing power of prayer, for which no natural laws nor force of
+necessity exists, which is omnipotent as the Godhead itself, and as
+all-powerful as desire. Here is rooted that ardent conviction of the near
+collapse of the entire world, of the coming kingdom of perfection which
+shall proceed, not from deeds and thought, but from faith and grace, and
+shall crown all human desires with glory. And intimately connected with
+all this stands the idea, visible in the background of all the moral
+prescripts of the gospels, and painted in the strongest colors, of a
+system of punishments and rewards in the world beyond; which makes of a
+God of love, a pitiless, infuriate God of vengeance.
+
+These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes of thought of
+the synoptic writers that it is impossible to separate them therefrom
+without doing violence to the internal connection of their doctrines.
+They who seek after a more spiritual conception may, it is true, find
+it in the gospel of John. But this book is so completely dominated by
+the metaphysical-religious speculation of the second century, and by the
+effort to bring the history of the life and doctrines of the Nazarene in
+the service of the Logos idea, that the modern mind can only with great
+difficulty find a common ground of understanding with it.
+
+The task of the modern reformers is, for these reasons, a very difficult
+one. They cannot but concede that Christianity, even in its purely
+evangelical form, contains much that is foreign to us, and that the
+elements of which it is composed must in part be excised and in part
+improved by criticism and interpretation.
+
+But the more the critical sense which is brought to bear upon this
+task is developed in the spirit of modern scientific thought, the more
+will historical Christianity shrink to the form of a mere colorless
+abstraction, and ultimately nothing remains of its exuberant yet
+visionary mental world but the picture of a philanthropic life joined
+to a strongly developed consciousness of God, which proclaims a
+popular morality in commandments and parables. But even this latter is
+inevitably exposed to the same fate as the other ideas. It is dominated
+throughout by the extremest notions of rewards and punishments, which
+the expectation of the doom of the world places in the very immediate
+future. It is impossible to take the system as a whole, and it must be
+made the subject of violent interpretation to acquire any fitness for
+the needs of modern life. Its principles are systematically turned and
+twisted till they have acquired in some direction practical utility. And
+who at this day can forget, that this system of morality, wherever and
+whenever attempts have been made literally and faithfully to imitate it
+in practical life, has led only to wretched caricatures? Moreover, it is
+again and again freely remodelled in the spirit of modern ethics, its
+offensive elements charitably cloaked, its useful ones developed to
+the utmost, and finally here too a complete set of wholly modern ideas
+consecrated by the borrowed authority of a venerable antiquity.
+
+And therefore I repeat my contention, that the modern reformation, this
+modern, pure, and scriptural Christianity, will, the honester it is,
+all the more surely lead its adherents away from Scripture and from
+Christianity and ultimately bring them to the adoption of a popularly
+expounded, but philosophically established, ethical system.
+
+I shall now take up the second of the two methods above mentioned.
+That which we have just considered was known and affected even by the
+eighteenth century. The discovery of the second is a merit of the present
+time. The honor belongs in a pre-eminent degree to the speculative
+philosophy of Germany, and to the intimate relations with theology which
+this philosophy, especially in the school of Hegel and Schleiermacher,
+entered into in the first half of the century. (Kant’s philosophy was not
+put to similar use until later.) All these movements, whose rich literary
+ramifications and development may be followed to the present day in Otto
+Pfleiderer’s excellent and erudite work, “The History of Protestant
+Theology in Germany Since Kant,”[60] have also begun in recent times,
+through Green, Caird, A. Seth, J. Martineau, R. Flint, and F. Robertson,
+to exert an influence on Anglo-American intellectual life.
+
+The common fundamental feature of this second movement is, that it
+proposes to accept as pure Christianity, not only the most ancient forms
+of Christian doctrine accessible to us, but also the entire system
+of dogmatic thoughts which in the course of the centuries primitive
+Christianity has produced. Christianity, these men say, has historically
+existed and acted in these maturer notions. It is not permissible
+arbitrarily to separate them from it, and to reverse by any authoritative
+edicts the real historical development. On the contrary, we now may and
+must continue the process which, by the tenor of dogmatic history, is the
+process which has continued for centuries, and give to the dogmas the
+form which best accords with modern spiritual needs. To-day as in the
+days of incipient Christianity, we see by the side of the naïve literal
+belief, which takes no offence at incomprehensible things if they only
+suit the needs of its heart, a gnosis arise which strives to reconcile
+faith and knowledge, religion and intellectual culture; a gnosis which to
+the unbelieving sceptic quotes the words of the poet:
+
+    “_Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;_
+    _Dein Sinn ist zu; dein Herz ist todt!_
+    _Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen_
+    _Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenroth!_”
+
+It is perhaps even more difficult to give a succinct and comprehensive
+notion of the ideas of this speculative theology, than of the results of
+the New Testament exegesis of which we spoke above. All gradations are
+here represented, from tender, conservative regard for the traditional
+beliefs of the sects and the needs of the pious heart to the boldest
+speculative interpretations and critical restrictions of dogma, which
+utterly discard the historical form and hold fast only to a central
+germinal truth. The present inquiry will restrict itself to those
+representatives of this gnosis, who as a matter of principle grant
+the greatest field of action to the rational development of dogma,
+and represent its philosophical elaboration in its finest and most
+complicated form. I shall attempt to signalise the ideas which may to-day
+be designated as the most spiritualised expression of the Christian view
+of the world.
+
+And first let us hear a greater mind speak. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s essays
+on the nature of religion and Christianity the following sentences occur:
+
+“The Christian religion is the revealed inwardness, the objectively
+expressed self of man; the contents of his highest aspirations; the
+essence of man purified and freed from the limitations of individuality;
+yet all subjectivised, that is intuited, known, and worshipped as a
+separate, independent entity, wholly distinct from himself. Religion
+is essentially dramatical. God himself is a dramatical creation, that
+is to say, a personal being opposed to man. He who takes from religion
+this idea, takes from it the gist of its being, and holds but the _caput
+mortuum_ in his hands.”
+
+These sentences of Feuerbach express with the greatest generality and
+precision the innermost nature of the Christian view of the world. They
+characterise excellently the point that cannot be given up without
+destroying the religious view as such. What I refer to is dualism, the
+dualism of the divine and the human, of the world beyond, and the world
+that is, of holiness and sin; dualism conceived not merely as a mode of
+view and of conceptual distinction, as a working contrariety in things
+that by their nature are one, but as a metaphysical difference, an actual
+contraposition of two worlds, of two kingdoms of existence, which are
+totally separate, no matter how extensive the relations of the one to
+the other may be. Only on such a supposition is that possible which
+Feuerbach, with inimitable aptness, called “the dramatic element” of
+religion. The history of humanity, the history of its religious life
+particularly, is no monologue of humanity with itself into which life
+and advancement enter solely through the multitude of the ideas created
+by individuals within the race itself. It is an action or process in a
+higher sense, an interactivity between two worlds, in which, it is true,
+humanity, to a certain extent, shapes its own fortunes and destiny, but
+at the same time is also constantly exposed to the interferences of a
+power which stands beyond and above it and to which it has to accommodate
+itself. And whatever artifices and care many of the representatives of
+the modern gnosis may employ to conceal this fundamental assumption, and
+to substitute for it the point of view of the immanence of this power
+in the world, still any radical breach with it is impossible without
+endangering the very foundations of the religious sense of humanity
+itself.
+
+The indispensability of this dualistic opposition and separation is
+equally well exhibited whether we take as our starting-point the
+existence of the world at large or the individual consciousness of man.
+The religious mode of view knows of no other way of asserting the rights
+and activity of the mind in the All than by making all existence assume
+a personal life in an infinite, self-conscious, and ethically perfect
+being. The emotions and experiences of one’s heart, its vacillations
+between humility and exaltation, remorse at the consciousness of one’s
+own imperfections, the inspired flight of the soul to higher realms of
+existence, appear as the intercourse of man with some extraneous power,
+allied to man and yet above him, in which the sum of all excellence to
+which thought and experience have ever led man, has its eternal source.
+
+These ideas constitute the point of view which is decisive of the history
+of humanity, particularly in what concerns religion. The history of
+religion is, in accordance with these ideas, conceived as a continuous
+self-revelation of God in the world of man. True, this view seems to be
+contradicted by the fact that the self-revelation of this infinitely good
+power is effected in the case of by far the greater part of mankind in a
+very insufficient manner—in the form, namely, of crude and superstitious
+notions which stand in need of constant purification by reason. But the
+explanation of this fact is sought in the idea of a divine pedagogical
+training of the human race, and in the theory that religion is not an
+immediate self-revelation of the absolute, but passes through the medium
+of the human mind and consequently must be conditioned by its character.
+
+Christianity, now, especially appears as the highest form of this
+self-revelation of God in humanity, that is to say as the absolute
+religion, which, in its historical forms, it is true, is as little
+free from adscititious ornaments and transient obscurations as other
+religions, yet in its essence can be as little improved as it can be
+discarded. This innermost essence of Christianity the majority of the
+representatives of this modern gnosis declare to be the conviction that
+all men are from the beginning children of God. In this idea two things
+are contained: submission to the will of God who is conceived as a
+kind parent and who in pity and love does everything for the best; and
+the imitation in our own thought and conduct of the ethical perfection
+conceived incarnate in God. The entering of man into this relation is
+designated the kingdom of God—a notion which constitutes the ideal goal
+of history. The condition of mind on which the kingdom of God rests is
+prefigured in a typical manner in the founder of the Christian religion.
+His person and his life are a guarantee of the possibility of this ideal,
+and exhibit at the same time the means of its accomplishment: namely, the
+helping love of God, which has infused into this one individual the whole
+plenitude of its being, so far as this is at all possible with human
+capacities, that humanity may have in it a direct living picture of the
+highest fulfilment of its religious and moral destiny. The historical
+Christ is the ideal of humanity, supported and ensouled by the spirit of
+God.
+
+The modern gnosis here goes back to the Paulinian interpretation of the
+Christ-idea. The consideration of the speculative difficulties of the
+idea of the Trinity is thus rendered superfluous for it. This notion
+is treated by the majority of its representatives simply as a dogmatic
+antiquity; its place is taken by the modern ideas of a distinction
+between the person of Jesus and the principle or spirit of Christianity,
+which is synonymous with the contrast of the idea and its revelation,
+the eternal and the temporal, of the inward essence and its historical
+realisation. That it employs the notions of idea, principle, and essence
+wholly in a Platonic sense, as the highest metaphysical realities, is
+self-evident.
+
+More distant still is the attitude which this speculative theology
+assumes towards another idea which proceeded from the Rabbinical school
+of thought of Paul: the notion of salvation or redemption in its
+connection with the expiatory death of Christ. From these conceptions
+of punitive suffering, of a vicarious atonement of God in his own
+person—conceptions of such juristical refinement as to be wholly
+unacceptable to modern modes of thought—the modern gnosis has upon the
+whole resolutely turned away and taken refuge in that more spiritual
+and more profound idea which in early Christian times the author of the
+gospel of St. John promulgated. The death of Christ is redemptive only in
+the sense in which Christ’s total history is redemptive, as the direct
+and prefigurative incarnation of the true religious relation between God
+and man. This is, it is true, applicable in a quite special sense to the
+Death; for it was by this that the eternal truth was manifested, that not
+only does all salvation accrue to man from the sacrifice of his own self
+in duteous and patient love, but that all the life of God is an emanation
+of this self-surrendering excellence, of this bliss of self-sacrifice.
+Still, there is one thing that is common to all the representatives of
+this movement as distinguished from the former, and that is this: they
+do not content themselves with picturing the activity of Jesus Christ
+in general outlines solely as one which is blessed and significant by
+example and doctrine for humanity, but they assume a continuous and
+active presence of the Christian principle in humanity, by means of
+which the moral discord in individuals is overcome, and in the personal
+spiritual life of individuals divine and human nature are united. This
+is the most speculative interpretation we have of the old dogmatic
+notion of redemption, which from its original character as a single
+isolated phenomenon of history has here become the constant activity of a
+Christian principle, and an ever-living precedent of Christian life.
+
+It would be a prolix and wearisome task to go through in this way the
+whole dogmatism of this speculative theology. The fundamental ideas which
+we have discussed will suffice to show the manner in which, on the one
+hand, it spiritualised the allegorical notions of popular Christianity,
+but on the other left untouched the gist of the religious view and the
+dramatical or dualistic opposition of the divine and human. The notions
+of grace and sanctification, the notion of the church as a living,
+organised instrument of salvation, spring directly and logically from
+these fundamental ideas.
+
+In the province of ethics this movement has a much easier task than the
+churches based on the New Testament. As it seeks to establish, not a
+primitive Christianity, but a modernised Christianity developed in the
+spirit of recent times, there is no necessity of its being incommoded
+by the ethical crudenesses of early Christianity, but it is in the
+same position to work these crudenesses over critically as it did the
+asperities of the old dogmas. It can assimilate most of what it needs
+from modern philosophical ethics, and content itself with giving to what
+it has thus borrowed a metaphysically religious background derived from
+dogmatic traditions.
+
+That this modern gnosis is in a constant state of vacillation with
+respect to the practical things of life, is a necessary consequence of
+its fundamental assumptions and of its position towards the doctrines
+of the church. Its foremost representatives acknowledge without any
+reserve that the true source from which religious emotions and sentiments
+flow is the symbolic or imaginative faculty of man. The grandly simple
+pictures in which the ancient Christian faith found satisfaction are
+now in the course of time inevitably disintegrated by the critical
+reason. The speculative theology itself proclaims that its vocation is
+one of coöperation towards this end. But it maintains nevertheless that
+the fruits of this work, the speculative interpretation of the dogmas,
+their exaltation into the sphere of the Idea, are fit only for initiated
+minds, and are caviare for the general. The general, the people, want
+and will use religion in the form which its fancy has created, and it
+cannot be revealed to it in any other. Progressive in its theories,
+this gnosis is in its ecclesiastical practice thoroughly conservative.
+It thinks two kinds of thought, and speaks two kinds of languages,
+according as it finds itself in the pulpit or in the professorial chair.
+And it is in just this procedure that it assumes a position which it is
+very difficult to attack. He, who working for a sound and progressive
+popular enlightenment on the ground of a unitary view of the world,
+opposes the further use of the antiquated and effete allegories of the
+old religions, is told that he is behind the times, and that religion,
+nurtured by the spirit of modern science, has become something different
+from what it formerly was. In very strict ecclesiastical quarters this
+gnosis is looked at askance, and accused of insincerity, nay, of secret
+alliance with unbelief; but the movement never allowed itself to be led
+astray by these accusations, and has never failed to assert its right
+of coöperation in the common work of the Christian church. For though
+it pretends to be in the hands of the thinking theologian a means of
+bringing into harmony the faith which he must confess and the thought
+which he cannot abandon, it yet admits, that with the majority of mankind
+the allegory will always remain an essential element of religion, and
+that therefore the task of scientific theology can never be to destroy
+these vessels of religion, but only to exercise a watchful care, that
+with the form the spirit also may not be lost.
+
+
+III.
+
+The question now arises,—and this brings us back to the considerations
+of the first part of this essay,—Does this rationalised Christianity of
+to-day really meet the demands of science, and if it does not, is it in
+the power of the modern scientific world-conception to furnish from its
+own resources some substitute for the religious views of the past?
+
+My answer to this question will be short and concise; for the existence
+of _The Monist_, the fundamental idea of its management, and the
+total character of the efforts which it has hitherto made, speak with
+sufficient emphasis. And we may, therefore, with the greatest respect
+for the scientific zeal and the personal ability of many of the
+representatives of this mediatory theology, say, without further ado:
+This rationalised Christianity of yours also is myth and symbol; it still
+adheres to that “dramatic” division of the world which our imaginations
+produced, and to the metaphysical dualism of God and man; it cannot
+lift itself to a rigorous conception of the All in One, for which God
+is in the same sense a simple function of human thought as thought is a
+function of the human organism. The God on whom all depends in religion,
+the God whose name is “Father,” the God of love and goodness, the God
+from whom all great thoughts and all grand resolves spring, the God who
+sanctifies us and lifts us above the earth—to displace this God from
+the world in which he has no place, into the inward being of humanity
+seems at this day so strange, nay, inconceivable, only because we have
+accustomed ourselves (and down to the times of Mill and Feuerbach, even
+strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza fell victims to this illusion) to
+mingle together in the idea of God two wholly distinct ideas—the ideas,
+namely, of nature and of an ethical ideal. To preserve this latter
+inviolate, and to secure it from all encroachments of human caprice,
+one thing alone seemed to the naïve dramatic modes of thought of early
+times a competent safeguard: the ideal must in some locality be real; the
+highest to which human thought and aspiration can exalt itself must be
+sought and must exist in some superhuman reality. And what reality could
+be better adapted to this than one on which even nature was conceived to
+be dependent? The entire history of the development of the idea of God in
+the Græco-Roman and Hebrew worlds, the confluence of these two streams
+of thought in Christian speculation, exhibit in the clearest possible
+manner these motives, which here I can only lightly touch upon.
+
+But this combination of the law of nature and the law of ethics in the
+idea of God, although solving some of the difficulties of humanity, has
+plunged it into incomparably greater ones. Through all the centuries
+of Christian thought a succession of desperate attempts may be traced
+to establish a theodicy, that is to say, attempts to demonstrate the
+existence in nature and in history of a God which harmonises with the
+ethical ideal. Even Kant could undertake to demonstrate the “necessary
+failure of all attempts at a theodicy,” and whoever might still have
+entertained any doubt as to the correctness of this demonstration, such a
+one must surely have been convinced of it by the scientific development
+of the past century. That which was indissolubly welded together in
+the Christian idea of God is to-day disintegrated into its component
+elements. The Lord _above_ nature, the Spirit _behind_ nature, have been
+rendered inconceivable by the modern notions of the conformity to law of
+all natural occurrences and of the unity of all existence. The spirit
+immanent in the All no thinker will deny, for this spirit manifests
+itself in an indisputable manner in the fact that this All is a cosmos,
+not a chaos, that not only the caprice of chance but also the laws of
+necessity rule in it, and that the personal self-conscious mind springs
+from its midst. But from this recognition of mind in the All, there is no
+bridge that leads to the old idea of God. We cannot worship the All as a
+moral ideal. We involve ourselves in absurd complications when we attempt
+to derive the actions of natural events and their conformity to law from
+ethical categories, and it is no less a desperate undertaking to imagine
+that we can draw impulses for our moral thought and conduct from nature.
+The adaptation of means to ends, the teleology, that rules in the All, is
+veiled for us in the deepest obscurity. All that we can unravel of it has
+no resemblance to that which, according to our notions, is ethical:
+
+    “_Denn unfühlend ist die Natur_,”
+
+she does not know what love or mercy is; she knows only the omnipotent
+power of universal laws; she knows only the rights of the whole, to
+which she sacrifices with unconcern the individual; she revels in the
+double pleasure of unceasing creation and unceasing destruction; she arms
+unpityingly the strong against the weak; in crises of annihilation she
+restores the disturbed equilibrium of things; but the palm of peace no
+one has ever seen in her hand. And we? We stand amazed at her might and
+greatness, at the plentitude of her powers of creation, at her myriad
+play of forces, at the inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which
+she binds being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
+the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and the same!
+But our prototype, our God, she can never be. To him we must look up;
+but on nature, despite her might, despite her stupendous grandeur, we
+look down. She did not whisper in our ears that in us which is best and
+highest. That did not come to us from heaven; _we ourselves_ won it
+by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed discipline. It is
+not _of_ nature; it is _above_ nature. Through _us_ something has come
+into the world that before us did not exist—something that the most
+exuberant creative magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical dreams, could
+never replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his weaker
+fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine, but thy will be
+done; I will give up my desires that thou also mayst be glad”; the day
+on which man first lifted up his head and said, “Let us make the world
+_good_ in the likeness of the picture that has become living in us, just
+as it should be”; this is the great and sanctified day in the history of
+our race on earth, the Christmas day on which God was born. But not as
+the religious fancy has expressed it, the day on which God became man,
+but the day on which man began to become God, that is the day on which he
+began to feel spiritual powers in his breast that transcended his animal
+impulses—powers to which the majority of humanity was still as remote as
+heaven from earth.
+
+This strict anthropological conception of God as the ideal which is
+always newly creating itself in the struggles of humanity, which is no
+Being but a Becoming, solves the innumerable difficulties which the idea
+of God has hitherto placed in the way of rigorous scientific knowledge
+and the construction of a unitary conception of the world. This God has
+nothing to do with the All. We need not seek him in the All or behind the
+All, and need not fear that any progress of our knowledge will make his
+existence a matter of doubt with us. Concerning the real validity of this
+idea we need not bother ourselves with more or less weak and insufficient
+demonstrations: the whole history of humanity is evidence of it if we
+but know how to rightly interpret it, and the stumbling block of the old
+theological idea of God has become the corner-stone upon which the new
+scientific conception is built.
+
+Nature and human history the work of an omnipotent and all-kind being
+that is mediately and immediately active in all events, nay, sacrificed
+himself in his own person that he might realise in this world his
+purposes! Compare the principle, the active force of this world-drama,
+pictured by the religious fancy as the highest power, the highest wisdom,
+and all-merciful love, with the real spectacle of the world! Is there
+anywhere a more pronounced contradiction, an obscurer riddle, a more
+inconceivable contrast between purpose and accomplishment? This world
+of cruelty and woe, in which one creature feeds on the heart-blood of
+another, in which here and there from seas of mud and dirt a form of
+light springs up, in which every nobler production must be bought with
+torrents of blood and tears; this revelation and self-manifestation of
+God in humanity, which everywhere appears joined to definite historical
+suppositions, which lacks all the conditions of true universality and of
+indisputable evidence, so that instead of forming a means of union it
+has become the source of dreadful contentions; this work of salvation
+and sanctification which is so restricted in its effects that “the
+kingdom of God” is still a dreamy vision of humanity, so restricted
+that we still see the majority of men, despite the most extraordinary
+supernatural dispositions, still remain far behind the simple ideals
+of natural ethical commandments, that hate and dissension, cruelty and
+selfishness, perform their unhallowed work—is this the work of infinite
+power and infinite wisdom? What claims theodicy makes on human thought!
+And how different the picture is, the moment we abandon the false
+theocentric point of view and assume the anthropocentric! Instead of a
+belief which all facts contradict—an idea which elucidates them all.
+No one can say how we are to interpret facts as the work of a holy and
+absolutely perfect being; but it can be shown, step by step, how in this,
+our human world, more perfect things spring from imperfect things, moral
+and mental laws from the blind play of natural forces and powers, the
+conscious energy of will from blind and unreasonable impulse, law and
+love of man from the selfishness and warring of all against all, and the
+notion of the unity of the race from infinite disruption and disunion.
+We must not allow ourselves to be led astray or discouraged here by the
+changing undulations and tremendous crises of this battle for the good.
+The ideal springs out of a dark abyss. The roots of our being are deep
+laid in nature, yet we struggle to exalt ourselves above it. No wonder,
+therefore, that time and again it draws us back.
+
+The greatest and sublimest spectacle! A tragical one, one filled with
+struggle and suffering, and yet one infinitely full of hope. For it shows
+us the inexhaustible grandeur of the human mind; it shows us the good,
+the ideal, as a tremendous real power, a power eternally becoming, surely
+forming itself out of an infinitude of individual deeds, a power fully
+incarnate in no one person, yet active and living in humanity. Not a
+tangible activity, and yet one of the realest of facts. A supersensuous,
+nay, if you will, a supernatural realm of thought; not the faded
+reflection or shadow of a grandeur and power beyond us, but the fruit
+of the noblest activities and powers of this given, existing world,
+antagonised in life, but grand and powerful in thought; imperfect even in
+its boldest flights, but bearing within it the germ of greater things to
+come.
+
+Here is the true point of union for Christian dogma and science. Here is
+the God in which science also may, nay, must, believe. Not humanity in
+its empirical reality, but the ideal world developed within the human
+realm of things—the spirit of humanity. This is the only true object
+of worship. Before it we are humiliated, and by it we feel ourselves
+exalted. From it we receive all the good that life bestows upon us; it
+gives us light and peace and lucid thought. And what higher, nobler thing
+can a life produce than the feeling that it has not been unworthy of this
+great ancestry, that it has helped to keep alive this holy fire, that it
+has helped, perhaps, to fan by its own life this living flame to greater
+heights?
+
+Here is the true source of the ideas of accountability and of salvation.
+We are not responsible to a being outside and above us, but to our own
+selves and to humanity, from which we have received the best that it had
+to give, and for which we must return what we ourselves have produced.
+This consciousness of being thrown utterly on the resources of one’s own
+self, on one’s own powers, was first created in the human mind by science
+and the technical arts, (as that most venerable and most sacred of all
+myths, the legend of Prometheus, so profoundly indicates,) and this
+consciousness will, by the progress of knowledge and power, be made more
+and more the dominating one of humanity. This is not a consciousness of
+omnipotence; it does not exclude the subjection of man to the inexorable
+laws of the universe; but it demands the enlistment of all the powers
+of the race: for nature does not give us more than we wrest from her by
+arduous toil.
+
+And as humanity is accountable only to itself, so do the means of its
+salvation lie only in itself. Not in any one individual, but in the
+spirit in it which ever works onward and upward. Yet this spirit is
+not an unpersonal existence; it must be possessed again and ever again
+by living men. And no one can serve humanity or augment its spiritual
+treasures or reincarnate in himself its holiest possessions without first
+having and feeling within himself the blessing of what he has done.
+And thus the profoundest significance of human life on earth may be
+formulated and embraced in that saying of the poet which was throughout
+conceived in the spirit of our times, and would have been wholly
+incomprehensible to the mind of those who gave us our faith—in the words:
+
+    “_Erlösung dem Erlöser._”
+
+                                                                  F. JODL.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[59] _Wesen des Christenthums._ First edition. 1841. Pp. 288-289.
+
+[60] Translation published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1891.
+
+
+
+
+THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE.
+
+
+Are religion and science indeed as contrary as they are often represented
+to be, and is the proposition to reconcile them a hopeless and futile
+undertaking? Professor Jodl, in his article “Religion and Modern
+Science,” (pp. 329-351 of this number,) says:
+
+    “That civilised humanity to-day is separated into two groups
+    which no longer understand each other, which do not speak the
+    same language, and which live in totally different worlds of
+    thought and sentiment.”
+
+There are those who cling to the old religions and those who supplant it
+by a new idealism. Between both, he adds:
+
+    “A third class stands which plays the part of a mediator.”
+
+Professor Jodl does not approve of reconciling the historical forms of
+religion with science. He rightly says:
+
+    “The ‘pure doctrine of Christ,’ the genuine, primitive form of
+    Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism.”
+
+We heartily agree with him in his remarks concerning the part which the
+miraculous and supernatural play in the Gospels:
+
+    “These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes
+    of thought of the synoptic writers that it is impossible to
+    separate them therefrom without doing violence to the internal
+    connection of their doctrines.”
+
+We also concur upon the whole with Professor Jodl in his criticism of
+the methods of Speculative Theology. No compromising with traditional
+errors, no covering or extenuating of the results of historical criticism
+is allowable merely for the love of tradition and for the preservation of
+errors that have become dear to a large number of people.
+
+We do not condemn the work of any mediator; on the contrary, we rather
+encourage it. We observe with pleasure in the latest phases of the
+religious evolution of Speculative Theology the prevalence of a more
+modern spirit, and we follow with a keen interest also the progress of
+biblical critique in its truly valuable labors: but we do not expect that
+either the one or the other will accomplish any regeneration of religion.
+
+Professor Jodl knows very well that the editors of _The Monist_ and
+_The Open Court_ have not undertaken any work of compromising between
+the errors of the past and the ideal of the future. Our idea of a
+reconciliation between religion and science is of a different nature. We
+are not blind to the errors of the old religions, and we do not mean to
+gloss them over, or to make old-fashioned views acceptable by presenting
+them in a new garment. We do not even stop to bury the dead, for we
+have better things to do than to trouble with problems that have been
+definitely settled. We keep our hands to the plough to accomplish the
+work needed to-day.
+
+While we are not blind to the errors of the old religions, we recognise
+at the same time that they contain in the language of parables some great
+truths which will remain forever. These truths constitute the backbone of
+religion, and we regard it as a very important duty of ours to preserve
+them. These truths must be preserved, not because they were believed in
+by our fathers, nor from any respect for tradition, nor from any regard
+for our sentiments, but simply because they are truths, because they can
+be proved to be true according to the methods of scientific inquiry.
+
+What is religion? Religion consists of all those ideas which regulate
+our conduct. In the savage these ideas are very crude and superstitious,
+and often self-contradictory. The higher a man rises, the clearer, the
+more scientific and consistent do these ideas become, until they develop
+into a systematic world-conception. Every scientific idea that changes
+our world-conception will change also our religion and with it our rules
+of conduct. Thus, for example, the idea of evolution has become to us an
+eminently religious idea.
+
+In order to indicate that the criterion of truth for religion is the very
+same thing as the criterion of truth for science, we have proposed to
+call the religion we advocate, “The Religion of Science.” (For details
+see the editorial of Vol. VII, No. 1, of _The Open Court_.)
+
+Our procedure appears to many as an annihilation of religion in favor of
+science. But it is not. And why not?
+
+We have learned many truths first from religion, long before science
+could ever think of proving them. In several respects science took the
+lead, and religion remained at a long distance behind, awkwardly, very
+slowly, and unwillingly limping onward on the road of progress. Instances
+are, the acceptance of the Copernican system and of the evolution theory.
+But in other respects religion took the lead, and science was unable to
+follow its ingenious flight. As instances of this we cite such moral
+truths as the love of enemies, which were not preached by scientists
+as scientific truths, but by religious teachers, by Confucius, Buddha,
+and Christ. There are scientists even to-day who regard what we would
+call “moral truths” as maxims that are contrary to the established views
+of science. Professor Huxley, for instance, is very emphatic in his
+declaration that the facts of nature do not teach morality.[61]
+
+This leads us to a point in which we disagree with Professor Jodl. He
+speaks of the illusion “of mingling together in the idea of God two
+wholly distinct ideas—the ideas namely of nature and of an ethical
+ideal”—an illusion to which “even strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza
+fell victims.”
+
+Professor Jodl’s position reminds us of John Stuart Mill’s “Essay on
+Nature,” in which he exposes the old doctrine _naturam sequi_ in all its
+absurd meanings and carefully avoids a discussion of the only rational
+conception of the precept. Thus his tirades appear most convincing, and
+to be sure they are quite correct—so far as they go. Says Mill:
+
+    “In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or
+    imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every-day
+    performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by
+    human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives....
+
+    “Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them
+    to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes
+    them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them
+    with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick
+    or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other
+    hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a
+    Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed.”
+
+Mill must indeed have felt the need of beginning these sentences with the
+words “In sober truth”; otherwise he might be suspected of humor.
+
+Similarly comical is Mill’s proposition to regard every voluntary action
+of man as a direct infringement upon nature. Man’s reason in that case
+would be the most unnatural phenomenon in the world, and the term
+“nature” would be confined to the lowest realms of existence exclusively.
+If the usage of reason were indeed an infringement upon nature, man’s
+appearance upon earth would mark the beginning of a supernatural realm;
+and Professor Jodl seems to accept this consequence when he says:
+
+    “It is not _of_ nature, it is _above_ nature.”
+
+If man’s rationality and his ethics were not born of nature, if their
+conditions were not founded in the very existence of nature, if they were
+not the natural product of evolution, then indeed I see no escape from a
+dualistic world-conception, in which a supernatural God introduces the
+spark of divinity which appears in the soul of man from spheres beyond.
+
+We have devoted to these vagaries of John Stuart Mill an elaborate
+discussion in another place and do not feel the need of repeating our
+arguments in this connection.[62]
+
+We agree with Professor Jodl that no rationalising of old dogmas will
+help us in the establishment of “a new idealism, formed in harmony
+with the spirit of science.” We must build our religion anew (as every
+generation had to build its religion anew) out of the best materials
+which are furnished by the maturest and most reliable knowledge of
+to-day. Says Professor Jodl:
+
+    “Through _us_ something has come into the world that before
+    us did not exist—something that the most exuberant creative
+    magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical dreams, could never
+    replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his
+    weaker fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine,
+    but thy will be done; I will give up my desires that thou also
+    mayst be glad”; the day upon which man first lifted up his head
+    and said, “Let us make the world _good_ in the likeness of the
+    picture that has become living in us, just as it should be”;
+    this is the great and sanctified day in the history of our race
+    on earth, the Christmas day on which God was born.”
+
+Certainly the origin of man on earth, and again the evolution of the
+moral man, is something quite new, which before did not exist. But did
+humanity originate out of nothing, as sometimes the imaginations of
+a poet are supposed to be created, or is there a prototype in whose
+image man has been created? Man’s reason, his ethics, and his humanity
+are something that did not exist before, but there is a feature in
+existence which makes it possible that rational and moral beings develop.
+Should there be sentient beings on other planets, and we have little
+reason to doubt it, we can be sure that they also will develop rational
+minds, and that they also will learn, perhaps as we did, through many
+bitter experiences, the same truths which constitute our main maxims of
+morality,[63] including such precepts as the love of enemies. And why are
+we sure that on other planets not only reason, but also the fundamental
+rules of ethics will be the same as with us here on earth? Simply because
+we know that there is a certain feature in reality which creates rational
+beings and moral beings as naturally as it creates rocks and seas on the
+surface of planets. Man’s reason and also man’s morality are not original
+inventions of his, but the result of many experiences which he had to
+learn. And the world in which he lives is such that he can acquire reason
+and morality, and if a being should acquire a wrong kind of reason or a
+wrong kind of morality, it will by and by be blotted out of existence.
+Accordingly there is a prototype of reason and of morality, and this
+prototype of the humanity of man is exactly that which in the language of
+the old religions has received the name “God.”
+
+We must make a distinction between ideals and dreams. Those creations
+of our fancy which are woven without any regard to reality are dreams.
+They have no value beyond whiling away a leisure hour or pleasing our
+imagination. But those creations of our mind which construct realisable
+formations such as machines or clocks or higher conditions of human
+society, are not mere dreams, they are ideals. What, then, is the
+difference between a dream and an ideal? A dream is a useless ebullition
+of an idle brain composed of ideas to which there is no correspondent
+reality; but an ideal is a potent factor in the living presence to shape
+the future: it is a combination of ideas which are correct descriptions
+of actual realities. The moral aspirations of mankind are not empty
+dreams, they are true and veritable ideals. There are certain qualities
+in nature which make their realisation possible and these qualities
+constitute the Divinity of nature.
+
+Professor Jodl speaks of the origin of morality as of the birth of God on
+earth. Truly that is the meaning of Christianity. But this birth of God
+into the world of human evolution as “the Son of Man” is possible only
+because of the existence of the God in nature whom Christian mythology so
+beautifully calls God the Father. The appearance of the Son of Man upon
+earth, the birth of morality, is a revelation of the divinity of nature.
+
+True enough, as Professor Jodl says, that we ourselves won the best and
+highest we have by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed
+discipline. As Prometheus says:
+
+    “_Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,_
+    _Heilig glühend Herz!_”
+
+That, too, is part of the divinity of nature, that every creature has
+to work out its very being itself, and that man must search for the way
+of salvation with great anxiety, under bitter tribulations and through
+extreme afflictions. But he cannot invent a new way of salvation, he has
+to find it, and there is but one that is the right one. The nature of
+morality is such as it is, and no other morality could be invented to
+replace it. And this feature of existence which makes morality quite a
+determined thing is a real presence in the world, it is an actual quality
+of the universe.
+
+Some of our liberal friends, foremost among them Professor Haeckel, deny
+the existence of a personal God and then proceed to declare that the God
+of science is nothing but matter and energy. We agree with Professor
+Haeckel in his rejection of anthropotheism; God is no supernatural being
+nor is he a huge world-ego. But we cannot accept his view of God as being
+only matter and energy. The idea of God is and always has been a moral
+idea. Thus we have come to regard all those features of nature as divine
+which condition the origin and existence of morality and we define God
+as the authority of moral conduct. This authority is not a person, not
+a sentient being, let alone a sentimental philanthropist; but it is,
+nevertheless, a reality, and, indeed, a stern reality.
+
+Such is the God of science. God is that quality of existence through
+which we originated as feeling, thinking, and aspiring beings. He is the
+prototype of the human soul, and the condition under which develop man’s
+reason and morality. Obedience to him is indispensable for a continued
+existence, for further progress and a higher evolution of the human
+soul. That these features of reality can by a great number of keen and
+fearless modern thinkers be supposed to be a non-entity is difficult
+to understand. This negation of the reality of qualities of existence
+which are not individual things but intrinsically inherent in all the
+individual things, it appears to us, is an old heirloom of nominalism.
+The nominalistic philosophy represented by Roscellinus was suppressed
+at the council at Soissons 1092, only to rise more powerfully in the
+fourteenth century in William of Occam, and finally to exterminate
+realism with all its rubbish of errors together with the truth contained
+in these errors. Kant marks in many respects the culmination of the
+victorious movement of nominalism. With all the benefits modern thought
+derived from the philosophical work of nominalism, a reaction is needed
+against its purely negative spirit. There is a truth in the old realism
+which cannot be neglected with impunity.[64]
+
+God (viz., the name of God) is, as Kant said, a noumenon, a thing of
+thought, an abstraction. God is not a thing, a concrete object, or an
+individual person. All the views of God which regard him as an individual
+being of some kind, or as a person only of infinite dimensions, are,
+closely considered, pagan notions which belittle God. But the name of
+God as a noumenon, a thought, an abstract idea, has a meaning. Abstract
+ideas are not nonentities, they represent some real features, some actual
+qualities, or properties, or relations; otherwise they would not be
+ideas, but unmeaning sounds.
+
+Some of our abstract ideas are of a very delicate fibre, so that the
+coarse mental vision of the average Philistine is unable to see them in
+their reality and potency. But it so happens that exactly they are of a
+more important, more powerful, and inevitable presence than the simple
+generalisations of things that visibly and corporeally surround us.
+This, their peculiar nature, makes such ideas mysterious to those who
+instinctively feel their reality without being able to point it out and
+understand it. And the most subtle, imponderous, and sublimated of all
+ideas is the idea of God.
+
+We have defined God as the ultimate authority of conduct, as the
+condition of our existence as rational and moral beings, as the
+all-power that enforces obedience, etc.; but we cannot in any one of our
+definitions exhaust the significance of the idea. We would by no means
+exclude from the idea of God anything without which reality would cease
+to be real. The qualities of matter and energy constitute that element
+in the God-idea which justify the old religions in speaking of him as
+omnipotent and everlasting. Thus they ought not to be excluded. But these
+qualities alone are insufficient to characterise his being. The sum-total
+of matter and energy as such and as such alone does not constitute any
+moral authority. Nature in her immeasurable greatness and oppressive
+vastness affects us with awe; but, after all, we look down upon her
+massive sublimity. Man is more than the biggest heap of crude matter and
+unintelligently operating energy. Says Professor Jodl:
+
+    “We stand amazed at her might and greatness, at the plentitude
+    of her powers of creation, at her myriad play of forces, at the
+    inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which she binds
+    being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
+    the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and
+    the same! But our prototype, our God, she can never be.”
+
+This grandeur of nature is part of her divinity, but it alone does not
+constitute the character of God. Yet, observe that throughout nature
+there is an imponderable quality present which makes every atom move in
+a definite way, so that the whirl of gaseous masses, apparently a chaos,
+will be recognised as a cosmic whole developing in a certain way and
+describable in what is generally called natural laws. This subtle quality
+is the condition of the regularities which are found in all the infinite
+varieties and innumerable particularities, and all these regularities
+conceived in their systematic unity are called the order of the universe.
+
+Man exists as a thinking being only because the immeasurable universe
+of which he is a part possesses this quality of order, and his reason
+is closely considered only a copy of it. Man’s reason was shaped into
+the image of the cosmic order, and suppose—a supposition which is very
+difficult to make and regarded by many as impossible or inconceivable—yet
+suppose that the world-order were radically different from what it
+actually is, man’s reason would accordingly be different too. Further,
+suppose that the whole frame and fundamental interrelations of the
+particles of reality were different from what they are, would not
+correspondingly the basic rules of conduct be changed too?
+
+The author of this article, in the eyes of the so-called orthodox
+Christian, is most certainly an atheist. And if theism means the belief
+in a personal or extramundane God he is an atheist indeed. If there is
+any opprobrium in the name atheism we are willing to accept it; and
+certainly, we do not reject the label of atheism in order to escape any
+odium attached to that name. We do reject atheism simply because we
+see a great and potent truth in the idea of God which is but too often
+disregarded.
+
+With Professor Haeckel and Professor Jodl we reject the conception of
+an anthropomorphic Deity. The anthropomorphic idol is doomed before the
+tribunal of science. But we see a deeper meaning in the idea of God which
+has formed through millenniums the very centre of the greatest religions
+on earth. Science has to recognise the reality of an all-presence in
+existence which is analogous to that which in a religious language is
+called God.
+
+Considering the fact that humanity owes many great truths to religion,
+let us not be hasty in condemning the religions of the past as pure
+superstition. There are valuable seeds in the chaff. If we discard the
+wheat together with the tares, we shall have to rediscover them, for it
+is little probable that humanity can for any length of time be satisfied
+with beautiful phrases or live in its moral aspirations in a realm of
+mere dreams.
+
+                                                                   EDITOR.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[61] For a discussion of this point see _Fundamental Problems_, pp.
+219-226.
+
+[62] See the article in Nos. 239, 241, and 242 of _The Open Court: Nature
+and Morality_. An Examination of the Ethical Views of John Stuart Mill.
+I. The Meaning of Basing Ethics Upon Nature. II. The Ethics Taught by
+Nature. III. Intelligent Action and Moral Action. IV. The Anthropomorphic
+Standpoint of Mill.
+
+[63] I purposely do not say _all_ maxims of conduct, because we can very
+well imagine that different conditions may produce some very important
+variations in the rules of conduct; but the main foundation of morality
+would be the same.
+
+[64] There are two men at present who boldly fly the flag of the old
+realism again, both having our full sympathy in their aspirations,
+although we cannot agree with many of their teachings. The one is Mr.
+Charles S. Peirce, the other Dr. Francis E. Abbot.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUPERSTITION OF NECESSITY.[65]
+
+
+Lest my title give such offense as to prejudice unduly my contention, I
+may say that I use the term in the way indicated by its etymology: as
+a standing-still on the part of thought; a clinging to old ideas after
+those ideas have lost their use, and hence, like all superstitions,
+have become obstructions. For I shall try to show that the doctrine
+of necessity is a survival; that it holds over from an earlier and
+undeveloped period of knowledge; that as a means of getting out of and
+beyond that stage it had a certain value, but, having done its work,
+loses its significance. Halting judgment may, indeed, at one time have
+helped itself out of the slough of uncertainty, vagueness, and inadequacy
+on to ground of more solid and complete fact, by the use of necessity as
+a crutch; once upon the ground, the crutch makes progress slower and,
+preventing the full exercise of the natural means of locomotion, tends
+to paralyse science. The former support has become a burden, almost an
+intolerable one.
+
+The beginning of wisdom in the matter of necessity is, I conceive, in
+realising that it is a term which has bearing or relevancy only with
+reference to the development of judgment, not with reference to objective
+things or events. I do not mean by this that necessity refers to the
+compelling force with which we are driven to make a given affirmation:
+I mean that it refers to the content of that affirmation, expressing
+the degree of coherence between its constituent factors. When we say
+something or other _must_ be so and so, the “must” does not indicate
+anything in the nature of the fact itself, but a trait in our _judgment_
+of that fact; it indicates the degree with which we have succeeded in
+making a whole out of the various elements which have to be taken into
+account in forming the judgment. More specifically, it indicates a
+half-way stage. At one extreme we have two separate judgments, which, so
+far as consciousness is concerned, have nothing to do with each other;
+and at the other extreme we have one judgment into which the contents
+of the two former judgments have been so thoroughly organised as to
+lose all semblance of separateness. Necessity, as the middle term, is
+the midwife which, from the dying isolation of judgments, delivers the
+unified judgment just coming into life—it being understood that the
+separateness of the original judgments is not as yet quite negated,
+nor the unity of the coming judgment quite attained. The judgment of
+necessity, in other words, is exactly and solely the transition in our
+knowledge from unconnected judgments to a more comprehensive synthesis.
+Its value is just the value of this transition; as negating the old
+partial and isolated judgments—in its backward look—necessity has
+meaning; in its forward look—with reference to the resulting completely
+organised subject-matter—it is itself as false as the isolated judgments
+which it replaces. Its value is in what it rids judgment of. When it has
+succeeded, its value is nil. Like any go-between, its service consists in
+rendering itself uncalled for.
+
+All science can ultimately do is to report or describe, to completely
+state, the reality. So far as we reach this standpoint regarding any fact
+or group of facts, we do not say that the fact _must_ be such and such,
+but simply that it _is_ such and such. There is no necessity attaching
+to the fact either as whole or as parts. _Qua_ whole, the fact simply is
+what it is; while the parts, instead of being necessitated either by one
+another or by the whole, are the analysed factors constituting, in their
+complete circuit, the whole. In stating the whole, we, as of course,
+state all that enters into it; if we speak of the various elements as
+_making_ the whole, it is only in the sense of making it _up_, not
+of causing it. The fallacy of the necessitarian theory consists in
+transforming the determinate in the sense of the wholly defined, into the
+determined in the sense of something externally made to be what it is.
+
+The whole, although first in the order of reality, is last in the order
+of knowledge. The complete statement of the whole is the goal, not the
+beginning of wisdom. We begin, therefore, with fragments, which are
+taken for wholes; and it is only by piecing together these fragments,
+and by the transformation of them involved in this combination, that we
+arrive at the real fact. There comes a stage at which the recognition
+of the unity begins to dawn upon us, and yet, the tradition of the many
+distinct wholes survives; judgment has to combine these two contradictory
+conceptions; it does so by the theory that the dawning unity is an effect
+necessarily produced by the interaction of the former wholes. Only as the
+consciousness of the unity grows still more is it seen that instead of
+a group of independent facts, held together by “necessary” ties, there
+is one reality, of which we have been apprehending various fragments in
+succession and attributing to them a spurious wholeness and independence.
+We learn (but only at the end) that instead of discovering and then
+connecting together a number of separate realities, we have been engaged
+in the progressive definition of one fact.
+
+There are certain points upon which there is now _practical_ agreement
+among all schools. What one school has got at by a logical analysis of
+science, another school has arrived at by the road of a psychological
+analysis of experience. What one school calls the unity of thought
+and reality, another school calls the relativity of knowledge. The
+metaphysical interpretation further given to these respective statements
+may be quite different, but, so far as they go, they come to the same
+thing: that objects, _as known_, are not independent of the process
+of knowing, but are the content of our judgments. One school, indeed,
+may conceive of judgment as a mere associative or habitual grouping of
+sensations, the other as the correlative diversification and synthesis of
+the self; but the practical outcome, that the “object” (anyway as known)
+is a form of judgment, is the same. This point being held in common,
+both schools must agree that _the progress of judgment is equivalent
+to a change in the value of objects_—that objects as they are for us,
+as known, change with the development of our judgments. If this be so,
+truth, however it be metaphysically defined, must attach to late rather
+than to early judgments.
+
+I am fortunate in being able to quote from authors, who may be taken as
+typical of the two schools. Says Professor Caird in his article upon
+“Metaphysic,” (lately reprinted, “Essays in Philosophy and Literature,”):
+
+    “Our first consciousness of things is not an immovable
+    foundation upon which science may build, but rather a
+    hypothetical and self-contradictory starting-point of
+    investigation, which becomes changed and transformed as we
+    advance.” (“Essays,” Vol. II, p. 398.)
+
+On the other hand, Mr. Venn writes (in the first chapter of his
+“Empirical Logic”):
+
+    “Select what object we please—the most apparently simple in
+    itself, and the most definitely parted off from others that we
+    can discover—yet we shall find ourselves constrained to admit
+    that a considerable mental process has been passed through
+    before that object could be recognised as being an object, that
+    is, as possessing some degree of unity and as requiring to be
+    distinguished from other such unities.”
+
+He goes on to illustrate by such an apparently fixed and given object
+as the sun, pointing out how its unity as a persistent thing involves
+a continued synthesis of elements very diverse in time and space, and
+an analysis, a selection, from other elements in very close physical
+juxtaposition. He goes on to raise the question whether a dog, for
+example, may be said to “see” a rainbow at all, because of the complex
+analysis and synthesis involved in such an object. The “mental whole” (to
+use Mr. Venn’s words, the “ideal unity” as others might term it) is so
+extensive and intricate that
+
+    “One might almost as reasonably expect the dog to ‘see’ the
+    progress of democracy in the place where he lives, of which
+    course of events the ultimate sensible constituents are
+    accessible to his observation precisely as they are to ours.”
+
+As Mr. Venn is not discussing just the same point which I have raised,
+he does not refer to the partial and tentative character of our first
+judgments—our first objects. It is clear enough, however, that there
+will be all degrees between total failure to analyse and combine (as,
+say, in the case of the dog and rainbow) and fairly adequate grouping.
+The difference between the savage whose synthesis is so limited in scope
+that he sets up a new sun every day and the scientific man whose object
+is a unity comprehending differences through thousands of years of time
+and interactions going on through millions of miles of space is a case
+in point. The distinction between the respective objects is not simply
+a superimposition of new qualities upon an old object, that old object
+remaining the same; it is not getting new objects; it is a continual
+qualitative reconstruction of the object itself. This fact, which is the
+matter under consideration, is well stated by Mr. Venn, when he goes on
+to say:
+
+    “The act of predication, in its two-fold aspect of affirmation
+    and denial, really is a process by which we are not only
+    enabled to add to our information _about_ objects, _but is also
+    the process by the continued performance of which the objects
+    had been originally acquired, or rather produced_” (italics are
+    mine).
+
+This statement cannot be admitted at all without recognising that the
+first judgments do not make the object once for all, but that the
+continued process of judging is a continued process of “producing” the
+object.
+
+Of course the confused and hypothetical character of our first objects
+does not force itself upon us when we are still engaged in constructing
+them. On the contrary, it is only when the original subject-matter has
+been overloaded with various and opposing predicates that we think of
+doubting the correctness of our first judgments, of putting our first
+objects under suspicion. At the start, these objects assert themselves
+as the baldest and solidest of hard facts. The dogmatic and naïve
+quality of the original judgment is in exact proportion to its crudeness
+and inadequacy. The objects which are the content of these judgments
+thus come to be identified with reality _par excellence_; they are
+_facts_, however doubtful everything else. They hang on obstinately.
+New judgments, instead of being regarded as better definitions of
+the actual fact and hence as displacing the prior object, are tacked
+on to the old as best they may be. Unless the contradiction is too
+flagrant, the new predicates are set side by side with the old as simply
+additional information; they do not react into the former qualities. If
+the contradiction is too obvious to be overlooked the new predicate
+is used, if possible, to constitute another object, independent of the
+former. So the savage, having to deal with the apparently incompatible
+predicates of light and darkness, makes two objects; two suns, for two
+successive days. Once the Ptolemaic conception is well rooted, cycles and
+epicycles, almost without end, are superadded, rather than reconstruct
+the original object. Here, then, is our starting point: when qualities
+arise so incompatible with the object already formed that they cannot be
+referred to that object, it is easier to form a new object on their basis
+than it is to doubt the correctness of the old, involving as that does
+the surrender of the _object_ (the fact, seemingly) and the formation of
+another object.
+
+It is easier, I say, for there is no doubt that the reluctance of the
+mind to give up an object once made lies deep in its economies. I shall
+have occasion hereafter to point out the teleological character of the
+notions of necessity and chance, but I wish here to call attention to the
+fact that the forming of a number of distinct objects has its origin in
+practical needs of our nature. The analysis and synthesis which is first
+made is that of most practical importance; what is abstracted from the
+complex net-work of reality is some net outcome, some result which is of
+value for life. As Venn says:
+
+    “What the savage mostly wants to do is to produce something
+    or to avert something, not to account for a thing which has
+    already happened. What interests him is to know how to kill
+    somebody, not to know how somebody has been killed.” (P. 62 of
+    “Empirical Logic.”)
+
+And again:
+
+    “What not only the savage, but also the practical man mostly
+    wants, is a _general_ result, say the death of his enemy. It
+    does not matter whether the symptoms, i. e., the qualifying
+    circumstances, are those attendant on poison, or a blow from a
+    club, or on incantation, provided the death is brought about.
+    But they do desire _certainty_ in respect of this general
+    result.” (P. 64.)
+
+Now it is this “general result,” the net outcome for practical purposes,
+which is _the_ fact, _the_ object at first. Anything else is useless
+subtlety. That the man is dead—that is the fact; anything further is
+at most external circumstances which happen to accompany the fact.
+That the death is only a bare fraction of a fact; that the attendant
+“circumstances” are as much constituent factors of the real fact as
+the mere “death” itself (probably more so from the scientific point of
+view)—all this is foreign to conception. We pluck the fruit, and that
+fruit is the fact. Only when practical experience forces upon us the
+recognition that we cannot get the fruit without heeding certain other
+“conditions” do we consent to return upon our assumed object, put it
+under suspicion and question whether it is really what we took it to be.
+It is, we may presume, the savage who in order to get his living, has
+to regulate his conduct for long periods, through changes of seasons,
+in some continuous mode, who first makes the synthesis of one sun going
+through a recurring cycle of changes—the year.
+
+As time goes on, the series of independent and isolated objects passes
+through a gradual change. Just as the recognition of incompatible
+qualities has led to setting up of separate things, so the growing
+recognition of similar qualities in these disparate objects begins to
+pull them together again. Some relation between the two objects is
+perceived; it is seen that neither object is just what it is in its
+isolation, but owes some of its meaning to the other objects. While in
+reality, (as I hope later to point out,) this “relationship” and mutual
+dependence means membership in a common whole, contribution to one and
+the same activity, a midway stage intervenes before this one fact,
+including as parts of itself the hitherto separate objects, comes to
+consciousness. The tradition of isolation is too strong to give way at
+the first suggestion of community. This passage-way from isolation to
+unity, denying the former but not admitting the latter, is necessity or
+determinism. The wall of partition between the two separate “objects”
+cannot be broken at one attack; they have to be worn away by the
+attrition arising from their slow movement into one another. It is the
+“necessary” influence which one exerts upon the other that finally rubs
+away the separateness and leaves them revealed as elements of one unified
+whole. This done, the determining influence has gone too.
+
+The process may be symbolised as follows: _M_ is the object, the original
+synthesis of the elements seen to be of practical importance; _a_, _b_,
+_c_, etc., to _h_ are predicates of constantly growing incompatibility.
+When the quality _i_ is discovered, it is so manifestly incompatible
+with _a_ that all attempt to refer it to the same subject _M_ is
+resisted. Two alternatives are now logically open. The subject-matter
+_M_, as the synthesis of the qualities _a_-_h_, may be taken up; it may
+be asked whether the object is really _M_ with these qualities; whether
+it is not rather Σ, having instead of the predicates _a_, _b_, etc., the
+qualities ρα, ρβ, with which the new quality _i_ is quite compatible. But
+this process goes against the practical grain of our knowledge; it means
+not only that we do not know what we thought we knew; it means that we
+did not _do_ what we thought we did. Such unsettling of action is hardly
+to be borne. It is easier to erect a new object _N_, to which the more
+incompatible predicates are referred. Finally, it is discovered that
+both _M_ and _N_ have the same predicates _r_ and _s_; that in virtue
+of this community of qualities there is a certain like element even in
+the qualities previously considered disparate. This mutual attraction
+continues until it becomes so marked a feature of the case that there
+is no alternative but to suppose that the _r_ and _s_ of one produces
+these qualities in the other, and thereby influences all the qualities
+of the other. This drawing together continues until we have the one
+reconstructed object Σ, with the traits ρα, ρβρ, etc. It is found that
+there is one somewhat comprehensive synthesis which includes within
+itself the several separate objects so far produced; and it is found that
+this inclusion in the larger whole reacts into the meaning of the several
+constituting parts—as parts of one whole, they lose traits which they
+seemed to possess in their isolation, and gain new traits, because of
+their membership in the same whole.
+
+We have now to consider, more in detail, how the intermediate idea of
+necessity grows up and how it gives away upon the discovery of the one
+inclusive whole. Let us continue the illustration of the killing. The
+“general result,” the death of the hated enemy, is at first the fact; all
+else is mere accidental circumstance. Indeed, the other circumstances
+at first are hardly that; they do not attract attention, having no
+importance. Not only the savage, but also the common-sense man of
+to-day, I conceive, would say that any attempt to extend the definition
+of the “fact” beyond the mere occurrence of the death is metaphysical
+refinement; that the _fact_ is the killing, the death, and that that
+“fact” remains quite the same, however it is brought about. What has
+been done, in other words, is to abstract part of the real fact, part of
+_this_ death, and set up the trait or universal thus abstracted as itself
+_fact_, and not only as fact, but as _the_ fact, _par excellence_, with
+reference to which all the factors which constitute the reality, the
+concrete fact, of _this_ death, are circumstantial and “accidental.”[66]
+
+A fragment of the whole reality, of the actual fact individualised and
+specified with all kind of minute detail, having been thus hypostatised
+into an object, the idea of necessity is in fair way to arise. These
+deaths in general do not occur. Although the mere death of the man, his
+removal from the face of the earth, is the _fact_, none the less all
+_actual_ deaths have a certain amount of detail in them. The savage has
+to hit his enemy with a club or spear, or perform a magic incantation,
+before he can attain that all-important end of getting rid of him.
+Moreover, a man with a coat of armor on will not die just the same way
+as the man who is defenseless. These circumstances have to be taken into
+account. Now, if the “fact” had not been so rigidly identified with
+the bare practical outcome, the removal of the hated one, a coherent
+interpretation of the need for these further incidents would be open. It
+could be admitted that the original death was a highly complex affair,
+involving a synthesis of a very large number of different factors;
+furthermore, the new cases of murder could be employed to reconstruct
+the original analysis-synthesis; to eliminate supposed factors which
+were not relevant, and to show the presence of factors at first not
+suspected. In other words, the real fact would be under constant process
+of definition, of “production.” But the stiff-necked identification of
+the fragment, which happened to have practical importance with the real
+object, effectually prevents any such reaction and reconstruction. What
+is to be done, however, with these conditions of spear, of stone, of
+armor, which so obviously have something _to do_ with the real fact,
+although, as it would seem, they are not the fact? They are considered
+as circumstances, _accidental_, so far as death in general is concerned;
+_necessary_, so far as _this_ death is concerned. That is, wanting simply
+to get the net result of the removal of my enemy, so that he will no
+longer blight the fair face of nature, it is accidental how I do it;
+but having, after all, to kill a man of certain characteristics and
+surroundings in life, having to choose time and place, etc., it becomes
+necessary, _if_ I am to succeed, that I kill him in a certain way, say,
+with poison, or a dynamite bomb. Thus we get our concrete, individual
+fact again.
+
+Consider, then, that tortuous path from reality to reality, _via_
+a circuit of unreality, which calls the thought of necessity into
+existence. We first mutilate the actual fact by selecting some portion
+that appeals to our needs; we falsify, by erecting this fragment into
+the whole fact. Having the rest of the fact thus left on our hands for
+disposal, when we have no need of the concrete fact we consider it
+accidental, merely circumstantial; but we consider it necessary whenever
+we have occasion to descend from the outcome which we have abstracted
+back to the real fact, in all its individuality. Necessity is a device
+by which we both conceal from ourselves the unreal character of what we
+have called real, and also get rid of the practical evil consequences of
+hypostatising a fragment into an independent whole.
+
+If the purely teleological character of necessity is not yet evident,
+I think the following considerations will serve to bring it out. The
+practical value, the fruit from the tree, we pick out and set up for the
+entire fact so far as our past action is concerned. But so far as our
+_future_ action is concerned, this value is a result _to be_ reached;
+it is an end to be attained. Other factors, in reality all the time
+bound up in the one concrete fact or individual whole, have now to be
+brought in as means to get this end. Although after our desire has been
+met they have been eliminated as accidental, as irrelevant, yet when the
+experience is again desired their integral membership in the real fact
+has to be recognised. This is done under the guise of considering them as
+means which are necessary to bring about the end. Thus the idea of the
+circumstances as external to the “fact” is retained, while we get all the
+practical benefit of their being not external but elements of one and the
+same whole. Contingent and necessary are thus the correlative aspects
+of one and the same fact; conditions are accidental so far as we have
+abstracted a fragment and set it up as the whole; they are necessary the
+moment it is required to pass from this abstraction back to the concrete
+fact. Both are teleological in character—contingency referring to the
+separation of means from end, due to the fact that the end having been
+already reached the means have lost their value for us; necessity being
+the reference of means to an end _which has still to be got_. Necessary
+means _needed_; contingency means no longer required—because already
+enjoyed.
+
+Note that the necessity of the means has reference to an end still to
+be attained, and in so far itself hypothetical or contingent, while the
+contingent circumstances are no longer needed precisely because they have
+resulted in a definite outcome (which, accordingly, is now a fact, and,
+in that sense, necessary) and we begin to see how completely necessity
+and chance are bound up with each other.
+
+Their correlation may thus be stated: _If_ we are to reach an end we
+_must_ take certain means; while so far as we want an undefined end,
+an end in general, conditions which accompany it are mere accidents.
+Whichever way the relationship be stated, the underlying truth is that we
+are dealing with only partial phases of fact, which, having been unduly
+separated from each other through their erection into distinct wholes,
+have now to be brought back into their real unity.
+
+In the first place, then, _if_ I am to reach an end, certain means
+_must_ be used. Here the end is obviously postulated; save as it is
+begged (presupposed), the necessity of the means has no sense. If,
+when starving, I am to live I must steal a dinner, but, having stolen,
+the logical but unsympathetic judge may question the relevancy (that
+is, the necessity) of my end, and thus cut the ground out from under
+the necessity of my means. My end requires _its_ justification, the
+establishing of its validity, before the necessity of the means is
+anything more than hypothetical. The proximate end must be referred to a
+more ultimate and inclusive end to get any solid ground. Here we have our
+choice: we may deny the existence of any organic whole in life and keep
+chasing in a never-ending series, the _progressus ad infinitum_, after
+an end valid in itself. In this case we never get beyond a hypothetical
+necessity—something is necessary _if_ we are to have something else,
+the necessity being relative to the implied doubt. Or, being convinced
+that life is a whole and not a series merely, we may say there is one
+comprehensive end which gives its own validity to the lesser ends in
+so far as they constitute it. While, on the other alternative, we
+reach only a hypothetical necessity, on this we reach none at all. The
+comprehensive end is no end at all in the sense of something by itself
+to be reached by means external to it. Any such end would be simply one
+in the infinite series and would be itself hypothetical. Whenever minor
+ends cease to be in turn means to further ends it is because they have
+become parts, constituent elements, of the higher end and thus ceased to
+be steps towards an end and beyond and outside of themselves. Given a
+final (i. e., inclusive) end, eating and drinking, study and gossip, play
+and business, cease to be means _towards_ an end and become its concrete
+definition, its analytic content. The minor activities state the supreme
+activity in its specific factors.
+
+Our dilemma is the choice between an end which itself has no existence
+save upon presupposition of another end, (is contingent,) and an end
+which as an end in itself simply _is_.
+
+The externality of means to end is merely a symptom of lack of
+specification or concreteness in the end itself. _If_ I am going to
+invent some improvement in a type-writer, the necessity of going through
+certain preliminary steps is exactly proportionate to the indefiniteness
+of my conception of what the improvement is to be; when the end is
+realised, the operations which enter into the realisation cease to be
+means necessary to an end and become the specific _content_ of that end.
+The improvement is a _fact_, having such and such elements defining it.
+If I simply want, in general, to get my mail I _must_ take this path
+(there being but one road); but if my end is not thus general, if it is
+individualised with concrete filling, the walk to the office may become
+a part of the end, a part of the actual fact. In so far, of course, it
+loses all aspect of necessitation. It simply _is_. And in general, so
+far as my end is vague, or abstract, so far as it is not specified as
+to its details, so far the filling up of its empty schema to give it
+particularity (and thus make it fact) appears as a means necessary to
+reach an end outside itself. The growth in concreteness of the end itself
+is transformed into ways of effecting an end already presupposed. Or, to
+state it in yet one other way, determination in the sense of definition
+in consciousness is hypostatised into determination in the sense of a
+physical making.
+
+The point may come out more clearly if we consider it with the emphasis
+on chance instead of upon necessity. The usual statement that chance is
+relative to ignorance seems to me to convey the truth though not in the
+sense generally intended—viz., that if we knew more about the occurrence
+we should see it necessitated by its conditions. Chance is relative to
+ignorance in the sense rather that it refers to an indefiniteness in
+our conception of what we are doing. In our consciousness of our end
+(our acts) we are always making impossible abstractions; we break off
+certain phases of the act which are of chief interest to us, without
+any regard to whether the concrete conditions of action—that is, the
+deed in its whole definition—permits any such division. Then, when in
+our actual doing the circumstances to which we have not attended thrust
+themselves into consciousness—when, that is to say, the act appears in
+more of its own specific nature—we dispose of those events, foreign to
+our conscious purpose, as accidental; we did not want them or intend
+them—what more proof of their accidental character is needed? The falling
+of a stone upon a man’s head as he walks under a window is “chance,”
+for it has nothing to do with what the man proposed to do, it is no
+part of his conception of that walk. To an enemy who takes that means
+of killing him, it is anything but an accident, being involved in
+_his_ conscious purpose. It is “chance” when we throw a two and a six;
+for the concreteness of the act falls outside of the content of our
+intention. We intended _a_ throw, some throw, and in so far the result
+is not accidental, but this special result, being irrelevant to our
+conception of what we were to do, in so far is contingent. The vagueness
+or lack of determinateness in our end, the irrelevancy of actual end to
+conscious intent, chance, are all names for the same thing. And if I
+am asked whether a gambler who has a hundred dollars upon the outcome
+does not _intend_ to throw double sixes, I reply that he has no such
+intention—unless the dice are loaded. He may _hope_ to make that throw,
+but he cannot intend it save as he can define that act—tell how to do it,
+tell, that is, just _what_ the act is. Or, once more, if I intend to get
+my mail and there are four paths open to me it is chance which I take,
+just in proportion to the abstractness of my end. If I have not defined
+it beyond the mere “general result” of getting mail, anything else is
+extraneous and in so far contingent. If the end is individualised to the
+extent, say, of getting the mail in the shortest possible time, or with
+the maximum of pleasant surroundings, or with the maximum of healthy
+exercise, the indifferency of the “means,” and with it their contingency,
+disappears. This or that path is no longer a mere means which _may_ be
+taken to get a result foreign to its own value; the path is an intrinsic
+part of the end.
+
+In so far as a man presents to himself an end in general, he sets up an
+abstraction so far lacking in detail as (taken _per se_) to exclude the
+possibility of realisation. In order to exist as concrete or individual
+(and of course, nothing can exist except as individual or concrete)
+it must be defined or particularised. But so far as consciousness is
+concerned the original vague end is _the_ reality; it is all that the man
+cares about and hence constitutes his act. The further particularisation
+of the end, therefore, instead of appearing as what it really is, viz.,
+the discovery of the actual reality, presents itself as something
+outside that end. This externality to the end previously realised in
+consciousness is, taken as mere externality, contingency, or accident;
+taken as none the less so bound up with the desired end that it must
+be gone through before reaching that end, it is necessary. Chance, in
+other words, stands for the irrelevancy as the matter at first presents
+itself to consciousness; necessity is the required, but partial, negation
+of this irrelevancy. Let it be complete, instead of partial, and we
+have the one real activity defined throughout. With reference to this
+reality, conditions are neither accidental nor necessary, but simply
+constituting elements—they neither may be nor must be, but just are. What
+is irrelevant is now not simply indifferent; it is excluded, eliminated.
+What is relevant is no longer something required in order to get a result
+beyond itself; it is incorporated into the result, it is integral.
+
+It now remains to connect the two parts of our discussion, the logical
+and the practical consideration of necessity, and show that, as
+suggested, logical necessity rests upon teleological—that, indeed, it
+is the teleological read backwards. The logical process of discovering
+and stating the reality of some event simply reverses the process which
+the mind goes through in setting up and realising an end. Instead of the
+killing of an enemy as something to be accomplished, we have the fact of
+a murder to be accounted for. Just as on the practical side, the end, as
+it first arises in consciousness, is an end in general and thus contrasts
+with the concrete end which is individualised; so the fact, as at first
+realised in consciousness, is a _bare_ fact, and thus contrasts with the
+actual event with its complete particularisation. The actual fact, the
+murder as it really took place, is one thing; the fact as it stands in
+consciousness, the phases of the actual event which are picked out and
+put together, is another thing. The fact of knowledge, it is safe to
+say, is no _fact_ at all; that is, if there had been in reality no more
+particularisation, no more of detail, than there is consciousness, the
+murder would never have happened. But just as, practically, we take the
+end in general to be the real thing, (since it is the only thing of any
+direct interest,) so in knowledge we take the bare fact as abstracted
+from the actual whole, as _the_ fact. Just as the end of the savage is
+merely to kill his enemy, so the “fact” is merely the dead body with
+the weapon sticking in it. The fact, as it stands in consciousness, is
+indeterminate and partial, but, since it is in consciousness by itself,
+it is taken as a whole and as the certain thing. But as the abstractness
+of the “end in general” is confessed in the fact that means are required
+in order to make it real—to give it existence—so the unreal character of
+the “fact” is revealed in the statement that the causes which produced
+it are unknown and have to be discovered. The bare fact thus becomes
+a result to be accounted for: in this conception the two sides are
+combined; the “fact” is at once given a certain reality of its own while
+at the same time the lack of concreteness is recognised in the reference
+to external causes.
+
+The gradual introduction of further factors, under the guise of causes
+accounting for the effect, defines the original vague “fact,” until,
+at last, when it is accounted for, we have before us the one and only
+concrete reality. This done, we no longer have an effect to be accounted
+for, and causes which produce it, but one fact whose statement or
+description is such and such. But intermediate between the isolation and
+the integration is the stage when necessity appears. We have advanced,
+we will suppose, from the bare fact of the murder to the discovery of a
+large amount of “circumstantial” evidence regarding that fact. We hear of
+a man who had a quarrel with the deceased; he cannot account for himself
+at the time when the murder _must_ have been committed; he is found
+to have had a weapon like that with which the murder _must_ have been
+committed. Finally we conclude he _must_ have been the murderer. What
+do these “musts” (the “must” of the time, weapon, and murderer) mean?
+Are they not obviously the gradual filling-in of the previously empty
+judgment, through bringing things at first unconnected into relation
+with each other? The existence of the man M. N. is wholly isolated from
+the “fact” of the murder till it is learned that he had a grudge against
+the murdered man; this third fact, also distinct _per se_, brought
+into connection with the others (the “fact” of the murder and of the
+existence of M. N.) compels them to move together; the result is at
+first the possibility, later, as the points of connection get more and
+more marked and numerous, the “necessity,” that M. N. is the murderer.
+Further, it is clear that this “must” marks not a greater certainty or
+actuality than a mere “is” would indicate, but rather a doubt, a surmise
+or guess gradually gaining in certainty. When the fact is really made
+out to our satisfaction, we drop the “must” and fall back on the simple
+_is_. Only so long as there is room for doubt, and thus for argument
+do we state that the time and weapon must have been such and such. So
+when we finally conclude that the murderer must have been M. N., it
+means that we have woven a large number of facts, previously discrete,
+into such a state of inter-relationship that we do not see how to avoid
+denying their discreteness and incorporating them all into one concrete
+whole, or individual fact. That we still say “must” shows, however, that
+we have not quite succeeded in overcoming the partial and indefinite
+character of the original “fact.” Had we succeeded in getting the whole
+fact before us the judgment would take this form: The murder _is_ a fact
+of such and such definite nature, having as its content such and such
+precise elements. In this comprehensive whole all distinction of effect
+to be accounted for and causes which produce clean disappears. The idea
+of necessity, in a word, comes in only while we are still engaged in
+correcting our original error, but have not surrendered it root and
+branch; this error being that the fragment of reality which we grasp is
+concrete enough to warrant the appellation “fact.”
+
+A great deal of attention has been directed to the category of cause
+and effect. One striking feature of the ordinary consideration is, that
+it takes for granted the matter most needing investigation and aims the
+inquiry at the dependent member of the firm. The effect seems to be so
+clearly _there_, while the cause is so obviously something to be searched
+for that the category of effect is assumed, and it is supposed that only
+the idea of causation is in need of examination. And yet this abstraction
+of certain phases of fact, the erection of the parts thus abstracted into
+distinct entities, which, though distinct, are still dependent in their
+mode of existence, is precisely the point needing examination. It is but
+another instance of the supreme importance of our practical interests.
+The effect is the end, the practical outcome, which interests us; the
+search for causes is but the search for the means which would produce
+the result. We call it “means and end” when we set up a result to be
+reached in the future and set ourselves upon finding the causes which
+put the desired end in our hands; we call it “cause and effect” when
+the “result” is given, and the search for means is a regressive one. In
+either case the separation of one side from the other, of cause from
+effect, of means from end, has the same origin: a partial and vague idea
+of the whole fact, together with the habit of taking this part (because
+of its superior practical importance) for a whole, for a fact.
+
+I hope now to have made good my original thesis: that the idea of
+necessity marks a certain stage in the development of judgment; that
+it refers to a residuum, in our judgments and thus in our objects,
+of indeterminateness or vagueness, which it replaces without wholly
+negating; that it is thus relative to “chance” or contingency; that its
+value consists wholly in the impulse given judgment towards the _is_, or
+the concrete reality defined throughout. The analysis has been long; the
+reader may have found it not only tedious, but seemingly superfluous,
+since, as he may be saying to himself, no one nowadays regards necessity
+as anything but a name for fixed uniformities in nature, and of this view
+of the case nothing has been said. I hope, however, that when we come
+to a consideration of necessity as equivalent to uniformity, it will be
+found that the course of this discussion has not been irrelevant, but the
+sure basis for going further.
+
+                                                               JOHN DEWEY.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[65] This article, as the title may indicate, was suggested by Mr.
+Peirce’s article upon “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” As, however,
+my thought takes finally a different turn, I have deemed it better to let
+it run its own course from the start, and so have not referred, except
+indirectly, to Mr. Peirce’s argument. I hope this will not be taken as a
+desire to slur over my indebtedness to him.
+
+[66] The reason of this abstraction is in practical nature, as already
+indicated. For all the savage _cares_ about it, the death in general,
+_is_ the real fact. It is all that interests him. It is hardly worth
+while to attempt to persuade the savage; indeed, if he were not only a
+savage, but also a philosopher, he might boldly challenge the objector
+to present _any_ definition of object which should not refer objectivity
+to man’s practical activity; although he might, as a shrewd savage,
+admit that some one activity (or self) to which the object is referred
+has more content than another. In this case, I, for one, should not care
+about entering the lists against the savage. But when the common-sense
+philosopher, who resists all attempts to reconstruct the original object
+on the ground that a fact is a fact and all beyond that is metaphysics,
+is also a case-hardened nominalist (as he generally is), it is time to
+protest. It might be true that the real object is always relative to the
+value of some action; but to erect this pure universal into the object,
+and then pride one’s self on enlightenment in rejecting the “scholastic
+figment” of the reality of universals is a little too much.
+
+
+
+
+THE ISSUES OF “SYNECHISM.”
+
+
+In a late number of _The Monist_, (Vol. II, No. 4,) there appears a
+singularly acute and profound article, from the pen of one of the ablest
+of American logicians and mathematicians, Mr. Charles S. Peirce. Its
+subject is “The Law of Mind”—the idea of continuity. The writer tells
+us, (p. 534,) “the tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which
+I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy, may
+conveniently be termed _Synechism_.” With this _synechistic_ philosophy,
+as applied to mind, the paper is occupied, to the exclusion, for the
+nonce, of Mr. Peirce’s companion doctrine of _Tychism_,[67] which was
+dealt with, by him, in the January, 1891, and April, 1892, issues of _The
+Monist_. These conceptions are, both of them, to be viewed as essential
+to philosophy as a whole, but the latter is; for the present, allowed
+to drop out of sight, in order to allow of the due elaboration of the
+former.[68]
+
+
+THE FORMULA OF SYNECHISM.
+
+The formula of Synechism, with which the article begins, is as follows:
+
+    “Logical analysis applied to mental phenomena shows that there
+    is but one law of mind, namely, that ideas tend to spread
+    continuously, and to affect certain others which stand to them
+    in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they
+    lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others,
+    but gain generality, and become welded with other ideas.” (Vol.
+    II, No. 4, p. 534.)
+
+The individuality and continuity of ideas are, then, shown respectively
+to involve no contradiction; an idea once past—in the sense of an
+event in an individual consciousness—is not wholly past, it is only
+going—“infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable past date.”
+Thus the conclusion is reached that “the present is connected with the
+past by a series of real, infinitesimal steps.” Again, “We are forced to
+say that we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval
+of time. This is all that is requisite.” (_Ibid._, pp. 535-536.)
+
+All that it is necessary to say at the outset is, that this view is
+supported by an elaborate inquiry into the nature of infinity and
+continuity in general, into which, for the purpose of the present paper,
+it is not needful to enter. And this for two reasons: (1) The synechistic
+philosophy, by itself, does not profess to be monistic. Its expounder
+does not, even if his Tychism were not in reserve, profess to carry it
+beyond the realm of mind, with all that is implied in such a reservation.
+Now, it is the bearing of Mr. Peirce’s Synechism upon a monistic solution
+of the universe with which the present article is concerned. And (2)
+Mr. Peirce’s method of treatment, though precise and logical in the
+direction of its own path, is too purely technical to be summarised for
+the general reader’s benefit. But withal, Synechism is far too fertile,
+not so much in respect of what it makes clear, as suggestively, and, if
+the expression may be allowed, _obliquely_, to be passed over without
+comment. Its excogitator is eminently frank; he does not conceal the
+difficulties which, ever and anon, occur in his statement. Sometimes
+his theory seems a trifle too wide for the facts encountered, sometimes
+rather too scanty to contain them. Such phrases as the following: “No, I
+think we can only hold”—p. 552; “we are driven to perceive”—p. 555; “this
+obliges me to say”—p. 557; “the principle with which I set out requires
+me to maintain”—p. 558; “the only answer that I can, at present, make
+is”—p. 559, etc., etc., do every credit to the writer’s candor, but they
+would scarcely occur in an exposition, which, in the mind of its author,
+made the rough places altogether plain. Synechism, even with Tychism in
+the background, probably does not, in Mr. Peirce’s own mind, completely
+solve the world-riddle, at least, as yet. Still these very pauses
+themselves, on the part of a thinker of such ability, are eminently
+suggestive. To use his own words: “the present paper is intended to show
+what Synechism is, and what it leads to.” Let us emphasise this latter
+clause, as likely to be more fruitful than the former.
+
+
+MR. PEIRCE’S POSITIVISM.
+
+Mr. Peirce, in spite of his theory of chance, is, in his Synechism,
+almost severely a positivist;[69] but his positivism, like most of that
+current nowadays, does not go deep enough. He is positivist, _after_ he
+has got externality—fertile in excitations—comfortably disposed around
+his subject; and vibrations, undulations, attractions, etc., ready to
+play upon the thousand-stringed harp, _but not before_. For, “we must not
+tax introspection,” he tells us, p. 548, “to make a phenomenon manifest,
+which essentially involves externality,” when the real problem at issue
+is: Is there externality, in the vulgar sense, at all, or is it only that
+_rationalised externality_ which _circumspection_, within the limits
+of egoity, reveals? Now, upon this a good deal hinges. At all events
+the difference in question, or, rather, that there _is_ a difference,
+has been mooted, to say the least. And, this being the case, it is a
+little tedious, when the really vital point of the spatial extension of
+feelings is being debated, to have this illustration brought in, (p.
+548,): “Moreover, our own feelings are focused in attention to such a
+degree, that we are not aware that ideas are not brought to an absolute
+unity. Just as nobody, not instructed by special experiment, has any idea
+how very, very little of the field of vision is distinct.” Why, that is
+reasoning in a circle, if some systems are true; and it is a begging of
+the question, if they are the reverse.
+
+If the system of so-called objective reality were, at sight, wholly
+veracious, if everything existed just as it seems, this positivism of
+Mr. Peirce’s might be workable. Then no one would seek to go beneath
+the process of the apparent, the actually visible, for a _rationale_.
+But modern science teaches, in its very primer, that many things are,
+and act, quite otherwise than as they seem to be, and do. Appearances
+_rationalised_ are alone to be accepted. The sun does not “rise”
+and “set,” as it seems to do. The earth is not, as it appears to be,
+an immovable plane, and so on. And, this once allowed, where is the
+principle to end? If the superficial judgment may be thus corrected,
+or reversed, it is liable to revision or reversal _ad infinitum_,
+unless reason be shown to the contrary. It may thus be disputed whether
+our author is quite in order in writing, as he does, and using the
+statement to support his theory—“Precisely how primary sensations, as
+colors and tones, are excited, we cannot tell, in the present state of
+psychology.... As far as sight and hearing are in question, we know that
+they are only excited by vibrations of inconceivable complexity; and the
+chemical senses are probably not more simple.” (P. 557.)
+
+To argue, we cannot tell precisely _how_ they are excited, but we know
+that they _are_ excited, is somewhat feminine; seeing that the said
+“excitement” is not patent on the surface of ordinary perception. And,
+this being the case, the excitement, or its mode rather, not being given
+immediately, but only mentally annexed, Mr. Peirce is not consistently
+positivist. It is equally open to an opponent to “annex” something else
+of his own to the “given” thing, or altogether to deny the necessity of
+anything whatever being thus annexed. In any case that (if anything)
+which is sought to be annexed must stand the test of positivism; we must
+know _if_ such a thing is, and _what_ it is precisely. And this is just
+what Mr. Peirce cannot do for us. He cannot tell us exactly what the
+“excitant” of feelings _is_; he can only guess what it is “_something
+like_,” viz.: the feelings themselves. Hence the following:
+
+    “The principle with which I set out [that of continuity]
+    requires me to maintain that these feelings are communicated to
+    the nerves by continuity, _so that there must be something like
+    them in the excitants themselves_. If this seems extravagant,
+    it is to be remembered that it is the sole possible way of
+    reaching any explanation of sensation, which otherwise must be
+    pronounced a general fact absolutely inexplicable and ultimate.
+    Now absolute inexplicability is a hypothesis which sound logic
+    refuses, under any circumstances, to justify.” (P. 558.—The
+    italics are not in the original.)
+
+There must be something like the feelings in the excitants of the
+feelings. Now, this point is worthy of the closest attention. Note that
+“the excitant” _alone_ is mentioned. _Vibrations_ excite sight and
+hearing. Yet, from what follows, it is plain that Synechism is not
+inconsistent with belief in a fixed objective. “Even the least psychical
+of peripheral sensations, that of pressure, has, in its excitation,
+conditions which, though apparently simple, are seen to be complicated
+enough when we consider _the molecules and their attractions_,” pp.
+557-558. Can there, then, be any doubt that we have here three distinct
+things: (1) a subjective, (2) an “excitant,” and (3) an objective; the
+middle term being a vehicle of communication between the first and third?
+It does not affect this presentation of Mr. Peirce’s position that,
+at an earlier stage of his argument, he speaks of matter—synonymous,
+presumably, with the objective—as being “not completely dead, but merely
+mind, hide-bound with habits,” as “partially deadened” or “effete,”
+mind; or that the editor of _The Monist_ says that, with Mr. Peirce,
+“mind is the beginning of all.” (_The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p.
+95.) The question, at present, is not regarding origins, but regarding
+co-existences. So that there is a distinct _hiatus_ here, arising from
+the confusion of the stimulant, or excitant, of sensation with the
+objective itself.[70] Now, the stimulant of sensation is never the object
+perceived. Hence, once an objective is admitted, a trinity of entities is
+unavoidable, since still less can the “stimulant” be the subject. This
+special difficulty, in the present writer’s opinion, is inseparable from
+dualism in every form. How it besets Mr. Peirce’s theory is evident from
+his hazarded suggestion: “There must be _something like_ the feelings
+in the excitants.” He thus uses only two of his cosmical terms, and
+gives the third the go-by! All dualism halts, but surely there is here a
+palpable stumble.
+
+In a recent article in _The Open Court_[71] I have pointed out the
+vanity of introducing a vehicle of communication between object and
+subject, especially emphasising the fact that, once this intermediate
+term is brought in, the veritable objective disappears. “Once you bring
+in vibrations,” I remarked, “you practically provide a _second_ object,
+which is really a part of the subject, and, in order to do this, you
+have taken from the original objective all that composed it.”[72] (_The
+Open Court_, p. 3361.)
+
+Is it any wonder, then, that Mr. Peirce should suppose the excitants
+to be “something like” the excited feelings? Since he, practically,
+surrenders the objective, what could more closely resemble the subjective
+than the subjective itself? If he had adopted the position of Hume,
+and made impressions and ideas all-in-all, his principle of continuity
+might hold. But this he does not do, since (1) he implicitly admits the
+objective element, and (2) even if he did not do this, there must be
+something other than the idea or feeling in his system, since, otherwise,
+there could be no ground for the charge of seeming “extravagance,” which,
+he admits, may be leveled against, at least one of, his conclusions.
+
+
+FEELINGS SPATIALLY EXTENDED.
+
+This leads us to Mr. Peirce’s conclusions regarding subjective spatial
+extension—the spatial extension of feelings—as the result of observation
+of irritated protoplasm. Our attention is directed to an excited mass of
+protoplasm,—an amœba, or a slime-mould,—which “does not differ in any
+radical way from the contents of a nerve-cell, though its functions may
+be less specialised.” (P. 547.) The irritation is induced when, say, the
+amœba is “quiescent and rigid,” and we note its behaviour under it. That
+feeling passes from one part of this amorphous continuum of protoplasm to
+another, we are led to believe. And this conclusion follows: “Whatever
+there is in the whole phenomenon to make us think there is feeling in
+such a mass of protoplasm,—_feeling_, but plainly no _personality_,—goes
+logically to show that that feeling has a subjective, or substantial,
+spatial extension, as the excited state has.” This is a chain of
+reasoning. Let us examine its links. We have:
+
+(1) The behaviour of the amœba under immediate, mechanical irritation—the
+spread, or spatial extension, of the state of irritation.
+
+(2) We are asked to identify this spread-out irritation, this field of
+excitation, with “feeling” on the part of the amœba, because there is “no
+doubt that it feels when it is excited.”
+
+(3) From the spatial extension of the irritation, thus identified with
+feeling, we are asked to conclude that the feeling, in the amœba, has a
+subjective, spatial extension as the excited state has, and, finally,
+passing from the feeling of the amœba to our own feelings, by inference,
+we are asked to admit:
+
+(4) Not that we have necessarily a feeling of bigness, but that “the
+feeling [inferentially arrived at from the spread-out irritation on the
+part of the amœba] as a subject of inhesion is big.” (P. 548.)
+
+After this, we are disposed to agree with Mr. Peirce when he says: “This
+is, no doubt, a difficult idea to seize”; not, as he goes on to say, “for
+the reason that it is a subjective, not an objective, extension,” but on
+the ground that the reasoning involves, plainly, not only the subjective
+and objective, but what Clifford calls the “ejective,” as well, and this
+assumption, _inter alia_, that the last-named lies on the same plane as
+the former. Never, surely, was the conclusion that feelings have spatial
+extension more easily reached. It is only when we find that in (1) we
+are dealing with the objective pure and simple, observed phenomena; that
+in (2) the connection between irritation or excitation, and feeling
+is assumed, in the object, because feeling, subjectively, is found to
+accompany irritation; that (3) as the irritation, in the amœba, is spread
+out, so is the feeling to be viewed; and (4) that, as the feeling of the
+amœba, so is our feeling to be considered, viz.: that the feeling, “as
+a subject of inhesion, is big,” we are led to say after all this, that,
+by such a process, anything, or everything, could be demonstrated,—the
+_field_ of spatial extension, for example, having no more claim to be
+assumed than the _point_ at which the irritation admittedly begins. Why
+should the _middle_ stage of the irritation be selected in preference to
+the _initial_ and _final_ ones? The irritation originates in a point,
+spreads, and then dies out. Thus our feeling, (we purposely use Mr.
+Peirce’s nomenclature,) or idea, of an elephant, is unquestionably,
+as a subject of inhesion, “big.” _But only for a time, and not at
+first._ Really, our idea, or feeling—in Synechism—of an elephant, must
+logically commence as a minute speck, and return to this vanishing-point
+again. There is no other way out of it. For must not the analogy of the
+irritated amœba be followed throughout, and if not, why not?
+
+
+DUALISM AND THE WAY OUT.
+
+The _crux_ of philosophy, from the time of Hume to the present day, has
+been, what may be summarised as, the consciousness of succession _as_
+succession. The hours pass over the mental dial, but, though one succeeds
+the other, something is needed besides the succession of the terms of the
+series to give consciousness of the series _as a series_, to give the
+synthesis of the day made up of hours. Hume virtually gave up the problem
+in eviscerating the subjective. Prof. T. H. Green only missed the point
+at issue when he placed his eternal consciousness, which was to “have
+and to hold” the terms of the cosmical series, as it were in solution,
+for the human organism, _out of time altogether_. Mr. Peirce puts the
+matter boldly when he says: “An idea once past is gone forever, [in the
+sense of an event in an individual consciousness,] and any supposed
+recurrence of it is another idea.” (P. 534.) In order, then, that an
+idea past may be present really, and not vicariously, the notion that
+consciousness necessarily occupies an interval of (finite) time must be
+given up; since, to put it briefly, a second past is as much past as a
+year. According to Mr. Peirce then, and his contention is supported by an
+elaborate inquiry into the nature of infinity and continuity generally,
+“we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal interval of time.”
+For the complete _rationale_, reference must necessarily be made to the
+article itself.
+
+Even the above outline, however, is sufficient to show that, here as
+elsewhere, Mr. Peirce’s dualism is his snare. Nothing but this could lead
+to a disintegration so complete as the following:
+
+    “In this infinitesimal interval, not only is consciousness
+    continuous in a subjective sense, that is, considered as a
+    subject, or substance, having the attribute of duration; but
+    also, because it is immediate consciousness, its object is
+    _ipso facto_ continuous.” (P. 536.)
+
+This is to admit, practically, that there is something in consciousness
+other than the consciousness itself. And this is evident, because at
+one and the same time, (whether an interval of finite time, or an
+infinitesimal interval,—whether an “instant” or a “moment,”—does not
+matter,) these two entities are different. For:
+
+    “This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object
+    represented, spread over the four instants; but subjectively,
+    or as itself the subject of duration, it is completely embraced
+    in the second moment.” (_Ibid._)
+
+But this “mediate” and “immediate” cannot simultaneously exist, unless
+there is something else _to which_ they do so exist. It is only paltering
+with us in a double sense to speak of “instant” and “moment” in this
+connection. The one may pass into the other, but there is “a time when”
+(it matters not whether the interval be finite or infinitesimal) they do
+not coexist. Hence, they are not the same, but different.
+
+According to Mr. Peirce’s notation, for all ordinary purposes we may
+write, if _a_ is a finite quantity, and _i_ an infinitesimal, _a_ + _i_
+= _a_. “That is to say, this is so for all purposes of measurement.” Be
+it so; the infinitesimal may be neglected for purposes of calculation.
+But such a formula can only be experimental. The theory which embodies
+it cannot avail for a world-scheme; to admit it would be to grant that
+a thing is, and is not, at one and the same time. Surely the most
+superficial reader will see that, to put it popularly, a world-scheme
+admits of no alternative subject to accept, or to reject, a neglectable
+quantity.
+
+And this is not the only instance of dualism in Mr. Peirce’s world-scheme
+as a totality. For have we not Synechism and Tychism as well? With the
+latter Mr. Peirce does not deal in the paper now under consideration. He
+must, however, be credited, or debited, with it, as held in reserve. For
+our present purpose it is not necessary to examine Tychism in detail. Its
+alleged existence is sufficient. For, and here let the significance of
+what follows be noted, in Mr. Peirce’s view, as opposed to determinism,
+Tychism exists as a principle. It _is_, otherwise it could not be
+expounded as operative. But it also exists as an idea, first, it may be,
+in our author’s mind, and subsequently in the minds of his disciples.
+Thus it falls into the synechistic province: “As an idea it can only be
+affected by an idea, by anything but an idea it cannot be affected at
+all.” (“The Law of Mind,” p. 557.) Yet to affirm Tychism thus impotent,
+because unaffectible, outside the synechistic sphere, is to contradict
+Mr. Peirce’s conclusions, for if Tychism is nothing outside the ideal
+realm, it is altogether inside it. Hence Synechism is everything
+practically, and Tychism nothing. But that Mr. Peirce will not have. He
+has a two-fold Tychism, that is the fact; actual and operative on the one
+hand, ideal on the other. And this is dualism confessed.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s method is quite fertile in duplication of the subjective
+entity. His latest paper, “Man’s Glassy Essence,” (_The Monist_, Vol.
+III, No. 1,) contains some typical instances.
+
+    “Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of
+    action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter.
+    Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character
+    as feeling, it appears as consciousness.” (P. 20.)
+
+This is the strictly empirical view. And it may be possibly defended
+with the contention that all problems, to be duly examined, must, in
+the first place, be viewed from that standpoint. But it must be plainly
+manifest to any unprejudiced thinker that, even granted a total cosmical
+problem made up of separate problems of an individual nature, the same
+method of solving the sum cannot be employed which is used in solving
+its constituents. In the above instance, considering matter in its
+totality, and consciousness in its totality, what is left to view them
+indifferently from “outside,” or “inside”? Plainly nothing. Still more
+transparent an example is the following:
+
+    “The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In
+    each action of that habit certain atoms get thrown out of
+    their orbit, and replaced by others. Upon all the different
+    occasions it is different atoms that are thrown off, but they
+    are analogous from a physical point of view, and there is an
+    inward sense of their being analogous. Every time one of the
+    associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less vague sense
+    that there are others, that it has a general character, and of
+    about what this general character is.” (P. 20.)
+
+This is part of the answer to the query: How do general ideas appear in
+the molecular theory of protoplasm? Now, without discussing the value
+of this _rationale_, as affecting Mr. Peirce’s own theories, it is not
+difficult to see what its acceptance would “lead to.” Certain atoms of
+a molecule get thrown out and are replaced by _others_. This happens
+repeatedly. On different occasions _different atoms_ come and go. Yet
+they are “analogous,” and there is “an inward sense” of this. Upon whose
+shoulders is the burden of proving the analogy placed, or of experiencing
+it even? With whom or what is there “an inward sense”? Perhaps it is
+better not to answer otherwise than to say that if this faculty be
+not present in the ever changing molecule to begin with, it cannot be
+logically reached by any process of multiplying it.
+
+
+THE MONISTIC SOLUTION.
+
+Monism, as a unitary system of the universe, does not necessarily commend
+itself to acceptance simply _as_ monism. To say, this is dualism,
+_therefore_ it cannot be a correct _rationale_ of the universe, since
+the only true one must be monistic, is to start with an unphilosophical
+prepossession. The true solution may be two-fold, or it may be manifold.
+But it is not too much to say, perhaps, on the other hand, that, even as
+causes may not be multiplied without necessity, even so phenomena must
+not logically be divided into independent groupings without sufficient
+reason given. Preference should be accorded to a monistic, rather than
+to a dualistic, system, not on the ground alone of the simplicity of
+the former, but on the ground that a theory which has one explanation
+for one set of phenomena and another explanation for a second set, must
+first demonstrate that a unitary conception of the universe is, at
+least, improbable, otherwise it will always be hinted that the dualism
+in question has not gone deep enough to find a synthetic bond wherewith
+to unite the apparently diverse. Mr. Peirce, throughout his article on
+Synechism, constantly touches, despite his latent dualism, the margin
+of a truth so great as to merit the title of transcendent. As often he
+misses it. And his concluding words are, in this connection, almost
+wistful: “The facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us
+in the face, are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily
+discerned. That has been remarked from time immemorial.” (P. 559.) But
+though thus “remarked,” the maxim has, as immemorially, been neglected
+in practice. To none can this remark be more fitly applied than to the
+excogitator of Synechism, himself seeing that, having arrived at the
+point of asserting that “there must be _something like_ the feelings in
+the excitants themselves,” he does not see that the excitant and the
+feeling are one and the same; and that there is no second or third term
+in the cosmical equation.
+
+Does this seem “extravagant”? If so, the reply must be _not_ that it is
+the only escape from an otherwise inexplicable difficulty, but that there
+is really no difficulty at all. What Mr. Peirce’s own Synechism “_leads
+to_” is that the past, the present, and the to-come, alike of matter and
+idea, are not reconciled by “time and its flow,” or even by the logic
+of infinitesimals, subtle though that may be, but that the contents of
+each and all, with all their apparently infinite variety, resolve into a
+consistent unity.
+
+
+THE “MISSING LINK.”
+
+Pushed to a logical conclusion, the excitants and the feelings owe
+their apparent variety to their assigned position in a series, the
+correspondence or relation between them being _only another link in
+the self-same chain_. Vulgar realism never fathoms this explanation.
+It always harps upon the one string that idealism, and more especially
+idealistic monism, fails to account for variety or difference;
+forgetting, or rather never seeing, that difference or variety which
+is its essence, is only one more added perception on the same plane
+with ordinary perceptions; so that given _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_,—sundry
+perceptions,—their essential variety may be stated as _e_. Or this may
+be stated numerically; variety, as a whole, being nothing more than
+the sum of differences, which is always something other than the terms
+differentiated, but always on the same level with them—the difference
+between any continuous number, above unity, and another number being a
+third number, which is different from either. Variety in numbers cannot
+be expressed otherwise than numerically. So, in the last recess, the
+variety of colors is only colorable, of tones audible, and so on. The
+“vibrations of inconceivable complexity” which, according to Mr. Peirce,
+“excite sight and hearing,” can be approximately stated numerically,
+so that the difference between red and, say, yellow, is a number
+corresponding to another color, which may be orange or not; it being
+part of the present scientific theory of light that any specific number
+of ethereal undulations happening between the colors of the ocular
+spectrum, corresponds to a possible color, although the retinal expanse
+may be insensible to these particular rates of tremor. To Mr. Peirce it
+may appear “extravagant,” but the difference between any two colors and
+tones is another color, another tone; just as the difference between any
+two numbers is a third number. This is the logical outcome of his own
+Synechism; _this_, in part, is what it “leads to.”
+
+
+TIME AND ITS “FLOW” RATIONALISED.
+
+Excitants and feelings being unified, and the element of variety,
+hitherto supposed to be the exclusive copyright of vulgar realism, shown
+to be nothing but another term added to the series, or, numerically, a
+concurrent series—so that should _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ ... be a series,
+the variety of the series may be expressed as _e_, or the individual
+differences as _f_, _g_, _h_ ...—it only needs an examination of what
+Mr. Peirce terms “time and its flow,” to render his system a completely
+monistic one, and this although true monism is much more than the
+negation of determinism, synechistically expressed.
+
+In Mr. Peirce’s article under examination, “The Law of Mind,” the
+notation of infinitesimals, which forms the keystone of Synechism, is
+only introduced after a lament over the incapacity, or unworkableness
+rather, of finite time, when the duration of consciousness is involved.
+If _finite_ time is to come in as a factor—“an idea once past [in the
+sense of an event in an individual consciousness] is gone forever, and
+any supposed recurrence of it is another idea” (p. 534). And the problem
+which Mr. Peirce sets himself to solve is how in effect to bring _back_
+this past idea—not vicariously—but in all its pristine freshness, into
+the now-time. This is sought to be accomplished by the explanation that
+the past idea is “not wholly past, it is only going, less past than any
+assignable past date”—and so on through the intricacies of Mr. Peirce’s
+infinitesimal theory, into which we need not enter at present. But the
+statement of the, supposed, difficulty which finite time presents in this
+connection,—the past idea really past and gone, and the recurrence of it
+another idea,—if put in a slightly different form, hints a solution, in
+continuity with the foregoing pages, without the aid of the infinitesimal
+at all. _That an idea is once past and gone_, any occurrence, or
+recurrence, of this idea, _is another idea_.[73]
+
+But, in the meantime, let us see what Mr. Peirce has to say regarding
+“time and its flow”:
+
+    “One of the most marked features about the law of mind is, that
+    it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past
+    to future. The relation of past to future is, in reference
+    to the law of mind, different from the relation of future to
+    past. This makes one of the great contrasts between the law
+    of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more
+    distinction between the two opposite directions in time than
+    between moving northward, and moving southward” (p. 546).
+
+This for once is not very clear. It is difficult to see how “the law of
+physical force” can be spoken of as “in time,” to the exclusion of mind;
+not easy, also, to understand the distinction further insisted upon. But
+the intention is evident, viz., to perpetuate, if not to originate, a
+cosmical duality. Time, it would seem, marches indifferently in at least
+two directions, though it is not very clear how this is accomplished.
+And then the old fiction follows, that “Time, as the universal form of
+change, cannot exist unless there is something to undergo change, etc.”
+(p. 547.)
+
+The same notation suits in this case as in the foregoing. Time is only
+another term in the series. If _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ be a series, _e_
+is the variety, _f_ the whole time involved, and _g_ the individual
+intervals. Of course all this is not a simple series, it is an infinitely
+complicated one; the above arrangement is only intended to show that
+difference, variety, time, etc., are no mysterious entities pervading
+events, acting as their “form” or carrying them in their “flow,” but
+simply percepts, or concepts, on a level with others.
+
+This is not patent on the surface, it may be. Time has the appearance
+of a current in which events float. But this is an illusion dispelled
+by examination. Events cannot be submerged in time. Time cannot be
+the vehicle of events. It is impossible to conceive time as existing
+simultaneously with an event. It always follows it. What to Mr. Peirce
+appears as a “flow,” arises from the foregoing. Take events, percepts,
+or concepts, as a hypothetical series, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ ... and their
+times as _a´_, _b´_, _c´_, _d´_ ... the first series contains the event
+_per se_, or as happening; the “time when” is contained in the second
+series, practically inseparable from the first, but the time when
+necessarily follows—consequently if the first be _a_, the second must
+be, at least _a_. But no concept or percept is abstract, except the
+concept time itself, which, being unconnected, _seems_ anywhere, and,
+like its fellow-abstract space, is spread out, to us, tri-dimensionally,
+as past, present, and to come. And, as in space the position is simply
+spectral,[74] a question of perspective or adjustment, so, in time, the
+timal series is adjusted to the substantive idea. But this two-fold
+spectral succession breeds by comparative intensity (which is another
+complex series) the sense of a flow, where there is none, but only the
+idea of a flowing, which is another matter. Thus, the so-called “veil
+of the future” is no more a veil than it is a brickbat. It is simply
+the indeterminateness of an unconnected adjective—as if one should say,
+white—and the query arises, _What_ is it that is white? When the noun is
+supplied you have something definite. Just so, when the future lapses
+into the present.
+
+Thus there is never anything without, at least, these three additions:
+first, variety or difference; second, time; third, relation, spatial
+or otherwise. These are all terms in a series, or set of concurrent
+series. Nothing can be, practically, isolated, for everything runs in a
+series. But this is a much broader theory of continuity than that which
+Synechism affords.[75] All apparent perplexities vanish. The difficulty
+no longer exists that to perceive a series we must hold it, as it were,
+in solution. Since other than series nothing is. Hence the cosmos is
+an illimitable series or complex of series. But inasmuch as the timal
+element (as also the spatial) occurs through the series having time-term
+and space-term resident within it, all difficulty in apprehending it as
+a series vanishes. The impracticability, if any, would be in viewing any
+term as isolated.
+
+
+THE RESULT _RE_ TYCHISM.
+
+What a flood of light does such a system shed indirectly upon Tychism,
+since the controversy between the latter and determinism mainly hinges
+upon the “must be,” the imperative, as it were, of the series! It has
+been very ably pointed out by Dr. Carus in his article _re_ Mr. Peirce’s
+“Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No.
+4, pp. 573-4.) that the formula adopted by Mr. Peirce in his Tychism,
+“chance is first, law is second, the tendency of habits is third,”
+involves its author in the admission of a law in a system professing to
+be, in its inception at all events, chanceful and _lawless_. Mr. Peirce’s
+“Synechism” professes to be the law of mind. Parenthetically, however,
+it may be remarked, that the distinction as to law, and lawlessness or
+“chance,” narrows itself to the plane of one term more or less in a
+series, or _even to less than that subordinate place_. For, although,
+for convenience sake, and for facility of contrast, we have followed
+Mr. Peirce’s figure of a series, to show more clearly also to what his
+theory leads, it is nevertheless plain, that time and its accompanying
+relations being placed on their proper level, that of integral percepts
+and concepts, the figure of a series is simply a matter of convenience
+of arrangement. Certainly as the “time when” is necessarily annexed to
+every percept and concept the timal element may be said to follow, not
+to precede, its fellow-term. Really, however, they may be said to be
+simultaneous, since the timal refinements of finite, infinite, past,
+present, and future are each of them contained in a percept of its own.
+
+
+EXTERNALITY A SERIAL TERM.
+
+But if the timal element be independent as a separate percept, the
+spatial as another, and so on, it follows that, although the terms of the
+series may, as it were, _run_, though we cannot conceive them separated,
+or as, in practice, otherwise than as continuous in their flow, still,
+theoretically, a series or complex of series it _is_, and a series may
+be interrupted at any term. Thus externality itself being a spatial
+relation, is but _one term more_, non-essential in theory, to the term
+preceding. So that when the Neo-Kantians speak of the “constitution of
+the objective” it ought to be added that it is not only the content
+of the objective which is thus constituted by consciousness, but that
+externality, all that goes to make up what is termed “out-sidedness,” is
+constituted by consciousness also.
+
+
+THE NOW-TIME.
+
+“_The present is half past, and half to come_,” (p. 546) like the color
+of a curved boundary line on a particolored surface; i. e. “betwixt
+and between” the two. It is here that the theory of Synechism shows
+its chief defect. Up to this stage we have been dealing with ideas,
+feelings, _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_ ... successively passing through a point
+of consciousness _e_. And the infinitesimal notation suits the required
+process fairly well. It is complicated enough, but it is ingenious, and
+at least plausible. Nothing up to this stage would lead us to suppose
+that any additional element was to be imported into the _rationale_ which
+Mr. Peirce presents. As we have seen, finite time would not serve his
+purpose. By however minute a _finite_ interval have _a_, _b_, _c_ or _d_
+passed the point _e_, all chance of their recovery is hopeless. Well, we
+have recourse to infinitesimals, and find (to put it popularly, and not
+in Mr. Peirce’s technical terms) that _a_ past the point of consciousness
+by an infinitesimal interval heralds _b_. So that _e_ is simultaneously
+confronted with the disappearing form of the first and the appearing
+form of the second, and the same with _b_, and _c_, in turn, and so on.
+Thus the present, in the sense of ideas successively passing through
+consciousness, is half _a_ and half _b_, then half _b_ and half _c_, this
+infinitesimal gradation ultimately ensuring the presence of the whole
+series in the last “moment.”
+
+But this will not avail with the concept time itself as distinguished
+from timed succession. That these two are separate with Mr. Peirce it is
+impossible to doubt. He says, e. g., “Time with its continuity logically
+involves some other kind of continuity than its own,” (p. 547) and
+speaks of “time and its flow,” and of “time as the universal form of
+change.” And it is confusing, to say the least, when we are shifted
+without warning from what is practically the perceptual to the conceptual
+region. Granted the ideas, the feelings, or what not, “gliding almost
+imperceptibly” (as did the late Mr. Bardell to another sphere) past the
+central point of consciousness, yet not wholly past, only going, less
+past than any assignable past date, granted this, the assertion is not
+consequently warranted that time itself, the _present_, as time, not
+as involving the succession of ideas, is “half past and half to come.”
+The ideas, the feelings, of which Mr. Peirce writes, successively pass
+through the stage of being thus half past and half to come, but that
+is by no means the same thing as saying that the present is half past,
+half to come, as Synechism avers. With our theory, as presented in the
+foregoing pages there is indeed no such difficulty, but Mr. Peirce, on
+the other hand, has elected to stand by infinitesimally measuring time,
+as applied to ideas etc., as separate from conceptual time, and must take
+the consequences of his decision. He says _the present, not the present
+idea_.
+
+Now, in the concept time as a whole, in its entire range, a definite
+point may be selected—to the exclusion of other points—a point having
+position but not extension, as _the present_. Is it, then,—the
+present,—half past, half to come, as a timed idea is? Certainly not.
+There is nothing of the flow of a series in it. Further, this selection
+of the “now,” as a point, does not interfere with its permanence.
+“Nowness” may persist. And the moment it partook, even infinitesimally,
+of the character of the past or of the future, it would cease to be the
+present. In the case of a series of ideas in time the difficulty is to
+get them all in present solution, as it were, without detriment to their
+evident continuity, but the definition of the present as a point in time
+presents no such difficulty. The conditions are quite distinct. Yet
+regarding this time point—the present—Mr. Peirce assures us that it is
+“half past, half to come,” which is just that of which it is the precise
+negation, if words are to have any meaning.
+
+Again, Mr. Peirce’s _rationale_ shows, upon the face of it, that there
+is (1) finitely divisible time and, (2) time divided infinitesimally,
+for what finite time could not do, in that it had limitations,
+the infinitesimal notation readily accomplishes. In its ulterior
+consequences, this is somewhat unfortunate for Synechism, inasmuch as the
+consciousness of ideas in continuity being confined to the infinitesimal
+theory, where, it may be asked, is the place, in consciousness, for
+the succession of finite intervals? Consciousness must be practically
+doubled, so to speak, if it is to hold both of these together. This
+is what comes of making one’s world-scheme hang upon a mathematical
+subtlety—the subtlety in question partaking as a rule, more or less of
+the nature of an escape from the difficulties of the vulgar notation, the
+vulgar notation remains to be reckoned with, and both have to be credited
+to consciousness. As an instance of this take the following from Mr.
+Peirce’s late article,[76] “Man’s Glassy Essence”—p. 15:
+
+    “In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and
+    firmly assimilated into a broken molecule of protoplasm,
+    it is necessary not only that it should have precisely the
+    right chemical composition, but also that it should be at
+    precisely the right spot _at the right time_ and should be
+    moving in precisely the right direction with precisely the
+    right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled, ...
+    it will be in special danger of being thrown out again” (The
+    italics are not in the original).
+
+Now here is a “time when” which can be exactly specified in accordance
+with the conditions. Certain results follow unless it is kept to.
+This is what Mr. Peirce would doubtless consider as a timed physical
+event, part and parcel of the regularity of matter, and yet an event
+which, in its own time and way, goes to account for both feeling and
+habit-taking—capable, therefore, of being stated in terms of finite
+time, as happening at a given instant, and neither before nor after it.
+But when this same molecule is, by virtue of keeping its appointment
+punctually, safely installed in feeling protoplasm, the succession of
+ideas, or feelings, of which, as subject, it is capable, obeys another
+rule—a given _instant_ obtains no longer; it is the _moment_ which is
+everything[77]—a moment half its predecessor, half its successor. Even
+granted the function of the infinitesimal, this looks very much like a
+reduction to absurdity. For, if the above mentioned timed coalescence
+of the sub-molecule with the broken molecule were _also_ a matter of
+subjective feeling, passed as process through a consciousness, the
+conclusion follows that the juncture of the molecules happens at two
+different times! There is no escape from this. Given the _instant_ in
+the one case, the _moment_ in the other, these two cannot possibly be
+the same point in time. The moment partakes, however insensibly, of the
+preceding and succeeding stages, the instant does not. Hence they are not
+the same but different times.
+
+
+OTHERNESS.
+
+The foregoing has a distinct bearing upon the question of “other selves”
+of which Mr. Peirce writes as follows:
+
+    “The recognition by one person of another’s personality takes
+    place by means to some extent identical with the means by which
+    he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second
+    personality, which is as much as to say that second personality
+    itself, enters within the field of direct consciousness of
+    the first person, and is as immediately perceived as his ego,
+    though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between
+    the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the
+    second is recognised.” (“The Law of Mind,” p. 558.)
+
+This is the scheme of “otherness” which, in the case of the Neo-Kantians,
+particularly the French section, represented by M. Pillon, M. Renouvier,
+and others, has proved such a snare. To these thinkers, (as indeed to
+the late Prof. T. H. Green, of Oxford, though in a less degree,) the
+so-called external world lies in “other” thinking subjects—in “foreign
+centres of representations.” The free-trade doctrine has verily
+penetrated to the philosophic region—the wholesale admission of foreign
+wares to the detriment of home products. Why should I place the content
+of that so-called external world, which, external or internal, is my
+very own inalienably, in a centre of representation other than my own,
+thus making my cognition of it rest entirely upon the “ejective” plane?
+It is only when I discover, as I must sooner or later, that there is
+nothing in the report of an “outsider” (or in any number of them) beyond
+what I credit him or her with in my own consciousness; and that the
+outsider is on the same plane as other objects, it is only then that
+the mystification is cleared up. I do _not_ cognise, or recognise, the
+external at second-hand. The “note” of otherness is simply another term
+more or less in the cosmical series.
+
+It is, however, not only with the familiar “other selves” of ordinary
+life that we are confronted in Synechism. In the creed of animism
+
+    “Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,”
+
+and Mr. Peirce speaks of “spiritual influences” (p. 559) as having at
+least no hindrance presented to them by his doctrine. But he has some
+other shadowy personalities at command, which, it must be confessed, are
+well calculated to give us pause. “There should be something like[78]
+personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely
+sympathetic communion.... None of us can fully realise which the minds
+of corporations are.... But the law of mind clearly points to the
+existence of such personalities.” It is probably true that the “minds of
+corporations,” must ever present an insoluble riddle of perversity to the
+suburban dweller, vexed with the mockery of paving and lighting. But we
+need not linger over this speculation, for there are other shades behind.
+
+    “If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere it
+    should be in the Church.... Surely a personality ought to have
+    developed in that Church, in that ‘bride of Christ,’ as they
+    call it.” (“Man’s Glassy Essence,” pp. 21-22.)
+
+
+A PERSONAL CREATOR.
+
+Bearing our ecclesiastical divisions in mind, it is difficult to conceive
+the unity of a “corporate personality” of this kind, but, to let that
+pass, it may be remarked that, when any one begins to imagine that there
+are others in the universe besides himself, he is not, as a rule, content
+with two or three companions of his solitude. They come in battalions.
+Thus, behind the other selves, corporate personalities and spiritual
+influences of Synechism, there looms a transcendent personality. “A
+genuine evolutionary philosophy,” we are told, “... is so far from being
+antagonistic to the idea of a personal Creator, that it is really
+inseparable from that idea.” And a philosophy of pseudo-evolutionism is
+“hostile to all hopes of personal relations to God.” (“The Law of Mind,”
+p. 557.)
+
+Mr. Peirce thus assigns to his first cause a place in the _continuum_ of
+ideas, and says that if there is a personal God we must have a direct
+perception of that person and “indeed be in personal communication
+with him.” The difficulty, he admits, is that if this be so, how is it
+possible that the existence of this being should ever have been doubted
+by anybody. And the only answer he can at present make is, that “facts
+that stand before our face and eyes, and stare us in the face, are
+far from being in all cases the ones most easily discerned. That,” he
+adds, “has been remarked from time immemorial.” (“The Law of Mind,” pp.
+558-559.)
+
+One of the ablest of living philosophical writers, Professor Veitch,
+of Glasgow University, puts it somewhat similarly, though with his own
+realistic coloring, when he says:
+
+    “God, if at all, must rise above the line of finite regress; He
+    cannot be a cause in that; He cannot be a cause dependent on
+    another cause; He must be somewhere, or at some point, in the
+    line of an otherwise endless scientific regress, there, above
+    it, yet related to it, and in it; otherwise He is nothing for
+    us.” (“Knowing and Being,” p. 320.)
+
+The parallelism is worth noting. Those views embody what has been the
+contention of the present writer throughout this paper, _with this most
+notable difference_: that no term of a series may thus transcend the
+series, or be other than on a level with the other terms, being itself
+only a term, a link, in the series itself. And with this falls forever
+the idea of a cause uncaused.
+
+Yet am _I_ not _in_ the series? For all that is in the series is
+mine every percept, every concept; so that, “extravagant” as it may
+appear, it is _I who am the series_. In other words, the ego is the
+universe-synthesis, and the universe-synthesis the ego.
+
+Is Mr. Peirce prepared to take the consequences of that which his
+Synechism leads to?
+
+                                                             G. M. MCCRIE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[67] From τύχη, chance.
+
+[68] _Tychism_ again comes to the front in the succeeding number of _The
+Monist_, (Vol. III, No. 1,) in an article by Mr. Peirce, entitled “Man’s
+Glassy Essence.”
+
+[69] Dr. Carus, in his review of Mr. Peirce’s doctrines, (_The Monist_,
+Vol. II, No. 4, p. 575,) notes this positivistic-constructionism.
+
+[70] Cf. T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Ch. II, p. 63.
+
+[71] Nos. 258, 59, 61, August, 1892. _Miss Naden’s World-Scheme._
+
+[72] In a note to this passage was appended a quotation from a pamphlet
+by Dr. E. Cobham Brewer as a practical instance of the objective being,
+on the antiquated subject-object plane, actually superseded. Suppose a
+very remote star to become extinct, the “vibrations” would continue to
+“travel” towards a spectator situated on our planet for years, it may
+be for centuries. So that the spectator, ultimately, “sees” that which
+does not even exist. Dr. Brewer’s comment, which cannot be considered any
+contribution to a satisfactory _rationale_, is: “the objects, however,
+must have existed, or no messenger could have been sent from their
+courts.” Evidently, in this case, that which is sent is, at least, as
+good as the sender—is, in fact, the self-same thing. Only, in that case,
+what of the extinct object?
+
+[73] Or to put it in another form, any one idea, and the timing of this
+idea are really two ideas, although, as we shall see later, they may be
+inseparable in practice.
+
+[74] Cf., in this connection, the results of experiments by Cheselden,
+as far back as 1727 on congenitally blind persons, couched for double
+cataract.
+
+[75] Much more inclusive, also, than the Relational Theory of the
+Neo-Kantians.
+
+[76] _The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1.
+
+[77] Mr. Peirce uses the word “instant” to mean a point of time, and
+“moment” to mean an infinitesimal duration.
+
+[78] The phrase, “something like,” is significant, when we remember, (see
+_ante_,) that with Mr. Peirce the excitants were “something like” the
+excited feelings.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOURTH DIMENSION.
+
+MATHEMATICAL AND SPIRITUALISTIC.
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY.
+
+The tendency to generalise long ago led mathematicians to extend the
+notion of three-dimensional space, which is the space of sensible
+representation, and to define aggregates of points, or spaces, of more
+than three dimensions, with the view of employing these definitions as
+useful means of investigation. They had no idea of requiring people to
+imagine four-dimensional things and worlds, and they were even still
+less remote from requiring of them to believe in the real existence of
+a four-dimensioned space. In the hands of mathematicians this extension
+of the notion of space was a mere means devised for the discovery and
+expression, by shorter and more convenient ways, of truths applicable to
+common geometry and to algebra operating with more than three unknown
+quantities. At this stage, however, the spiritualists came in, and coolly
+took possession of this private property of the mathematicians. They
+were in great perplexity as to where they should put the spirits of the
+dead. To give them a place in the world accessible to our senses was not
+exactly practicable. They were compelled, therefore, to look around after
+some _terra incognita_, which should oppose to the spirit of research
+inborn in humanity an insuperable barrier. The residence of the spirits
+had to be a place inaccessible to our senses and full of mystery to the
+mind. This property the four-dimensioned space of the mathematicians
+possessed. With an intellectual perversity which science has no idea of,
+these spiritualists boldly asserted, first, that the whole world was so
+situated in a four-dimensioned space as a plane might be situated in
+the space familiar to us, secondly, that the spirits of the dead lived
+in such a four-dimensioned space, thirdly, that these spirits could
+accordingly act upon the world and, consequently, upon the human beings
+resident in it, exactly as we three-dimensioned creatures can produce
+effects upon things that are two-dimensional; for example, such effects
+as that produced when we shatter a lamina of ice, and so influence some
+possibly existing two-dimensioned _ice_-world.
+
+Since spiritualism, under the leadership of the Leipsic Professor
+Zöllner, thus proclaimed the existence of a four-dimensioned space, this
+notion, which the mathematicians are thoroughly master of,—for in all
+their operations with it, though they have forsaken the path of actual
+representability, they have never left that of the truth,—this notion
+has also passed into the heads of lay persons who have used it as a
+catchword, ordinarily without having any clear idea of what they or any
+one else mean by it. To clear up such ideas and to correct the wrong
+impressions of cultured people who have not a technical mathematical
+training, is the purpose of the following pages. A similar elucidation
+was aimed at in the tracts which Schlegel (Riemann, Berlin, 1888) and
+Cranz (Virchow-Holtzendorff’s Sammlung, Nos. 112 and 113) have published
+on the so-called fourth dimension. Both treatises possess indubitable
+merits, but their methods of presentation are in many respects too
+concise to give a lay mind any profound comprehension of the subject. The
+author, accordingly, has been able to add to the reflections which these
+excellent treatises offer, a great deal that appears to him necessary for
+a thorough explanation in the minds of non-mathematicians of the notion
+of the fourth dimension.
+
+
+I.
+
+THE CONCEPT OF DIMENSION.
+
+Many text-books of stereometry begin with the words: “Every body has
+three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness.” If we should ask the
+author of a book of this description to tell us the length, breadth, and
+thickness of an apple, of a sponge, or of a cloud of tobacco smoke, he
+would be somewhat perplexed and would probably say, that the definition
+in question referred to something different. A cubical box, or some
+similar structure, whose angles are all right angles and whose bounding
+surfaces are consequently all rectangles is the only body of which it can
+at all be unmistakably asserted that there are three principal directions
+distinguishable in it, of which any one can be called the length, any
+other the breadth, and any third the thickness. We thus see that the
+notions of length, breadth, and thickness are not sufficiently clear and
+universal to enable us to derive from them any idea of what is meant when
+it is said that every body possesses three dimensions, or that the space
+of the world is three-dimensional.
+
+This distinction may be made sharper and more evident by the following
+considerations: We have, let us suppose, a straight line on which a
+point is situated, and the problem is proposed to determine the position
+of the point on the line in an unequivocal manner. The simplest way to
+solve this is, to state how far the point is removed in the one or the
+other direction from some given fixed point; just as in a thermometer
+the position of the surface of the mercury is given by a statement of
+its distance in the direction of cold or heat from a predetermined fixed
+point—the point of freezing water. To state, therefore, the position
+of a point on a straight line, the sole datum necessary is a single
+number, for beforehand we have fixed upon some standard line, like the
+centimetre, and some definite point to which we give the value zero,
+and have also previously decided in what direction from the zero-point,
+points must be situated whose position is expressed by positive numbers,
+and also in what direction those must lie whose position is expressed by
+negative numbers. This last mentioned fact, that a _single_ number is
+sufficient to determine the place of a point in a straight line, is the
+real reason why we attribute to the straight line or to any part of it a
+single dimension.
+
+More generally, we call every totality or system, of infinitely numerous
+things, _one_-dimensional, in which _one_ number is all that is requisite
+to determine and distinguish any particular one of these things amidst
+the entire totality. Thus, time is one-dimensional. We, as inhabitants
+of the earth, have naturally chosen as our unit of time, the period of
+the rotation of the earth about its axis, namely, the day, or a definite
+portion of a day. The zero-point of time is regarded in Christian
+countries as the year of the birth of Christ, and the positive direction
+of time is the time _subsequent_ to the birth of Christ. These data
+fixed, all that is necessary to establish and distinguish any definite
+point of time amid the infinite totality of all the points of time, _is
+a single number_. Of course this number need not be a whole number, but
+may be made up of the sum of a whole number and a fraction in whose
+numerator and denominator we may have numbers as great as we please. We
+may, therefore, also say that the totality of all conceivable numerical
+magnitudes, or of only such as are greater than one definite number and
+smaller than some other definite number, is one-dimensional.
+
+We shall add here a few additional examples of one-dimensioned magnitudes
+presented by geometry. First, the circumference of a circle is a
+one-dimensional magnitude, as is every curved line, whether it returns
+into itself or not. Further, the totality of all equilateral triangles
+which stand on the same base is one-dimensional, or the totality of
+all circles that can be described through two fixed points. Also, the
+totality of all conceivable cubes will be seen to be one-dimensional,
+provided they are distinguished, not with respect to position, but with
+respect to magnitude.
+
+In conformity with the fundamental ideas by which we define the notion
+of a one-dimensional manifoldness, it will be seen that the attribute
+_two_-dimensional must be applied to all totalities of things in
+which _two_ numbers are necessary (and sufficient) to distinguish
+any determinate individual thing amid the totality. The simplest
+two-dimensioned complex which we know of is the plane. To determine
+accurately the position of a point in a plane, the simplest way is to
+take two axes at right angles to each other, that is, fixed straight
+lines, and then to specify the distances by which the point in question
+is removed from each of these axes.
+
+This method of determining the position of a point in a plane suggested
+to the celebrated philosopher and mathematician Descartes the fundamental
+idea of analytical geometry, a branch of mathematics in which by the
+simple artifice of ascribing to every point in a plane two numerical
+values, determined by its distances from the two axes above referred
+to, planimetrical considerations are transformed into algebraical. So,
+too, all kinds of curves that graphically represent the dependence of
+things on time, make use of the fact that the totality of the points in
+a plane is two-dimensional. For example, to represent in a graphical
+form the increase of the population of a city, we take a horizontal axis
+to represent the time, and a perpendicular one to represent the numbers
+which are the measures of the population. Any two lines, then, whose
+lengths practical considerations determine, are taken as the unit of
+time, which we may say is a year, and as the unit of population, which
+we will say is one thousand. Some definite year, say 1850, is fixed
+upon as the zero point. Then, from all the equally distant points on
+the horizontal axis, which points stand for the years, we proceed in
+directions parallel to the other axis, that is, in the perpendicular
+direction, just so much upwards as the numbers which stand for the
+population of that year require. The terminal points so reached, or the
+curve which runs through these terminal points, will then present a
+graphic picture of the rates of increase of the population of the town
+in the different years. The rectangular axes of Descartes are employed
+in a similar way for the construction of barometer curves, which specify
+for the different localities of a country the amount of variation of the
+atmospheric pressure during any period of time. Immediately next to the
+plane the surface of the earth will be recognised as a two-dimensional
+aggregate of points. In this case geographical latitude and longitude
+supply the two numbers that are requisite accurately to determine the
+position of a point. Also, the totality of all the possible straight
+lines that can be drawn through any point in space is two-dimensional, as
+we shall best understand if we picture to ourselves a plane which is cut
+in a point by each of these straight lines and then remember that by such
+a construction every point on the plane will belong to some one line and,
+_vice versa_, a line to every point, whence it follows that the totality
+of all the straight lines which pass through the point assigned are of
+the same dimensions as the totality of the points of the imagined plane.
+
+The question might be asked, In what way and to what extent in this
+case is the specification of _two_ numbers requisite and sufficient
+to determine amid all the rays which pass through the specified point
+a definite individual ray? To get a clear idea of the problem here
+involved, let us imagine the ray produced far into the heavens, where
+some quite definite point will correspond to it. Now, the position of
+a point in the heavens depends, as does the position of a point on all
+spherical surfaces, on two numbers. In the heavens these two numbers are
+ordinarily supplied by the two angles called altitude, or the distance
+above the plane of the horizon, and azimuth, or the angular distance
+between the circle on which the altitude is measured and the meridian
+of the observer. It will be seen thus that the totality of all the
+luminous rays that an eye, conceived as a point, can receive from the
+outer world is two-dimensional, and also that a luminous point emits
+a two-dimensional group of luminous rays. It will also be observed,
+in connection with this example, that the two-dimensional totality of
+all the rays that can be drawn through a point in space is something
+different from the totality of the rays that pass through a point but
+are required to lie in a given plane. Such a group of objects as the
+last-named one, is a one-dimensional totality.
+
+Now that we have sufficiently discussed the attributes that are
+characteristic of one and two-dimensional aggregates, we may, without any
+further investigation of the subject, propose the following definition,
+that, generally, _an n-dimensional totality of infinitely numerous
+things is such, with respect to which the specification of n numbers
+is necessary and sufficient to indicate a definite individual amid the
+totality of all the infinitely numerous individuals of the group_.
+
+Accordingly, the point-aggregate made up of the world-space which we
+inhabit, is a three-dimensional totality. To get true bearings in this
+space and to define any determinate point in it, we have therefore to lay
+through any point which we take as our zero-point three axes at right
+angles to each other, one running from right to left, one backwards
+and forwards, and one upwards and downwards. We then join each two of
+these axes by a plane and are enabled thus to specify the position of
+every point in space by the three perpendicular distances by which the
+point in question is removed in a positive or negative sense from
+these three planes. It is customary to denote the numbers which are the
+measures of these three distances by _x_, _y_, and _z_, the positive
+_x_, positive _y_, and positive _z_ ordinarily being reckoned in the
+right hand, the forward, and the upward directions from the origin.
+If now, with direct reference to this fundamental axial system, any
+particular specification of _x_, _y_, and _z_ be made, there will, by
+such an operation, be cut out and isolated from the three-dimensional
+manifoldness of all the points of space a totality of less dimensions.
+If, for example, _z_ is equal to seven units or measures, this is
+equivalent to a statement that only the two-dimensional totality of the
+points is meant, which constitute the plane that can be laid at right
+angles to the upward-passing _z_-axis at a distance of seven measures
+from the zero-point. Consequently, every imaginable equation between _x_,
+_y_, and _z_ isolates and defines a two-dimensional aggregate of points.
+If two different equations obtain between _x_, _y_, and _z_, two such
+two-dimensional totalities will be isolated from among all the points
+of space. But as these last must have some one-dimensional totality in
+common, we may say that the co-existence of two equations between _x_,
+_y_, and _z_ defines a one-dimensional totality of points, that is to say
+a straight line, a line curved in a plane, or even, perhaps, one curved
+in space. It is evident from this that the introduction of the three axes
+of reference forms a bridge between the theory of space and the theory of
+equations involving three variable quantities, _x_, _y_, _z_. The reason
+that the theory of space cannot thus be brought into connection with
+algebra in general, that is, with the theory of indefinitely numerous
+equations, but only with the algebra of three quantities, _x_, _y_, _z_,
+is simply to be sought in the fact that space, as we picture it, can only
+have three dimensions.
+
+We have now only to supply a few additional examples of _n_-dimensional
+totalities. All particles of air are four-dimensional in magnitude
+when in addition to their position in space we also consider the
+variable densities which they assume, as they are expressed by
+the different heights of the barometer in the different parts of
+the atmosphere. Similarly, all conceivable spheres in space are
+four-dimensional magnitudes, for their centres form a three-dimensional
+point-aggregate, and around each centre there may be additionally
+conceived a one-dimensional totality of spheres, the radii of which can
+be expressed by every numerical magnitude from zero to infinity. Further,
+if we imagine a measuring stick of invariable length to assume every
+conceivable position in space, the positions so obtained will constitute
+a five-dimensional aggregate. For, in the first place, one of the
+extremities of the measuring stick may be conceived to assume a position
+at every point of space, and this determines for one extremity alone
+of the stick a three-dimensional totality of positions; and secondly,
+as we have seen above, there proceeds from every such position of this
+extremity a two-dimensional totality of directions, and by conceiving the
+measuring-stick to be placed lengthwise in every one of these directions
+we shall obtain all the conceivable positions which the second extremity
+can assume, and consequently, the dimensions must be 3 plus 2 or 5.
+Finally, to find out how many dimensions the totality of all the possible
+positions of a square, invariable in magnitude, possesses, we first give
+one of its corners all conceivable positions in space, and we thus obtain
+three dimensions. One definite point in space now being fixed for the
+position of one corner of the square, we imagine drawn through this point
+all possible lines, and on each we lay off the length of the side of
+the square and thus obtain two additional dimensions. Through the point
+obtained for the position of the second corner of the square we must
+now conceive all the possible directions drawn that are perpendicular
+to the line thus fixed, and we must lay off once more on each of these
+directions the side of the square. By this last determination the
+dimensions are only increased by one, for only one one-dimensional
+totality of perpendicular directions is possible to one straight line
+in one of its points. Three corners of the square are now fixed and
+therewith the position of the fourth also is uniquely determined.
+Accordingly, the totality of all equal squares which only differ from one
+another by their position in space, constitutes a manifoldness of six
+dimensions.
+
+
+II.
+
+THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NOTION OF FOUR-DIMENSIONAL POINT-AGGREGATES,
+PERMISSIBLE.
+
+In the preceding section it was shown that we can conceive not only
+of manifoldnesses of one, two, and three dimensions, but also of
+manifoldnesses of _any_ number of dimensions. But it was at the same time
+indicated that our world-space, that is, the totality of all conceivable
+_points_ that differ only in respect of position, cannot in agreement
+with our notions of things possess more than three dimensions. But the
+question now arises, whether, if the progress of science tends in such
+a direction, it is permissible to extend the notion of space by the
+introduction of point-aggregates of more than three dimensions, and to
+engage in the study of the properties of such creations, although we know
+that notwithstanding the fact that we may conceptually establish and
+explore such aggregates of points, yet we cannot picture to ourselves
+these creations as we do the spatial magnitudes which surround us, that
+is, the regular three-dimensional aggregates of points.
+
+To show the reader clearly that this question must be answered in the
+affirmative, that the extension of our notion of space is permissible,
+although it leads to things which we cannot perceive by our senses,
+I may call the reader’s attention to the fact that in arithmetic
+we are accustomed from our youth upwards to extensions of ideas,
+which, accurately viewed, as little admit of graphic conception as a
+four-dimensional space, that is, a point-aggregate of four dimensions. By
+his senses man first reaches only the idea of whole numbers—the results
+of counting. The observation of primitive peoples[79] and of children
+clearly proves that the essential decisive factors of counting are these
+three: First, we abstract, in the counting of things, completely from
+the individual and characteristic attributes of these things, that is,
+we consider them as homogeneous. Second, we associate individually with
+the things which we count other homogeneous things. These other things
+are even now, among uncivilised peoples, the ten fingers of the two
+hands. They may, however, be simple strokes, or, as in the case of dice
+and dominoes, black points on a white background. Third, we substitute
+for the result of this association some concise symbol or word; for
+example, the Romans substituted for three things counted, three strokes
+placed side by side, namely: III; but for greater numbers of things
+they employed abbreviated signs. The Aztecs, the original inhabitants
+of Mexico, had time enough, it seems, to express all the numbers up to
+nineteen by equal circles placed side by side. They had abbreviated signs
+only for the numbers 20, 400, 8000, and so forth. In speaking, some one
+same sound might be associated with the things counted; but this method
+of counting is nowadays employed only by clocks: the languages of men
+since prehistoric times have fashioned concise words for the results of
+the association in question. From the notion of number, thus fixed as
+the result of counting, man reached the notion of the addition of two
+numbers, and thence the notion that is the inverse of the last process,
+the notion of subtraction. But at this point it clearly appears that
+not every problem which may be propounded is soluble; for there is no
+number which can express the result of the subtraction of a number from
+one which is equally large or from one which is smaller than itself. The
+primary school pupil who says that 8 from 5 “won’t go” is perfectly right
+from his point of view. For there really does not exist any result of
+counting which added to eight will give five.
+
+If humanity had abided by this point of view and had rested content with
+the opinion that the problem “5 minus 8” is not solvable, the science of
+arithmetic would never have received its full development, and humanity
+would not have advanced as far in civilisation as it has. Fortunately,
+men said to themselves at this crisis: “If 5 minus 8 won’t go, we’ll
+_make it go_; if 5 minus 8 does not possess an intelligible meaning, we
+will simply give it one.” As a fact, things which have not a meaning
+always afford men a pleasing opportunity of investing them with one. The
+question is, then, what significance is the problem “5 minus 8” to be
+invested with?
+
+The most natural and, therefore, the most advantageous solution
+undoubtedly is to abide by the original notion of subtraction as the
+inverse of addition, and to make the significance of 5 minus 8 such,
+that for 5 minus 8 plus 8 we shall get our original minuend 5. By such a
+method all the rules of computation which apply to real differences will
+also hold good for unreal differences, such as 5 minus 8. But it then
+clearly appears that all forms expressive of differences in which the
+number that stands before the minus direction is less by an equal amount
+than that which follows it may be regarded as equal; so that the simplest
+course seems to be to introduce as the common characteristic of all equal
+differential forms of this description a common sign, which will indicate
+at the same time the difference of the two numbers thus associated. Thus
+it came about, that for 5 minus 8, as well as for every differential form
+which can be regarded as equal thereto the sign “-3” was introduced. But
+in calling differential forms of this description numbers, the notion of
+number was extended and a new domain was opened up, namely, the domain of
+negative numbers.
+
+In the further development of the science of arithmetic, through the
+operation of division viewed as the inverse of multiplication, a second
+extension of the idea of number was reached, namely, the notion of
+fractional numbers as the outcome of divisions that had led to numbers
+hitherto undefined. We find, thus, that the science of arithmetic
+throughout its whole development has strictly adhered to the principle
+of conformity and consistency and has invested every association of
+two numbers, which before had no significance, by the introduction of
+new numbers, with a real significance, such that similar operations in
+conformity with exactly the same rules could be performed with the new
+numbers, viewed as the results of this association, as with the numbers
+which were before known and perfectly defined. Thus the science proceeded
+further on its way and reached the notions of irrational, imaginary, and
+complex numbers.
+
+The point in all this, which the reader must carefully note, is, that
+all the numbers of arithmetic, with the exception of the positive whole
+numbers, are artificial products of human thought, invented to make the
+language of arithmetic more flexible, and to accelerate the progress of
+science. All these numbers lack the attributes of representability.
+
+No man in the world can picture to himself “minus three trees.” It is
+possible, of course, to know that when three trees of a garden have been
+cut down and carried away, that three are missing, and by substituting
+for “missing” the inverse notion of “added,” we may say, perhaps, that
+“minus three trees” are added. But this is quite different from the feat
+of imagining a negative number of trees. We can only picture to ourselves
+a number of trees that results from actual counting, that is, a positive
+whole number. Yet, notwithstanding all this, people had not the slightest
+hesitation in extending the notion of number. Exactly so must it be
+permitted us in geometry to extend the notion of space, even though such
+an extension can only be mentally defined and can never be brought within
+the range of human powers of representation.
+
+In mathematics, in fact, the extension of any notion is admissible,
+provided such extension does not lead to contradictions with itself or
+with results which are well established. Whether such extensions are
+necessary, justifiable, or important for the advancement of science
+is a different question. It must be admitted, therefore, that the
+mathematician is justified in the extension of the notion of space as a
+point-aggregate of three dimensions, and in the introduction of space or
+point-aggregates of more than three dimensions, and in the employment
+of them as means of research. Other sciences also operate with things
+which they do not know exist, and which, though they are sufficiently
+defined, cannot be perceived by our senses. For example, the physicist
+employs the ether as a means of investigation, though he can have no
+sensory knowledge of it. The ether is nothing more than a means which
+enables us to comprehend mechanically the effects known as action at a
+distance and to bring them within the range of a common point of view.
+Without the assumption of a material which penetrates everything, and
+by means of whose undulations impulses are transmitted to the remotest
+parts of space, the phenomena of light, of heat, of gravitation, and of
+electricity would be a jumble of isolated and unconnected mysteries. The
+assumption of an ether, however, comprises in a systematic scheme all
+these isolated events, facilitates our mental control of the phenomena
+of nature, and enables us to produce these phenomena at will. But it
+must not be forgotten in such reflections that the ether itself is
+even a greater problem for man, and that the ether-hypothesis does not
+solve the difficulties of phenomena, but only puts them in a unitary
+conceptual shape. Notwithstanding all this, physicists have never had
+the least hesitation in employing the ether as a means of investigation.
+And as little do reasons exist why the mathematicians should hesitate to
+investigate the properties of a four-dimensioned point-aggregate, with
+the view of acquiring thus a convenient means of research.
+
+
+III.
+
+THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IDEA OF FOUR-DIMENSIONED POINT-AGGREGATES OF
+SERVICE TO RESEARCH.
+
+From the concession that the mathematician has the right to define
+and investigate the properties of point-aggregates of more than three
+dimensions, it does not necessarily follow that the introduction of an
+idea of this description is of value to science. Thus, for example, in
+arithmetic, the introduction of operations which spring from involution,
+as involution and its two inverse operations proceed from multiplication,
+is undoubtedly permitted. Just as for “_a_ times _a_ times _a_” we write
+the abbreviated symbol “_a_³,” (which we read, _a_ to the third power,)
+and investigate in detail the operation of involution thus defined, so we
+might also introduce some shorthand symbol for “_a_ to the _a_ᵗʰ power to
+the _a_ᵗʰ power” and thus reach an operation of the fourth degree, which
+would regard _a_ as a passive number and the number 3, or any higher
+number, as the active number, that is, as the number which indicates how
+often _a_ is taken as the base of a power whose exponent may be _a_, or
+“_a_ to the _a_ᵗʰ,” or “_a_ to the _a_ᵗʰ to the _a_ᵗʰ power.”
+
+But the introduction of such an operation of the fourth degree has proved
+itself to be of no especial value to mathematics. And the reason is that
+in the operation of involution the law of commutation does not hold
+good. In addition, the numbers to be added may be interchanged and the
+introduction of multiplication is therefore of great value. So, also,
+in multiplication the numbers which are combined, that is, the factors,
+may be changed about in any way, and thus the introduction of involution
+is of value. But in involution the base and the exponent cannot be
+interchanged, and consequently the introduction of any higher operation
+is almost valueless.
+
+But with the introduction of the idea of point-aggregates of multiple
+dimensions the case is wholly different. The innovation in question
+has proved itself to be not only of great importance to research, but
+the progress of science has irresistibly forced investigators to the
+introduction of this idea, as we shall now set forth in detail.
+
+In the first place, algebra, especially the algebraical theory of
+systems of equations, derives much advantage from the notion of multiple
+dimensioned spaces. If we have only three unknown quantities, _x_, _y_,
+_z_, the algebraical questions which arise from the possible problems of
+this class admit, as we have above seen, of geometrical representation
+to the eye. Owing to this possibility of geometrical representation,
+some certain simple geometrical ideas like “moving,” “lying in,”
+“intersecting,” and so forth, may be translated into algebraical
+events. Now, no reason exists why algebra should stop at three variable
+quantities; it must in fact take into consideration any number of
+variable quantities.
+
+For purposes of brevity and greater evidentness, therefore, it is quite
+natural to employ geometrical forms of speech in the consideration of
+more than three variables. But when we do this, we assume, perhaps
+without really intending to do so, the idea of a space of more than
+three dimensions. If we have four variable quantities, _x_, _y_,
+_z_, _u_, we arrive, by conceiving attributed to each of these four
+quantities every possible numerical magnitude, at a four-dimensioned
+manifoldness of numerical quantities, which we may just as well regard as
+a four-dimensioned aggregate of points. Two equations which exist on this
+supposition between _x_, _y_, _z_, and _u_, define two three-dimensioned
+aggregates of points, which intersect, as we may briefly say, in a
+two-dimensioned aggregate of points, that is, in a surface; and so on.
+In a somewhat different manner the determination of the contents of a
+square or a cube by the involution of a number which stands for the
+length of its sides, leads to the notion of four-dimensioned structures,
+and, consequently, to the notion of a four-dimensioned point-space. When
+we note that _a_² stands for the contents of a square, and _a_³ for
+the contents of a cube, we naturally inquire after the contents of a
+structure which is produced from the cube as the cube is produced from
+the square and which also will have the contents _a_⁴. We cannot, it
+is true, clearly picture to ourselves a structure of this description,
+but we can, nevertheless, establish its properties with mathematical
+exactness.[80] It is bounded by 8 cubes just as the cube is bounded by 6
+squares; it has 16 corners, 24 squares, and 32 edges, so that from every
+corner 4 edges, 6 squares, and 4 cubes proceed, and from every edge 3
+squares and 3 cubes.
+
+Yet despite the great service to algebra of this idea of
+multiple-dimensioned space, it must be conceded that the conception
+although convenient is yet not indispensable. It is true, algebra is in
+need of the idea of multiple dimensions, but it is not so absolutely in
+need of the idea of _point_-aggregates of multiple dimensions.
+
+This notion is, however, necessary and serviceable for a profound
+comprehension of geometry. The system of geometrical knowledge which
+Euclid of Alexandria created about three hundred years before Christ,
+supplied during a period of more than two thousand years a brilliant
+example of a body of conclusions and truths which were mutually
+consistent and logical. Up to the present century the idea of elementary
+geometry was indissolubly bound up with the name of Euclid, so that in
+England where people adhered longest to the rigid deductive system of
+the Grecian mathematician, the task of “learning geometry” and “reading
+Euclid” were until a few years ago identical. Every proposition of this
+Euclidian system rests on other propositions, as one building-stone in a
+house rests upon another. Only the very lowest stones, the foundations,
+were without supports. These are the axioms or fundamental propositions,
+truths on which all other truths are, directly or indirectly, founded,
+but which themselves are assumed without demonstration as self-evident.
+
+But the spirit of mathematical research grew in time more and more
+critical, and finally asked, whether these axioms might not possibly
+admit of demonstration. Especially was a rigid proof sought for the
+eleventh axiom of Euclid, which treats of parallels.
+
+After centuries of fruitless attempts to prove Euclid’s eleventh axiom,
+Gauss, and with him Bolyai and Lobatschewsky, Riemann and Helmholtz,
+finally stated the decisive reasons why any attempt to prove the axiom
+of the parallels must necessarily be futile. These reasons consist of
+the fact that though this axiom holds good enough in the world-space
+such as we do and can conceive it, yet three-dimensioned spaces are
+ideally conceivable though not capable of mental representation, where
+the axiom does not hold good. The axiom was thus shown to be a mere
+fact of _observation_, and from that time on there could no longer be
+any thought of a deductive demonstration of it. In view of the intimate
+connection, which both in an historical and epistemological point of view
+exists between the extension of the concept of space and the critical
+examination of the axioms of Euclid, we must enter at somewhat greater
+length into the discussion of the last mentioned propositions.
+
+Of the axioms which Euclid premises to his geometry, only the following
+three are really geometrical axioms:
+
+_Eighth axiom_: Magnitudes which coincide with one another are equal to
+one another.
+
+_Eleventh axiom_: If a straight line meet two straight lines so as to
+make the two interior angles on the same side of it taken together less
+than two right angles, these straight lines, being continually produced,
+shall at length meet on that side on which are the angles which are less
+than two right angles.
+
+_Twelfth axiom_: Two straight lines cannot inclose a [finite] space.
+
+The numerous proofs which in the course of time were adduced in
+demonstration of these axioms, especially of the eleventh, all turn out
+on close examination to be pseudo-proofs. Legendre drew attention to the
+fact that either of the following axioms might be substituted for the
+eleventh:
+
+_a_) Through a point there can be drawn to a straight line, within the
+plane which joins the point with the line, one and one line only which
+shall not intersect the first (parallels) however far the two lines may
+be produced;
+
+_b_) If two parallel lines are cut by a third straight line, the interior
+alternate angles will be equal.
+
+_c_) The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles,
+that is, to the angle of a straight line or 180°.
+
+By the aid of any one of these three assertions, the eleventh axiom of
+Euclid may be proved, and, _vice versa_, by the aid of the latter each
+of the three assertions may be proved, of course with the help of the
+other two axioms, eight and twelve. The perception that the eleventh
+axiom does not admit of demonstration without the employment of one of
+the foregoing substitutes may best be gained from the consideration of
+congruent figures. Every reader will remember from his first instruction
+in geometry that the congruence of two triangles is demonstrated by the
+superposition of one triangle on the other and by then ascertaining
+whether the two completely coincide, no assumptions being made in the
+determination except those above mentioned.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
+
+In the case of triangles which are congruent as are I and II in
+the preceding cut, this coincidence may be effected by the simple
+_displacement_ of one of the triangles; so that even a two-dimensional
+being, supposed to be endowed with powers of reasoning, but only capable
+of picturing to itself motions within a plane, also might convince itself
+that the two triangles I and II could be made to coincide. But a being
+of this description could not convince itself in like manner of the
+congruence of triangles I and III. It would discover the equality of
+the three sides and the three angles, but it could never succeed in so
+superposing the two triangles on each other as to make them coincide. A
+three-dimensioned being, however, can do this very easily. It has simply
+to turn triangle I about one of its sides and to shove the triangle,
+thus brought into the position of its reflection in a mirror, into the
+position of triangle III. Similarly, triangles II and III may be made to
+coincide by moving either out of the plane of the paper around one of
+its sides as axis and turning it until it again falls in the plane of
+the paper. The triangle thus turned over can then be brought into the
+position of the other.
+
+Later on we shall revert to these two kinds of congruence: “congruence
+by displacement” and “congruence by circumversion.” For the present we
+will start from the fact that it is always possible within the limits of
+a plane to take a triangle out of one position and bring it into another
+without altering its sides and angles. The question is, whether this
+is only possible in the plane, or whether it can also be done on other
+surfaces.
+
+We find that there are certain surfaces in which this is possible, and
+certain others in which it is not. For instance, it is impossible to move
+the triangle drawn on the surface of an egg into some other position on
+the egg’s surface without a distension or contraction of some of the
+triangle’s parts. On the other hand, it is quite possible to move the
+triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere into any other position on the
+sphere’s surface without a distension or contraction of its parts. The
+mathematical reason of this fact is, that the surface of a sphere, like
+the plane, has everywhere the same curvature, but that the surface of an
+egg at different places has different curvatures. Of a plane we say that
+it has everywhere the curvature zero; of the surface of a sphere we say
+it has everywhere a positive curvature, which is greater in proportion
+as the radius is smaller. There are surfaces also which have a constant
+negative curvature; these surfaces exhibit at every point in directions
+proceeding from the same side a partly concave and a partly convex
+structure, somewhat like the centre of a saddle. There is no necessity
+of our entering in any detail into the character and structure of the
+last-mentioned surfaces.
+
+Intimately related with the plane, however, are all those surfaces,
+which, like the plane, have the curvature zero; in this category belong
+especially cylindrical surfaces and conical surfaces. A sheet of paper
+of the form of the sector of a circle may, for example, be readily bent
+into the shape of a conical surface. If two congruent triangles, now,
+be drawn on the sheet of paper, which may by displacement be translated
+the one into the other, these triangles will, it is plain, also remain
+congruent on the conical surface; that is, on the conical surface also
+we may displace the one into the other; for though a bending of the
+figures will take place, there will be no distension or contraction.
+Similarly, there are surfaces which, like the sphere, have everywhere a
+constant positive curvature. On such surfaces also every figure can be
+transferred into some other position without distension or contraction
+of its parts. Accordingly, on all surfaces thus related to the plane or
+sphere, the assumption which underlies the eighth axiom of Euclid, that
+it is possible to transfer into any new position any figure drawn on such
+surfaces without distortion, holds good.
+
+The eleventh axiom in its turn also holds good on all surfaces of
+constant curvature, whether the curvature be zero or positive; only in
+such instances instead of “straight” line we must say “shortest” line. On
+the surface of a sphere, namely, two shortest lines, that is, arcs of two
+great circles, always intersect, no matter whether they are produced in
+the direction of the side at which the third arc of a great circle makes
+with them angles less than two right angles, or, in the direction of the
+other side, where this arc makes with them angles of more than two right
+angles. On the plane, however, two straight lines intersect only on the
+side where a third straight line that meets them makes with them interior
+angles less than two right angles.
+
+The twelfth axiom of Euclid, finally, only holds good on the plane and
+on the surfaces related to it, but not on the sphere or other surfaces
+which, like the sphere, have a constant positive curvature. This also
+accounts for the fact that one of the three postulates which we regarded
+as substitutes for the eleventh axiom, though valid for the plane, is not
+true for the surface of a sphere; namely, the postulate that defines
+the sum of the angles of a triangle. This sum in a plane triangle is two
+right angles; in a spherical triangle it is more than two right angles,
+the spherical triangle being greater, the greater the excess the sum
+of its angles is above two right angles. It will be seen, from these
+considerations, that in geometries in which curved surfaces and not fixed
+planes are studied, the axioms of Euclid are either all or partially
+false.
+
+The axioms of geometry thus having been revealed as facts of experience,
+the question suggested itself whether in the same way in which it was
+shown that different two-dimensional geometries were possible, also
+different three-dimensional systems of geometry might not be developed;
+and consequently what the relations were in which these might stand to
+the geometry of the space given by our senses and representable to our
+mind. As a fact, a three-dimensional geometry can be developed, which
+like the geometry of the surface of an egg will exclude the axiom that a
+figure or body can be transferred from any one part of space to any other
+and yet remain congruent to itself. Of a three-dimensional space in which
+such a geometry can be developed we say, that it has no constant measure
+of curvature.
+
+The space which is representable to us, and which we shall henceforth
+call the _space of experience_, possesses, as our experiences without
+exception confirm, the especial property that every bodily thing can be
+transferred from any one part of it to any other without suffering in the
+transference any distension or any contraction. The space of experience,
+therefore, has a constant measure of curvature. The question, however,
+whether this measure of curvature is zero or positive, that is, whether
+the space of experience possesses the properties which in two-dimensioned
+structures a plane possesses, or whether it is the three-dimensioned
+analogon of the surface of a sphere is one which future experience alone
+can answer. If the space of experience has a constant positive measure
+of curvature which is different from zero, be the difference ever so
+slight, a point which should move forever onward in a straight line, or,
+more accurately expressed, in a shortest line, would sometime, though
+perhaps after having traversed a distance which to us is inconceivable,
+ultimately have to arrive from the opposite direction at the place from
+which it set out, just as a point which moves forever onward in the
+same direction on the surface of a sphere must ultimately arrive at its
+starting point, the distance it traverses being longer the greater the
+radius of the sphere or the smaller its curvature.
+
+It will seem, at first blush, almost incredible, that the space of
+experience even _can_ have this property. But an example, which is the
+historical analogon of this modern transformation of our conceptions,
+will render the idea less marvellous. Let us transport ourselves back to
+the age of Homer. At that time people believed that the earth was a great
+disc surrounded on all sides by oceans which were conceived to be in
+all directions infinitely great. Indeed, for the primitive man, who has
+never journeyed far from the place of his birth, this is the most natural
+conception. But imagine now that some scholar had come, and had informed
+the Homeric hero Ulysses that if he would travel forever on the earth in
+the same direction he would ultimately come back to the point from which
+he started; surely Ulysses would have gazed with as much astonishment
+upon this scholar as we now look upon the mathematician who tells us that
+it is possible that a point which moves forever onward in space in the
+same direction may ultimately arrive at the place from which it started.
+But despite the fact that Ulysses would have regarded the assertion of
+the scholar as false because contradictory to his familiar conceptions,
+that scholar, nevertheless, would have been right; for the earth is not
+a plane but a spherical surface. So also the mathematician might be
+right who bases this more recent strange view on the possible fact that
+the space of experience may have a measure of curvature which is not
+exactly zero but slightly greater than zero. If this were really the
+case, the _volume_ of the space of experience, though very large, would,
+nevertheless, be finite; just as the real spherical surface of the earth
+as contrasted with the Homeric plane surface is finite, having so and so
+many square miles. When the objection is here made that a finiteness of
+space is totally at variance with our modes of thought and conceptions,
+two ideas, “infinitely great” and “unlimited,” are confounded. All that
+is at variance with our practical conceptions is that space can anywhere
+have a limit; not that it may possibly be of tremendous but finite
+magnitude.
+
+It will now be asked if we cannot determine by actual observation
+whether the measure of curvature of experiential space is exactly zero
+or slightly different therefrom. The theorem of the sum of the angles of
+a triangle and the conclusions which follow from this theorem do indeed
+supply us with a means of ascertaining this fact. And the results of
+observation have been, that _the measure of curvature of space is in all
+probability exactly equal to zero or if it is slightly different from
+zero it is so little so that the technical means of observation at our
+command and especially our telescopes are not competent to determine the
+amount of the deviation_. More, we cannot with any certainty say.
+
+All these reflections, to which the criticism of the hypotheses that
+underlie geometry long ago led investigators, compel us to institute a
+comparison between the space of experience and other three-dimensioned
+aggregates of points (spaces), which we cannot mentally represent but can
+in thought and word accurately define and investigate. As soon, however,
+as we are fully involved in the task of accurately investigating the
+properties of three-dimensional aggregates of points, we similarly find
+ourselves forced to regard such aggregates as the component elements
+of a manifoldness of more than three dimensions. In this way the exact
+criticism of even ordinary geometry leads us to the abstract assumption
+of a space of more than three dimensions. And as the extension of
+every idea gives a clearer and more translucent form to the idea as it
+originally stood, here too the idea of multiple-dimensioned aggregates
+of points and the investigation of their properties has thrown a new
+light on the truths of ordinary geometry and placed its properties in
+clearer relief. Amid the numerous examples which show how the notion of a
+space of multiple-dimensions has been of great service to science in the
+investigation of three-dimensioned space, we shall give one a place here
+which is within the comprehension of non-mathematicians.
+
+Imagine in a plane two triangles whose angles are denoted by pairs of
+numbers—namely, by 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, and 2-5, 3-5, 4-5. (See Fig. 2.) Let
+the two triangles so lie that the three lines which join the angles
+1-2 and 2-5, 1-3 and 3-5, and 1-4 and 4-5 intersect at a point, which
+we will call 1-5. If now we cause the sides of the triangles which are
+opposite to these angles to intersect, it will be found that the points
+of intersection so obtained possess the peculiar property of lying all
+in one and the same straight line. The point of intersection of the
+connection 1-3 and 1-4 with the connection 4-5 and 3-5 may appropriately
+be called 3-4. Similarly, the point of intersection 2-4 is produced by
+the meeting of 4-5, 2-5 and 1-2, 1-4; and the point of intersection
+2-3, by the meeting of 1-3, 1-2 and 3-5, 2-5. The statement, that the
+three points of intersection 3-4, 2-4, 2-3, thus obtained, lie in one
+straight line, can be proved by the principles of plane geometry only
+with difficulty and great circumstantiality. But by resorting to the
+three-dimensional space of experience, in which the plane of the drawing
+lies, the proposition may be rendered almost self-evident.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
+
+To begin with, imagine any five points in space which may be denoted by
+the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; then imagine all the possible ten straight
+lines of junction drawn between each two of these points, namely, 1-2,
+1-3 ... 4-5; and finally, also, all the ten planes of junction of every
+three points described, namely, the plane 1-2-3, 1-2-4, ... 3-4-5. A
+spatial figure will thus be obtained, whose ten straight lines will meet
+some interposed plane in ten points whose relative positions are exactly
+those of the ten points above described. Thus, for example, on this plane
+the points 1-2, 1-3, and 2-3 will lie in a straight line, for through the
+three spatial points 1, 2, 3, a plane can be drawn which will cut the
+plane of a drawing in a straight line. The reason, therefore, that the
+three points 3-4, 2-4, 2-3, also must ultimately lie in a straight line,
+consists in the simple fact that the plane of the three points 2, 3, 4,
+must cut the plane of the drawing in a straight line. The figure here
+considered consists of ten points of which sets of three so lie ten times
+in a straight line that conversely from every point also three straight
+lines proceed.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 3.]
+
+Now, just as this figure is a section of a complete three-dimensional
+pentagon, so another remarkable figure, of similar properties, may be
+obtained by the section of a figure of four-dimensioned space. Imagine,
+namely, six points, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, situated in this four-dimensioned
+space, and every three of them connected by a plane, and every four of
+them by a three-dimensioned space. We shall obtain thus twenty planes and
+fifteen three-dimensioned spaces which will cut the plane in which the
+figure is to be produced in twenty points and fifteen rays which so lie
+that each point sends out three rays and every ray contains four points.
+(See Fig. 3.) Figures of this description, which are so composed of
+points and rays that an equal number of rays proceed from every point and
+an equal number of points lie in every ray, are called _configurations_.
+Other configurations may, of course, be produced, by taking a different
+number of points and by assuming that the points taken lie in a space of
+different or even higher dimensions. The author of this article was the
+first to draw attention to configurations derived from spaces of higher
+dimensions. As we see, then, the notion of a space of more than three
+dimensions has performed important work in the investigations of common
+plane geometry.
+
+In conclusion, I should like to add a remark which Cranz makes regarding
+the application of the idea of multiple-dimensioned space to theoretical
+chemistry. (See the treatise before cited.) In chemistry, the molecules
+of a compound body are said to consist of the atoms of the elements
+which are contained in the body, and these are supposed to be situated
+at certain distances from one another, and to be held in their relative
+positions by certain forces. At first, the centres of the atoms were
+conceived to lie in one and the same plane. But Wislicenus was led by
+researches in paralactic acid to explain the differences of isomeric
+molecules of the same structural formulæ by the different positions of
+the atoms in _space_. (Compare “La chimie dans l’espace” by van’t Hoff,
+1875, preface by J. Wislicenus). In fact four points can always be so
+arranged in space that every two of them may have any distance from each
+other; and the change of one of the six distances does not necessarily
+involve the alteration of any other.
+
+But suppose our molecule consists of five atoms? Four of these may be
+so placed that the distance between any two of them can be made what we
+please. But it is no longer possible to give the fifth atom a position
+such that each of the four distances by which it is separated from
+the other atoms may be what we please. Quite the contrary, the fourth
+distance is dependent on the three remaining distances; for the space of
+experience has only three dimensions. If, therefore, I have a molecule
+which consists of five atoms I cannot alter the distance between two of
+them without at least altering some second distance. But if we imagine
+the centres of the atoms placed in a four-dimensioned space, this can be
+done; all the ten distances which may be conceived to exist between the
+five points will then be independent of one another. To reach the same
+result in the case of six atoms we must assume a five-dimensional space;
+and so on.
+
+Now, if the independence of all the possible distances between the atoms
+of a molecule is absolutely required by theoretical chemical research,
+the science is really compelled, if it deals with molecules of more
+than four atoms, to make use of the idea of a space of more than three
+dimensions. This idea is, in this case, simply an instrument of research,
+just as are, also, the ideas of molecules and atoms—means designed to
+embrace in an obvious and systematic form the phenomena of chemistry
+and to discover the conditions under which new phenomena can be evoked.
+Whether a four-dimensioned space really exists is a question whose
+insolubility cannot prevent research from making use of the idea, exactly
+as chemistry has not been prevented from making use of the notion of
+atom, although no one really knows whether the things we call atoms exist
+or not.
+
+
+IV.
+
+REFUTATION OF THE ARGUMENTS ADDUCED TO PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF A
+FOUR-DIMENSIONED SPACE INCLUSIVE OF THE VISIBLE WORLD.
+
+The considerations of the preceding section will have convinced
+the cultured non-mathematician of the service which the theory of
+multiple-dimensioned spaces has done, and bids fair to do, for
+geometrical research. In addition thereto is the consideration that every
+extension of one branch of mathematical science is a constant source of
+beneficial and helpful influence to the other branches. The knowledge,
+however, that mathematicians can employ the notion of four-dimensioned
+space with good results in their researches, would never have been
+sufficient to procure it its present popularity; for every man of
+intelligence has now heard of it, and, in jest or in earnest, often
+speaks of it. The knowledge of a four-dimensioned space did not reach
+the ears of cultured non-mathematicians until the consequences which the
+spiritualists fancied it was permissible to draw from this mathematical
+notion were publicly known. But it is a tremendous step from the
+four-dimensioned space of the mathematicians to the space from which the
+spirit-friends of the spiritualistic mediums entertain us with rappings,
+knockings, and bad English. Before taking this step we will first discuss
+the question of the real existence of a four-dimensional space, not
+judging the question whether this space, if it really does exist, is
+inhabited by reasonable beings who consciously act upon the world in
+which we exist.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 4.]
+
+Among the reasons which are put forward to prove the existence of a
+four-dimensional space containing the world, the least reprehensible are
+those which are based on the existence of symmetry. We spoke above of
+two triangles in the same plane which have all their sides and angles
+congruent, but which cannot be made to coincide by simple displacement
+within the plane; but we saw that this coincidence could be effected by
+holding fast one side of one triangle and moving it out of its plane
+until it had been so far turned round that it fell back into its plane.
+Now something similar to this exists in space. Cut two figures, exactly
+like that of Fig. 4., out of a piece of paper, and turn the triangle
+_ABF_ about the side _AB_, _ACE_ about the side _AC_, _BCD_ about the
+side _BC_, and in one figure above and in the other below; then in both
+cases the points _D_, _E_, _F_ will meet at a point, because _AE_ is
+equal to _AF_, _BF_ is equal to _BD_, _CD_ is equal to _CE_. In this
+manner we obtain two pyramids which in all lengths and all angles are
+congruent, yet which cannot, no matter how we try, be made to coincide,
+that is, be so fitted the one into the other that they shall both stand
+as one pyramid. But the _reflected_ image of the one could be brought
+into coincidence with the other. Two spatial structures whose sides and
+angles are thus equal to each other, and of which each may be viewed
+as the reflected image of the other, are called _symmetrical_. For
+instance, the right and the left hand are symmetrical; or, a right and
+a left glove. Now just as in two dimensions it is impossible by simple
+displacement to bring into congruence triangles which like those above
+mentioned can only be made to coincide by circumversion, so also in three
+dimensions it is impossible to bring into congruence two symmetrical
+pyramids. Careful mathematical reflection, however, declares, that this
+could be effected if it were possible, while holding one of the surfaces,
+to move the pyramid out of the space of experience, and to turn it round
+through a four-dimensioned space until it reached a point at which it
+would return again into our experiential space. This process would simply
+be the four-dimensional analogon of the three-dimensional circumversion
+in the above-mentioned case of the two triangles. Further, the interior
+surfaces in this process would be converted into exterior surfaces,
+and _vice versa_, exactly as in the circumversion of a triangle the
+anterior and posterior sides are interchanged. If the structure which is
+to be converted into its symmetrical counterpart is made of a flexible
+material, the interchange mentioned of the interior and exterior surfaces
+may be effected by simply turning the structure inside out; for example,
+a right glove may thus be converted into a left glove.
+
+Now from this truth, that every structure can be converted by means
+of a four-dimensional space inclusive of the world, into a structure
+symmetrical with it, it has been sought to establish the probability of
+the real existence of a four-dimensioned space. Yet it will be evident,
+from the discussions of the preceding section, that the only inference
+which we can here make is, that the idea of a four-dimensioned space is
+competent, from a mathematical point of view, to throw some light upon
+the phenomena of symmetry. To conclude from these facts that a space
+of this kind really exists, would be as daring as to conclude from
+the fact that the uniform angular velocity of the apparent motions of
+the fixed stars is explicable from the assumption of an axial motion
+of the firmament, that the fixed stars are really rigidly placed in a
+celestial sphere rotating about its axis. It must not be forgotten that
+our comprehension of the phenomena of the real world consists of two
+elements: first, of that which the things really are; and, second, of
+that by which we rationally apprehend the things. This latter element
+is partly dependent on the sum of the experiences which we have before
+acquired, and partly on the necessity, due to the imperfection of reason,
+of our embracing the multitudinous isolated phenomena of the world into
+categories which we ourselves have formed, and which, therefore, are not
+wholly derived from the phenomena themselves, but to a great extent are
+dependent on us.
+
+Besides geometrical reasons, Zöllner has also adduced cosmological
+reasons to prove the existence of a four-dimensional space. To these
+reasons belong especially the questions whether the number of the fixed
+stars is infinitely great, whether the world is finite or infinite
+in extension, whether the world had a beginning or will have an end,
+whether the world is not hastening towards a condition of equilibrium or
+dead level by the universal distribution of its matter and energy; the
+problems, also, of gravitation and action at a distance; and finally, the
+questions concerning the relations between the phenomena in the world of
+sense-perception to the unknown things-in-themselves. All these questions
+which can be decided in no definite sense, led Zöllner and his followers
+to the assumption that a four-dimensioned space inclusive of the space of
+experience must really exist. But more careful reflection will show that
+this assumption does not dispose of the difficulties but simply displaces
+them into another realm. Furthermore, even if four-dimensioned space did
+unravel and make clear all the cosmological problems which have bothered
+the human mind, still, its existence would not be proved thereby; it
+would yet remain a mere hypothesis, designed to render more intelligible
+to a being who can only make experiences in a three-dimensional space,
+the phenomena therein which are full of mystery to it. A four-dimensioned
+space would in such case possess for the metaphysician a value similar
+to that which the ether possesses for the physicist. Still more
+convincing than these cosmological reasons to the majority of men is
+the physio-psychological reason drawn from the phenomena of vision which
+Zöllner adduces. Into this main argument we will enter in more detail.
+
+When we “see” an object, as we all know, the light which proceeds or is
+reflected therefrom produces an image on the retina of our eye; this
+image is conducted to our consciousness by means of the optical nerve,
+and our reason draws therefrom an inference respecting the object. When,
+now, we look at a square whose sides are a decimetre in length, and
+whose centre is situated at the distance of a metre from the pupil of
+our eye, an image is produced on the retina. But exactly the same image
+will be produced there if we look at a square whose sides are parallel
+to the sides of the first square but two decimetres in length, and whose
+centre is situated at a distance of two metres from the pupil of the eye.
+Proceeding thus further, we readily discover that an eye can perceive
+in any length or line only the ratio of its magnitude to the distance
+at which it is situated from it, and that generally a three-dimensional
+world must appear to the eye two-dimensional, because all points which
+lie behind each other in the direction outwards from the eye produce
+on the retina only one image. This is due to the fact that the retinal
+images are themselves two-dimensional; for which reason, Zöllner says,
+the world must appear to a child as two-dimensional, if it be supposed to
+live in a primitive condition of unconscious mental activity. To such a
+child two objects which are moving the one behind the other, must appear
+as suffering displacement on a surface, which we conceive behind the
+objects, and on which the latter are projected. In all these apparent
+displacements, coincidences and changes of form also are effected. All
+these things must appear puzzling to a human being in the first stages
+of its development, and the mind thus finds itself, as Zöllner further
+argues, in the first years of childhood forced to adopt a hypothesis
+concerning the constitution of space and to assume that the world is
+three-dimensional, although the eye can really perceive it as only
+two-dimensional. Zöllner then further says, that in the explanation of
+the effects of the external world, man constantly finds this hypothesis
+of his childish years confirmed, and that in this way it has become in
+his mind so profound a conviction that it is no longer possible for him
+to think it away. Consonant with this argumentation, also, is Zöllner’s
+remark, that the same phenomenon has presented itself in astronomical
+methods of knowledge. To explain the movements of the planets, which
+appear to describe regular paths on the surface of a celestial sphere,
+we were compelled in the solution of the riddles which these motions
+presented, to assume in the structure of the heavens a dimension of
+“depth,” and the complicated motions in the two-dimensioned firmament
+were converted into very simple motions in three-dimensioned space.
+Zöllner also contends that our conception of the entire visible world as
+possessed of three dimensions is a product of our reason, which the mind
+was driven to form by the contradictions which would be presented to it
+on the assumption of only two dimensions by the perspective distortions,
+coincidences, and changes of magnitude of objects. When a child moves its
+hand before its eyes, turns it, brings it nearer, or pushes it farther
+away, this child successively receives the most various impressions on
+the surface of its retina of one and the same object of whose identity
+and constancy its feelings offer it a perfect assurance. If the child
+regarded the changeable projection of the hand on the surface of the
+retina as the real object, and not the hand which lies beyond it, the
+child would constantly be met with contradictions in its experience,
+and to avoid this it makes the hypothesis that the space of experience
+is three-dimensional. Zöllner’s contention is, therefore, that man
+originally had only a two-dimensional intuition of space, but was forced
+by experience to represent to himself the objects which on the retinal
+surface appeared two-dimensional, as three-dimensional, and thus to
+transform his two-dimensional space-intuition into a three-dimensional
+one. Now, in exactly the same way, according to Zöllner’s notion, will
+man, by the advancement and increasing exactness of his knowledge of
+the phenomena of the outer world, also be compelled to conceive of the
+material world as a “shadow cast by a more real four-dimensional world,”
+so that these conceptions will be just as trivial for the people of the
+twentieth century as since Copernicus’s time the explanation of the
+motions of the heavenly bodies by means of a three-dimensional motion
+has been.
+
+Zöllner’s arguments from the phenomena of vision may be refuted as
+follows: In the first place it is incorrect to say that we see the
+things of the external world by means of two-dimensional retinal images.
+The light which penetrates the eye causes an irritation of the optical
+nerves, and any such effect which, though it be not powerful, is,
+nevertheless, a mechanical one, can only take place on things which are
+material. But material things are always three-dimensional. The effect
+of light on the sensitive plates of photography can with just as little
+justice be regarded as two-dimensional. Our senses can have perception
+of nothing but three-dimensional things, and this perception is effected
+by forces which in their turn act on three-dimensional things, namely,
+our sensory nerves. It is wrong to call an image two-dimensional,
+for it is only by abstraction that we can conceive of a thickness so
+growing constantly smaller and smaller as to admit of our regarding a
+three-dimensional picture as two-dimensional, by giving it in mind a
+vanishingly small thickness. It is also wrong to say, as Zöllner says,
+that when we see the shadow of a hand which is cast upon a wall we see
+something two-dimensional. What we really perceive is that no light
+falls upon our eye from the region included by the shadow, while from
+the entire surrounding region light does fall on our eye. But this light
+is reflected from the material particles which form the surface of the
+wall, that is, from three-dimensional particles of matter. We must
+always remember that our eye communicates to us only three-dimensional
+knowledge, and that for the comprehension of anything which has two, one,
+or no dimensions, _a purely intellectual act of abstraction must be added
+to the act of perception_. When we imagine we have made a lead-pencil
+mark on paper, we have, exactly viewed, simply heaped along side of each
+other little particles of graphite in such a manner that there are by
+far fewer graphite particles in the lateral and upward directions than
+there are in the longitudinal direction, and thus our reason arrives by
+abstraction at the notion of a straight line. When we look at an object,
+say a cube of wood, we recognise the object as three-dimensional, and
+it is only by abstraction that we can conceive of its two-dimensional
+surfaces, of its twelve one-dimensional edges, and of its eight
+no-dimensional corners. For we reach the perception of its surface, for
+example, solely by reason of the fact that the material particles which
+form the cube prevent the transmission of light, and reflect it, whereby
+a part of the light reflected from every material particle strikes our
+eye. Now, by thinking exclusively of those material particles which are
+reflected, in contrariety to the empty space without and the hidden and
+therefore non-reflected particles within, we form the notion of a surface.
+
+It is evident from this, that all that we perceive is three-dimensional,
+that we cannot come at anything two-dimensional without an intellectual
+abstraction, and that, therefore, we cannot conceive of anything
+two-dimensional exerting effects upon material things. But this fact is a
+refutation of the retinal argument of Zöllner. If vision consisted wholly
+and exclusively in the creation of a two-dimensioned image, the things
+which take place in the world could never come into our consciousness.
+The child, therefore, does not originally apprehend the world, as Zöllner
+says, as two-dimensional; on the contrary, it apprehends it either not
+at all, or it apprehends it as three-dimensional. Of course the child
+must first “learn how” to see. It is found from the observation of
+children during the first months of their lives, and of the congenitally
+blind, who have suddenly acquired the power of vision by some successful
+operation, that seeing does not consist alone in the irritations which
+arise in the optic nerves, but also in the correct interpretation of
+these irritations by reason. This correct interpretation, however, can
+be accomplished only by the accumulation of a considerable stock of
+experience. Especially must the recognition of the distance of the object
+seen, be gradually learned. In this, two things are especially helpful;
+first, the fact that we have two eyes and, consequently, that we must
+feel two irritations of the optic nerves which are not wholly alike; and
+secondly, the fact that we are enabled by our power of motion and our
+sense of touch to convince ourselves of the distance and form of the
+bodies seen. The question now arises, what sort of an intuition of space
+would a creature have that had only one eye, that could neither move
+itself nor its eye, and also possessed no peripheral nerves. According
+to Zöllner’s view, this creature could, owing to its two-dimensional
+retinal images, only have a two-dimensional intuition of space. The
+author’s opinion, however, is, that such a creature could not see at all,
+as it has no possibility of collecting experiences which are adapted in
+any way to interpreting the effects of things on its retina. The light
+which proceeded from the objects roundabout and fell on the retina could
+produce no other effect on the being than that of a wholly intelligible
+irritation, or, perhaps, even pain.
+
+The reflections presented sufficiently show that neither the phenomena
+of symmetry nor the retinal images of the objects of vision necessarily
+force upon us the assumption of a four-dimensioned space. If the
+material world should ever present problems which could not in the
+progress of knowledge be solved in a natural way, the assumption that
+a four-dimensional space containing the world exists would also be
+incompetent to resolve the difficulties presented; it would simply
+convert these difficulties into others, and not dispose of the problems
+but simply displace them to another world. Yet the question might be
+asked, Is the existence of a four-dimensional space really _impossible_?
+To answer this question, we must first clearly know what we mean by
+“exist.” If existence means that the intellectual _idea_ of a thing
+can be formed and that this idea shall not lead to contradictions with
+other well-established ideas and with experience, we have only to
+say that four-dimensioned space does exist, as the arguments adduced
+in sections II and III have rendered plain. If, namely, the space
+of four dimensions did not exist as a clear idea in the minds of
+mathematicians, mathematicians could certainly not have been led by
+this idea to results which are recognised by the senses as true, and
+which really take place in our own representable space. But if existence
+means “material actuality” we must say that we neither now nor in the
+future can know anything about it. For we know material actuality
+only as three-dimensional, our senses can only make three-dimensional
+experiences, and the inferences of our reason, although they can
+well abstract from material things, can never ascend to the point of
+explaining a four-dimensional materiality. Just as little, therefore,
+as we can locally fix the idea of a two-dimensional material world, as
+little can we substantiate the notion of a four-dimensioned material
+existence.
+
+
+V.
+
+EXAMINATION OF THE HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE EXISTENCE OF
+FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SPIRITS.
+
+In connection with the belief that the visible world is contained in a
+four-dimensioned space, Zöllner and his adherents further hold that this
+higher space is inhabited by intelligent beings who can act consciously
+and at will on the human beings who live in experiential space. To invest
+this opinion with greater strength Zöllner appealed to the fact that the
+greatest thinkers of antiquity and of modern times were either wholly
+of this opinion or at least held views from which his contentions might
+be immediately derived. Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Glaukon
+in the seventh book of the Republic, is evidence, says Zöllner, that
+this greatest philosopher of antiquity possessed some presentiment of
+this extension of the notion of space. Yet any one who has connectedly
+studied and understood Plato’s system of philosophy must concede that
+the so-called “ideas” of the Platonic system denote something wholly
+different from what Zöllner sees in them or pretends to see. Zöllner
+says that these Platonic ideas are spatial objects of more than three
+dimensions and represent “real existence” in the same sense that the
+material world, as contrasted with the images on the retina, represents
+it. Zöllner similarly deals with the Kantian “thing-in-itself,” which is
+also regarded as an object of higher dimensions.
+
+To show Kant in the light of a predecessor, Zöllner quotes the following
+passage from the former’s “Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch
+Träume der Metaphysik” (1766, Collected Works, Vol. VII, page 32 et
+seqq.): “I confess that I am very much inclined to assert the existence
+of immaterial beings in the world, and to rank my own soul as one of
+such a class. It appears, there is a spiritual essence existent which is
+intimately bound up with matter but which does not act on those forces of
+the elements by which the latter are connected, but upon some internal
+principle of its own condition. It will, in the time to come—I know not
+when or where—be proved, that the human soul, even in this life, exists
+in a state of uninterrupted connection with all the immaterial natures
+of the spiritual world; that it alternately acts on them and receives
+impressions from them, of which, as a human soul, it is not, in the
+normal state of things, conscious. It would be a great thing, if some
+such systematic constitution of the spiritual world, as we conceive it,
+could be deduced, not exclusively from our general notion of spiritual
+nature, which is altogether too hypothetical, but from some real and
+universally admitted observations,—or, for that matter, if it could even
+be shown to be probable.”
+
+What Kant really asserts here is, first, the partly independent and
+partly dependent existence of the soul, and of spiritual beings
+generally, on matter, and, second, that spiritual beings have some
+common connection with and mutually influence one another. This
+contention, which is that of very many thinkers, does not, however,
+entail the consequence that the “transcendental subject of Kant” must be
+four-dimensional, as Zöllner asserts it does. Kant never even hinted at
+the theory that the psychical features of the world owe their connection
+with the material features to the fact that they are four-dimensional
+and, therefore, include the three-dimensional. Is it a necessary
+conclusion that if a thing exists and is not three-dimensional, as is
+the case with the soul, that it is therefore four-dimensional? Can it
+not in fact be so constituted that it is wholly meaningless to speak of
+dimensions at all in connection with it?
+
+Yet still more strongly than the words of Plato and Kant do certain
+utterances of the mathematicians Gauss and Riemann speak in favor of
+Zöllner’s hypothesis. S. v. Waltershausen relates of Gauss in his “Gruss
+zum Gedächtnis,” (Leipsic, 1856,) that Gauss had often remarked that the
+three dimensions of space were only a specific peculiarity of the human
+mind. We can think ourselves, he said, into beings who are only conscious
+of two dimensions; similarly, perhaps, beings who are above and outside
+our world may look down upon us; and there were, he continued, in a
+jesting tone, a number of problems which he had here indefinitely laid
+aside, but hoped to treat in a superior state by superior geometrical
+methods. Leaving aside this jest, which quite naturally suggested itself,
+the remarks of Gauss are quite correct. We possess the power to abstract
+and can think, therefore, what kind of geometry a being that is only
+acquainted with a two-dimensional world would have; for instance, we can
+imagine that such a being could not conceive of the possibility of making
+two triangles coincide which were congruent in the sense above explained,
+and so on. So, also, we can understand that a being who has control of
+four dimensions can only conceive of a geometry of four-dimensional
+space, yet may have the capacity of thinking itself into spaces of other
+dimensions. But it does not follow from this that a four-dimensional
+space exists, let alone that it is inhabited by reasonable beings.
+
+Riemann, on the other hand, speaks directly of a world of spirits. In
+his “Neue mathematische Principien der Naturphilosophie” he puts forth
+the hypothesis that the space of the world is filled with a material
+that is constantly pouring into the ponderable atoms, there to disappear
+from the phenomenal world. In every ponderable atom, he says, at every
+moment of time, there enters and appears a determinate amount of matter,
+proportional to the force of gravitation. The ponderable bodies,
+according to this theory, are the place at which the spiritual world
+enters and acts on the material world. Riemann’s world of spirits, the
+sole office of which is to explain the phenomenon of gravitation as
+a force governing matter, is, though, essentially different from the
+spiritual world of Zöllner, the function of which is to explain supposed
+supersensuous phenomena which stand in the most glaring contradiction
+with the established known laws of the material world.
+
+Besides this appeal to the testimony of eminent men like Plato, Kant,
+Gauss, and Riemann, the scientific prophet of modern spiritualism also
+bases his theory on the belief, which has obtained at all times and
+appeared in various forms among all peoples, that there exist in the
+world forces which at times are competent to evoke phenomena that are
+exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. We have but to think of the
+phenomena of table-turning which once excited the Chinese as much as
+it has aroused, during the last few decades, the European and American
+worlds; or of the divining-rod, by whose help our forefathers sought for
+water, in fact, as we do now in parts of Europe and America.
+
+Cranz, in his essay on the subject, divides spiritualistic phenomena
+into physical and intellectual. Of the first class he enumerates
+the following: the moving of chairs and tables; the animation of
+walking-sticks, slippers, and broomsticks; the miraculous throwing of
+objects; spirit-rappings (Luther heard a sound in the Wartburg, “as if
+three score casks were hurled down the stairs”); the ecstatic suspension
+of persons above the floor; the diminution of the forces of gravity; the
+ordeals of witches; the fetching of wished-for objects; the declination
+of the magnetic needle by persons at a distance; the untying of knots
+in a closed string; insensibility to injury and exemption therefrom
+when tortured, as in handling red-hot coals, carrying hot irons, etc.;
+the music of invisible spirits; the materialisations of spirits or of
+individual parts of spirits (the footprints in the experiments of Slade,
+photographed by Zöllner); the double appearance of the same person;
+the penetration of matter (of closed doors, windows, and so forth).
+As numerous also is the selection presented by Cranz of intellectual
+phenomena, namely: spirit-writing (Have’s instrument for the facilitation
+of intercourse with spirits), the clairvoyance and divination of
+somnambulists, of visionary, ecstatic, and hypnotised persons, prompted
+or controlled by narcotic medicines, by sleeping in temples, by music and
+dancing, by ascetic modes of life and residence in barren localities, by
+the exudations of the soil and of water, by the contemplation of jewels,
+mirrors, and crystal-pure water, and by anointing the finger-nails with
+consecrated oil. Also the following additional intellectual phenomena
+are cited: increased eloquence or suddenly acquired power of speaking
+in foreign languages; spirit-effects at a distance; inability to move,
+transferences of the will, and so forth.
+
+All these phenomena, presented with the aspect of truth, and associated
+more or less with trickery, self-deception, and humbug, are adduced
+by the spiritualists to substantiate the belief in a world of spirits
+which consciously and purposely take part in the events of the material
+world, and that these phenomena may be sufficiently and consistently
+explained by the effects of the activity of such a world. It is
+impossible for us to discuss and put to the test here the explanations
+of all these supersensuous phenomena. Anything and everything can be
+explained by spirits who act at will upon the world. There are only a
+few of these phenomena, namely, clairvoyance and Slade’s experiments,
+whose explanations are so intimately connected with our main theme, the
+so-called fourth dimension, that they cannot be passed over.
+
+First, with respect to clairvoyance, the American visionary Davis
+describes the experiences which he claims to have made in this condition,
+induced by “magnetic sleep,” as follows:[81] “The sphere of my vision
+now began to expand. At first, I could only clearly discern the walls of
+the house. At the start they seemed to me dark and gloomy; but they soon
+became brighter and finally transparent. I could now see the objects,
+the utensils, and the persons in the adjoining house as easily as those
+in the room in which I sat. But my perceptions extended further still;
+before my wandering glance, which seemed to control a great semi-circle,
+the broad surface of the earth, for hundreds of miles about me, grew as
+transparent as water, and I saw the brains, the entrails, and the entire
+anatomy of the beasts that wandered about in the forests of the eastern
+hemisphere, hundreds and thousands of miles from the room in which I
+sat.” The belief in the possibility of such states of clairvoyance is
+by no means new. Alexander Dumas made use of it, for example, in his
+“Mémoires d’un médicin,” in which Count Balsamo, afterwards called
+Cagliostro, is said to possess the power of transforming suitable persons
+into this wonderful condition and thus to find out what other persons at
+distant places are doing. Zöllner explains clairvoyance by means of the
+fourth dimension thus:
+
+A man who is accustomed to viewing things on a plain is supposed to
+ascend to a considerable height in a balloon. He will there enjoy a
+much more extended prospect than if he had remained on the plain below,
+and will also be able to signal to greater distances. The plain,
+that is, the two-dimensioned space, is accordingly viewed by him from
+points outside of the plain as “open” in all directions. Exactly so,
+in Zöllner’s theory, must three-dimensioned spaces appear, when viewed
+from points in four-dimensioned space, namely, as “open”; and the more
+so in proportion as the point in question is situated at a greater
+distance from the place of our body, or in proportion as the soul ascends
+to a greater height in this fourth dimension. Zöllner thus explains
+clairvoyance as a condition in which the soul has displaced itself out
+of its three-dimensioned space and reached a point which with respect
+to this space is four-dimensionally situated and whence it is able to
+contemplate the three-dimensional world without the interference of
+intervening obstacles.
+
+The following remark is to be made to this explanation. The reason why
+we have a better and more extended view from a balloon than from places
+on the earth is simply this, that between the suspended balloon and the
+objects seen at a distance nothing intervenes but the air, and air allows
+the transmission of light, whereas, at the places below on the earth
+there are all kinds of material things about the observer which prevent
+the transmission of light and either render difficult or absolutely
+impossible the sight of things which lie far away. In the same way,
+also, from a point in four-dimensioned space, a three-dimensional object
+will be visible only provided there are no obstacles intervening. If,
+therefore, this awareness of a distant object is a real, actual vision by
+means of a luminous ray which strikes the eye, there is contained in the
+explanation of Zöllner the tacit assumption that the medium with which
+the four-dimensional world is filled is also pervious to light exactly as
+the atmosphere is.
+
+The theory that there are four-dimensional spirits who produce the
+phenomena cited by the spiritualists received special support from the
+experiments which the prestidigitateur Slade, who claimed he was a
+spiritualistic medium, performed before Zöllner. Of these experiments
+we will speak of the two most important, the experiment with the glass
+sphere and the experiment with the knots. To explain the connection
+of the glass sphere experiment with the fourth dimension, we must
+first conceive of two-dimensional reasoning beings, or, let us say,
+two-dimensional worms, living and moving in a plane. For a creature of
+this kind it will be self-evident that there are no other paths between
+two points of its plane than such as lie within the plane. It must,
+accordingly, be beyond the range of conception of this worm, how any
+two-dimensional object which lies within a circle in its space can be
+brought to any other position in its space outside the circle without the
+object passing through the barriers formed by the circle’s circumference.
+But if this worm could procure the services of a three-dimensional being,
+the transportation of the object from a position within the circle to
+any position outside it could be effected by the three-dimensional being
+simply taking the object _out of_ the plane and placing it at the desired
+point. This object, therefore, would, in an inexplicable manner, suddenly
+disappear before the eyes of the worms who were assembled as spectators,
+and after the lapse of an interval of time would again appear outside
+the circle without having passed at any point through the circle’s
+circumference. If now we add another dimension, we shall derive from this
+trick, which is wholly removed from the sense-perception of the flattened
+worms, the following experiment, which is wholly beyond the perception
+of us human beings. Inside a glass sphere, which is closed all around,
+a grain of corn is placed; the problem is to transport the corn to some
+place outside the sphere without passing through the glass surface. Now
+we should be able to perform this trick if some four-dimensional being
+would render us the same aid that we before rendered the two-dimensional
+worm. For the four-dimensional being could take the grain of corn into
+his four-dimensional space and then replace it in our space in the
+desired spot outside of the glass sphere. Slade performed this trick
+before Zöllner. Its mere performance sufficed to convince this latter
+investigator that Slade had here made use of a four-dimensional agent,
+who, in respect of power of motion, controlled his four-dimensional space
+as we do our three-dimensional space. It never occurred to Zöllner that
+this experiment was the cleverly executed trick of a prestidigitateur,
+or, as it would at once occur to us, that the whole thing was a sensory
+illusion. The fact that we cannot explain a trick easily and naturally
+does not irrevocably prove that it is accomplished by other means than
+those which the world of matter presents.
+
+Still better known than this last performance is Slade’s experiments
+with knots. To explain this in connection with the fourth dimension, we
+must resort again to the plane and the flat worm inhabiting it. To two
+parallel lines in a plane let the two ends of a third line, which has a
+double point, that is, intersects itself once, be attached. Our flat worm
+would not be able to untie the loop formed by the doubled third line,
+which we will call a string, because it cannot execute motions in three
+dimensions. If, therefore, a two-dimensional prestidigitateur should
+appear and accomplish the trick of untying this loop without removing the
+two ends of the string from the parallel lines, he will have accomplished
+for our flat worm a supersensuous experiment. A human being engaged in
+the service of the prestidigitateur could execute for him the experiment
+by simply lifting the string a little out of the plane, pulling it
+taut, and placing it back again. This suggests the following analogous
+experiment for three-dimensional beings. The two ends of a string in
+which a common knot has been made are sealed to the opposite walls of a
+room. The problem is to untie this knot without breaking the seals at the
+two ends of the string. Everybody knows that this problem is not soluble,
+but it may be calculated mathematically that the knot in the string can
+be untied as easily by motions in a fourth dimension of space as in the
+experiment above described the knot in the two-dimensional string was
+untied by a three-dimensional motion. Now as Slade untied the knot before
+Zöllner’s eyes without apparently making any use of the ends fastened in
+the walls, Zöllner was still more strongly confirmed in the view that
+Slade had power over spirits who performed the experiments for him.
+
+Still more far-reaching is the theory of Carl du Prel concerning the
+relations of the material and the four-dimensional world. (Compare his
+numerous essays in the spiritualistic magazine _Sphinx_.) Just as the
+shadows of three-dimensional objects cast on a wall are controlled
+in their movements by the things whose projections they are, in the
+same way it is claimed does there exist back of everything of this
+sense-perceptible world a real transcendental and four-dimensional
+“thing-in itself” whose projection in the space of experience is what we
+falsely regard as the independent thing. Thus every man besides existing
+in his terrestrial self also exists in a spiritual or astral self which
+constantly accompanies him in his walks through life and whose existence
+is especially proclaimed in states of profound sleep, of somnambulism,
+and in the conditions of mediums. In this way Du Prel explains the
+wonderful feats of somnambulists, and the aerial journeys of sorcerers
+and witches. Whereas, ordinarily the separation of the material body from
+the astral body is only effected at the moment of death; in the case of
+somnambulists this separation may take place at any time, or, as Du Prel
+says: “the threshold of feeling may be permanently displaced.”
+
+In view of the natural relations of such theories to the dogmas of
+Christianity it is explainable that theologians also have raised their
+voices for or against spiritualism. While the _Protestant Church Times_
+beheld in the “repulsive thaumaturgic performances which these coryphæi
+of modern science offer, a lack of comprehension of real philosophy,” the
+magazine _The Proof of Faith_, expresses its delight at the discovery
+of spiritualism in the following manner: “Every Christian will surely
+rejoice at the deep and perhaps mortal wound which these new discoveries
+have in all probability administered to modern materialism.”
+
+We shall pass by the childish opinion that the Bible also speaks of
+four dimensions, as both in Job (xi, 8-9) and in the Epistle to the
+Ephesians (iii, 18) only breadth, length, depth, and height, that is,
+four directions of extension, are mentioned. Yet we will still add, as
+Cranz has done, the reflections which Zöllner, as the most prominent
+representative of modern spiritualism, has put forward respecting its
+relation to the doctrines of Christianity (_Wissensch. Abhandl._,
+Vol. III). By the foundation of transcendental physics on the basis
+of spiritualistic phenomena, the “new light” has arisen which is
+spoken of in the New Testament. The rending of the veil of the Temple
+on the crucifixion of Christ, the resurrection, the ascension, the
+transfiguration, the speaking with many tongues on the giving out of the
+Holy Ghost, all these are in Zöllner’s view spiritualistic phenomena.
+Similarly, he sees a reference to the four-dimensional world of spirits
+in all those sayings of Christ in which the latter speaks to his Apostles
+of the impossibility of their having any image or notion of the place to
+which when he disappeared he would go and whence he would return. (Gospel
+of St. John, xiii, 33, 36; xiv, 2, 3, 28; xvi, 5, 13).
+
+Ulrici, however, goes furthest in the mingling of spiritualistic and
+Christian beliefs; for he sees in the doctrine of spiritualism a means
+of strengthening belief in a supreme moral world-order and in the
+immortality of the soul. In answer to Ulrici’s tract “Spiritualism
+So-called, a Question of Science” (1889) Wundt wrote an annihilating
+reply bearing the title “Spiritualism, a Question of Science So-called.”
+Wundt criticises the future condition of our souls according to
+spiritualistic hypotheses in the following sarcastic yet pertinent words,
+which Cranz also quotes: “(1) Physically, the souls of the dead come
+into the thraldom of certain living beings who are called mediums. These
+mediums are, for the present, at least, a not widely diffused class and
+they appear to be almost exclusively Americans. At the command of these
+mediums, departed souls perform mechanical feats which possess throughout
+the character of absolute aimlessness. They rap, they lift tables and
+chairs, they move beds, they play on the harmonica, and do other similar
+things. (2) Intellectually, the souls of the dead enter a condition
+which, if we are to judge from the productions which they deposit on
+the slates of the mediums, must be termed a very lamentable one. These
+slate-writings belong throughout in the category of imbecility; they
+are totally bereft of any contents. (3) The most favored, apparently,
+is the moral condition of the soul. According to the testimony which
+we have, its character cannot be said to be anything else than that of
+utter harmlessness. From brutal performances, such, for instance, as the
+destruction of bed-canopies, the spirits most politely refrain.” Wundt
+then laments the demoralising effect which spiritualism exercises on
+people who have hitherto devoted their powers to some serious pursuit or
+even to the service of science. In fact it is a presumptuous and flagrant
+procedure to forsake the path of exact research, which slow as it is,
+yet always leads to a sure extension of knowledge, in the hope that
+some aimless, foolhardy venture into the realm of uncertainty will carry
+us further than the path of slow toil, and that we can ever thus easily
+lift the veil which hides from man the problems of the world that are yet
+unsolved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now that we have presented the opinions of others respecting the
+existence of a four-dimensional world of spirits, the author would
+like to develop one or two ideas of his own on the subject. In the
+preceding section it was stated that everything that we perceive by our
+senses is three-dimensional and that everything that possesses four
+or more dimensions can only be regarded as abstractions or fictions
+which our reason forms in its constant efforts after an extension and
+generalisation of knowledge. To speak of a two-dimensional matter is
+as self-contradictory as the notion of four-dimensional matter. But a
+two or a four-dimensional world might exist in some other manner than a
+material manner, and for all we know in one which to us does not admit
+of representation. But in such a case, if it were without the power of
+affecting the material world, we should never be able to acquire any
+knowledge concerning its existence, and it would be totally indifferent
+to the people of the three-dimensional world, whether such a world
+existed or not. Just as an artist during his lifetime produces a number
+of different works of art, so also the Creator might have created a
+number of different-dimensioned worlds which in no wise interfere with
+one another. In such a case, any one world would not be able to know
+anything of any other, and we must consequently regard the question
+whether a four-dimensional world exists which is incapable of affecting
+ours, as insoluble. We have only to examine, therefore, the question
+whether the phenomenal world perhaps is a single individual in a great
+layer of worlds of which every successive one has one more dimension
+than the preceding and which are so connected with one another that
+each successive world contains and includes the preceding world, and,
+therefore, can produce effects in it. For our reason, which draws its
+inferences from the phenomena of this world, tells us, that if outside
+the three-dimensional world there exists a second four-dimensional
+world, containing ours, there is no reason why worlds of more or less
+dimensions should not, with the same right, also exist. But if now,
+as Zöllner and his adherents maintain, four-dimensional spirits exist
+which can act by the mere efforts of their own wills on our world,
+there is surely no reason why we three-dimensional beings should not
+also be able to produce effects on some two-dimensional animated world.
+Whether we have, generally, any such influence we do not know, but we
+certainly do know that we do not act purposely and consciously on a
+two-dimensional world. If, therefore, Zöllner were right, the plan of
+creation would possess the wonderful feature that four-dimensional beings
+are capable of arbitrarily affecting the three-dimensional world, but
+that three-dimensional beings have no right in their turn consciously to
+affect a two dimensional world.
+
+The supporters of Zöllner’s hypothesis will perhaps reply to the
+objection just made, that the plan of creation might, after all, possibly
+possess this wonderful peculiarity, that we human beings perhaps, in
+some higher condition of culture, will be able to act consciously on
+two-dimensional worlds, and that at any rate it is simply an inference
+by analogy to conclude from the non-existence of a relation between
+three and two dimensions that the same relation is also wanting in the
+case of four and three dimensions. As a matter of fact, the objection
+above made is not intended to refute Zöllner’s hypothesis, but only to
+stamp it as very improbable. But despite this improbability Zöllner
+would still be right if the phenomena of the material world actually
+made his hypothesis necessary. That, however, is by no means the case.
+Although most of the phenomena to which the spiritualists appeal are
+probably founded on sense-illusions, humbug, and self-deception, it
+cannot be denied that there possibly do exist phenomena which cannot be
+brought into harmony with the natural laws now known. There always have
+been mysterious phenomena, and there always will be. Yet, as we have
+often seen that the progress of science has again and again revealed as
+natural what former generations held to be supernatural, it is certainly
+wholly wrong to bring in for the explanation of phenomena which now seem
+mysterious an hypothesis like that of Zöllner’s, by which everything in
+the world can be explained. If we adopt a point of view which regards it
+as natural for spirits arbitrarily to interfere in the workings of the
+world, all scientific investigation will cease, for we could never more
+trust or rely upon any chemical or physical experiment, or any botanical
+or zoölogical culture. If the spirits are the authors of the phenomena
+that are mysterious to us, why should they also not have control of
+the phenomena which are not mysterious? The existence of mysterious
+phenomena justifies in no manner or form the assumption that spirits
+exist which produce them. Would it not be much simpler, if we _must_ have
+supernatural influences, to adopt the naïve religious point of view,
+according to which everything that happens is traceable to the direct,
+actual, and personal interference of a single being which we call God?
+Things which formerly stood beyond the sphere of our knowledge and were
+regarded as marvellous events, as a storm, for example, now stand in the
+most intimate connection with known natural laws. Things that formerly
+were mysterious are so no longer. If one hundred and fifty years ago some
+scientists were in the possession of our present knowledge of inductional
+electricity and had connected Paris and Berlin with a wire by whose aid
+one could clearly interpret in Berlin what another person had at that
+very moment said in Paris, people would have regarded this phenomenon
+as supernatural and assumed that the originator of this long-distance
+speaking was in league with spirits.
+
+We recognise, thus, that the things which are termed supernatural depend
+to a great extent on the stage of culture which humanity has reached.
+Things which now appear to us mysterious, may, in a very few decades,
+be recognised as quite natural. This knowledge, however, is not to be
+obtained by the lazy assumption of bands of spirits as the authors of
+mysterious phenomena, but by performing what in physics and chemistry
+is called experiment. But the first and essential condition of all
+scientific experimenting is that the experimenter shall be absolutely
+master of the conditions under which the experiment is or is not to
+succeed. Now, this criterion of scientific experimenting is totally
+lacking in all spiritualistic experiments. We can never assign in their
+case the conditions under which they will or will not succeed. When all
+the preparations in a spiritualistic séance have been properly made, but
+nothing takes place, the beautiful excuse is always forthcoming that the
+“spirits were not willing,” that there were “too many incredulous persons
+present,” and so forth. Fortunately, in physical experiments these
+pretexts are not necessary. By the path of experiment, and not by that of
+transcendental speculation, physics has thus made incredible progress and
+has piled new knowledge strata on strata upon the old. Accordingly, the
+prospect is left that the mysteries which the conditions and properties
+of the human soul still present can be solved more and more by the
+methods of scientific experiment. To this end, however, it is especially
+necessary that the physio-psychological experiments in question should
+only be performed by men who possess the critical eye of inquiry, who are
+free from the dangers of self-illusion, and who are competent to keep
+apart from their experiments all superstition and deception. The history
+of natural science clearly teaches that it is only by this road that man
+can arrive at certain and well-established knowledge. If, therefore,
+there really is behind such phenomena as mind-reading, telepathy, and
+similar psychical phenomena something besides humbug and self-illusion,
+what we have to do is to study privately and carefully by serious
+experiments the success or non-success of such phenomena, and not allow
+ourselves to be influenced by the public and dramatic performances of
+psychical artists, like Cumberland and his ilk.
+
+The high eminence on which the knowledge and civilisation of humanity
+now stands was not reached by the thoughtless employment of fanciful
+ideas, nor by recourse to four-dimensional worlds, but by hard, serious
+labor and slow, unceasing research. Let all men of science, therefore,
+band themselves together and oppose a solid front to methods that
+explain everything that is now mysterious to us by the interference of
+independent spirits. For these methods, owing to the fact that they can
+explain everything, explain nothing, and thus oppose dangerous obstacles
+to the progress of real research, to which we owe the beautiful temple of
+modern knowledge.
+
+                                                         HERMANN SCHUBERT.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[79] This is discussed at greater length in my tract _Zahl und Zählen_ in
+Virchow-Holtzendorff’s collection of popular essays, J. F. Richter, 1887.
+
+[80] Victor Schlegel, indeed, has made models of the three-dimensional
+nets of all the six structures which correspond in four-dimensioned space
+to the five regular bodies of our space, in an analogous manner to that
+by which we draw in a plane the nets of five regular bodies. Schlegel’s
+models are made by Brill of Darmstadt.
+
+[81] Quoted by Cranz.
+
+
+
+
+CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK IN FRANCE.
+
+
+The return of Mme. Hyacinthe Loyson to France after her American tour,
+undertaken, I understand, in order to obtain new support for the Gallican
+church, suggests the writing of this article, which will be a brief
+survey, from the point of view of an American layman, of the present
+religious situation in France.
+
+As Père Hyacinthe’s reform has been made the peg on which to hang this
+article, perhaps I cannot do better than begin by an examination of the
+noble but fruitless labors of the eloquent ex-Carmelite. While one cannot
+help being carried away by the oratory of Hyacinthe Loyson and charmed
+with his personality, so full of wit, kindliness, and gentility; while
+one must admire the devotedness and earnestness of Mme. Loyson and feel
+much sympathy for their studious and promising son Paul, one is convinced
+in spite of one’s self that this latter-day Gallicanism is doomed to
+failure if indeed it has not already failed. You have simply to visit
+the poor little church in the Rue d’Arras, in this city, to see what a
+mere handful of followers Père Hyacinthe has been able to collect in
+this great centre of two million people, after years of work and after
+preaching hundreds of magnificent sermons that would fill to overflowing
+the largest edifice in America, Sunday after Sunday, if delivered
+with similar eloquence by a divine of no matter what denomination or
+of no denomination at all. To the practical layman of this practical
+age no further demonstration is necessary in order to prove that Père
+Hyacinthe’s mission is, as the French say, _un coup dans l’eau_, that
+is, an effort which produces no result. Whenever I leave this humble
+church and am well out in the narrow, shabby street in which it is
+situated and am away from the influence of the preacher’s fascination, I
+cannot help exclaiming, What a waste of power, What a casting of pearls
+before swine! And all of Mme. Loyson’s enthusiastic conversation in
+private, her accounts of the encouraging letters received by the Père,
+furtively of course, from discontented priests, and her statements
+concerning the warm words of sympathy and support from the churchmen of
+foreign lands, cannot remove that abiding feeling that this rejuvenated
+Gallican church movement is other than a dismal failure; more than ever
+one exclaims: _C’est un coup dans l’eau_.
+
+Père Hyacinthe has always received, in France as abroad, his greatest
+support from the Protestants. But Protestantism here in France is a
+sickly growth when compared, for instance, with its rich and sturdy
+brother in the United States. It has, at most, only a small band of
+followers, nearly lost to view in the vast army of Catholicism and
+Freethought. Furthermore, the Liberal wing is losing ground and the
+Orthodox wing gaining slightly, not an encouraging sign in these days to
+those who hope for the final triumph of faith over the growing tendency
+towards infidelity. The real truth is that about the only strength left
+in French Protestantism to-day lies in the fact that there is a certain
+_éclat_ associated, in the eyes of the upper classes, with the being a
+Protestant, much as is the case in America and England, in the same rank,
+about being a Roman Catholic. It distinguishes you from the multitude,
+and in these democratic times human nature, especially when it is that
+of the “upper ten,” is very keen for elimination from “the vulgar
+throng.” It is difficult for an American to comprehend this peculiar
+little streak of innocent vanity running through certain French circles
+which shows itself in this wish to be known as Protestants. It is not
+too much to say that to the impartial outside observer this phase of the
+French Protestantism of to-day is the one that first strikes the eye;
+which goes to prove in a peculiar but significant manner the weak hold,
+on the one hand, which the doctrine of Luther and Calvin now has on the
+French nation, and, on the other hand, how universal must be scepticism,
+freethought, and utter indifference to church and religion of every kind.
+
+If native French Protestantism exerts so little influence on the nation,
+it is easy to imagine the excessive futility of the work of the foreign
+missionary. There is a great deal said in American and religious circles
+about the labors in France of the Salvation Army, the McAll Mission,
+the Young Men’s Christian Association, etc. I have received more than
+one letter from would-be subscribers in the United States asking me if
+these and other similar organisations were really accomplishing all that
+they pretend. My reply is invariably that if you regard their labors as
+charity work some good is being done, but if money is asked for because
+of the religious results which have been accomplished, the demand should
+be considered to be arrant humbug. If Père Hyacinthe, a Frenchman and a
+Catholic, after forty years of labor, has accomplished next to nothing,
+it is easy to imagine how this nation, so reserved in its relations
+with the foreigner when he attempts to penetrate into its inner life,
+would treat Scotch and Yankee missionaries. From a religious standpoint,
+therefore, American money and sympathy is absolutely thrown away when
+it is sent to France. If it be answered that much misery and physical
+suffering is relieved by these foreign missions, the French might well
+ask if charity does not begin at home. The French are a peculiarly
+thrifty people. Few are poor, beggars are scarce and charitable
+institutions are rich and numerous. Hence devoting American dollars to
+the relief of French distress is much like sending coals to Newcastle, if
+it is not a piece of sheer impertinence, like our protesting to the Czar
+against his Siberian convict system when we have one quite as cruel in
+full swing in some of our Southern states.
+
+And now, finally, a few paragraphs about the great Roman Catholic
+church of France, the only religious institution of any real first-rate
+importance in this country.
+
+While it is true that the Catholic Church, at least as a church, still
+has a strong hold on the French nation, it is also quite true that
+indifference, infidelity, free thought, and atheism are on the increase.
+Matthew Arnold says, in his essay on Tolstoi, written in 1887: “Between
+the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he [Tolstoi] had lost, he tells
+us, the Christian belief in which he had been brought up, a loss of which
+examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere, but which in Russia, as
+in France, is among all young men of the upper and cultivated classes
+more a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, more avowed, than it is
+with us.” Arnold might have enlarged, at least in the case of France, his
+limits and stated that in the cities the middle and lower classes, too,
+particularly the male portion, have abandoned Rome. One has only to visit
+a Paris church to be convinced of the contempt which men feel for the
+priesthood and religion: you can count ten female devotees for one of the
+masculine gender. In the village church, far away from the great centres,
+the priest may still have the large majority of the population, men and
+women alike, as faithful attendants upon service. But even here, for one
+man who confesses, a dozen or score of women will kneel at the chair.
+Then again, this more general participation in religious ceremonies by
+the rural population is due in a large measure to the fact that these
+Sunday masses and vespers are almost the only break and variety in a very
+dead and monotonous existence. The church is a sort of meeting place,
+where whole families, babies, children, and adults, congregate. The hum
+of idle conversation, the crying of infants, and the ardent exhortations
+of the priest are often mingled in a manner that would astonish and shock
+a pious Protestant, accustomed to the highly proper atmosphere of an
+Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church in the United States.
+
+Another sign of the disfavor in which French Catholicism finds itself
+to-day is seen in the quality of its future priests. You have simply to
+look into the faces of the seminarists as they pass by you in procession
+in the streets of Paris to be convinced of the well-known fact that these
+young men are, for the most part, the faint-hearted and dull-headed sons
+of the peasantry, eager to escape the drudgery of farm life and not
+intelligent enough for business or the petty employments offered by the
+State.
+
+“Anybody can make a priest,” is often heard in France. The result is that
+just as the English army is the receptacle for the riff-raff—the Tommy
+Atkinses of Rudyard Kipling’s “Barrack-room Ballads”—of the cities, so
+the French priesthood draws most of its recruits from the scum of the
+farming districts. This fact contrasts strongly, by the way, with the
+manner in which the Protestants fill their pulpits. The young man who
+becomes a pastor is not looked upon by his friends and companions as a
+failure and a numskull. Quite the contrary; he is immediately classed
+among those taking a high moral stand. Some of the best families of
+France are descended from, or have relatives who are, clergymen, and they
+are quite proud of the fact; another example of that sentiment of halo
+surrounding French Protestantism to which reference has already been made.
+
+Another cause of this boycotting of the cloth as a profession by the
+youth of the élite is due to the Church having got on the wrong side
+during the struggle for the foundation of the present Republic. The
+Catholics supported the Monarchists and Bonapartists and took an active
+part in the attempt to prevent the advent of republican institutions and
+to overthrow these institutions when they had been accepted by a majority
+of the nation. This unpatriotic course brought the Church into bad odor
+among republicans, so that the having a son in orders, for example, would
+be apt to be an impediment to a father aspiring to political preferment,
+especially if the latter belonged to the Radical or Socialist wing of the
+Republican army. The result is that a whole great political party is, in
+its general tendency, opposed to the Catholic Church.
+
+Nor is the harm occasioned thereby limited to lowering the quality of
+the seminarists. It makes a vast number of intelligent and influential
+citizens sworn enemies of religion. Thus, when Gambetta attended
+funerals, he would not enter the church, but wait outside in the porch.
+When Louis Blanc was buried neither church nor priest participated in
+the pageant. On the death of Henri Martin, a free-thinking Protestant
+clergyman officiated at the burial service. Hundreds of other prominent
+Republicans, who have died or been buried since 1870, never entered a
+church, perhaps, except when their bodies were borne there by their
+families, acting under the influence of its female members, or out of
+respect for public sentiment.
+
+One of the shrewdest acts of Leo XIII. is his recent declaration in
+favor of the French Republic. He not only accepts the situation, but
+has ordered the faithful, both ecclesiastical and lay, in France to do
+likewise. But this demand has not been complied with without a murmur.
+More than one priest and noble has shown himself more ultramontane than
+the Pope. The important fact remains true, however, that officially
+the Vatican recognises the political change in France, and, though the
+Republicans, particularly those of the Radical camp, are wary of these
+new converts and still believe with Gambetta, that “_le clericalisme,
+voilà l’ennemi_,” yet the mere fact that the Vatican lays down its arms
+means a great deal, even if the hatchet may not be definitively buried.
+Moderate Republicans, those who go to church even if they do not believe
+what is said there, think they see in this action of the Holy Father a
+new source of strength for the Republic. And it seems to me that they are
+right, and that this view is the soundest. If the priesthood ceases its
+attacks on the political powers that be, and if these latter keep a sharp
+watch, which will be done while the Radical and Socialist elements are so
+strong in Chamber and Senate, the clerical party can be held in check,
+and the Republic will have so many less enemies, even if these quondam
+enemies are but lukewarm friends.
+
+                                                         THEODORE STANTON.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+NEW FRENCH BOOKS.
+
+
+I am happy to have the opportunity in my present letter to speak
+of a book of real importance, _La pathologie des emotions, Études
+physiologiques et cliniques_, by M. CH. FÉRÉ. The name of this learned
+physician of the Bicêtre is sufficiently well known to dispense me from
+the necessity of speaking of his personality, so that I can devote all
+that I have to say to his work. Its great merit is not so much the
+novelty of the psychological theory which is laid at its foundation, as
+the wealth of facts presented and the sureness of the methods pursued.
+M. Féré’s mind is of a distinctly positive cast, and he possesses in a
+high degree the ability to draw from the thesis which he illustrates and
+confirms, the various consequences which from a medical and social point
+of view this thesis involves.
+
+States of intellectual consciousness, he writes, citing Spencer, cannot
+be dissociated from emotional states. The emotions are the products
+of our mental representations of agreeable states or painful states,
+and are the stronger according as they contain a greater number of
+present or nascent sensations competent to recall these states. The
+emotions, accordingly, being simply representations of states of
+consciousness provoked by external excitations, it is to be presumed
+that the physiological conditions of emotions (of central or cerebral
+origin) present a striking analogy, if not an absolute resemblance,
+to the physiological conditions of sensations (of peripheral origin,
+either internal or external); and this relation should be as prominently
+marked in pathological as in normal states. The upshot of all this is,
+continues M. Féré, that physical agents capable of modifying a state of
+consciousness of peripheral origin (sensations), are also capable of
+modifying states of consciousness of central origin (emotions). “The
+external signs of these different states of consciousness can be studied
+by the same methods. Psychology is only specialised physiology; mental
+medicine only a specialisation of general medicine, from which it must
+borrow its methods of research and action—all purely physical. The
+demonstration of these relations is the object of the present work.”
+
+The work, which contains almost six hundred pages, presents no divisions
+but that of chapters. But it would not be difficult to group its contents
+under the four general titles: (1) physiological and pathological effects
+of physical agents on man; (2) physiological conditions and pathological
+and curative effects of emotions; (3) psychopathy and morbid emotivity;
+(4) the consequences to individuals and society of morbid emotivity, its
+medical treatment, prophylaxis and legislation. The entire demonstration
+of M. Féré, I might add, is essentially aimed at the two following
+propositions: the first, that all the symptoms of emotions possess a
+certain resemblance to those of fatigue or physical pain; the other, that
+the original source of morbid emotivities and their resultant disorders
+is a state of depression congenital or acquired.
+
+M. Féré reverts constantly to these fundamental ideas. After having
+exhibited, for example, the reciprocal influences of the emotions, or
+disorders of the imagination, and of disorders which are of physical
+origin, he concludes that “physical disease and moral disease have the
+same basis.” It is thus only in appearance, he writes, that the mind has
+any influence on the functions of the body; the phenomena of mind are,
+quite the reverse, the necessary effect of certain modifications of the
+body, and it is by the intermediary action of the manifestations of the
+body that the representations of the mind act. It is found convenient to
+regard the gray matter of the brain as the central organ of the emotions,
+and the great sympathetic as the peripheral organ that presides over
+their “exteriorisation”; but we have no right to think of the emotions
+without their external signs, and we are thus led to the conclusion that
+“emotion is essentially a generalised reflex phenomenon the centrifugal
+path of which is principally the great sympathetic system.”
+
+A psychological question much debated since M. Ribot took it up, the
+question of _attention_, is also treated here, in an incidental yet
+very interesting manner (Chapter III). M. Féré connects attention with
+the study of the physiological conditions of physical action, and thus
+takes sides, it will be seen, with the motory theory of attention.
+James Sully, and others, have denied the existence of muscular phenomena
+accompanying attention. But physiology is in a position to disclose
+the existence of these movements; it can study their qualities, their
+energy, their form, their precision, and their rapidity. We will find
+in M. Féré’s book a number of new experimental facts establishing the
+thesis that “muscular tension constitutes the physiological condition of
+attention.” “The mistake of many psychologists (M. Hirth, for example)
+has been, that they have confounded rest with willed immobility, which
+from a mechanical point of view is very far removed from the former;
+for immobility of will is precisely the result of very intense muscular
+activities, and can only be produced by a general tension of the muscular
+system, which throws the subject in a state such that it can react the
+most quickly and most energetically on any excitation, whencesoever it
+may proceed.” Willed, or voluntary, immobility is attention itself;
+to produce this state, well-enervated and well-nourished muscles are
+necessary. “We may say,” declares M. Féré, “that the practice of
+immobility is the most favorable exercise for the development of the
+mind: a system of education which should neglect this exercise would
+suppress attention, it would be a regressive education.”
+
+“It is lack of attention,” he tells us further on, “that is the cause
+of the insensibility of hysterical patients, and it is instability of
+attention that is the cause of the variability of their sensory and
+motory disorders.” It is all due to the want of sufficient energy to
+bring simultaneously into a state of tension the muscular settings of all
+of the sensory organs. Hysterical anæsthesia according to him—and how
+perfectly right he is!—is nothing but a mental and psychical disease,
+which may be cured by _suggestion_; it is an organic malady, which cannot
+be cured without the restoration of the proper organic state.
+
+Worthy of notice are a few pages on the existence of electrical
+phenomena, “which are exaggerated in certain subjects, but which appear
+to exist in a more feeble degree in the normal states.” The facts here
+involved might furnish us with a key to the phenomena of transmission,
+polarisation, elective sensibility, and certain actions at a distance,
+whose solution still presents great difficulties. Also to be noted are
+a number of corrections of inductions made by Darwin, whom ignorance
+of physiology often involved in mistakes concerning the true nature
+of phenomena: thus Darwin was often led to attribute an intentional
+character to actions which are throughout reflex.
+
+Basing his views on the inevitable correlation of these two orders of
+phenomena, the physical and the psychical, M. Féré stands in a position
+of direct hostility to the metaphysics (of course, unconscious) of the
+great body of alienists. He selects the characteristic disorder of
+insanity, namely hallucination, and sets about to show the existence of
+physical phenomena concomitant with hallucination. Chapter XIII is one of
+the most instructive of his work and well worth thoughtful perusal. Let
+us add on this point that M. Féré stoutly combats the doctrine, held by
+Magnan in particular, that all forms of phobia, that is to say, of morbid
+emotive states, are the brands of degeneration. He admits, however,
+that a great number are connected with permanent constitutional states,
+congenital or acquired.
+
+M. Féré accepts the pathological and degenerative theory of crime.
+But he rejects in a measure Lombroso’s thesis of the assimilation of
+genius to insanity. Genius and talent, he says, are by no means devoid
+of intellectual and emotional anomalies, but it is not true that
+neuropathic states are the indispensable concomitants of genius, although
+susceptibility to impressions is, when not developed to excess, one of
+the physiological conditions of genius.
+
+With respect to the social consequences involved, I will simply quote
+his concise statement that “physiology is quite in accord with political
+economy in condemning the intemperate generosity which favors the
+development and multiplication of emotive personalities.” With regard,
+finally, to the question of responsibility, M. Féré’s position differs,
+so far as I can see, in no respect from my own, which I have expounded at
+sufficient length in a former number of _The Monist_, to dispense me from
+the necessity of reverting to it here.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our next book is also a remarkable one—_Les transformations du droit_,
+by M. G. TARDE, a small volume of some two hundred and twelve pages.
+M. Tarde has again and again declared himself the avowed adversary of
+Spencerianism, and of evolution generally, at least in so far as the idea
+of evolution is indiscriminately and unreflectingly employed, as is the
+case, he maintains, in a great class of social questions which make up
+the criminal and civil law. Everywhere in these domains, despite apparent
+uniformity, which is the simple effect of a perspective that effaces the
+differences of remote times, is found diversity. The serial stages of
+development professedly disclosed, he rejects as absolutely incompetent
+in the explanation of criminal law, procedure, the status of persons and
+things, and obligations.
+
+In criminal law, for example, we ordinarily regard the system of
+pecuniary composition as the origin of penal justice, and the idea
+of vengeance as necessarily antecedent to the idea of culpability. A
+mistake, says M. Tarde. And he offers on this subject a distinction which
+is quite curious. He sees the defensive reaction made against criminal
+acts originally splitting up into two distinct forms of quite unequal
+scope: the one moral, the joint product of indignation and compassion;
+the other vindictive, malevolent, and ruthless. The first, according
+to him, is exercised within the family and between members of the same
+social group; the second is displayed towards the foreigner and the
+enemy. Of these two sources of penality, the domestic moral punishment
+is the most important; the blow-for-blow policy, or vengeance, although
+more apparent, is a secondary source. I fully admit that the instinct
+of sympathy, the primitive condition of all social aggregation, has
+never been wholly absent from human relations, and it might be that
+the distinction perceived by M. Tarde is well founded, although the
+two sources appear to have become so confounded in the justice of the
+tribunals that it is difficult to trace them to that point. But M.
+Tarde seems to me to be too much disposed to flatter the portrait of
+the primitive man and to make as “mild as lambs” these prehistoric
+creatures whom we have pictured as “cruel as tigers,” and to be too much
+preoccupied with the ideas of penality and moral responsibility, which he
+thinks the new theories have compromised.
+
+With respect to the status of persons, he denies the existence of the
+well-known order of development by which promiscuity, matriarchy, and
+patriarchy are said to succeed each other. The tribe could only have
+arisen, he tells us, from the federation of families, and the strong
+family, the one capable of development, could only have been patriarchal.
+It is wrong, he adds, to regard uterine filiation, that is, the custom
+of considering a child the son of its mother and not the son of its
+father, as a vestige of a pre-existent matriarchy. “In a patriarchal
+society, polygamy—which is the very reverse of matriarchy—ought in the
+very necessity of things to give predominance to the custom referred to,
+so that children born of the same mother could be distinguished from one
+another.” This, indeed, was the idea of the Greek tragedians. The maxim,
+which occurs so often in Euripides, that it is not good that a man should
+have several wives, is always disclosed as the anxiety of assuring the
+legitimacy of children; Æschylus charges Minerva to defend the “cause of
+her father”; it is one of the aspects of the reaction against the customs
+of Asia. The primitive family, says M. Tarde, in summing up, was quite
+different in its original forms; it was here monogamic, there polygamic,
+and in other places polyandrous, at one time exogamic and at another
+endogamic, and so forth. “Marriage, therefore, did not spring from a
+single typical form, nor does it, in its various forms, make towards
+such.”
+
+His criticisms are of equal strength with regard to the status of
+things and the presumed priority of collective property. Contrary to
+the views of M. de Laveleye, he is of opinion that the community of the
+village could only have arisen on an enlarged model of the community of
+the family, “just as the vestal fire of the city could only have been
+lighted in imitation of the fire of the domestic hearth”: The certain
+effect of the first must in its origin have been to encroach upon, not to
+produce, the second. Excessively preoccupied in finding in the present
+the vestiges of a state of things that is past, the evolutionists involve
+themselves, regardless of consequences, in many naïve and wonderful
+theories, which M. Tarde, in his keen and pointed style, has not
+hesitated to expose. There is much point and a profusion of the _granum
+salis_ in these instructive pages.
+
+With respect to obligations, he makes a distinction, as in criminal law,
+between internal and external relations. Also, after having asserted
+with Sir Henry Sumner Maine, the non-fusion of the law of nature and
+the law of nations, he remarks that here also there exists two sources
+whose waters have not subsequently flowed together: the _jus naturæ_ is
+conceived to be the generalisation of a type of relations abstracted from
+the internal relations of the members of the primitive social group; the
+_jus gentium_ to be the outcome of relations between men that belong to
+different groups.
+
+Is, then, this disordered succession of the social data mere chance? The
+reader will bethink himself of a number of facts which go to disprove
+this conclusion, and it is a difficulty moreover which M. Tarde has
+also felt. He replies by making a distinction of “two kinds of laws,
+the laws of causation and the supposed laws of evolution.” The first,
+which in his theory are analogous to the laws of celestial mechanics,
+whose formulæ remain constant no matter what the history of the solar
+systems distributed throughout the heavens may be, are the psychological
+laws; the second are merely arbitrary formulæ, which, when we come to
+define them accurately, do not admit of adaptation even to the majority
+of cases. The psychological laws of which M. Tarde here speaks are
+reducible to _imitation_[82]—consequently to _invention_—and to _logic_.
+I certainly do not propose to question the importance of these factors.
+In a short tract published several years ago I pointed out myself that
+the influences of contact are more efficient than the influences of race
+or even of climate, and this implicitly involves the idea of imitation.
+Yet the character of the psychological factor does not, it seems to me,
+exclude a tendency towards a certain arrangement of the data of society,
+despite their possible and actual diversity. “With respect to the facts
+of society,” I wrote, “we point out their changes but do not succeed
+in disclosing the laws of their evolution; the most we have done is to
+note amid the totality certain features which appear to predominate.”
+To extricate these features is a task not unworthy of the historian. M.
+Tarde himself admits that results of this character have already been
+reached, and he especially points to “the splendid and commendable
+movement in advance, which though not generally noticed[83] has,
+nevertheless, accompanied all juridical evolutions”—namely, the constant
+enlargement of the relations of law as the result of a growing sympathy
+and sociability.
+
+To sum up, the point of view which M. Tarde has taken does not exclude
+a class of researches different from his. Nothing can be better than to
+formulate the laws of the psychological agent, and M. Tarde, original
+mind that he is, has done this with a superiority and penetration to
+which I yield my unqualified admiration. At bottom, does not the view
+of Auguste Comte, despite his contempt for psychology, involve the
+preliminary study of the biological individual and the social agent?
+Psychological laws and physical laws undoubtedly meet in the same group
+of “laws of causation”; still, it should not be forgotten that in the
+social order of things man is the creator of the facts and that his
+creations react upon him in the proportion in which they are realised. At
+any rate, a tangible relation exists between the creations of the agent
+and the variations of the results, and it is not forbidden to inquire if
+there does not also exist a certain order in these creations, the effect
+of which would be to produce a recognisable serial succession in the
+results, a medial line about which the events of our life oscillate. A
+difficult investigation—and one in which M. Tarde has shown himself to be
+too speedily satisfied, and in which we should strenuously guard against
+hasty generalisations. It is unpleasant, we admit, to turn topsy-turvy a
+house in which we have long lived in comfort; but our contentment returns
+in an increased measure when we have replaced our things in their proper
+places, and swept out the dusty corners.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+M. M. AGUILÉRA has just published a work entitled, _L’idée du Droit en
+Allemagne_. His book is a history of the different schools of law which
+have arisen in Germany and lays especial emphasis on the fact that no
+nation has advanced as far as this in seeking in philosophical ideas the
+motives and the justification of its acts, and he sets about showing how
+the existence of Germany’s special conception of law may be explained.
+Germany, he writes in his conclusion, everywhere starts from the idea of
+force. Its peculiar characteristic is to bow before victorious force. And
+to this must be added, if we wish to comprehend its aggressive character,
+the sentiment of vanity, which has led it to proclaim “that incredible
+formula: the ideal of Germany is the ideal of humanity.”
+
+M. GEORGE LYON gives us a learned historical study, _La philosophie
+de Hobbes_. He points out how everything is interrelated in the work
+of this philosopher—his conception of the state to his theories of
+ethics, his ethical doctrines to his psychological theories, and the
+latter to general principles concerning nature, thought, and their laws.
+But he also presents with much force the objections to Hobbism. He
+condemns its final consequence, which is submission to force. He points
+out finally the inevitable ambiguity which permeates this system in
+consequence of the struggle “between individual inspiration, which is
+purely ontological, and the action of an intellectual environment which
+is eminently empirical. Hobbes was the metaphysician of empiricism as
+Bacon was its poet.” I dismiss for the present all discussion of these
+subjects; an occasion will present itself later of dealing with them.
+
+In _Les races et les langues_ M. ANDRÉ LEFÈVRE sums up the state of
+the science of language. The distinguishing characteristic of his work
+is the non-separation of language from the organism which has produced
+it, and the simultaneous presentation of languages with the ethnical
+groups which speak them. M. Lefèvre accepts, let us note at once, the
+well-known stages of the linguistic school—monosyllabism, agglutination,
+inflection, and analysis, which M. Tarde, if he should unexpectedly
+become a philologist would stigmatise as gratuitous. Of the races, of the
+places of origin, and of the migrations of the ancient peoples he tells
+a great many stories which are somewhat of the fairy-tale order, but
+this reservation does not affect in the least the value of his special
+linguistic researches.
+
+In conclusion I shall mention _Le problème de la mort, ses solutions
+imaginaires et la science positive_, by M. L. BOURDEAU, and _Platon,
+sa philosophie, précédé d’un aperçu de sa vie et de ses écrits_, by M.
+CH. BÉNARD, a new volume in the series of historical studies by this
+venerable professor.[84]
+
+                                                            LUCIEN ARRÉAT.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[82] See his work _Les lois de l’imitation_ (Alcan, Paris).
+
+[83] I have called attention to this in a less definite manner in
+several passages of my book _La morale dans le drame, l’épopée et le
+roman_, in which I shall have to incorporate the corrections which the
+splendid studies of M. Tarde have suggested. For the citation given a
+few lines above I ask permission to refer the reader to my _Journal d’un
+philosophe_ (Alcan, Paris).
+
+[84] All the works mentioned are published by F. Alcan.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+
+EINLEITUNG IN DIE PHILOSOPHIE. By _Prof. Friedrich Paulsen_. Berlin:
+Wilhelm Hertz. 1892.
+
+Friedrich Paulsen, professor at the University of Berlin, writes this
+“Introduction” not so much for connoisseurs as for students, whom it
+may serve as a guide. He discusses in general outlines the various
+fundamental problems of philosophy, at the same time indicating his
+own position, which, in more than one respect, is very similar to the
+philosophy presented in the columns of _The Monist_.
+
+His own view, which, as he trusts, is the general tendency of modern
+philosophical thought, he calls “idealistic monism.” It is opposed, on
+the one hand, to supernatural dualism, and on the other hand to atomistic
+materialism; the former being the traditional doctrine of the schoolmen
+and of ecclesiasticism, separating body and soul, nature and God, etc.,
+each into two distinct realities, which are accidentally combined,
+the latter being an attempt, having its beginning in the eighteenth
+century, to explain all natural phenomena in a purely mechanical way.
+Paulsen adds: “The whole history of modern philosophy can be said to
+be a continuous attempt to overcome this opposition.... The principle
+of natural science is the _Natur-Gesetzmässigkeit_ of all events....
+Modern materialism derives from this a kind of metaphysics, represents
+all reality as a system of blindly operating physical forces....
+Philosophy undertakes to dispel the opposition of these two doctrines;
+its proposition is—and we may say that this is the main-spring of the
+entire evolution of modern philosophy—_to reconcile the religious
+world-conception with that of natural science_. There are many who regard
+this aspiration as a sort of squaring of the circle, and we grant that
+some similitude between the two may exist, for here as well as there we
+can attain only to approximations, here as well as there we can never
+solve the problem finally and forever. At any rate, we must recognise the
+fact that the whole philosophical thought of the last three centuries has
+been directed towards this goal.”
+
+Professor Paulsen classes the various philosophies of the present time
+as follows: (1) The phenomenalistic-positivistic philosophy which denies
+any absolute cognition of reality, least of all in physics; the world of
+objects is a world of phenomena. (2) The idealistic monistic philosophy.
+To define the nature of reality as it is in itself, we must rely upon
+the data of our inner experience. The intellectual-historical world is
+to us the most comprehensible dénouement of reality—in fact, the only
+comprehensible one. The ultimate idea to which we are led in tracing
+out facts, is this: Reality, which presents itself to our senses in the
+objective world as a unitary system of motions, is the appearance of a
+spiritual all-being, which must be conceived as the evolution of some
+unitary idea. In this respect idealistic monism agrees upon the whole
+with speculative philosophy, or rather with all idealism since Plato.
+
+The philosophy of the present time is, further on, characterised (3) as
+passing from intellectualism to voluntaryism; namely, it allows the will
+to have its legitimate influence in the construction of a world-view. It
+is (4) evolutionistic-theological, which latter tendency meets half way
+the above-mentioned idealistic monism. Both are beginning to permeate
+ethics, sociology, jurisprudence, and politics. The old formalistic
+methods are dropped and teleological considerations prevail. Purpose
+is recognised to rule in life. Lastly (5) the philosophy of to-day
+is historical. The older philosophy is mathematical-naturalistic or
+abstract-rationalistic. Speculative philosophy precedes the construction
+of an intellectual-historical world; it then attempts also to construct
+nature historically, at least in a logico-genetic schematism. Natural
+science has already pursued this course in its cosmical and biological
+theories of evolution. It is apparent how these tendencies follow the old
+tradition of harmonising the physical and the intellectual-historical
+worlds into one unitary conception of the whole.
+
+The book is divided into two parts, with an introduction and conclusion.
+The introduction defines the relation of philosophy to mythology and to
+the sciences. Philosophy cannot be separated from the sciences. Says
+Paulsen: “Figuratively speaking, reality is a great riddle proposed to
+man; all the various sciences determine some parts of it, and the attempt
+to solve the _whole_, to find the key to the _mysterium magnum_ of being,
+is called philosophy.”
+
+The first book treats, in two chapters, of the problems of metaphysics,
+viz.: the ontological problem and the cosmo-theological problem. In
+the former chapter materialism, panpsychism, and the nature of the
+soul are discussed, while the second chapter is devoted to atomism and
+teleological theism, implying such subjects as the theory of evolution,
+causality, pantheism. The second part reviews, in the first chapter, the
+problems of the theory of cognition, viz.: the idealistic arguments, the
+realistic views, and our knowledge of the outer world. The second chapter
+presents an exposé of the problems regarding the origin of cognition as
+viewed by rationalism and empiricism, paying special attention to Kant’s
+formalistic realism. The conclusion is a brief treatment of some ethical
+problems.
+
+It is impossible to discuss all the details of the 444 pages of Paulsen’s
+book, but a few specimen quotations from the chapter “Pantheism and
+World-soul” may be welcome to our readers. Our author asks: Considering
+all the tendencies of yearning and willing that appear in the innumerable
+forms of reality, is there a unity of inner life corresponding to the
+unity of the physical world in its universal interaction? The affirmation
+of this question constitutes the idealistic pantheism.
+
+Idealistic pantheism is to Professor Paulsen the simplest and most
+obvious construction of the world possible. To other world-views, the
+existence of the soul is a problem; it has even been called an “absolute
+problem.” “I believe,” he adds, with great truth, “that there can be
+no stronger argument against any world-view than that it regards the
+existence of soul as something absolutely mysterious.” There is a power
+of conviction in idealistic pantheism verified by the astonishing
+agreement of the testimonies of many various thinkers in the Orient as
+well as in the Occident, in antiquity no less than in modern times. (P.
+243.)
+
+Says Professor Paulsen: “The dayfly may imagine when the sun sinks that
+all is at an end; light vanishes forever and the whole world is swallowed
+up in darkness and death. But man who sees so many suns sink and rise
+should have learned that in the infinite there are many possibilities
+which he cannot see at present [p. 241]. The conception of a world-soul,
+of a spiritual all-being, of a _mundus intelligibilis_ appears to our
+physicists and physiologists in the same light as the conception of
+anthropomorphic deities—as a childish dream. They have no need of this
+hypothesis [pp. 243-244]. Du Bois-Reymond declares that a naturalist
+before admitting the assumption of a world-soul should demand, ‘that
+we ought to find somewhere in the world neuroglia embedded in warm
+arterial blood under the proper pressure and provided with appropriate
+sense-organs, ganglions, and fibres, corresponding to the intellectual
+capacities of such a soul.’ An animal,” says Paulsen, “needs as a matter
+of course legs to stand upon and to move with, a stomach, teeth, eyes,
+and a central nervous system, but the All is not in need of this; it
+needs no legs to stand upon and to move with, no stomach for alimentary
+purposes, no eyes, no ears, for there is nothing to be seen or heard
+outside of it, and so it can also dispense with a nervous system and a
+brain.”
+
+Quoting two passages, one from Fechner, the other from Nägeli, to the
+effect that the system of fixed stars might be regarded as a group of
+molecules in an infinitely larger whole which we should have to conceive
+of as a unitary organism, Paulsen says: “Indeed, there is no objection to
+regarding a planet as a ganglion of the world-brain. Is it too large? No.
+Why should not the world-brain have bigger cells than an animal brain. Or
+is its composition inappropriate? Why? We find in it the same materials,
+carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, and so forth, and also
+innumerable interactions similar for all we know to those that take place
+in a ganglion. Who knows how striking would be the resemblance of their
+structures, if we could but see a ganglion under a sufficiently powerful
+magnifying glass.”
+
+These ideas are mere possibilities and are presented as such, but we
+cannot attribute to them any philosophical, scientific, or religious
+importance. Our idea of “a world-soul” or, better, of God, is different
+and we avoid purposely anything that can be constructed upon the basis of
+a vague hypothesis.
+
+We ourselves reject pantheism, the view which identifies God and the
+All for reasons which we need not repeat here. We call our view of
+God entheism, and in forming our idea of God we purposely avoid such
+fantastical assumptions as considering the possibility of solar systems
+being molecules in the organism of a huge world-animal. Granted the
+truth of this view, the mere possibility of which we cannot deny,
+this extraordinary creature or world-animal would not be God, its
+will would not be our moral authority; it would not be the eternal,
+the immutable, the ground of all being, the ultimate rule of action,
+and the omnipotent universal law of existence: it would merely be a
+creature like ourselves, only immeasurably bigger, evolving like other
+animals and subject to the same or analogous or perhaps similar wants,
+disappointments, sufferings, and joys as ourselves. What a miserable God
+such a world-being would be; we know nothing of him and he knows nothing
+of us. His will and aspirations would have even less influence upon our
+aspirations, than, for instance, the hopes of a man upon the molecular
+groupings in his tissues, we being only the parasites upon the crust
+of an atom of his tissues. We have presented our view of the subject
+in Vol. III, No. 2, pp. 249-257, of _The Monist_, in the third part of
+the article “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” with reference to a similar
+hypothesis incidentally touched upon as a possibility of monistic theism
+by Professor Romanes.
+
+We simply state the difference between our position and that of Professor
+Paulsen concerning the nature of a world-soul without intending to make
+more of it than he does himself; for, if we are not mistaken, it is with
+him a mere suggestion.
+
+We conclude our review with a passage which shows Professor Paulsen’s
+attitude toward Christianity, which more than anything else proves the
+general agreement of his work with ours. He says:
+
+“The Christian faith is not a philosophical system, not a theological
+dogma and still less the residue of an old superstition, but the
+immediate and living certainty of the heart concerning the nature of the
+good and its importance in real life. This faith can be to-day the same
+as it was in Luther’s, or St. Augustine’s, or the apostles’ time who saw
+Jesus with their own eyes bodily. If Christianity, did indeed consist of
+a number of doctrines and opinions, it would certainly be true, as some
+claim, that it has been dead a long time, for doctrines and opinions are
+not long-lived. If Christianity really did consist of the belief in the
+creation of the world five thousand years ago out of nothing, the rib
+story of Eve, the story of Eden and the fall, etc., etc., ... then indeed
+it would be impossible for a thinking man of to-day to be a Christian.
+But all that is not the faith of Christianity, it is not the religion of
+Jesus. And if all the leaders of all the confessions declare that this
+is the Christian faith and that he who does not believe all these things
+can have no part in Christ, their proposition must be rejected as untrue.
+No one can be saved by believing these things; while the request of the
+church to believe in certain opinions set forth by men has expelled
+many an honest man.... In the life and death of Jesus I have learned to
+understand the meaning of life and I call God and the revelation of God
+that which makes my life possible and explains to me the significance of
+my life.... Is such a faith compatible with the above-mentioned monistic
+world-conception? My answer is, By all means.”
+
+This is Professor Paulsen’s solution of the problem of a reconciliation
+of science and religion—and we add that it is ours too.
+
+                                                                     P. C.
+
+
+FIRST STEPS IN PHILOSOPHY. By _William Mackintire Salter_. Chicago: C. H.
+Kerr & Co. 1892. Price, $1.00. Pages, 155.
+
+This little book is divided into two parts: (1) Physical, (2) Ethical.
+In the first, Mr. Salter discusses the conception of matter; in the
+second, that of duty. Mr. Salter’s philosophical position is epitomised
+in a sentence which he quotes from Herbert Spencer. This sentence states,
+that, “what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to
+its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by
+objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable.” Mr. Salter’s
+philosophical position, accordingly, is, first, Idealism, and, second,
+Agnosticism.
+
+In ethics, Mr. Salter’s view embraces Utilitarianism, or Hedonism, and
+Intuitionism, both of which, he says, are incomplete in themselves, and
+must be supplemented by other elements. Utilitarianism makes happiness
+the ultimate end; Intuitionism, virtue; and Mr. Salter adds, such an end
+must embrace the “realisation of _all_ our capacities.” Mr. Salter’s
+ethical position has been before discussed in our journals.
+
+If we study Mr. Salter’s philosophical views, we shall find that his
+theory is a reproduction of Berkeley’s analysis of the data of knowledge,
+embellished by the results of modern physiological psychology. Yet Mr.
+Salter’s theory, although it everywhere shows the traces of a close study
+of Berkeley’s views, presents the strange historical anomaly of undoing
+Berkeley’s work. Berkeley’s undoubted aim was to place knowledge on a
+basis of fact and refute, in a philosophical manner, the agnosticism,
+metaphysicism, and transcendentalism prevalent in his day. But Mr. Salter
+adds to Berkeley’s results the very things that Berkeley sought to
+overthrow, and thus renders the latter’s analysis (and consequently his
+own) in need of an equivalent analysis.
+
+Take, for instance, the above-quoted sentence from Herbert Spencer, to
+which Mr. Salter assents. “Objective agencies,” “unknown and unknowable”!
+Is this consistent? All knowledge is a knowledge of sensations, a
+knowledge _of_ and _in_ the mind, says the idealist, and we cannot, by
+any process of ratiocination, arrive at things “outside” the mind. Yet he
+himself, it seems, arrives at a knowledge of “objective agencies” outside
+the mind (pp. 65, 69), and, what is more wonderful, at agencies that are
+“unknown” and “unknowable.” Surely, this is not abiding by an analysis
+of the facts of sensation (Berkeley). It is as unrational a procedure to
+infer metaphysical objective agencies, as it is to infer a metaphysical
+substratum “matter,” which last is the error of the realist.
+
+Again, take the notion of cause. Here, also, the same unwarrantable
+abandonment of the facts of sensation, i. e. of _all that is_, is evident.
+
+At the end of an analysis, in which he shows that “all the choir of
+Heaven and the furniture of the earth,” and “all which it inhabit,”
+retreat and vanish in mind, Mr. Salter asks: “But is there absolutely
+nothing real and objective left? So far as sensible phenomena are
+concerned, we must answer, No, absolutely nothing is left; the whole
+sensible (material) world is but an effect upon ourselves. But,” he adds,
+“it would be a hasty inference,” on these grounds, “to say that nothing
+whatever is left.” And when asked “what is left,” he answers, “all that
+causes sensation.” We can never know scientifically what these causes
+are, but “we have an inextinguishable faith” _that_ they are, “there
+being no particular thing we are more sure of than that for every event
+(and every sensible phenomenon is an event, viz., in ourselves) there is
+some kind of explanation or cause.” To sum up: The theory of “sensible or
+physical idealism”[85] implies a “supersensible or metaphysical realism.”
+In the theory of sensible idealism things only exist as sensations;
+“only exist, that is, _save in their supersensible or transcendental
+causes_”—which, says the author, we must always add.
+
+What is a cause? Cause is an abstraction. An abstraction from what? from
+a real, physical world, or from a metaphysical, transcendental world?
+Plainly, from our real world, from Mr. Salter’s world of “sensible
+reality.” By what philosophical warrant, then, is this concept applied to
+a world from which it has not been derived and to which it surely cannot
+apply! It is wrong to speak of a cause of the All. The All has no cause,
+just as it has no weight.
+
+All these difficulties arise from the notion that there are two kinds
+of knowledge and two kinds of existences. Idealism, to be consistent,
+must be absolute; Mr. Salter’s idealism is not absolute. This is exactly
+the criticism that the reading of his book at once forces on one. All
+knowledge is knowledge of sensations, i. e. of reality; things not
+accessible to sensation are not real, they do not exist; consequently,
+all entities transcendental, metaphysical, and supersensible do not
+exist. This is the conclusion to which any philosophy, idealism, realism,
+or what not _must_ lead.
+
+Nowadays, few people dispute the fundamental thesis of idealism (of
+course, expressed in different terms from those of Mr. Spencer’s
+sentence). In a sense, it is established. Its only drawback is, that its
+“establishment” accomplishes nothing. It leaves the problem of philosophy
+where it found it.[86] Reality is still reality. The same difficulties
+and perplexities exist. The universe still mocks us. And foremost among
+the riddles that the world opposes to man, stands that eternal query:
+“What is mind?” Mr. Salter’s views of this question will show us what
+contributions his theory is likely to make to philosophy.
+
+Mr. Salter defines mind as “that which experiences sensations and
+thoughts, or, more simply, that which feels and thinks.” It is not
+feeling, not thinking, but _that which_ feels and thinks. It is thus an
+agent, a subject. It is difficult to understand how this notion of mind
+is come at, without self-contradiction. In their origin, all notions
+of mind-subjects, mind-essences, mind-agencies, and so forth, are
+materialistic. They must be volatilised and stripped of their substantial
+attributes, if they are to take a place in an idealistic philosophy, and
+then, as they “cannot be ranged along with the sensible phenomena of
+which the mind takes cognisance,” there is but one realm left to exist
+in, which is the transcendentalistic.
+
+All this comes from carrying the abstraction by which “mind” is reached,
+to mathematically infinite limits. In this abstraction the world retreats
+and fades away into nothingness. And what is left? Not a single idea
+or fact by which we can fix our abstraction. Mind is all, and mind is
+nothing. It is not matter, not time, not space—not even a mathematical
+point, which we expect it to become in its infinitely contracting
+perspective. It has no attributes, no qualities; it is nothing and
+nowhere. This conception of mind, Mr. Salter says, is only mysterious as
+we _make_ it so, by careless and inaccurate thinking. And Mr. Salter is
+right. It would require much careless thinking to make such a conception
+mysterious. A thing or notion that cannot be defined, placed, or brought
+into connection with any other thing or notion in the world, is not
+_mysterious_, but simply does not exist. In that respect, it is as plain
+as day.
+
+The same confusion exists in the discussion which disposes of the query,
+“_Where_ is mind?” The idealist, in Mr. Salter’s sense, does not admit
+that the mind is in, or in anywise spatially connected with, the brain.
+The question, _where_ is mind? he says, has no meaning, any more than
+the question, what is the color of a pleasure? This is true. Mind is an
+abstraction. In this sense it has no spatial existence. But the phenomena
+from which this abstraction has produced itself, _are_ linked with
+phenomena which have spatial existence, and in this sense the mental
+processes are not mysterious nothings and nowheres. When I lose that
+group of sensations called my leg, I know that, generally, I have lost
+the feeling of my leg. So, also, when a certain part of that group of
+sensations called my brain is destroyed, I know that I shall then have
+lost my power of memory or of speech or of motion. I may also experiment
+with other groups of sensations called dogs and cats, which I know have
+mental powers. In the light of these facts it is not correct, either in
+philosophy or common sense, to say that mental processes are absolutely
+independent of locality. I know that my thoughts are not connected
+with the group of sensations I call the moon, and I know they are not
+connected with that group of sensations that I call Mr. Smith. I am
+always aware of them as connected with that group of sensations which I
+call “myself.”
+
+Mr. Salter, in fact, half recognises this. He says, “The mind _is_
+dependent on the body in the sense that our general power of sensation
+and thought is connected with those sensations we call our body.” Yet,
+“why this should be so is mysterious.” Indeed! One is inclined to ask
+Mr. Salter here, what species of explanation or knowledge he wishes
+of this phenomenon. Is explanation, or knowledge, something more than
+the recognition and seeing of a plain connection between the groups of
+sensations that constitute reality? In Mr. Salter’s analysis, all the
+facts of the world are mysterious. Why a thing is as it is and is not
+other than it is, is mysterious. He utterly fails to understand why
+the power of perceiving colors is linked with the particular group of
+sensations he calls his eye, and why it should not just as well be linked
+with some other group or no group at all.
+
+Why do I see with my eye? Why do I not see with my hand or with the hairs
+of my head, or why do I not eat with my elbow, instead of my mouth?
+Why do not stones fall upwards? Why do not magnets point towards the
+East? Why do not the planets move about Jupiter or Saturn? Mr. Salter’s
+question makes a jumble of the whole universe.
+
+It is not the object of science or philosophy to find out why things are
+not what they are, but to find out what they are. In this inquiry the why
+and wherefore, properly understood, will evolve themselves.
+
+Science simply concerns itself with the connection of the groups of
+sensations which the idealist, and for that matter every one else, calls
+reality. It cannot concern itself with anything else. All other things
+are artificial and self-made existences. Nothing exists but reality
+and the connections of reality. To seek for any other connections than
+those that exist is absurd and futile. And to seek for any other causes
+or cause of relations than such as really are is also futile. Before we
+speak of the knowledge of a thing we must analyse and define our notion
+of knowledge, and before we speak of the cause of a thing we must analyse
+and define our notion of cause. In our view, the relation which Mr.
+Salter doubts, is so intimately and inextricably one, that the causal
+relation disappears. Neither is the cause of the other. We may, for the
+purposes of inquiry, start from either as our general concept, but we
+should never go so far as utterly to expel from reality the other. True
+science and philosophy are neither idealistic nor materialistic, but
+_real_. The two positions are extreme positions, and each is useful only
+as a safeguard against the errors of the others. Reality is reality;
+that is the main thing. Whether it is idealistic or materialistic is of
+minor consequence. Besides reality there is nothing; its negation is
+non-existence.
+
+We do not wish in these criticisms to repudiate all that is in Mr.
+Salter’s book. A great many of its reflections are helpful and
+suggestive. We may refer, for example, to the passages in which the body
+is regarded as a gradually decreasing wall of separation between that
+part of reality which is known subjectively and that part which is known
+objectively. This is really a unitary view. We believe, however, that if
+Mr. Salter would carefully analyse the notions of knowledge, explanation,
+cause, effect, and, therefore, the notion of reality, he would not
+push his philosophy to the mysterious extreme at which it finally
+arrives, and he would absolutely reject such unscientific conceptions
+as supersensible realism, metaphysical realism, and supersensible
+or transcendental causes. These render the reading of his book as a
+philosophical help unsatisfactory, and leave the mind even more confused
+and perplexed than it was before. However, all discussions of this sort
+have their value, and Mr. Salter’s book possesses a virtue which few
+other philosophical productions can boast of: it is very short. The
+author’s pleasant style will also add to the pleasure of its perusal, and
+if read critically the book will evoke much helpful thought.
+
+                                                          T. J. MCCORMACK.
+
+
+A REVIEW OF THE SYSTEMS OF ETHICS FOUNDED ON THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. By
+_C. M. Williams_. New York and London: Macmillan & Co. 1893.
+
+This is a book, the perusal of which will leave the earnest student of
+moral science full of disappointment. Not at all that it manifests any
+lack of ability or information. On the contrary, it is at once clearly
+and entertainingly written, and at the same time packed with notes and
+comments that are full of interest and instruction.
+
+The course of the book may be briefly stated. The first part, comprising
+nearly half of its six hundred pages, is devoted to the statement of
+the ethical doctrines maintained by thirteen prominent writers, whose
+views have been formed more or less under the influence of the theory of
+evolution, viz.: Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Spencer, Fiske, Rolph, Baratt,
+Stephen, Carneri, Höffding, Gizycki, Alexander, and Paul Ree. The rest
+of the book is the review of our author. This review is conducted under
+the topical heads: The Concepts of Evolution; Intelligence and End;
+The Will; Thought, Feeling, and Will in Evolution; Egoism and Altruism
+in Evolution; Conscience; Moral Progress in History; The Results of
+Ethical Inquiry on an Evolutional Basis; and The Ideal and the Way of Its
+Attainment.
+
+These are all topics of great interest and importance, and the author
+has brought to the consideration of them a mind fully stored and
+entirely competent. But we look in vain for that discourse and criticism
+which above all other matters relating to moral science those who are
+interested in human welfare crave from those who tender their reflections
+upon ethical topics.
+
+The great need of moral science is the discovery and certification of its
+basis. It is a need that far transcends the scope of mere moral science,
+for upon its right determination depends the right determination of a
+multitude of questions that deeply involve the welfare of humanity. It
+is a need that is not merely crying to be supplied. It is absolutely
+wailing. Could it only be rightly determined, mankind would fast enough
+orient itself in the course of evolution and with undissipated energy
+work out its best possible development. But undiscovered or uncertified
+it balks all process, save only that mechanical, halting, stumbling
+process that has hitherto obtained; a process that is, as all may
+observe, one that has little if any inward coördination, but is full of
+inability and cross-purposes. Since it was the professed purpose of
+our author to review a number of the more prominent systems of ethics,
+which he esteems to be founded on the theory of evolution, his failure
+to notice and to comment upon so conspicuous a feature of moral science
+would naturally lead a reader, unversed in the works noticed, to suppose
+that those works had altogether slighted this topic. Such is, however,
+not the case. With the exception of perhaps Darwin and Wallace, all
+the writers reviewed by our author have given more or less attention
+to this matter, and they have left us in no doubt as to the positions
+which they severally hold. Most of them are Hedonists of one sort or
+another. Haeckel, Carneri, Rolph, and Alexander are, we believe, the only
+exceptions.
+
+But a more serious criticism upon the work under notice is suggested by
+its very title. That title as much as says that the various works which
+are reviewed by our author are “founded” upon the theory of evolution, at
+least in so far as their ethical doctrines are concerned.
+
+Now, what is the theory of evolution? What is its essential nature?
+Does not its very form consist in the affirmation of an eternal secular
+mutation, in which there is no discontinuity whatever? It says that
+existence in sum and in every detail is eternal and continuous process.
+It uncompromisingly forbids all suppositions of any absolute beginning,
+or of any absolute end, or of any absolutely final adjustment. Hence, no
+system of ethics can with truth be said to be “founded” upon the theory
+of evolution that ignores or forgets this essential character of it.
+Now, when we turn to the consideration of the various “systems” which
+our author supposes to be “founded” upon the theory of evolution, we
+find them, one and all, occupied more or less with suppositions of ends.
+All are forecasting some “ideal” condition, which, being attained, all
+chances of retrogression will be foreclosed and all possibilities of
+betterment will be exhausted. In other words, they suppose an attainment
+of death, or rather an attainment of a death-in-life more utterly
+horrible than any actual death can possibly be. The very first condition
+for an ethics that will be truly evolutional must be the fit and full
+recognition of a boundless horizon to evolution in morals as well as in
+all else. Emerson perceived the truth when he said in “The Sphynx”:
+
+    “Profounder, profounder
+    Man’s spirit must dive;
+    To his aye rolling orb
+    No goal will arrive.
+    The heavens that now draw him
+    With sweetness untold,
+    Once found; for _new_ heavens
+    He spurneth the old.”
+
+And at present, the most serious efforts to establish a truly
+clear-sighted ethics of evolution, with an unequivocal disavowal of any
+and all Hedonism, is made by the editors of _The Monist_. It, indeed,
+is the key-note of the missionary work that characterises all the
+publications of The Open Court Publishing Co.
+
+Any truly evolutional ethics must show itself a doctrine that applies
+just as well to regress as to progress. Evolution is too often confounded
+with progress, but degeneration is just as truly evolutional as is the
+contrary movement, and, looking the facts of existence in the face,
+mankind has no assurance of any unchangeable course of betterment. The
+principles of morals are, however, not dependent upon the benign action
+of nature. When the earth’s stock of fuel shall become exhausted, or
+when the ice age returns, or when the sun grows cold, there will be no
+alteration thereby in the moral law. Good and evil must and will be
+the same under all circumstances, and no system of ethics is nor can
+be anything but a temporary makeshift, that does not as well fit the
+_diastoles_ as it does the _systoles_ of existence. We must look for
+a doctrine that shall inform the conduct of men not only for the fore
+part of the day, when all is jubilant and bounding and man asks only
+for some good task to do, but also for the evening and night, when man
+grows weary and craves for rest; for not only youth and maturity, but for
+waning strength, old age, and death; for not only the progressive era of
+cosmic history, but for the periods when natural conditions may disfavor
+mankind, when, say, man may gradually be so reduced in resources that
+the same will barely suffice for simple life-preservation; when under
+the stress of natural conditions the human intellect, in the course of
+generations, becomes step by step eliminated; when indeed humanity itself
+tends perhaps slowly, but with certainty, towards permanent extinction.
+
+They who complacently protest that the theory of evolution leaves the
+domain of moral science substantially unaffected are surely in great
+default either in their comprehension of the nature and implications
+of that theory, or in their powers of circumspection, while those who
+suppose that moral science becomes evolutional simply because of a little
+application of that theory to some of the subordinate questions that are
+involved, show themselves in a plight as bad as the others if not worse.
+
+Our author notices without dissent, and even with seeming concurrence,
+the various remarks made by many of the writers reviewed by him in
+discredit of teleology.
+
+Since as we have before protested the theory of evolution forbids all
+suppositions of any ends that are absolutely final, it of course follows
+that teleology is in the strictness of its meaning inadmissible, even
+in ethics. But in dismissing teleology, let us not pour out the child
+with the bath. However it ought to be with the interpretation of the
+order of nature as a speculative exercise, something that is analogous
+to teleology is an absolute necessity if ethics is to be anything more
+than a curious study of human practise. The universe may manifest no
+purpose, design or secular tendency, but man is and can be nothing but a
+miserable estray on the ocean of existence unless he sails on a course,
+instead of merely drifting. To do this he must take something by which to
+steer, and any plausible stability is better than no bearings whatever.
+At any rate man is insuperably drawn to thus mark out his course. If the
+theory of evolution forbids him to suppose any ends that are absolutely
+final, it does not prevent him from ascertaining directions. Indeed
+evolution affords him data of the very first importance for that behoof.
+Instead of ends we have aims and if ethics is to become that counsel and
+guide to humanity, which we yearn for so anxiously, it must ascertain
+and certify that single paramount aim to which all other tendencies are
+naturally subsidiary. Teleology, or rather the determination of the aim
+of evolution, must prepare the foundation before any evolutional ethics
+that is worthy the name can be established.
+
+Again our author with considerable debate notices the remarks of
+the writers reviewed by him on the old question of free will and
+necessity,—but like the positing of some end or aim to be subserved,
+free will is one of the presuppositions of ethics. When man begins to
+debate the possibility of rightly ascertaining the true end or aim for
+his pursuit, or when he begins to moot the question of free will, he
+is debating not any question of ethics proper, but only whether such a
+science is possible. Unless conditions and events are functions, as well
+of man’s personality as of his environment; unless persons count for
+something in the variations of the course of nature, it is altogether
+vain and idle to be troubled with questions of morality.
+
+Free will and somewhat to be achieved are principles which whether well
+or ill founded, ethics proper must take for granted before it has or can
+have any _raison d’être_. As for free will, however the metaphysicians
+may have stumbled over their own feet, the common sense of mankind has
+never wavered. As a practical question (and ethics is pre-eminently a
+matter of practice) this question is not an open one.
+
+But on the question of what is the true paramount aim for man to pursue,
+the decision that shall finally satisfy man is yet to be made. The best
+proof that no satisfactory answer has yet been made is the fact that
+we are still seeking an answer. As with regard to the needful prime
+condition for a truly evolutional ethics we found wisdom in the poetical
+insight, so again in this exigency we personally find the most profound
+ethical philosophy in that same insight.
+
+    “’Tis Life of which our nerves are scant.
+    ’Tis Life, not death for which we pant,
+    More Life, and fuller that we want.”
+
+                                                       FRANCIS C. RUSSELL.
+
+
+DER PESSIMISMUS IM LICHTE EINER HÖHEREN WELTAUFFASSUNG. By _Dr. J.
+Friedländer_ and _Dr. M. Berendt_. Berlin W.: S. Gerstmann. 1893.
+
+The authors’ aim is the refutation of pessimism and the foundation of
+a higher world-conception. This latter is a pantheism spiritualised
+by moral ideals and contrasted to Darwinism and materialism. Natural
+science is said to be the surrounding walls of the new view, furnishing
+(1) negative truths of criticism and (2) a knowledge of the positive
+features of nature. The negative truths are: the impossibility of the
+existence of a personal God, of the efficiency of prayer, of miracles,
+of the immortality of the soul, of the separate existence of souls
+without bodies. The positive results of natural science are the unity
+of nature, the indestructibility of nature, the harmony of the All,
+the indivisibility of nature, the irrefragable necessity of natural
+processes according to immutable laws, and the freedom or independence of
+nature, as having its cause in itself, uncreated and uninfluenced by any
+extramundane being.
+
+Natural science alone, according to the authors, is not sufficient to
+constitute the new world-conception. A one-sided view of natural science
+together with the obsolete conceptions of theism are exactly what has
+brought forth the philosophical pessimism of our time. Natural science,
+accordingly, is not to be regarded as the sole source of truth; it is
+to be corrected by pantheism. The former teaches us “to regard matter
+and its motion, so to say, as a dead inert substance to which motion is
+attached; it treats matter as an immediate reality. Pantheism, however,
+teaches that matter is to be conceived as the interrelation of the
+innumerable live acts of will appearing successively in time and side
+by side in space,” etc. The authors point out that the necessity of law
+which regulates the mechanical processes of nature does not exclude
+freedom; for “freedom is not arbitrariness but is controlled by an
+immanent _Gesetzmässigkeit_.”
+
+This summary is sufficient to characterise the ideas of the Drs.
+Friedländer and Berendt. We cannot say that they admit of no criticism,
+(e. g. their conception of natural science must be pronounced as too
+narrow if not actually erroneous, nor should the law of the survival
+of the fittest be interpreted in the sense that strength means brutal
+force,) but we can, nevertheless, express our sympathy with the aim of
+the authors as well as with the spirit in which they pursue it.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+DIE PHILOSOPHIE UND DIE SOCIALE FRAGE. By _Gustav Engel_. Leipsic: C. E.
+M. Pfeffer. 1892.
+
+ACHT ABHANDLUNGEN, HERRN PROFESSOR DR. KARL LUDWIG MICHELET ZUM 90.
+GEBURTSTAG ALS FESTGRUSS DARGEREICHT VON MITGLIEDERN DER PHILOSOPHISCHEN
+GESELLSCHAFT. Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer. 1892.
+
+WIE STEHT ES JETZT MIT DER PHILOSOPHIE, UND WAS HABEN WIR VON IHR ZU
+HOFFEN? By _Dr. Wilhelm Paszkowski_. Halle a. S.: F. Beyer, 1892.
+
+This lecture by the well-known writer on the science of statistics
+and its related subjects was read before the Philosophical Society of
+Berlin on the 31st of May, 1890. It discusses the problem of socialism,
+or rather the aspirations of the German social democracy from the
+philosophical point of view of the lecturer, which is a modernised
+Hegelianism. This lecture drew forth on the evening of its delivery
+considerable discussion, which was participated in by Herr Kahle, a
+socialist, and Herr Runze. The discussions of these gentlemen, together
+with Mr. Engel’s reply, are embodied in the pamphlet.
+
+The second of these two pamphlets is also a publication of the
+Philosophical Society of Berlin. It consists of eight treatises, essays,
+or lectures, which were presented by the members of the society to Prof.
+Karl Ludwig Michelet as a festival gift on his ninetieth natal day. The
+authors of these eight essays are: Adolf Lasson, August Cieszkowski,
+Gustav Engel, Friedrich Kirchner, Wilhelm Paszkowski, Max Runze, Georg
+Ulrich, and F. Zelle. They deal with philosophical subjects, chiefly such
+as pertain to the Hegelian philosophy. Appended to the pamphlet is a
+bibliography of the writings of this Nestor of the Philosophical Society
+by F. Ascherson.
+
+The author of the third pamphlet complains about the decay of philosophy:
+“Metaphysics, the inner fane in the temple of science, stands desolate,”
+and the last disciples of Hegel can no longer prevent the deluge which
+sweeps away the idealism of their grand old master.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+DER MATERIALISMUS, EINE VERIRRUNG DES MENSCHLICHEN GEISTES, WIDERLEGT
+DURCH EINE ZEITGEMÄSSE WELTANSCHAUUNG. By _Dr. Eugen Dreher_. Berlin: S.
+Gerstmann. 1892.
+
+The author of this pamphlet, at present a docent at the University of
+Halle, feels somewhat oppressed by the materialistic tendencies of our
+times. His desire is to establish in the world a province of the ideal,
+and this domain of idealistic aspirations and hopes, he says, must and
+can be based upon a scientific foundation. To reach this goal, the author
+propounds a philosophy which is confessedly dualistic, and which must be
+made a kind of religion. Descartes’s _Cogito, ergo sum_, is to him the
+beginning of all philosophy. The existence of the All is devoid of sense,
+unless there is an ego to think it. This dualism, if made a religion,
+will throw light upon the problems of the labyrinth of life.
+
+The aspirations of the author are serious and noble. We cannot, however,
+agree with the results of his reasonings. He does not seem to have
+considered Kant’s objections to the fallacy of the _cogito, ergo “ego”
+sum_. Nor is he familiar with Lichtenberg’s famous remark, that “we
+should say by rights ‘it thinks,’ exactly as we say ‘it rains.’” The
+same moral conclusions at which the author arrives may be reached, the
+same province for ideal aspirations in the world may be gained, the same
+religious comfort may be found, without any surrender of the monistic
+view of the world. Materialism is an error of human thought. But the
+error cannot be cured by dualism.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+UEBER DIE GRUNDFORMEN DER VORSTELLUNGSVERBINDUNG. Psychologische Studie.
+By _Max Offner_. Marburg: R. Friedrich. 1892.
+
+This little brochure is a carefully worked out study of the phenomena of
+association. The author’s view is summed up in the following statement:
+“The attempt to reduce the phenomena of association, in conformity with
+their real nature, to one single ultimate process cannot be regarded as
+successful, and we shall have to control our aspirations after a unitary
+conception and rest satisfied with reducing the various phenomena of
+association to two processes which are closely related, namely: (1) to
+an association of simultaneity; and (2) to an association of immediate
+succession.” There is much that is suggestive in the sixty-seven pages of
+this pamphlet.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+FINITE HOMOGENEOUS STRAIN, FLOW, AND RUPTURE OF ROCKS. Bulletin of
+the Geological Society of America. By _George F. Becker_. Rochester:
+Published by the Society. 1893.
+
+This is a purely technical research, concerning the causes and form of
+the discontinuity of rock masses. The studies presented are the outgrowth
+of field-work in the Sierra Nevada of California. This range is so
+intersected by false joints, schistose and slaty cleavages, that on a
+scale of one mile to the inch their average separation would be for the
+most part microscopic. The dynamic manifestations in these regions are
+very systematic. Some of the strains which have produced this phenomenon
+have been infinitesimal, and others have been finite. Only the latter
+are here treated. Finite strain, the relations of stress to strain,
+the nature of finite shear, viscosity, flow, plasticity, ductility,
+and rupture, the relation of plastic solids to fluids, the spacing of
+fissures formed by inclined pressures, jointing, and slaty cleavage,
+are the chief subjects discussed. The most important result of the
+investigation is that jointing, schistosity, and slaty cleavage all imply
+relative movement and are thus as truly orogenic as falls of notable
+throw. “In the light of this conclusion,” says the author, “it appears
+that if one could reproduce the orogeny of the Sierra in a moderate
+interval of time on a model made to a scale of one mile to the inch, it
+would seem to yield to external and bodily forces much like a mass of
+lard of the same dimensions.”
+
+This pamphlet is neatly got up, and reflects credit upon the author and
+publisher.
+
+                                                                     μκρκ.
+
+
+DER ECHTE UND DER XENOPHONTISCHE SOKRATES. By _Karl Joël_. Volume I.
+Berlin: R. Gaertner. 1893.
+
+There are two sources from which we have derived the main bulk of
+our knowledge concerning Socrates; namely, the writings of Plato and
+Xenophon. The former is generally regarded as an idealiser, and the
+latter as an historical biographer; for Plato simply uses the impressive
+figure of Socrates to expound his own philosophy, while Xenophon, the
+general, the politician, the historian, is supposed to give in the
+“Memorabilia” a simple and faithful account of what appeared to him
+worthy of being preserved. As Xenophon was not a philosopher himself, it
+is tacitly assumed that he had no reason to alter, to suppress, or to add
+his own personal views to the historical account of the great master whom
+he bore in grateful remembrance as a faithful disciple. There are some
+other sources; but they are less rich than those of Plato and Xenophon.
+Among them must be mentioned several passages in Aristotle, especially in
+“Magna Moralia” I, p. 1182, a 15. Our author urges with good reason that
+the Xenophontic Socrates is radically different from and even opposed
+to the real Socrates, and that we ought to rely more on Aristotle than
+on Xenophon. Xenophon’s “Memorabilia,” Karl Joël declares, is not an
+historical writing but a _Tendenzschrift_, and we have to be on our guard
+wherever Xenophon’s special tendency comes in.
+
+Socrates is the representative of the philosophical spirit of Attica,
+and the character of his teachings may in a word be described as a noble
+and sublimated subjectivism. Socrates is a rationalist and as such he
+opposes the mysticism of the soothsayer and mantic. He goes so far in his
+rationalism as to identify knowledge and virtue. He cannot understand,
+from his point of view, (which regards the soul as a rational being
+only and leaves out of sight the existence of impulses,) that a man can
+knowingly neglect to choose the better thing and choose the worse. Plato,
+in order to avoid the error of Socrates, invented the distinction between
+the rational and irrational part of the soul and Aristotle criticises
+Socrates saying τὰς γὰρ ἀρετὰς ἐπιστήμας ἐποίει.
+
+The subjectivism of Socrates appears in his trust in the δαιμόνιον, the
+divine voice within his soul, his rationalism in his constant request
+to gather information before beginning to act. He exhibits in his talks
+great irony; for instance, when telling a politician that as a shoemaker
+must know his trade before making shoes, so he, the politician, ought to
+know _his_ business before undertaking to manage affairs of state. Again
+and again he satirises the bungling levity of men who imagine that in the
+greatest and gravest things of life they can act without any information.
+Both the subjectivism and rationalism of Socrates appear in his constant
+inculcation of the Delphian motto “know thyself.”
+
+What a different character is Xenophon! He was a convinced believer in
+manticism. There are more than a hundred passages in his writings in
+which not rational forethought but the art of the soothsayer is left
+to decide the most important questions of practical life. When the
+courageous ten thousand offered him the leadership in their dangerous
+retreat, his ambition urged him to accept, but he first asks the God,
+and the omens being unfavorable, he refuses. He did not accept the offer
+until he had received another more auspicious omen. In the same way
+Xenophon acts throughout. All important decisions which prudence would
+urge, are made dependent upon sacrifices, dreams, or the flight of birds,
+and more than once the safety of the army is greatly endangered by a
+fatal passivity caused through unfavorable omens which prevent Xenophon’s
+acting with decision at the right moment. It is no exaggeration to
+say that these ten thousand Greek soldiers escaped only by good luck
+the fate of the Athenian army in Sicily under Nikias. And this man,
+a zealous believer in manticism, should be an impartial and reliable
+historian of the doctrines of Socrates? The δαιμόνιον of Socrates is
+changed into a mystic power, a kind of _spiritus familiaris_. It has
+ceased to be the divinity of man’s inner self as which it appears in
+Plato’s account, and is represented by Xenophon as some peculiarity of
+Socrates which was given him as a special favor by the gods. Socrates
+dethroned the old fate that was supposed to rule the affairs of men
+and pointed out the importance of knowledge, for through knowledge we
+can learn to regulate our fate ourselves. The philosopher who thought
+little of well-being, of εὐτυχία, and demanded above all a well-doing,
+an εὐ πράττειν (“Memorabilia,” III, 9, 14, 15,) did not recommend asking
+soothsayers questions where we should better ask ourselves, although it
+is probable that he recommended the Athenians to apply to the Delphic
+oracle instead of relying upon omens not so much because he believed in
+prophesies, but because he thought that they would be influenced by the
+authority of this venerable institution whose wisdom and conservative
+spirit were beyond question, so that good advice could be expected from
+it. Karl Joël, accordingly, advises us to read the “Memorabilia” with
+an inversion of the points, viz., to convert the sentences qualified by
+“although” and “to be sure” into the main sentences and _vice versa_. In
+this way we shall be able to distinguish between the pagan orthodoxy of
+Xenophon and the rationalism of Socrates. Why does Xenophon not state
+directly and simply (1) Socrates advised his friend to ask the oracles in
+all cases of uncertainty, (2) manticism is indispensable in the economy
+of a household as well as of a state, and (3) the gods have not granted
+us any real knowledge as to a final success and reveal it through special
+revelations. Why must he add long sentences introduced by “although”?
+He adds to (1) that everybody ought to act solely according to his own
+conviction, to (2) that all the trades up to the highest professions had
+to be learned before practiced, and to (3) that those who inquired at the
+oracles for things which could be learned and studied in the usual way
+are crazy and even blasphemers.
+
+This sketch may suffice to characterise the book which is much better
+than could be anticipated after a perusal of the preface, which almost
+induced us to lay it aside unread. It is not the modesty of the author
+which produces a prejudice but the random talk concerning things which
+neither a reader nor a reviewer will care to know. The author has
+apparently no talent for writing prefaces, and he would be wise to omit
+them in the future entirely. The book might be very much condensed,
+repetitions avoided, and an alphabetical index certainly should have been
+added.
+
+It contains _five hundred and fifty-four_ pages; and the author says he
+is preparing a _second_ volume. We think it would have been better for
+his views if he had expressed them in a pamphlet.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+A PERPLEXED PHILOSOPHER. Being an examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
+various utterances on the land question, with some incidental reference
+to his synthetic philosophy. By _Henry George_. New York: Charles L.
+Webster & Company. 320 pp.
+
+The “Perplexed Philosopher” herein described is Mr. Herbert Spencer,
+and persons who like ginger in their ale will enjoy this book; for its
+eloquent invective, hot from the heart, cheers us like that stimulating
+drink. Because of this fiery and revengeful attack on Herbert Spencer
+much dignified reproof has been aimed at Mr. George by those excellent
+people who religiously forgive the injuries done to others, and allow
+only to themselves the luxury of retaliation; but when we consider the
+provocation given by Mr. Spencer, this counter-blow of Mr. George is
+mild. Mr. Spencer had a critic’s right severely or tenderly to condemn
+the doctrines of Mr. George; and had he kept himself within his privilege
+Mr. George in reply would not have had any right to assail the personal
+character and motives of Mr. Spencer; but the older philosopher chose
+to treat the younger with supercilious disdain, and this was a personal
+affront that fully justified a retort personal. Scorn is an ignoble
+argument, lawful only in return for scorn.
+
+Apart from the truth or error they contain, the writings of Mr. George
+have achieved a phenomenal popularity; their influence on social opinion
+has been in some directions almost revolutionary; they are to-day
+the political creed of many men in different parts of the world, and
+especially of many thousands in America, Great Britain, and Australia.
+They are bold in theories, attractive in illustration, and admirable
+in their literary form. Their approval of “Social Statics” was an
+advertisement that multiplied by hundreds the readers of that book, and
+there is no philosopher great enough to affect ignorance of Mr. George’s
+writings, or to dismiss them with a sneer. More copies of “Progress and
+Poverty” have been sold than of any other book on social economics that
+ever has been written, and when Mr. Spencer spoke of that book as “a
+work which I closed after a few minutes on finding how visionary were
+its ideas,” he put on airs of aggravating superiority which naturally
+provoked the resentment of Mr. George.
+
+After not reading the book Mr. Spencer condemned its heresies and said:
+
+“There is the movement for land nationalisation pressed by Mr. George
+and his friends with avowed disregard for the just claims of existing
+owners....
+
+“And now this doctrine (that society as a whole has an absolute right
+over the possessions of each member) is being openly proclaimed. Mr.
+George and his friends, Mr. Hyndman and his friends, are putting their
+theory to its logical issue.”
+
+To that Mr. George replies as follows:
+
+“In nothing I have ever written or spoken is there any justification for
+such a characterisation. I am not even a land nationalisationist as the
+English and German and American nationalisationists well know.... I have
+been a staunch denier of the assumption of the right of society to the
+possessions of each member, and a clearer and more resolute upholder of
+the rights of property than Mr. Spencer has been.”
+
+Without waiting to inquire whether Mr. George includes within the “rights
+of property” the right to property in land, it is enough to say that
+here at least Mr. Spencer is at a disadvantage. He disarmed himself
+before going into battle by refusing to read Mr. George’s writings, and
+scorning to examine them he accused them of communism, confiscation,
+and land-nationalisation. Mr. Spencer cannot now strike back for he
+has thrown his weapons away. He is a prisoner in the hands of Mr.
+George, who couples him with Parson Wilbur denouncing a print called the
+_Liberator_, “whose heresies,” he said, “I take every opportunity of
+combating, and of which, I thank God, I have never read a single line.”
+The parallel is well drawn; and the lesson of it is this, never challenge
+a man and then treat him with contempt; if you think he is not a foeman
+worthy of your steel, let him alone.
+
+Had Mr. Spencer studied the works of Mr. Henry George, he would have
+found in them some doctrines having a manifest family likeness to
+communism, confiscation, and land-nationalisation; but they avail Mr.
+Spencer nothing, because he would not condescend to read the chapters
+where those revolutionary principles are. If he would bend his brow a
+moment and examine them he might find that in this controversy there are
+two perplexed philosophers instead of one. In the book before us Mr.
+George remarks:
+
+“It is this confusion of Mr. Spencer as to rent and value that has led
+him into confusion as to the right of property; and that, at first, at
+least prevented him from seeing that to secure the equal rights of men
+to land, _it is not necessary that society should take formal possession
+of land, and let it out_, and consequently, that the difficulties he
+anticipated in taking possession of improved land were imaginary.”
+
+But, in “Progress and Poverty,” Chapter II, he said:
+
+“We should satisfy the law of justice, we should meet all economic
+requirements, by at one stroke abolishing all private titles, declaring
+all land public property, and _letting it out to the highest bidders in
+lots to suit_, under such conditions as would safely guard the right to
+improvements.”
+
+The italics are ours, directing the attention to apparent contradictions
+which it is for Mr. George to reconcile. And, if English words have
+any meaning, “abolishing all private titles” means confiscation; and
+“declaring all land public property and letting it out to the highest
+bidders,” is land-nationalisation; at least, the ordinary reader
+may innocently think so, yet Mr. George declares that he is not a
+land-nationalisationist.
+
+As a personal defense and explanation Mr. George has a right to say that
+he is not a land-nationalisationist, or a communist, or an “ist” of any
+other kind, and we are bound to take his word for it, but in this dispute
+that matter is wholly immaterial. The question before the meeting is
+this, Is Mr. George’s book a land-nationalisationist or is it not? Is it
+a confiscationist or not? In “Progress and Poverty” Mr. George explains
+his meaning thus:
+
+“I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate property in land.
+The first would be unjust, the second needless. Let the individuals who
+now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are
+pleased to call _their_ land. Let them continue to call it _their_ land.
+Let them buy and sell and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave
+them the shell if we take the kernel. _It is not necessary to confiscate
+land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent._”
+
+The italics are by Mr. George; and a little farther on, he says;
+
+“That is the first step upon which the practical struggle must be made.
+When the hare is once caught and killed, cooking him will follow as a
+matter of course.”
+
+And several years afterwards, in “Protection or Free Trade,” page 302,
+Mr. George describes the artful mechanism of the snare by which the hare
+is to be caught and killed:
+
+“Now it is evident that, in order to take for the use of the government
+the whole income arising from land just as effectively as it could be
+taken by formally appropriating and letting out the land, it is only
+necessary to abolish, one after another, all taxes now levied, and to
+increase the tax on land values till it reaches as near as may be the
+full annual value of the land.”
+
+In that paragraph “government” is merely another word for “nation,” and
+the taking away from private owners all the lands of the country “for the
+use of the government” is land-nationalisation, whether the taking be
+done boldly by imperial decree, or furtively by taxing it up to its “full
+value” and out of the hands of its owners.
+
+The discrimination above made must apply to Herbert Spencer as well as
+to Henry George. Mr. Spencer has a right to qualify and explain as much
+as he pleases; he may properly say what he thinks now about the right of
+land-ownership, but the question at issue is this, What are the opinions
+of “Social Statics” upon the land question? Are they not in principle,
+and very nearly in expression the opinions of “Progress and Poverty”?
+
+It is not to be denied that “Progress and Poverty” found moral support
+in “Social Statics.” In fact, the disciples of Henry George, whenever
+their doctrines were assailed, brought Herbert Spencer into the field as
+a reinforcement. This, at last, gave Mr. Spencer great annoyance, and
+in a moment of irritation he determined even by a qualified recantation
+to withdraw the reserve brigade on which “Progress and Poverty” had so
+long depended for assistance. Hence, his letters to the _Times_ and the
+_St. James’s Gazette_, and the modification of his views which appears
+in “Justice.” He tried to do this by dropping Mr. George to the ground,
+while endeavoring to stand on consistent feet himself; and this it is
+that inspires the vehement criticism of Mr. George.
+
+With a scalpel most logically keen Mr. George has dissected Mr. Spencer’s
+philosophy of land, and with almost Indian exultation he exposes its
+eccentricities and contradictions. As was inevitable, for we cannot
+get along without it, the old familiar Galileo moral is brought in by
+Mr. George to prove that “still it moves.” He is right; for if it is
+ethically and politically true, as declared by Mr. Spencer in 1850, “that
+equity does not permit property in land,” it will be true forever, and no
+extremity of recantation can make it false. The attempt of Mr. Spencer
+to show by duplicate metaphysics that his later opinions concerning land
+are not inconsistent with the occult meaning of “Social Statics,” is
+a failure. It cannot stand a moment before the searching analysis and
+legible comparisons of Mr. George.
+
+The attempt to resolve a concrete subject, such as government ownership
+of land, into abstract terms of justice limited or expanded by the right
+of some private person to the house on the land, and the barn, and the
+well, and the fences, and the apple-trees, and other appurtenances,
+corporeal and incorporeal, has involved Mr. George himself, as well as
+Mr. Spencer, in some confusion of thought, and has entangled both of
+them in varieties of statement not easy to reconcile. This might be due
+to obscure definitions and multiplied explanations, or to changes of
+opinion, but Mr. George asserts that Mr. Spencer’s inconsistencies are
+the result of moral and intellectual dishonesty, prompting him to explain
+away his principles to propitiate the landlords and other aristocratic
+persons who admitted him into their high society after he became eminent,
+and before they knew that his philosophy denied the right of private
+property in land.
+
+In his letter to the _Times_, apologising for “Social Statics,” Mr.
+Spencer said:
+
+“The work referred to—“Social Statics”—was intended to be a system of
+Political Ethics—absolute political ethics, or that which ought to be, as
+distinguished from relative political ethics, or that which is at present
+the nearest practical approach to it.”
+
+And then the philosopher becomes a politician and frames for the landed
+and the landless a moral code, ambidextrous and elastic as a party
+platform. Duty, justice, right, and truth, lose all their absolute
+qualities, and become relative to expediency and our own convenience.
+He teaches us to oppose wrongs until they become vested rights and then
+defend them. He makes ethics changeable as our coats, and the man who can
+afford two suits of clothes may have two suits of ethics, an “absolute”
+suit for Sundays and a “relative” suit for every day; an “abstract”
+suit for wearing about the house, and a “practical” suit for business
+purposes. He may wear a suit of “pure” ethics when buying, and a suit
+of “applied” ethics when selling; and so, at last, by those harlequin
+morals, it happens that what we ought to do has no relation at all to
+“that which ought to be.” Those pure subtleties and applied subterfuges
+make Mr. Spencer an easy mark for the indignant sarcasm of Mr. George,
+who shows what Mr. Spencer thought of absolute and relative ethics when
+he said in “Social Statics”:
+
+“When a man admits that an act is ‘theoretically just,’ he admits it to
+be that which, in strict duty, should be done. By ‘true to principle’ he
+means in harmony with the conduct decreed for us. The course which he
+calls ‘abstractedly right,’ he believes to be the appointed way to human
+happiness. There is no escape. The expressions mean this or they mean
+nothing.”
+
+The book is written in an angry vein, and the nicknames “traitor,”
+“juggler,” “apostate,” and the like, add nothing to the value of its
+argument; they only give bitterness to the censure. They are not to be
+commended, although they ought to be excused, for they sprang out of “a
+tempest of provocation.” Mr. George has been fighting under the banner of
+Herbert Spencer, and he feels like a soldier whose general deserts him in
+the battle and then disowns him altogether.
+
+The only rational explanation of Mr. Spencer’s letters to the _Times_ and
+the _St. James’s Gazette_ is that he has radically changed his opinions
+about the private ownership of land: and his timid, uncertain, and
+equivocal way of saying so makes him look very much like the “perplexed
+philosopher” that Mr. George describes. At the same time it must be
+noticed that Mr. George himself is not so radical in this last book
+as he was in “Progress and Poverty.” His principles appear to be the
+same, but in the application of remedies he is milder than he was about
+fourteen years ago. When he reaches Mr. Spencer’s age he may be just as
+conservative and “perplexed” as that philosopher is now.
+
+                                                           M. M. TRUMBULL.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[85] Mr. Salter’s name for his theory.
+
+[86] Says Mr. Salter: “Idealism (as here stated) is not, however, itself
+a solution, being only a clear statement of what the problem is; and for
+all that such idealism can say, the problem may be insoluble.”
+
+
+
+
+PERIODICALS.
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 4 and 5.
+
+    DIE GRUNDEMPFINDUNGEN IN NORMALEN UND ANOMALEN FARBENSYSTEMEN
+    UND IHRE ITENSITÄTSVERTEILUNG IM SPEKTRUM. By _Arthur König and
+    Conrad Dieterici_.
+
+    IST EINE CEREBRALE ENTSTEHUNG VON SCHWEBUNGEN MÖGLICH? By _Karl
+    L. Schaefer_.
+
+    UEBER EINIGE NEUERE FORTSCHRITTE IN DER ANATOMIE UND
+    PHYSIOLOGIE DER ARTHROPODENAUGEN. By _Sigmund Fuchs_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. IV. No. 6.
+
+    DAS TAPETUM LUCIDUM BEI DURCHLEUCHTUNG DES AUGES. By _Ziem_.
+
+    BERICHTIGUNG ZU PROFESSOR MÜNSTERBERGS BEITRÄGEN ZUR
+    EXPERIMENTELLEN PSYCHOLOGIE, HEFT 4. By _G. E. Müller_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
+
+
+PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XXIX. No. 3 and 4.
+
+    DIE ÄLTESTE FASSUNG VON MELANCHTHONS ETHIK. By _H. Heineck_.
+
+    DIE MODERNE ENERGETIK IN IHRER BEDEUTUNG FÜR DIE
+    ERKENNTNISSKRITIK, II. By _K. Lasswitz_.
+
+    DIE SITTLICHE FRAGE EINE SOCIALE FRAGE, II. By _F. Staudinger_.
+
+    JOHANN EDUARD ERDMANN. By _B. Erdmann_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)
+
+
+VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVI. No. 4.
+
+    DIE STATISCHEN FUNCTIONEN DES OHRLABYRINTHES UND IHRE
+    BEZIEHUNGEN ZU DEN RAUMEMPFINDUNGEN. (Part I.) By _R. Wlassak_.
+
+    UEBER VERSCHMELZUNG UND ANALYSE. Eine psychologische Studie.
+    (Part I.) By _H. Cornelius_.
+
+    DIE WICHTIGKEIT DER REPRODUCTIONSGEFÜHLE FÜR DIE ENTWICKLUNG
+    UND BILDUNG DES MENSCHEN. By _J. Zahlfleisch_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 1.
+
+    UEBER DEN BEGRIFF DER WISSENSCHAFT BEI GALILEI. By _A. Riehl_.
+
+    DIE STATISCHEN FUNCTIONEN DES OHRLABYRINTHES UND IHRE
+    BEZIEHUNGEN ZU DEN RAUMEMPFINDUNGEN. (Concluded.) By _R.
+    Wlassak_.
+
+    UEBER VERSCHMELZUNG UND ANALYSE. Eine psychologische Studie.
+    (Concluded.) By _H. Cornelius_.
+
+    WERTHTHEORIE UND ETHIK. (Part I.) By _Chr. Ehrenfels_.
+
+    A. VOIGT’S “ELEMENTARE LOGIK” UND MEINE DARLEGUNGEN ZUR LOGIK
+    DES LOGISCHEN CALCULS. By _E. G. Husserl_. (Leipsic: O. R.
+    Reisland.)
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. CI. No. 2.
+
+    DOXOGRAPHISCHES ZUR LEHRE VOM ΤΈΛΟΣ. By _A. Döring_.
+
+    ERNST PLATNER’S UND KANT’S ERKENNTNISSTHEORIE MIT BESONDERER
+    BERÜCKSICHTIGUNG VON TETENS UND AENESIDEMUS. By _Dr. Arthur
+    Wreschner_.
+
+    JAHRESBERICHT ÜBER ERSCHEINUNGEN DER PHILOSOPHISCHEN LITTERATUR
+    IN FRANZÖSISCHER SPRACHE AUS DEN JAHREN 1889 UND 1890. By
+    _Adolph Lasson_.
+
+    RECENSIONEN. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)
+
+
+THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. V. No. 2.
+
+    ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF VOLUNTARY MOTOR ABILITY. By _Wm. L.
+    Bryan_.
+
+    THE TRAINING OF ANIMALS. By _James E. LeRossignol_, Ph. D.
+
+    ON THE JUDGMENT OF ANGLES AND POSITIONS OF LINES. By _Joseph
+    Jastrow_, Ph. D.
+
+    STATISTICS OF “UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION.” By _Charles M. Child_.
+
+    EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AT WELLESLEY COLLEGE. By _Mary Whiton
+    Calkins_. (Worcester: J. H. Orpha.)
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 2.
+
+    THE ETHICS OF SOCIAL PROGRESS. _Prof. Franklin H. Giddings._
+
+    DID THE ROMANS DEGENERATE? By _Mary Emily Case_.
+
+    POLITICAL ECONOMY AND PRACTICAL LIFE. By _Prof. William
+    Cunningham_.
+
+    GERMAN CHARACTER AS REFLECTED IN THE NATIONAL LIFE AND
+    LITERATURE. By _Richard M. Meyer_, Ph. D.
+
+    BOOK REVIEWS. (Philadelphia: _International Journal of Ethics_,
+    118 South Twelfth Street.)
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 1.
+
+    THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. By _Prof. Otto Pfleiderer_.
+
+    AN ANCIENT PESSIMIST. By _Prof. J. Clark Murray_.
+
+    THE CONCEPT OF LAW IN ETHICS. By _Prof. F. C. French_.
+
+    J. H. LAMBERT. By _Harold Griffing_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 2.
+
+    KANT’S CRITICAL PROBLEM. By _J. G. Schurman_.
+
+    EPISTEMOLOGY IN LOCKE AND KANT. By _Prof. Andrew Seth_.
+
+    ANTHROPOMETRY AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. By _Prof. E. B.
+    Titchener_.
+
+    DISCUSSIONS: Reality and Idealism. By _David G. Ritchie_ and
+    _F. C. S. Schiller_.
+
+    BOOK REVIEWS. (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn & Company.)
+
+
+THE NEW WORLD.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 5.
+
+    THE PLACE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL IN THE NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE.
+    By _Orello Cone_.
+
+    THE FOLK-SONG OF ISRAEL IN THE MOUTH OF THE PROPHETS. By _Karl
+    Budde_.
+
+    COSMOPOLITAN RELIGION. By _C. A. Bartol_.
+
+    THE ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS. By _A. W. Benn_.
+
+    WHITTIER’S SPIRITUAL CAREER. By _John W. Chadwick_.
+
+    THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. By _Marvin R.
+    Vincent_.
+
+    ISRAEL IN EGYPT. By _C. H. Toy_.
+
+    THE BRIGGS HERESY TRIAL. By _C. R. Gillett_. (Boston: Houghton,
+    Mifflin & Co.)
+
+
+REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 12.
+
+    LE MOUVEMENT PHILOSOPHIQUE EN RUSSIE: II. LA PHILOSOPHIE DE
+    HEGEL ET LES CERCLES PHILOSOPHIQUES. By _E. Lannes_.
+
+    LA COMPOSITION MUSICALE ET LES LOIS GÉNÉRALES DE LA
+    PSYCHOLOGIE. By _M. Paulhan_.
+
+    LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES (2nd article). By _L. Marillier_.
+
+    ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 1.
+
+    LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES (3d article). By _L. Marillier_.
+
+    LA CROYANCE MÉTAPHYSIQUE. By _J. Gourd_.
+
+    LA BEAUTÉ PLASTIQUE. By _L. Couturat_.
+
+    ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 2.
+
+    L’UNITÉ DE LA PHILOSOPHIE. By _P. Janet_.
+
+    L’EXPRESSION OBJECTIVE EN MUSIQUE D’APRÈS LE LANGAGE
+    INSTINCTIF. By _J. Combarieu_.
+
+    LA PSYCHOLOGIE DE W. JAMES. (Concluded.) By _L. Marillier_.
+
+    REVUE DES PÉRIODIQUES ÉTRANGERS. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 3.
+
+    RECHERCHES SUR LA SUCCESSION DES PHÉNOMÈNES PSYCHOLOGIQUES. By
+    _B. Bourdon_.
+
+    L’AMOUR EST-IL UN ÉTAT PATHOLOGIQUE? By _G. Danville_.
+
+    SUR UN EFFET PARTICULIER DE L’ATTENTION APPLIQUÉE AUX IMAGES.
+    By _André Lalande_.
+
+    BEAUTÉ ORGANIQUE ET BEAUTÉ PLASTIQUE. By _A. Naville_.
+
+
+REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 1.
+
+    MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET MORALE. By _Félix Ravaisson_.
+
+    LE CONTINU MATHÉMATIQUE. By _H. Poincaré_.
+
+    ESSAI SUR QUELQUES PROBLÈMES DE PHILOSOPHIE PREMIÈRE. By _F.
+    Rauh_. (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.)
+
+
+VOPROSUI FILOSOFII I PSICHOLOGII.[87]
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 15.
+
+    THE AIM OF HUMAN LIFE. By _W. Rosanoff_.
+
+    THE PROBLEM OF JUDGMENT. By _F. Charitonoff_.
+
+    THE POSITIVISM OF KANT. By _A. Kozloff_.
+
+    THE BASIS OF THE MORAL DUTY. By _N. Grote_.
+
+    A CRITICISM OF MORAL ALTRUISM. By _W. Preobrajensky_.
+
+    THE SENSE OF LOVE. By _W. Solowoff_.
+
+    THE FOUNDER OF TRANSCENDENTAL MONISM. By _A. Wedensky_.
+
+    THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY IN
+    LONDON. By _W. Chige_.
+
+    THE QUESTION OF ZOÖPSYCHOLOGY. By _W. Wagner_.
+
+    THE LAW OF PERCEPTION. By _N. Lange_. (Moscow, 1892.)
+
+
+PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. VI. No. 1.
+
+    UEBER DIE ACTUALE BESTIMMTHEIT DES UNENDLICH KLEINEN. By
+    _Pohle_.
+
+    GASSENDI’S SKEPTICISMUS UND SEINE STELLUNG ZUM MATERIALISMUS.
+    By _Kiefl_.
+
+    DER BEGRIFF DES “WAHREN.” By _Franz Schmid_.
+
+    DER BEGRIFF DES UNBEWUSSTEN IN PSYCHOLOGISCHER UND
+    ERKENNTNISSTHEORETISCHER HINSICHT BEI ED. V. HARTMANN. By
+    _Achelis_.
+
+    DER SUBSTANZBEGRIFF BEI CARTESIUS IM ZUSAMMENHANG MIT DER
+    SCHOLASTISCHEN UND NEUEREN PHILOSOPHIE. (Continued.) By _Carl
+    Ludewig_, S. J. (Fulda, 1893.)
+
+
+SPHINX.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XV. No. 84.
+
+    NIRWANA. By _Menetos_.—DIE WIEDERVERKÖRPERUNGSLEHRE IM DRAMA.
+    By _Ludwig Deinhard_.—DIE GNADE. By _Maria Janitschek_.—DAS
+    FERNSEHEN ALS FUNKTION DES TRANSSCENDENTALEN SUBJEKTS.
+    By _Carl du Prel_, Ph. D. (Concluded.)—AN CARL DU PREL.
+    By _Martin Greif_.—SEHEN UND WAHRTRÄUMEN. By _Hermann
+    Haug_.—UEBER DIE SPIRITISTISCHEN PHÄNOMENE VOM PHYSIKALISCHEN
+    STANDPUNKT. By _Dr. Anton Lampa_.—SCHULD UND SÜHNE. Ein
+    Beitrag zur Frage der Telepathie. By _M. Const. Hoch_.
+    (Concluded.)—DIE GÖTTIN DES GENUSSES. Eine Traumphantasie.
+    By _Karl Friedr. Jordan_.—FEGFEUER. Nach François Coppée.
+    By _Rudolf Geering_.—GERETTET! By _Raphael von Koeber_, Ph.
+    D.—MELANCHOLIE. By _Carl Vanselow_.—DIE SECHS SCHWÄNE. Ein
+    Beitrag zum Nachweis des Esoterismus im Volksbewusstsein.
+    By _Gottschalk Thorsten_.—GEHEIMNISS. By _Adolf K. W.
+    Hochenegg_.—EINE GEISTERSTIMME. By _Hugo Gozdawa_.—DER BEGRIFF
+    DES ABSOLUTEN. By _O. Plümacher_.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVI, No. 85.
+
+    LEBE DEINEM HÖCHSTEN IDEAL GETREU!—A-U-M. By
+    _Menetos_.—PSALMEN. By _Franz Evers_.—MEISTER DER MYSTIK.
+    By _Wilhelm von Saintgeorge_.—AEGYPTENS GROSSE PYRAMIDE.
+    Ein Tempel der Einweihung in die Mysterien. By _Eduard
+    Maitland_.—DIE DEUTSCHE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR ETHISCHE KULTUR UND
+    HERR VON EGIDY. By _Hugo von Gizycki_.—DIE MYSTIK DES ISLAM. By
+    _Adolf Engelbach_.—EIN ECHTER DIENER GOTTES. By _Dr. Raphael
+    von Koeber_.—EIN GEGNER DES SPIRITISMUS. By _Carl du Prel_.—DIE
+    WISSENSCHAFT DER MAGIER. By _Ludwig Deinhard_.—HEBE DICH
+    WEG VON MIR, SATAN! By _H. v. M._—ANNA HENLE. Ein Erlebnis.
+    By _Hübbe-Schleiden_.—DER STERN DER SINTFLUT. By _Arthur
+    Stentzel_.—SELIGE GEGENWART. By _Maria Janitschek_.—SEHNSUCHT.
+    By _Carl Vanselow_.—DAS ELFLEIN, DAS AUSGING, DEN KÖNIG ZU
+    SUCHEN. By _Bernhard Fabler_.—DER BLINDE PASSAGIER. By _Ludwig
+    Ganghofer_.—FRÜHLINGS ERWACHEN. Für Väter und Erzieher. By _O.
+    Plümacher_.—DREI KNOSPEN. By _Hans von Mosch_. (Brunswick: C.
+    A. Schwetschke & Son.)
+
+We cannot be accused of having any penchant for Theosophy or Spiritualism
+and find little occasion to praise their productions, which are usually
+crude and illiterate. But we must confess that Hübbe-Schleiden’s review,
+the _Sphinx_, is greatly superior to anything in this field we have
+ever seen. There is artistic taste about it; there is, so far as its
+position admits of, a certain contact with positive science; there is an
+attractive popularity without shallowness. All these means are skilfully
+employed by the editor to impress his ideas, erroneous though they may
+be, upon his public. If the magazine appeared in English, instead of
+German, it would at once become the recognised leader in its field.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[87] _Questions of Philosophy and Psychology._
+
+
+
+
+                VOL. III.       JULY, 1893.         NO. 4.
+
+                                THE MONIST.
+
+
+
+
+NATIONALISATION OF EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITIES.[88]
+
+
+A little more than a century ago it was universally believed that, in the
+nature of things, the vitality of a republic and its size stand in an
+inverse ratio. The inadaptability of a republican system of government to
+a state of vast territorial expanse and with a very numerous population
+was considered an almost axiomatic, i. e. self-evident, truth. When the
+thirteen English colonies in North America had taken the bold resolution
+to transform themselves into the United States of America, many an ardent
+patriot often asked himself, not free from anxious foreboding, whether
+the Union was within the limits laid down by irreversible political laws,
+as the utmost extent of republics fit to endure. If it had not been
+for the size of the country, the doubts as to whether the republican
+experiment was likely to prove a success, would never have assumed a
+character, which gave sufficient color to the charge of monarchical
+tendencies, to make them appear well-founded in the eyes of so many
+people. When afterwards a new empire was to be added to the Union by the
+Louisiana purchase, the doubt, as to whether the republican system of
+government would be equal to the strain put upon it by such an immense
+enlargement of the area of the United States, played a not unimportant
+part among the objections of the opposition. That experience has
+definitively disposed of these ideas, by proving the apprehensions to
+be unfounded, is no reason to think meanly of the political discernment
+of those who entertained them. It will not be universally admitted, that
+experience has thus far proved them to be wholly unfounded also as to
+consolidated republics. And how can it be wondered at, that at that time
+the essential difference was not fully realised and understood, which
+exists between a federal and a consolidated republic with regard to the
+peculiar dangers and evils apt to arise from this specific cause. Though
+republican federations had been known to the world for two thousand
+years, no instruction was to be derived from their history on this head.
+As to the extent of territory, the consolidated Roman republic, which
+had consumed its vitality with its growth, could alone be compared with
+the United States; and as to many of the essential features of their
+political structure, neither modern nor ancient history furnished an
+analogy. In the soil of the New World, the germs of European institutions
+had—adapting themselves to the new conditions—developed into a new type
+of commonwealth.
+
+It is conceded on all sides that, next to the capacity of the American
+people for self-government, the United States owe it primarily to the
+happy blending of the principles of National Union and State Independence
+that, taking all in all, hitherto their history has been the most
+striking and convincing vindication of republican institutions; and
+it is hardly questioned that, but for the happy blending of these two
+principles, a republic comprising half the North American continent and
+possessed of all the requisites of vitality never would nor could have
+existed. Upon their being “an indestructible Union of indestructible
+States,” the vitality of the United States absolutely depends. That,
+with this principle as the foundation, the domain of a republic _can_
+be almost indefinitely extended, without thereby destroying its vital
+energies, has been irrefutably demonstrated. But does that mean, that
+the United States have definitively solved the problem of keeping the
+vital forces of a republic covering a vast area unimpaired? By no means.
+Only the preliminary question has been settled by them for all time to
+come, what the indispensable prerequisite of its solution is, and they
+have thus far succeeded in preserving their vitality. But even as to
+themselves, the solution of the problem itself has to be repeated over
+and over again, not only by generation after generation, but every year
+and every day. The hour never will, never can come, when the American
+people can, with impunity, say: the task is accomplished; let us rest
+and enjoy the fruits. It never can come, because the problem itself is
+in a continuous state of transformation. Though the changes be so slow,
+that they are imperceptible to the keenest eye trying to follow them up
+from year to year, they are none the less real, and if they are not duly
+heeded, the penalty will have to be paid some time in one way or another.
+While the fundamental principle, the blending of National Union and
+State Independence, is irreversible, the attempt to make its application
+immutable, would be fatal. I say the attempt, for actually to do it, is,
+in the nature of things, impossible. The American people are not only
+constitutionally a nation. The civil war did not result in the permanent
+disruption of the Union, but in welding it more indissolubly together,
+because, with the single exception of slavery, the facts coincided with
+the law. In spite of the tremendous sectionalising influence exercised
+by slavery, the nationalisation in feeling, thinking, and interests had
+made such progress under the operation and protection of the law of the
+land, that it could stand as severe a test, as any consolidated State can
+boast of having stood. The causes, to which it was due, that the facts
+were in conformity with the law, have been ever since unremittingly at
+work,—the counter-tendencies have disappeared with the abolishment of
+slavery,—and, independent of that, those causes are every year acquiring
+a greater force. The actual nationalisation, therefore, goes steadily on,
+whether we like it or not, and though the constitutional nationalisation
+be allowed to remain unchanged. While the legal status under the
+Constitution may not be altered for ever so long, we are confronted by
+constantly changing conditions. If we do not conform in what we do and
+leave undone to the irrepressible changes of this evolutionary process,
+the maintenance of the principle of blending National Union and State
+Independence will avail us but little. The vital energies will dry up
+and ebb away, for while we have kept the form, we have become strangers
+to the spirit which renders it a magic force. Nor ought the dividing
+line between political parties to run, as in days of yore, on the
+question of State rights and consolidation. All discriminating patriots
+must be as well State rights men as consolidationists, respectively
+conscious supporters and promoters of further nationalisation. Where and
+how ought State independence to be strengthened, so as to prevent an
+over-consolidation by the silent working of those nationalising causes,
+which it is impossible to stem? and: Where and how ought consolidation,
+respectively nationalisation, to be promoted, in order to make the
+working of those nationalising causes conducive to the true interests
+of the people and to the invigorating of republican institutions? These
+are the two questions which the American people have constantly to ask
+themselves. On the discretion and discernment displayed in trying to find
+the correct answers must it depend, whether the federative principle will
+work as well in the future, as it has done in the past.
+
+If these propositions must be admitted, it can be proved that in no
+respect is conscious and systematic nationalisation more imperatively
+needed than in regard to education. At first sight this assertion may
+seem worse than extravagant. I am, however, not afraid to submit my case
+to the jury of the American people, if I am but conceded the legal right
+of every criminal, to be heard ere I am judged.
+
+Education is the bed-rock on which this republic rests. However
+excellent its political institutions be, its decay and ultimate
+downfall is inevitable, if the people fail to do their full duty by
+themselves in this respect. For, in a democratic republic, political
+institutions are live forces only so far as the people have the mental
+and moral requirements for working them well, and these mental and moral
+requirements can be attained only by education. It is, therefore, in the
+strictest sense of the word, a _vital_ question for the republic that
+every one of its sons and daughters receive not only some schooling, but
+that the education of all be proper and adequate. That is a tremendous
+task. It constantly grows in scope and intricacy, and at the same time,
+it becomes of more and more import that it be well accomplished. With
+the people rests the ultimate decision in everything, and the problems
+confronting the commonwealth are assuming more and more a character,
+taxing the highest statesmanship to the utmost. Thus the claims upon
+the intelligence and the moral soundness of the people are fast being
+strained far beyond anything ever known by any former generation in this
+or any other country. And lack of the required intelligence and moral
+soundness in any one State necessarily affects the whole Union. A State
+that is derelict to its duty in the education of its people, wrongs not
+only itself, but also the nation. By its share in the federal government,
+every State is directly instrumental in laying down the law for the whole
+country. All the States are thereby made to participate in the payment
+of the penalty for its intellectual and moral deficiencies. This is,
+however, by no means the only way in which they are made to suffer by
+them. What the law does with regard to everything rendered federal by the
+Constitution; commerce, travel, and interchange of population do in other
+respects. They are unremittingly and with ever increasing intensity at
+work, multiplying and rendering more close the organic relations between
+all the parts of the vast domain, every water-way, railroad-track, and
+telegraph line performing the functions of the veins in the animal
+organism. If the blood be poisoned in one limb, the virus cannot be
+prevented from working its way into the whole system.
+
+To admit that education is in the highest degree a national
+_interest_, and to deny its being a national _concern_, is, however, a
+self-contradiction. To contest either the right or the duty of a nation
+to acknowledge every national interest a national concern, and to deal
+with it accordingly, is a palpable absurdity. Not as to the Whether, but
+only as to the How, can the people be restricted by the Constitution. A
+constitution imposing upon the people an injunction to minister to the
+needs of the commonwealth, would be as great a political monstrosity as a
+constitution providing for the dissolution of the state.
+
+This doctrine will not be allowed to pass unchallenged. I shall be
+asked whether I set myself against the universally accepted fundamental
+principle of American constitutional law, that the federal government
+has no powers but those granted to it by the Constitution. I do not.
+“Where, then,” my interlocutor will go on, “do you find the express grant
+or the implied power?” Nowhere. “Then you advocate a constitutional
+amendment to the effect indicated by you?” I do not. I know that such an
+amendment could not get the vote of a single state, and if there were a
+possibility of its being adopted by the constitutional number of states,
+I should be found, to the last, among those fighting it tooth and nail.
+I can hardly conceive of a more suicidal measure than the adoption of
+such an amendment. Just because education is the bed-rock on which the
+republic rests, is it of vital importance that it does not become a
+federal affair. Self-reliance and responsibility are the main pillars
+supporting a democratic commonwealth. Kill, in the people of a state
+and the population of its subdivisions, the habit of self-reliance and
+the sense of responsibility in regard to the substratum of the whole
+political and social structure, and they will wither and shrivel up in
+regard to everything else. The compulsion to tax themselves directly for
+the establishment and maintenance of schools and the being in close touch
+with those entrusted with the direction of the educational work are an
+inestimable boon to the people.
+
+Even if it were economically possible to do without direct taxes,
+political reasons would peremptorily forbid their abolishment. On
+account of their moral effect, no state could dispense with them, and
+least of all a democracy. All indirect taxes are paid more or less
+unconsciously; the people, however, must be kept conscious that the
+public purse means their own pockets. The more they lose sight of
+this, the wider the door is opened to paternalism, and paternalism is
+a more deadly enemy of liberty than despotism and tyranny. These, if
+any vitality be left in the people, ultimately kindle the desire for
+liberty, while paternalism acts upon it as an opiate and ends by killing
+it through the systematic enervation of self-government. If this is
+to be kept alive not only in form, but also in essence and in spirit,
+the people must constantly be held to teach themselves in illustrating
+by their own acts the irrefutable truth, that not the rights, but the
+self-imposed duties are the vital principle of true democracy. Nothing,
+however, is more apt to drive this all-important fact irresistibly
+home, implanting it ineradicably in their whole feeling and in their
+conscious thinking, than the necessity to vote, as directly as possible,
+out of their own pockets the money required for preserving intact and
+in vigor the prerequisite of _all_ that is needed for the preservation
+of the nation’s vitality. If it be not deemed irreverent, I should
+say that every dollar a man voluntarily votes out of his pocket to
+provide for the educational needs of the community, preaches to him a
+political “Sermon on the Mount.” “Liberty and self-government,” it says,
+“must be paid for;—state and society are in their very essence ethical
+conceptions;—they must totter, fall, and crumble to pieces, unless
+they rest on an ethical foundation;—to preserve, broaden, and deepen
+this foundation, by providing for the required intellectual and moral
+equipment of the generations in whose hands the future destinies of the
+commonwealth will lie, is the paramount duty of the people;—no one has
+the right to exempt himself from doing his share in the fulfilment of
+this duty, for the heirloom of the past, enjoyed by the present, is but a
+trust to be left, with accrued interest, to the future;—the fulfilment of
+this duty ought to be considered rather a privilege than a sacrifice, for
+every farthing paid for the maintenance of the humblest village school is
+an integral part of the nation’s life-insurance premium;—glory in this
+responsibility to the whole country, for it constitutes you, with the
+wealthiest and mightiest, a joint builder of its greatness;—glory in thus
+bearing witness by the fruit of the sweat of your brow, that you, too,
+are sworn in on the creed that man does not live by bread alone;—glory in
+and render thanks for being thus held to keep ablaze in your own bosom
+and help kindle in the bosom of the lowliest child of the community, the
+sacred fire of idealism.”
+
+That by many, perhaps by most people, this appeal is not heard in
+distinct words, I do not contest. But that is no reason to make light of
+it. Utterly lost it never is. Something of it sinks into the mind even
+of the dullest and most hard-hearted, though it be but in the form of
+a faint and vague feeling. To make them lose this, is to deprive them
+of the best they have. Democracy is not a mill-pond, on which a fragile
+boat can outride the wildest tempest. It is the open sea, on which the
+proudest and stoutest craft is sure to be swamped, sooner or later,
+if it be not properly ballasted. True idealism, however, never was a
+more essential part of the ballast, than in these times and in this
+country. It stands more in need of it than any other state, because its
+unparalleled opportunities are appallingly powerful incentives to plunge
+headlong into the materialistic tendencies of the age. Therefore, it is
+ruthless to lay hands on anything tending to keep alive and foster true
+idealism in the people. For this reason it would be, in my opinion,—not
+in intention, but in effect,—a dastardly crime, under any plea whatever,
+to release the people from the obligation to provide in their local
+organisations for the education of their youths.
+
+Therefore, I even deem it upon the whole more beneficial than detrimental
+that many of the higher and most of the highest educational institutions
+of the country are the free gift of high-minded men and women to the
+people. I have never agreed with those who have contended in this country
+that the duty of the commonwealth does not extend beyond providing for
+primary and, at the most, to some extent for secondary education, and
+that it would not be fair and proper to tax all for the establishment
+and maintenance of colleges and universities, which, in the nature of
+the case, only a small minority can frequent. It would be hard to name
+a more promising sign of the times, than that this doctrine has of late
+lost so much of its former hold upon public opinion, that one would
+have to search long for an advocate of it in its original rigor. It
+is eminently in the interest of all, that there be an ample number of
+men and women who have received the highest education. Therefore, it
+is evidently not only justified, but imperative, that the commonwealth
+furnish the means for supplying its want. But if the views held in this
+respect on the continent of Europe had prevailed in the United States,
+the American people would have been the poorer of one of the vastest and
+most grateful fields for manifesting idealistic public-spiritedness. An
+inestimable loss, for idealistic public-spiritedness is not the least of
+the causes to which it is due that American democracy has stood the test;
+and idealistic public-spiritedness, like every virtue, grows stronger and
+more fruitful by being practised. Every donation for educational purposes
+prompts others to follow suit, and is, apart from its direct beneficent
+effects, a most valuable object-lesson to the whole nation. With equal
+impressiveness, the rich and the poor are reminded of the treasures which
+“neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.” On every educational institution
+brought into existence in such a way are indelibly inscribed the two
+magic words to which this country owes it greatness: Help yourself,
+and Public Spirit; every one of them is a living protest, as well
+against paternalism—whether it present itself in the socialistic or
+in any other garb—as against the setting up of the golden calf as the
+idol of the republic. Therefore, everything tending to seriously check
+these manifestations of idealism and public spirit in regard to higher
+education would be deplorable, even if it were in itself commendable, for
+paternalism and materialism are too rampant to leave anything undone that
+is calculated to keep them down.
+
+To contend that the existing decentralisation in regard to education must
+be done away with, would, for these reasons, be a truly Quixotic charge
+upon windmills: the venture must result in broken bones. It cannot, and,
+if it could, ought not to be done, for this decentralisation is the
+natural outgrowth of the whole historical development of the commonwealth
+and in perfect accordance with the underlying principle of its political
+and social structure. But it would be strange logic to conclude from
+this that it can have worked no harm, or that the evil consequences it
+may have had cannot be remedied. Can it be denied that, apart from the
+primary schools, it sounds almost like mockery to speak of an American
+system of education? If we look at the schools of a higher grade, we are
+confronted by a bewildering chaos, and the nearer the top, the worse the
+confusion becomes. That the effects of this are not altogether good, will
+be universally admitted, though opinions will differ as to the weight
+that ought to be attached to the bad consequences in the aggregate and
+severally. To me, some of them seem to be of a very serious character,
+and I hold that they must from year to year become of more consequence.
+To say that somebody has been through a “high school,” does not convey
+sufficiently definite information as to either the kind or the amount of
+instruction he has received. To know that somebody is a graduate of an
+“academy,” a “college,” a “university,” means to know next to nothing as
+to his mental equipment. To gauge our man, we must inquire, What academy,
+what college, what university? Having learned that, we are in hundreds
+of cases not a whit wiser than before. We have to ask for the calendar
+of the institution, and, after having read that, we shall often be still
+pretty much at sea, for, as the Germans say, “paper is patient,” and the
+printing of a first-class programme implies by no means of necessity
+first-class instruction. This may be considered by some of little or no
+moment, because the degrees confer no rights whatever. But they are,
+nevertheless, not senseless gewgaws. If they be deemed such, their
+abolishment must be insisted upon, for then they are as much out of place
+in this country as orders or other meaningless titles. They are intended
+to be certificates of knowledge and mental training. If they lose this
+character, they are nothing, or worse than nothing. It is, however,
+self-evident that they must be deprived of this character, exactly to
+the extent that the educational institutions bearing the same name and
+conferring the same degrees differ from each other. Do you not think it
+more than likely that, if a law were passed making it obligatory to add
+to the letters indicating a degree the name of the institution by which
+it was conferred, an astounding number of ornamental tails to names would
+be cut off forever?
+
+This would not be done, if the degrees merely failed to be definite and
+reliable certificates of knowledge and mental training. They do positive
+harm, because the institutions conferring them have little more in common
+than the name, their educational standard differing in the extremes,
+as much as the crippled shrub and the sturdy oak. While the public do
+not know what value to attach to the degree, a large percentage of the
+recipients are betrayed into offensive and pernicious self-deception.
+Upon the official averment of their _alma mater_, they lay the flattering
+unction to their soul that they have received a much better intellectual
+outfit than they really possess. These institutions practically reverse
+the precept of the Greek sage: not “know thyself,” but “deceive thyself”
+is the maxim imprinted on their diplomas. And this self-deception is a
+subtle, contagious virus. It is at least doubtful, whether more will
+take warning by looking through the false pretense, or be lured by it
+into the same mistaken notions as to the requirements of genuine higher
+education. To have practically no fixed standards for the different
+grades of higher education must as inevitably have mischievous effects
+upon the intellectual life of a people, as its economic life must be
+demoralised by allowing everybody to coin money of the same outward
+appearance, but of any alloy he pleases. Not that harm has been done by
+the almost unlimited freedom enjoyed by the educational institutions
+owing their existence to private munificence, is to be wondered at; it
+is astonishing that the deleterious effects have not been much worse.
+A premium is offered for sailing under a false flag. If a college may
+be called a university, and an academy a college, it would be more
+than surprising if the grander name were not frequently preferred, for
+it flatters alike the vanity of the donors, the instructors, and the
+pupils, and will—with more or less reason—be expected to work as a bait.
+With the name goes the right to confer degrees, and the exercising of
+this privilege is to serve the same purposes. But the name renders it
+necessary to keep up appearances, and that is an expensive pleasure. The
+masquerading in a pretentious guise cuts down the allowance of wholesome
+food. Worthless universities instead of good colleges, inferior colleges
+instead of satisfactory academies and fitting schools, are but too often
+the result. No name will deprive the rose of its sweet scent; but the
+buttercup cannot, with impunity, call itself a rose.
+
+The worst, however, is, that even the best institutions of the higher
+order are made to pay a heavy penalty for the shortcomings of those of
+the lower rank. Not getting the proper material, they do not turn out
+as good work as they in themselves might do. Much valuable time, which
+ought to be devoted to going on with the building, must be spent in
+mending and strengthening the deficient foundation, which, after all,
+does not acquire the requisite solidity, because mending is necessarily
+patchwork. Nor is the damage confined to the pupils that have been sent
+up from inefficient schools. These act as a drag upon those who have
+come adequately prepared. To render matters worse, the deficiencies are
+neither the same with all, nor is it known beforehand where they will be
+found and how far they will extend. Neither are the curricula the same,
+nor is there any guaranty that the same curriculum means the same work
+done. Here so many things have been taught, that everything has suffered
+in regard to thoroughness. There, specialisation has commenced so early,
+that the basis is too narrow and too shallow. Training for a special
+purpose has encroached upon education. All these difficulties greatly
+hamper the institution. But they do more. They exercise a strong pressure
+upon it to stray from the right path, for they are powerful incentives to
+yield to the evil tendency, more to measure, than to weigh the work done.
+This is, in my opinion, the most deplorable of all the bad consequences
+which the lack of a uniform system, resulting from the decentralisation
+of education, has thus far had; and it is all the more dangerous, because
+the measuring principle is so well fitted to be clad in the seductive
+garb of a lucid and clear-cut system.
+
+I do not expect that every one of my propositions will be universally
+assented to. But can any unprejudiced observer dispute that there is
+enough truth in what I have said to prompt the people seriously to
+ponder the question, where this is going to end? If no conscious,
+energetic, and concerted effort be made to counteract the evil effects
+of decentralisation, the very fact of higher education having assumed
+such a kaleidoscopic character renders inevitable its becoming more
+and more kaleidoscopic. The founders, boards of trustees, presidents,
+and faculties of new institutions are almost compelled to give their
+individual notions on higher education, to a dangerous extent,
+free scope. Having a hundred different patterns presented to their
+consideration, the temptation is well-nigh irresistible not to adopt any
+one of them, but to devise a new one. A new experimenting laboratory is
+set up. That its experiments will be, positively or negatively, of some
+value, is to be supposed. In most cases, however, the public interest
+would have been better served by a good factory, renouncing the risky
+ambition of dabbling with new inventions.
+
+A European is struck with wonderment that, considering the extent to
+which decentralisation in higher education has been carried, not
+infinitely more harm has been done, and that the harm it does, seems to
+impress the Americans comparatively so little. Neither can be understood,
+unless one fully realises to what a degree the American commonwealth
+is still in its formative period, and what an astounding educational
+power there is in American life. To the former it is principally due,
+that the deleterious effects mentioned are here in fact of much less
+consequence, than they would be, where the advantages of an historical
+development, counting by more than centuries, are paid for by the
+rigidity of age; and the latter supplements and corrects the work of the
+schools so effectively, that it is not surprising to find even many a
+keen-sighted and highly accomplished American more or less blindfolded
+as to this. Because the ultimate results are satisfactory, it is taken
+for granted, that the educational conditions of the country must be
+all right, while a searching critical examination irresistibly forces
+upon one the question, whether a good deal is not achieved in spite of
+them. If this be so, failure to promptly attend to what is defective
+in them will surely be punished, for thanks to the rapidity with which
+the United States are being filled up, their formative period is fast
+drawing to a close, and with its close, the educational power of American
+life will be, in some important respects, very sensibly diminished. The
+peculiar advantages, they have thus far enjoyed, are steadily growing
+weaker, while intellectually and morally, the difficulties confronting
+the whole civilised world, and difficulties peculiar to them, are as
+steadily making greater demands upon the people. Growth of population and
+development of economical life, with all its attending circumstances,
+constantly working at the further nationalisation of the American people,
+and the problems to be solved growing more and more intricate, disaster
+must become inevitable, if education does not keep abreast of this
+double movement; and this it cannot do, if we do not energetically and
+systematically go to work to nationalise education without consolidating
+it. Nor have we any time to lose, for the task is by no means easy. Every
+inch of ground gained will be the price of an arduous and protracted
+struggle.
+
+From the Federal Government no direct assistance is to be derived, for
+the question is not within the province of its constitutional powers,
+and if it were, we ought not to ask its interference, because, as I said,
+to nationalise education without consolidating it, is to be the aim.
+Public opinion, unaided by law, must effect the reform. Public opinion,
+however, is in this country even more powerful than the law. It is sure
+finally to overcome not only all active, but even all passive resistance,
+which is always much harder to overcome. But is there any possibility of
+ever inducing public opinion to take the question up in full earnest? I
+am confident there is, and at all events it must be tried. The difficulty
+of the task is no excuse for not undertaking it. It only admonishes us,
+not to waste time, strength, and enthusiasm in vain attempts to carry
+the fortress by assault. The works are so extended and so strong that
+only a methodical siege requiring a great deal of skill, patience, and
+determination, offers any chance of success. Two preliminary questions
+must, therefore, be answered, ere operations can be commenced: who is to
+conduct the campaign, and by what tactics can the approaches be pushed on
+the fastest?
+
+The answer to be given to the first question is plain. The instructors
+are to be considered the experts, if anybody can claim the title. Upon
+them, therefore, devolves the duty to take the lead. This they have
+already commenced to do. The very existence of a National Educational
+(Teacher’s) Association is in itself irrefutable proof that the opinions
+advanced by me, have, in some way and to some extent, asserted themselves
+for some time. How this has been done and what has been effected, I do
+not feel called upon to discuss. I merely state that while I appreciate
+what it has done and expect from it still more in the future, I am
+firmly convinced that the goal can never be reached if we are to content
+ourselves with what this organisation is capable of achieving. This
+will be deemed the less disparaging, if I furthermore state that, in my
+opinion, the end could no more be attained by any other organisation
+acting singlehanded. Hunting for any one device which will as certainly
+effect a cure as patent medicines claim to cure bodily ailments, is but
+to waste time. The evil has to be attacked from many points and in many
+ways, if sanitation is to set in.
+
+While I am fully persuaded of this, I am, however, on the other hand as
+firmly convinced that nothing will be of avail if the Universities do
+not step forward, heading the column of attack and adding compulsion to
+suasion. The reform has to be worked from the top downward. At present
+the law is, to a great extent, dictated by the schools of the lower
+grade to those of the higher. This must be reversed. The Universities
+must insist upon getting the proper material for doing what in their
+judgment is the proper work. They must cease fitting themselves to what
+the schools are pleased to send them. By closing their doors against
+all applicants whom they do not really deem adequately prepared, they
+must compel the schools, either to take down from their portals the
+inscription “fitting school,” or to mend their ways and furnish their
+pupils the kind and the amount of instruction they ought. A University
+that meekly submits to travel on whatever roads some hundreds of schools,
+which all more or less follow their own notions, happen to think good
+enough, never can be a University except in name. No institution has a
+moral right to the proud name of University that does not, consciously
+and determinately, do all that is in its power to direct its educational
+policy solely by what the civilisation of the age and the true interests
+of the nation require.
+
+I wish the old maxim _ultra posse nemo obligatur_ did not compel me to
+say “to do all that is in its power,” for I am but too well aware how
+deplorably little that is in many cases. State Universities are subject
+to another will, and this other will is apt to have very much its own
+notions as to how much a University may be allowed to cost, and to
+determine the standard of the University entirely by the local standard
+of schools. Other Universities, though legally their own masters, are
+practically restrained as much or even more by implacable facts. No
+University can entirely dispense with students, and the endowment of more
+than one University forbids its making light of the number of students it
+can secure. Being to some extent dependent upon the students for their
+maintenance, they cannot afford to be very fastidious in regard to the
+standard of schools they try to enlist into their constituency. But there
+is also a goodly number of Universities whose position is in absolutely
+every respect so strong that they can enter the lists without any risk
+whatever to themselves. Whether they stop growing for a while or even
+decline in numbers for some years does not affect their future in the
+least. They are so much in quest by students that the fitting schools
+are sure to make haste to meet their requirements, if these rise above
+their curriculum. To move on in wild leaps would, of course, be foolish.
+But so long as these Universities do not do that they never need to look
+backward in their onward march; their whole constituency of schools must
+follow close upon their heels, because they cannot afford to bolt and
+drop out. The more the leading Universities proceed upon a concerted
+plan, the larger the circle would grow, within which their joint pressure
+would be irresistible: the strength of each would be doubled by pressing
+on, shoulder to shoulder with the others, on the same lines. At the same
+time it will make it correspondingly easier for the weaker ones to follow
+in their wake. How could it fail to make an impression upon those on
+whom they depend, if they can back their pleas by urging the practical
+unanimity of all the foremost institutions of the country as to the right
+course to take? The more the leading Universities are united, not only
+as to the scope and method of their own work, but also as to what is
+to be considered the proper preparation for University work, the more
+will deviations from the rules laid down by them come to imply to public
+opinion inferiority of standard; and if there is a whip under which
+American communities smart, it is this. As to this would be added the
+missionary influences of the alumni sent from the leading Universities
+into all parts of the republic, it would be strange indeed, if the idea
+were not constantly to spread and to cast deeper root, that to adequately
+provide for the educational needs of the country, it is necessary
+consciously to create and systematically to foster a tendency, by the
+free action of public opinion, more and more to harmonise education, in
+developing it everywhere and in all its ramifications into a thoroughly
+organic structure.
+
+I am prepared to hear the opinions I have ventured to advance strenuously
+contested and, perhaps, even mercilessly ridiculed by many. The open
+antagonists, however, cause me but little uneasiness. I fear only one
+thing, i. e. that those who more or less endorse my criticisms and agree
+with me as to what is desirable, will be induced by the arduousness of
+the work to persuade themselves that it is impossible to bring about such
+a reform. To them I should say: Where there is a will, there is a way,
+and the American people _must_ be brought to will this reform, because
+every year a portentous word is becoming more true and of greater import:
+“the age of perils is past, but the age of difficulties has set it.”
+
+                                                             H. VON HOLST.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[88] Commencement address at the Nebraska State University, June 7, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+MEANING AND METAPHOR.
+
+
+Professor Huxley supposes[89] “that so long as the human mind exists, it
+will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual
+conceptions.” He finds that “the science of the present day is as full of
+this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience
+of ignorant ages.” The difference he sees is “that the philosopher who is
+worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law,
+and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the
+ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality.”
+He then goes on to warn us against dealing with symbols as though they
+were “real existences.”
+
+Few indeed are free from reproach in this matter, so far as reproach is
+deserved at all in the general unconsciousness of what constitutes the
+danger. Few see the question to be vital or the danger to be urgent;
+and even those who do are apt to deny that the search for a remedy can
+be a crusade worth attempting; the very idea seems Utopian or pedantic.
+On the one hand, teachers as a rule do not take their own analogies and
+metaphors seriously. Both the literary and scientific, as well as the
+philosophic and historical instinct tell against their doing so. In their
+eyes figures have either faded into indifferent abstractions, or they are
+obviously pictorial and merely rhetorical. But the average reader is apt
+to take them at the foot of the letter. He is usually unaware both of the
+extent to which he literalises and of the curious inconsistencies which
+his literalising involves. So he makes his inferences with alight heart,
+and wonders, perhaps, at the resulting confusion without suspecting its
+true cause.
+
+Would that the real state of the case and its practical consequences
+could be pressed home to all with such force, that whatever be our line
+of work or thought or expression we should strive in earnest to mend
+matters. At least, we might begin by learning better what part symbolism
+plays in the rituals of expression, and ask ourselves what else is
+language itself but symbolism, and what it symbolises. We should then
+examine anew the relations of the “symbolic” to the “real”; of image,
+figure, metaphor, to what we call literal or actual. For this concerns
+us all. Imagery runs in and out, so to speak, from the symbolic to the
+real world and back again. As matters stand, we never know where we are
+because we know so little where our phrases or our words are; indeed,
+perhaps they and we are “neither here nor there.” Or, if we do know
+where we are, we cannot be sure that our hearer or reader knows where
+he is. He, too, is probably “neither here nor there.” He often praises
+or agrees with us in the wrong place or the wrong manner. That is worse
+than being complained of or differed from; it is difficult to repudiate
+approval. Nor can we take refuge in lucidity and fancy that the clear
+must be the true. In the long run and in the cases which _signify_ most,
+there is no escape through merely lucid style or method. The “luminous”
+speaker or writer, the “forcible” orator or essayist, the moment he tries
+to convey to the public mind a thought which is really new, will find
+himself hampered by his very clearness itself. His ideas are controverted
+on assumptions not really his; or he himself is misled in subtle ways by
+what he assumes in others.
+
+Thus, by an instructive paradox, the clearest writer is often the most
+controversial; and he wonders at our perverseness as, while we admire
+his power and his “style,” we wonder at the perverseness in him. We
+possibly agree with him in ways we do not suspect; he possibly agrees
+with us in senses he ignores. Such a writer may pride himself on a chary
+use of metaphor, or on a carefully sharp distinction between “image”
+and “thing” or “object.” But he is liable to forget the danger dogging
+him even here. One is tempted to say that there is only one term more
+figurative as well as more ambiguous than “metaphorical,” and that is
+“literal.” Most certainly much that is called “literal” is tinged with
+the figurative in varying degrees, not always easy to distinguish, even
+with the help of context. The word “literal” itself is indeed a case in
+point. It has rarely, if ever, any reference to writing.
+
+The question is, whether this state of things is quite so inevitable
+as most of us seem to think. Certainly, so long as we are content to
+live in the fool’s paradise of supposing that only the perverse, the
+prejudiced, the stupid, or the ignorant can possibly mistake our meaning,
+and that our misreadings of others are simply due to their “obscurity,”
+or “quibbling,” or literary incapacity, we shall ourselves contribute to
+the hopelessness of the situation. But this is a subject which cannot be
+dealt with in an incidental way; it is rather a hope for the future, that
+one of the most practically serviceable of subjects—that of Meaning, its
+conditions and its changes—shall be seriously taken up. Then, indeed,
+we may get back to the first of all questions, and that which is most
+pregnant of helpful answers; that which needs asking more than any other
+if good work is to be done in this day of universal “unsettlement”:—What
+do we really mean? On all sides dead calms are stirred and ruffled,
+dead levels upheaved or depressed; nothing (happily) can hope to escape
+the wave of quickening force. So before long we may well be asking this
+question in good earnest; and when we do we can but be the better, even
+if we must needs submit in some cases where we may have been prematurely
+positive, to be content (for the moment) with the answer: We do not
+really know.
+
+The fact is, that we have been postulating an absolute Plain Meaning to
+be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have been virtually
+assuming that our hearers and readers all share the same mental
+background and atmosphere. We have practically supposed that they all
+look through the same inferential eyes, that their attention waxes and
+wanes at the same points, that their associations, their halos of memory
+and circumstance, their congenital tendencies to symbolise or picture,
+are all on one pattern. Verily, we need a “Critique of Plain Meaning”!
+
+Again we _quote_ on the same assumption. Unless the language of our
+author is obviously archaic; unless his allusions unmistakably betray
+a different life-context, a different social “milieu,” in short, a
+different mental world, we claim him or we repudiate him on the same
+principle. We take his words, we take his phrases, we fill them out with
+the same content as our own, we make him mean precisely what we ourselves
+mean. And be it noted that it is always what we mean _now_. That this in
+any way varies from what we meant at some time when, e. g., our attention
+was differently focussed, rarely enters our heads.
+
+We shall, I suppose, admit that until lately there was one very good
+reason for this state of things. Only the exceptional mind (if any);
+only the mind which could not make itself fully understood by its
+contemporaries, and would risk being reckoned crazy or criminal if it
+spoke “plainly,” had any suspicion that this way of looking at things
+was being gradually invalidated by the general extension of the critical
+domain. The history of language, its relation to thought; the scope
+of expression and representation, the function of the figurative and
+symbolic; the growth of all means of mental communion from the simplest
+rudiments of gesture or cry to the highest point of intellectual
+complexity,—all this was either ignored or taken for granted on radically
+insecure bases.
+
+Again, while the underlying conditions of language must be looked for
+in the domain of psycho-physics, that science had not yet come into
+existence. Even now it is but feeling its way and putting forth tentative
+hypotheses, warning us, as it does, so that they are liable to be
+constantly modified and occasionally revolutionised. And what does it
+realise, first and foremost? That our difficulties on the very threshold
+of the inquiry are, as usual, largely those of language. On all sides we
+have to use, as best we may, modes of expression that inevitably convey
+ambiguous meanings even to the thoughtful, even to the trained mind,
+which cannot but carry with them a background of outgrown or disproved
+premises, vitiating more or less every conclusion that we draw from them.
+The very phrases which are our only shorthand for the vast oratory of
+nature and experience betray us in the using. We have taken them as
+though they were like numerals invariable in meaning, thus supposing them
+subject to a permanent uniformity. We have taken them as though they
+were without a history, merely fortuitous labels or symbols of unanimous
+consent; the accepted sense, we think, being easily ascertainable, always
+persistent, and wholly sufficient for practical purposes. In any case we
+strangely assume that we may safely play upon all the chords of imagery,
+reserving without difficulty for serious use a body of terms which are
+direct expressions of “fact.”
+
+But the suggestion now made is that this is precisely one of the most
+dangerous of presuppositions. It is not the man who has mystified
+himself, or who wishes to mystify others; it is not the man who confounds
+the reality of the logical with that of the actual; it is not the man who
+takes emotion for proof and notion for fact; it is none of these, but
+the man who is clear on such points and sees that they must be drawn out
+into clues and followed up to the uttermost, if we would know where we
+are—who is beginning to see that the paramount need of the moment is the
+“torpedo-shock” of the question, What do we really mean? He knows that
+the off-hand vagueness and ready-made confusion, which too often from
+sheer ignorance usurp the name of common-sense, are in the long run its
+most deadly enemies.
+
+We may look forward then with a new hope to the rise of a systematic
+inquiry on the subject of meaning and its changes. This would entail
+the much-needed work of classifying metaphor, and might even be found
+to point to the existence of a third value, neither wholly literal, nor
+wholly figurative, as that of a large proportion of ordinary expression.
+From this and like causes, in this age of rapid changes due mainly to
+scientific conquest, we can all readily put to each other questions to
+which either a “yes” or a “no” must be equally misleading. And men of
+science have specially realised this, since many a time they have been
+unjustly credited with evasion, or with untenable or immoral views,
+because they either answered to a “plain question”: “In one sense, yes;
+in another, no,” or else gave an answer which could not fail to be
+misunderstood by a mind which was governed by unconscious survivals. So
+far as we are in touch with modern culture, we no longer mean what we
+must have meant in the days before Copernicus, when we say, for instance,
+“the sun rises.” When we speak of infection, we no longer mean what we
+used to mean before microbes had been heard of. When we talk of “heat,”
+we no longer mean what we used to mean even fifty years ago. And when a
+man says that he believes in the sun, the planets, the cosmos, in the
+heavens and the earth, in mind and matter, in soul and body, in spirit
+and flesh, he cannot, if he would, mean just what his forefathers meant,
+or indeed anything at all absolutely and finally. Whether we will or
+no, the meaning of such terms is changing on our very tongues, and ever
+swaying between the extremes which we call literal and metaphorical;
+“heaven,” e. g., ranging in value from sky to human destiny; “earth,”
+from soil to the visible Home of Man. We may appeal, and are right
+to appeal to “hard, dry” facts; but we perforce put something out of
+ourselves even into these. They become “facts” under the quickening
+touch of “mind,” while that emerges from a dim world of prepossession,
+bequeathing us many a primitive legacy from pre-intelligent sentience,
+and perhaps from little-suspected sources lying yet further back. For
+instance, primitive terror in its “superstitious” forms tended to
+represent man as inferior to and dependent on powers of some sort;—and
+this was true to natural order in the fact that his very world was not
+self-centred and was dependent for its best boons upon a greater than
+itself. As language advanced, he began quite naturally to express his
+meaning in “appropriate metaphors”; to use, e. g., the figures of light
+and then of sight to describe what he had, as we now say, “in his mind,”
+or what sense-messages, as we now say, had “put into his head.” For
+“something told him” that light, as it had been the first pleasure, was
+also the great means of life.[90] And he “saw,” in however grotesque a
+guise, the unbroken continuity of the organic and the inorganic, and
+perhaps even more clearly than most of us yet do, that of so-called
+“matter” and so-called “mind.” Perhaps in some cases, therefore, he
+chose his imagery better than (after long ages of dualism carried to the
+splitting-point) we generally do now.
+
+He knew again that the senses after all, stern masters though they were
+while life was so hard to live, had very narrow limits; and that the
+world was in some sense fuller and richer of life than it had seemed to
+be as known directly through them.[91] And then he wondered,—and began
+to ask. He was the first Questioner. As Prof. Max Müller says,[92] “the
+greater the savagery, the dullness, the stupidity with which _Homo
+sapiens_ began, the greater the marvel at what must have been from the
+first, though undeveloped, in him, and made him in the end what we find
+him to be in the men of light and leading of our own age.” The mere fact
+of the question is the riddle to be solved. For certainly the beasts had
+not taught him either to wonder or to ask. And not merely insatiable
+questioning but something more here rises to challenge our attention and
+to demand reflection. Man is the first critic because he is the first
+idealist; the first to be discontented, to protest, to see life as a
+“ravelled end,” as something which is incomplete and speaks of something
+more. Surely in any case the step of all steps, the deepest yet the
+narrowest line to cross is the step from something noticed or found, from
+something which happens or appears, from something which somehow affects
+us, excites us, to its significance.
+
+Of course in one sense it is impossible to fix any definite moment
+as that of the advent of this “significance.” Animals interpret each
+other’s aspect and gestures, often indeed with a subtle precision which
+to some extent we have lost. But interpretation in the intellectual
+sense becomes, from our present point of view, that which makes us
+really human. Our progress, our ascent, is mainly marked in this. The
+root-question to ask in gauging levels of humanity is, how much can a
+given man interpret or translate, of a world that teems with meaning? How
+much can he truly classify and relate, how much can he rightly infer and
+conclude, how much can he account for, explain, and fruitfully apply? For
+after all, results must be our tests. Claims and credentials are nothing,
+unless they can show this warrant; whereas truth which can use all facts
+alike is the very means of survival. Man begins by doing, by acting
+out impulse; then he learns to “think” little by little, observing,
+questioning, pondering, testing his way onward and upward. And throughout
+his patient, often painful journey, he is himself perpetually challenged.
+Nature’s stimulating appeals rain upon him ceaselessly from every side;
+she orders him to master all her meanings. He responds:—at first again,
+“blindly,” but ever rising to higher grades of answer. Both deficiency
+and error are no doubt more or less present in all mental response to
+actual fact—that is, in all experience. But the essence of sanity from
+the first lies in corrective power. Everywhere there is either absence of
+notice, absence of response, or there is experimental activity (broadly
+speaking) corrected at once; automatically or by the combined effect of
+the related organic activities. For instance, in health, if in using
+the hand, one finger accidentally goes astray, the coördinating muscles
+promptly recall it to a “sense of duty.” We know how the same rule works
+in speech and writing. Therefore, unless “voluntary” and “capricious”
+(or “willing” and “wilful”) are synonyms, the advent of volition ought
+not to mean the abrogation of this rule.
+
+It is, however, obvious that “natural selection” can only operate
+in cases where death or sterility is the consequence of failure in
+adaptation and appropriate reaction, or segregation the consequence of
+excessive variation. But the point here is, why does not a tendency
+to correction, thus established, survive automatically in incipient
+imagination and therefore in language? It seems almost a burlesque
+of popular notions of “free will” to suppose that the moment the
+death-penalty is taken off, the new-born intelligence, unique in adapting
+power, should go astray persistently without let or hindrance. Many now
+merely formal or even jocular customs still prevailing[93] testify, as
+legacies from a remote time of danger needing to be averted, to the
+strength of tendencies organised during myriads of generations under the
+pressure of the struggle for life. Why does not this apply to language?
+
+But sight gives us here perhaps the most suggestive lesson; for therein
+the ascending series seems especially gradual and unbroken. The eye,
+unlike the other organs of sense is an outgrowth of the very brain
+itself; “the retina ... is in reality a part of the brain.”[94] We
+may well therefore connect its functions specially with the thought
+of significance; it is the main out-post of our central means of
+interpretation.
+
+Taking the stages in the evolution of the eye, and using a short summary
+of these as a convenient means of testing the value of a conspicuous
+group of metaphors, we find (1) a mere dint; (2) this dint deepening
+into a pit which (3) gradually narrows. Hitherto we have had only light
+and darkness; now we have an image, though but a dim one. (4) The pit is
+closed by a transparent membrane; this is protection, not obstacle. (5)
+The lens is formed by deposit of cuticle. Gain; increased distinctness
+and increased brightness. The lens can focus a larger pencil of rays
+from each part of the object to each part of the retina (corresponding
+point). Finally, iris and eyelid protect the perfected eye more
+completely, and enable it both to bear more light and to discern more
+detail.
+
+If mental development were in any way comparable to this physiological
+development, we should expect to find (1) something which would
+naturally be described as a vague or dim “impression”; gradually
+deepening, becoming more distinctly localised as the stimulus became
+more definitely “impressive.” (2) We should begin to find “reality” and
+the “unreal”; “fact” and “fancy”; “truth” and “falsehood”; knowledge and
+ignorance,—contrasted as “light” and “darkness.”[95] And this is what
+actually happens.[96]
+
+(3) Still our mental “impression” would not as yet afford us an image;
+“imagination” only now comes upon the scene and begins to work (though as
+yet “dimly”) upon the objects which more and more “incisively” “impress”
+us. (4) Our deep “impression” is closed in one sense from direct contact
+with the outward; mental vision becomes more delicately differentiated
+from the emotional “touch,” however this may be specialised and
+intensified. But what secludes this is transparent; it is protection, not
+obstacle. We rightly speak of mental penetration; of “seeing through”
+a superficial limit. The mental “lens” is formed from that “continuum”
+on which the original “impression” was made. The gain now is increased
+distinctness and brightness. More rays of “light,” of reality, of fact,
+of truth, of knowledge, can now be focussed from each part of a given
+object (or group of objects) of mental attention and interest; to each
+part of the responsive “sensitive plate” of the mind. Finally we have,
+so to speak, increased protective growth. The function of what are called
+academic culture and scientific method, with their fastidious standards
+of fitness and accuracy, may perhaps represent something not unlike that
+of iris and eyelid, enabling the developing mind safely to bear intenser
+illumination and also to discern more subtle detail.
+
+It must be admitted that so far as it goes this is a significant
+psychological parable. However slender its right to the position even
+of a working clue to early stages of mind, it has at least better
+credentials than many accepted analogies can claim. And throughout
+its course what most “impresses” itself upon one’s mind is the steady
+maintenance of invariable reaction to excitation, and of protection from
+unfavorable stimulus.
+
+“Mind,” as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson tells us,[97] “is a fiction of the
+fancy.” Of course this is open to the retort that so is fancy a fiction
+of the mind, or fiction a fancy of the mind.
+
+Psychology is full of these see-saws of paradox, depending on
+vicissitudes of linguistic usage or context. But mind is indeed a fiction
+of the fancy when we endow it with a fanciful freedom from all ties with
+what we call physical reality. For this, however plainly we may recognise
+its genesis in our own sequences of sense-impression, does practically
+through them rule us with an undeviating severity which neither fiction
+nor fancy can tamper with. Therefore, if we think it absurd to suppose
+that there may possibly be an undiscovered vein of authentic and really
+indicative symbol or metaphor running through the arbitrary meshes of
+fanciful custom or mythical term, we are in fact implying that all clues
+from the original interactions of physical energy were entirely lost when
+what we call “mind” issued first in language. But at all events we may be
+sure that links between the “physical” and the “psychical” are everywhere
+drawing closer and emerging clearer, however buried as yet in a mass of
+the fantastic or the arbitrary.
+
+It will probably be objected that we can never hope to find these. No
+doubt such an attempt must mean the patient work of many lifetimes, and
+at best we could not hope to lay bare the ultimate point of “origin.”
+But yet it seems worth trying. For after all, even the results which
+may appear so scanty in the tracing back of language, are already rich
+far beyond what could have been hoped for a few generations back. And
+if it were once realised that such a line of work might have practical
+and far-reaching issues; if we really saw that thus some barren disputes
+and speculations might cease to bar the way or to waste some precious
+energies, we should be more than rewarded. In his “Dialogues of
+Plato”[98] Professor Jowett warned us twenty years ago of our linguistic
+dangers, repeating his warning with greater emphasis and in fresh forms
+in the admirable essays added in the edition just published. He urges
+that the “greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language
+teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our
+servants and not allowing them to be our masters.” “Words,” he tells
+us, “appear to be isolated but they are really the parts of an organism
+which is always being reproduced. They are refined by civilisation,
+harmonised by poetry, emphasised by literature, technically applied in
+philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on the border-ground of
+human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress from individual genius,
+and come with a new force and association to every lively-minded person.
+They are fixed by the simultaneous utterance of millions and yet are
+always imperceptibly changing:—not the inventors of language, but writing
+and speaking, and particularly great writers, or works which pass into
+the hearts of nations, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, the German or English
+Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They carry
+with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the use of
+a word in a striking and familiar passage, gives a complexion to its
+use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar phrase has
+also a peculiar power over us.” Then he reminds us of what we too often
+forget; that “language is an aspect of man, of nature, and of nations,
+the transfiguration of the world in thought, the meeting-point of the
+physical and mental sciences, and also the mirror in which they are
+reflected, an effect and partly a cause of our common humanity, present
+at every moment to the individual and yet having a sort of eternal or
+universal nature.”[99]
+
+Nowadays, when we feel most scathingly superior, we often announce that
+we fail to see and have yet to learn something which, bringing us, it
+may be, a really fresh idea, unpleasantly stirs misgiving. Let us go
+on with our greeting, meaning it in good earnest. For when we honestly
+and without reservation consent to learn and succeed in seeing some
+things now waiting for our study we may find more than we look for,
+within reach. After all it may be that we have really failed to see
+and have really yet to learn the part that meaning—whether of language
+or of conduct—and its change or variations (successive or simultaneous)
+have had throughout the mental history of man. It may be that while
+the ordinary modern metaphor like the ordinary modern analogy is a
+mere rhetorical device, some few images may be found to hail from an
+altogether deeper and more authentic source. Many, however ancient, are
+not of course any the more valid for their antiquity. On the contrary it
+is obvious that such a figure for instance as “foundation” or “basis” to
+express an ultimate necessity, is a survival from days in which the earth
+was supposed to require and to possess such fixed and immutable base,
+while the analogies, e. g. between the human and the inorganic orders are
+now reversed. We import the idea of mechanism and invariable sequence
+into the former instead of exporting conscious intention into the latter;
+we level down where our forefathers levelled up. And we have to beware of
+the subtle atmosphere of fallacy thus introduced.
+
+But on the other hand it is conceivable that some may be found to belong
+to that as yet mysterious energy on which natural selection plays and of
+which variation is the outcome or the sign. What we find in language may
+thus be, as it were, not merely the “scarred and weather-worn” remnant
+of geogenic strata but sometimes the meteorite, the calcined fragment of
+earlier worlds of correspondence, ultra-earthly, cosmical. We have no
+right to do more than ask and seek and knock at the gates of fact in such
+a matter as this. But until that has been done; until at least we have
+tried the experiment; have looked for grades of validity in metaphor and
+analogy in the light of modern science, and still more, have recognised
+clearly the powerful though hidden effects upon us of organised mental
+picture brought in surreptitiously with verbal imagery, or by comparison;
+we cannot know whether such an effort is worth while or no, or what
+harvest it may yield. For after all, whether we like it or no, we _are_
+heliocentric; the world and all that is in it is cosmically generated.
+As far as science—and experience—are concerned, anything which says “I
+don’t admit that origin; I claim to have produced myself or to have
+been originated by and on the earth in a final sense,” must make good
+its geocentric or self-creating pretensions with overwhelming cogency
+and rigorous proof. We appeal to the “light” of science, of reason, of
+experience, against the “darkness” of superstition, myth, and mysticism.
+And we are thus appealing not to the supersensuous or supernatural
+but to the ultra-satellitic. Not only beyond the earth and touch but
+beyond the atmosphere and hearing is the home of the light that lightens
+our small world, calling forth in us the answer of sight. And the
+manifold revelations through this sense—in its mental as well as bodily
+character—press upon us, with greater and greater insistence, the wealth
+of our relations with the universe.
+
+In any case, _meaning_—in the widest sense of the word—is the only value
+of whatever “fact” presents itself to us. Without this, to observe and
+record appearances or occurrences would become a worse than wasteful
+task. Significance is the one value of all that consciousness brings, or
+that intelligence deals with; the one value of life itself. But perhaps
+for this very reason we have taken it too much for granted. It may need a
+more definite place in psychological inquiries. It may have unsuspected
+bearings.
+
+When we have realised better what manner of gift this is, we may find
+answers of which we have prematurely despaired; answers coming not from
+the “mystical” point of the horizon of experience, but rather from the
+neural. And let us beware here of repeating the pre-scientific error of
+postulating, for figurative purposes, a flat earth on which whatever lies
+beyond “horizons” never meets! But, it may be said, why not? Why should
+it signify? Why, but because Man is the one not merely who thinks, or
+speaks, or writes, or looks upwards, but the one who _means_, the one
+who _is_ the meaning of much, and makes the meaning of all; the one who
+will not tolerate the unmeaning anywhere in experience. Nothing remains
+but that he should interpret rightly; that he should apprehend nature and
+experience in their true sense. It is the glory of science that she puts
+this aim in the forefront of her labors. She tells us that nothing can
+be done without assumption and hypothesis as to the meaning of things.
+But that significance belongs to the very spring to which we owe her
+dauntless energy and her accumulating triumphs.
+
+Why should it signify? The very term answers us. To “signify” is the one
+test of the important. The significant is alone worth notice. We inherit
+a mode of thinking which we are at last becoming able to criticise in
+the light of knowledge gained by observation and experiment. But if we
+persist in using, without warning to hearer or reader, imagery which has
+no longer either sense or relevance, or which tends to call up a false
+mental picture or to perpetuate an else decaying error, we shall to that
+extent forfeit the very gifts which science brings us, and must not
+complain of the obstinate persistence of ideas which needlessly divide
+us. At least, let us try to realise more clearly what we are losing in
+this way. The danger even thus must needs be lessened; detected bogies
+become powerless for mischief; but we need not leave their ancient home
+empty, swept, and garnished; stores of verified analogy are waiting to
+replace them. The figurative must not indeed be pressed, still less
+literalised. But we may see that it conveys a true, rather than a false
+impression; and harmonises with, instead of contradicting that which we
+most surely know.[100]
+
+It may be said in a true sense that the function of the hero, the saint,
+the poet, is to bring the world to _life_. But the function of the
+devoted servant of science, the critical scholar, the true philosopher,
+is to bring the world to _truth_, in a sense only now becoming possible.
+Through the last discipline alone, in its most thorough applications, can
+we hope fully to master the scope of all significance and the laws of all
+its workings. Then, indeed, we may further hope to read with a fresh eye
+the Significance of Life.
+
+                                                           VICTORIA WELBY.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[89] _The Nineteenth Century_, April, 1886. (Reprinted in _Essays on
+Controverted Questions_.)
+
+[90] “Light affects the new-born infant at an early stage, although in
+this as in other respects individual differences immediately assert
+themselves. The child seems to take pleasure in an excitation of light
+and tries (even on the second day after birth) to turn towards it in
+order to retain it.” (_Outlines of Psychology_, H. Höffding, p. 4.)
+
+“Under the influence of light the conversion of inorganic matter into
+more complex organic matter takes place, more particularly in the green
+cells of plants.” (_Ibid._, p. 315.)
+
+“It is certainly necessary to look further back than the visual
+sensations to understand the great influence of light on all creatures
+that have sensuous perception.... Light is thus one of the most
+elementary conditions of life.” (_Ibid._, p. 229.)
+
+[91] It must be borne in mind that I am using psychological terms in
+a merely general sense. Among many examples of such use I may quote
+Sachs (_Physiology of Plants_, p. 200) and F. Darwin (_Address to
+Biological Section_, Brit. Assoc, August 1891), who speaks of the plant
+as “perceiving” external change, as “recognising” the vertical line,
+“knowing” where the centre of the earth is, “translating” stimulus, etc.
+See also Darwin’s _Forms of Flowers_, p. 90.
+
+Again Prof. M. Foster uses the word “will” in the same general (rather
+than metaphorical) sense. (_Text Book of Phys._, Part 3, pp. 1059, 1062,
+1063.) Modes of reaction are thus verbally linked with consciousness, and
+we must remember that all our terms for the “mental” belong first to the
+“physical,” and that many are reciprocally used in the two spheres.
+
+[92] _Natural Religion_, p. 243.
+
+[93] See Dr. Tylor’s _Primitive Culture_, Vol. I, pp. 74-121; _Ibid._,
+Vol. II, pp. 297-298, 404-428.
+
+[94] Dr. M. Foster’s _Text-Book of Physiology_, Part 4, p. 1142.
+
+[95] I am of course merely directing attention to the relative aptness
+of metaphors of mental process familiarly in use in our own language. It
+is obvious that before any inference could be made from them as to the
+value of unconscious analogies of imagery, we should have to make appeal
+to comparative philology and embark on a wide inquiry, for which the
+English-speaking races must wait for Dr. Murray’s epoch-making Dictionary.
+
+[96] It must be borne in mind that the whole process presupposes the
+other senses or at least the temperature-sense, the “muscular sense”
+and that of touch; that is, we should have “felt” simple stimuli
+“emotionally” before we “saw” things intellectually. And hearing is
+not now in question, though in that, too, we should find the same
+character of development, i. e. the same prominence of the protective and
+discriminative factors.
+
+[97] _Brain_, June, 1891. P. 13.
+
+[98] Vol. I, pp. 285-286, 293.
+
+[99] The following, among many pregnant passages between which it is
+difficult to choose, may be further quoted:
+
+“The famous dispute between Nominalists and Realists would never have
+been heard of, if, instead of transferring the Platonic ideas into a
+crude Latin phraseology, the spirit of Plato had been truly understood
+and appreciated. Upon the term substance at least two celebrated
+theological controversies appear to hinge, which would not have existed,
+or at least not in their present form, if we had ‘interrogated’ the word
+substance, as Plato has the notions of Unity and Being. Those weeds of
+philosophy have struck their roots deep into the soil, and are always
+tending to reappear, sometimes in new-fangled forms; while similar words,
+such as development, evolution, law, and the like, are constantly put in
+the place of facts, even by writers who profess to base truth entirely
+upon fact. In an unmetaphysical age there is probably more metaphysics in
+the common sense (i. e. more _a priori_ assumption) than in any other,
+because there is more complete unconsciousness that we are resting on
+our own ideas, while we please ourselves with the conviction that we are
+resting on facts. We do not consider how much metaphysics are required to
+place us above metaphysics, or how difficult it is to prevent the forms
+of expression which are ready made for our use from outrunning actual
+observation and experiment.” (Vol. IV, p. 39-40.)
+
+“To have the true use of words we must compare them with things; in using
+them we acknowledge that they seldom give a perfect representation of our
+meaning. In like manner when we interrogate our ideas we find that we are
+not using them always in the sense which we supposed. (_Ibid._, p. 41.)
+
+“Many erroneous conceptions of the mind derived from former philosophies
+have found their way into language, and we with difficulty disengage
+ourselves from them. Mere figures of speech have unconsciously influenced
+the minds of great thinkers. Also there are some distinctions, as,
+for example, that of the will and of reason, and of the moral and
+intellectual faculties, which are carried further than is justified by
+experience. Any separation of things which we cannot see or exactly
+define, though it may be necessary, is a fertile source of error. The
+division of the mind into faculties or powers or virtues is too deeply
+rooted in language to be got rid of, but it gives a false impression. For
+if we reflect on ourselves we see that all our faculties easily pass into
+one another, and are bound together in a single mind or consciousness;
+but this mental unity is apt to be concealed from us by the distinctions
+of language.” (_Ibid._, p. 155.)
+
+[100] I would gladly forward to any reader interested in a question of
+such practical bearings, a small collection of _Witnesses to Ambiguity_
+gathered from representative sources, and a pamphlet which was circulated
+at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, held in London,
+August, 1892, giving examples of the mischievous confusions suggested
+by the use, even among writers of the first rank, of the metaphor,
+_Inner and Outer_. Prof. H. Sidgwick, the president, in his opening
+address, expressed the opinion that very important work of this kind
+remained to be done, and added, “I have much sympathy with the view
+urged in a pamphlet that I have received for distribution among members
+of the Congress, which illustrates forcibly the confusion caused by
+one established antithesis of terms.” Professor Sully and others have
+expressed themselves strongly in the same sense.
+
+
+
+
+REPLY TO THE NECESSITARIANS.
+
+REJOINDER TO DR. CARUS.
+
+
+§ 1. In _The Monist_ for January, 1891, and in the number for April,
+1892, I attacked the doctrine that every event is precisely determined by
+law. Like everybody else, I admit that there is regularity: I go further;
+I maintain the existence of law as something _real and general_. But I
+hold there is no reason to think that there are general formulæ to which
+the phenomena of nature _always_ conform, or to which they _precisely_
+conform. At the end of my second paper, the partisans of the doctrine of
+necessity were courteously challenged and besought to attempt to answer
+my arguments. This, so far as I can learn, Dr. Carus alone, in _The
+Monist_ of July and October, 1892, has publicly vouchsafed to do. For
+this I owe him my particular thanks and a careful rejoinder.
+
+§ 2. I number the paragraphs of his papers consecutively. The following
+index shows the pages on which those paragraphs commence, and the
+numbered sections of this rejoinder in which they are noticed.
+
+        DR. CARUS     REJOINDER
+    Vol. II, p. 560   ¶ 1
+         ”       ”      2  §28
+         ”       ”      3   29
+         ”      561     4   23.27
+         ”       ”      5   21
+         ”       ”      6   18
+         ”       ”      7   18
+         ”      562     8   18 _bis._
+         ”       ”      9   21
+         ”       ”     10
+         ”      563    11   12.21.22
+         ”       ”     12   19
+         ”       ”     13   19
+         ”      564    14    3.12 _bis._ 22
+         ”       ”     15    8 _ter_, 16
+         ”      565    16   21
+         ”       ”     17    3
+         ”       ”     18    3
+         ”       ”     19   13 note
+         ”      566    20   14
+         ”       ”     21   13, 14
+         ”       ”     22   3.12.22
+         ”       ”     23   12
+         ”       ”     24    3.13.14
+         ”      567    25    8
+         ”       ”     26    8
+         ”       ”     27    8.22
+         ”       ”     28   20.22
+         ”       ”     29   12
+         ”      568    30   22
+         ”       ”     31   22 _bis_
+         ”       ”     32   22
+         ”      569    33   22
+         ”       ”     34   22
+         ”       ”     35    8
+         ”       ”     36   29
+         ”       ”     37
+         ”      570    38
+         ”       ”     39
+         ”       ”     40
+         ”      571    41
+         ”       ”     42
+         ”       ”     43
+         ”      572    44   23
+         ”       ”     45
+         ”       ”     46    5.23
+         ”      573    47
+         ”       ”     48    7
+         ”       ”     49    7
+         ”       ”     50    7
+         ”      574    51    7.25
+         ”       ”     52
+         ”       ”     53   25
+         ”       ”     54
+         ”       ”     55   25 _bis_
+         ”      575    56   17
+         ”       ”     57   17 _bis_
+         ”       ”     58   17.25
+         ”       ”     59   17
+         ”       ”     60   17
+         ”      576    61   7.17.25 _bis_
+         ”       ”     62   17.21
+         ”       ”     63   17
+         ”      577    64   17 _bis_
+         ”       ”     65   26
+         ”       ”     66   25
+         ”       ”     67   25 _bis_
+         ”      578    68    6.7
+         ”       ”     69    17
+         ”      579    70    6
+         ”       ”     71    3
+         ”      580    72    3
+         ”       ”     73    3
+         ”       ”     74    3
+         ”       ”     75    3
+         ”      581    76    3
+         ”       ”     77    3.11
+         ”       ”     78
+         ”       ”     79   21
+         ”      582    80
+         ”       ”     81   29
+         ”       ”     82   29
+         ”       ”     83   29
+    Vol. III,    68    84    5
+         ”       ”     85   27
+         ”       ”     86
+         ”       69    87   12
+         ”       ”     88    5.15 _bis_
+         ”       ”     89
+         ”       ”     90
+         ”       ”     91    5
+         ”       ”     92    5
+         ”       70    93    5
+         ”       ”     94    5
+         ”       ”     95    3
+         ”       ”     96    4.11
+         ”       71    97
+         ”       ”     98
+         ”       ”     99
+         ”       ”    100
+         ”       72   101
+         ”       ”    102   11
+         ”       ”    103    6
+         ”       ”    104
+         ”       ”    105
+         ”       73   106   11
+         ”       ”    107    6
+         ”       ”    108    6
+         ”       ”    109    6
+         ”       ”    110    6
+         ”       ”    111    6
+         ”       74   112    6
+         ”       ”    113    6.11
+         ”       ”    114    6
+         ”       ”    115    6
+         ”       75   116    6.7
+         ”       ”    117    6
+         ”       76   118
+         ”       ”    119    9
+         ”       ”    120    6.16
+         ”       ”    121   14
+         ”       ”    122   11
+         ”       77   123    3
+         ”       ”    124   10
+         ”       ”    125    7
+         ”       78   126    8
+         ”       ”    127    8
+         ”       ”    128   29
+         ”       79   129
+         ”       ”    130
+         ”       ”    131
+         ”       ”    132
+         ”       ”    133   27
+         ”       ”    134
+         ”       80   135
+         ”       ”    136
+         ”       ”    137   15
+         ”       ”    138   15
+         ”       ”    139    5.15
+         ”       81   140   15
+         ”       ”    141   15
+         ”       ”    142   15.25
+         ”       ”    143   15.24
+         ”       ”    144   15 _bis_
+         ”       ”    145   15 _bis_
+         ”       ”    146   15 _bis_
+         ”       ”    147   15 _ter_
+         ”       82   148   15
+         ”       ”    149   12.15
+         ”       ”    150   15 _bis._ 25
+         ”       83   151   15.24
+         ”       ”    152   15.24
+         ”       ”    153   15.24
+         ”       ”    154   15.24
+         ”       ”    155   15.24
+         ”       84   156   15 _bis_
+         ”       ”    157   15
+         ”       ”    158   15.24
+         ”       85   159   15.24
+         ”       ”    160   15.24
+         ”       86   161   15 _bis_
+         ”       ”    162   15
+         ”       ”    163    5.14
+         ”       ”    164   14
+         ”       87   165    4.14
+         ”       ”    166   14
+         ”       ”    167   14
+         ”       ”    168   27
+         ”       ”    169   27
+         ”       88   170   27
+         ”       ”    171   27
+         ”       ”    172   27
+         ”       ”    173
+         ”       ”    174
+         ”       89   175   27
+         ”       ”    176   27 _bis_
+         ”       ”    177   27
+         ”       ”    178   27
+         ”       ”    179
+         ”       ”    180   30
+         ”       ”    181
+         ”       ”    182
+         ”       90   183   30
+         ”       ”    184
+         ”       ”    185   27
+         ”       ”    186   27
+         ”       91   187   27
+         ”       ”    188
+         ”       ”    189
+         ”       ”    190
+         ”       92   191    4
+         ”       ”    192   27 _bis_
+         ”       ”    193   20.27 _bis_
+         ”       93   194
+         ”       ”    195    8
+         ”       ”    196    8
+         ”       94   197
+         ”       ”    198    6
+         ”       ”    199   30
+         ”       ”    200
+         ”       ”    201
+         ”       95   202
+         ”       ”    203   20.29
+         ”       ”    204   29
+         ”       96   205   20
+         ”       ”    206
+         ”       ”    207
+
+§ 3. Dr. Carus’s philosophy is hard to understand. Some phrases which
+he frequently uses lead the reader to imagine that he is listening to
+an old-fashioned Königsberg Kantian. What, then, is our surprise when
+we find (¶ 14) that he sneers at the Kantian, Sir William Hamilton
+(whom he calls Mr. Hamilton) as having “no adequate conception of the
+_a priori_.” In his “Ursache, Grund und Zweck” (1883), an admirably
+clear and systematic exposition of much of his thought, he takes a
+Schleiermacherian view of the _a priori_. He admits it to be founded in
+the universal conditions of cognition; but he thinks it is among the
+objective rather than the subjective conditions. This is an opinion
+to which Hamilton is also at times inclined. It is a weak conception,
+unless the whole distinction between the inward and the outward world be
+reformed in the light of agapastic and synechistic ontology. For to deny
+that the _a priori_ is subjective is to remove its essential character;
+and to make it both subjective and objective (otherwise than in the sense
+in which Kant himself makes it objective) is uncalled for, and is cut off
+by Ockham’s razor. But when synechism has united the two worlds, this
+view gains new life.
+
+Another thing which has astonished me is Dr. Carus’s extravagant
+laudation (¶ 17) of Venn’s highly enlightened and remarkably
+bright-thinking, yet blundering little book, “The Logic of Chance.”[101]
+This is the way he speaks of it: “This admirable work, we will make
+bold to say, marks a new epoch in the study of logic.” He adds that it
+“paves the way which Mr. Peirce has actually followed.” But the question
+of the nature of probability had long before that publication engaged
+the attention of some of the most powerful intellects in England; and
+my opinion concerning it was fully made up before I saw the book. I do
+not think I learned anything from that except a classification of the
+philosophies of probability. However, after all his eulogy, Dr. Carus
+only uses the book to quote from it Mill’s rewording of Kant’s definition
+of causation, which he would better have quoted direct.
+
+Let me say, not to Dr. Carus, but to the younger generation of readers,
+that if they imagine that Hamilton, because he is antiquated, is not
+worth reading, they are much mistaken. The Scotistic elements of his
+philosophy, and his method in the notes on Reid are especially worthy of
+attention. As for Mill, though his philosophy was not profound, it is,
+at least in his “Examination of Hamilton,” admirably set forth. Whoever
+wishes to appeal to the American philosophical mind needs to be quite
+familiar with the writings of these two men.
+
+Dr. Carus himself accepts all that I hold for erroneous in Kant’s
+definition of causation as universal and necessary sequence. Mill
+merely substitutes the exacter words _invariable_ for “universal,”
+and _unconditional_ for “necessary.”[102] In giving his form of the
+definition, Mill shows why it is not applicable to the sequence of day
+and night, namely, that that is not necessary. Yet Dr. Carus writes (¶
+18) of this very same sequence as if it came under Mill’s definition![103]
+
+Again, why should he make it “the immortal merit of the great Scotchman”
+(¶ 22), that is, of Hume, that he admitted the truth of Leibniz’s
+principle?
+
+The famed puzzle of causation is peculiarly understood by Dr. Carus.
+The difficulties which the perusal of Hume suggested to the mind
+of Kant,[104] were such as belonged to all categories, or general
+conceptions of the understanding. The precritical Kant inherited a very
+decided nominalism from Leibniz and Wolf; and the puzzle for him was
+simply the usual difficulty that plagues nominalism when it finds itself
+confronted with a reality which has an element of generality. Necessity
+is, I need hardly say, but a particular variety of universality. But
+Dr. Carus (¶ 24) passes over this, to dwell upon an entirely different
+objection to causation, namely, that it seems to be a creation out of
+nothing, and a miracle.
+
+I find myself equally at cross-purposes with him, when in ¶¶ 71-77, he
+speaks of the prevalent views of logicians concerning _comprehension_.
+This word, in logic, measures the amount of predicates or marks attached
+to a conception; but Dr. Carus’s criticisms seem to be based upon the
+idea that by comprehension is meant logical breadth, or the amount of
+subjects to which the conception is applicable.
+
+I am simply gravelled by his remarks (¶ 95) concerning sundry English
+words.
+
+No more do I know what to make of his praise (¶ 123) of the German
+translation of a French phrase used in the theory of functions, meaning
+_univocally determined_.
+
+§ 4. One habit which goes far to obscure Dr. Carus’s meaning is that
+whenever he finds his opinion at variance with a familiar saying, instead
+of rejecting that formula, he retains it and changes the meaning. This is
+calculated to throw the whole discussion into confusion. Thus, nothing is
+more certain than that the so-called “law of identity,” or _A_ is _A_,
+was intended to express the fact that every term is predicable of itself.
+But Dr. Carus, simply because he finds that “meaningless and useless” (¶
+96), thinks himself authorised to confuse the terminology of logic by
+making this formula, _A_ = _A_, under the same old name, mean that things
+to which the same name is applicable are for some purpose equivalent.
+
+In like manner, he changes the meaning of the word _freedom_ (¶ 165),
+so that the distinction between those who maintain and those who oppose
+the freedom of the will may, in words, disappear. It seems scarcely
+defensible for a thoroughgoing necessitarian, such as he is, to fly the
+flag of Free Will.
+
+He, also, changes the meaning of _spontaneity_ so far that, according to
+him, “masses gravitate spontaneously” (¶ 191), and so pretends that his
+doctrine does not suppress the spontaneity of nature!
+
+§ 5. There are other questions of terminology in which I am unable to
+agree with Dr. Carus. Thus, when I define necessitarianism as “the theory
+that the will is subject to the general mechanical law of cause and
+effect,” Dr. Carus (¶ 139) wishes to delete “mechanical.” But the result
+would be to define a doctrine to which the advocates of free will would
+generally subscribe, as readily as their opponents. In order properly to
+limit the definition, it is quite requisite to exclude “free causation.”
+By “mechanical” causation, I mean a causation entirely determinative,
+like that of dynamics, but not necessarily operating upon matter.
+
+Dr. Carus mentions (¶ 84) that there are several different ideas to
+which the term necessity is applied. It seems to me that what lies at
+the bottom of all of them is the experience of reaction against one’s
+will. In the simplest form, this gives the sense of reality. Dr. Carus
+himself admits (¶ 46) that reality involves the idea of inevitable fate.
+Yet philosophical necessity is a special case of universality. But the
+universality, or better, the generality, of a pure form involves no
+necessity. It is only when the form is materialised that the distinction
+between necessity and freedom makes itself plain. These ideas are,
+therefore, as it seems to me, of a mixed nature. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 91-94)
+insists that by the necessary, he wishes to be understood to mean in
+all cases the _inevitable_. This is the idea of _fate_, and is not the
+conception which determinists usually attach to the term necessity.
+Yet he does not appear to be quite consistent. At one time (¶ 88), he
+carefully distinguishes necessity from fate. At another time (¶ 163),
+every element of compulsion is to be excluded from the conception of
+necessity.
+
+§ 6. One important key to Dr. Carus’s opinions is the recognition of the
+fact that, like many other philosophers, he is a nominalist tinctured
+with realistic opinions.
+
+He says (¶ 103), that “there is no need of discussing the truism that,
+properly speaking, there is no absolute sameness.” Now, upon the
+nominalistic theory, there is not only no absolute or numerical identity,
+but there are not even any real agreements or likenesses between
+individuals; for likeness consists merely in the calling of several
+individuals by one name, or (in some systems) in their exciting one idea.
+On the other hand, upon the realistic theory, the fact that identity is
+a relation of reason does not in the least prevent it from being real.
+On that theory, it is real unless it is _false_ that anything is itself.
+Thus, upon either theory, identity is just as real as similarity. But
+Dr. Carus, being a nominalist leaning toward realism, is inclined to
+make dynamical relations real, and second-intentional ones unreal. This
+opinion, I think, is a transitional one.
+
+The declaration (¶ 198) that “natural laws are simply a description
+of nature as nature is,” and that “the facts of nature express the
+character of nature,” are nominalistic. But in another place (¶¶
+107-116), he says distinctly that uniformities are real.
+
+He says (¶ 70), “Mr. Peirce attempts to explain natural laws as if they
+were concrete and _single facts_.” This is eminently nominalistic. The
+nominalist alone makes this sharp distinction between the abstract and
+the concrete,[105] which must not be confounded with Hegel’s distinction
+for which the same words are used. The nominalist alone falls into the
+absurdity of talking of “single facts,” or _individual generals_. Yet
+Dr. Carus says (¶ 68) that natural laws describe the facts of nature
+_sub specie aeternitatis_. Now I understand Spinoza to be a realist.
+In ¶117 he considers it “settled” “that there are samenesses.” This is
+realistic. But in ¶ 120, he holds “the whole business of science to be to
+systematise the samenesses of experience,” which is nominalistic.
+
+§ 7. Dr. Carus seems to be in some doubt as to how far evolutionism ought
+to be carried. In ¶¶ 48-51, he seems to side with my contention that it
+should be thoroughgoing. In ¶116, he makes intellect an evolution from
+feeling. Yet he is sometimes (¶ 125) “inclined” to say the world never
+was a chaos; he sometimes (¶ 61) thinks it weak to suppose that real
+chance begets order; and he sometimes (¶ 68) goes so far as to pronounce
+eternity to be the _conditio sine qua non_ of natural law.
+
+§ 8. Every reader of _The Monist_ knows that our good editor’s great word
+is “formal law.” The clearest statement he has ever made of this doctrine
+I find in the following two sentences (¶ 127):
+
+    “The _a priori_ systems of thought are ... constructions
+    raised out of the recognition of the formal, i. e. relational
+    samenesses that appear in experience. All possibilities of a
+    certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated in
+    theorems.”[106]
+
+This is perspicuous. For example, of pairs, we can easily show that
+there are but two forms _A_:_A_ and _A_:_B_. This proposition,—theorem
+if you will,—exhausts the possibilities. If we make believe there is no
+danger of falling into error in mathematical reasoning,—and one danger,
+though not, perhaps, a very serious one, _is_ eliminated,—then this
+proposition is absolutely certain. But I will say, at once, that such a
+proposition is not, in a proper sense, synthetic. It is a mere corollary
+from the definition of a pair. Moreover, its application to experience,
+or to possible experience, opens the door to probability, and shuts out
+absolute necessity and certainty, _in toto_.
+
+Concerning points like this, Dr. Carus, in company with the general
+body of thinkers, is laboring under a great disadvantage from not
+understanding the logic of relatives. It is a subject I have been
+studying for a great many years, and I feel and know that I have an
+important report that I ought to make upon it. This branch of logic is,
+however, so abstruse, that I have never been able to find the leisure to
+translate my conclusions into a form in which their significance would
+be manifest even to a powerful thinker whose thoughts had not long been
+turned in that direction. I shall succeed in doing so, whenever I can
+find myself in a situation where I need think of nothing else for months,
+and not before. That may not be for thirty years; but I believe it is the
+intention of providence that it should be. Meantime, I will testify, and
+the reader can take my testimony for what he thinks it is worth, that
+all deductive reasoning, except that kind which is so childishly simple
+that acute minds have doubted whether there was any reasoning there,—I
+mean non-relative syllogism,—requires an act of choice; because from a
+given premise, several conclusions,—in some cases an infinite number,—can
+be drawn. Hence, Dr. Carus is altogether too hasty in his confidence
+(¶¶ 195, 196) that general thinking machines “are not impossibilities.”
+An act of original and arbitrary determination would be required; and
+it seems almost evident that no machine could perform such an act
+except within narrow limits, thought out beforehand and embodied in
+its construction. Moreover, positive observation is called for in all
+inference, even the simplest,—though in deduction it is only observation
+of an object of imagination. Moreover, a peculiar act which may properly
+be called _abstraction_[107] is usually required, consisting in seizing
+evanescent elements of thought and holding them before the mind as
+“substantive” objects, to borrow a phrase from William James. At the
+same time, the process I am describing, that is, relative deduction, is
+perfectly general and demonstrative, and depends upon the truth of the
+assumed premises, and not, like inductive reasoning, upon the manner in
+which those premises present themselves.
+
+But the application of the logic of relatives shows that the propositions
+of arithmetic, which Dr. Carus usually adduces as examples of formal law
+(¶ 15), are, in fact, only corollaries from definitions. They are certain
+only as applied to ideal constructions, and in such application, they are
+merely analytical.
+
+The truth is our ideas about the distinction between analytical and
+synthetical judgments is much modified by the logic of relatives, and
+by the logic of probable inference. An analytical proposition is a
+definition or a proposition _deducible_ from definitions; a synthetical
+proposition is a proposition not analytical. Deduction, or analytical
+reasoning, is, as I have shown in my “Theory of Probable Reasoning,” a
+reasoning in which the conclusion follows (necessarily, or probably) from
+the state of things expressed in the premises, in contradistinction to
+scientific, or synthetical, reasoning, which is a reasoning in which the
+conclusion follows probably and approximately from the premises, owing to
+the conditions under which the latter have been observed, or otherwise
+ascertained. The two classes of reasoning present, besides, some other
+contrasts that need not be insisted upon in this place. They also present
+some significant resemblances. Deduction is really a matter of perception
+and of experimentation, just as induction and hypothetic inference are;
+only, the perception and experimentation are concerned with imaginary
+objects instead of with real ones. The operations of perception and of
+experimentation are subject to error, and therefore it is only in a
+Pickwickian sense that mathematical reasoning can be said to be perfectly
+certain. It is so, only under the condition that no error creeps into
+it: yet, after all, it is susceptible of attaining a practical certainty.
+So, for that matter, is scientific reasoning; but not so readily. Again,
+mathematics brings to light results as truly occult[108] and unexpected
+as those of chemistry; only they are results dependent upon the action
+of reason in the depths of our own consciousness, instead of being
+dependent, like those of chemistry, upon the action of Cosmical Reason,
+or Law. Or, stating the matter under another aspect, analytical reasoning
+depends upon associations of similarity, synthetical reasoning upon
+associations of contiguity. The logic of relatives, which justifies these
+assertions, shows accordingly that deductive reasoning is really quite
+different from what it was supposed by Kant to be; and this explains how
+it is that he and others have taken various mathematical propositions
+to be synthetical which in their ideal sense, as propositions of pure
+mathematics, are in truth only analytical.
+
+Descending from things I can demonstrate to things of which various
+facts, in the light of those demonstrations, fully persuade me, I
+will say that in my opinion there are many synthetical propositions
+which, if not _a priori_ in Dr. Carus’s sense, are, at least, innate
+(notwithstanding his frequent denials of this, as in ¶ 15) though he
+is quite right in saying that their abstract and distinct formulation
+comes very late (¶ 126). But turn the facts as I will, I cannot see that
+they afford the slightest reason for thinking that such propositions are
+ever absolutely universal, exact, or necessary in their truth. On the
+contrary, the principles of probable inference show this to be impossible.
+
+Dr. Carus adduces the instance of a geometrical proposition, namely,
+“that two congruent regular tetrahedrons, when put together, will form a
+hexahedron.” (¶ 25.) This, he says, seems to be “a very wonderful thing”;
+for why should not a larger tetrahedron be formed, just as two heaps of
+flour make a large heap of flour? Yet, he continues, the probability
+that the two tetrahedrons do always make a hexahedron is 1, “which
+means certainty” (¶ 27). But as it happens, the proposition, in the
+form stated is quite erroneous. What is true is this. If two tetrahedra
+are so placed that one face of each is coincident with one face of the
+other, while all the other faces are inclined to one another, and if of
+the 8 faces, the 2 that are coincident are not counted, there remain to
+be counted 8-2=6 faces. But there is nothing more wonderful about this
+than that 8-2=6, which is an easy corollary from definitions. Very few
+propositions in mathematics that appear “marvellous” will hold water; and
+those few excite our astonishment only because the real complexity of the
+conditions are masked in an intuitional presentation of them.
+
+Dr. Carus holds (¶ 15) that formal knowledge is absolutely universal,
+exact, and necessary. In some cases, as where he says that, given the
+number of dimensions of space, the entire geometry could be deduced (¶
+35), the boasted infallibility will prove on examination to be downright
+error. In all other cases, the propositions only relate to ideal
+constructions, and their applicability to the real world is at the best
+doubtful, and, as I think, false; while in their ideal purity, they are
+not synthetical.
+
+Thus, my good friend and antagonist holds that the combination of oxygen
+and hydrogen to produce water is not “different in principle” from that
+of the tetrahedra to produce a hexahedron (¶ 26). There is all the
+difference between the ideal and the real; which to my Scotistic mind is
+very important. But this is not the only passage in which he speaks as if
+form were the principle of individuation.
+
+§ 9. Dr. Carus’s position is even weaker than that of Kant, who makes
+space, for example, a necessary form of thought (in a broad sense of that
+term). But Dr. Carus appears to consider space as an absolute reality.
+For he says (¶ 119) that “every single point of space has its special
+and individual qualities.” Here again form is made the principle of
+individuation; whence the queer phrase, “individual qualities.”
+
+§ 10. Dr. Carus argues that whatever is unequivocally determinate is
+necessary. (¶ 124.) Were the determination spoken of real dynamic
+determination, this would be a mere truism. But the expression used,
+_eindeutig bestimmt_, merely expresses a mathematical determination, and
+therefore no real necessity ensues. The equation
+
+    (Transcriber’s Note: Italics have been removed from the
+    formulæ for readability.)
+
+    x² - 23x + 132¼ = 0
+
+determines _x_ to be either 11·477 or 11·523. In this sense, _x_ has
+necessarily one value or the other. The equation
+
+    x² - 12x + 6 = 0
+
+determines _x_ to be either 11·477 or 0·523. Together, the two equations
+uniquely determine _x_ to be 11·477. This shows how much that argument
+amounts to.
+
+§ 11. By “sameness,” Dr. Carus means equivalence for a given purpose. (¶¶
+102, 106.) By the “idea of sameness,” he means (¶¶ 77, 96) the principle
+that things having a common character are for some purpose equivalent.
+This, he says, “has a solid basis in the facts of experience.” By a
+“world of sameness” (¶ 113), he seems to mean one in which any two given
+concrete things are in some respect equivalent. He argues (¶ 122) that
+a “world of sameness is a world in which necessity rules.” I do not see
+this. It seems to me so bald a _non sequitur_, that I cannot but suppose
+the thought escapes my apprehension. If there were anything in the
+argument, it would seem to be a marvellously expeditious way of settling
+the whole dispute; and therefore it would have been worth the trouble of
+stating, so as to bring it within the purview of minds like mine.
+
+§ 12. My candid opponent sometimes endorses emphatically the Leibnizian
+principle. “Necessitarianism must be founded on something other than
+observation. Observation is _a posteriori_; it has reference to single
+facts, to particulars; yet the doctrine of necessity ... is of universal
+application. The doctrine of necessity ... is of an _a priori_ nature.”
+(¶ 11.) “Millions of single experiences ... cannot establish a solid
+belief in necessity.” (¶ 14.) “No amount of experience is sufficient to
+constitute causation by a mere synthesis of sequences.” (¶ 22.) “Millions
+of millions of cases” constitute “no proof” that a proposition “is always
+so.” (¶ 29.)
+
+Nevertheless, he holds that the law of “the conservation of matter and
+energy” so conclusively proves necessary causation, that the obstinacy
+of Hume, himself, could not have withstood the argument. (¶ 23.) One
+wonders, then, what is supposed to prove this “law of the conservation of
+matter and energy,” if no amount of experience can prove it.
+
+But the _a priori_ itself can “be based on the firm ground of
+experience.” (¶ 14.) In that case, it is not prior to experience, after
+all! “The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness,
+and ... the existence of sameness is a fact of experience.” (¶ 87.)
+If absolute necessity can be irrefragably demonstrated from the fact
+that two things are alike, it is a pity Dr. Carus should not state
+this demonstration in a form, that I, and men like me, can understand.
+That would be more to the purpose than merely saying it can be proved.
+Absolute chance is rejected as “involving a violation of laws well
+established by _positive evidence_.” (¶ 149.)
+
+All these _denials_ that absolute necessity can be established and
+absolute chance refuted by experiential evidence, mixed with as clear
+_assertions_ of the same things, when taken together, have the appearance
+of an attempt, as the politicians say, to “straddle” the question.
+
+§13. But the ingenious Doctor seeks to bolster up necessity by
+introducing the confused notion of “causation.”
+
+I do not know where the idea originated that a cause is an instantaneous
+state of things, perfectly determinative of every subsequent state. It
+seems to be at the bottom of Kant’s discourse on the subject; yet it
+accords neither with the original conception of a cause, nor with the
+principles of mechanics. The original idea of an efficient cause is
+that of an agent, more or less like a man. It is prior to the effect,
+in the sense of having come into being before the latter; but it is not
+transformed into the effect. In this sense, it may happen that an event
+is a cause of a subsequent event; seldom, however, is it the principal
+cause. Far less are events the only causes. The modern mechanical
+conception, on the other hand, is that the relative positions of
+particles determine their accelerations at the instants when they occupy
+those positions. In other words, if the positions of all the particles
+are given at _two_ instants (together with the law of force), then
+the positions at all other instants may be deduced.[109] This doctrine
+conflicts with Kant’s second analogy of experience, as interpreted by
+him, in no less than four essential particulars. In the first place, far
+from involving any principle that could properly be termed generation, or
+_Erzeugung_, which is Kant’s word for the sequence of effect from cause,
+the modern mechanical doctrine is a doctrine of persistence, and, as I
+have repeatedly explained, positively prohibits any real growth. In the
+second place, one state of things (i. e. one configuration of the system)
+is not sufficient to determine a second, it is two that determine a
+third. To whomsoever may think that this is an inconsiderable divergence
+of opinions, let me say, study the logic of relatives, and you will think
+so no longer. In the third place, the two determining configurations,
+according to mechanics, may be taken at almost any two instants, and the
+determined configuration be taken at any third instant we like. _There is
+no mechanical truth in saying that the past determines the future, rather
+than the future the past._ We habitually follow tradition in continuing
+to use that form of expression, but every mathematician knows that it is
+nothing but a form of expression. We continue, for convenience, to talk
+of mechanical phenomena as if they were regulated, in the same manner
+in which our intentions regulate our actions (which is essentially a
+determination of the future by the past), although we are quite aware
+that it is not really so. Remark how Kant reasons:
+
+    “If it is a necessary law of our sensibility, and consequently
+    a _formal condition_ of all perceptions, that the preceding
+    time determines the following, (since I can only come to
+    the following through the preceding,) then is it also an
+    indispensable _law of the empirical representation_ of the
+    time-series that the appearances of the preceding time
+    determine every occurrence in the following.”
+
+What this leads to is a causality like that of mental phenomena, where it
+_is_ the past which determines the future, and _not_ (in the same sense)
+the reverse; but the doctrine of the conservation of energy consists
+precisely in the denial that anything like this occurs in the domain of
+physics. Had Kant studied the psychological phenomena more attentively
+and generalised them more broadly, he would have seen that in the mind
+causation is not absolute, but follows such a curve as is traced in my
+essay towards “The Law of Mind” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, 550). Does our
+judicious editor deem it ungracious to find fault with Kant for not doing
+so much more than he did, considering what that hero-like achievement
+was? We must seem to carp, as long as thinkers can hold that achievement
+for sufficient. In the fourth place, Kant’s “Analogy” ignores that
+continuity which is the life-blood of mathematical thought. He deals
+with those awkward chunks of phenomenon, called “events.” He represents
+one such “event” as determined by certain others, definitely, while
+the rest have nothing to do with it. It is impossible to cement such
+thought as this into hermetic continuity with the refined conceptions of
+modern dynamics. The statement that every instantaneous state of things
+determines precisely all subsequent states, and not at all any previous
+states, could, I rather think, be shown to involve a contradiction.
+
+The notion which Dr. Carus holds of a cause seems to be that it is a
+state, embracing all the positions and velocities of all the masses at
+one instant, the effect being a similar state for any subsequent instant.
+(¶¶ 21, 24.) This breaks at once with common parlance, with dynamics,
+and with philosophical logic. In common parlance, we do not say that
+the position and upward velocity of a missile is the cause of its being
+at a subsequent instant lower down and moving with a greater downward
+velocity.[110] In dynamics, it is the fixed force, gravitation, or
+whatever else, together with those relative positions of the bodies that
+determine the intensity and direction of the forces, that is regarded
+as the cause. But these causes are not previous to, but simultaneous
+with, their effects, which are the instantaneous accelerations. Finally,
+logic opposes our calling one of two states which equally determine one
+another (as any two states of a system do, if the velocities are taken to
+be included in these states) _the_ determinator, or cause, simply because
+of the circumstance that it precedes the other in time,—a circumstance
+that is upon the principles of dynamics plainly insignificant and
+irrelevant.
+
+Everybody will make slips in the use of words that have been on his lips
+from before the time when he learned to think; but the practice which
+I endeavor to follow in regard to the word _cause_, is to use it in
+the Aristotelian sense of an _efficient cause_, in all its crudeness.
+In short, I refuse to use it at all as a philosophical word. When my
+conception is of a dynamical character, I endeavor to employ the accepted
+terminology of dynamics;[111] and when my idea is a more general and
+logical one, I prefer to speak of the _explanation_.
+
+§ 14. Dr. Carus thinks the element of necessity in causation can be
+demonstrated by considering the process as a transformation. “It is a
+sequence of two states which belong together as an initial and final
+aspect of one and the same event.” (¶ 21. Compare ¶¶ 20, 24.) He neglects
+to explain how he brings under this formula the inward causation of the
+will and character, as set forth by him in ¶¶ 163-167.
+
+It is unnecessary for me to reply, at length, to an argument so
+manifestly inconclusive. On the one hand, it conflicts with the principle
+that absolute necessity cannot be proved from experience; and on the
+other hand, it leaves room for an imperfect necessity.
+
+Professor Tait has done an ill office to thought in countenancing the
+idea that the conservation of energy is of the same nature as the
+“conservation,” or rather perduration, of matter. Dr. Carus says (¶ 121)
+that
+
+    “The law of the conservation of matter and energy rests upon
+    the experience (corroborated by experiments) that causation
+    is transformation. It states that the total amount of matter
+    and the total amount of energy remain constant. There is no
+    creation out of nothing and no conversion of something into
+    nothing.”
+
+The historical part of this statement contains only a small grain of
+truth; but that I will not stop to criticise. The point I wish to make
+is that the law of the conservation of energy is here represented under
+a false aspect. The true substance of the law is that the accelerations,
+or rates of change, of the motions of the particles at any instant depend
+solely on their relative positions at those instants. The equation which
+expresses the law under this form is a differential equation of the
+second order; that is, it involves the rates of change of the rates of
+change of positions, together with the positions themselves. Now, because
+of the purely analytic proposition of the differential calculus that
+
+    Dₜ²s = ½Dₛ(Dₜs)²,
+
+the first integral of the differential equation of the second order, that
+is, the differential equation of the first order which expresses the same
+state of things, equates half the sum of the masses, each multiplied by
+the square of its velocity, to a function of the relative positions of
+the particles _plus_ an arbitrary constant.[112] In order to fix our
+ideas, let us take a very simple example, that of a single particle
+accelerated towards an infinite plane, at a rate proportional to the
+_n_ᵗʰ power of its distance from the plane. In this case, if _s_ be the
+distance, the second differential equation will be
+
+    Dₜ²s = -asⁿ,
+
+and the first integral of it will be
+
+    (Dₜs)² = -(²ᵃ⁄ₙ₊₁)sⁿ⁺¹ + C.
+
+By the first law of motion, and the Pythagorean proposition, the part
+of the velocity-square depending on the horizontal component is also
+constant.
+
+The arbitrary constant, _C_, plainly has its genesis in the fact that
+forces do not determine velocities, but only accelerations. Its value
+will be fixed as soon as the velocity at any instant is known. This
+quantity would exist, just the same, and be independent of the time, and
+would therefore be “conserved” whether the forces were “conservative,”
+that is, simply positional, or not. Now, this constant is the energy;
+or rather, the energy is composed of this constant increased by another
+which is absolutely indeterminable, being merely supposed large enough to
+make the sum positive.
+
+Thus, the law of energy does not prescribe that the total amount of
+energy shall remain constant; for this would be so in any case by virtue
+of the second law of motion; but what it prescribes is that the total
+energy diminished by the living force shall give a remainder which
+depends upon the relative positions of the particles and not upon the
+time or the velocities. It is also to be noticed that the energy has
+no particular magnitude, or quantity. Furthermore, in transformations
+of kinetical energy into positional energy, and the reverse, the
+different portions of energy do not retain their identity, any more
+than, in book-keeping, the identity of the amounts of different items
+is preserved. In short, the conservation of energy, (I do not mean the
+_law_ of conservation,) is a mere result of algebra. Very different is
+it with the “conservation” of matter. For, in the first place, the total
+mass is a perfectly definite quantity; and, in the second place, in all
+its transformations, not only is the _total_ amount constant, but all the
+different parts preserve their identity. To speak, therefore, of “the
+conservation of matter and energy,” is to assimilate facts of essentially
+contrary natures; and to say that the law of the conservation of energy
+makes the total amount of energy constant is to attribute to this law
+a phenomenon really due to another law, and to overlook what this law
+really does determine, namely, _that the total energy less the kinetic
+energy gives a remainder which is exclusively positional_.
+
+§ 15. Dr. Carus does not make it clear what he means by _chance_. He
+does, indeed, say (¶¶ 145, 146):
+
+    “What is chance?
+
+    “Chance is any event not especially intended, either not
+    calculated, or, with a given and limited stock of knowledge,
+    incalculable.”
+
+This defines what he means by a chance event, in the concrete; what he
+understands by probability, we are left to conjecture. But from what he
+says in ¶ 147, I infer that he regards it as dependent upon the state of
+our ignorance, and therefore nothing real.
+
+I am, therefore, much puzzled when I find him expressing a conviction
+(¶¶ 88, 156) that chance plays an important part in the real world. He
+explains very distinctly that “when we call a throw of the dice pure
+chance, we mean that the incidents which condition the turning up of
+these or those special faces of the dice have not been, or cannot be,
+calculated.” (¶ 147.) This is the commonest, because the shallowest,
+philosophy of chance. Even Venn might teach him better than that.
+However, according to that view, when he writes of “the important part
+that chance plays in the world,—not absolute chance ... but that same
+chance of which the throw of the die is a typical instance” (¶ 88), he
+can be understood to mean no more than that many things happen which we
+are not in condition to calculate or predict. This is not playing a part
+_in the world_, one would say—at least, not in the natural world; it is
+only playing a part in our ignorance.
+
+Dr. Carus frequently uses phrases which make us suspect he penetrates
+deeper. Thus, he says, “we do not believe in absolute chance, but we
+believe in chance” (¶ 144); and again, “Every man is the architect of
+his own fortune—but not entirely. There are sometimes coincidences
+determining the fates of men.” (¶ 161.) But when we remark the
+consecution of ¶¶ 137-162, we feel pretty sure he really sees no
+further. To do so would have been to perceive that indefinitely varied
+specificalness _is_ chance.
+
+For a long time, I myself strove to make chance that diversity in the
+universe which laws leave room for, instead of a violation of law, or
+lawlessness. That was truly believing in chance that was not absolute
+chance. It was recognising that chance does play a part in the real
+world, apart from what we may know or be ignorant of. But it was a
+transitional belief which I have passed through, while Dr. Carus seems
+not to have reached it.
+
+As for absolute chance, Dr. Carus makes the momentous admission that
+it is “not unimaginable” (¶ 150). If so, its negation, or absolute
+necessity, cannot be a formal principle.
+
+§ 16. But it is time for me to leave the consideration of Dr. Carus’s
+system and to take up his strictures upon mine. His philosophy is one
+eminently enlightened by modern ideas, which it synthetises to an
+unusual extent. It is distinguished for its freedom from the vice of
+one-sidedness, and displays every facet of the gem of philosophical
+inquiry, except the one on which it rests, the question of absolute
+law. Its prominent faults, which I feel sure must have struck every
+competent reader, are that it shows little trace of meditation upon the
+thoughts of the great idealists, and that there is a certain want of
+congruity between different elements of it. How strangely it sounds,
+for instance, to find an apriorian, and one who is dinging “formal
+laws” so perpetually into our ears, one who holds that “in order to
+weave the woof of the _a posteriori_ elements into coherent cloth, we
+want the warp of the _a priori_” (¶ 15), to find this man declaring for
+a positivism “which accepts no doctrine, theory, or law, unless it be
+a formulation of facts,” and proclaiming that “the whole business of
+science is to systematise the samenesses of experience, and to present
+them in convenient formulas” (¶ 120). Now there is just one way of
+bringing such warring elements into harmony, and curing the greatest
+defect of the system,—and it is a way which would also bring the whole
+into far better concordance with natural science. It is to lop off the
+heads of all absolute propositions Whose subject is not the Absolute,
+and reduce them to the level of probable and approximate statements.
+Were that defalcation performed, Dr. Carus’s philosophy would, in its
+general features, offer no violent opposition to my opinions. Moreover,
+the Doctor has at heart the conciliation of religion and science. I
+confess such serious concern makes me smile; for I think the atonement
+he desires is a thing which will come to pass of itself when time is
+ripe, and that our efforts to hasten it have just that slight effect
+that our efforts to hasten the ripening of apples on a tree may have.
+Besides, natural ripening is the best. Let science and religion each have
+stout faith in itself, and refuse to compromise with alien and secondary
+purposes, but push the development of its own thought on its own line;
+and then, when reconcilement comes,—as come it surely will,—it will have
+a positive value, and be an unmixed good. But since our accomplished
+editor thinks himself called upon to assist in this birth of time, let
+me ask him whether of all the conditions of such peace, the first is not
+that religious thought should abandon that extravagant absoluteness of
+assertion which is proper to the state of intellectual infancy, but which
+it has so long been too timid to let go? This pragmatical and unneeded
+absoluteness it is which is most deeply contrary to the method, the
+results, and the whole spirit of science; and no error can be greater
+than to fancy that science, or scientific men, rest upon it or readily
+tolerate it.
+
+§ 17. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 56-64) condemns my method of investigation as
+contrary to that by which science has been advanced; and holds that a
+radically different, and thoroughly positivistic method is requisite,—a
+method so intensely positivistic as to exclude all originality. I suppose
+he will not object to my forming an opinion concerning the methods of
+science. I was brought up in an atmosphere of scientific inquiry, and
+have all my life chiefly lived among scientific men. For the last thirty
+years, the study which has constantly been before my mind has been upon
+the nature, strength, and history of methods of scientific thought. I
+have no space here to argue the question. In its logical aspect, I have
+partly considered it in various publications; and in its historical
+aspect, I have long been engaged upon a treatise about it. My critic says
+(¶ 57) that 1 am “very positivistic in my logic of science.” This is a
+singular misapprehension. Few of the great scientific minds with whom
+I have come into personal contact, and from whom I endeavored to learn
+were disposed to contemn originality or the ideal part of the mind’s work
+in investigation; and those few, it was easy to see, really breathed an
+atmosphere of ideas which were so incessantly present that they were
+unconscious of them. Were I to name those of my teachers who were most
+positivistic in theory, a smile would be excited. My own historical
+studies, which have been somewhat minutely critical, have, on the whole
+confirmed the views of Whewell, the only man of philosophical power
+conjoined with scientific training who had made a comprehensive survey
+of the whole course of science, that progress in science depends upon
+the observation of the right facts by minds _furnished with appropriate
+ideas_. Finally, my long investigation of the logical process, of
+scientific reasoning led me many years ago to the conclusion that science
+is nothing but a development of our natural instincts. So much for my
+_theory_ of scientific logic. It is as totally opposed as anything can
+be to Dr. Carus’s theory (¶ 69, note; and “Ursache, Grund und Zweck,” p.
+2) that originality is out of place in science.
+
+But in my _practice_ of scientific reasoning, Dr. Carus accuses me of
+being what he calls a “constructionist”; that is, a theoriser unguided by
+indications from observation or accepted facts. To a mind upon whom that
+celebrated and splendid chapter of Kant upon the architectonical method
+failed to make a deep impression, I may appear so; but _travesty_ is in
+truth hardly too strong a word to describe the account of my method by
+Dr. Carus.
+
+Perhaps exaggeration is not without its value. If so, let me sum up the
+method Dr. Carus recommends. Eschew originality, is its pious formula;
+do not think for yourself, nor countenance results obtained by original
+minds. Distrust them; they are not safe men. Leave originality to
+mathematicians and their breed, to poets, and to all those who seek the
+sad notoriety of having unsettled belief.[113] Flee all philosophies
+which smack of this aberrant nineteenth century.[114] This theory of Dr.
+Carus condemns itself; for it is highly original, and soars into the free
+ether untrammelled by historic facts.
+
+Keppler comes very close to realising my ideal of the scientific method;
+and he is one of the few thinkers who have taken their readers fully into
+their confidence as to what their method really has been.[115] I should
+not feel justified in inflicting upon mine an autobiographical account
+of my own course of thought; but some things Dr. Carus’s accusation
+forces me to mention. My method of attacking all problems has ever been
+to begin with an historical and rational inquiry into the special method
+adapted to the special problem. This is the essence of my architectonical
+proceeding upon which Dr. Carus has commented very severely. To look an
+inch before one’s nose involves originality: therefore, it is wrong to
+have a conscious method. But further, in regard to philosophy, not only
+the methods, but the elementary ideas which are to enter into those
+methods, should be subjected to careful preliminary examination. This,
+especially, Dr. Carus finds very unscientific. (¶ 64, and elsewhere.)
+It is, undoubtedly, the most characteristic feature of my procedure.
+Certainly it was not a notion hastily or irreflectively caught up; but
+is the maturest fruit of a lifetime of reflection upon the methods of
+science, including those of philosophy; and if it shall be found that one
+contribution to thought on my part has proved of permanent service, that,
+I expect, will be the one. This method in no wise teaches that the method
+and materials for thought are not to be modified in the course of the
+study of the subject-matter. But instead of taking ideas at haphazard, or
+being satisfied with those that have been handed down from the good old
+times, as a mind keenly alive to the dangers of originality would have
+done, I have undertaken to make a systematic survey of human knowledge
+(a very slight sketch of which composed the substance of my paper on
+the “Architecture of Theories,”) in order to find what ideas have, as a
+fact, proved most fruitful, and to observe the special utilities they
+have severally fulfilled. A subsidiary object of this survey was to note
+what the great obstacles are to-day in the way of the further advance of
+the different branches of science. In my “Architecture of Theories,” I
+never professed to do more than make a slight sketch of a small portion
+of my preliminary studies, devoting thirteen lines to some hints as to
+the nature of the results. In the four following papers I have given
+a selection of a few of these results. Among those which remain to be
+reported are some of much more immediate importance than any of those
+hitherto set forth. If anybody has been surprised to find my subsequent
+papers developing thoughts which they were unable to foresee from my
+first, it is only what I warned people from the outset that they would
+find to happen. Nor have the greatest of these surprises yet been
+reached.[116]
+
+The next series of facts reviewed was that of the history of philosophy.
+I waded right into this fearful slough of “originality,” in order to
+gather what seemed to throw a light upon the subject. Finally, I reviewed
+the general facts of the universe.
+
+I now found myself forced by a great many different indications to
+the conclusion that an evolutionary philosophy of some kind must be
+accepted,—including among such philosophies systems like those of
+Aristotle and of Hegel. From this point the reasoning was more rapid.
+Evolution had been a prominent study for half a generation; and much
+light had been thrown upon the conditions for a fruitful evolutionary
+philosophy. The first question was, how far shall this evolution go back?
+What shall we suppose _not_ to be a product of growth? I fancy it is this
+cautious reflectiveness of my procedure which especially displeases Dr.
+Carus. It is not positivistic: it is architectonic. But the answer to the
+question was not far to seek. If an evolutionary explanation is to be
+adopted, philosophy, logic, and the economy of research all dictate that
+in the first essay, at least, that style of explanation be carried as far
+back as explanation is called for. What elements of the universe require
+no explanation? This was a simple question, capable of being decided
+by logic with as much facility and certainty as a suitable problem is
+solved by differential calculus. Being, and the uniformity in which being
+consists, require to be explained. The only thing that does not require
+it is non-existent spontaneity. This was soon seen to mean absolute
+chance. The conclusion so reached was clinched by a careful reëxamination
+of the office of chance in science generally, and especially in the
+doctrines of evolution. Arrived at this point, the next question was,
+what is the principle by which the development is to proceed? It was a
+difficult inquiry, and involved researches from different points of view.
+
+But I will not trouble the reader with further autobiographical details.
+I have given enough to show that my method has neither been in theory
+purely empirical, nor in practice mere brain-spinning; and that, in
+short, my friend Dr. Carus’s account of it has been as incorrect as can
+be.
+
+§ 18. The learned doctor (¶¶ 6, 7, 8) pronounces me to be an imitator of
+David Hume, or, at least, classes my opinions as closely allied to his.
+Yet be it known that never, during the thirty years in which I have been
+writing on philosophical questions, have I failed in my allegiance to
+realistic opinions and to certain Scotistic ideas; while all that Hume
+has to say is said at the instance and in the interest of the extremest
+nominalism. Moreover, instead of being a purely negative critic, like
+Hume, seeking to annul a fundamental conception generally admitted,
+I am a positive critic, pleading for the admission to a place in our
+scheme of the universe for an idea generally rejected. In the first
+paper of this series, in which I gave a preliminary sketch of such of my
+ideas as could be so presented, I carefully recorded my opposition to
+all philosophies which deny the reality of the Absolute, and asserted
+that “the one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective
+idealism, that matter is effete mind.” This is as much as to say that I
+am a Schellingian, of some stripe; so that, on the whole, I do not think
+Dr. Carus has made a very happy hit in likening me to Hume, to whose
+whole method and style of philosophising I have always been perhaps too
+intensely averse. Yet, notwithstanding my present disclaimer, I have
+little doubt apriorians will continue to describe me as belonging to the
+sceptical school. They have their wonderful ways of arriving at truth,
+without stooping to confront their conclusions with facts; and it is
+amusing to see how sincerely they are convinced that nobody can have
+science at heart, without denying all they uphold.[117]
+
+My opponent has a habit of throwing out surprising opinions without
+the least attempt to illuminate them with the effulgence of reason.
+Thus he says (¶ 8): “If Kant’s answer to Hume had been satisfactory,
+Mr. Peirce would probably not have renewed the attack.” What attack?
+All that Hume attacked I defend, namely, law as a reality. How could a
+defence of that which I defend as essential to my position, cause me to
+surrender that position, namely, that real regularity is imperfect? In
+any sense in which Hume could have admitted the possibility of law, it
+must be precisely followed; since its existence could consist only in
+the conformity of facts unto it. But perhaps Dr. Carus means that if one
+question had been completely settled, I should probably have confined
+myself to talking about that, instead of broaching a new one.
+
+§ 19. Another misunderstanding of my position on the part of Dr. Carus
+(¶¶ 12, 13) is simply due to “boldly” having been twice printed where
+the reading should have been “baldly,” in my paper on “The Doctrine of
+Necessity.” (_The Monist_, Vol. II, p. 336, lines 20 and 25.) I wish
+printers would learn that I never use the word _bold_. I have so little
+of the quality, that I don’t know what it means. As I read the “revise,”
+as usual, it was presumably my fault that the _erratum_ occurred. At any
+rate, had my meaning been clearly expressed, the proof-reader would not
+have been misled by my defective chirography. What I was trying to say
+was, in substance, this: Absolute chance is a hypothesis; and, like every
+hypothesis, can only be defended as explaining certain phenomena.[118]
+Yet to suppose that an event is brought about by absolute chance is
+utterly illogical, since as a hypothesis it could only be admitted on
+the ground of its explaining observed facts; now from mere non-law
+nothing necessarily follows, and therefore nothing can be explained; for
+to explain a fact is to show that it is a necessary, or, at least, a
+probable, result from another fact, known or supposed. Why is not this a
+complete refutation of the theory of absolute chance? _Answer_: because
+the _existence_ of absolute chance, as well as many of its characters,
+are not themselves absolute chances, or sporadic events, unsubject to
+general law. On the contrary, these things _are_ general laws. Everybody
+is familiar with the fact that chance has laws, and that statistical
+results follow therefrom. Very well: I do not propose to explain
+anything as due to the action of chance, that is, as being lawless. I
+do not countenance the idea that Bible stories, for instance, show that
+nature’s laws were violated;—though they may help to show that nature’s
+laws are not so mechanical as we are accustomed to think. But I only
+propose to explain the regularities of nature as consequences of the only
+uniformity, or general fact, there was in the chaos, namely, the general
+absence of any, determinate law.[119] In fact, after the first step is
+taken, I only use _chance_ to give room for the development of law by
+means of the law of habits.
+
+§ 20. In ¶ 28, I read: “Mr. Peirce does not object to necessity in
+certain cases; he objects to necessity being a universal feature of
+the world.” This is correctly stated, and so it is in ¶ 203. I object
+to necessity being universal, as well as to its ever being exact. In
+short, I object to absolute universality, absolute exactitude, absolute
+necessity, being attributed to any proposition that does not deal with
+the Α and the Ω, in the which I do not include any object of ordinary
+knowledge. But it is careless to write (¶ 193) that I “describe the
+domain of mind as the absence of law.” Is not one of my papers entitled
+“The Law of Mind”? It is true that I make the law of mind essentially
+different in its mode of action from the law of mechanics, inasmuch as
+it requires its own violation; but it is law, not chance uncontrolled.
+That it is not “an undetermined and indeterminable sporting” should have
+been obvious from my expressly stating that its ultimate result must
+be the entire elimination of chance from the universe. That directly
+negatives the adjective “indeterminable,” and hence also the adjective
+“undetermined.” Still more unwarranted is the statement (¶ 205) that
+I deny “that there are samenesses in this world.” If the slightest
+excuse for such an accusation can be found in all my writings I shall be
+mightily surprised.
+
+§ 21. Dr. Carus fully admits (¶ 9) the justice of my first reply to the
+argument that necessity is postulated in all scientific reasoning, which
+reply is that to postulate necessity does not make it true. As this
+reply, if correct is complete, Dr. Carus was bound after that admission
+to drop the postulate-argument in favor of necessity.[120] But he takes
+no notice, at all, of my four-page argument to show that scientific
+reasoning does _not_ postulate absolute universality, exactitude, or
+necessity (_The Monist_, Vol. II, pp. 324-327); but calmly asserts,
+four or five times over (¶¶ 5, 11, 16, 62, 79), without one scintilla
+of argumentation, that that postulate _is_ made, and uses this as an
+argument in favor of necessity.
+
+§ 22. He also fully admits (¶¶ 11, 14, 22) the justice of my argument
+that the absoluteness of universality, exactitude, and necessity, cannot
+be proved, nor rendered probable, by arguments from observation. That
+argument consisted in assuming that all arguments from observation are
+probable arguments, and in showing that probable inferences are always
+affected with probable errors.
+
+Had I deemed it requisite, I might easily have fortified that argument
+by a more profound analysis of scientific reasoning. Such an analysis I
+had formerly given in my “Theory of Probable Inference” (in “Studies in
+Logic,” Boston: Little and Brown).
+
+But, notwithstanding his admissions, Dr. Carus sets up his _ipse dixit_
+against my argumentation. “We deny most positively,” says the editorial
+Elohim, “that the calculus of probabilities is applicable to the order of
+the world, as to whether it may or may not be universal.” (¶¶ 27, 31.)
+
+To support this, he cites (¶¶ 31-34) four passages from articles written
+by me sixteen years ago. I hope my mind has not been stationary during
+all these years; yet there is little in those old articles which I now
+think positively erroneous, and nothing in the passages cited. My present
+views had, at that time, already begun to urge themselves on my mind;
+but they were not ripe for public avowal. In the first of the passages
+cited, I express the opinion, which I first uttered in my earlier
+lectures before the Lowell Institute, in 1866, afterwards in the _Popular
+Science Monthly_ in 1877, in still fuller elaboration in my “Theory
+of Probable Inference” in 1882, and maintain now as strongly as ever,
+that no definite probability can be assigned to any general arrangement
+of nature. To speak of an _antecedent_ probability would imply that
+there was a statistical science of different universes; and a _deduced_
+probability requires an antecedent probability for one of its data.[121]
+This consideration only goes to fortify my present position, that we
+cannot conclude from observed facts with any degree of probability,
+and therefore _a fortiori_ not with certainty, that any proposition is
+absolutely universal, exact, or necessary. In the absence of any weight
+of probability in favor of any particular exact statement, the formal
+presumption is altogether against any one out of innumerable possible
+statements of that kind.
+
+The second passage cited is one in which I argue that the universe is
+not a chaos, or chance-medley. Now Dr. Carus admits (¶ 28) that I do not
+to-day maintain that it is a chance-medley.
+
+The third passage cited is this: “A contradiction is involved in the
+very idea of a chance-world.” This is in entire harmony with my present
+position that “a chaos ... being without connection or regularity would
+properly be without existence.” (“Architecture of Theories,” _The
+Monist_, Vol. I, p. 176.)
+
+The fourth passage is to the effect that “the interest which the
+uniformities of nature have for an animal measures his place in the scale
+of intelligence.” This I still believe.
+
+So much for my supposed contradictions. If I am not mistaken, our
+amiable editor, whose admirable editorship springs so largely out of his
+amiability, in copying out these passages was really not half so much
+intent on showing me to be wrong at present, as on showing me to have
+been right formerly. However hard he hits, he contrives to honey his
+sockdologers, and sincerely cares more to make the reader admire his
+antagonist when he is right than to condemn him when he is wrong. There
+is a touch of art in this that proclaims the born editor, and which I can
+hardly hope to imitate.
+
+Though Dr. Carus admits over and over again that necessity cannot be
+based on observation, he often slips back to the idea that it can be so
+based. He says, (¶ 30) that “form is a quality of this world, not of some
+samples of it, but throughout, so far as we know of existence in even the
+most superficial way.” But does he not see that all we _do_ know, and all
+we _shall_ to-morrow, or at any date know, is nothing but a sample of our
+possible experience,—nay, is but a sample of what we are in the future
+to have already experienced? I have characterised inductive inference as
+reasoning from samples; but the most usual way of sampling a class is by
+examining _all_ the instances of it that have come under our observation,
+or which we can at once collect.
+
+§ 23. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 44, 46) holds that from my social theory of reality,
+namely, that the real is the idea in which the community ultimately
+settles down, the existence of something inevitable is to be inferred.
+I confess I never anticipated that anybody would urge that. I thought
+just the reverse might be objected, namely, that all absoluteness was
+removed from reality by that theory, and it was many years ago that, in
+my “Theory of Probable Inference,” I admitted the obvious justice, as
+it seemed to me, of that objection. We cannot be quite sure that the
+community ever will settle down to an unalterable conclusion upon any
+given question. Even if they do so for the most part, we have no reason
+to think the unanimity will be quite complete, nor can we rationally
+presume any overwhelming _consensus_ of opinion will be reached upon
+every question. All that we are entitled to assume is in the form of a
+_hope_ that such conclusion may be substantially reached concerning the
+particular questions with which our inquiries are busied.
+
+Such, at least, are the results to which the consideration of the
+doctrine of probability brings my mind irresistibly. So that, the social
+theory of reality, far from being incompatible with tychism, inevitably
+leads up to that form of philosophy. Socialistic, or as I prefer to term
+it, agapastic ontology seems to me likely to find favor with many minds
+at an early day, because it is a natural path by which the nominalist may
+be led into the realistic ways of thought, ways toward which many facts
+and inward forces impel him. It is well, therefore, to call attention
+to the circumstances that the realism to which it leads is a doctrine
+which declares general truths to be real,—independent of the opinions
+of any particular collection of minds,—but not to be destined, in a
+strictly universal, exact, and sure acceptation, to be so settled, and
+established. Now to assert that general truths are objectively real,
+but to deny that they are strictly universal, exact, and certain, is to
+embrace the doctrine of absolute chance. Thus it is that the agapastic
+ontologist who endeavors to escape tychism will find himself “led into”
+that “inextricable confusion” which Dr. Carus (¶ 4) has taken a contract
+to show that I am led into.
+
+§ 24. Conservatism is wholesome and necessary; the most convinced radical
+must admit the wisdom of it, in the abstract; and a conservative will
+be in no haste to espouse the doctrine of absolute chance. I, myself,
+pondered over it for long years before doing so. But I am persuaded, at
+length, that mankind will before very long take up with it; and I do not
+believe philosophers will be found tagging on to the tail of the general
+procession.
+
+My little dialogue between the tychist and the necessitarian (_The
+Monist_, Vol. II, pp. 331-333) seems to have represented pretty fairly
+the views of the latter; for Dr. Carus, in ¶¶ 151-155, does little more
+than reiterate them, without much, if at all, reinforcing them. His ¶¶
+158-160 merely work out, in a form perhaps not quite clear, what is
+manifest from the elementary principles of dynamics, and was considered
+in my dialogue.
+
+His arguments in this connection, apart from those already noticed, are
+that absolute chance is something which if it existed would require
+explanation, that the manifold specificalness of nature is explained by
+law without any aid from chance, and that absolute chance if it existed,
+in the sense in which it is supposed to exist in my chaos, could not
+possibly breed law as supposed by me. To the consideration of these
+arguments I proceed to apply myself.
+
+§ 25. One of the architectonic—and, therefore, I suppose, by Dr.
+Carus considered as highly reprehensible—features of my theory, is
+that, instead of saying off-hand what elements strike me as requiring
+explanation and what as not doing so, which seems to be his way, I
+have devoted a long time to the study of the whole logical doctrine of
+explanation, and of the history of explanations, and have based upon the
+general principles so ascertained my conclusions as to what things do and
+what do not require to be explained.
+
+Dr. Carus (¶ 67) defines _explanation_ as a description of a special
+process of nature in such a way that the process is recognised as a
+transformation. This I cannot quite grant. First, I cannot admit that
+“special processes of nature” are the only things to be explained.
+For instance, if I were to meet a gentleman who seemed to conform
+scrupulously to all the usages of good society, except that he wore to
+an evening party an emerald satin vest, that would be a fact calling for
+explanation, although it would not be a “special process of nature.”
+Second, I cannot admit that an explanation is a description of the fact
+explained. It is true that in the setting forth of some explanations,
+it is convenient to restate the fact explained, so as to set it under
+another aspect; but even in these cases, the statement of _other_ facts
+is essential. In all cases, it is _other facts_, usually hypothetical,
+which constitute the explanation; and the process of explaining is a
+process by which from those other facts the fact to be explained is
+shown to follow as a consequence, by virtue of a general principle, or
+otherwise. Thus, a “special process of nature” calling for explanation
+is the circumstance that the planet Mars, while moving in a general way
+from west to east among the fixed stars, yet retrogrades a part of the
+time, so as to describe loops in the heavens. The explanation is that
+Mars revolves in one approximate circle and we in another. Again, it has
+been stated that a warm spring in Europe is usually followed by a cool
+autumn, and the explanation has been offered that so many more icebergs
+than usual are liberated during a warm spring, that they subsequently
+lower sensibly the temperature of Europe. I care little whether the
+fact and the explanation are correct or no. The case illustrates, at
+any rate, my point that an explanation is a special fact, supposed or
+known, from which the fact to be explained follows as a consequence.
+Third, I cannot admit that every description which recognises the fact
+described as a transformation is an explanation; far less that “it is
+complete and exhaustive” (¶ 67). A magician transforms a watch into a
+dove. Recognise it as a transformation and the trick is explained, is
+it? This is delightfully facile. Describe the change from a caterpillar
+to a butterfly as a transformation, and does that explain it? Fourth, I
+cannot admit that every explanation recognises the fact explained as a
+transformation. The explanation of the loops in the motion of Mars is not
+of that nature. But I willingly recognise in Dr. Carus’s definition an
+attempt,—more or less successful,—to formulate one of the great offices
+of scientific inquiry, that of bridging over the gap between the familiar
+and the unfamiliar.
+
+_Explanation_, however, properly speaking, is the replacement of a
+complex predicate, or one which seems improbable or extraordinary, by
+a simple predicate from which the complex predicate follows on known
+principles. In like manner, a _reason_, in one sense, is the replacement
+of a multiple subject of an observational proposition by a general
+subject, which by the very conditions of the special experience is
+predicable of the multiple subject.[122] Such a reason may be called an
+explanation in a loose sense.
+
+Accordingly, that which alone requires an explanation is a coincidence.
+
+Hence, I say that a uniformity, or law, is _par excellence_, the thing
+that requires explanation. And Dr. Carus (¶ 51) admits that this “is
+perfectly true.”
+
+But I cannot imagine anything further from the truth than his statement
+(¶ 66) that “the only thing in the world of which we cannot and need not
+give account is the existence of facts itself.” I should say, on the
+contrary, that the existence of facts is the only thing of which we need
+give account. Forms may indulge in whatever eccentricities they please in
+the world of dreams, without responsibility; but when they attempt that
+kind of thing in the world of real existence, they must expect to have
+their conduct inquired into. But should Dr. Carus reply that I mistake
+his meaning, that it is only “being in general” (¶ 66) that he holds
+unaccountable, I reply that this is simply expressing scepticism as to
+the possibility and need of philosophy. In a certain sense, my theory of
+reality, namely that reality is the dynamical reaction of certain forms
+upon the mind of the community, is a proposed explanation of being in
+general; and be it remarked that the mind of the community, itself, is
+the thing the nature of whose being this explanation first of all puts
+upon an idealistic footing.
+
+Chance, according to me, or irregularity,—that is, the absence of any
+coincidence,—calls for no explanation. If _law_ calls for a particular
+explanation, as Dr. Carus admits it does, surely the mere absence of law
+calls for no further explanation than is afforded by the mere absence of
+any particular circumstance necessitating the result. An explanation is
+the conception of a fact as a necessary result, thereby accounting for
+the coincidence it presents. It would be highly absurd to say that the
+absence of any definite character, must be accounted for, as if it were a
+peculiar phenomenon, simply because the imperfection of language leads us
+so to talk of it. Quite unfounded, therefore, is Dr. Carus’s opinion that
+“chance needs exactly as much explanation as anything else” (¶ 53);—an
+opinion which, so far as I can see, rests on no defensible principle.
+
+Equally hasty is his oft repeated objection (¶ 55, 58, 61) that my
+absolute chance is something ultimate and inexplicable. I go back to
+a chaos so irregular that in strictness the word existence is not
+applicable to its merely germinal state of being; and here I reach a
+region in which the objection to ultimate causes loses its force. But
+I do not stop there. Even this nothingness, though it antecedes the
+infinitely distant absolute beginning of time, is traced back to a
+nothingness more rudimentary still, in which there is no variety, but
+only an indefinite specificability, which is nothing but a tendency to
+the diversification of the nothing, while leaving it as nothing as it
+was before. What objectionable ultimacy is here? The objection to an
+ultimate consists in its raising a barrier across the path of inquiry,
+in its specifying a phenomenon at which questions must stop, contrary
+to the postulate, or hope, of logic. But what question to which any
+meaning can be attached am I forbidding by my absolute chance? If
+what is demanded is a theological backing, or rational antecedent,
+to the chaos, that my theory fully supplies. The chaos is a state of
+intensest feeling, although, memory and habit being totally absent,
+it is sheer nothing still. Feeling has existence only so far as it is
+welded into feeling. Now the welding of this feeling to the great whole
+of feeling is accomplished only by the reflection of a later date. In
+itself, therefore, it is nothing; but in its relation to the end, it is
+everything.
+
+More unreasonable yet is Dr. Carus’s pretension, that the manifold
+specificalness, which is what I mean by chance, is capable of explanation
+(¶¶ 142, 143) by his own philosophic method. He may explain one
+particularity by another, of course; but to explain specificalness
+itself, would be to show that a specific predicate is a necessary
+consequence of a generic one, or that a whole is without ambiguity a
+part of its part. Remark, reader, at this point, that chance, whether
+it be absolute or not, is not the mere creature of our ignorance. It
+is that diversity and variety of things and events which law does not
+prevent. Such is that real chance upon which the kinetical theory of
+gases, and the doctrines of political economy, depend. To say that it is
+not absolute is to say that it,—this diversity, this specificalness,—can
+be explained as a consequence of law. But this, as we have seen, is
+logically absurd.
+
+Dr. Carus admits that absolute chance is “not unimaginable” (¶ 150).
+Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of all, things
+the most obtrusive. That it is absolute, is the most manifest of all
+intellectual perceptions. That it is a being, living and conscious, is
+what all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can scarce
+muster hardihood to deny.
+
+Almost as unthinking is the objection (¶ 61) that absolute chance could
+never beget order. I have noticed elsewhere the historic oblivescence
+of this objection. Must I once again repeat that the tendency to take
+habits, being itself a habit, has _eo ipso_ a tendency to grow; so that
+only a slightest germ is needed? A realist, such as I am, can find
+no difficulty in the production of that first infinitesimal germ of
+habit-taking by chance, provided he thinks chance could act at all. This
+seems, at first blush, to be explaining something as a chance-result. But
+exact analysis will show it is not so.
+
+In like manner, when the eminent thinker who does me the honor to notice
+my speculation, objects that I do not, after all, escape making law
+absolute, since the tendency to take habits which I propose to make
+universal is itself a law, I confess I can find only words without ideas
+in the objection. Law is a word found convenient, I grant, in describing
+that tendency; but is there no difference between a law the essence
+of which is to be inviolable (which is the nominalistic conception of
+mechanical law, whose being, they say, lies in its action) and that
+mental law the violation of which is so included in its essence that
+unless it were violated it would cease to exist? In my essay, “The Law
+of Mind,” I have so described that law. In so describing it, I make it a
+law, but not an absolute law; and thus I clearly escape the contradiction
+attributed to me.
+
+§ 26. In my attack on “The Doctrine of Necessity,” I offered four
+positive arguments for believing in real chance. They were as follows:
+
+1. The general prevalence of growth, which seems to be opposed to the
+conservation of energy.
+
+2. The variety of the universe, which is chance, and is manifestly
+inexplicable.
+
+3. Law, which requires to be explained, and like everything which is to
+be explained must be explained by something else, that is, by non-law or
+real chance.
+
+4. Feeling, for which room cannot be found if the conservation of energy
+is maintained.
+
+In a brief conversation I had with him, my friend remarked (and it was an
+inconsiderate concession, I certainly do not wish to hold him to it) that
+while the theory of tychism had some attractive features, its weakness
+consisted in the absence of any positive reasons in its favor. I infer
+from this that I did not properly state the above four arguments. I
+therefore desire once more to call attention to them, especially in their
+relations to one another.
+
+Mathematicians are familiar with the theorem that if a system of
+particles is subject only to positional forces, it is such that if at any
+instant the velocities were all suddenly reversed, without being altered
+in quantity, the whole previous history of the system would be repeated
+in inverse succession. Hence, when physicists find themselves confronted
+with a phenomenon which takes place only in one order of succession
+and never in the reverse order,—of which no better illustration could
+be found than the phenomena of growth, for nobody ever heard of an
+animal growing back into an egg,—they always take refuge in the laws of
+probability as preventive of the velocities ever getting so reversed.
+To understand my argument number 1, it is necessary to make this method
+of escape from apparent violations of the law of energy quite familiar
+to oneself. For example, according to the law of energy, it seems to
+follow (and by the aid of the accepted theory of light it does follow)
+that if a prism, or a grating, disperses white light into a spectrum,
+then the colors of the spectrum falling upon the prism or grating
+at the same angles, and in the same proportions, will be recombined
+into white light; and, everybody knows that this does in fact happen.
+Nevertheless, the usual and prevalent effect of prisms and gratings is to
+produce colored spectra. Why? Evidently, because, by the principles of
+probability, it will rarely happen that colored lights converging from
+different directions will fall at just the right angles and in just the
+right proportions to be recombined into white light. So, when physicists
+meet with the phenomena of frictional and viscous resistance to a body
+in motion, although, according to their doctrine, if the molecules were
+to move with the same velocities in opposite directions the moving body
+would be accelerated, yet they say that the laws of probability, applied
+to the trillions of molecules concerned, render this practically certain
+not to occur. I do no more, then, than follow the usual method of the
+physicists, in calling in chance to explain the apparent violation of
+the law of energy which is presented by the phenomena of growth: only
+instead of chance as they understand it, I call in absolute chance. For
+many months, I endeavored to satisfy the data of the case with ordinary
+_quasi_ chance; but it would not do. I believe that in a broad view of
+the universe, a simulation of a given elementary mode of action can
+hardly be explained except by supposing the genuine mode of action
+somewhere has place. If it is improbable that colored lights should
+fall together in just such a way as to give a white ray, is it not an
+equally extraordinary thing that they should all be generated in such
+a way as to produce a white ray? If it is incredible that trillions of
+molecules in a fluid should strike a solid body moving through it so as
+to accelerate it, is it not marvellous that trillions of trillions of
+molecules all alike should ever have got so segregated as to create a
+state of things in which they should be practically certain to retard
+the body? It is far from easy to understand how mere positional forces
+could ever have brought about those vast congregations of similar atoms
+which we suppose to exist in every mass of gas, and by which we account
+for the apparent violations of the law of energy in the phenomena of the
+viscosity of the gas. There is no difficulty in seeing how sulphuric acid
+acting on marble may produce an aggregation of molecules of carbonic
+anhydride, because there are similar aggregations in the acid and in
+the marble, but how were such aggregations brought about in the first
+place? I will not go so far as to say that such a result is manifestly
+impossible with positional forces alone; but I do say that we cannot
+help suspecting that the simulated violation of the law of energy has a
+real violation of the same law as its ultimate explanation. Now, growth
+_appears_ to violate the law of energy. To explain it, we must, at least,
+suppose a simulated, or _quasi_, chance, such as Darwin calls in to
+produce his fortuitous variations from strict heredity. It may be there
+is no real violation of the law, and no real chance; but even if there
+be nothing of the sort in the immediate phenomenon, can the conditions
+upon which the phenomenon depends have been brought about except by real
+chance? It is conceivable, again, that the law of the conservation of
+forces is not strictly accurate, and that, nevertheless, there is no
+absolute chance. But I think so much has been done to put the law of the
+conservation of forces upon the level of the other mechanical laws, that
+when one is led to entertain a serious doubt of the exactitude of that,
+one will be inclined to question the others.
+
+Besides, few psychologists will deny the very intimate connection which
+seems to subsist between the law, or _quasi_-law, of growth and the
+law of habit, which is the principal, if not (as I hold it to be) the
+sole, law of mental action. Now, this law of habit seems to be quite
+radically different in its general form from mechanical law, inasmuch as
+it would at once cease to operate if it were rigidly obeyed; since in
+that case all habits would at once become so fixed as to give room for no
+further formation of habits. In this point of view, then, growth seems to
+indicate a positive violation of law.
+
+Let us now consider argument number 3: and remark how it fortifies number
+1. Physical laws that appear to be radically different yet present some
+striking analogies. Electrical force appears to be polar. Its polarity is
+explained away by Franklin’s one-fluid theory, but in that view the force
+is a repulsion. Now, gravitation is an attraction, and is, therefore,
+essentially different from electricity. Yet both vary inversely as the
+square of this distance. Radiation, likewise follows the same formula.
+In this last case, the formula, in one aspect of it, follows from the
+conservation of energy. In another aspect of it, it results from the
+principle of probability, and does not hold good, in a certain sense,
+when the light is concentrated by a lens free from spherical aberration.
+But neither the conservation of energy nor the principle of probability
+seems to afford any possible explanation of the application of this
+theory to gravitation nor to electricity. How, then, are such analogies
+to be explained? The law of the conservation of energy and that of the
+perduration of matter present so striking an analogy that it has blinded
+some powerful intellects to their radically different nature. The law
+of action and reaction, again, has often been stated as the law of the
+conservation of momentum. Yet it is not only an independent law, but is
+even of a contrary nature, inasmuch as it is only the algebraical sum of
+opposite momenta that is “conserved.”[123] How is this striking analogy
+between three fundamental laws to be explained? Consider the still more
+obvious analogy between space and time. Newton argues that the laws of
+mechanics prove space and time to be absolute entities. Leibniz, on
+the other hand, takes them as laws of nature. Either view calls for an
+explanation of the analogy between them, which no such reflection as
+the impossibility of motion without that analogy can supply. Kant’s
+theory seems to hint at the possibility of an explanation from both
+being derived from the nature of the same mind. Any three orthogonal
+directions[124] in space are exactly alike, yet are dynamically
+independent.
+
+These things call for explanation; yet no explanation of them can be
+given, if the laws are fundamentally original and absolute.
+
+Moreover, law itself calls for explanation. But how is it to be explained
+if it is as fundamentally original and absolute as it is commonly
+supposed to be? Yet if it is not so absolute, there is such a phenomenon
+as absolute chance.
+
+Thus, the chance which growth calls for is now seen to be absolute, not
+_quasi_ chance.
+
+Now consider argument number 2. The variety of the universe so far as
+it consists of unlikenesses between things calls for no explanation.
+But so far as it is a general character, it ought to be explained. The
+manifold diversity or specificalness, in general, which we see whenever
+and wherever we open our eyes, constitutes its liveliness, or vivacity.
+The perception of it is a direct, though darkling, perception of God.
+Further explanation in that direction is uncalled for. But the question
+is, whether this manifold specificalness was put into the universe at the
+outset, whether God created the universe in the infinitely distant past
+and has left it to its own machinery ever since, or whether there is an
+incessant influx of specificalness. Some of us are evolutionists; that
+is, we are so impressed with the pervasiveness of growth, whose course
+seems only here and there to be interrupted, that it seems to us that
+the universe as a whole, so far as anything can possibly be conceived or
+logically opined of the whole, should be conceived as growing. But others
+say, though parts of the universe simulate growth at intervals, yet there
+really is no growth on the whole,—no passage from a simpler to a more
+complex state of things, no increasing diversity.
+
+Now, my argument is that, according to the principles of logic, we
+never have a right to conclude that anything is absolutely inexplicable
+or unaccountable. For such a conclusion goes beyond what can be
+directly observed, and we have no right to conclude what goes beyond
+what we observe, except so far as it explains or accounts for what we
+observe. But it is no explanation or account of a fact to pronounce it
+inexplicable or unaccountable, or to pronounce any other fact so. Now,
+to say no process of diversification takes place in nature leaves the
+infinite diversity of nature unaccounted for; while to say the diversity
+is the result of a general tendency to diversification is a perfectly
+logical probable inference. Suppose there be a general tendency to
+diversification; what would be the consequence? Evidently, a high degree
+of diversity. But this is just what we find in nature. It does not answer
+the purpose to say there is diversity because God made it so, for we
+cannot tell what God would do, nor penetrate his counsels. We see what
+He _does_ do, and nothing more. For the same reason one cannot logically
+infer the existence of God; one can only know Him by direct perception.
+
+It is to be noted that a general tendency to diversification does not
+explain diversity in its specific characters; nor is this called for.
+Neither can such a tendency explain any specific fact. Any attempt to
+make use of the principle in that manner would be utterly illogical. But
+it can be used to explain universal facts, just as quasi-chance is used
+to explain statistical facts. Now, the diversity of nature is a universal
+fact.
+
+To explain diversity is to go behind the chaos, to the original
+undiversified nothing. Diversificacity was the first germ.
+
+Argument No. 4 was, upon its negative side, sufficiently well presented
+in my “Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” Mechanical causation, if
+absolute, leaves nothing for consciousness to do in the world of matter;
+and if the world of mind is merely a transcript of that of matter, there
+is nothing for consciousness to do even in the mental realm. The account
+of matters would be better, if it could be left out of account. But the
+positive part of the argument, showing what can be done to reinstate
+consciousness as a factor of the universe when once tychism is admitted,
+is reinforced in the later papers. This ought to commend itself to Dr.
+Carus, who shows himself fully alive to the importance of that part of
+the task of science which consists in bridging gaps. But consciousness,
+for the reason just stated, is not to be so reinstated without tychism;
+nor can the work be accomplished by assigning to the mind an occult
+power, as in two theories to be considered in the section following
+this. As might be anticipated, (and a presumption of this kind is rarely
+falsified in metaphysics,) to bridge the gap synechism is required.
+Supposing matter to be but mind under the slavery of inveterate habit,
+the law of mind still applies to it. According to that law, consciousness
+subsides as habit becomes established, and is excited again at the
+breaking up of habit. But the highest quality of mind involves a great
+readiness to take habits, and a great readiness to lose them; and this
+implies a degree of feeling neither very intense nor very feeble.
+
+I have noticed above (§ 7) Dr. Carus’s dubious attitude toward the first
+argument. I considered in the last section his attempted reply to the
+second. To the third argument, he replies (¶ 65) that law ought to be
+accounted for by the principle of sufficient reason. But, of course, that
+principle cannot recommend itself to me, a realist; for it is nothing
+but the lame attempt of a nominalist to wriggle out of his difficulties.
+Reasons explain nothing, except upon some theistic hypothesis which may
+be pardoned to the yearning heart of man, but which must appear doubtful
+in the eyes of philosophy, since it comes to this, that Tom, Dick, and
+Harry are competent to pry into the counsels of the Most High, and can
+invite in their cousins and sweethearts and sweethearts’ cousins to look
+over the original designs of the Ancient of Days.
+
+§ 27. My fourth argument it is which seems to have made most impression
+upon Dr. Carus’s mind (¶ 85), and his reply is rather elaborate.
+
+While embracing unequivocally the necessitarian dogma, equally for
+mind and for matter (¶ 193), Dr. Carus wishes utterly to repudiate
+materialism and the mechanical philosophy (¶ 133). To facilitate his,
+thus, walking the slack-rope, he makes (¶ 168) a division of events into
+“(1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4) physiological, and (5)
+psychical events.” The first three (¶¶ 169-171) are merely distinguished
+by the magnitude of the moving masses, so that, for philosophical
+purposes, they do not differ at all. As for physiological events, though
+he devotes a paragraph (¶ 172) to their definition, he utterly fails
+to distinguish them from the mechanical (including the physical and
+chemical) on the one hand, or from the psychical on the other. Dr. Carus
+seems to think (¶ 176) that by this division he has separated himself
+entirely from the materialists; but this is an illusion, for nobody
+denies the existence of feelings.
+
+The truth is, he distinctly enrolls himself in the mechanical army when
+he asserts that mental laws are of the same necessitarian character
+as mechanical laws (¶ 193). The only question that remains as to his
+position is whether he is a materialist or not. He instances (¶ 185)
+the case of a general receiving a written dispatch and being stimulated
+into great activity by its perusal, and causing great motions to be
+made and missiles to be sped in consequence. Now, the dilemma is this.
+Will Dr. Carus, on the one hand, say that the motion of those missiles
+was determined by mechanical laws alone, in which case, it would only
+be necessary to state all the positions and velocities of particles
+concerned, a hundred years before, to determine just how those bullets
+would move and, consequently, whether the guns were to be fired or not,
+and this would constitute him a materialist, or will he say that the laws
+of motion do not suffice to determine motions of matter, in which case,
+since they formally certainly do so suffice, they must be _violated_, and
+he will be giving to mind a direct dynamical power which is open to every
+objection that can be urged against tychism?
+
+Now admire the decision with which he cuts the Gordian knot!
+
+    “THERE ARE NO PURELY MECHANICAL PHENOMENA.” (¶ 175.)
+
+That is,
+
+    “_The laws of motion ARE applicable to and will explain all
+    motions_.” (¶ 177.)
+
+But hold!
+
+    “The mechanical philosopher ... feels warranted in the hope
+    that ... the actions of man ... can be explained by the laws of
+    motion .... We may anticipate that this conclusion will prove
+    ERRONEOUS. _And so it is._” (¶ 176.)
+
+At the same time,
+
+    “NO OBJECTION CAN BE MADE _to the possibility of explaining the
+    delicate motions in the nervous substance of the brain by the
+    laws of molar or molecular mechanics_.” (¶ 178.)
+
+Yet,
+
+    “_The simplest_ psychical reflexes, including those
+    _physiological reflexes_ which we must suppose to have
+    originated by conscious adaptation ... CANNOT _be explained
+    from mechanical_ or physical _laws_ alone.” (¶ 186.)
+
+However,
+
+    “_We do NOT say that there are motions_ ... in the brain ...
+    _which form exceptions to the laws of mechanics_.” (¶ 187.)
+
+Nevertheless,
+
+    “The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as
+    the atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there is present an
+    additional feature; there are present states of awareness....
+    Neither states of awareness nor their meanings can be weighed
+    on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they
+    determinable in foot-pounds.” (¶ 192.)
+
+Clearness is the first merit of a philosopher; and what ¶ 192 comes
+to is crystal-clear. Dr. Carus wants to have the three laws of motion
+always obeyed; but he wishes the forces between the molecules to be
+varied according to the momentary states of awareness. All right: he
+is entitled to suppose whatever he likes, so long as the supposition
+is self-consistent, as this supposition is. It conflicts with the law
+of energy, it is true; for that law is that the forces depend on the
+situations of the particles alone, and not on the time. It is liable
+to give rise to perpetual motion. It was intended, no doubt, to be an
+improvement on my molecular theory of protoplasm, earlier in the same
+number. It escapes materialism. It supposes a direct dynamical action
+between mind and matter, such as has not been supposed by any eminent
+philosopher that I know of for centuries. I am sorry to say that it shows
+a dangerous leaning toward originality. The argument for thus rejecting
+the law of the conservation of energy, I leave to others to be weighed.
+It seems to suppose a much larger falsification of that law than my
+doctrine; but it is a pretty clever attempt to escape my conclusions. It
+rejects what has to be rejected, the law of the conservation of energy;
+and is far more intelligent than the theory of those (like Oliver and
+Lodge) who wish to give to mind a power of deflecting atoms, which would
+satisfy the conservation of energy while violating the law of action
+and reaction. If it can have due consideration, I doubt not it will
+accelerate the acceptance of my views. Meantime, I do not see where that
+“inextricable confusion” into which I was to be led is to come in. (¶ 4.)
+
+§ 28. Little more requires to be noticed in Dr. Carus’s articles. He
+admits (¶ 2) that indeterminism is the more natural belief, which is no
+slight argument in its favor.
+
+§ 29. The remarks upon the theological bearings of the theories, if they
+are found somewhat wide of the mark, are explained by the haste of the
+editor to show just what all the affiliations of my views were, before
+I had had time to explain what those views are. The remarks to which I
+refer will be found in ¶¶ 3, 36, 81, 82, 83, 128, 203, 204. They are
+worth putting together.
+
+§ 30. The doctrine of symbolism, to which Dr. Carus has recourse,
+seems to be similar to that of my essay “Some Consequences of Four
+Incapacities” (_Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, II.) (¶¶ 180, 183,
+199.) On this head, I can only approve of his ideas.
+
+§ 31. It is true that I wrote many definitions for one of the
+“encyclopedic lexicons.” But they were necessarily rather vaguely
+expressed, in order to include the popular use of terms, and in some
+cases were modified by proof-readers or editors; and for reasons not
+needful here to explain, they are hardly such as I should give in a
+Philosophical Dictionary proper.
+
+                                                             C. S. PEIRCE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[101] J. S. Mill had in the first edition of his _Logic_ decisively taken
+an objective conception of chance and probability; but in his second
+edition he had become puzzled and had retracted, leaving that chapter,
+and with it his whole logic, a melancholy wreck, over which the qualified
+reader sighs, “And this once seemed intelligible!” Venn in the first
+edition of his book set forth the same objective conception with great
+clearness, and for that he was entitled to high praise, notwithstanding
+his manifest inadequacy to the problems treated. But in his second
+edition, he too has fallen away from his first and correct view, and has
+adopted a theory which I shall some day show to be untenable. Venn’s
+whole method in logic, as well as his system, is in my opinion of the
+weakest.
+
+[102] Mill often did good service in substituting precise terms for
+ambiguous ones; as when in speaking of mathematical conclusions he
+prefers to say they are legitimate deductions rather than that they are
+necessary.
+
+[103] In his _Ursache, Grund and Zweck_, Dr. Carus alludes to this
+passage. But he prefers the treatment of the question by Reid, whom he
+calls Mill’s opponent (_Gegner_).
+
+[104] It is of comparatively little consequence what Hume really meant.
+The main interest is in what Kant thought he meant.
+
+[105] Along with the distinction, I would of course do away with this
+use of the words _abstract_ and _concrete_ to which no clear idea can be
+attached, as far as I can see.
+
+[106] I cannot but disapprove of this use of the word “construction” to
+mean a studied theory, because the word is imperatively required in the
+theory of cognition to denote a mathematical diagram framed according to
+a general precept.
+
+[107] I apply this term because it is essentially like the passage from
+the concrete “virtuous” to the abstract “virtue,” or from the concrete
+“white” (adjective) to the abstract “whiteness,” or “white” (substantive).
+
+[108] I can never use this word without thinking of the explanation of
+it given by Petrus Peregrinus in his _Epistole de Magnete_. He says that
+physical properties are occult in the sense that they are only brought
+out by experimentation, and are not to be deduced from admixtures of
+_hot_ and _cold_, _moist_ and _dry_.
+
+[109] It follows as a corollary from this that if the positions of the
+particles at any one instant, together with the velocities at that
+instant, and the law of force, are given, the positions at all instants
+can be calculated. Of course, to give the positions and velocities at
+one instant, is a special case of the giving of the positions at two
+instants. The two instants may be such that there will be more than one
+solution of the problem; but this is an insignificant detail.
+
+[110] It would seem to follow from his notion that in uniform motion each
+minute’s motion is the cause of that of the next. Yet he says (¶ 19)
+“there is no cause that is equal to its effect.”
+
+[111] But, as I have elsewhere said, I should like to persuade
+mathematicians to speak of “positional energy” as _Kinetic potency_, the
+_vis viva_ as _Kinetic energy_, and the total “energy” as the _Kinetic
+entelechy_.
+
+[112] The differential equation being an ordinary, not a partial one,
+this is an absolute constant, determined by initial (or final, or any
+instantaneous) conditions.
+
+[113] Dr. Carus calls attention to the connection between my doctrine of
+the fixation of opinion and his anti-originalism.
+
+[114] Dr. Carus passes a sweeping judgment on Post-Kantian philosophy, as
+being original.
+
+[115] This was a remark of my father’s.
+
+[116] A person in the last _Monist_, breaks in upon my series of articles
+to foretell what the “issues of synechism” will be. Were he able to do
+so, it would certainly be the height of ill-manners thus to take the
+words out of my mouth.
+
+[117] As I am writing, I am shown a letter, in which the writer says:
+“Peirce with all his materialistic ideas, yet,” etc I never promulgated
+a materialistic idea in my life. The writer simply assumes that science
+is materialistic. As I am correcting the proofs, I notice that Mr. B.
+C. Burt, in his new _History of Modern Philosophy_, sets me down as
+sceptical, though doubtfully. There are a good many inaccuracies in the
+work. This was inevitable in a first edition. But the ingenious plan of
+the book admirably adapts it to the wants of just that class of students
+who cannot understand that no repertory of facts ever can be trusted
+implicitly.
+
+[118] Its being hypothetical will not prevent its being established with
+a very high degree of certainty. Thus, all history is of the nature of
+hypothesis; since its facts cannot be directly observed, but are only
+supposed to be true to account for the characters of the monuments and
+other documents.
+
+[119] Somebody may notice that I here admit a proposition as absolutely
+true. Undoubtedly; because it relates to the Absolute.
+
+[120] Indeed, to admit that reply is all but to admit the non-absolute
+grade of necessity.
+
+[121] I rightly go somewhat further in my _Theory of Probable Inference_;
+but that has no bearing on the present discussion.
+
+[122] Dr. Carus, in his _Ursache, Grund und Zweck_, well says that
+_reasons_ are discovered by induction, in the strict sense. It is often
+admitted that _causes_ can only be inferred by hypothetic reasoning.
+
+[123] The conservation of a vortex, which consists of the preservation of
+a certain character of motion by the same particles, though derived from
+the coöperation of other laws, is, in form, quite different.
+
+[124] In speaking of directions, we assume the Euclidean hypothesis that
+the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDER OF TYCHISM, HIS METHODS, PHILOSOPHY, AND CRITICISMS.
+
+IN REPLY TO MR. CHARLES S. PEIRCE.
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY AND PERSONAL.
+
+Soon after I had received Mr. Peirce’s manuscript he wrote me in a
+private letter as follows:
+
+    “You have not found, I trust, that in my rejoinder I have
+    anywhere overstepped the limit of amiable disputation. If
+    anything of that kind did, unconsciously to me, in the heat
+    of composition, slip from my pen, I am most anxious to have
+    it pointed out to me, so that there may be no feeling in the
+    matter of a disagreeable kind. For if you should not mention
+    it, I should at some future time discover it, and it would be a
+    source of real unhappiness to me.”
+
+This is a very amiable disposition of mind. Mr. Peirce presses me very
+hard in the struggle for truth: he does not hesitate to take advantage of
+even the smallest weak point which he espies or rather which he believes
+he espies. He does not shrink from using plain terms, such as “absurd,”
+“unthinking,” “weak,” “hasty,” “irrational.” Yet he preserves in the
+heat of the controversy a friendly spirit towards his antagonist, which
+I cannot but appreciate and wish publicly to acknowledge. But I would
+not have him change a word or soften the language of his article in the
+least, _for my sake_. If Mr. Peirce is wrong, I will take care of myself;
+if he is right, let the truth come out.
+
+We are both, as it were, by profession champions of truth; so we need not
+mind an occasional fling if in the end the cause of truth be promoted.
+Especially, in the present case, I need not mind the hard blows which
+Mr. Peirce deals with such assurance, for all the points at which he
+strikes are well protected. The fiercer the onslaught, the better the
+test. I feel satisfied that his severe scrutiny only serves to prove the
+strength of the position which I defend.
+
+I shall speak my mind as freely and unreservedly as does Mr. Peirce, and
+hope he in his turn will resent plain words as little as I do. As offense
+is not intended, so offense should not be taken.
+
+Let me add here in these introductory remarks that I am always open
+to conviction. The views which I uphold have been well considered and
+thought out in their most important consequences. They are consistent
+and well guarded in spite of Mr. Peirce’s thinking the contrary, so that
+I feel no need of changing them. But should some unforeseen difficulty
+arise which would oblige me to revise the whole system of my ideas, I
+shall not hesitate publicly to confess it and allow myself to be lead by
+truth whithersoever it be.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The issue of our controversy is the problem of chance—not of chance as it
+occurs, for instance, in the throw of dice, but of “absolute chance,” or
+perfect lawlessness. Mr. Peirce makes absolute chance the corner-stone of
+his philosophy; he propounds a radical and sweeping indeterminism, while
+I reject the idea, not of chance, but of absolute chance as incompatible
+with the philosophy of science.
+
+
+I. DIFFERENCES OF METHOD.
+
+Mr. Peirce calls himself a Scotist and professes to represent mediæval
+Realism, speaking at the same time of me as a Nominalist. We find,
+however, that the inverse statement would be nearer the truth.
+
+Before discussing Mr. Peirce’s philosophy itself, we must examine his
+methods. Difference of method will produce important divergencies of
+opinion.
+
+
+1. ATTENTION TO DETAIL.
+
+Mr. Peirce takes up in his rejoinder many incidental points, which have
+little or no bearing upon the main issues between us. On the one hand,
+things of no consequence, such as my granting that “absolute chance”
+like the impossibilities of fairy tales, is not unimaginable, and my
+saying that tychism is attractive but weak for lack of arguments, are
+adduced as “momentous admissions,” and “inconsiderate concessions.”
+On the other hand, Mr. Peirce catches at straws to prove a lack of
+information on my part. He cannot forbear calling attention to the little
+breach of etiquette committed in not giving an English baronet his proper
+title.
+
+Mr. Peirce shows on all these and other occasions a love of the
+incidental, and if I were to allow myself to follow his example the
+battle would soon be broken up into innumerable skirmishes.
+
+It is noteworthy that Mr. Peirce’s procedure appears to be a nominalistic
+tradition. Nominalists, regarding universals as mere names of many
+particular things, have always showed a great preference for the single,
+the incidental, the scattered; while realists viewing universals as
+real things were in the habit of laying perhaps too much stress upon
+universalities and generalities to the neglect of the particular and
+individual.
+
+Indeed, Mr. Peirce’s favorite idea, which is a belief in absolute chance,
+is in my opinion the most nominalistic and anti-realistic proposition I
+have ever met with. Regularity, or natural law, is to him the product
+of evolution. Thus he demolishes the eternity of the universal, and
+eternity is only universality in time. Now suppose that eternity (i. e.
+universality in time) could be proved an error; then, the universality
+of the universal in space also will become illusory. If those abiding
+features of nature which we call natural laws have indeed originated from
+a general sporting, from chance, from a chaotic lawlessness, by a gradual
+habit taking, who can assure us that nature has not taken different
+habits in other parts of the universe?
+
+I look upon Mr. Peirce as an extreme nominalist, or, if he prefers it, as
+a nominal realist soaked with nominalistic opinions. He professes to be a
+realist, but he rescinds the foundation of realism.
+
+Like the bear of the hermit Mr. Peirce throws the stone at the fly of
+necessary connection, and in doing so kills the philosophy of realism
+itself.
+
+
+2. ORIGINALITY.
+
+Originality, wherever we find it, is pleasing; but a hankering after
+originality is dangerous. Experience teaches us to regard a thinker’s
+love of originality as one of the main causes of his going astray. Let
+the poet be original, but not the scientist, not the philosopher, not the
+searcher for truth. The conceit of being original flatters our vanity,
+and original ideas in philosophy are tantamount to original errors.
+
+I do not deny the value of originality, but I do deny that it is a
+criterion of truth.
+
+Originality consists in the free exercise of our imagination, and a vivid
+imagination is very valuable to the thinker. But it so happens that every
+dreamer cherishes with a mother’s love the children of his fancy. And it
+is, therefore, necessary to be especially critical with the offspring of
+one’s own brain.
+
+Kepler (“who,” Mr. Peirce says, “comes very close to realising my ideal
+of the scientific method”) was endowed with an extraordinarily vivid
+imagination. He invented an extremely original scheme of explanation for
+the solar system, and expounded it with great poetical fervor in his
+“Mysterium Cosmographicum.”[125]
+
+Kepler at once became famous by his “Mysterium Cosmographicum” and was
+generally admired for his originality. But his bent for hatching original
+ideas did not alone make Kepler what he is to us now in the history
+of science. A greater quality than his poetical fervor and original
+imagination was his rigorous self-criticism. He took notice of every
+little fact that did not agree with his theories, and for the sake of
+truth, of objectively provable truth, that is, the agreement of his views
+with positive facts, he sternly slew all those creatures of his fancy
+which he foresaw could not survive.
+
+Having myself a good deal of imagination, and having tried myself
+many original ideas, I can appreciate the self-denial and discipline
+of Kepler. I have come to the conclusion that originality is only an
+important means of attaining truth. Our ways of reaching the truth,
+our methods of finding it, may deserve the praise of originality, but
+truth itself is never original; for truth is the faithfulness of a copy
+which in our representations we make of reality, and to praise ideas as
+original is certainly no argument that they are true.
+
+There is no need of showing that Mr. Peirce is not just in his statement
+of my view of originality, by maintaining that I have advised people
+“think not for yourself.” Confessedly he exaggerates, but in truth he
+misrepresents.
+
+Mr. Peirce does not relish what I have to say on the subject, and,
+to pacify his mind, he does not tire of praising originality as the
+high-water mark of genius.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s love of originality is a nominalistic feature of his mind. A
+nominalist who denies the existence of universals cannot understand that
+everything in science must be sacrificed to truthfulness. The question,
+Does this idea correctly represent its respective reality? has no sense
+to a nominalist. The nominalist is only interested in what a thinker
+makes of things. The subjective conception, in his opinion, exhausts the
+subject. I can understand that a nominalist should be greatly pleased
+with originality, but a realist should not allow himself to be seduced by
+its charms.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s penchant for, and my distrust of, originality, have a direct
+influence upon our respective methods of thought. It naturally makes him
+bolder and me more cautious.[126]
+
+
+3. A MODERN PROCRUSTES.
+
+There was a man in ancient Greece named Procrustes, who had two beds;
+one long, the other short. He used to lay his tall guests upon the short
+bed, and his short guests upon the long bed, cutting off the limbs of the
+former and stretching out the bodies of the latter, until they fitted
+the size of their unpleasant resting places. In the same way Mr. Peirce
+treats philosophical views.
+
+There is the bed of the materialist and, as all processes to the
+materialist are purely mechanical, necessitarianism is stretched in the
+materialist’s bed to mechanicalism. I plead, since ideas and feelings
+are not motions, that mental processes cannot be explained by the laws
+of motion, but can, for that reason, be none the less determined; but I
+plead in vain. That view of necessitarianism does not suit the bed upon
+which my Procrustes places me. Other views, however, are cut down without
+further ado because they are said to be nominalistic. Anything that does
+not appeal to Mr. Peirce’s realistic mind is dismissed with a shrug.
+
+I am neither a realist nor a nominalist, or rather, I am both realist
+and nominalist. I am convinced that to some extent both sides were right
+and both sides were wrong, and regard it as our duty to sift their
+propositions and accept the truth whether it be nominalistic or realistic.
+
+We must follow the principle of hearing both sides, and not consider
+at all whether a statement agrees or disagrees with certain party
+principles.[127]
+
+
+4. OCCAM’S RAZOR.
+
+The most brilliant disciple of Duns Scotus was William of Occam, whose
+fame almost rivalled that of his master. Occam became an adversary of
+realism; he became a nominalist, and after him was named a method known
+as Occam’s razor, especially useful to nominalists in their warfare
+against realists.
+
+Occam’s razor is expressed in the sentence: “_Entia non sunt
+multiplicanda præter necessitatem_,” which means: Only in cases
+of extremest necessity are we allowed to assume the existence of
+hypothetical facts. If assumed facts are not absolutely indispensable,
+cut them off!
+
+Occam’s razor was invented for a special purpose, that of cutting off the
+realistic hypostatisation of abstract ideas.
+
+I do not know which is more startling, that a realist in name, such as
+Mr. Peirce, should use a weapon forged by nominalists against realism,
+or that he whom in other respects we found in such a close contact with
+nominalistic methods, should not understand how to handle a nominalistic
+weapon.
+
+Mr. Peirce censures me for making the statement that the formal is
+subjective as well as objective. This, he says, is cut off by Occam’s
+razor.
+
+The formal is subjective, for our sensation is possessed of form and our
+mind is in possession of formal thought. It is objective, for reality is
+not void of form and the things are such as they are by virtue of their
+peculiar shape.
+
+The proposition that the formal is objective and subjective at the
+same time is as little cut off by Occam’s razor as, for instance, the
+proposition that there is air inside and outside of us, viz. in our lungs
+and in the surrounding atmosphere.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s usage of the beds of Procrustes is cruel, but his usage of
+Occam’s razor is inconsiderate. He should be careful in handling such a
+sharp knife, lest he do himself harm.
+
+Mr. Peirce uses Occam’s razor to cut off statements and facts which make
+his pet theories dispensable; but he forgets that Occam’s razor cuts off
+ideas only, and when it comes in contact with facts its edge is turned.
+
+Occam’s razor is an excellent instrument to dispose of such hypotheses as
+absolute chance, for it declares that if their assumption is not quite
+indispensable, we must cut them off.
+
+Now it either is or is not a fact that the formal is objective and
+subjective at once. It cannot be untrue in my philosophy while it is
+true in Mr. Peirce’s system. My proposition of the formal being at once
+objective and subjective is, according to Mr. Peirce, “cut off by Occam’s
+razor.” “But,” adds he, “when synechism has united the two worlds this
+view gains new life.” So long as I say so, it is wrong; but should I
+adopt Mr. Peirce’s system, it will pass as right.
+
+
+5. THE APPLICATION OF LEARNING.
+
+Philosophers should make it a rule not to encumber their thoughts
+unnecessarily with learning. The great problems of philosophy are, in my
+opinion, much simpler than they are generally supposed to be. The art
+mainly consists in stating them in the simplest possible manner.
+
+It is indispensable for a philosopher to be familiar, at least in a
+general way, with all the most important sciences, especially with
+psychology, physiology, logic, physics, mathematics, and mechanics. But
+he should not for that reason introduce any more than he can help their
+complicated details into his expositions.
+
+Every specialist is inclined to look at things through the spectacles of
+his own speciality. But the philosopher who takes a higher standpoint
+should be on his guard. He should always endeavor to simplify matters and
+avoid introducing into philosophy issues which belong to a special field,
+and derive their peculiarities from special conditions. To confound the
+methods of the various sciences, or to generalise without sufficient
+discrimination, will throw everything into confusion.
+
+Mr. Peirce, as we well know, has greatly distinguished himself in
+logic by valuable discoveries and independent investigations. We have
+repeatedly taken occasion to pronounce unreservedly our admiration of his
+achievements in this field. But we cannot approve of his application of
+certain methods of his speciality to philosophy in general. Mr. Peirce
+is inclined to look at the world through the spectacles of that new and
+extremely specialised branch of logic which he is at present about to
+invent.
+
+One hindrance to properly appreciating his doctrines, says Mr. Peirce,
+lies in my “laboring under the great disadvantage of not understanding
+the logic of relatives,” which, he adds (p. 533):
+
+    “Is a subject I have been studying for a great many years, and
+    I feel and know that I have an important report that I ought
+    to make upon it. This branch of logic is, however, so abstruse
+    that I have never been able to find the leisure to translate my
+    conclusions into a form in which their significance would be
+    manifest even to powerful thinkers, whose thoughts had not long
+    been turned in that direction.”
+
+I shall be glad to sit at Mr. Peirce’s feet as an attentive student, as
+soon as he has worked out his logic of relatives, or any other subject.
+But I cannot now accept any of his theories on the credit of some
+half-developed science, be it ever so profound or intricate, until I see
+plainly its connection with the present issues.
+
+Mr. Peirce trusts that his favorite ideas will find support in his
+peculiar conception of the logic of relatives. Judging from the
+quiddities which he now so confidently propounds as weighty arguments,
+we cannot share his sanguine hopes. His arguments, to be derived from
+the logic of relatives, are like promises to pay out of the returns of a
+gold-mine, just discovered and boomed by the owners. There may be gold in
+the mine, but I do not as yet take any stock in it.
+
+Mr. Peirce promises to prove by the logic of relatives what, if it were
+true, he should be able to demonstrate in plain language.
+
+I have an idea that the logic of relatives can be worked out into as
+clear a science as is mathematics or algebra. But what shall we say when
+told that the logic of relatives is really abstruse, and that he who
+labors under the disadvantage of not understanding this abstruse science
+is not prepared to grasp Mr. Peirce’s philosophy? The abstrusity, in my
+mind, counts against Mr. Peirce’s philosophy, as much as against his
+logic of relatives.
+
+In my childhood I was much plagued with Latin, but as soon as I had
+acquired a smattering of it, I began to talk Latin to the servants, and
+when they did not understand me I thought that they were “laboring under
+the great disadvantage” of not speaking Latin. Since then I have learned
+to translate my Latin into the language of the people with whom I have to
+deal.
+
+Mr. Peirce seems to rely on his learning in proportion to its abstrusity;
+he likes to walk on stilts.
+
+Mr. Peirce is scholarly to excess. He has a special talent of rendering
+issues involved. Not even his references to my articles in _The Monist_
+are made directly by quoting the pages on which they appear. That method
+would be too common. He invents a ponderous system, necessitating the
+reader to look twice when he wishes to find a passage,—a scheme which
+is original and very dignified in appearance, but makes quotation
+unnecessarily complicated.
+
+Learning is a virtue, but even virtues should be used with discretion.
+
+
+6. THE PRINCIPLE OF POSITIVISM.
+
+Says Mr. Peirce in confirmation of Whewell (p. 546):
+
+    “Progress in science depends upon the observation of the right
+    facts by minds _furnished with appropriate ideas_.”
+
+To rely on the observation of facts is, in my opinion, a principle
+of positivism. That facts must be observed “by minds furnished with
+appropriate ideas” is undeniable, but ideas, in order to be appropriate,
+must be true; they must be representations of facts.
+
+Because he relies on facts I have characterised Mr. Peirce’s method as
+positivistic. But he indignantly repudiates “the charge” as “totally
+unfounded.”
+
+Positivism (which I have always carefully distinguished from Comtism,
+the latter being a special kind of positivism[128]) is not a peculiar
+philosophy, but a most important principle of science.
+
+Mr. Peirce seems to use the term positivism in a different sense from
+that in which I use it. Be it so. I shall not nominalistically quarrel
+about words so long as there are more urgent subjects under discussion.
+Noticing that Mr. Peirce does not state that all ideas should be
+ultimately reducible to facts, he is to be acquitted.
+
+
+7. LOPPING OFF THE ABSOLUTE.
+
+Mr. Peirce thinks that an agreement between us could be arrived at. He
+says (p. 545):
+
+    “Dr. Carus’s philosophy would, in its general features, offer
+    no violent opposition to my opinions” (§ 16).
+
+But the condition is (p. 545):
+
+    “To lop off the heads of all absolute propositions whose
+    subject is not the Absolute.”
+
+As a matter of fact I have lopped off all absolutes. If Mr. Peirce
+were more familiar with my views he would have known that. Thus, on
+my part, I had done all I could to come to an agreement with him long
+before he asked me to do it. But I fear that having also lopped off the
+Absolute itself, I did too much of a good thing, for Mr. Peirce carefully
+records his opposition to all philosophies which deny the reality of the
+Absolute. (See § 18.)
+
+I wish to improve this occasion for conciliation, by turning the tables.
+Mr. Peirce’s views would, upon the whole, offer no violent opposition to
+my opinions if he would only consent to lop off the absolute-property
+of his absolute chance. I would even swallow his Absolute if he would
+promise to designate by that name some real quality of the world, or the
+world itself as a whole, or something that is thinkable without making
+one’s head swim.[129]
+
+Every predication of absolute, changes a real and useful idea into its
+caricature. To, say that a complicated calculation is “absolutely true,”
+that is, true without stipulating the condition that the methods are
+right, and that the execution is made without any mistake, is ridiculous;
+and thus the phrase “in a Pickwickian sense” (which we gratefully borrow
+from Mr. Peirce) would always form a drastic but adequate substitute
+for the term absolute. “Absolutely true” is “true in a Pickwickian
+sense” only. There are no absolute truths which are in this sense
+unconditionally true. In the same way, “absolute chance” is different
+from that real chance known to us in experience and instanced by the
+throw of the dice. Absolute chance is “chance in a Pickwickian sense.”
+
+Strange Mr. Peirce speaks of real chance when he means an imaginary
+absolute chance. He apparently uses the word “real” in this connection
+not to denote something that is a fact of experience but to express the
+idea of its being perfect or complete. Thus we may speak of a “real”
+perpetual motion, stating at the same time that it is neither real nor
+realisable.
+
+
+8. THE THEORY OF PROBABLE INFERENCE.
+
+Mr. Peirce applies his theory of probable inference to everything; also
+to those cases which are unequivocally determined. He granted in a
+private conversation that 2 × 2 = 4 admits of no exception. But of other
+purely formal statements which are in the same predicament, for instance,
+that the sum of the angles of a triangle in a plane measures 180°, he
+states as probable that they are either somewhat less or somewhat more
+than 180°, adding, “that they are exactly that amount is what nobody
+can ever be justified in concluding.” To determine the sum of the
+angles of a plane triangle by measuring the parallaxes of stars rests
+upon a fundamental misconception of the principles of formal sciences.
+It would be consistent for Mr. Peirce to say, that 2 × 2 = 4 is true
+only according to the definitions or axioms of arithmetic. But in order
+to know whether 2 × 2 = 4 in reality, we ought to apply the theory of
+probable inference. Until we had verified the statement 2 × 2 = 4 by
+applying this formula to the farthest solar systems, we should not be
+justified in concluding that it is exactly true. The theory of probable
+inferences is supposed to help us out of this perplexity, “and within
+another century our grandchildren will surely know whether the three
+angles of a triangle are greater or less than 180°.”[130]
+
+There is always danger in the application of abstract ratiocination; and
+the theory of probable inference forms no exception to the rule. On the
+contrary, it is especially liable to lead one astray. There is the case
+of the doctor who said to his patient: “I am sure you will be cured, for
+I had ninety-nine patients who died during the operation, and statistics
+prove beyond doubt that one among a hundred will survive it. You are the
+hundredth.”
+
+The theory of probable inferences is often misapplied, but can it be
+worse misapplied than by introducing it into the province of that which
+is certain? There is no sense in applying the theory of probabilities to
+what is certain. We may doubt whether the rays of light travel in exactly
+straight lines, but we cannot doubt the straightness of lines in plane
+geometry. We cannot doubt that all the radii in a circle are equal, or
+that the sum of the angles of a Euclidean triangle are 180°.
+
+
+9. ZWEIDEUTIG BESTIMMT.
+
+Mr. Peirce very kindly informs me that the term _eindeutig bestimmt_ is a
+translation of a French phrase. Very well, I do not deny it. I know very
+well that the phrase has a long history, but I do not consider myself
+bound to present the whole pedigree of every term I use.
+
+Does Mr. Peirce perhaps suppose that the French phrase is the original?
+If we have to go back to the original beginning at all, why does he not
+tell us that the French _univoque_ is a translation from the mediæval
+Latin _univoce_, which was coined and used by the schoolmen in opposition
+to _æquivoce_. Neither the term _eindeutig_, as Mr. Peirce asserts,
+nor its scholastic original _univoce_, is an exclusively mathematical
+expression.
+
+Although the term _eindeutig_ is a translation of the French _univoque_,
+there is after all a great difference between the French term and the
+German term, and I have a good reason to prefer the German expression.
+The French term is nominalistic or even vocalistic, the German one
+is realistic. _Univoque_ and _univocal_ mean that there is only one
+name or one _vox_, while _eindeutig_ lays no stress on the name but
+on the meaning of the name, denoting that which admits of but one
+interpretation. This is a sufficient reason for me to prefer it, and it
+ought to appeal to Mr. Peirce’s realistic mind.[131]
+
+Mr. Peirce, maintaining that _eindeutig bestimmt_ is only a mathematical
+term, adduces two equations, each one of which, taken singly, admits,
+he says, of two possible determinations.[132] Mr. Peirce uses these
+equations as an argument against my application of the term, adding,
+sarcastically: “This shows how much that argument amounts to.” But his
+example proves at best only that there are incomplete determinations;
+some problems allow of several solutions. In a German township in which
+blue hussars are garrisoned, children used to propose to another this
+profound problem: “It lies under a plum-tree and is blue; what is it?”
+If the child questioned argues, “It is a plum,” he is corrected “No, it
+is a hussar.” But if he argues, “It is a hussar,” he is corrected, “No,
+it is a plum.” So he has no chance of guessing right. The result of Mr.
+Peirce’s first equation, which may be either 11·477 or 11·523, is like
+the conundrum of the plum-tree: it amounts to the same, viz. to nothing,
+and proves only that there are determinations which are _zweideutig
+bestimmt_.
+
+
+10. EXPLANATION.
+
+The differences of method become very serious when we disagree on the
+very meaning of “explanation” itself. How can two debaters accept or
+reject one another’s arguments, if their ideas of explanation are
+radically different?
+
+Mr. Peirce’s definition of the term “explanation” appears to me very
+unsatisfactory. He says (p. 57):
+
+    “I cannot admit that explanation is description of the fact
+    explained. It is true that in the setting forth of some
+    explanations it is convenient to restate the fact explained so
+    as to set it under another aspect, but even in these cases the
+    statement of other facts is essential. (!) In all cases it is
+    _other facts_, (!) usually hypothetical, which constitute the
+    explanation; (!) and the process of explaining is a process by
+    which from those other facts the fact to be explained is shown
+    to follow as a consequence by virtue of a general principle or
+    otherwise.”
+
+    “To explain a fact is to show that it is a necessary or
+    at least a probable result from another fact (!) known or
+    supposed.”
+
+My definition of “explanation,” as a description in which the process
+described is recognised as a transformation is sneered at. Says Mr.
+Peirce (p. 558):
+
+    “A magician transforms a watch into a dove. Recognise it as
+    a transformation and the trick is explained, is it? This is
+    delightfully facile.”
+
+Indeed, the magician’s trick is explained as soon as we know all the
+changes that have taken place. Take the whole number of objects handled
+by the magician, those which he shows and those which he conceals. Let
+us observe how he hides the watch and how he produces the dove, and the
+trick is explained. Is it not?
+
+Explanation is, as the word suggests, a making plain, so that we can look
+over the whole field before us, and leave nothing hidden from sight. This
+whole field, the survey of which is needed for the recognition of the
+transformation, is called the system of the explanation. After we have
+seen how the changes take place, and after we have described in exact
+formulas their modes of action, our desire for explanation is completely
+satisfied.
+
+The instances adduced by Mr. Peirce prove plainly that his objections
+cannot be maintained. Every one of them is an instance of transformation
+(with the exception of the emerald vest, which, however, is not stated
+with sufficient completeness). Take, for instance, the following example
+adduced by Mr. Peirce (p. 557):
+
+    “A ‘special process of nature,’ calling for explanation, is the
+    circumstance that the planet Mars, while moving in a general
+    way from west to east among the fixed stars, yet retrogrades a
+    part of the time, so as to describe loops in the heavens. The
+    explanation is, that Mars revolves in one approximate circle
+    and we in another.”
+
+Can any one deny that this explanation is a description? We draw the
+two orbits as correctly as possible for the required demonstration
+and combine the points representing the earth with those representing
+Mars at their successive positions. Considering the fact that we do
+not perceive the motion of the earth, we have to construct a diagram
+in which the directions of these lines are described as viewed from a
+stationary point. This is a description of changes that take place. It is
+a portrayal of the transpositions of two bodies, and the appearance which
+the change of this relation presents to one of them.
+
+Mr. Peirce has neither the grace nor good-will to, understand my
+proposition, that _explanation is always a tracing of form_. He says (p.
+558):
+
+    “Forms may indulge in whatever eccentricities they please, in
+    the world of dreams, without responsibility.”
+
+In the world of dreams, yes! But not in the world of reality. And even
+the irresponsible eccentricities of dreams take place according to law.
+
+Feeling that he mistakes my position, Mr. Peirce adds:
+
+    “Should Dr. Carus reply that I mistake his meaning, that it is
+    only ‘being in general’ (§ 66), that he holds unaccountable,
+    I reply that this is simply expressing scepticism as to the
+    possibility and need of philosophy.” (P. 558.)
+
+Of course, I mean “being in general.” As to the scepticism imputed to me,
+I answer, that any attempt at explaining how matter and energy, which I
+take to be eternal, came into being, is a wrongly formulated problem.
+Mr. Peirce might as well call me a sceptic, because I recognise that we
+cannot square the circle. (Compare “Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed., pp.
+283-285 and 291.)
+
+Mr. Peirce’s gravest mistake is his belief that
+
+    “In all cases it is _other facts_ which constitute the
+    explanation.” (P. 557.)
+
+The practical application of this mistake becomes fatal to his philosophy.
+
+It is by no means necessary to pass beyond that system of facts which
+contains the phenomenon to be explained. We must, as a matter of course,
+keep completing the facts of a phenomenon until we have acquired a survey
+of what we call the whole system of the facts, but we have never to
+resort to other facts.
+
+We are confronted every day with hundreds of facts of which we never
+see the whole system to which they belong, but we readily supply these
+deficiencies from the stock of our experience. We refer the unknown to
+the known. The single case under observation is referred to something
+with which we are familiar. Those systems of explanation which are known
+to us serve as patterns for others that are only partially known, and we
+fill out, with their assistance, the gaps of our observation.
+
+The readiness and reliability of our explanation thus depends upon the
+stock of knowledge we have. The more we know, the easier shall we conquer
+the unknown; the more incomplete our knowledge is, the greater the number
+of hypothetical facts that will have to be introduced; and this always
+weakens the reliability of our explanations. Hypothetical facts should
+be introduced only in cases of urgent necessity. However, if they are
+admitted at all, they have to be thought of as parts of the system under
+investigation, for they have been invented only because we are compelled
+to assume that without them it would be incomplete.
+
+Mr. Peirce adduces the following example to prove that “other facts” are
+required in an explanation:
+
+    “It has been stated that a warm spring in Europe is usually
+    followed by a cool autumn, and the explanation has been offered
+    that so many more icebergs than usual are liberated during
+    a warm spring, that they subsequently lower sensibly the
+    temperature of Europe. I care little whether the fact and the
+    explanation are correct or no. The case illustrates, at any
+    rate, my point that an explanation is a special fact, supposed
+    or known, from which the fact to be explained follows as a
+    consequence.” (P. 557.)
+
+When, as in this instance, we recognise that one fact is the necessary
+result of another fact, we view them both as parts of one set or system
+of facts in which a transformation is taking place, and, unless we
+see the connection of the two facts as constituting one process of
+transformation, we cannot say that the problem is explained. When we
+observe changes which are the results of transformations taking place
+beyond the horizon of our knowledge, we are, as a matter of course,
+unable to give an explanation.
+
+Mr. Peirce had perhaps in mind a special and more complex kind of
+explanation, which we define as “comprehension.” He says (p. 557):
+
+    “The fact to be explained is shown to follow as a consequence,
+    by virtue of a general principle or otherwise.”
+
+Take as an instance the law of gravitation. There are the facts of
+falling stones and the motions of celestial bodies. Both sets of
+facts are explained, according to Mr. Peirce, “by virtue of a general
+principle,” i. e. gravitation, while we say, both sets of facts are
+comprehended under a common formula. Mr. Peirce’s conception of
+“explanation” rests on the antiquated view that gravitation is a
+principle behind the gravitating masses which compels the stone to fall.
+Gravitation, however, is not “another fact” foreign to the facts under
+consideration. It is not a principle called in from the outside. On the
+contrary, it is the essence and extract of the very facts that are to be
+explained.
+
+Principles which have not been derived either from the facts to be
+explained, or from the additional facts which belong to their system, do
+not and cannot explain the phenomena.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Comprehension is, as it were, an explanation of a higher degree. The
+term means a grasping together, and it actually consists in viewing two
+or several facts in such a way as to recognise their common features.
+Comprehension is a reduction of our patterns of explanation; it unites
+two or several of them in one formula.
+
+For instance, it has been observed that certain objects float in water
+while others sink to the bottom. The observations do not seem to agree,
+they present two incoherent facts. When we find out that the weight of
+a floating body is equal to the weight of water which it displaces,
+we understand at once why bodies whose specific gravity is greater
+than water sink while those of a lighter specific gravity float.
+Comprehension, in this as in every other case, is the description of a
+process which comprises all the facts that belong to a special class in
+a common formula. The description must be applicable to all single cases
+however different they may be.
+
+This conception of comprehension has a great advantage over Mr. Peirce’s
+view. While he has to bring in some “other fact” from the outside, we
+need not introduce any foreign element. Comprehension, as we understand
+it, can rise from the statement of particular facts to more and more
+general formulations, until finally we arrive at universal laws. All
+the laws thus formulated to satisfy our cravings for comprehension, are
+found to belong to one great system of laws, and our scientists are
+constantly engaged not only in widening the range of our experience by
+new discoveries, but also in revising our statements of the uniformities
+of nature and, where they appear to be in collision, in bringing them
+into harmony.
+
+This conception of comprehension is monistic, Mr. Peirce’s is dualistic.
+We need not, in order to explain the facts of existence, go beyond them
+into a supernatural realm. Mr. Peirce must go outside of the world
+into non-existence when he attempts to understand the world by the
+principles of his philosophy. It is very doubtful whether explanations,
+the “essential” nature of which is to consist of “other facts usually
+hypothetical,” will be satisfactory to anybody except himself.
+
+Otherness makes any fact unfit to serve as a factor of an explanation and
+indeed I cannot think of any instance, real or imaginary, in which the
+explanatory facts, be they real or hypothetical, do not form parts of the
+system under consideration.
+
+There is only one instance to which Mr. Peirce’s method of explanation
+has been applied, and I am under the impression that it has been invented
+solely for this purpose. Mr. Peirce’s philosophy is too original to
+be explained by the usual methods; it must have an original method of
+its own. In order to explain “law” Mr. Peirce calls in “chance.” His
+explanation must be an “other fact” and the only fact different from
+law is not-law, lawlessness, or absolute chance. According to my idea
+of explanation, law can never be explained by chance. According to Mr.
+Peirce, it is the only possible thing that can be called in as that
+“_other_ fact” which is supposed to be the essential constituent of an
+explanation.
+
+If Mr. Peirce’s method of explanation were sound, we should have to
+explain order from chaos, possibility from impossibility, and sense from
+nonsense.
+
+
+II. MR. PEIRCE’S PHILOSOPHY.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s constant references to scholastic philosophy remind me of
+happy years long past when I was extremely interested in the theories
+of such men as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Occam, Abelard, Tauler,
+and others. Together with my chum, now a sober Professor of physics at
+a German University, I freely indulged in the construction of various
+world-theories, which, alas! were quickly overthrown one after another by
+the slightest puff of wind. I have not lost my interest in the schoolmen,
+but it is considerably weakened.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s repeated praise of scholastic realism and his condemnation
+of any theory that he brands as nominalistic, seems to me like the method
+of some of our politicians who, eager to revive toryism, should censure
+all evils of the politics of to-day as whiggish. This comparison is not
+exaggerated, for there are a few Hamiltonians who miss the refining
+influence of an aristocratic class and regret that the historical
+tradition of toryism has been so completely broken. I would not deny that
+there is some truth in it, and there is some truth, too, in mediæval
+realism, which has been neglected by the, first violently suppressed and
+then triumphant, nominalism. But in reviving realism the Scotists should
+be very careful to avoid a resurrection of its errors.
+
+
+1. DUNS SCOTUS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PATRON SAINT.
+
+Johannes Duns Scotus, a Franciscan, honored since his successful defense
+of the Blessed Virgin’s Immaculate Conception by the title Doctor
+Subtilis, and the very same man after whom, on account of the narrowness
+of his later disciples during the time of the Reformation, a blockhead
+is to-day called a dunce, was one of the most characteristic figures of
+scholastic philosophy. He lived at the end of the thirteenth Century when
+the authority of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas who had died March 7th,
+1274, was all but universally recognised. Scotus appeared as the most
+powerful opponent of Thomas. Ingenious, original, bold, and buoyant in
+his attacks he had a short but brilliant career and died comparatively
+young at Cologne, in November, 1308.
+
+While Thomas, surnamed Dr. Universalis, or Dr. Angelicus, is regarded by
+his order, the Dominicans, as the greatest authority in philosophical
+matters, Scotus succeeded in impressing his mode of thought upon the
+Franciscans; yet Thomas is universally regarded in the Roman church and
+also among Protestant theologians as the more orthodox Christian.
+
+Almost all the ideas of Scotus were set forth in opposition to the views
+of others and mainly of Thomas. Thomas was a determinist, Scotus an
+outspoken indeterminist. Thomas says that man’s action is necessarily
+determined by what he thinks is best. Scotus avers that man thinks in a
+certain way because he wills in a certain way. Man’s ideas are fashioned
+to suit his character. His motto is, “_voluntas superior est intellectu_”
+and his idea of will is identified with the indetermined arbitrariness of
+a perfect _liberum arbitrium_. According to Thomas, God commands us to do
+the good because it is good. Scotus calls good that which God commands
+simply because God commands it. The will of God, like the will of man is,
+in Scotus’s opinion, undetermined, it is arbitrary. Thus God created the
+world not because his will was determined by some motive, but because
+it so pleased him; and Christ’s passion and death were not really an
+atonement; they simply were accepted as such by God.
+
+Without entering into this controversy of _anno olim_ we might say
+that we side neither with Thomas nor with Scotus, but would modify the
+statement of the former by the criticism of the latter. Thomas goes
+too far when he says that whatever is recognised as the best will of
+necessity be done. He overlooks the power of passions. Thomas’s statement
+would be right, if every passion were regarded as a will which has its
+own and independent but mistaken ideas about good. A soul whose passions
+are more powerful than rational considerations will necessarily be
+inclined to obey its irrational impulses. There is something in Scotus’s
+criticism, but his view is no improvement. In speaking of will as
+superior to the intellect, did he ever ask himself the question, What his
+own will would be independent of his intellect? Further, when God is said
+to command the good because it is good, Thomas separates in a logical
+consideration two ideas which are identical. Scotus is right in defining
+good as the will of God. From our standpoint we should say, the will of
+God, viz., the moral order of the universe, is of a definite kind which
+can be ascertained by experience. To speak of the will of God as good is
+an anthropomorphic expression. Good is that which agrees with the will of
+God; bad, that which opposes it. Suppose the moral order of the universe
+were different, goodness and badness would change with it.
+
+We have sketched the views of Scotus only to show the points of
+contact between him and Mr. Peirce. Mr. Peirce is also an outspoken
+indeterminist. He identifies feeling with chance, and his free will is a
+_liberum arbitrium_. Mr. Peirce, like Scotus, also separates theology,
+and, with it, religion, from philosophy.[133] Scotus ridicules those
+who confound both, clearly indicating that he is aiming at Thomas, to
+whose fervent faith their conciliation was a matter of momentous and all
+important consequence. Scotus goes so far as to aver that something might
+be true in philosophy which is wrong in theology (see Ed. “Wadding” Fol.
+4, p. 848)—a statement that to an honest searcher for truth must almost
+appear as frivolous.[134]
+
+How much more imbued with true religiosity was his great namesake John
+Scotus Erigena the venerable founder of scholasticism when saying: “_Non
+est alia philosophia, i. e. sapientiae stadium, et alia religio_.”
+
+
+2. MR. PEIRCE’S ORIGINAL THEORIES.
+
+Mr. Peirce as a controversalist and critic is like Scotus, brilliant,
+versatile, and powerful. But he is more; he is also constructive.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s style of architecture reminds us of neo-Platonism, and this
+is quite in harmony with Scotism, for Scotus, through Avicebron, derived
+many of his ideas from the Neo-Platonists. Mr. Peirce proposes a modern
+view of emanation, which starts the world from that βῦθος of nothingness
+which at the same time is the womb of all existence. The primeval state
+of being, says Mr. Peirce, “Was mere nothing from a physical aspect,”
+but, if it was not really nothing, what, then, was it?
+
+It was chance.
+
+Here lies the essential difference between Mr. Peirce and the
+neo-Platonists. The neo-Platonists (whose speculations, if they are
+treated not as philosophy, but as poetical effusions, are very profound
+and thoughtful) look to the Logos, or world-reason, as the beginning
+of the world emanation, while Mr. Peirce shows a certain contempt for
+reason. To the neo-Platonist, reasons _are_ explanations, while to our
+modern Scotist, reasons explain nothing. He says:
+
+    “Reasons explain nothing, except upon some theistic hypothesis
+    which may be pardoned to the yearning heart of man, but must be
+    doubtful in the eyes of philosophy....” (P. 567.)
+
+Mr. Peirce goes so far as to speak of “the dullness of ratiocination’s
+self.”
+
+Mr. Peirce’s gospel would deviate in the very first verse from that of
+St. John, for it would read
+
+    Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ἡ τυχή.—In the Beginning was Chance!
+
+And this chance which was in the beginning actually is, to Mr. Peirce,
+God, a personal God, an anthropomorphic deity endowed with consciousness.
+He says:
+
+    “That primeval chaos in which there was no regularity was
+    mere nothing from a physical aspect. Yet it was not a blank
+    zero; for there was an intensity of consciousness there, in
+    comparison with which all that we ever feel is but as the
+    struggling of a molecule or two to throw off a little of the
+    force of law to an endless and innumerable diversity of chance
+    utterly unlimited.” (_The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 19.)
+
+And in another passage he says of chance:
+
+    “That it is a being living and conscious is what all the
+    dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can scarce muster
+    hardihood to deny.” (P. 560.)
+
+Mr. Peirce’s argument that all the dullness that belongs to
+ratiocination’s self can scarcely muster hardihood to deny his
+proposition, sounds strange in the mouth of a scientist. But it is not
+strange; for I have found that enthusiastic defenders of improbable
+theories always fill the holes of their argumentation with abuse of those
+who dare to discover these holes. Call a person who doubts the truth
+of your statements dull, and you will frighten many a weak mind into a
+patient acceptance of your view.
+
+We may rest assured that whenever a philosopher scolds he is at his wit’s
+end. For why should he lose patience if he can prove his proposition?
+Thus diatribes are always symptoms that there is some flaw in one’s logic
+and the louder one chides the sorer is the spot.
+
+Mr. Peirce is serious in the statement that chance is a conscious being.
+He actually identifies chance and feeling. He says:
+
+    “Chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself
+    is feeling.”
+
+The primordial chance, the existence of which, according to Mr. Peirce,
+“calls for no explanation,” has “a primordial habit-taking tendency.”
+Whence this tendency gets into the universe of absolute chance, Mr.
+Peirce is unable to disclose. The deviations from the mechanical order
+in the present course of things, which, by the by, are by no means
+proved, suggest to him and justify, in his opinion, this assumption.
+Thus, assumes he, primordial chance ceased to be chance; it changed by
+a gradual habit-taking into regularities. Consciousness ceased to be
+consciousness and became crystallised into natural laws. Mind ceased to
+be an arbitrary sporting, and by becoming effete it begot, through a
+summation of minute effects, this material universe of ours. Accordingly,
+real existence or thing-ness consists merely in the regularities thus
+produced, and “physical events are but the degraded ... forms of
+psychical events.”
+
+This is in brief Mr. Peirce’s cosmogony, which, as the prophet of
+Tychism, he reveals to us in axiomatic aphorisms.
+
+By gradual habit-taking, Mr. Peirce declares (_The Monist_, Vol. I,
+No. 2, p. 176), mind will at last be “crystallised in the infinitely
+distant future.” This rather sad outlook is, in another passage, modified
+by a counter-oracle, which announces that “an element of pure chance
+survives.” Why, he does not say. Irregularities, not being entirely
+suppressed, can increase again, and as such they are “undeveloped forms
+of psychical events.” Says Mr. Peirce (_The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p.
+18):
+
+    “There are almost insensible fortuitous departures from
+    regularity; these will produce, in general, equally minute
+    effects.... Protoplasm is in an excessively unstable
+    condition.... In the protoplasm these habits are to some slight
+    extent broken up, so that, according to the law of mind, ...
+    feeling becomes intensified.
+
+    “This breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity
+    will, according to the law of mind, be accompanied by an
+    intensification of feeling.”
+
+This is the gist of Mr. Peirce’s mental philosophy, which proclaims that
+“consciousness is not to be reinstated without tychism.” The reappearance
+of chance is said to explain the origin of mind!
+
+Our conception of mind is different. We see mind develop out of sentiency
+by the recognition of the regularities of the surrounding world. Reason
+is almost a synonym of man’s ability to form generalisations, of his
+having and operating with concepts, of his thinking ideas. Not the
+arbitrariness of a wilful mind is the properly mental of man’s soul,
+but his reason; and man’s reason originates under the influence of the
+uniformities of the surrounding world, which impress themselves, in what
+we call experience, upon his existence. The more a creature recognises
+the regularities of existence, and the more its soul becomes an image of
+this world-order, which is the prototype of his reason, of the divine
+Logos, the higher it rises in the scale of evolution.
+
+If chance, as Mr. Peirce declares, is but the outward aspect of that
+which within is feeling, we should henceforth have to look upon the
+roulette and dice as sentient beings.
+
+
+3. THE FOUR POSITIVE ARGUMENTS OF TYCHISM INSUFFICIENT.
+
+Mr. Peirce adduces four positive arguments for believing in absolute
+chance. They are: (1) the prevalence of growth; (2) the variety of the
+universe; (3) the necessity of explaining law; and (4) the existence of
+feeling.
+
+By growth, Mr. Peirce does not understand the growth of crystals, or
+trees, or organisms. That kind of growth is a mere transformation.
+Mr. Peirce’s idea of “real” growth is “opposed to the conservation
+of energy.” It is not an increase of the thing growing through the
+assimilation of substances taken from the surrounding world; it is an
+actual increase of energy, not a mere change; it is a growth of the
+universe itself. Granted the possibility of this so-called “real” growth,
+and we can easily explain the evolution of the world out of the tiniest
+beginning. But, of course, one thing has to go: either the conservation
+of energy or “real growth.” Mr. Peirce lets go the former, I the
+latter.[135]
+
+The variety of the universe is, in my world-conception, sufficiently
+explained by the variety of forms, for form is indeed the _principium
+individuationis_; a doctrine, which, but for Mr. Peirce’s philosophy,
+I should regard as almost universally accepted. Among its advocates we
+find also Mr. Peirce’s great master, Duns Scotus, and Scotus’s teacher,
+Avicebron. In so far as various formations are possible, (exactly as the
+die can show six different surfaces,) chance plays an important part in
+the diversification of nature, but this chance is not to be thought of as
+a violation of the law, but appears to be a special case only, and a true
+manifestation of the law under complicated conditions.
+
+Chance and probability are not mere subjective ideas, creatures of our
+ignorance, playing a rôle simply in our limited knowledge of the world.
+The words signify a certain condition of objective existence.
+
+For instance, the probability of throwing 1 with one die is 1/6.
+This means, the die is so constructed that it can show six different
+positions, one among them being 1; and these six possibilities are as
+real a quality of the die, as its weight or its color.
+
+The die has six possible positions. Now I take a die and throw 3. Are we
+not entitled to believe that the throw was sufficiently determined by all
+the innumerable conditions which accompany the act? We confidently think
+so, and feel no need of assuming any absolute chance. Now I throw again.
+What is now the probability of throwing 1? We answer again, 1/6. And, lo!
+there it is! It came at the second throw, and we ask, was our statement
+of the probabilities wrong? We say, no! it was not wrong, for it remains
+true even now. The statement does not mean that we shall throw a 1 at
+each sixth throw, but that (supposing the die to be perfect) 1/6 among
+all the possible throws will be 1, so that supposing all the possible
+throws realised in an infinite series of throws, the average number of
+1’s among them will be the one-sixth part of the whole.
+
+The enormous importance of chance (viz., of that real chance which is
+no violation of the law) has been recognised since Democritus and has
+received a fresh illustration from the investigations of Darwin, which I
+need not here recapitulate.
+
+The theory of probabilities teaches, that whatever can happen in the long
+course of an infinite number of events, actually will happen, and that
+whatever, according to the nature of things, has a greater probability,
+will in an infinite number of cases occur with proportionately greater
+frequency.
+
+The lesson which we have to draw from this statement is, that that which
+we wish not to happen, should be made impossible. And this can be done,
+perhaps not perfectly, but approximately. According to Mr. Peirce, the
+evolution of mind is due to the reappearance of chance; we say that the
+evolution of mind is marked by man’s increasing power in the restriction
+of chance.
+
+The identification of chance with feeling, or even with mind, is to me an
+idea so grotesque, that I am inclined to regard it as a relic of gnostic
+speculations.
+
+Mr. Peirce, instead of attempting to comprehend laws, as we do, seeks to
+trace their origin. He tries to explain their existence by growth, as if
+they were beings that evolve like the forms of planetary systems or the
+organisms of living creatures. Considering the fact that Mr. Peirce is a
+realist only in name, and that his philosophy is soaked with nominalistic
+traditions, we should say (and Mr. Peirce will pardon me that I quote the
+expression from him) that:
+
+    “The puzzle for him is simply the usual difficulty that plagues
+    nominalism when it finds itself confronted with a reality which
+    has an element of generality.”
+
+The assumption of absolute chance might be used to account for any
+otherwise inexplicable event, but Mr. Peirce does not countenance this
+idea. He warns us to be cautious in its use, like the druggist who labels
+his poisons “handle with care”; “I only use chance,” he says, “to give
+room for the development of law.” Having used absolute chance to start
+the world with, he dismisses it. So Fiesco discharges his negro after he
+has done his work: “_Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit gethan, der Mohr
+kann gehen_.”
+
+In my criticism of Mr. Peirce’s theory I said (_The Monist_, II, p. 574):
+
+    “How little, after all, we can escape the determinism of law as
+    being a feature of the world, will be seen from the fact that
+    the explanation for the evolution of law is presented by Mr.
+    Peirce as being itself a law, i. e., a formula describing a
+    regularity supposed to obtain in facts.”
+
+Mr. Peirce replies:
+
+    “Is there no difference between a law, the essence of which
+    is to be inviolable ... and _that mental law, the violation
+    of which is so included in the essence that unless it were
+    violated, it would cease to exist_?... Thus I clearly escape
+    the contradiction attributed to me.” (P. 561.)
+
+Mr. Peirce’s escape is like the disappearance of a medium from a room
+without doors. He must have got out through the fourth dimension. The
+argument is so subtle that I cannot see it, and I feel tempted to retort
+in a sentence quoted from my profound adversary:
+
+    “I confess, I can find only words without ideas in the
+    objection.” (P. 561.)
+
+Mr. Peirce speaks of law as having developed out of chance, but he
+himself, in fact, after a fashion, explains the origin of those laws of
+nature which represent its present uniformities by a law of habit-taking.
+
+That the conservation of energy should leave no room for feeling is
+to me an obscure proposition. The law of the conservation of energy
+declares only that the sum of all energy in the world, potential as well
+as kinetic, remains constant. If a living and feeling being renews its
+waste and stores up new energy in its tissues, it must take it out of the
+general storehouse of nature; it must transform it, and cannot produce it
+out of nothing. Why should feeling become impossible, if the conservation
+of energy is true?
+
+The identification of chance with feeling is, to my mind, a vagary. It is
+true that feeling develops mind; mind makes deliberation possible, and
+deliberation implies choice. But choice is not chance. The choice which
+a man makes is determined by his character. There is more resemblance
+between logical identity and a pun, than between feeling and chance.
+
+
+4. THE NEGATIVE ARGUMENT A LOGICAL FALLACY.
+
+The four positive arguments for believing in absolute chance are
+untenable. But Mr. Peirce, knowing that he had to weather a storm of
+criticisms, has taken along a sheet-anchor, consisting of a negative
+argument, which, if it were true, would make the four positive arguments
+redundant.
+
+What shall we say to the statement, that chance need not be explained?
+Mr. Peirce says:
+
+    “Chance, according to me, or irregularity—that is, the absence
+    of any coincidence,—calls for no explanation. If _law_ calls
+    for explanation, as Dr. Carus admits it does, surely the
+    mere absence of law calls for no further explanation than is
+    afforded by the mere absence of any particular circumstance
+    necessitating the result.” (P. 559.)
+
+Mr. Peirce is a great logician, but the logical arguments of his
+philosophy are not sound. If the absence of law, of coincidences, of
+regularities, did not require explanation, the scientist would (as is
+but right) still have to explain the uniformities of nature, but the
+miracle monger would have a good time; for he could tell us boldly that,
+according to the rules of modern logic he is not bound to give any
+explanation.
+
+It is true that while everything must be explained, the absence of
+everything (i. e. nothing) need not be explained; but we cannot use
+this pattern as a schedule which can be filled out at our pleasure. The
+ideas “absence of,” “no,” “no one,” and “nothing” play a part in logic
+analogous to that of zero in mathematics. I need hardly remind the
+reader of the puzzling demonstration, that since one cat has one tail
+more than _no_ cat, and since no cat has eight tails, one cat must have
+nine tails. Operations with zero act like death in the realm of human
+conventionalities. Death makes the beggar equal to the king. Multiply any
+equation that is wrong with zero, and it will be correct. Operations with
+zero render the impossible possible.
+
+But let us look closer at Mr. Peirce’s proposition. He avers that “the
+mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating the result
+calls for no explanation.”
+
+Should it ever happen that the absence of any particular circumstance
+necessitates the result, I do not see why this absence should remain
+unexplained. Say for instance, a certain stronghold is taken because the
+enemy discovers the absence of guards in a certain part of the walls. If
+this absence of guards be counted as an important circumstance helpful
+in the conquest of the citadel (and there is no reason why we should not
+count it as such) can we say that while the presence of guards on all
+other spots of the wall has to be and can be explained as an endeavor to
+secure the place against a _coup de main_, the mere absence of guards
+calls for no explanation? The absence of guards in a particular spot
+of the Capitol during the siege by the Gauls, was accounted for by the
+steepness of the place. This particular spot was regarded as safe on
+account of its inaccessibility. Similarly, the absence of guards in the
+citadel of the Messenians is explained by the idea that the Spartans
+would make no attack because in that particularly stormy night a
+cloudburst seemed to prevent all approach.
+
+Obviously the necessity of explaining a rule, does not confer the
+privilege of neglecting to explain its exceptions.
+
+It goes without saying that Mr. Peirce’s argument (even if it were
+formally faultless) can have no force with a necessitarian. Such
+a one, after having explained and proved to his satisfaction that
+_Gesetzmässigkeit_ (or regularity such as can be formulated in laws) is a
+characteristic feature of the universe, is not only asked to believe that
+there are after all exceptions to law, but is even told that according to
+some paragraph in Mr. Peirce’s unwritten logic of relatives no further
+argument is needed to prove the non-existence of law. Only Mr. Peirce’s
+extreme love of his pet theories can make him blind to such palpable
+fallacies. But such are the foundations of his philosophical architecture.
+
+
+III. MR. PEIRCE AS A CRITIC.
+
+A good general, who has to mask the weak points of his position, uses
+the strategem of making demonstrative sallies upon his enemy. Mr.
+Peirce, although apparently quite unconscious of the fact that his basic
+doctrines are untenable, instinctively imitates this maxim of warfare.
+His defence is mostly aggressive. Instead of replying to my arguments he
+endeavors to represent my views as incohesive and contradictory.
+
+The present issue is not whether my views are tenable, but whether Mr.
+Peirce’s are. However, I am glad to have the benefit of the searching
+criticism of so subtle a thinker as Mr. Peirce. Therefore, I willingly
+appear before his tribunal to expurgate myself of his charges.
+
+
+1. THE A PRIORI AND POSITIVISM.
+
+Mr. Peirce is greatly puzzled with my position. He quotes several
+statements of mine which appear to him contradictory. I said: (1) that
+millions of _single_ experiences cannot establish a belief in necessity,
+(2) that necessitarianism must be founded upon the _a priori_, and (3)
+that the _a priori_ must be founded upon experience.[136] To him who
+overlooks the here italicised word “single” this may, indeed, seem to be
+a vicious circle.
+
+All knowledge begins with experience. We define experience as the effects
+of events upon sentient beings, and these effects are sense-impressions
+of certain forms and interrelations. At an advanced stage of evolution,
+the formal and relational are first unconsciously, as, for instance, in
+counting, and then consciously, with scientific deliberation, abstracted
+from the sensory. Systems of pure forms are constructed out of the purely
+formal elements, thus gained from experience by abstraction, such as
+our system of numbers and the logical categories. Now the laws of these
+forms of thought are applicable to all formal and relational conditions
+of reality. The formal and relational of reality are known to us even
+in those regions of the universe and in those provinces of scientific
+investigation which have not as yet been explored. The scientist knows
+them _a priori_, even before he investigates objects which he never saw
+before. He is acquainted with certain of their qualities, viz., with the
+laws of their formal and relational conditions.
+
+Thus the _a priori_, or, as I prefer to call it, formal thought, is a
+product of experience, and is again applicable to experience.
+
+Single experiences, isolated observations, innumerable particular cases
+cannot directly yield or reveal the laws of formal thought. So long as
+they remain single and isolated they will never develop into mental
+factors; but such is the nature of reality that the single experiences
+will be built up and arranged in feeling substance as systematically
+as, for instance, the formation of crystals or the harmonious growth of
+cells in organisms? When sentient creatures become conscious not only
+of the sensory element of their experience, but also of this system of
+their soul, of the formal of their psychical existence, they become
+rational beings; and the formal which grows with their sentiency is not
+an exclusive and peculiar quality of theirs; it is not purely subjective,
+but it has been imparted to them, piecemeal, together with the single
+data of their experience. It constitutes a part of their _Anschauung_; it
+is found in the objective world and is a general feature of reality.
+
+Out of the formal elements of our _Anschauungen_, of the facts of
+experience, that organ of cognition is developed which Kant calls “pure
+reason.”
+
+Experience is often used to denote sense-experience only; thus Kant
+contrasts experience or sense-perception, which he calls _a posteriori_,
+with pure reason and formal thought, which he calls _a priori_. We use
+experience in the sense defined above, _so as to include the formal
+element_.
+
+I am unable to form a clear conception of Mr. Peirce’s view of the _a
+priori_. Those systems of formal thought which I regard as constructions
+he regards as products of analysis. He says, “They are results dependent
+upon the action of reason in the depths of our own consciousness.” He
+only grants that “their abstract and distinct formulation comes very
+late.” He still holds that the _a priori_ is innate.
+
+In my conception, mathematical ideas, like that of the contrivance of
+logarithms, are inventions; and they are constructions as much as the
+invention of the steam-engine by James Watt.
+
+There is one peculiarity about the purely formal which is not found in
+the sensory elements of experience. Our knowledge of the various spheres
+of the purely formal is of a general nature; it applies to any form of
+the same kind. This gives system to our formal conceptions, and enables
+us to make statements which are rigidly and unequivocally determined. It
+is this quality which makes them available as an organ of cognition when
+dealing with facts of experience. They furnish us with methods, schedules
+of reference, and plans which like blanks have to be filled out.
+
+Science begins with the application of formal thought, viz., with
+counting, measuring, and classifying. Only with the assistance of the
+formal sciences can we master the material of the sensory data of
+experience; and thus it happens that the formal is the condition, not of
+any kind of experience, but of every systematic experience.
+
+The formal sciences are the tools of cognition. That to which they cannot
+be applied remains unexplained, and this is the ultimate reason why
+processes of nature can be regarded as explained only when recognised as
+processes of transformation. Cognition is the tracing of form. We can
+understand a change only if it is a change of form. We cannot understand
+how anything real can disappear into, or originate out of, nothing. We
+have no explanation for any actual increase or decrease either of matter
+or energy. Whenever we see something entirely new we regard it as a new
+combination, the elements of which existed before.
+
+If there were processes in the universe which could positively be proved
+not to be transformations we should be confronted with an unfathomable
+mystery; and it is a matter of course that we must not be duped so easily
+by the appearance of problems which cannot be solved at first sight. The
+advance of science which has resolved so many mysterious phenomena into
+plain instances of transformation gives us confidence that this method
+is the only reliable maxim of inquiry. It has helped us so far, and it
+will help us in the future.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I call my views positivism, because like the French positivists and also
+like Locke and his school I maintain that all knowledge is to be derived
+from the positive facts of experience. But my positivism is not of the
+old kind; it is neither sensationalism nor materialism nor Comtism. It is
+a new positivism broadened by a study of Kantian philosophy and Kant’s
+problem of the _a priori_; and this new positivism, I hope, deserves the
+attention of the thinkers of mankind.
+
+Mr. Peirce calls it a “straddling of the question,” by which he means
+that a man is “on both sides of the fence,” and has learned so to
+formulate the issues, “that both parties can readily subscribe to his
+propositions.”
+
+
+2. DETERMINISM AND FATALISM.
+
+Fatalism and determinism must not be confounded. We define determinism
+as that view, according to which every event is determined by its
+conditions. The decision of a man whose liberty is not curtailed by any
+compulsion, so that he can act as he pleases exactly in agreement with
+his character, is determined objectively by the motive and subjectively
+by his character. A man of a certain character in a given situation will
+act in a way that is perfectly determinable.
+
+Determinism, as I take it, does not exclude free-will. Nor does it
+exclude such chance as is, for instance, the incidental turning up of the
+various faces of a die.
+
+Determinism is the basis of science, and also of ethics as a science. If
+the decision of a free will were merely the result of chance, why should
+our teachers and preachers take so much trouble to form character?
+
+While determinism is a sound doctrine, fatalism is a superstition.
+Fatalism excludes the idea of free will. We define fatalism as that view
+which regards the fate of a man, whatsoever he may do, as fixed. For
+instance, we call the orthodox Mohammedan a fatalist; he looks at the
+flame without quenching it, because he argues, “if it is Allah’s will
+that my house burn down, it will burn down, whatever I may do.”
+
+In my reply to Mr. Peirce (_The Monist_, Vol. II, p. 572) I approvingly
+quoted from him a passage containing the word “fate,” adding that here
+“the word ‘fate’ must be understood as Mr. Peirce understands it.” In
+spite of this warning, Mr. Peirce employs this quotation made from _his_
+writings as if it were mine, and calls attention to the inconsistency
+involved in the different application of the word. This charge of
+inconsistency is neither judicious nor fair!
+
+We define “necessary” as “that which is determined.”
+
+Determined means describable. Necessity is that feature of things which
+makes it possible that we can, in proportion to our knowledge, describe
+beforehand or predict the course of events.
+
+Kant’s definition of “necessary,” as given in his “Critique of Pure
+Reason,” is narrower. He says:
+
+    “That the coherence of which with the real is determined
+    according to universal conditions of experience is necessary,
+    or exists necessarily.”
+
+This means in our phraseology, “that feature of the real which is
+determined by the laws of form.”
+
+The word “determinism” has been inappropriately used in the sense of
+fatalism, in which sense it has to be condemned as a superstition.
+The term is needed, however, to denote a basic principle of great
+value. “Determinism,” if used in the sense which the word literally
+indicates, means “that view which regards all events as determined by its
+conditions.” Determinism does not mean that everything is decreed by some
+fate, that some Deity or other power has determined the course of events.
+It means that definite conditions produce definite results, and that the
+results can be ascertained and described, if _all_ the conditions are
+known.
+
+Fatalism is a peculiar kind of determinism, and, indeed, an obviously
+erroneous one. Fatalism rests upon a dualistic conception, regarding
+necessity as a foreign force residing outside and above things and
+compelling them to act in a special way. It is the Moira of the ancients
+and the Kismet of the Mohammedans. The monistic view knows nothing of
+a foreign force or supermundane _fatum_ enacting a special course
+of affairs. Necessity, in the monistic conception, simply denotes
+the determinedness of results by its conditions; it signifies that
+_Gesetzmässigkeit_, or regularity according to law, is a feature of
+reality. We need not repeat again that the monistic view of determinism
+excludes neither chance nor free-will. It only excludes “absolute” chance
+and that indeterminable arbitrariness which is sometimes said to be
+free-will.
+
+If events were not determined, if under the very same conditions the
+same causes could bring about different results, so that no regularities
+formulable in laws existed, the world would be a chaos and no cosmos,
+absolute chance would prevail, and science would be impossible.
+
+Mr. Peirce not only confounds fate and necessity, but he also identifies
+them with resistance, and with reality. My idea of necessity has as
+little to do with the experience of, reaction as, for instance, with
+the idea of density, or with pleasure and pain. To confound such
+heterogeneous concepts must be productive of confusion. No wonder that
+Mr. Peirce makes the confession that these ideas seem to him “of a mixed
+nature.”
+
+That my presentation of the case of Determinism _versus_ Free-will
+results in “a doctrine to which the advocates of free-will will generally
+subscribe as readily as their opponents,” is used as a reproach; but I do
+not take it as such, for my intention is not to side with one party, but
+to bring out the truth of both views.
+
+
+3. NATURAL LAWS, DESCRIPTIONS.
+
+Mr. Peirce makes the following allegation of inconsistency. He says of me:
+
+    “The declaration (§ 198) that ‘natural laws are simply a
+    description of nature as nature is,’ and that ‘the facts of
+    nature express the character of nature,’ are nominalistic. But
+    in another place (107-116) he says distinctly that uniformities
+    are real.” (P. 531.)
+
+I am unable to detect any inconsistency in these expressions. The gist of
+these three statements is this: the formulas usually called natural laws
+describe certain uniformities of reality.
+
+The expression “description of nature” is by no means nominalistic. If
+law is said to be a description, it is not a mere name, but presupposes
+the existence of some objective reality for the description of which it
+has been formulated.
+
+
+4. CAUSATION.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s usage of the word “cause” is very unsettled. He says (p.
+538):
+
+    “The original idea of an efficient cause is that of an agent,
+    more or less like man.”
+
+The original idea of “cause” is the struggle of reaching an end or
+bringing about a certain state of things. The Latin _causa_ means “a
+lawsuit.”
+
+In a similar way, the German _Ursache_ does not mean the original thing,
+but a “seeking.” _Sache_ is the English _sake_ and Gothic _sakjô_,
+meaning “struggle,” or “quarrel.” It is derived from the same root as the
+verb “to seek.”
+
+Like _causa_, the word _Ursache_ was used as a legal term.
+
+Mr. Peirce further states:
+
+    “The modern mechanical conception, on the other hand, is
+    that the relative positions of particles determine their
+    accelerations at the instants when they occupy those
+    positions.” (P. 538.)
+
+    “In dynamics, it is the fixed force, gravitation, or whatever
+    else, together with those relative positions of the bodies that
+    determine the intensity and direction of the forces, that is
+    regarded as the cause.” (P. 540.)
+
+    “The practice which I endeavor to follow in regard to the
+    word _cause_ is, to use it in the Aristotelian sense of an
+    _efficient cause_ in all its crudeness.” (P. 541.)
+
+    “When my idea is a more general and logical one, I prefer to
+    speak of the explanation.” (P. 541.)
+
+No wonder that some causes are prior to their effects, others
+simultaneous, and that effects may even be prior to their causes! Using
+the word in various senses, Mr. Peirce becomes so entangled about
+causation, that in mustering the ideas force, position, reason, law,
+cause, and explanation, he no longer knows which is which.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mr. Peirce being unable to bring any consistency into the usage of the
+term “cause,” drops it entirely as a philosophical word. This is Dr.
+Ironbeard’s method, who kills his patient to save him pain.
+
+There was a time when I felt inclined to follow that plan of dealing
+with words in this predicament. But I found out very soon that there is
+not one difficult word in philosophical language which is not or was not
+at some time or other almost universally maltreated by the professional
+thinkers of mankind. What, then, is to be done? Shall we eradicate all
+old terms that are erroneously used and create a philosophical Volapük,
+which will have the advantage of being unincumbered with the errors of a
+long historical inheritance, but the disadvantage of being nowhere spoken
+and nowhere understood, except by its inventors?
+
+Dr. Ironbeard’s method of dealing with terms is radical. It imitates the
+method of the social reformers who, on finding something wrong in society
+generally, propose to tear down the entire social structure, and begin
+the world over again from its beginning.
+
+Most of the terms which have been in use for centuries and even
+millenniums, I have found to correspond to a special want of expressing
+some definite reality or constant group of realities or important
+relation among realities. The misuse of different words almost invariably
+has its origin in a consideration of the name alone, to the neglect
+of the reality denoted by the name. And misuses can be mended only by
+carefully investigating the realities themselves for the denotation of
+which the words have been invented. If we were to make a clean sweep
+of the “superstitions,” soul, God, cause, natural law, etc., because
+in many minds there are superstitious notions connected with these
+ideas, we should soon have to invent new terms for the realities which
+necessitated the formation of the old ones. The great bulk of religious
+and philosophical words originated because in each case there was an
+actual want of a phrase to denote some specific reality. The errors of
+the various terms arise because our ideas concerning the nature of these
+realities have not as yet been matured, and it is the office of the
+philosopher to contribute his mite toward their clarification.
+
+Causation, in my conception, is transformation. Take any system of
+conditions and let it somehow be changed. The event which starts the
+change is called the cause, the new configuration produced, the effect.
+The various factors of the system are the conditions or circumstances.
+
+Taking this view, I _do not say_ that the effect is the cause
+transformed. The total effect is the cause plus all the circumstances
+transformed. The effect is something radically different from the cause.
+The cause is always an event, that is a motion of some kind; the effect,
+a new arrangement, a new formation, a new state of things, or perhaps the
+dissolution of an old state of things.
+
+While cause and effect are different, the whole process of causation,
+including cause, circumstances, and effect, is to be viewed as one
+fact, or, rather, as one system of facts; and a process of causation is
+explained, (as we have seen above) as soon as it is so described that we
+recognise it as a transformation.[137]
+
+There is a popular usage which calls the cause of the falling stone
+gravitation. This kind of cause is not an event, not a motion, but a law
+of nature, and I prefer to call it “the reason” for the stone’s fall.
+
+Mr. Peirce defines a reason as follows:
+
+    “A reason, in one sense, is the replacement of a
+    multiple-subject of an observational proposition by a general
+    subject, which by the very conditions of the special experience
+    is predicable of the multiple subject.” (P. 558.)
+
+This somewhat stilted definition seems upon the whole to agree with what
+I also call “a reason.” All the reasons by which we comprehend nature are
+formulated in statements which describe those general features of reality
+which we call “laws of nature.”
+
+Who does not see that causes (i. e., events which produce effects) and
+reasons (i. e., the formulas by which we comprehend the uniformities of
+nature) are two radically different ideas, and who can deny that the
+denotation of these two radically different ideas, by one and the same
+term, must and actually does bring about lamentable confusion in the
+minds of philosophers! Accordingly, let us call them by different names;
+never mind what we call them, but let us distinguish them. I regard the
+usage stated here as the most appropriate. We call “the cause” of the
+stone’s fall that event which removed its support; but when we inquire
+after the reason why the stone falls, we want to know the law of nature
+which describes in a general formula that quality of stones which makes
+them fall.
+
+
+5. THE FUTURE IN MENTAL CAUSATION.
+
+It seems as if some evil genius had caused Mr. Peirce to cross my
+position everywhere, even where I should expect to find him in perfect
+agreement.
+
+Concerning mental and mechanical causation he first startles me with an
+italicised proposition which declares:
+
+    “_There is no mechanical truth in saying that the past
+    determines the future rather than the future the past._” (P.
+    539.)
+
+Mr. Peirce apparently intends to discredit the belief that the past
+determines the future. He adds:
+
+    “We continue, for convenience, to talk of mechanical phenomena
+    as if they were regulated, in the same manner in which our
+    intentions regulate our actions, (which is essentially a
+    determination of the future by the past,) although we are quite
+    aware that it is not really so.” (P. 539.)
+
+In other words, Mr. Peirce contends that our view of mechanical causation
+is based upon an analogy with mental causation; the latter being a
+determination of the future by the past, we conclude that the former is
+regulated in the same manner.
+
+This is an old error which rests on the supposition that cognition begins
+with introspection or self-knowledge. The truth is that all cognition
+begins with objective observation.
+
+We have to say, (1) that man’s view of mechanical causation has not been
+fashioned after the model of mental causation, and (2) that the future
+actually enters as a factor in mental causation. We do not believe that
+the future determines the past, but it does determine the present.
+
+Should we judge of the causation of mechanical motions from our own
+mental experience, we should certainly reach other conclusions than we
+do, for the most characteristic feature of mental causation, that which
+essentially distinguishes it from mechanical causation, is the fact that
+the future actually enters into it as the main factor.
+
+We as rational beings, and the lower animals also on a smaller scale,
+do know to some extent the future. We know by experience the effects of
+certain actions. This fact of the future’s being partly known, makes
+it possible for the future to enter as a factor in mental causation.
+I go so far as to maintain that there is no mental causation except
+some consideration of the future be contained in the motive cause. The
+presence of a plan, of an end kept in view, of an aim to be reached
+in the future, is exactly what distinguishes the purposive action of
+thinking beings from mechanical events.
+
+
+6. MENTAL CAUSATION.
+
+Mr. Peirce has discovered in my expositions of mechanical and mental
+action what he believes to be a flagrant contradiction, and, as if
+it were the exhibition of my scalp, displays it triumphantly (§ 27)
+in capitals and italics. “No objection can be made,” I said, “to the
+possibility of explaining the motions ... of the brain by the laws of
+molar and molecular mechanics.” And “yet the simplest psychical reflexes
+cannot be explained from mechanical or physical laws alone.”
+
+Is this really a contradiction, or is it Mr. Peirce’s inability to
+discover the agreement between the two statements? Let us see.
+
+Take a little toy fish of tin with a small iron rod in its snout,
+floating in the water, and push the fish so that it shoots forward with
+a certain velocity in a straight line. Now take a magnet and hold it at
+a short distance from the prolonged path of the fish. The fish at once
+changes its course; it now describes a curve which according to the
+laws of mechanics is determined (omitting any other possible modifying
+circumstances) by the momentum of the push, the velocity of which is
+gradually diminished by the friction of the water, and the attraction of
+the magnet. These are the data, and from these data the motion of the
+fish is unequivocally determined by the laws of mechanics.
+
+Now, when we speak of the motion of the fish, we mean the motion, and
+not the iron rod, or the qualities of the iron rod, in its snout. While
+speaking of motion or the laws of motion, and while calculating the curve
+of a motion, our ideas move in a perfectly defined sphere of abstraction
+from which all other things and considerations are excluded. This method
+of abstraction which is the essence of human thought and also of that
+special kind of human thought called science, is the way by which alone
+we are enabled to arrive at clear distinctions and lucid explanations. We
+have to keep our various abstractions stored in an orderly manner in our
+mind, each one in a special box. If we do not distinguish the different
+spheres of abstraction and their limits, we shall soon confound all
+issues in a hopeless chaos.
+
+But we find, on further examination, that in this limitation of the
+description to the abstract sphere of pure motion only a part of
+the process before us is described. The description explains fully,
+exhaustively, and satisfactorily the mechanical aspect of the case, but
+it does not explain why the magnet attracts iron. The attraction of
+the magnet consists in the definite qualities of (1) the magnet, (2)
+the iron, and (3) the medium between them. When we inquire after an
+explanation of the physical qualities of things, we enter into another
+sphere of abstraction, viz., that of physics. That physics will have
+to be explained as a domain of molecular mechanics may be mentioned
+incidentally.
+
+Take another and simpler instance: the fall of a stone. The motion of
+the stone, its increasing velocity during the fall can be explained
+according to the laws of mechanics; but that quality of the stone called
+gravity, which is the reason of its fall, cannot be deduced from the laws
+of mechanics. The gravity of a mass is treated in mechanics as the given
+fact or datum, an investigation into the nature of which is excluded from
+the sphere of mechanics. He who demands of mechanics an explanation of
+gravity searches in the wrong box.
+
+When we come to the investigation of psychical phenomena, we strike a
+feature which is entirely absent in mechanics, physics, and chemistry.
+It is the appearance of feeling. Feelings vary according to the various
+impressions made by surrounding objects. The same objects making the
+same impressions, special kinds of feelings come to stand for or to
+represent their respective kinds of objects, and thus feelings acquire
+meaning, feelings become ideas. This peculiarity of sentiency, that it
+has acquired meaning, is the characteristic feature of “mind.”
+
+When speaking of mind I refer to all those phenomena of meaning-freighted
+feelings which ensoul thinking beings; and the domain of psychology is
+thus again quite a distinct domain of abstraction.
+
+Now let us return to the contradiction of which Mr. Peirce accuses me.
+
+An idea which physiologically considered is a special brain-structure or
+combination of brain-structures, reacts upon a given stimulus, which, let
+us say, is the sound of a certain word. The word is a sound-symbol and
+the word possesses a certain meaning. The word spoken having the same
+meaning as a special idea that is thought, while its brain-structure is
+agitated, possesses a quality comparable to chemical affinities. This
+peculiar word will serve as a stimulus for this peculiar idea. It will
+not (at least not directly) stimulate other ideas—as little as a chemical
+that has no affinity for the ingredients of another chemical will cause a
+reaction. Why the motion takes place calls for a psychical explanation,
+but the motion itself takes place in strict accord with the laws of
+mechanics.
+
+But are not the laws of mechanics annulled by the laws of physics, and
+those of physiology by the laws of psychology?
+
+No, they are not annulled, but modified.
+
+A piece of iron that falls to the ground with the same velocity as a
+stone of equal weight will be held up by a magnet strong enough to hold
+it. This is not an annulment of the gravity of the iron; it is not a
+reversion of the law of gravitation; gravitation holds in this case as
+good as in any other. It is only a modification and a complication. We
+must remember that the law of gravity does not say, the non-supported
+piece of iron or stone will drop, it says that all bodies are attracted
+by the earth with a definite force depending upon their mass and
+position. And this attraction takes place in our example; the iron
+supported by the magnet retains all its inherent gravity, which is
+constantly asserting itself, although counteracted by the force of the
+attraction of the magnet.
+
+Since the mechanical, chemical, psychical, etc. qualities represent
+reality in various abstract aspects, we should know that there are no
+purely mechanical, no purely chemical, no purely psychical phenomena.
+Every real phenomenon, i. e. the original whole from which the
+abstractions have been made, presents a complex state of things of which
+many various aspects can and must be taken.
+
+I repeat now without fear of contradiction or miscomprehension,
+that brain-motions are perfectly explainable by the laws of molar
+and molecular mechanics, while psychical reflexes, not being purely
+mechanical processes, cannot be explained by mechanical laws. The
+properly psychical and the properly mental are other elements of an
+entirely different nature from the mechanical and the physical. They
+belong to a radically different sphere of abstraction. He who tries to
+explain the psychical by the mechanical, looks for his explanation in the
+wrong box. And he who regards the proposition that the mechanical laws
+hold good for all motions without any exception, but that they cannot be
+called upon to explain that which is not motion, as a contradiction, has
+not as yet learned practically to apply the method of abstraction.
+
+It is strange that we have to give this little lesson in the elements
+of abstraction lore to so prominent a logician as Mr. Peirce. We feel
+inclined to exclaim: “Art thou a master of Israel and knowest not these
+things?”
+
+
+STRAY SHOTS.
+
+There are a number of incidental comments aimed at scattered points of
+my position. I call them “stray shots”; they have exploded without harm.
+While going over the battle-field I shall pick them up and will throw
+some of them back into Mr. Peirce’s camp, whence they came.
+
+Mr. Peirce is in the habit of calling every approach to his views “deep,”
+while divergencies are branded as “shallow.”—
+
+Hume’s scepticism is called Leibnitz’s principle, by which latter Mr.
+Peirce apparently means that innumerable single cases of experience
+alone do not constitute certainty. Why Mr. Peirce demands that Hume’s
+conclusion which Leibnitz never would have countenanced, should be
+identified with Leibnitz’s principle from which it is derived is not
+apparent.—
+
+How easily Mr. Peirce changes his opinion! Venn’s “Logic of Chance,”
+which Mr. Peirce so much admired formerly, has become “a blundering
+little book.”—
+
+Synechism and agapasticism, viz., the principle of continuity and the
+idea of love as main factors of evolution are nothing new. I have
+always defended them, although not in the peculiar way that Mr. Peirce
+does.[138] In his article “Evolutionary Love” he appears to me unjust
+toward Darwin. I do not think that I should improve my propositions,
+which are in their way synechistic as well as agapastic, by adopting
+either Mr. Peirce’s terms or his presentation of these principles.—
+
+Mr. Peirce says, he does not doubt that my idea of mental causation was
+intended to be an improvement on his molecular theory of protoplasm. I
+can assure Mr. Peirce that I had no such intentions. I held my view long
+before I ever had a chance of knowing Mr. Peirce’s molecular theory of
+protoplasm. Moreover, I am unable to discover any similarity between his
+views and mine.—
+
+I took pains to explain that, if we disregard the notion of form, every
+transformation, that is, every case of causation, will appear as a most
+miraculous and inexplicable event. To illustrate my view I said that
+“_supposing we had no idea of the laws of form or only an incoherent and
+fragmentary knowledge of them_,” it would be “a very wonderful thing”
+that two congruent regular tetrahedrons when put together will form a
+hexahedron—a body which is something new. And I added to this statement,
+“_but the laws of form do perfectly and satisfactorily explain it_.”
+How great was my astonishment to see Mr. Peirce with great complacency
+take up the problem and explain it! Indeed, it is true. That the
+combination of two congruent regular tetrahedrons will make a hexahedron,
+is wonderful _only_ to him who does not understand the laws of form.
+Otherwise, it is not wonderful. I was amused at Mr. Peirce’s ingenuity to
+prove to me that it is a case of 8-2=6.—
+
+There is a difference between the combination of two tetrahedrons and
+of the atoms _H₂O_. Mr. Peirce tells me, that the one is ideal, the
+other real—“a difference which to his Scotistic mind is very important.”
+Did Mr. Peirce think, indeed, that I was not aware of this difference,
+or does he mean to establish a rule never to compare the relations as
+developed in the sciences of pure forms to the relations that obtain in
+reality?—
+
+Says Mr. Peirce in one passage, there is a difference between the ideal
+and the real, which to his Scotistic mind is very important. In another
+passage he declares that “the nominalist alone makes a sharp distinction
+between the abstract and the concrete.”—
+
+Mr. Peirce smiles at the endeavor of reconciling religion with science.
+For he thinks:
+
+    “It is a thing which will come to pass of itself when time is
+    ripe, and that our efforts to hasten it have just that slight
+    effect that our efforts to hasten the ripening of apples on a
+    tree may have.” (P. 545.)
+
+Mr. Peirce forgets that the religious fruits of the conciliation between
+religion and science are our own sentiments. He who says that man should
+be indifferent about working out the truth, on the plea that truth will
+take care of itself, is comparable to the apple-tree, that refuses to
+work out the ripening of the apples. The proposition to let religion and
+science work out their destinies, one of which is their mutual agreement,
+of themselves, is irreligious and also unscientific. Truth will not take
+care of itself if we do not strain all our efforts to find truth; and the
+kingdom of heaven will never come unless (as Christ taught, Matt. 11, 12)
+“it suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”—
+
+The same Mr. Peirce who says that our efforts to hasten the conciliation
+of religion with science are useless, believes in miracles and proposes a
+theory that prayer can work miracles.—
+
+Several philosophers, such as Locke and Hegel, have complained of the
+uselessness of the logical law of identity _A_ = _A_, and also of its
+barrenness for any practical purpose. The law of identity has been
+invented nevertheless, because there is a want for it; and this want, in
+my opinion, was felt because the statement of sameness (as set forth in
+_The Monist_, Vol. III, p. 70, et seqq.) is one of the most elementary
+and important forms of reasoning, being indispensable, for instance, in
+mathematics where it appears as equations. We may simply laugh at the old
+logicians
+
+    “Who whirl in narrow circling trails,
+    Like kittens playing with their tails.”
+
+We may impatiently discard the whole proceeding as empty talk, yet
+I submit that we had better try to understand the meaning of their
+unprofitable exertions and the drift of their apparently meaningless
+argumentations. If we regard the principle of absolute identity as the
+formula of sameness (in the sense explained in the quoted passage, _The
+Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 70, et seqq.) emptied of its contents we
+shall understand why logicians wasted so much energy on an entirely
+barren subject. We shall readily condone their mistakes in consideration
+of the importance of the subject. It is difficult to say how much we have
+profited by their blunders.—
+
+Mr. Peirce uses the terms analytical and synthetical in a new sense for
+reasons which he explains at greater length in his “Theory of Probable
+Inferences.” He says, “analytical reasoning depends upon associations
+of similarity; synthetical reasoning upon associations of contiguity.”
+I willingly grant to the scientist and the philosopher the liberty to
+change the historical meaning of terms if the traditional usage is
+not helpful in our dealings with the facts which they were invented to
+describe. However, we must not change a term without good and sufficient
+reasons. In the present case, I still prefer the traditional usage of the
+terms “analytical” and “synthetic.”—
+
+Mr. Peirce takes the liberty of changing terms for himself, but he
+resents it in others.—
+
+Mr. Peirce disapproves of the usage of the word “construction” in the
+sense of systems of formal thought, such as the decimal system, etc.,
+etc. “Because,” he says, “the word is imperatively required in the
+theory of cognition to denote a mathematical diagram framed according to
+a general precept.” On the strength of this argument we might as well
+disapprove of calling churches, mosques, houses, cottages, or any kind of
+edifice, “building,” because the word “building” is imperatively required
+to denote business-buildings.—
+
+Mr. Peirce says that according to my statement (in ¶ 163) “every element
+of compulsion is to be excluded from the conception of necessity.” Having
+never made such a statement, I looked up the passage, which is the last
+but one paragraph in _The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, page 86, and find
+that Mr. Peirce must have misread the sentence, “compulsion excludes
+free will, and necessity does not,” which, of course, has an entirely
+different meaning.—
+
+Mr. Peirce identifies evolution with real growth, regarding it as opposed
+to the law of the conservation of energy. He regards everything as a
+product of such growth, or _Erzeugung_, and adds, “I fancy it is this
+cautious reflectiveness of my procedure which especially displeases Dr.
+Carus.” Mr. Peirce does not use the word “bold.” He says, “cautious
+reflectiveness.”—
+
+I did not say that causation is to be explained from the law of the
+conservation of matter and energy. I said (_The Monist_, Vol. II, No.
+4, p. 566) that the law of the conservation of matter and energy throws
+light upon the problem of causation. The law of the conservation of
+matter and energy and the law of causation describe the same thing under
+two different aspects. If we understand the one, it will help us to
+understand the other.—
+
+Kant’s chapter on the Architectonic of Pure Reason is well known to me,
+but I think that Kant was possessed of a peculiar love of architectonic
+which has contributed not a little to rendering the system of his
+philosophy unnecessarily labyrinthine.—
+
+It is surprising to find a man whom I always regarded as a Kant scholar
+of first degree saying that “Kant makes space a necessary form of
+thought.” Now, as a matter of fact, Kant does not make space a form of
+_thought_, but of _Anschauung_ or intuition. We cannot understand Kant
+unless we understand this distinction.[139]—
+
+Kant conceives of causation as a necessary sequence. Mill, who objects to
+the idea of necessity, replaces Kant’s words “universal” and “necessary”
+by “invariable” and “unconditioned,” a substitution which was made with
+the outspoken intention of radically changing the meaning of the phrase.
+Mill’s terms are _not_ “more exact,” as Mr. Peirce says, but different.
+They are worse than less exact to a Kantian, and can appear more exact
+only to those who take Mill’s view, which is nominalistic. And this
+substitution of Mill’s is regarded by realistic Mr. Peirce as a mere
+“rewording of Kant’s definition”!—
+
+Mr. Peirce makes too much of the idea of “_Erzeugung_, which,” as he
+correctly says, “is Kant’s word for the sequence of effect from cause.”
+Yet Kant’s idea of _Erzeugung_ does not conflict with “the modern
+mechanical doctrine.” Kant says in that very same chapter, “_Aller
+Wechsel (Succession) der Erscheinungen ist nur Veränderung_,” i. e., “All
+change (succession) of phenomena is only transformation.” (!) Does not
+Mr. Peirce know that Kant calls every world-conception that stands in
+contradiction to the mechanical principle “a philosophy of indolence,” or
+“_faule Weltweisheit_”?—
+
+The same Kant who proposed a mechanical explanation of the evolution of
+the starry heavens, objected very strongly to that kind of explanations
+“which derive all order from chance”; and speaking of Epicurus’s
+“absolute chance”(!) he adds: “Epicurus was even so reckless (_so
+unverschämt_) as to demand that the atoms should deviate from their
+straight course without any cause.” Mr. Peirce has either overlooked in
+Kant these passages, or, if he has read them, he has never taken them to
+heart.—
+
+Mr. Peirce objects to my statement that according to his philosophy the
+domain of mind is characterised by absence of law. He argues: “Is not one
+of my papers entitled ‘The Law of Mind?’” Yet this law of mind, he states
+two lines further on, “requires its own violation.” (P. 552.)—
+
+The “sporting” of the primeval chance, Mr. Peirce says on page 552
+of this number, is “not undetermined and indeterminable,” because
+“its ultimate result must be an entire elimination of chance from the
+universe.” Shall we understand that the “arbitrary sporting” of the
+primeval chaos, with which Mr. Peirce (according to _The Monist_, Vol. I,
+No. 2, p. 175) begins his cosmogony, was determined? If absolute chance
+is determined, why not call such a philosophy “determined Indeterminism”?
+We try hard to understand Mr. Peirce, but sometimes we really have to
+give it up.—
+
+Physiology teaches that memory alone changes feeling into consciousness,
+but the consciousness of Mr. Peirce’s original Chance is without memory
+and habit.—
+
+Chance, a being living and conscious, has, according to Mr. Peirce,
+created the world, but the ultimate result of evolution must be an
+entire elimination of Chance from the universe. Thus it appears that the
+creation of the world is an act of divine suicide. The world-process is a
+slow degeneration of God, finally ending in his complete annihilation.
+
+
+RETROSPECT.
+
+In summing up the result of the whole battle, we find that there is not
+a single question on which we have to yield or even modify our position.
+Our position remains the same, while Mr. Peirce’s position has become
+glaringly untenable. There is one point, however, in which justice
+demands that we should recognise that he is right. I should not have
+called Hamilton “Mr.,” but “Sir William.” I can, however, assure Mr.
+Peirce that this mistake of mine (which in all my allusions to Hamilton
+occurs only once) was a mere slip of the pen; it was not ignorance on my
+part and still less was it any disregard of the rules of politeness.
+
+We are obliged to reject the favorite ideas of Mr. Peirce, and have only
+to add that our esteem for him has not been lessened, in spite of all
+disagreements, and notwithstanding the flaws we have detected in his
+reasoning. On the contrary, our admiration for him as a dialectitian
+has been greatly increased, for, in truth, we have never before seen
+propositions so untenable in their nature, so odd and almost bizarre, as
+those of “absolute chance,” of “matter as effete mind,” of “feeling as
+being the inner aspect of chance,” and of “real growth as opposed to the
+conservation of energy,” defended with greater adroitness.
+
+Mr. Peirce is unusually familiar with certain branches of learning, of
+which he has made a specialty, and also with general philosophy; but he
+has original ideas, and he prizes them too highly. Where he makes no use
+of his originality, he does extraordinarily good Work. Thus, most of his
+papers on logic, published in sundry magazines, are, in their critical
+as well as constructive parts, strictly scientific and almost free from
+apocryphal speculations. Only slight hints in them have been a puzzle to
+me and other readers of his essays. Of late, however, Mr. Peirce has come
+out more explicitly with his peculiar philosophy, and we regret to say
+that the more he allows his original ideas to enter into his thoughts,
+the more warped are his theories.
+
+While we regard Mr. Peirce’s original ideas as erroneous, we must
+say that they are nevertheless highly interesting and stimulating.
+His propositions are presented so vigorously, so attractively, so
+brilliantly, that while perusing his articles, we find them remarkably
+suggestive; we enjoy them as we do poetry. They read like a romance of
+the origin of the world or a fairy-tale of metaphysics.
+
+Mr. Peirce’s views should receive the consideration of all earnest
+students of philosophy; for he goes to the root of its main problems, and
+his very errors are instructive.
+
+                                                                   EDITOR.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[125] Kepler’s scheme is, that all the regular solids, icosahedron,
+dodecahedron, octohedron, tetrahedron, and cube should be placed one
+within the other at such distances that spheres could be described
+between them so as to touch the corners of each respective interior and
+the planes of each respective exterior solid. He found, by placing the
+sun in the centre and allowing the planets to move in great circles on
+the spheres, (making the circle between the icosahedron and dodecahedron
+equal to the orbit of the earth,) that then the distances between the
+planets would, upon the whole, agree with astronomical observations.
+
+This theory is as ingenious, as fascinating, and as original as Mr.
+Peirce’s propositions. It has only one little fault; it does not agree
+with facts. And Kepler afterwards abandoned his original theory.
+
+[126] Like Mr. Peirce, Kepler had, in his days, too, thought of the
+possibility of making the world evolve from chance. When, in 1604, a new
+and brilliant fixed star suddenly appeared in Ophiuchos, he took up the
+problem of star-evolution. We will let Kepler tell the story in his own
+words as it appears in his treatise on the new star:
+
+“Yesterday, while pondering over the problem, I was called to dinner, and
+my young wife served the salad. ‘Do you think,’ I asked her, ‘if since
+the origin of creation, pewter platters, salad leaves, oil and vinegar,
+and also hard-boiled eggs had been flying in a chaotic mixture through
+space that _Chance_ would have been able to collect them to-day in a
+salad?’ ‘Certainly not in such a good mixture as this is,’ was the reply
+of my beautiful wife.”
+
+Kepler rejected the idea that the world could have evolved by chance.
+
+[127] The philosophical articles of the _Century Dictionary_ do not
+seem to be free of party spirit. An extraordinary amount of praise is
+given to the mediæval realists which, considering the vagaries of their
+propositions, they do not deserve. On the other hand, the blame for
+the discredit into which scholasticism has fallen is heaped upon the
+nominalists.
+
+[128] I said in _Fundamental Problems_, page 142, “The introduction of
+the word positivism into philosophy is the merit of M. Auguste Comte.
+Although we cannot accept much of M. Comte’s conception of positivism
+we gratefully adopt the name.” There are plenty of other passages in
+which my usage of the term positivism, as distinguished from the French
+positivism, is set forth, so that there could be little danger of being
+misunderstood.
+
+[129] My main objection to the term Absolute is to forestall any
+hypostatising of a vague abstract notion which can only serve the purpose
+of mystification. I suffer the term Absolute in a loose sense when it is
+understood that it is used loosely. I do not say, as Mr. Peirce seems
+to believe, “absolutely universal” or “absolutely necessary.” The words
+universal and necessary are sufficiently significant to me without any
+additional emphasis.
+
+Reality is relative throughout. Absolute existences are, if the term is
+taken seriously, nonentities; and the expression “The Absolute” for the
+whole of existence or for those features of existence which are universal
+and necessary is, to say the least, misleading. These are my reasons for
+rejecting the Absolute as a philosophical term. There is, of course,
+no objection to the term in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and other
+sciences, where it has acquired technical meanings.
+
+[130] Mr. Peirce correctly says that the axioms of geometry are now
+exploded. This, however, does not overthrow the reliability of formal
+mathematics; on the contrary, it places it on a safer basis than that of
+unprovable assumptions, which must be taken for granted.
+
+We look upon the whole system of geometry as a _product of mental
+operations_. We perform some operations and note what their products are.
+We do something and mind the consequences of what we do. The problem
+of modern geometry is to invent a method by which we can construct in
+the simplest manner possible a straight line and a plane. Euclid still
+presupposes the existence of the plane and assumes it to be such that
+parallel lines do not meet. When we are able to construct the plane of
+Euclidean geometry, we can dispense with the axiom of parallels, for, in
+that case, the plane will possess the qualities it has by construction.
+We can very well execute other constructions in which parallel lines
+possess other qualities, and we shall on the basis of such an altered
+plan of operation be able to produce entirely different systems of
+geometry.
+
+We must distinguish between the space of our mathematicians and real
+space. Experience teaches us that real space has three dimensions
+which means that from a given point every other point is determinable
+by three magnitudes. We might doubt (although I think there is little
+occasion to do so) whether the real space of our experience is truly
+three-dimensional, but we cannot doubt that the truths developed in the
+one-dimensional system of numbers, in the two-dimensional system of plane
+geometry, in the three-dimensional system of solid geometry, and also in
+_n_-dimensional systems each in their respective domain are perfectly
+reliable, for they are unequivocally determined, they are _eindeutig
+bestimmt_. There is no application of the theory of probabilities in a
+field where the products are not due to chance but result with certainty.
+
+[131] I wonder why the _Century Dictionary_ does not mention the
+scholastic usage of the word _univocus_ as the root of univocal.
+Similarly we are not told that the word _incompossibilitas_ is an
+invention of the schoolmen. Duns Scotus, Mr. Peirce’s favorite
+philosopher, uses the terms _univoce_ and _incompossibilitas_ freely.
+
+[132] We accept in this argument Mr. Peirce’s solutions, which, however,
+are his own. A simpler example would have been more appropriate.
+
+[133] The belief in a duality of truth appears quite rational from the
+dualistic standpoint of the middle ages, and the arguments of Scotus are
+cleverly devised, being based upon the supposition that the fall of man
+had changed the entire order of the world, so that the laws of nature
+prior to the Fall were different to those which obtain now.
+
+[134] Duns Scotus was a very zealous advocate of ecclesiastical
+supremacy, even advising, for instance, the prosecution of the Jews in
+order to convert them. It is a strange irony of fate that the author of
+the _Fons vitæ_, upon whose authority Scotus so largely depends and from
+whom he derived some of his most important ideas was an Israelite. Scotus
+did not know that Avicebron was a pseudonym of the Spanish Jew Salomon
+ben Gebirol.
+
+[135] I omit here a discussion as to whether or not the conservation
+of energy is true or not. I need not mention that the views of our
+physicists, such men as Helmholtz, Mach, Maxwell, Tait, and others differ
+widely from Mr. Peirce’s presentation of the subject. Mr. Peirce rejects
+the law of the conservation of energy, but retains the conservation,
+or (as he prefers to say) perduration of matter. I waive the question,
+whether this is consistent, and call attention only to another, most
+flagrant contradiction. Mr. Peirce states that, “not only the total
+amount [of matter] remains constant, but all the different parts preserve
+their identity”; and yet he says that “matter is effete mind.” Thus when
+mind becomes effete, the amount of matter increases; however, when the
+habits of matter are broken up, mind originates, and the amount of matter
+decreases. This, it seems, would make any perduration of matter and of
+the identity of its different parts impossible.
+
+[136] That my view of the _a priori_, as Mr. Peirce claims, is
+“Schleiermacherian” is new to me.
+
+[137] It is a matter of course that frequently several events coöperate
+to bring about an effect. In that case we have our choice, either to
+speak of several causes, or to treat the coöperation of all of them as
+_the_ cause, or to select one of them to be called the cause, while the
+others may be counted among the conditions.
+
+The limitation of a system of causation depends entirely upon the purpose
+of our inquiry, and we must here, as in many other things, use discretion.
+
+Mr. Peirce concludes, that according to my view of causation we can,
+in a relatively uniform motion, such as the flight of a cannon ball,
+regard the motion of every moment as the cause for the motion of the
+next moment. I say “relatively,” for absolutely uniform motion does not
+exist. I grant this, but I do not grant what Mr. Peirce regards as a
+contradiction of mine, that in that case the cause would be equal to the
+effect. A man who knows the artifices of the hair-splitting Eleates and
+the other conundrums of logic, should know that every second of time is
+different from every other second; 12 o’clock is different from 1 second
+past 12. He who denies this, has only to miss a train in order to be
+converted. And how much more different than the moments of time are the
+various moments of real motion, for in every moment the moving body is in
+another place, with changed relations; and if that does not constitute a
+difference, we should have to deny the existence of motion.
+
+[138] See my article on “The Continuity of Evolution” in _The Monist_,
+Vol. II, No 1; and also “Monism and Meliorism,” p. 73, where “the
+struggle for the ideal” is contrasted with “the struggle for life.”
+
+[139] For details see, in _The Monist_, Vol. II, No. 4, page 518, et
+seqq., and 527, et seqq., my articles, “Mr. Spencer on the Ethics of
+Kant,” heading iv, and “What Does Anschauung Mean?”
+
+I now forgive Mr. Spencer; for if a Kant scholar like Mr. Peirce can
+fall into this unpardonable mistake, why should not Mr. Spencer, whose
+knowledge of Kant’s writings is, as he confesses himself, extremely
+limited, have the same privilege?
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF THEISM.
+
+
+I. THE REALISM OF THEISM.
+
+It is commonly alleged that there is deeply seated in the human mind
+a belief in the existence of a supreme being, and that the prevalence
+of such belief is evidence that it has a basis in supernatural
+revelation. It is urged in reply to this assertion, that this belief
+is not universal, and that in any case its presence cannot be regarded
+as satisfactory evidence that is well founded. It is known that the
+disposition to worship is aroused by grand and beautiful objects; and as
+Darwin well remarks in one of his letters, the natural sentiments of the
+sublime and the beautiful easily assume a personal direction. Scientific
+explanations, moreover, push a personal source of things ever further
+from us, and it is becoming apparently more easy to doubt or deny any
+such source whatever.
+
+Prevalent human instincts and intuitions are, however, the result of
+experience imperfectly or perfectly digested, as the case may be.
+In most instances they yield to analysis something of value. A more
+plausible explanation of the theistic instinct is the anthropomorphic
+one. Man knows that he originates many movements, both of his own body
+and of other material things, and he knows of no other real source of
+such movements. He therefore, in his primitive state, before scientific
+explanations are attained, naturally refers motions in nature to an
+original personal source. This, it may be supposed, is the natural habit
+of the unsophisticated mind, and is at the bottom of theistic belief,
+whether as unexplained in consciousness, and therefore an instinct, or
+as a distinctly formulated belief. The phenomena of nature must have
+originated somehow, and there is no other conceivable source of motion
+than a personal one.
+
+Facts developed by scientific research tend to weaken this
+anthropomorphism. The indestructibility of matter means that it has never
+been created. The conservation of energy states that matter has always
+been in motion. The law of organic evolution is supposed to do away with
+the necessity for creative intervention in the origination of plants
+and animals. Finally, the observed facts of the evolution of mind show
+that this, the light of the world, grew like the organic beings which
+it inhabits. Nothing higher than man has been found, and there seems to
+be no ground for suspecting the existence of any higher mind. And man
+himself dies and undergoes dissolution, like other organic bodies. The
+result of this use of the facts of science is agnosticism, at least. We
+know of nothing beyond what they teach, and some agnostics go so far as
+to say, “ignorabimus,” we shall never know. Agnostics, however, have
+their faces set in different directions. Some rest in it as a relief
+from mental toil, as persons more theologically inclined join a church.
+Others, believers in the progressive evolution of knowledge as of other
+phenomena, set themselves to explore the unknown country, believing that
+our opportunities in this direction are practically unlimited.
+
+Let us look again at this anthropomorphism which is so deeply seated and
+so widely spread. Its essence is the fact that we control our own bodies
+in a great degree and that our material organs obey the behests of our
+mind. We do things for, to us, satisfactory reasons, and for satisfactory
+reasons we leave many things undone, which we could readily do. What has
+science done towards explaining this most ordinary phenomenon? We may
+truthfully say, absolutely nothing. It remains a fact that a majority, if
+not all animals, move their bodies in their entirety or in part, because
+they have sensations. In the lower animals these sensations are merely
+either sense-impressions from without, or they are from within, being
+produced by their physical condition. We rise but little in the scale,
+when effects of memory are evident, for we find that many actions are
+due to experience of the result of former actions. With still higher
+development, mental organisation becomes more apparent, and the reasoning
+and emotional states have more and more distinct outcome in intelligent
+acts. But the mechanism by which the act is called forth by the mental
+state, has never been explained.
+
+The difficulty lies here. A sensation, or a state of mind, weighs
+nothing. A material body, let it be a cell or a mass of cells, as a
+muscle, weighs something. How then can the former move the latter? From a
+mechanical point of view, it cannot be done. For that which has no weight
+to set in motion anything which has weight, is to violate the law of the
+conservation and correlation of energy. And this law is not only an _a
+priori_ necessity, but it has been demonstrated _a posteriori_ in so many
+cases that exceptions cannot be thought of. So a school of physiologists
+say that _it is not done_. No animal eats because it is hungry, or drinks
+because it is thirsty. The man does not direct the muscle of his arm when
+he writes, nor those of his tongue when he speaks. But it is easy to see
+why such a school of physiologists includes but an infinitesimal part of
+mankind.
+
+There is a school of evolutionists who account for the whole matter
+in harmony with the views of the physiologists above mentioned. I
+refer to the Post-Darwinians, who account for evolution by natural
+selection exclusively. That is, animals originally moved aimlessly
+in all directions. Those whose movements were beneficial to them,
+survived, while those whose movements were not beneficial, or which were
+injurious, perished. As frequent motions in a given direction lead to
+habits, so were inaugurated movements which were habitually beneficial
+to the actors, which have therefore persisted and multiplied. Thus were
+established the multifarious habits of animals and men. Consciousness had
+nothing to do with the process. It merely acted the part of the onlooker,
+being simply aware of what went on. “Like the locomotive whistle,” says
+Huxley, “it made considerable noise, but did none of the work.”
+
+To a person familiar with the facts of the evolution of the structures of
+animals, this seems like a most inadequate theory. It is a commonplace
+that no kind of selection, either artificial or natural, ever originated
+anything. Selection simply selects between existing alternatives. The
+fundamental question of evolution is, What is the origin of things?
+What is the fate of things originated? is a secondary question. To
+this first question the Post-Darwinian reply must be, that everything
+possible has originated no one knows yet how, so that what has survived
+was necessarily to be found in this _embarras de richesse_. This is an
+enormous assumption, and one to which the history of the life of past
+and present ages lends no support. No such multifarious and promiscuous
+variation is known to have occurred in living or in extinct organic
+beings. But if the variations have not been infinite, then the chance of
+the existing one having been hit upon becomes greatly reduced, and the
+chance of its having occurred at the same time in individuals of opposite
+sex is still smaller. Finally, the chance of its not being immediately
+bred out by the overwhelming numbers of individuals not possessing it, is
+indeed infinitesimal. In fact, it is evident that variations of structure
+must have appeared in numbers of individuals of a species at the same
+time, in order to secure survival. This indicates a common cause of
+general application. That such causes have existed and been effective
+at all periods of past and present time is amply proved by the facts
+of geology and paleontology. The most influential in effecting change
+of form and structure has been the motion of the body and of its parts
+necessary to secure its food, to defend or protect itself from dangers,
+and to reproduce its kind. The direct mechanical effects of these motions
+on all the materials of the body may be traced in the successive stages
+of the forms of past ages to those of the present time.
+
+The objections above made to the theory of multifarious variation of
+organic forms, apply with equal force to the theory of multifarious
+movements of organic beings as furnishing the source of intelligent
+habits. An additional and especial objection to the latter hypothesis
+is the fact that it does not recognise the well-known adaptability of
+animals to new situations and circumstances. If the events of life were
+a routine moving with mathematical precision, the theory of origin from
+multifarious variations would have a better foundation; but this is not
+the case. Food, friends, and enemies do not appear in stated periods,
+quantities, or qualities. Emergencies are common, and variation of
+circumstance is the rule. Without sensation, uniform habits would but
+lead to destruction. Everything which should not be presented in the
+habitual form and at the habitual time would be neglected. Food and
+drink would be refused, or not obtained; defense and reproduction would
+not be attempted under the proper conditions. In fact, the conduct of
+living beings would be no more intelligent than that of inorganic matter
+in motion, were sensation to have no share in the process. But as soon
+as we believe that the habits of animals are due to hunger, thirst,
+and the perception of temperature, resistance, etc., their acts become
+intelligible, and the formation of habits becomes a necessary consequence
+of memory or the faculty of subsequent recognition of sensations
+experienced at a previous time.
+
+It is, in this connection, of great interest to recall the diverse
+effects on our mental history of sense-impressions, as compared with
+the effect of thought. Sense-impressions are not remembered in the
+proper sense of the term. The repetition in memory is always vastly more
+indistinct than the original state of consciousness; so much so as to be
+a very different thing. Thought, on the contrary, when remembered at all,
+is an exact repetition in quality of its first presence. The presentative
+consciousness has one quality; the representative and re-representative
+have another quality. This shows us that the structural arrangement
+of brain substance concerned in the latter forms of consciousness
+have a far more permanent quality than that due to the former. They
+thus constitute more permanent acquisitions, and this being the case,
+must have a most important bearing on evolution.[140] This is because
+it is a representative state which determines action. The process of
+determination may become so rapid as to be almost instantaneous; but
+it had to be learned and the representation was what gave the act its
+character and which organised the machinery of the automatic or reflex
+act.
+
+I here refer to the low degrees of consciousness sometimes called
+subconsciousness, and the expression, “the subliminal consciousness,”
+introduced by F. Meyer. All shades of consciousness intervene between
+the most distinct forms and the unconsciousness of the reflex state.
+Intelligent subconsciousness is a low stage in this evanescent
+series. Stages on the passage to and from sleep, and other forms of
+unconsciousness due to physical causes, are properly termed subconscious.
+There are reflexes which are due to mechanisms which we inherit from
+our animal and human ancestors, which are sometimes accompanied by
+consciousness. The amount of intelligence displayed will depend on
+the function involved. Experiments on vertebrate animals show that
+intelligent adaptation of the movements of the body have been transferred
+forwards in the brain during the course of evolution. Thus, a fish which
+retains the medulla only, will guide itself through the water so as
+to avoid danger. If the cerebellum and thalami are left to a reptile,
+it will avoid destructive acts. But if a mammal is deprived of its
+hemispheres, its actions are without design, and it is incapable of
+self-preservation.
+
+It may be that in the temporary absence of the higher consciousness,
+the lower forms which once existed in our ancestors may be revived, as
+in some of the elements of our dreams, and in some forms of cerebral
+disease, when much of the blood is withdrawn from the cortex or parts
+of it. The amount of consciousness necessary to the performance of
+intelligent acts depends on the novelty of the situation. Many of the
+theories on this subject, however, take it for granted that intelligent
+acts arise in primarily unconscious states. This is only credible on the
+supposition that such acts have arisen by natural selection only, a view
+which I have combated on a previous page. Some authors use expressions
+which can only imply unconscious consciousness. This is of course
+absurd and self-contradictory. No source but sensation can be found for
+intelligent acts.
+
+It is true that there are some movements of organic bodies which have an
+intelligent appearance, to which we cannot ascribe consciousness. Such
+are those of the spermatozoöids and of the leucocytes. Some of the lowest
+animals and plants cannot be yet proved to be conscious. We cannot now
+explain the nature of the movements which these forms exhibit, but they
+will probably yield to research. Enough it is for our present purpose
+to know that the majority of animals are conscious for a large part
+of their lives. And we have abundant evidence to show that movements
+inaugurated in conscious states may be performed, so soon as learned, in
+unconsciousness, and become part of the mental furniture of the animal.
+
+It seems, then, that the control of ponderable matter by mental states
+is not the exclusive prerogative of man, but is a phenomenon of common
+observation in the animal kingdom. The facts indicate that it is
+characteristic of mind to move resistant and tri-dimensional matter
+under suitable conditions. These conditions are rigid, but within the
+limits which they define, the sequence is definite. It is difficult
+to believe in anything which is in direct violation of mechanical
+necessity, and a mere hypothesis to that effect would not deserve a
+moment’s consideration. But the belief that the body, or parts of it, are
+moved in direct obedience to mental states is founded on more numerous
+observations than are most of those beliefs which we hold to be true. In
+fact there is no scientific doctrine better supported by observation and
+experience than this one. On this ground alone, then, we are compelled
+to believe in something in the universe which is supermechanical, or
+extramechanical. We may call this supernaturalism, or occultism, or
+what we like, but the fact remains. We have in it the germ of theism,
+anthropomorphic, if you will, but one which grows in importance as we
+come to examine further into the characteristics of mental action.
+
+Before going into this part of the subject, I will refer to the part
+played by mind in evolution. From what has gone before, it is evident
+that this part has been an important one. If structures are produced by
+motions, it is clear that habits produce structures, and _vice versa_;
+and that under the law of natural selection only the useful and harmless
+ones have survived. It follows, then, that progressive evolution of
+form is secured by the presence of consciousness, and must, sooner or
+later, fail without it. With development of intelligence the progress
+must become more continuous and rapid. The facts of paleontology confirm
+such a hypothesis; since the more intelligent animals (Mammalia) have
+generally supplanted the less intelligent, (Reptilia and Batrachia),
+whenever brought into conflict with them. The supremacy of the
+intelligent over the unintelligent Mammalia is also clearly shown by
+research into their past history. The modification of type, or evolution,
+has also become more and more rapid as time has advanced and intelligence
+developed.
+
+There is another reason why the intervention of supermechanics into
+the process has been necessary to secure such results as we observe in
+the evolution of life. The law of inorganic evolution is, as Spencer
+epitomises it, “the integration of matter and the dissipation of
+energy.” Natural chemical reactions when not interfered with by human
+intelligence, produce solids and give out heat. In other words, they
+result in death and not in life. To produce life something different from
+chemical energy has been necessary. And as the case is a parallel one
+to the evolution of the types of life, we may suspect that the agency
+at work has been a related one. It is some form of energy of the vital
+class which is able to overcome the bonds which hold dead matter in
+their adamantine grasp; and it is evident that such an energy could have
+been organised only in some region where mechanics of a superchemical
+order prevail. If we take a large view of the universe the alternatives
+of life and death present themselves clearly before us. The law of the
+latter is the integration of matter and dissipation of energy. The law of
+the former is the converse; the loosing of the bonds of matter, and the
+production of mechanism for the raising of the type of energy. The first
+is catagenesis, the latter is anagenesis. The end of catagenesis is the
+extinction of all mind and all life. Anagenesis sustains both. The best
+foundation for our belief in anagenesis is that it exists. Catagenesis
+has not destroyed it, and this fact must lead us to suspect that it is
+the product of an agency which is superchemical; and the only such that
+we know is consciousness.
+
+In the presence of such a far-reaching hypothesis we are called upon to
+consider more particularly the relations of mind to its physical basis.
+The essential condition of the existence of mind as we know it, is
+metabolism. The substance[141] of the nervous cells must be in a state
+of decomposition and recomposition; old material loosing its chemical
+bonds and giving forth energy, and new material arriving to undergo
+the same process. The energy thus produced displays the phenomena of
+mind, and as such differs widely from the inorganic energies of heat,
+light, etc. The extent to which it displays habits depends on the part
+of the nervous structure where it is produced. In the spinal cord it is
+strictly automatic, and as we approach the hemispheres the so-called
+voluntary element becomes more apparent, until a region is reached where
+conception, deliberation, and judgment have their seat. In this region
+energy is purely mental in its attributes, and it unlocks the executive
+mechanism of the body, and puts it in action in accordance with the needs
+of consciousness. So far, mechanical laws explain the order of events.
+The supermechanical resides in the mental content and its effects on the
+outgoing energy. No quantitative relation can be shown to exist between
+the results of the mental processes of classification, conception,
+judgment, etc, and the amount of incoming or outgoing energy. Indeed it
+is plain that none can exist, if the statement already made be true,
+viz., that thoughts are without weight. This part of the subject requires
+critical treatment, but the general result is included in the above
+statement, which is sufficient for our present purpose.
+
+Since consciousness possesses such extraordinary relations to matter we
+may well suspect that it has a wider distribution than comes within the
+purview of our present limited ken. Why should it not protect and nourish
+itself under conditions different from those which prevail in our planet?
+The one condition necessary to it is metabolism—which means free energy.
+The kind of physical basis cannot be important, provided it be capable
+of exhibiting this kind of non-automatic energy. Automatism and all its
+reflex consequences are the death of consciousness, as every one knows.
+From such a type of energy all the fixed types of energy must have been
+derived, and with them the types of both mental and physical structures.
+In its freest form it should have as a physical basis a form of matter
+which should be without habits, but always ready to undergo a catagenetic
+change into routine energy and ultimate unconsciousness. Such a medium
+should be unspecialised matter, and the consciousness inhabiting it would
+be a creator. Such consciousness would be readily transmitted wherever
+the physical basis should be suitable, and one such substance is our
+protoplasm. The probable inferiority of protoplasm as a physical basis
+is indicated by the long and tedious education which has been necessary
+to enable beings made of it to attain a high order of intelligence. In
+such a basis anagenesis is slow, and catagenesis is easy. Other bases
+might be imagined where the reverse would be the case. No assumption
+can be made as to a constant and limited amount of consciousness in the
+universe. That such is the case is supposable; but it is also supposable
+that the amount of suitable physical basis may be increased by a process
+of assimilation of non-conscious matter, as is done by animals in
+digestion and reproduction. This process might continue until all matter
+should be brought into that generalised condition which is necessary
+to the continuance of consciousness. The entire universe would then
+be conscious, and a maximum limit would be reached. In the primitive
+consciousness, whatever its extent in space in the Universe, we have the
+Supreme Being or Person.
+
+
+II. THE IDEALISM OF THEISM.
+
+What I mean by the above expression is the theism which is supposed
+to be demonstrated by idealistic metaphysics. There are two forms of
+this alleged demonstration, both of which have for their starting-point
+the basis of the idealistic philosophy. This basis is the fact that we
+know nothing of matter excepting as sense-impressions. From this it is
+inferred that were conscious beings to become extinct, matter would
+no longer exist. It is also a consequence of this belief that what we
+observe of the conduct of matter, which we call by the name of natural
+law, is of purely mental origin.
+
+If now the universe consist wholly of mind, the totality of it, either
+as reduced to a body of general laws, or to a single comprehensive
+generalisation, or concept, is one form of idealistic God. The other
+demonstration is as follows. Since matter exists as mental states, and
+since these mental states are common to mankind, who are mortal; since
+these mental states reproduce themselves from generation to generation,
+it is inferred that a permanent mental state exists, which possesses the
+permanent sensations we call matter. And this common mind of humanity is
+God.
+
+The difference between these deities is this. In the first case he is an
+abstraction of the human mind and therefore not a person apart from such
+men as are capable of the generalisations of which he consists. In the
+second case he is a person apart from humanity. The validity of either
+demonstration to the thinker depends on his point of view. To every one
+but the idealist, the first proposition is atheism. The evidence for the
+second is metaphysical anthropomorphism, and would be a demonstration,
+were the theory of idealism well founded.
+
+The fact that we only know matter as sense-impressions does not, in
+the opinion of realists, prove that it does not exist as the resistant
+and extended. Resistance of each part to the movements of other parts
+(energy), and extension in space, are conditions about which we have a
+great deal of information. Our lives are spent in overcoming the one, and
+in getting round the other. Our methods of dealing with it represent the
+antithesis of those employed in thought-processes. The latter are best
+performed in the absence of the muscular exertion which is so necessary
+in dealing with the former. I have referred to the well-known difference
+in consciousness between sense-impressions and the representation and
+re-representation of them. The difference certainly implies a difference
+in the immediate sources of the respective kinds of consciousness. The
+one is produced by something different from that which produces the
+other. In short, the one is produced by the contact of matter external
+to our physical basis, and the other is produced by a modification of
+brain-structure; and in the first place by that simplest form of it
+which is the cause of memory. The effect of such observation is the
+conviction that matter exists as something outside of consciousness or
+mind, in spite of the fact that we only know it in consciousness. In a
+word, consciousness and knowledge imply the existence rather than the
+non-existence of something which is known.
+
+The fundamental actualities are, then, subject and object; or, in popular
+language, mind and matter. Philosophy includes the sciences which embrace
+the knowledge of both subject and object; but the practical philosophy
+is the science of the mutual relations of the two. It may be said that
+subject and object are opposite sides of the same reality, but this form
+of expression appears to me to be no more accurate than the statement
+that energy and matter are opposite sides of the same thing. As energy
+is the motion of matter, mind is the intelligence of matter; and both
+may be called properties of matter with equal propriety, since both are
+impossible without a physical basis. Mind, however, differs from energy
+in possessing some intrinsic qualities which are in essence independent
+of the qualities of the physical basis; and these intrinsic qualities
+are the forms of logic. These are, however, but a part of the totality
+of mind, although they underlie or penetrate all its representative
+activities.
+
+While mind then cannot exist without a physical basis, it remains to
+be considered whether any other objective world is necessary to its
+existence. It is sometimes alleged that consciousness could not exist
+without an objective, exterior to its physical basis. If, however,
+consciousness is a necessary attribute of free energy, the latter purely
+metaphysical speculation has no foundation. The “intuition of Being”
+(Rosmini) would exist, albeit not much specialised, in the absence of
+multifarious objects; but the forms of logic would characterise it
+nevertheless.
+
+It is alleged that we can never know matter as it is, because our
+observation is restricted to the mutual relations of its component
+parts. In this assertion our intelligence necessarily concurs, but this
+need not cause us to relax our exertions in the pursuit of knowledge.
+The practical philosophy is, as already remarked, the knowledge of the
+relations subsisting between mind and matter, so that our most valuable
+acquisition will be in the end the laws of a relation. We may well
+postpone our endeavors after the absolute, even if we can ever attain a
+knowledge of it. The realist is content to believe that if we do not know
+“things as they are in themselves,” it is because, of the imperfection of
+our senses. But we are constantly discovering new aids to research, and
+we can put no limit to our power in this direction.
+
+The research into the relations of subject and object, means to theology,
+an investigation as to the existence and nature of Deity, and as to an
+existence for conscious beings in other than terrestrial life. The pure
+idealist reaches an affirmative answer to these problems by a short and
+easy route, based on a study of the intrinsic nature of mind alone. The
+pure realist reaches a negative conclusion by an equally short cut, by
+considering the properties of matter alone. Not a few thinkers entertain
+both doctrines at one and the same time, although they are mutually
+exclusive and contradictory. No wonder that they reach what Montgomery
+well terms “the puzzle of puzzles.” But the rational conclusion from this
+deadlock must be, that there is something wrong with the methods of both
+sides. To the practical mind it seems that the vice in both methods is
+the failure to harmonise properly with their own, the facts adduced by
+the opposite side in the discussion. And it is indeed evident that that
+cannot be the final philosophy which restricts itself to a consideration
+of mind alone; or that which restricts itself to a consideration of
+matter alone. That men should pursue different lines of research is
+natural. Those whose minds are capable in the fields of conception
+naturally prefer idealistic studies; while those whose especial genius
+lies in the direction of mechanics, easily pursue-materialistic research.
+What is needed is a combination of the two fields of ability in the same
+mind.
+
+A considerable class of serious people, observing the diversities between
+the schools of philosophy, regard such studies as useless. Since they
+have not the disposition or ability to solve the question for themselves,
+they find it best to rest in uncertainty, which has optimistic or
+pessimistic tendencies according to temperament and education. The
+optimist has faith that all is, and all will be, well; while the
+pessimist takes the opposite view. Both are sustained in their position
+by those teachers who teach the impotence of our faculties and the
+uselessness of knowledge. Such appeal in support of their position to the
+facts already cited; the imperfection of our senses; the relativity of
+knowledge; the inscrutable nature of mind and matter, etc. This position
+is, however, a plea of avoidance, and it will be time enough to listen to
+it when the avenues of the increase of human knowledge are permanently
+closed. This they are not at present.
+
+The key to the position is the doctrine of evolution. Here we behold
+the interaction of subject and object, both in our own persons and in
+the inferior beings which are with us, and which have preceded us on
+earth. That mind has not sprung full-fledged upon this planet, is clear;
+and that it has made wonderful progress in power, is equally clear. Why
+did it not appear with all its powers “in the beginning”? The answer
+obviously is, “the intractability of matter.” Why has it progressed in
+face of this obstacle? The answer is, the tractability of matter. Mind,
+through its intrinsic quality, has coërced matter, in ever increasing
+degree, and the limit of its capacity in this direction plainly has not
+yet been reached. Its most important conquest has been that of its own
+physical basis, and next to it is the conquest of the world of objects by
+which it is surrounded. Its last conquest will be the knowledge of its
+destiny, as a projection of its known past. To this end the knowledge
+of its own constitution is essential, but this is not all, as the pure
+idealist would have us believe. The knowledge of external relations is
+also essential, for we can in no state of being escape them. Psychic life
+is an “internal adjustment to external relations,” quite as much as is
+the physical life, as it is defined by Spencer in the phrase just quoted.
+
+The Deity of evolution indicated in the first section of this paper,
+will not satisfy the pure idealist. He is not an absolute, since He
+is compelled to respect relations. But we find Him to be just, which
+he evidently is not if absolute. He is anthropomorphic, and not an
+abstraction of the human mind. And yet as the seat of rationality, and
+as the director of free energy, He possesses the function of creator
+of whatever is possible. The evolution of independent human minds has
+been only possible through education, and here as elsewhere, teachable
+students have met with greater success than the stolid.
+
+It has been already pointed out that the process of evolution may be
+either progressive (Anagenesis) or retrogressive (Catagenesis). This is
+well known to be the case with organic types, where degenerate phyla are
+common. It seems, indeed, that in the order of things degeneracy has
+occurred wherever it has been possible; that is, under circumstances
+which permitted vegetative life through lack of stimuli to energetic
+motion. There has always been “room at the top”; but only when all
+the lower fields of existence have been for the time being filled,
+has there been room at the top only. The history of mental evolution
+has accompanied that of general structural evolution, and for similar
+reasons. It is well illustrated in human society to-day. These facts
+suggest that this has been the history of all evolution, since they
+harmonise with the order of evolution observed in our solar system, in
+which the inorganic has preceded the organic, or Catagenesis has preceded
+Anagenesis. If the forms of non-vital energy represent a result of
+Catagenesis, we are not bound to look on minerals as in any sense living,
+as has been suggested by Haeckel and others. Most, if not all, forms
+of chemical energy have sunk below the vital level, and certainly far
+below the possibility of displaying consciousness. We are here looking
+over unexplored territory, and one whose elucidation is entirely in the
+future, but we may put our ideas in order, if we do nothing more.
+
+Besides his relations to the impersonal materials that surround him, man
+has essential relations to his fellow-man. The laws of these relations
+are ethics. Much is written and spoken against the utilitarian or
+evolutionary theory of ethics. I cannot, however, escape the conviction
+that this theory offers the true explanation of the rise of the ethical
+sentiment in mankind. But to understand it aright, we must include
+the growth of the social sentiment, as well as that of the rational
+element, in the evolution of justice or right. The opponents of this view
+sometimes commit the error common to all those who do not understand the
+nature of mental evolution. Some of them imagine that it is necessary to
+suppose that, in harmony with this theory, every man decides his every
+act solely in accordance with what appears to him at the time to subserve
+the lowest form of selfishness of which he is capable. The doctrine,
+on the contrary, maintains that habits of honesty and justice are the
+result of the education of the ages, and that men obey such motives
+according to their developmental status; that is, in accordance with the
+evolution of the habit of preferring the higher to the lower forms of
+utility. The further question of what it is that has raised the standard
+of utility, is answered by what we see going on around us. The fear of
+the law; the love of the approbation of our fellows; the sympathy with
+our fellow-men; the fear of their indignation; all these are educators of
+great potency, which have always been active. These motives, organised as
+character, are compulsory, and it would be strange if they have not been
+effective in producing results.
+
+Practical ethics has to do with material beings and their material
+possessions, i. e. with person and property. Without the objective,
+the content of ethics is purely ideal, consisting of love and hate,
+and the justice and injustice of opinion which might be the outcome of
+those sentiments. These sentiments are realities of the subjective,
+representing the affections, as the form of thought constitutes the
+rational faculties. But if we endeavor in thought to deprive love
+and hate, justice and injustice, of all material consequences and
+implications, we deprive those sentiments of much of their value if we
+do not abolish their occasions altogether. It appears to me at least
+doubtful whether hate and injustice could exist in a society consisting
+of disembodied minds, if such beings could be imagined; a supposition
+which I cannot entertain.
+
+If ethics cannot exist without material expression, it is clear that,
+on the other hand, they cannot exist without a subjective foundation.
+Thus ethics is the highest expression of the relation between mind and
+matter. Ethics is the practical application of the mental powers to
+human relations, and the more complete the evolution of mind, the more
+perfect is the ethical practice. Thus the evolution of the mind is the
+guarantee of ethical progress, and the more intelligent the mind, the
+more easy will the evolution be. As in all education, the laggards
+experience the severities of compulsion, while pains and penalties are
+avoided by those who perceive their approach and do not await their
+arrival. Here we have the utilitarian ground of our numerous ethical
+and religious organisations. They invite men to _a priori_ subjective
+theory, and objective practice, so as to preserve society from the evils
+of inferior and painful methods of compulsion, which lie at the basis of
+ethical evolution. It is the dread of this method which rouses a natural
+repugnance in the minds of many men to the doctrine which teaches of it.
+But it must be remembered that the instruments of evolution change with
+the thing that is evolving, and the conditions of progressive ethics are
+the stages of progress of the mind. What is necessary for the education
+of the lower mind is no longer necessary for the higher. This is not only
+a truth of philosophy, but the fact may be discerned in the religions
+which men have made for themselves. They describe the ethical state of
+their authors, and prescribe the treatment appropriate to it.
+
+Our knowledge of some parts of evolutionary history is meagre, and on
+some of its chapters we are absolutely in the dark. This is especially
+true of the causes of the appearance of life and consciousness on the
+earth. Spontaneous generation has not been proven, and the immediate
+source of sensation is unknown. The conclusions enumerated in the
+preceding pages are derived from evidence presented in more or less
+complete fragments. But the thesis remains true that mind possesses a
+limited control over its physical basis, but one which is sufficient to
+account for the main direction of the evolution of those organic forms
+which possess it. And it is also true that the essential forms of the
+rational mind are not due to corresponding qualities of the physical
+basis. These forms are: the principles of identity, of abstraction, and
+of generalisation or conception. These characteristics constitute the
+idealistic essence of Theism. But we look to the realistic element of
+Theism for the demonstration of the distinct personality of God.
+
+                                                               E. D. COPE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[140] _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society_, 1889, p. 495
+
+[141] Recent experiments conducted in the laboratory of the Johns Hopkins
+University show that the cytoplasm of cells, which are exhausted by
+labor, is vacuolated.
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+
+
+
+GERMANY.
+
+
+The name of Cesare Lombroso is now more and more mentioned in Germany,
+not only in psychiatrical, juridical, and sociological works, written
+for the learned public, but also in the newspapers and magazines. By the
+side of occasional recognition of his doctrine of the born criminal and
+genius, we meet—and these are the majority of the cases—with violent
+attacks on it, which not seldom exhibit real ignorance of the views of
+the celebrated Italian investigator. Lombroso himself is partly to blame
+for this unfortunate circumstance, for his writings, with their mountains
+of undigested material, are so lacking in unity and perspicuity that
+misconceptions are very apt to arise.
+
+The German translator of Lombroso, DR. H. KURELLA, psychiatrist in
+Kreuzburg, in Silesia, has recently given to the world a synoptical
+exposition of Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal, under the title
+_Cesare Lombroso und die Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers_, Hamburg, 1892,
+Richter. The author not only expounds the doctrines of Lombroso, but also
+deals critically with them, and, although upon the whole his sympathies
+are with the views of the Italian scientist, he nevertheless believes
+that the existence of a fixed type of the _delinquente nato_, embracing
+all special forms of criminality, is yet a question of doubt. On the
+other hand, MAX NORDAU, a widely-read author of ours, gives unqualified
+recognition to the theories of Lombroso, fully accepting the idea of
+“degeneration,” first introduced by Morel into science and further
+developed by Lombroso, and, in completion of the work of his master,
+extending this idea to art and literature. In his work, _Entartung_, the
+first volume of which was recently published by Carl Duncker, of Berlin,
+and is dedicated to Lombroso, “his dear, admired master,” he says:
+“Degenerate types are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and
+idiots. They are often writers and artists, and these exhibit the same
+mental, and frequently also the same physical, traits as those members of
+the same anthropological family that satisfy their diseased instincts by
+means of the murderer’s knife or the cartridge of the dynamitard, instead
+of with pen and pencil.”
+
+People who are acquainted with Nordau’s previous works will perhaps
+imagine that this latest book of his is simply a mass of journalistic
+ebullitions which can lay no claim to _scientific_ value. This, however,
+is wrong. Nordau is not only well acquainted with the patho-psychological
+literature of this province—especially with the French—but he also
+turns his knowledge to scientific account, which psychiatrists like
+Pelman and others have publicly admitted. Taking it as a whole, Nordau
+has presented in this first volume of his work a good psychology of
+mysticism—good, that is, for all who accept the association psychology.
+Nordau’s expositions embrace all the psychological theories which belong
+in this province, with their applications to individuals and to the
+tendencies of modern literature and art. With respect to the first point,
+the author is right in saying that he does not offer here anything new
+to the professional psychologist, but he is wrong in his theory that
+psychologists will read this chapter with impatience, for his exposition
+is unquestioniably elegantly written. Of much greater interest is the
+second part, in which a diagnosis of imbecility is rendered upon the
+English pre-Raphaelites, the French symbolists, the Tolstois, and
+Richard Wagners. The chapter on Richard Wagner will especially attract
+attention for its severity. Nordau closes it with the words, “of all the
+aberrations of the present time, Wagnerism is the most widely diffused
+and the most important. The playhouse at Bayreuth, the _Bayreuther
+Blätter_, the Parisian _Revue Wagnerienne_, are lasting monuments by
+which the future will measure in wonderment the dimensions of this
+degeneration and hysteria of our day.”
+
+Nordau throws light upon numerous mooted phenomena of modern art and
+literature, pointing out their diseased features. One is really surprised
+at the extent of his work. All in all, it may be foreseen that Koch’s
+doctrine of the “psychopathical minor factors”—or those psychical factors
+which constitute the border-line between mental health and disease—will
+clear up much more extensive fields than they have, when applied in the
+direction indicated by Nordau. KOCH has now published the third part of
+his work, (which I have repeatedly mentioned in _The Monist_) and thus
+completed it. He concludes his last volume with these words: “The domain
+of the ‘psychopathical minor factors’ is a wide and very interesting one.
+Whosoever enters profoundly into it will learn to look at much in life
+with different eyes from those with which he began, will understand many
+men and many human acts, which before he did not understand. There are
+yet many scientific treasures to be unearthed in this field, and I hope
+that I shall win many a coadjutor. I hope, also, that qualified men will
+make this theory of the psychopathical minor factors fruitful in wider
+fields and for greater problems.”
+
+It is a common belief that it is pre-eminently in our time that psychical
+disorders and psychical minor factors play so great a rôle. But that in
+the sense of Nordau they are not of so recent origin a careful reader
+will learn from a new work of LUDWIG GEIGER, the well-known historian
+of literature and civilisation (Paetel, Berlin). Its title is: _Berlin,
+1688-1840: Geschichte des geistigen Lebens der preussischen Hauptstadt_.
+As yet, only the first volume has appeared, which extends to the death of
+Frederick the Great. The reader, however, would obtain an entirely wrong
+impression of the work if he were to believe that psychiatrical points
+of view are expressly dwelt upon in this book. To find them he must read
+between the lines. The book is an extraordinarily painstaking history of
+the civilisation of Berlin, taken from the sources, and giving especial
+prominence to intellectual factors. We shall reserve the detailed
+discussion of this important work for another occasion, perhaps until it
+is fully completed.
+
+                                                           CHRISTIAN UFER.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK REVIEWS.
+
+
+HAND-COMMENTAR ZUM NEUEN TESTAMENT. IV. EVANGELIUM, BRIEFL UND
+OFFENBARUNG DES JOHANNES. Bearbeitet von _H. J. Holtzmann_. Zweite
+verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage. (Freiburg I. B. and Leipsic: 1893. J.
+C. B. Mohr.)
+
+The fourth gospel, of all the sacred writings of the New Testament, has
+always been the reviewer’s favorite book. Its profundity, its wealth of
+philosophical ideas, the fervor of its author’s religious sentiment,
+and the spiritual grace that pervades the whole book, exercised an
+unspeakable charm on my mind. This gospel was the first to rouse my
+doubts in the belief of literal inspiration, and it was again the one,
+which, after the severest storms of infidelity had blown over, reconciled
+me to the spirit of Christianity. Thus the perusal of Professor
+Holtzmann’s commentary again arouses the recollections of former
+struggles, and I find that even to-day the first chapter of the fourth
+gospel has lost none of its fascination. It is a wonderful book, and its
+author is a man whom I always longed to meet and shake hands with, over
+a span of almost two millenniums and a world-wide abyss of difference of
+opinion.
+
+Only those who are familiar with the difficulties of the St. John
+literature of the New Testament can really appreciate this latest work
+of Prof. H. J. Holtzmann. He presents in a most clear and concise manner
+the problems involved, together with their various solutions, critically
+arranged. He carefully avoids obtruding on the reader his own views.
+He stands before us as a faithful compiler only. I say “only,” but
+this “only” means a great deal. It does not mean that he suppresses or
+conceals his own views, it means that he states the facts with scrupulous
+impartiality. If there is any partiality apparent in his treatment of
+the sacred writings, it is the reverent attitude he preserves whenever
+love of truth obliges him to accept the negative result of critical
+investigations. And where is there a theological scholar to-day, who
+is orthodox enough to dare to accept the theory that the gospel of St.
+John was written by the apostle? Holtzmann carries his impartiality
+to the extent of not rejecting this old traditional idea, concerning
+the authorship of the fourth gospel, but the evidence against it is
+overwhelmingly sufficient to satisfy the most narrowminded believer.
+Holtzmann teaches us at the same time to understand the spirit of
+the first and second century of our era, and thus excludes from the
+beginning the old prejudice, that if the author were not the man whom
+he impersonated his work must be regarded as a fraud. The historical
+value of the book lies in the revelations it gives us concerning the
+religious demands of the times in which it was written. The fourth
+gospel originated when the Jewish religiosity of growing Christianity
+began to expand into cosmic universality. The author was undoubtedly a
+Jew-Christian, whose home most likely was Ephesus. Ephesus was the place
+where we find the first beginnings of Christian Alexandrianism. Here the
+Logos-idea was introduced into Christian thought. Philo, the Alexandrian
+Jew, had already represented Moses as the incarnation of the divine
+Logos. Should not now a Christian familiar with Philo’s philosophy apply
+the same method to Jesus of Nazareth? Some work adapted to satisfy the
+wants of the time and especially the religious yearnings for knowledge as
+a means of edification was needed. The Christ-idea had taken a definite
+shape in the imagination of the Christian congregations of Asia Minor,
+consisting of diaspora Jews and Gentiles, and their Christ-idea found a
+worthy expression in the picture of Jesus of Nazareth as we have it in
+the fourth gospel.
+
+The fact that the author of the fourth gospel was a Jew-Christian,
+appears from his readiness to explain Jewish customs. He knows Judaism,
+and is familiar with Jerusalem as it appeared after the destruction of
+the temple. The probability is that he wrote his gospel between 120 and
+140. He is comparable to Matthew in so far as both are greatly interested
+in the controversy between Gentiles _versus_ Jews, yet Matthew’s
+Israel has grown into the world-wide cosmos. The frequent occurrence
+of the very word “cosmos” in the fourth gospel is remarkable. In the
+same way the Greek term γιγνώσκειν (to know) appears besides the older
+term πιστεύειν (to believe), which latter is a translation of a Jewish
+conception, still employed so vigorously by St. Paul. The author of the
+fourth gospel is not familiar with Galilee and does not seem to care for
+consistency in the details of his accounts, for he frequently contradicts
+his own statements. The most important differences between his and the
+three synoptic gospels are the accounts as to the main field of Jesus’s
+activity, which according to St. John was Judea, according to the
+synoptic gospels Galilee, and the day of Jesus’s death, which according
+to St. John is the 14th of Nisan, according to the synoptic gospels the
+15th of Nisan, so that if we follow the latter, Jesus would have been
+tried and condemned, against all Jewish customs, on one of the greatest
+festival days. Holtzmann rightly warns the reader, that whatever may
+speak in favor of the synoptic gospels as being, in general, historically
+more correct, the author of the fourth gospel might have had some special
+source for this particular fact.—
+
+The Revelation of St. John has given more trouble to the Christian
+exegesis than any other book, and light was not shed upon its plan and
+construction, until it was found to be one instance only of a whole class
+of literary productions. When we consider the Revelation of St. John in
+the same line with other apocalyptic works, and when we understand the
+mental disposition of the pious Jews shortly before and after Christ, we
+have a clew to the enigmatic visions which are unrolled before our eyes.
+
+The expectations of the Jews in the times of the Maccabees were
+disappointed again and again. The great events of the world did not
+justify the national hopes, and God did not seem to care about fulfilling
+his promises. The last prophet, who called himself Malachi, or “the
+messenger of God,” proclaimed the message of the Lord, “Yet I loved
+Jacob,” and he comforts the faithful who still endure in all their
+tribulations, that “a book of remembrance is written before him for them
+that feared the Lord and that thought upon His name.” After Malachi,
+a number of revelations appeared, which, to the satisfaction of the
+Messianic expectations, explained the events of the world, and prophesied
+that those only who should persevere until the end would be called upon
+to rule, together with the “Son of Man,” who is to come to smite the
+heathens and to rule them with an iron rod. The first apocalyptic author,
+who wrote in 164 B. C., impersonated Daniel, the prophet, who had lived
+about 400 B. C. The powerful nations of the world are represented as
+beasts, the fourth and last beast being the Macedonian empire. It has
+ten horns, that is, rulers, the last one being Antiochus Epiphanes. As
+soon as his power is broken, the power over the earth will be given to
+Israel, which is called the Son of Man. The power of the tenth horn was
+broken, indeed, yet the Messianic hopes remained unfulfilled, and thus
+new prophecies were wanted, which should again explain the plans of
+the Almighty, so that the faithful would still endure and hope. Thus,
+Henoch was written, and after Henoch the Assumption of Moses, the book of
+Baruch, and other revelations.
+
+The apocalyptic literature is characterised by Messianic expectations and
+eschatological reflections. The end of the present course of affairs is
+said to be near at hand and a new order will be established in which the
+faithful shall rule for a whole millennium and the wicked be tormented.
+
+The Revelation of St. John represents this spirit of apocalyptic hopes
+among the early Christians of Asia Minor. It throws much light upon the
+conditions and the conceptions of a period concerning which we have
+very little information. We here see Christianity in its beginnings.
+The coloring of the Revelation is still Jewish. Its author stands in
+a conscious contrast to the Greek spirit which is about to change the
+properly Jewish character of the new doctrine. The author of the St. John
+revelation is a Jew to the backbone still; he denounces the antinomistic
+Christianity of the Gentiles as represented by Nocolaitanes whom, we are
+told, God hateth. He does not directly mention the apostle St. Paul, but
+there is little doubt that he is alluded to in Chap. II, 2, as one of
+them “which say they are apostles and are not.”
+
+The more powerful the Greek spirit grew in the church, the weaker became
+these original features inherited from the diaspora Jews until they
+were dropped forever through the efforts of Origenes who made a decided
+and successful opposition to the belief in the millennium. Yet it took
+some time for the traditional view of the Messiah to change into the
+purer and more spiritual Christ-ideal There were two parties in the
+early church who spoke two radically different idioms; the one still
+cherished the old chiliasm, dreaming of the establishment of a millennium
+on earth. Their terminology moved always in the same allegories: they
+spoke of green and fat fields and of sulphurous abysses, of white horses
+and terrible beasts, of trees of life, of golden cities and of war and
+bloodshed, while the other party spoke of Logos, of the eternal Son
+through whom the world had been made, of “the dispensation of the fulness
+of the times in which God might gather together in one all things in
+Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth,” of the pleroma
+and of aeons.
+
+The Revelation of St. John is an expression of the former party and it
+was natural that after a complete victory of the latter party, Christian
+teachers knew not what to make of this book which shows Christian views
+by the side of an irreconcilable Judaism, and a worldly empire in
+Jerusalem, the beloved city with twenty-four Jewish elders representing
+the twelve tribes of Israel. The rest of Jerusalem is to be finally
+converted while there is no hope for paganism. The difference between
+Israelites and Gentiles remains a radical one even in the Holy City when
+the new heaven and the new earth has been created. The Gentile-Christians
+appear as citizens of a lower order. The Israelites alone live in the
+city while the Gentiles only walk in the light thereof, and they shall
+bring the glory and honor of the nations into it.
+
+We have given a few glimpses of the problems of the St. John literature
+only. It is impossible to go over the whole field. Nor is it necessary to
+do so. Professor Holtzmann has given us so complete a presentation that
+we need but refer to his work which is indispensable to all interested
+in the literature of the New Testament. It will be the more valuable
+and welcome as it is furnished with an index, a feature rarely found in
+German books.
+
+                                                                     P. C.
+
+
+DIE WILLENSFREIHEIT UND IHRE GEGNER. By _Dr. Constantin Gutberlet_.
+Fulda: Fuldaer Actiendruckerei. 1893.
+
+Dr. Constantin Gutberlet regards the doctrine of free-will as a cardinal
+doctrine of Christianity. In the present booklet he endeavors to show
+that all attacks made upon it by unchristian savants have failed. He
+criticises Höffding, Lombroso, Wundt, Münsterberg, Lotze, P. Ree, and
+Schopenhauer, and establishes as his own view a theory of free-will which
+he calls “freedom of choice.” He says: “There is no decision without
+_sufficient_ reason, but there may be without _rational_ reason. The
+sufficient reason is that a greater good may be recognised as possessing
+‘blind’ sides, that we can do without it and even reject it for the sake
+of these ‘blind’ sides. On the other hand, a lesser good may be given as
+an object of willing, and our willing by its own energy conditions the
+free decision of the will” (p. 25). Freedom of will is not a reversal
+of causation, which latter, according to Gutberlet, is “an absolutely
+necessary law” (p. 8 and _passim_).
+
+It is difficult to understand how Gutberlet, taking this view, can class
+himself among the indeterminists. From his premises, we should expect
+him to take the view which we have defended, that freedom of will is not
+contradictory to determinism. If freedom of will means freedom of choice,
+in which “we ourselves, as the contents of our ideas, feelings, and
+dispositions, are the cause not only of our activities, but also of our
+free decision” (p. 19), then our decisions are most certainly determined
+by our character. Gutberlet’s criticism of Wundt (pp. 167-171), who
+defends freedom of will and determinism, is wide of the mark, and it
+seems that Gutberlet is either not clear on this point himself or he does
+not draw the consequences of his own standpoint. Says Gutberlet: “Only
+on the supposition that there is no other than ‘mechanical’ causation of
+natural forces, can the determinist maintain that freedom abolishes the
+principle of causation. In the application of the principle of Causation
+‘what happens has a cause’ to natural forces, the principle can be
+inverted thus: ‘when all sufficient causes are given, the effect follows
+with necessity.’ Yet if there are spiritual agents which stand above the
+mechanical causation of nature and natural forces, we cannot _a priori_
+declare that their effects follow with the same necessity from their
+character as is the case with nature. Accordingly, unless we assume the
+questionable theory that free causation is impossible, we cannot invert
+here the principle of causation and use it against free decision” (p.
+168).
+
+How does this sentence agree with Mr. Gutberlet’s statements that
+causation is an absolutely necessary law and that “we ourselves ...
+are the cause of our free decision.” Our decisions are determined by
+“our ideas, feelings, and dispositions,” and yet a sufficient cause
+determines its effect only if the causation is mechanical, not if it is
+spiritual. Gutberlet explains the difficulty as follows: “Certainly, if
+we did not reduce the free decision _once made_ (die _eingetretene_ freie
+Entscheidung), to an adequate cause, we should sin against logic and
+psychology. But we understand by ‘adequate cause of a decision’ not only
+the influence of motives, but also the energy of a free will.” Very well
+then, Mr. Gutberlet would be a determinist as much as Wundt. Decisions
+are determined by two factors: (1) by the motives (i. e. the objects
+which act as stimuli upon the will) and (2) by the character of the
+agent. Not everybody is affected by the same stimulus in the same way.
+One chooses this and another that motive, and his character determines
+the choice; and a man of a certain character, under definitely given
+conditions, will freely and yet necessarily choose a certain motive. Dr.
+Gutberlet, it appears to us, says yes and no in one breath.
+
+Dr. Gutberlet is the editor of the _Philosophisches Jahrbuch_, a Roman
+Catholic periodical. He belongs to that class of men who by partisans of
+free thought are regarded as especially dangerous. He is not as narrow
+as the common type of _defensores fidei_. He studies the works of modern
+savants “whose intellectual superiority,” as he confesses, he “admires
+in many respects.” He is broader than most of his _confreres_, and thus
+he makes the creed of his church appear broader than it practically is.
+We can see no danger in the appearance of such men. It is true, he will
+make converts among the educated, or at least, he will keep some wavering
+elements within the pale of the church; for the Roman church is, upon the
+whole, still very hostile to progress. But, on the other hand, such a man
+is in his circles a missionary of science; he will help to broaden the
+views of his brethren. He is learning, and they will learn from him.
+
+                                                                     P. C.
+
+
+GRUNDZÜGE DER PHYSIOLOGISCHEN PSYCHOLOGIE. By _Wilhelm Wundt_. Leipsic:
+Wilhelm Engelmann. 1893.
+
+Wundt’s “Physiological Psychology” is perhaps justly regarded as his
+best and most valuable work. We have just received the first part of the
+fourth edition and may expect that the second part will soon appear. We
+intend to review the whole work as soon as completed, and will state
+here only that this new edition contains, among many emendations and
+additions, an explicit account of the modern methods of psychological
+investigations, with descriptions and illustrations of the most important
+instruments invented for that purpose.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+VERGLEICHEND-ENTWICKELUNGSGESCHICHTLICHE UND ANATOMISCHE STUDIEN IM
+BEREICHE DER HIRNANATOMIE. 3. RIECHAPPARAT UND AMMONSHORN. Abdruck
+aus _Anatomischer Anzeiger_. By _Dr. L. Edinger_. (Jena: 1893. Gustav
+Fischer.)
+
+Dr. Edinger proves in this essay that in the cerebral evolution of
+animals the cortex makes its first appearance in the formation of the
+cornu ammonis. This convolution being the centre of smell, it is more
+than merely probable that smell sensations, or something analogous to
+smell sensations, were phylogenetically the first psychical functions.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+ÉTAT MENTAL DES HYSTÉRIQUES LES STIGMATES MENTAUX. By _Pierre Janet_.
+Paris: Rueff & Co. 1892.
+
+M. Pierre Janet, one of the most prominent disciples of Professor
+Charcot, presents in this little volume of two hundred and thirty-three
+pages a summary of the results of modern psychical research as it is
+understood at the Salpétrière. Charcot himself recommends the book to the
+medical profession. Janet investigates anæsthesia (Chap. I), amnesia,
+abulia, the diseases of motion, and the modifications of character. The
+author proposes to “describe the phenomena and endeavors to establish a
+rigorous determinism of their relations. The moral view of a diseased
+person,” he says, “ought to constitute a part of the clinical diagnosis
+while the psychical state must be closely investigated in its connection
+with physiological facts. This is the only way in which the physician
+can gain a knowledge of the entire man and understand the diseases which
+affect his organism.”
+
+Professor Charcot states that Professor Janet’s researches on the mental
+state of hysterical persons were begun long ago and completed under his
+supervision; that they were expounded by M. Janet in the Spring of 1892
+in a few lectures at the Salpétrière; that they tend to confirm the
+idea, often expressed in his own teachings, that hysteria is upon the
+whole a mental disease.
+
+Hypnotism has long enough been regarded not only as harmless but even as
+a panacea for almost all the ailments of mankind. It would be well to
+heed Charcot’s warning, as hysterical diseases may be treated with better
+success, if the mystery that still surrounds them disappears before calm
+and scientific investigation.
+
+                                                                        ς.
+
+
+L’ÉCOLE D’ANTHROPOLOGIE CRIMINELLE. By _l’Abbé Maurice de Baets_. Gand:
+P. van Fleteren. 1893.
+
+Dr. de Baets, Professor of Philosophy of the Gregorian University
+of Rome, Italy, and Secretary to the Bishop of Ghent, criticises in
+this elegantly printed little volume the modern school of criminal
+anthropology. He believes with Herbert Spencer that, if a great number
+of people accept certain errors, these errors must contain a kernel of
+truth. Professor de Baets says that he does not deny crime to be an
+outgrowth of the organism, to be inherited, to be closely connected with
+insanity, etc., but he cannot approve of criminal unaccountableness. The
+denial of responsibility, he says, is the denial of the wrong, and the
+denial of the wrong is the denial of morality. He sums up his view in
+italics on page 48: “Man is responsible for his acts in the measure that
+his acts depend on a free will.”
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+AGAINST DOGMA AND FREE-WILL. By _H. Croft Hiller_. London: Williams and
+NORGATE. 1892.
+
+The author has much to say against ecclesiasticism and sacerdotalism, and
+while he repudiates such men as Wundt and Ribot, he “begs to thank Drs.
+Weismann, Luys, and Ferrier from whose labors the views expressed in this
+treatise derive that scientific authentication without which they would
+be worthless.” The book is apparently a first venture into the stormy
+ocean of literary pursuits.
+
+                                                                        ς.
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUALITY, OR THE ONE AND THE MANY. By _Antoinette
+Brown Blackwell_. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1893.
+
+The author trusts that she has “_demonstrated_ a conscious immortality.”
+In a former book of hers entitled “The Physical Basis of Immortality,”
+1876, she propounded “the theory of persistent mind-matter individuals”
+which are to be conceived as ultimate atoms. The present volume of five
+hundred and nineteen pages is written to show that “this conception of
+the ultimate atoms could consistently explain and harmonise mental and
+material phenomena and by coördinated interpretations of the most diverse
+processes simplify and unify nature and her manifestations.” The theory
+of the correlation of matter and mind is accepted; “Nature,” the author
+says, “is nothing if not mathematical,” and there are many passages to
+which no monistic thinker would take exception. Along with them we find
+statements, e. g. on the rhythmic motion of atoms, etc., which it will be
+difficult to prove. Her peculiar view is characterised in the following
+sentence: “All ultimate individualities _may_ be identical in kind, but
+no obvious necessity decides that they _must_ be, and in an order of
+things where other varieties are prevalent, the weight of evidence for
+the present is on the side of varieties, even in the ultimate units.”
+The author’s theory (if we rightly understand her) has been tried
+before. Some suggestions of Goethe’s seem to indicate that he believed
+in soul-monads, and the German psychologist Herbart erected on the
+assumption of material soul-atoms his system of a mathematical psychology
+in which sound science was curiously mingled with improbable vagaries.
+The author of “The Philosophy of Individuality,” although apparently
+quite well informed otherwise, has, strange enough, not taken notice
+either of Goethe or of Herbart. Perhaps she would have abandoned her
+theory if she had been fully familiar with Herbartism and the critique
+which it has received; for Herbart’s soul-atoms are to-day regarded as a
+thing of the past.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+DIE GRUNDBEGRIFFE DER GEGENWART. By _Prof. Rudolf Eucken_. Leipsic: Veit
+& Co. 1893.
+
+Prof. Rudolf Eucken discusses in this volume such topics as
+“Subjective—Objective”; “A priori—A posteriori”; “Monism—Dualism”;
+“Idealism, Realism, and Naturalism”; “Theoretical—Practical,” and
+so forth. It seems to us that Eucken has not yet fully succeeded in
+reconciling his philosophy with natural science. We are glad to notice
+that he has a critical eye for the shortcomings of naturalists under
+whose methods of classification and mechanical conceptions the properly
+spiritual of man would be eliminated. He is judicious in his exposition
+of the various problems, but we miss a final solution, such as would
+clearly state and recognise the truth in both. Nevertheless the book is
+sound, full of valuable information, and its perusal is to be recommended
+to every student of philosophy.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+THE ÆSTHETIC ELEMENT IN MORALITY. By _Frank Chapman Sharp, Ph.D._ New
+York: Macmillan & Co. 1893.
+
+The book contains chapters on: (1) the theory of altruism; (2) the
+intrinsic worth of character; (3) an analysis of moral beauty; (4)
+an examination of the æsthetic method of ethics; and (5) the idea of
+obligation in æsthetics and ethics. The author’s knowledge of ethical
+theories appears to be limited. Duns Scotus, the Realist, is called a
+thoroughgoing Nominalist. In spite of such defects, we find much that
+is good in the book. In the end of his discussion the author says with
+truth: “When the element of the _good_, or that which is capable of
+clothing itself in the form of an ideal, is taken out of the conception
+of obligation, this latter degenerates into what is nothing more than
+mere submission to an arbitrary imperative....Prometheus, chained to the
+rocks for bringing the gift of fire to the wretched barbarous inhabitants
+of the earth, in defiance of the will of the ‘Father of gods and men,’ is
+one of the grandest productions of the human imagination, and were the
+Supreme Being such a one as Augustine and Calvin imagined him, we should
+despise the wretched slaves that licked the dust at his feet.”
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+
+
+
+PERIODICALS.
+
+
+ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. V. Nos. 1 and 2.
+
+    DIE STABILITÄT DER RAUMWERTE AUF DER NETZHAUT. By _Franz
+    Hillebrand_.
+
+    UEBER EIN OPTISCHES PARADOXON. (Second Article.) By _Franz
+    Brentano_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
+
+This second article, “On an Optical Paradox,” is a rejoinder of Franz
+Brentano of Vienna to Th. Lipps. We gave an account of this interesting
+discussion in _The Monist_, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 153 et seqq. Professor
+Brentano insists on explaining the optical illusion concerning distances
+between two points, as seen in Fig. 1-3, by an overestimation of
+small and an underestimation of large angles. He complains of being
+misunderstood by Professor Lipps who substitutes “acute” for “small” and
+“obtuse” for “large”; for, says he, in comparisons both angles may be
+obtuse or both may be acute. Professor Brentano adds some more puzzling
+figures to prove his case; and, as in his first article, his propositions
+are ingenious and thought-stimulating; but his arguments do not suffice
+to convince us of the validity of his theory. We do not exactly
+intend to deny the general rule as to the overestimation of large and
+underestimation of small angles, but are inclined to believe that it will
+not serve as a sufficient explanation. We reproduce the most important
+figures devised by Brentano, and take the liberty of adding a few remarks
+and additional figures of our own.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 3.]
+
+Fig. 4 represents two right angles, one of which is divided into nine
+angles of 10° each. Brentano claims that we so overestimate the nine
+small angles as to take the undivided right angle as an acute one. I can
+only say that however much I have tried, I am not subject to the illusion.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 4.]
+
+In Fig. 5 we have on the straight line _AB_ a series of stations which
+are connected with a common centre. The line _AB_ is not a curve, but
+this figure reminds us of a perspective view of the sector of a circle.
+The drawing appears as the diagrammatic picture of a shield, the buckle
+of which is in _C_. Thus _AB_ is conceived as representing a curve. It
+does not seem that a comparison of the angles has anything to do with the
+illusion.
+
+How much perspective interferes with the optical illusions under
+discussion, impresses itself upon my mind, when I think of figure 5 as
+the diagram of a mountain, rising above the plane _AB_. If I imagine I
+stand below the plane, which may be a high table-land, the line _AB_
+appears to my eye straight. But when I imagine I am looking down upon the
+plane, the curvature of _AB_ becomes very strongly marked.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 5.]
+
+In Fig. 6 we can detect no optical illusion. The line _AB_ appears
+straight to us. The drawing reminds us of a sunrise on the ocean.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 6.]
+
+The same must be said about Figure 7. Brentano, in agreement with Lipps,
+claims that we are inclined to regard the distance between the ends of
+the two lines as larger than between the points. If there is any illusion
+at all, it seems to me, that on the contrary, the distance between the
+ends of the lines appears shorter. And why? We measure the distance by
+allowing our eyes to run from one point to the other and then comparing
+the measurements. This comparison is geometrically effected by combining
+the respective starting points, and thus judging as to the parallelism
+of these two lines mentally constructed. Whether or not the dots appear
+equidistant, depends upon the execution of all these operations. While
+directly measuring the distances between the points, we have an easier
+measurement where the lines are attached. The lines give to the points
+a certain vim; they almost appear to move with a velocity indicated by
+the length of the little lines, while the isolated dots present a very
+phlegmatic appearance.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 7.]
+
+In order to see what effects other positions of the lines produce, let
+us compare in Fig. 9 the several relations by covering the rest. If
+there is any illusion as to _a_ and _b_, we should say that the points
+of _a_ appear at a greater distance; as to _b_ and _c_, we see the
+greater distance in _c_, as to _c_ and _d_, we feel doubtful, while
+any comparison with _e_, tends strongly to convince us of their equal
+distance. The reason is obvious. The lines in _e_ assist us in drawing
+the parallels, which we consciously or unconsciously construct in order
+to compare the distances.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 8.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 9.]
+
+A comparison like that of α and β in Fig. 8, where the equal length of
+the combining lines is very apparent, induced Brentano to regard the
+illusion which is observed in Figures 1-3 as due to the angles. In our
+opinion he is mistaken. For the illusion actually takes place in α and
+β; only it is quickly corrected with the help of the parallels, which,
+as in ε, assist the imagination in making an exact comparison. When we
+place α and β either at a sufficient distance, or are somehow prevented
+from making use of the parallel lines, we shall have the same illusion
+as appears in Figures 1, 2, 3. To prove this, we have but to bring the
+figure α in a slanting position, as is shown in λ, and the illusion
+is so strong that many will find it difficult to believe that λ is an
+electrotyped duplicate of α.
+
+The mooted illusions are not sense-illusions, but illusions of judgment;
+and we believe that the explanation of these curious phenomena must be
+sought in the elements which unconsciously enter into the make-up of our
+judgments.
+
+Lipps says that lines are felt to be movements. If a line is continued,
+albeit with a slight declination, the motion appears “free and
+victorious,” aspiring beyond itself; while, if confined in the corner
+of an acute angle, it seems cut off and impeded. The victoriously
+progressive motion is overestimated; the checked motion is underestimated.
+
+Brentano, in order to meet Lipps’s objections, proposes a few additional
+figures, of which we reproduce the most important ones in Fig. 10-14.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 10.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 11.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 12.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 13.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 14.]
+
+It seems to us that the main part which the angles play in these or any
+other similar figures, consists in leading our imagination astray. The
+parallel lines which we attempt to construct for our comparison, switch
+slightly off with an inclination toward the angles.
+
+But that is not all; there are other elements that affect our judgment
+at the very outset. In measuring a distance we do something, and in
+looking at a diagram we think something. The diagram is suggestive of
+some reality to which we compare it. All these ideas, be they conscious,
+subconscious, or even unconscious, affect our judgment and are sometimes
+apt to lead it astray.
+
+In addition we have to mention two things, the influence of which upon
+our verdict cannot be doubted; the one is the size of the entire figure,
+the other the vacuity of the distance to be measured: both tend to make
+the distance appear longer than it really is. To illustrate this, we add
+the three Figures 15, 16, 17 which contain no angles and yet show the
+same illusions.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 15.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 16.]
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 17.]
+
+The distance between the points in Figure 17 appears longer than in
+Figure 16, and in Figure 16 again longer than in Figure 15. The fact is,
+that before starting on our measurement-journey, we have in Figure 17
+already traversed a good distance after having noted the extraordinarily
+lengthened boundary marks. The town _A_ may be exactly as far as the town
+_B_, yet the journey to _A_ will appear longer, if I have to ride an hour
+before I reach the station, while I may live opposite the terminus of the
+railroad to _B_.
+
+When our eyes glide down from one point to the other, we pass in one
+case through an empty desert the dreariness of which is not interrupted.
+We almost lose our way and become lonesome in its monotony. If our way,
+however, is full of variations, we are pleasantly entertained and regard
+our journey as so much shorter. The contrast is most obvious in figure
+10. The time-illusions as to the swiftness of hours of work or amusement
+and the slowness of moments of _ennui_ have become proverbial among all
+nations. The more dreariness, the more marked is the lengthening of the
+distance, while even a partial accompaniment shortens the traversed road.
+
+                                                                      κρς.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. V. Nos. 3 and 4.
+
+    THEORIE DES FARBENSEHENS. By _H. Ebbinghaus_.
+
+    UEBER DEN MUSKELSINN BEI BLINDEN. By _Paul Hocheisen_.
+
+    LITTERATURBERICHT. (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)
+
+
+VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 2.
+
+    EINIGES ZUR GRUNDLEGUNG DER SITTENLEHRE. (First Article.) By
+    _J. Petzoldt_.
+
+    KRITIK DER GRUNDANSCHAUUNGEN DER SOCIOLOGIE H. SPENCER’S. By
+    _P. Barth_.
+
+    WERTHTHEORIE UND ETHIK. (Second Article.) By _Chr. Ehrenfels_.
+    (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
+
+
+THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. V. No. 3.
+
+    ON ERRORS OF OBSERVATION. By _Prof. James McKeen Cattell_.
+
+    MINOR STUDIES FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY OF CLARK
+    UNIVERSITY.
+
+    ON THE DISCRIMINATION OF GROUPS OF RAPID CLICKS. By _Thaddeus
+    L. Bolton_.
+
+    STATISTICS OF DREAMS. By _Mary Whiton Calkins_.
+
+    ON THE PRESSURE SENSE OF THE DRUM OF THE EAR AND “FACIAL
+    VISION.” By _F. B. Dresslar_.
+
+    ON REACTION-TIMES WHEN THE STIMULUS IS APPLIED TO THE REACTING
+    HAND. By _J. F. Reigart and Edmund C. Sanford_.
+
+    EXPERIMENTS UPON PHYSIOLOGICAL MEMORY BY MEANS OF THE
+    INTERFERENCE OF ASSOCIATIONS. By _John A. Bergström_.
+
+    A NEW INSTRUMENT FOR WEBER’S LAW; WITH INDICATIONS OF A LAW OF
+    SENSE MEMORY. By _James H. Leuba_.
+
+    A NEW PENDULUM CHRONOGRAPH. By _Edmund C. Sanford, Ph. D._
+
+    LABORATORY COURSE IN PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. (Fourth Paper.)
+    By _Edmund C. Sanford, Ph. D._ (Worcester, Mass.: J. H. Orpha.)
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 3.
+
+    GERMAN KANTIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY. By _Dr. Erich Adickes_.
+
+    THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF NEO-KANTISM. By _Prof. Andrew Seth_.
+
+    MENTAL MEASUREMENT. By _Prof. J. McK. Cattell_.
+
+    BOOK REVIEWS. (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn & CO.)
+
+
+REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 5.
+
+    PSYCHOLOGIE DU MUSICIEN. 1. L’EVOLUTION DES APTITUDES
+    MUSICALES. By _L. Dauriac_.
+
+    LA SOCIABILITÉ ET LA MORALE CHEZ LES ANIMAUX. By _Houssay_.
+
+    SUR LES IDÉES GÉNÉRALES. By _Marchesini_.
+
+    QUESTIONNAIRE SUR L’AUDITION COLORÉE, FIGURÉE ET ILLUMINÉE. By
+    _Gruber_.
+
+    L’ATTENTION ET LES IMAGES. By _F. Paulhan_.
+
+    UNE ILLUSION D’OPTIQUE. By _B. Bourdon_.
+
+    SCIENCE ET SOCIALISME. _G. Sorel_.
+
+    ANALYSES ET COMPTES RENDUS. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 6.
+
+    LA NOUVELLE THÉORIE DE L’HÉRÉDITÉ DE WEISMANN. By _Y. Delage_.
+
+    UN CALCULATEUR DU TYPE VISUEL. By _J.-M. Charcot and A. Binet_.
+
+    PSYCHOLOGIE DU MUSICIEN.—II. L’OREILLE MUSICALE. By _L.
+    Dauriac_.
+
+
+REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.
+
+    LE MOUVEMENT ET LES ARGUMENTS DE ZÉNON D’ÉLÉE. By _G. Noël_.
+
+    LE PROBLÈME MORAL DANS LA PHILOSOPHIE DE SPINOZA. By _V.
+    Delbos_.
+
+    LE CONCEPT DU NOMBRE CHEZ LES PYTHAGORICIENS. By _G. Milhaud_.
+
+    LE DIALOGUE DANS L’ENSEIGNEMENT DE LA PHILOSOPHIE. By _C.
+    Mélinand_. (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.)
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.
+
+    LES PRÉTENDUS SOPHISMES DE ZÉNON D’ÉLÉE. By _V. Brochard_.
+
+    SPIR ET SA DOCTRINE. By _A. Penjon_.
+
+    ESSAI SUR LE CARACTÈRE GÉNÉRAL DE LA CONNAISSANCE. By _G.
+    Remacle_.
+
+
+PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH.
+
+CONTENTS: Vol. VI. No. 2.
+
+    BEGRIFF DER PHILOSOPHIE. By _Uebinger_.
+
+    DIE OBJECTIVITÄT UND DIE SICHERHEIT DES ERKENNENS. By
+    _Isenkrahe_.
+
+    DER BEGRIFF DES “WARREN.” (Concluded.) By _Franz Schmid_.
+
+    DER GRUNDPLAN DER MENSCHLICHEN WISSENSCHAFT. By _Bahlmann, S.
+    J._
+
+    HANDSCHRIFTLICHES ZU DEN WERKEN DES ALANUS. By _Bäumker_.
+    (Fulda, 1893.)
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76881 ***
diff --git a/76881-h/76881-h.htm b/76881-h/76881-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..91f56af
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/76881-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,30703 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      The Monist, Vol. III | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+a {
+    text-decoration: none;
+}
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 {
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+h2.nobreak {
+    page-break-before: avoid;
+}
+
+h4.book {
+    text-align: justify;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+}
+
+hr {
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.tb {
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    width: 45%;
+    margin-left: 27.5%;
+    margin-right: 27.5%;
+}
+
+hr.chap {
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    width: 65%;
+    margin-left: 17.5%;
+    margin-right: 17.5%;
+}
+
+img.w100 {
+    width: 100%;
+}
+
+div.chapter {
+    page-break-before: always;
+}
+
+ul {
+    list-style-type: none;
+}
+
+li {
+    margin-top: .5em;
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+p {
+    margin-top: 0.5em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: 0.5em;
+    text-indent: 1em;
+}
+
+table {
+    margin: 1em auto 1em auto;
+    max-width: 40em;
+    border-collapse: collapse;
+}
+
+th {
+    padding: 0.25em;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    font-size: 90%;
+}
+
+td {
+    padding-left: 2.25em;
+    padding-right: 0.25em;
+    vertical-align: top;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+td.c {
+    text-align: center;
+    padding-left: 0.25em;
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.tdc {
+    text-align: center;
+    text-indent: 0;
+    padding: 0.75em 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em;
+}
+
+.tdr {
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.tdpg {
+    vertical-align: bottom;
+    text-align: right;
+    white-space: nowrap;
+}
+
+blockquote {
+    margin: auto 10%;
+    font-size: 90%;
+}
+
+blockquote .sub {
+    font-size: 100%;
+}
+
+.center {
+    text-align: center;
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.contents p {
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+figcaption p {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    font-size: 90%;
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.figmulti {
+    display: inline-block;
+}
+
+.footnotes {
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    border: dashed 1px;
+}
+
+.footnote {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+    font-size: 0.9em;
+}
+
+.footnote .label {
+    position: absolute;
+    right: 84%;
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.fnanchor {
+    vertical-align: super;
+    font-size: .8em;
+    text-decoration: none;
+}
+
+.hanging {
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+.larger {
+    font-size: 150%;
+}
+
+.masthead {
+    margin: auto;
+    width: 40em;
+    padding: 0.5em;
+}
+
+.noindent {
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.pagenum {
+    position: absolute;
+    right: 4%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+
+.poetry-container {
+    text-align: center;
+    font-size: 90%;
+}
+
+.poetry {
+    display: inline-block;
+    text-align: left;
+}
+
+.poetry .stanza {
+    margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;
+}
+
+.poetry .verse {
+    padding-left: 3em;
+}
+
+.right {
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.smaller {
+    font-size: 80%;
+}
+
+.smcap {
+    font-variant: small-caps;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+
+.allsmcap {
+    font-variant: small-caps;
+    font-style: normal;
+    text-transform: lowercase;
+}
+
+.spacer {
+    margin-left: 10em;
+    margin-right: 10em;
+}
+
+.titlepage {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-top: 3em;
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.x-ebookmaker img {
+    max-width: 100%;
+    width: auto;
+    height: auto;
+}
+
+.x-ebookmaker .poetry {
+    display: block;
+    margin-left: 1.5em;
+}
+
+.x-ebookmaker blockquote {
+    margin: auto 5%;
+}
+
+/* Poetry indents */
+.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3.0em;}
+.poetry .indent28 {text-indent: 11.0em;}
+
+/* Illustration classes */
+.illowp100 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp62 {width: 62%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp62 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp37 {width: 37%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp37 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp46 {width: 46%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp46 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp75 {width: 75%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp75 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp71 {width: 71%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp71 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp34 {width: 34%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp34 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp81 {width: 81%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp81 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp54 {width: 54%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp54 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp80 {width: 80%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp80 {width: 100%;}
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76881 ***</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">[i]</span></p>
+
+<h1><span class="smcap">The Monist</span></h1>
+
+<p class="titlepage larger smcap">a<br>
+Quarterly Magazine</p>
+
+<p class="titlepage">VOL. III.</p>
+
+<p class="titlepage">CHICAGO:<br>
+THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.<br>
+1892-1893</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_ii">[ii]</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage smaller smcap">Copyright, 1893,<br>
+by<br>
+The Open Court Publishing Co.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iii">[iii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS_OF_VOLUME_III">CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">ARTICLES.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Auta, The Doctrine of. By C. Lloyd Morgan</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_DOCTRINE_OF_AUTA">161</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Cruelty and Pity in Woman. By Guillaume Ferrero</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CRUELTY_AND_PITY_IN_WOMAN">220</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Doctrine of Auta, The. By C. Lloyd Morgan</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_DOCTRINE_OF_AUTA">161</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Education, Nationalisation of, and the Universities. By H. von
+    Holst</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#NATIONALISATION_OF_EDUCATION">493</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Evolutionary Love. By Charles S. Peirce</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#EVOLUTIONARY_LOVE">176</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Foundations of Theism, The. By E. D. Cope</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_FOUNDATIONS_OF_THEISM">623</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Founder of Tychism, The: His Methods, Philosophy, and Criticisms.
+    Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_FOUNDER_OF_TYCHISM">571</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Fourth Dimension, The By Hermann Schubert</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_FOURTH_DIMENSION">402</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Hindu Monism. By Richard Garbe</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#HINDU_MONISM">51</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Insects, The Nervous Ganglia of. By Alfred Binet</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_NERVOUS_GANGLIA_OF_INSECTS">35</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Intuition and Reason. By Christine Ladd Franklin</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#INTUITION_AND_REASON">211</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Issues of “Synechism,” The. By G. M. McCrie</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_ISSUES_OF_SYNECHISM">380</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Love, Evolutionary. By Charles S. Peirce</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#EVOLUTIONARY_LOVE">176</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Man’s Glassy Essence. By Charles S. Peirce</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#MANS_GLASSY_ESSENCE">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Meaning and Metaphor. By Lady Victoria Welby</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#MEANING_AND_METAPHOR">510</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mental Mummies. By Felix L. Oswald</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#MENTAL_MUMMIES">30</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Modern Science, Religion and. By F. Jodl</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#RELIGION_AND_MODERN_SCIENCE">329</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Monism, Hindu. By Richard Garbe</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#HINDU_MONISM">51</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Nationalisation of Education and the Universities. By H. von
+    Holst</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#NATIONALISATION_OF_EDUCATION">493</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Necessitarians, Reply to the. By Charles S. Peirce</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#REPLY_TO_THE_NECESSITARIANS">526</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Necessity, The Idea of: Its Basis and Its Scope. Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_IDEA_OF_NECESSITY">68</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Necessity, The Superstition of. By John Dewey</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_SUPERSTITION_OF_NECESSITY">362</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Panbiotism, Panpsychism and. Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#PANPSYCHISM_AND_PANBIOTISM">234</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Panpsychism and Panbiotism. Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#PANPSYCHISM_AND_PANBIOTISM">234</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Reason, Intuition and. By Christine Ladd Franklin</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#INTUITION_AND_REASON">211</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Religion and Modern Science. By F. Jodl</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#RELIGION_AND_MODERN_SCIENCE">329</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Religion of Science, The. Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_RELIGION_OF_SCIENCE">352</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Renan: A Discourse Given at South Place Chapel, London. By
+    Moncure D. Conway</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#RENAN">201</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_iv">[iv]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Reply to the Necessitarians. By Charles S. Peirce</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#REPLY_TO_THE_NECESSITARIANS">526</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Science, The Religion of. Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_RELIGION_OF_SCIENCE">352</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Superstition of Necessity, The. By John Dewey</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_SUPERSTITION_OF_NECESSITY">362</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“Synechism,” The Issues of. By G. M. McCrie</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_ISSUES_OF_SYNECHISM">380</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Theism, The Foundations of. By E. D. Cope</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_FOUNDATIONS_OF_THEISM">623</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Thought in America, The Future of. By E. D. Cope</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_FUTURE_OF_THOUGHT_IN_AMERICA">23</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Tychism, The Founder of: His Methods, Philosophy, and
+    Criticisms. Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#THE_FOUNDER_OF_TYCHISM">571</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Universities, Nationalisation of Education and the. By H. von
+    Holst</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#NATIONALISATION_OF_EDUCATION">493</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Woman, Cruelty and Pity in. By Guillaume Ferrero</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CRUELTY_AND_PITY_IN_WOMAN">220</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>France. By Lucien Arréat</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#FRANCE_I">111</a>, <a href="#FRANCE_II">258</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>France, The Religious Outlook in. By Theodore Stanton</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#FRANCE_III_I">450</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Germany. By Christian Ufer</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#GERMANY_II">264</a>, <a href="#GERMANY_IV">640</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>New French Books. By Lucien Arréat</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#FRANCE_III_II">456</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Recent Evolutionary Studies in Germany. By Carus Sterne</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#GERMANY_I">97</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A Letter from Mr. Herbert Spencer</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#A_LETTER_FROM_MR_HERBERT_SPENCER">272</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Comte and Turgot. By Louis Belrose, Jr.</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#COMTE_AND_TURGOT">118</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Is Monism Arbitrary? Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#IS_MONISM_ARBITRARY">124</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>James’s Psychology, Observations on Some Points of. By W.
+    L. Worcester</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#OBSERVATIONS">285</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Logic as Relation Lore. By F. C. Russell</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#LOGIC_AS_RELATION-LORE">272</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mathematics a Description of Operations with Pure Forms.
+    Editor</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#MATHEMATICS">133</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Reply to a Critic, A. By Edward T. Dixon</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#A_REPLY_TO_A_CRITIC">127</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sensation, Prof. Ernst Mach’s Term</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#PROFESSOR_ERNST_MACHS_TERM_SENSATION">298</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Some Remarks Upon Professor James’s Discussion of Attention.
+    By Hiram M. Stanley</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#SOME_REMARKS">122</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">BOOK REVIEWS.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><i>Acht Abhandlungen, Herrn Professor Dr. Karl Ludwig
+    Michelet zum 90. Geburtstag</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_478">478</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Arréat, Lucien. <i>Psychologie du Peintre</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Baets, l’Abbé Maurice de. <i>L’école d’anthropologie
+    criminelle</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_649">649</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Becker, George F. <i>Finite Homogeneous Strain, Flow, and
+    Rupture of Rocks</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_480">480</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Berendt, M. and J. Friedländer. <i>Der Pessimismus im Lichte
+    einer höheren Weltauffassung</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_477">477</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Binet, Alfred. <i>Les Altérations de la Personnalité</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Blackwell, Antoinette Brown. <i>The Philosophy of Individuality,
+    or the One and the Many</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_649">649</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Cattell, James McKeen, and George Stuart Fullerton. <i>On the
+    Perception of Small Differences</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_141">141</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">[v]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Delbœuf, J. <i>L’Hypnotisme devant les Chambres Legislatives
+    Belges</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_318">318</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Dessoir, Max. <i>Ueber den Hautsinn</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Dixon, Edward T. <i>An Essay on Reasoning</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_138">138</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Dreher, Eugen. <i>Der Materialismus, eine Verirrung des
+    menschlichen Geistes, widerlegt durch eine zeitgemässe
+    Weltanschauung</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_479">479</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Edinger, L. <i>Vergleichend-entwickelungsgeschichtliche und
+    anatomische Studien im Bereiche der Hirnanatomie. 3. Riechapparat
+    und Ammonshorn</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_648">648</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Engel, Gustav. <i>Die Philosophie und die sociale Frage</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_478">478</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Eucken, Rudolf. <i>Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_650">650</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Friedländer, J. and M. Berendt. <i>Der Pessimismus im Lichte
+    einer höheren Weltauffassung</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_477">477</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Fullerton, George Stuart, and James McKeen Cattel. <i>On the
+    Perception of Small Differences</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>George, Henry. <i>A Perplexed Philosopher</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_482">482</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Gutberlet, Constantin. <i>Die Willensfreiheit und ihre Gegner</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_646">646</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Hiller, H. Croft. <i>Against Dogma and Free-Will</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_649">649</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Hirth, Georges. <i>Physiologie de L’Art</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. <i>Hand-Commentar zum neuen Testament.
+    IV. Evangelium, Briefe und Offenbarung des Johannes</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_643">643</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius. <i>Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen
+    Einleitung in das neue Testament</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_150">150</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Janet, Pierre. <i>État mental des hystériques les stigmates
+    mentaux</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_648">648</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Joël, Karl. <i>Der echte und der Xenophontische Sokrates</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_480">480</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Jones, E. E. Constance. <i>An Introduction to General Logic</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_314">314</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Lindemann, Ferdinand. <i>Vorlesungen über Geometrie</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_314">314</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Lotze, Hermann. <i>Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_140">140</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Lubbock, John. <i>The Beauties of Nature</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Meynert, Theodore. <i>Sammlung von populär-wissenschaftlichen
+    Vorträgen über den Bau und die Leistungen des Gehirns</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mik, J. <i>Graber’s Leitfaden der Zoologie für die oberen
+    Classen der Mittelschulen</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_322">322</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Münsterberg, Hugo. <i>Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Oelzelt-Newin, Anton. <i>Ueber sittliche Dispositionen</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Offner, Max. <i>Ueber die Grundformen der Vorstellungsverbindung</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_479">479</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Paszkowski, Wilhelm. <i>Wie steht es jetzt mit der Philosophie,
+    und was haben wir von ihr zu hoffen?</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_478">478</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Paulsen, Friedrich. <i>Einleitung in die Philosophie</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_466">466</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Rolfes, Eugen. <i>Die Aristotelische Auffassung vom Verhältnisse
+    Gottes zur Welt und zum Menschen</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Royce, Josiah. <i>The Spirit of Modern Philosophy</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_306">306</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Royer, Clémence. <i>Recherches d’optique physiologique et
+    physique</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_320">320</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vi">[vi]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Salter, William M. <i>First Steps in Philosophy</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_470">470</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Schellwien, Robert. <i>Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Schmidt, Johannes. <i>Die Urheimath der Indogermanen und das
+    europäische Zahlsystem</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Schmidkunz, Hans. <i>Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfasslicher
+    Darstellung</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_317">317</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sharp, Frank Chapman. <i>The Æsthetic Element in Morality</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_650">650</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sidgwick, Alfred. <i>Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_312">312</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Spencer, Herbert. <i>Social Statics and Justice</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sterne, Carus. <i>Natur und Kunst</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Topinard, Paul. <i>L’Homme dans la Nature</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_146">146</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Topinard, Paul. <i>L’Anthropologie du Bengale</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_322">322</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Tufts, James Hayden. <i>The Sources of Development of Kant’s
+    Teleology</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_312">312</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Verworn, Max. <i>Die Bewegung der lebendigen Substanz</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_321">321</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Williams, C. M. <i>A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded
+    on the Theory of Evolution</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_474">474</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Wundt, Wilhelm. <i>Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_300">300</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Wundt, Wilhelm. <i>Hypnotismus und Suggestion</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_315">315</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Wundt, Wilhelm. <i>Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie</i></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#Page_648">648</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">PERIODICALS</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdpg"><a href="#PERIODICALS_I">153-160</a>; <a href="#PERIODICALS_II">325-328</a>;
+    <a href="#PERIODICALS_III">488-492</a>; <a href="#PERIODICALS_IV">651-658.</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">APPENDIX.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><a href="#plates">Plates</a> belonging to the article “The Nervous
+    Ganglia of Insects.” (In No. 1 of this volume.)</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+
+<div class="masthead">
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Vol. III.</span>
+<span class="smcap spacer">October, 1892.</span>
+<span class="smcap">No. 1.</span></p>
+
+<h2>THE MONIST.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="MANS_GLASSY_ESSENCE">MAN’S GLASSY ESSENCE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In <i>The Monist</i> for January, 1891, I tried to show what conceptions
+ought to form the brick and mortar of a philosophical system.
+Chief among these was that of absolute chance for which I argued
+again in last April’s number.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_1" href="#Footnote_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> In July, I applied another fundamental
+idea, that of continuity, to the law of mind. Next in order, I
+have to elucidate, from the point of view chosen, the relation between
+the psychical and physical aspects of a substance.</p>
+
+<p>The first step towards this ought, I think, to be the framing of
+a molecular theory of protoplasm. But before doing that, it seems
+indispensable to glance at the constitution of matter, in general. We
+shall, thus, unavoidably make a long detour; but, after all, our pains
+will not be wasted, for the problems of the papers that are to follow
+in the series will call for the consideration of the same question.</p>
+
+<p>All physicists are rightly agreed the evidence is overwhelming
+which shows all sensible matter is composed of molecules in swift
+motion and exerting enormous mutual attractions, and perhaps repulsions,
+too. Even Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, who wishes
+to explode action at a distance and return to the doctrine of a plenum,
+not only speaks of molecules, but undertakes to assign definite
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span>magnitudes to them. The brilliant Judge Stallo, a man who did not
+always rightly estimate his own qualities in accepting tasks for himself,
+declared war upon the atomic theory in a book well worth careful
+perusal. To the old arguments in favor of atoms which he found
+in Fechner’s monograph, he was able to make replies of considerable
+force, though they were not sufficient to destroy those arguments.
+But against modern proofs he made no headway at all.
+These set out from the mechanical theory of heat. Rumford’s experiments
+showed that heat is not a substance. Joule demonstrated
+that it was a form of energy. The heating of gases under constant
+volume, and other facts instanced by Rankine, proved that it could
+not be an energy of strain. This drove physicists to the conclusion
+that it was a mode of motion. Then it was remembered that
+John Bernoulli had shown that the pressure of gases could be accounted
+for by assuming their molecules to be moving uniformly in
+rectilinear paths. The same hypothesis was now seen to account
+for Avogadro’s law, that in equal volumes of different kinds of gases
+exposed to the same pressure and temperature are contained equal
+numbers of molecules. Shortly after, it was found to account for
+the laws of diffusion and viscosity of gases, and for the numerical
+relation between these properties. Finally, Crookes’s radiometer
+furnished the last link in the strongest chain of evidence which supports
+any physical hypothesis.</p>
+
+<p>Such being the constitution of gases, liquids must clearly be
+bodies in which the molecules wander in curvilinear paths, while in
+solids they move in orbits or quasi-orbits. (See my definition <i>solid</i>
+II, 1, in the “Century Dictionary.”)</p>
+
+<p>We see that the resistance to compression and to interpenetration
+between sensible bodies is, by one of the prime propositions of
+the molecular theory, due in large measure to the kinetical energy
+of the particles, which must be supposed to be quite remote from
+one another, on the average, even in solids. This resistance is no
+doubt influenced by finite attractions and repulsions between the
+molecules. All the impenetrability of bodies which we can observe
+is, therefore, a limited impenetrability due to kinetic and positional
+energy. This being the case, we have no logical right to suppose
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[3]</span>that absolute impenetrability, or the exclusive occupancy of space,
+belongs to molecules or to atoms. It is an unwarranted hypothesis,
+not a <i>vera causa</i>.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_2" href="#Footnote_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Unless we are to give up the theory of energy,
+finite positional attractions and repulsions between molecules must
+be admitted. Absolute impenetrability would amount to an infinite
+repulsion at a certain distance. No analogy of known phenomena
+exists to excuse such a wanton violation of the principle of continuity
+as such a hypothesis is. In short, we are logically bound to
+adopt the Boscovichian idea that an atom is simply a distribution
+of component potential energy throughout space, (this distribution
+being absolutely rigid,) combined with inertia. The potential energy
+belongs to two molecules, and is to be conceived as different
+between molecules <i>A</i> and <i>B</i> from what it is between molecules <i>A</i>
+and <i>C</i>. The distribution of energy is not necessarily spherical. Nay,
+a molecule may conceivably have more than one centre; it may even
+have a central curve, returning into itself. But I do not think there
+are any observed facts pointing to such multiple or linear centres.
+On the other hand, many facts relating to crystals, especially those
+observed by Voigt,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_3" href="#Footnote_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> go to show that the distribution of energy is
+harmonical but not concentric. We can easily calculate the forces
+which such atoms must exert upon one another by considering&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_4" href="#Footnote_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> that
+they are equivalent to aggregations of pairs of electrically positive
+and negative points infinitely near to one another. About such an
+atom there would be regions of positive and of negative potential,
+and the number and distribution of such regions would determine
+the valency of the atom, a number which it is easy to see would in
+many cases be somewhat indeterminate. I must not dwell further
+upon this hypothesis, at present. In another paper, its consequences
+will be further considered.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot assume that the students of philosophy who read this
+magazine are thoroughly versed in modern molecular physics, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[4]</span>therefore it is proper to mention that the governing principle in this
+branch of science is Clausius’s law of the virial. I will first state
+the law, and then explain the peculiar terms of the statement. This
+statement is that the total kinetic energy of the particles of a system
+in stationary motion is equal to the total virial. By a <i>system</i> is here
+meant a number of particles acting upon one another.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_5" href="#Footnote_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> Stationary
+motion is a quasi-orbital motion among a system of particles so that
+none of them are removed to indefinitely great distances nor acquire
+indefinitely great velocities. The kinetic energy of a particle is the
+work which would be required to bring it to rest, independently of
+any forces which may be acting upon it. The virial of a pair of
+particles is half the work which the force which actually operates
+between them would do if, being independent of the distance, it
+were to bring them together. The equation of the virial is</p>
+
+<p class="center">½Σ<i>mv</i>² = ½ΣΣ<i>Rr</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula01" style="max-width: 14.0625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula01.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p>Here <i>m</i> is the mass of a particle, <i>v</i> its velocity, <i>R</i> is the attraction
+between two particles, and <i>r</i> is the distance between them. The
+sign Σ on the left hand side signifies that the values of <i>mv</i>² are to
+be summed for all the particles, and ΣΣ on the right hand side
+signifies that the values of <i>Rr</i> are to be summed for all the pairs of
+particles. If there is an external pressure <i>P</i> (as from the atmosphere)
+upon the system, and the volume of vacant space within the boundary
+of that pressure is <i>V</i>, then the virial must be understood as
+including ³⁄₂<i>PV</i>, so that the equation is</p>
+
+<p class="center">½Σ<i>mv</i>² = ³⁄₂<i>PV</i> + ½ΣΣ<i>Rr</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula02" style="max-width: 20.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula02.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p>There is strong (if not demonstrative) reason for thinking that the
+temperature of any body above the absolute zero (-273° C.), is proportional
+to the average kinetic energy of its molecules, or say <i>aθ</i>,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[5]</span>where <i>a</i> is a constant and <i>θ</i> is the absolute temperature. Hence,
+we may write the equation</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>aθ</i> = ½<i>m̅v̅</i>²̅ = ³⁄₂<i>PV̅</i> + ½Σ<i>R̅r̅</i></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula03" style="max-width: 21.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula03.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">where the heavy lines above the different expressions signify that
+the average values for single molecules are to be taken. In 1872, a
+student in the University of Leyden, Van der Waals, propounded in
+his thesis for the doctorate a specialisation of the equation of the
+virial which has since attracted great attention. Namely, he writes it</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>aθ</i> = (<i>P</i> + (<i>c</i>⁄<i>V</i>²))(<i>V</i>-<i>b</i>).</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula04" style="max-width: 21.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula04.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p>The quantity <i>b</i> is the volume of a molecule, which he supposes to
+be an impenetrable body, and all the virtue of the equation lies in
+this term which makes the equation a cubic in <i>V</i>, which is required
+to account for the shape of certain isothermal curves.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_6" href="#Footnote_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> But if the
+idea of an impenetrable atom is illogical, that of an impenetrable
+molecule is almost absurd. For the kinetical theory of matter
+teaches us that a molecule is like a solar system or star-cluster in
+miniature. Unless we suppose that in all heating of gases and
+vapors internal work is performed upon the molecules, implying
+that their atoms are at considerable distances, the whole kinetical
+theory of gases falls to the ground. As for the term added to <i>P</i>,
+there is no more than a partial and roughly approximative justification
+for it. Namely, let us imagine two spheres described round a
+particle as their centre, the radius of the larger being so great as to
+include all the particles whose action upon the centre is sensible,
+while the radius of the smaller is so large that a good many molecules
+are included within it. The possibility of describing such a
+sphere as the outer one implies that the attraction of the particles
+varies at some distances inversely as some higher power of the distance
+than the cube, or, to speak more clearly, that the attraction
+multiplied by the cube of the distance diminishes as the distance
+increases; for the number of particles at a given distance from any
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span>one particle is proportionate to the square of that distance and
+each of these gives a term of the virial which is the product of the
+attraction into the distance. Consequently unless the attraction
+multiplied by the cube of the distance diminished so rapidly with
+the distance as soon to become insensible, no such outer sphere as
+is supposed could be described. However, ordinary experience
+shows that such a sphere is possible; and consequently there must
+be distances at which the attraction does thus rapidly diminish as
+the distance increases. The two spheres, then, being so drawn,
+consider the virial of the central particle due to the particles between
+them. Let the density of the substance be increased, say,
+<i>N</i> times. Then, for every term, <i>Rr</i>, of the virial before the condensation,
+there will be <i>N</i> terms of the same magnitude after the
+condensation. Hence, the virial of each particle will be proportional
+to the density, and the equation of the virial becomes</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>aθ</i> = <i>PV̅</i> + <i>c</i>⁄<i>V̅</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula05" style="max-width: 12.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula05.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p>This omits the virial within the inner sphere, the radius of which
+is so taken that within that distance the number of particles is not
+proportional to the number in a large sphere. For Van der Waals
+this radius is the diameter of his hard molecules, which assumption
+gives his equation. But it is plain that the attraction between the
+molecules must to a certain extent modify their distribution, unless
+some peculiar conditions are fulfilled. The equation of Van der
+Waals can be approximately true therefore only for a gas. In a
+solid or liquid condition, in which the removal of a small amount of
+pressure has little effect on the volume, and where consequently the
+virial must be much greater than <i>PV̅</i>, the virial must increase with
+the volume. For suppose we had a substance in a critical condition
+in which an increase of the volume would diminish the virial more
+than it would increase ³⁄₂<i>PV̅</i>. If we were forcibly to diminish the
+volume of such a substance, when the temperature became equalised,
+the pressure which it could withstand would be less than before,
+and it would be still further condensed, and this would go on
+indefinitely until a condition were reached in which an increase of
+volume would increase ³⁄₂<i>PV̅</i> more than it would decrease the virial.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>In the case of solids, at least, <i>P</i> may be zero; so that the state
+reached would be one in which the virial increases with the volume,
+or the attraction between the particles does not increase so fast with
+a diminution of their distance as it would if the attraction were inversely
+as the distance.</p>
+
+<p>Almost contemporaneously with Van der Waals’s paper, another
+remarkable thesis for the doctorate was presented at Paris by
+Amagat. It related to the elasticity and expansion of gases, and to
+this subject the superb experimenter, its author, has devoted his
+whole subsequent life. Especially interesting are his observations
+of the volumes of ethylene and of carbonic acid at temperatures
+from 20° to 100° and at pressures ranging from an ounce to 5000
+pounds to the square inch. As soon as Amagat had obtained these
+results, he remarked that the “coefficient of expansion at constant
+volume,” as it is absurdly called, that is, the rate of variation of the
+pressure with the temperature, was very nearly constant for each
+volume. This accords with the equation of the virial, which gives</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>dp</i>⁄<i>dθ</i> = <i>a</i>⁄<i>V̅</i> - <i>d</i>Σ<i>R̅r̅</i>⁄<i>dθ</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula06" style="max-width: 12.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula06.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p>Now, the virial must be nearly independent of the temperature, and
+therefore the last term almost disappears. The virial would not
+be quite independent of the temperature, because if the temperature
+(i. e. the square of the velocity of the molecules) is lowered,
+and the pressure correspondingly lowered, so as to make the volume
+the same, the attractions of the molecules will have more time to
+produce their effects, and consequently, the pairs of molecules the
+closest together will be held together longer and closer; so that the
+virial will generally be increased by a decrease of temperature.
+Now, Amagat’s experiments do show an excessively minute effect of
+this sort, at least, when the volumes are not too small. However, the
+observations are well enough satisfied by assuming the “coefficient
+of expansion at constant volume” to consist wholly of the first term,
+<i>a</i>/(<i>V</i>). Thus, Amagat’s experiments enable us to determine the values
+of <i>a</i> and thence to calculate the virial; and this we find varies for
+carbonic acid gas nearly inversely to (<i>V</i>)⁰˙⁹. There is, thus, a rough
+approximation to satisfying Van der Waals’s equation. But the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>most interesting result of Amagat’s experiments, for our purpose at
+any rate, is that the quantity <i>a</i>, though nearly constant for any one
+volume, differs considerably with the volume, nearly doubling when
+the volume is reduced fivefold. This can only indicate that the
+mean kinetic energy of a given mass of the gas for a given temperature
+is greater the more the gas is compressed. But the laws of
+mechanics appear to enjoin that the mean kinetic energy of a moving
+particle shall be constant at any given temperature. The only
+escape from contradiction, then, is to suppose that the mean mass
+of a moving particle diminishes upon the condensation of the gas.
+In other words, many of the molecules are dissociated, or broken up
+into atoms or sub-molecules. The idea that dissociation should be
+favored by diminishing the volume will be pronounced by physicists,
+at first blush, as contrary to all our experience. But it must be
+remembered that the circumstances we are speaking of, that of a
+gas under fifty or more atmospheres pressure, are also unusual.
+That the “coefficient of expansion under constant volume” when
+multiplied by the volumes should increase with a decrement of the
+volume is also quite contrary to ordinary experience; yet it undoubtedly
+takes place in all gases under great pressure. Again,
+the doctrine of Arrhenius&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_7" href="#Footnote_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> is now generally accepted, that the molecular
+conductivity of an electrolyte is proportional to the dissociation
+of ions. Now the molecular conductivity of a fused electrolyte is
+usually superior to that of a solution. Here is a case, then, in which
+diminution of volume is accompanied by increased dissociation.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that several different kinds of dissociation have to
+be distinguished. In the first place, there is the dissociation of a
+chemical molecule to form chemical molecules under the regular
+action of chemical laws. This may be a double decomposition, as
+when iodhydric acid is dissociated, according to the formula</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>HI</i> + <i>HI</i> = <i>HH</i> + <i>II</i>;</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula07" style="max-width: 17.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula07.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">or, it may be a simple decomposition, as when pentachloride of
+phosphorus is dissociated according to the formula</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>PCl</i>₅ = <i>PCl</i>₃ + <i>ClCl</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula08" style="max-width: 20.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula08.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span></p>
+
+<p>All these dissociations require, according to the laws of thermochemistry,
+an elevated temperature. In the second place, there is
+the dissociation of a physically polymerous molecule, that is, of
+several chemical molecules joined by physical attractions. This I
+am inclined to suppose is a common concomitant of the heating of
+solids and liquids; for in these bodies there is no increase of compressibility
+with the temperature at all comparable with the increase
+of the expansibility. But, in the third place, there is the dissociation
+with which we are now concerned, which must be supposed to
+be a throwing off of unsaturated sub-molecules or atoms from the
+molecule. The molecule may, as I have said, be roughly likened
+to a solar system. As such, molecules are able to produce perturbations
+of one another’s internal motions; and in this way a planet,
+i. e. a sub-molecule, will occasionally get thrown off and wander
+about by itself, till it finds another unsaturated sub-molecule with
+which it can unite. Such dissociation by perturbation will naturally
+be favored by the proximity of the molecules to one another.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now pass to the consideration of that special substance,
+or rather class of substances, whose properties form the chief subject
+of botany and of zoölogy, as truly as those of the silicates form the
+chief subject of mineralogy: I mean the life-slimes, or protoplasm.
+Let us begin by cataloguing the general characters of these slimes.
+They one and all exist in two states of aggregation, a solid or nearly
+solid state and a liquid or nearly liquid state; but they do not pass
+from the former to the latter by ordinary fusion. They are readily
+decomposed by heat, especially in the liquid state; nor will they
+bear any considerable degree of cold. All their vital actions take
+place at temperatures very little below the point of decomposition.
+This extreme instability is one of numerous facts which demonstrate
+the chemical complexity of protoplasm. Every chemist will agree
+that they are far more complicated than the albumens. Now, albumen
+is estimated to contain in each molecule about a thousand
+atoms; so that it is natural to suppose that the protoplasms contain
+several thousands. We know that while they are chiefly composed
+of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, a large number
+of other elements enter into living bodies in small proportions; and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>it is likely that most of these enter into the composition of protoplasms.
+Now, since the numbers of chemical varieties increase at
+an enormous rate with the number of atoms per molecule, so that
+there are certainly hundreds of thousands of substances whose molecules
+contain twenty atoms or fewer, we may well suppose that the
+number of protoplasmic substances runs into the billions or trillions.
+Professor Cayley has given a mathematical theory of “trees,” with
+a view of throwing a light upon such questions; and in that light
+the estimate of trillions (in the English sense) seems immoderately
+moderate. It is true that an opinion has been emitted, and defended
+among biologists, that there is but one kind of protoplasm; but the
+observations of biologists, themselves, have almost exploded that
+hypothesis, which from a chemical standpoint appears utterly incredible.
+The anticipation of the chemist would decidedly be that enough
+different chemical substances having protoplasmic characters might
+be formed to account, not only for the differences between nerve-slime
+and muscle-slime, between whale-slime and lion-slime, but
+also for those minuter pervasive variations which characterise different
+breeds and single individuals.</p>
+
+<p>Protoplasm, when quiescent, is, broadly speaking, solid; but
+when it is disturbed in an appropriate way, or sometimes even
+spontaneously without external disturbance, it becomes, broadly
+speaking, liquid. A moner in this state is seen under the microscope
+to have streams within its matter; a slime-mould slowly flows by
+force of gravity. The liquefaction starts from the point of disturbance
+and spreads through the mass. This spreading, however,
+is not uniform in all directions; on the contrary it takes at one
+time one course, at another another, through the homogeneous
+mass, in a manner that seems a little mysterious. The cause of
+disturbance being removed, these motions gradually (with higher
+kinds of protoplasm, quickly) cease, and the slime returns to its
+solid condition.</p>
+
+<p>The liquefaction of protoplasm is accompanied by a mechanical
+phenomenon. Namely, some kinds exhibit a tendency to draw themselves
+up into a globular form. This happens particularly with the
+contents of muscle-cells. The prevalent opinion, founded on some
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>of the most exquisite experimental investigations that the history of
+science can show, is undoubtedly that the contraction of muscle-cells
+is due to osmotic pressure; and it must be allowed that that is a
+factor in producing the effect. But it does not seem to me that it
+satisfactorily accounts even for the phenomena of muscular contraction;
+and besides, even naked slimes often draw up in the same
+way. In this case, we seem to recognise an increase of the surface-tension.
+In some cases, too, the reverse action takes place, extraordinary
+pseudopodia being put forth, as if the surface-tension were
+diminished in spots. Indeed, such a slime always has a sort of skin,
+due no doubt to surface-tension, and this seems to give way at the
+point where a pseudopodium is put forth.</p>
+
+<p>Long-continued or frequently repeated liquefaction of the protoplasm
+results in an obstinate retention of the solid state, which we
+call fatigue. On the other hand repose in this state, if not too much
+prolonged, restores the liquefiability. These are both important
+functions.</p>
+
+<p>The life-slimes have, further, the peculiar property of growing.
+Crystals also grow; their growth, however, consists merely in attracting
+matter like their own from the circumambient fluid. To
+suppose the growth of protoplasm of the same nature, would be to
+suppose this substance to be spontaneously generated in copious
+supplies wherever food is in solution. Certainly, it must be granted
+that protoplasm is but a chemical substance, and that there is
+no reason why it should not be formed synthetically like any other
+chemical substance. Indeed, Clifford has clearly shown that we have
+overwhelming evidence that it is so formed. But to say that such
+formation is as regular and frequent as the assimilation of food is
+quite another matter. It is more consonant with the facts of observation
+to suppose that assimilated protoplasm is formed at the instant
+of assimilation, under the influence of the protoplasm already
+present. For each slime in its growth preserves its distinctive characters
+with wonderful truth, nerve-slime growing nerve-slime and
+muscle-slime muscle-slime, lion-slime growing lion-slime, and all the
+varieties of breeds and even individual characters being preserved
+in the growth. Now it is too much to suppose there are billions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>of different kinds of protoplasm floating about wherever there is
+food.</p>
+
+<p>The frequent liquefaction of protoplasm increases its power of
+assimilating food; so much so, indeed, that it is questionable whether
+in the solid form it possesses this power.</p>
+
+<p>The life-slime wastes as well as grows; and this too takes place
+chiefly if not exclusively in its liquid phases.</p>
+
+<p>Closely connected with growth is reproduction; and though in
+higher forms this is a specialised function, it is universally true that
+wherever there is protoplasm, there is, will be, or has been a power
+of reproducing that same kind of protoplasm in a separated organism.
+Reproduction seems to involve the union of two sexes; though
+it is not demonstrable that this is always requisite.</p>
+
+<p>Another physical property of protoplasm is that of taking habits.
+The course which the spread of liquefaction has taken in the past is
+rendered thereby more likely to be taken in the future; although
+there is no absolute certainty that the same path will be followed
+again.</p>
+
+<p>Very extraordinary, certainly, are all these properties of protoplasm;
+as extraordinary as indubitable. But the one which has
+next to be mentioned, while equally undeniable, is infinitely more
+wonderful. It is that protoplasm feels. We have no direct evidence
+that this is true of protoplasm universally, and certainly some kinds
+feel far more than others. But there is a fair analogical inference
+that all protoplasm feels. It not only feels but exercises all the functions
+of mind.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the properties of protoplasm. The problem is to find
+a hypothesis of the molecular constitution of this compound which
+will account for these properties, one and all.</p>
+
+<p>Some of them are obvious results of the excessively complicated
+constitution of the protoplasm molecule. All very complicated substances
+are unstable; and plainly a molecule of several thousand
+atoms may be separated in many ways into two parts in each of
+which the polar chemical forces are very nearly saturated. In the
+solid protoplasm, as in other solids, the molecules must be supposed
+to be moving as it were in orbits, or, at least, so as not to wander
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>indefinitely. But this solid cannot be melted, for the same reason
+that starch cannot be melted; because an amount of heat insufficient
+to make the entire molecules wander is sufficient to break them
+up completely and cause them to form new and simpler molecules.
+But when one of the molecules is disturbed, even if it be not quite
+thrown out of its orbit at first, sub-molecules of perhaps several
+hundred atoms each are thrown off from it. These will soon acquire
+the same mean kinetic energy as the others, and therefore velocities
+several times as great. They will naturally begin to wander, and
+in wandering will perturb a great many other molecules and cause
+them in their turn to behave like the one originally deranged. So
+many molecules will thus be broken up, that even those that are intact
+will no longer be restrained within orbits, but will wander about
+freely. This is the usual condition of a liquid, as modern chemists
+understand it; for in all electrolytic liquids there is considerable
+dissociation.</p>
+
+<p>But this process necessarily chills the substance, not merely on
+account of the heat of chemical combination, but still more because
+the number of separate particles being greatly increased, the mean
+kinetic energy must be less. The substance being a bad conductor,
+this heat is not at once restored. Now the particles moving more
+slowly, the attractions between them have time to take effect, and
+they approach the condition of equilibrium. But their dynamic
+equilibrium is found in the restoration of the solid condition, which
+therefore takes place, if the disturbance is not kept up.</p>
+
+<p>When a body is in the solid condition, most of its molecules
+must be moving at the same rate, or, at least, at certain regular sets
+of rates; otherwise the orbital motion would not be preserved. The
+distances of neighboring molecules must always be kept between a
+certain maximum and a certain minimum value. But if, without
+absorption of heat, the body be thrown into a liquid condition, the
+distances of neighboring molecules will be far more unequally distributed,
+and an effect upon the virial will result. The chilling of
+protoplasm upon its liquefaction must also be taken into account.
+The ordinary effect will no doubt be to increase the cohesion and
+with that the surface-tension, so that the mass will tend to draw itself
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>up. But in special cases, the virial will be increased so much
+that the surface-tension will be diminished at points where the temperature
+is first restored. In that case, the outer film will give way
+and the tension at other places will aid in causing the general fluid
+to be poured out at those points, forming pseudopodia.</p>
+
+<p>When the protoplasm is in a liquid state, and then only, a solution
+of food is able to penetrate its mass by diffusion. The protoplasm
+is then considerably dissociated; and so is the food, like all
+dissolved matter. If then the separated and unsaturated sub-molecules
+of the food happen to be of the same chemical species as sub-molecules
+of the protoplasm, they may unite with other sub-molecules
+of the protoplasm to form new molecules, in such a fashion
+that when the solid state is resumed, there may be more molecules
+of protoplasm than there were at the beginning. It is like the jack-knife
+whose blade and handle, after having been severally lost and
+replaced, were found and put together to make a new knife.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen that protoplasm is chilled by liquefaction, and
+that this brings it back to the solid state, when the heat is recovered.
+This series of operations must be very rapid in the case of
+nerve-slime and even of muscle-slime, and may account for the unsteady
+or vibratory character of their action. Of course, if assimilation
+takes place, the heat of combination, which is probably trifling,
+is gained. On the other hand, if work is done, whether by
+nerve or by muscle, loss of energy must take place. In the case of
+the muscle, the mode by which the instantaneous part of the fatigue
+is brought about is easily traced out. If when the muscle contracts
+it be under stress, it will contract less than it otherwise would do,
+and there will be a loss of heat. It is like an engine which should
+work by dissolving salt in water and using the contraction during
+the solution to lift a weight, the salt being recovered afterwards by
+distillation. But the major part of fatigue has nothing to do with
+the correlation of forces. A man must labor hard to do in a quarter
+of an hour the work which draws from him enough heat to cool his
+body by a single degree. Meantime, he will be getting heated, he
+will be pouring out extra products of combustion, perspiration, etc.,
+and he will be driving the blood at an accelerated rate through minute
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>tubes at great expense. Yet all this will have little to do with
+his fatigue. He may sit quietly at his table writing, doing practically
+no physical work at all, and yet in a few hours be terribly
+fagged. This seems to be owing to the deranged sub-molecules of
+the nerve-slime not having had time to settle back into their proper
+combinations. When such sub-molecules are thrown out, as they
+must be from time to time, there is so much waste of material.</p>
+
+<p>In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and
+firmly assimilated into a broken molecule of protoplasm, it is necessary
+not only that it should have precisely the right chemical
+composition, but also that it should be at precisely the right spot at
+the right time and should be moving in precisely the right direction
+with precisely the right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled,
+it will be more loosely retained than the other parts of the
+molecule; and every time it comes round into the situation in which
+it was drawn in, relatively to the other parts of that molecule and
+to such others as were near enough to be factors in the action, it will
+be in special danger of being thrown out again. Thus, when a partial
+liquefaction of the protoplasm takes place many times to about the
+same extent, it will, each time, be pretty nearly the same molecules
+that were last drawn in that are now thrown out. They will be
+thrown out, too, in about the same way, as to position, direction of
+motion, and velocity, in which they were drawn in; and this will be
+in about the same course that the ones last before them were thrown
+out. Not exactly, however; for the very cause of their being thrown
+off so easily is their not having fulfilled precisely the conditions of
+stable retention. Thus, the law of habit is accounted for, and with
+it its peculiar characteristic of not acting with exactitude.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that this explanation of habit, aside from the
+question of its truth or falsity, has a certain value as an addition to
+our little store of mechanical examples of actions analogous to habit.
+All the others, so far as I know, are either statical or else involve
+forces which, taking only the sensible motions into account, violate
+the law of energy. It is so with the stream that wears its own bed.
+Here, the sand is carried to its most stable situation and left there.
+The law of energy forbids this; for when anything reaches a position
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>of stable equilibrium, its momentum will be at a maximum, so that
+it can according to this law only be left at rest in an unstable situation.
+In all the statical illustrations, too, things are brought into
+certain states and left there. A garment receives folds and keeps
+them; that is, its limit of elasticity is exceeded. This failure to
+spring back is again an apparent violation of the law of energy; for
+the substance will not only not spring back of itself (which might
+be due to an unstable equilibrium being reached) but will not even
+do so when an impulse that way is applied to it. Accordingly,
+Professor James says “the phenomena of habit ... are due to the
+plasticity of the ... materials.” Now, plasticity of materials means
+the having of a low limit of elasticity. (See the “Century Dictionary,”
+under <i>solid</i>.) But the hypothetical constitution of protoplasm
+here proposed involves no forces but attractions and repulsions
+strictly following the law of energy. The action here, that is, the
+throwing of an atom out of its orbit in a molecule, and the entering
+of a new atom into nearly, but not quite the same orbit, is somewhat
+similar to the molecular actions which may be supposed to take
+place in a solid strained beyond its limit of elasticity. Namely,
+in that case certain molecules must be thrown out of their orbits,
+to settle down again shortly after into new orbits. In short, the
+plastic solid resembles protoplasm in being partially and temporarily
+liquefied by a slight mechanical force. But the taking of a set by
+a solid body has but a moderate resemblance to the taking of a
+habit, inasmuch as the characteristic feature of the latter, its inexactitude
+and want of complete determinacy, is not so marked in the
+former, if it can be said to be present there, at all.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that though the molecular explanation of habit is
+pretty vague on the mathematical side, there can be no doubt that
+systems of atoms having polar forces would act substantially in that
+manner, and the explanation is even too satisfactory to suit the convenience
+of an advocate of tychism. For it may fairly be urged
+that since the phenomena of habit may thus result from a purely
+mechanical arrangement, it is unnecessary to suppose that habit-taking
+is a primordial principle of the universe. But one fact
+remains unexplained mechanically, which concerns not only the facts
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span>of habit, but all cases of actions apparently violating the law of
+energy; it is that all these phenomena depend upon aggregations of
+trillions of molecules in one and the same condition and neighborhood;
+and it is by no means clear how they could have all been
+brought and left in the same place and state by any conservative
+forces. But let the mechanical explanation be as perfect as it may,
+the state of things which it supposes presents evidence of a primordial
+habit-taking tendency. For it shows us like things acting in
+like ways because they are alike. Now, those who insist on the
+doctrine of necessity will for the most part insist that the physical
+world is entirely individual. Yet law involves an element of generality.
+Now to say that generality is primordial, but generalisation
+not, is like saying that diversity is primordial but diversification
+not. It turns logic upside down. At any rate, it is clear that
+nothing but a principle of habit, itself due to the growth by habit of
+an infinitesimal chance tendency toward habit-taking, is the only
+bridge that can span the chasm between the chance-medley of chaos
+and the cosmos of order and law.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not attempt a molecular explanation of the phenomena
+of reproduction, because that would require a subsidiary hypothesis,
+and carry me away from my main object. Such phenomena, universally
+diffused though they be, appear to depend upon special
+conditions; and we do not find that all protoplasm has reproductive
+powers.</p>
+
+<p>But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness
+belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is
+this to be accounted for? The slime is nothing but a chemical compound.
+There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically
+in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements; and if it
+were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm.
+No doubt, then, it would feel. To hesitate to admit this
+would be puerile and ultra-puerile. By what element of the molecular
+arrangement, then, would that feeling be caused? This question
+cannot be evaded or pooh-poohed. Protoplasm certainly does
+feel; and unless we are to accept a weak dualism, the property
+must be shown to arise from some peculiarity of the mechanical system.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>Yet the attempt to deduce it from the three laws of mechanics,
+applied to never so ingenious a mechanical contrivance, would
+obviously be futile. It can never be explained, unless we admit that
+physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical
+events. But once grant that the phenomena of matter are but the
+result of the sensibly complete sway of habits upon mind, and it
+only remains to explain why in the protoplasm these habits are to
+some slight extent broken up, so that according to the law of mind,
+in that special clause of it sometimes called the principle of accommodation,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_8" href="#Footnote_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>
+feeling becomes intensified. Now the manner in which
+habits generally get broken up is this. Reactions usually terminate
+in the removal of a stimulus; for the excitation continues as
+long as the stimulus is present. Accordingly, habits are general
+ways of behavior which are associated with the removal of stimuli.
+But when the expected removal of the stimulus fails to occur, the
+excitation continues and increases, and non-habitual reactions take
+place; and these tend to weaken the habit. If, then, we suppose
+that matter never does obey its ideal laws with absolute precision,
+but that there are almost insensible fortuitous departures from regularity,
+these will produce, in general, equally minute effects. But
+protoplasm is in an excessively unstable condition; and it is the
+characteristic of unstable equilibrium, that near that point excessively
+minute causes may produce startlingly large effects. Here
+then, the usual departures from regularity will be followed by others
+that are very great; and the large fortuitous departures from law so
+produced, will tend still further to break up the laws, supposing
+that these are of the nature of habits. Now, this breaking up of
+habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity will, according to the law
+of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of feeling. The nerve-protoplasm
+is, without doubt, in the most unstable condition of any
+kind of matter; and consequently, there the resulting feeling is the
+most manifest.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we see that the idealist has no need to dread a mechanical
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>theory of life. On the contrary, such a theory, fully developed,
+is bound to call in a tychistic idealism as its indispensable adjunct.
+Wherever chance-spontaneity is found, there, in the same proportion,
+feeling exists. In fact, chance is but the outward aspect of that
+which within itself is feeling. I long ago showed that real existence,
+or thing-ness, consists in regularities. So, that primeval chaos in
+which there was no regularity was mere nothing, from a physical aspect.
+Yet it was not a blank zero; for there was an intensity of
+consciousness there in comparison with which all that we ever feel
+is but as the struggling of a molecule or two to throw off a little of
+the force of law to an endless and innumerable diversity of chance
+utterly unlimited.</p>
+
+<p>But after some atoms of the protoplasm have thus become partially
+emancipated from law, what happens next to them? To understand
+this, we have to remember that no mental tendency is so
+easily strengthened by the action of habit as is the tendency to take
+habits. Now, in the higher kinds of protoplasm, especially, the
+atoms in question have not only long belonged to one molecule or
+another of the particular mass of slime of which they are parts; but
+before that, they were constituents of food of a protoplasmic constitution.
+During all this time, they have been liable to lose habits
+and to recover them again; so that now, when the stimulus is removed,
+and the foregone habits tend to reassert themselves, they do
+so in the case of such atoms with great promptness. Indeed, the
+return is so prompt that there is nothing but the feeling to show
+conclusively that the bonds of law have ever been relaxed.</p>
+
+<p>In short, diversification is the vestige of chance-spontaneity;
+and wherever diversity is increasing, there chance must be operative.
+On the other hand, wherever uniformity is increasing, habit
+must be operative. But wherever actions take place under an established
+uniformity, there so much feeling as there may be takes the
+mode of a sense of reaction. That is the manner in which I am led
+to define the relation between the fundamental elements of consciousness
+and their physical equivalents.</p>
+
+<p>It remains to consider the physical relations of general ideas.
+It may be well here to reflect that if matter has no existence except
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>as a specialisation of mind, it follows that whatever affects matter
+according to regular laws is itself matter. But all mind is directly
+or indirectly connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less
+regular way; so that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of
+matter. Hence, it would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical
+and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct.
+Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of
+action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing
+it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it
+appears as consciousness. These two views are combined when we
+remember that mechanical laws are nothing but acquired habits,
+like all the regularities of mind, including the tendency to take
+habits, itself; and that this action of habit is nothing but generalisation,
+and generalisation is nothing but the spreading of feelings.
+But the question is, how do general ideas appear in the molecular
+theory of protoplasm?</p>
+
+<p>The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each
+action of that habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and
+replaced by others. Upon all the different occasions it is different
+atoms that are thrown off, but they are analogous from a physical
+point of view, and there is an inward sense of their being analogous.
+Every time one of the associated feelings recurs, there is a more or
+less vague sense that there are others, that it has a general character,
+and of about what this general character is. We ought not, I
+think, to hold that in protoplasm habit never acts in any other than
+the particular way suggested above. On the contrary, if habit be
+a primary property of mind, it must be equally so of matter, as a
+kind of mind. We can hardly refuse to admit that wherever chance
+motions have general characters, there is a tendency for this generality
+to spread and to perfect itself. In that case, a general idea is
+a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any regularity
+or general relation between chance actions.</p>
+
+<p>The consciousness of a general idea has a certain “unity of the
+ego,” in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another.
+It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person; and, indeed, a
+person is only a particular kind of general idea. Long ago, in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span><i>Journal of Speculative Philosophy</i> (Vol. III, p. 156), I pointed out
+that a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea; but
+my views were, then, too nominalistic to enable me to see that
+every general idea has the unified living feeling of a person.</p>
+
+<p>All that is necessary, upon this theory, to the existence of a
+person is that the feelings out of which he is constructed should be
+in close enough connection to influence one another. Here we can
+draw a consequence which it may be possible to submit to experimental
+test. Namely, if this be the case, there should be something
+like personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate
+and intensely sympathetic communion. It is true that when the
+generalisation of feeling has been carried so far as to include all
+within a person, a stopping-place, in a certain sense, has been attained;
+and further generalisation will have a less lively character.
+But we must not think it will cease. <i>Esprit de corps</i>, national sentiment,
+sympathy, are no mere metaphors. None of us can fully
+realise what the minds of corporations are, any more than one of
+my brain-cells can know what the whole brain is thinking. But the
+law of mind clearly points to the existence of such personalities,
+and there are many ordinary observations which, if they were critically
+examined and supplemented by special experiments, might,
+as first appearances promise, give evidence of the influence of such
+greater persons upon individuals. It is often remarked that on one
+day half a dozen people, strangers to one another, will take it into
+their heads to do one and the same strange deed, whether it be a
+physical experiment, a crime, or an act of virtue. When the thirty
+thousand young people of the society for Christian Endeavor were
+in New York, there seemed to me to be some mysterious diffusion
+of sweetness and light. If such a fact is capable of being made out
+anywhere, it should be in the church. The Christians have always
+been ready to risk their lives for the sake of having prayers in common,
+of getting together and praying simultaneously with great
+energy, and especially for their common body, for “the whole state
+of Christ’s church militant here in earth,” as one of the missals has
+it. This practice they have been keeping up everywhere, weekly,
+for many centuries. Surely, a personality ought to have developed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span>in that church, in that “bride of Christ,” as they call it, or else
+there is a strange break in the action of mind, and I shall have to
+acknowledge my views are much mistaken. Would not the societies
+for psychical research be more likely to break through the clouds,
+in seeking evidences of such corporate personality, than in seeking
+evidences of telepathy, which, upon the same theory, should be a
+far weaker phenomenon?</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">C. S. Peirce.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_1" href="#FNanchor_1" class="label">[1]</a> I am rejoiced to find, since my last paper was printed, that a philosopher as
+subtle and profound as Dr. Edmund Montgomery has long been arguing for the
+same element in the universe. Other world-renowned thinkers, as M. Renouvier
+and M. Delbœuf, appear to share this opinion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_2" href="#FNanchor_2" class="label">[2]</a> By a <i>vera causa</i>, in the logic of science, is meant a state of things known to
+exist in some cases and supposed to exist in other cases, because it would account
+for observed phenomena.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_3" href="#FNanchor_3" class="label">[3]</a> Wiedemann, <i>Annalen</i>, 1887-1889.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_4" href="#FNanchor_4" class="label">[4]</a> See Maxwell on Spherical Harmonics, in his <i>Electricity and Magnetism</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_5" href="#FNanchor_5" class="label">[5]</a> The word <i>system</i> has three peculiar meanings in mathematics. (<i>A.</i>) It means
+an orderly exposition of the truths of astronomy, and hence a theory of the motions
+of the stars; as the Ptolemaic <i>system</i>, the Copernican <i>system</i>. This is much like
+the sense in which we speak of the Calvinistic <i>system</i> of theology, the Kantian
+<i>system</i> of philosophy, etc. (<i>B.</i>) It means the aggregate of the planets considered as
+all moving in somewhat the same way, as the solar <i>system</i>; and hence any aggregate
+of particles moving under mutual forces. (<i>C.</i>) It means a number of forces
+acting simultaneously upon a number of particles.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_6" href="#FNanchor_6" class="label">[6]</a> But, in fact, an inspection of these curves is sufficient to show that they are
+of a higher degree than the third. For they have the line <i>V</i> = 0, or some line <i>V</i> a
+constant for an asymptote, while for small values of <i>P</i>, the values of (<i>d</i>²)<i>P</i>/(<i>dV</i>)² are
+positive.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_7" href="#FNanchor_7" class="label">[7]</a> Anticipated by Clausius as long ago as 1857; and by Williamson in 1851.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_8" href="#FNanchor_8" class="label">[8]</a> “Physiologically, ... accommodation means the breaking up of a habit....
+Psychologically, it means reviving consciousness.” Baldwin, <i>Psychology</i>, Part III
+ch. i., § 5.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_FUTURE_OF_THOUGHT_IN_AMERICA">THE FUTURE OF THOUGHT IN AMERICA.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>History teaches us the nature of the degenerative and destructive
+agencies in national life. These are of various kinds,
+but they may be generally included under the heads of Physical
+Vices, Superstitions, and Selfish Ambitions. These have become
+possible through excess of emotional, and deficiency of rational
+states of the mind. When a large part of a population is influenced
+by emotional rather than by rational modes of thought, unethical
+conduct has full opportunity, and suffering and destruction are sure
+to follow. All races and nations are subject to such disorders, if
+only in some cases during their periods of infancy and of degeneracy.</p>
+
+<p>The peoples of Europe have difficulties and dangers which are
+due to their own peculiar situation. The people of North America
+have to meet certain risks of a somewhat different character, owing
+to our peculiar position. In Europe we see an accumulation of
+many races who reached their <i>Ultima Thule</i> at the coast of the Atlantic,
+and who have had to accommodate themselves to each other
+as best they could. Speaking different languages and having different
+political organisations, they have consolidated into separate
+nations. This result has only been reached after many conflicts,
+and the result has been the combination and absorption of smaller
+states into greater, such as we find them to-day. This result has
+not terminated conflicts; it has reduced their frequency but has increased
+their scope and importance. To-day the antagonisms of
+these nations impose great burdens upon them, but they are at the
+same time productive of great good.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span></p>
+
+<p>With men as with other animals excellence is the result of use
+and exercise. With animals this exercise has been compulsory, and
+has been due largely to the pressure of hunger. Among men intellectual
+and ethical excellence may be due to compulsion, or it may
+result from the capacity to develop lofty ideals. In the former case
+man is driven; in the latter case he is led. Now the organisation
+of human society is such, that if man will not be led, he is driven.
+The “mills of the Gods” are ever ready for those who lag behind
+in the progress of the race. But there are mills and mills, and no
+mill has yet appeared in human history better calculated to grind
+out a good grist from an intellectual point of view, than western
+Eurasia, or Europe. The emulations and antagonisms of so many
+nations have stimulated men to do their best, and have stimulated
+governments to aid them in doing it, for several centuries. The
+result has been modern art, modern science pure and applied, and
+modern philosophy. To produce all this however, Europe has been
+under pressure, and the pressure has been in some, if not all of its
+countries, more or less galling.</p>
+
+<p>The European, in order to escape local tyranny, political, social,
+or theological, or to better his chances of physical living, has
+come to America. He has taken possession, and has bettered his
+condition from a physical point of view, most successfully. The
+question that interests us now, is whether he has bettered himself
+in any other way, and whether he is going to continue the mental
+progress which has so distinguished his history in Europe. Population
+is rapidly increasing, and the increasing severity of the
+“struggle for existence” which will follow, will stimulate men to
+increased excellence in their methods of obtaining a livelihood, but
+will it develop the mind in any other direction? We have before us
+in the case of China, the effect of close industrial competition in a
+dense population, without corresponding intellectual development.
+What is the outlook for the American? Will the process of natural
+selection only, the “devil-take-the-hindmost” doctrine of Darwin,
+be sufficient to develop the higher mental faculties, or having developed
+them, to enable them to survive and to become general, or
+not?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the first place we lack in America the great stimulus to mental
+progress already referred to, international jealousy and emulation.
+In this respect we are situated very much like the Chinese,
+but if anything less favorably. We practically own the continent.
+We have no fear of Tartar invasions from the west nor Japanese
+from the north east. The Canadians are of identical race with ourselves,
+and are almost certain to become identical in nationality
+with us. We are accustomed to boast ourselves of this, and to look
+with great satisfaction on our isolated position among nations. But
+our self-gratulation must be greatly tempered by the reflection that
+such isolation is only beneficial so long as we can maintain our ideals
+without external stimulus. And this is something that few nations
+have so far been able to accomplish. It is true, however, that the
+Atlantic ocean is not so wide as it was formerly, and we are truly
+one of the family of the Indo-European nations. But we will miss
+the effect of the daily stimulus which they afford each other, and
+the daily contact which transmits so much from man to man.</p>
+
+<p>What is our present intellectual rank among these nations to-day;
+meaning by this our status in actual production of intellectual
+work, and leaving aside history? Without any great competence
+to speak on many branches of such work, I may be not far from
+correct; if I summarise as follows: In music and sculpture unproductive;
+in painting and literature (as an art) good, but weak in
+quantity in comparison with our population. In sciences, feeble in
+many branches, but very productive in some others. I refer to pure
+science. In applied science we stand high. In philosophy as a nation,
+weak.</p>
+
+<p>But we have the future before us. If there is a demand for
+the products of pure thought in this country, the supply will come.
+Much may be expected of our race. We will hope that the demand
+will grow, for at present it is not as large as it ought to be. It is
+of course easy for thought to “run in accustomed channels,” and
+many people there are in this as in all other countries, who believe
+that sufficient is already known, and that he who would disturb
+current opinions is a “disturber of the peace.” Strange as it may
+seem, in this comparatively new country we have one special inducement
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>to this habit of mind. This is to be found in our political
+system, which requires an unhesitating submission to the will of the
+majority.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Here is our second danger. We are apt to confuse mental submission
+with physical submission. Physical submission to the will
+of the majority is generally necessary for physical reasons, with
+which we are all familiar. Ballots are simply a peaceful representation
+of bullets, and we anticipate the submission to the latter by submission
+to the former. But the mind should be free. Current or
+popular opinions are not always correct. In fact if they were, reform
+or progress would be unnecessary. A proposal for change always
+begins with a minority, and much time may often elapse before
+such change becomes acceptable to the majority. Before the
+majority accepts a new step of progress the progressive idea cannot
+govern physically. It must be content to be unpopular for a greater
+or less time. Now the politician naturally dreads unpopularity,
+for it is political death. And just in proportion as we are politicians
+do we share in this unfortunate mental attitude. And how many
+Americans are not politicians? It is the prevalent ethical disease
+of Americans. If it becomes general, the progress of this country
+is ended, and her fate among nations is sealed. Her manhood is
+gone, and woman may well feel her hand itch to</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Defeat their dirty tricks</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Confound their politics.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The prevalence of the habit of submission to what we know to
+be wrong in this country is simply detestable. Herbert Spencer has
+given us some excellent advice on this subject, and we will do well
+to heed it. The habit extends all the way through political, scientific,
+and domestic economy. The unpopularity of the reformer is
+expressed in the term “kicker,” which is applied to him among the
+lower classes in this country. As one of its advocates once said to
+me, it is the “American System,” and there was a strong element
+of truth in his assertion. With such people, criticism is identical
+with quarrelling, for they cannot conceive of any motive for endeavoring
+to reform some abuse or correct some error, but personal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>rancor. Such an attitude is a sure mark of intellectual mediocrity
+and ethical incapacity, and it infinitely increases the pains of the reformer,
+and readily converts him into a martyr. However, there
+are a good many men left in this country, and there are agencies
+at work which will probably keep up the supply.</p>
+
+<p>In the absence of compulsion in the form of external or civil
+wars and other disasters, the churches are doing a good work in
+keeping ideals before the people, and in inviting corresponding
+practical life. It is true that their efforts are more or less retarded
+by the insistence on erroneous and even absurd opinions about
+some things, but they do infinite service in teaching that “man
+shall not live by bread alone,” nor by the mere display of physical
+possessions. They teach that there are ideals of truth and beauty
+better worth living for, and that the mind is the greater part of man.
+It is the churches which make the majority of scientists and philosophers,
+as they formerly did of painters. Then let the churches
+flourish. Like the nations of Europe, their emulations and antagonisms
+bring out the truth. The Presbyterians have to solve the
+knotty questions of biblical inspiration and divine order. The
+Methodists will have to study the nature and value of human emotions.
+The Friends will know what is to be known of immediate
+divine influence. The Catholics have learned how to restrain in
+some measure the most thoughtless of mankind. The Unitarians
+and Ethical Culturists are proving that man may retain and live up
+to high ideals without much or any theology. So long as there is
+no philosophy or none to speak of in America, the evolution of
+thought will come from the conflicts of the theologies; a peaceful
+war which is far less wasteful than physical wars. Theology has
+been generally in Europe the parent of philosophy, and so it will be
+here. From the various stages and conditions of the agitation will
+spring science and art. By this method man is led into progress by
+measures which involve the best attributes of his nature, instead of
+being driven by appeals to his lower motives, or by physical force.
+In this progress moral courage is not lost, but it is developed; and
+criticism is truth’s best weapon, and is not a cause of offense. That
+this progress in the churches is real, is proven by our Woodrow,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>McQueary, Briggs, and others, and it will go on as long as the love
+of truth and moral courage exist in those organisations.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to remember that this struggle of opinions has
+passed through the same stages in Europe wherever the love of
+truth has had an abiding place. This is especially true of Germany,
+where also philosophy has had so large a development in relatively
+modern times. But we need something more than opinions to counteract
+the dangers which threaten earnestness of character in this
+country, which I have pointed out. Active organisations are necessary,
+which shall resist tendencies to crystallisation from both
+sides. Non-theological people must be stimulated to maintain ethical
+ideals; and theological people must be restrained from smothering
+them under useless and obstructive dogmas and practices. It
+is too true that while some theological dogmas include high ethical
+ideals, other dogmas discredit them by deriving them from incredible
+sources, and seeking to sustain them by incredible sanctions. Where
+such dogmas are sincerely held, true thought is suppressed, knowledge
+makes slow progress, and ethical life is more difficult.</p>
+
+<p>As already remarked, we cannot yet claim to be, as a nation,
+distinguished for profound thinking on the subjects of highest human
+interest; nor yet are we the most thoughtless. Ignorance of
+the possibilities of mind is not so general as in some parts of Europe,
+but it is greater than in others. Material objects and interests occupy
+almost as exclusively the minds of the majority of our citizens
+whom we are accustomed to consider “intelligent,” as among the
+unintelligent. Hence our proneness to boast of our material greatness,
+instead of our intellectual conquests. Hence that weakest of
+all forms of self-praise, the publication of the dimensions of our
+country and its rapid growth, as though these were indications of
+our superiority as a people or as a race. This is repeated <i>ad nauseam</i>,
+while our real merits, our contributions to the stock of the
+world’s progress in thought, knowledge, and mental power, are
+passed by in silence. Our newspaper press reflects this state of affairs,
+since they generally think it their best policy to follow rather
+than lead public opinion. There are, however, noteworthy exceptions
+to this character of the press both in the east and the west,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span>which we owe to the superiority of the men who edit and direct
+them.</p>
+
+<p>In the conduct of our schools and of our scientific organisations,
+we have a corresponding exhibition of mediocrity or worse, with a
+few noble and distinguished exceptions. A mere interest in education
+and research does not confer competency to direct and sustain
+them; yet an interest in such matters is generally the only qualification
+demanded of the directors of such institutions, provided they
+understand how to buy, sell, and invest money. It is to be hoped
+that this state of affairs will some day pass away, and that men who
+are influential in such matters will some time know enough themselves
+to distinguish between the false and the true, and between
+men of ability and adventurers who are after the money and position
+with which our institutions of learning and our scientific enterprises
+can endow them. This reform will progress exactly in proportion
+as it is understood how much human happiness depends on true research
+and on correct thinking, and how little on revelation and on
+ancient dogma.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, I repeat, sufficiently understood, how much human
+conduct depends on correct thinking. How much financial dishonesty
+would be averted by a rational thought as to the inevitable
+consequences? How much social irregularity would be prevented
+by a similar treatment of the subject? How much hatred and wasteful
+antagonism would the world lack, if the ordinary conditions of
+living were understood and acted on! So the cultivation of the rational
+mind is of incalculable importance, and if we wish to prosper
+as a nation we must bend our energies to the pleasant task this
+problem presents to us. Neglect of our mental powers means degeneracy
+and decay; while their cultivation means power and happiness.
+Wealth, except as a means of attaining this end, after physical
+necessities are supplied, is simply useless.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">E. D. Cope.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="MENTAL_MUMMIES">MENTAL MUMMIES.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>If we should name the most important factor in the changes which
+have gradually widened the contrast between modern science
+and the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, we might define it as a
+“progressive recognition of hereditary influences.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when each individual of the human race was
+considered a separate accident, called into existence by an act of
+unlimited, arbitrary power, and apt to be as suddenly changed, even
+unto a complete inversion of his former moral being, by a merciful,
+or revengeful, caprice of the same power.</p>
+
+<p>Biology has since taught us to apply the doctrine of evolution
+to the problems of our own moral and physical nature, to trace the
+tendencies of bygone times to their effects in the present age, to
+consider individuals the outcome of a long series of precedent influences,
+and to recognise the truth that the length of those influences
+is proportioned to the persistence of the result.</p>
+
+<p>Intelligent statesmen were the first to appreciate the practical
+value of those facts. The advisers of Alexander II. did not waste
+their time in a hopeless attempt to convert the freedom-worshipping
+natives of the Caucasus into devotees of Muscovite despotism, but
+at once confronted them with the alternative of exile or death. Our
+Indian commissioners early realised the impossibility of turning the
+descendants of a long ancestry of deer-hunters into tillers of the soil,
+and transferred the survivors of the long race-war to a territory where
+they could for better or worse, indulge their incurable penchant.
+The Groot Fontein penitentiary of the Transvaal Republic became
+the grave of so many Caffirs that the managers at last abandoned
+the plan of inuring nomads to the restraints of sedentary occupation,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>and saved the lives, if not the souls of their convicts by sending
+them about in chain-gangs to mend the irrigation ditches of the border
+settlements.</p>
+
+<p>Hereditary influences cannot be obliterated by force of rhetoric
+or of government edicts and it would solve many riddles if we would
+apply that principle to phenomena of ethical and religious evolution.
+How else shall we explain the fact that in less than sixty
+years the doctrine of Protestantism spread from central Germany to
+the highland hamlets of Scotland and Scandinavia, while in Spain,
+Portugal, and Italy a very decided progress in general intelligence
+has failed to lead to a similar result? How shall we account for the
+success of Christian missionaries in Tasmania and Otaheiti and their
+utter failure in Burmah and Hindostan? How for the persecution-proof
+vitality of Judaism, the ready collapse of Mormonism, or the
+revival of crass mystic delusions in the midst of our realistic civilisation?</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that the average Spanish sailor, or village-shopkeeper
+of to-day possesses a larger stock of general information
+than the average Brunswick school-teacher of the sixteenth century.
+Yet one of the least learned of those school-teachers could, by instinct,
+sufficiently appreciate the significance of the Protestant revolt to
+celebrate its triumph by a big bonfire and what our western friends
+would, call a “grand war-dance,” on a height near the little town of
+Wolfenbüttel. Why does Pedro Gonzales still cross himself at the
+mention of a heretic, while Peter Jansen would as soon return to
+the pig-sty hovels of the mediæval serfs as crawl back under the
+yoke of Jesuitry? How could the bogs of foggy Ireland and the
+vegas of sunny Spain nourish equally imperishable roots of a plant
+that failed to get a firm foot-hold in the sands of Brandenburgh?</p>
+
+<p>The solution of those enigmas can be found in the circumstance
+that the doctrine of anti-naturalism had extended its influence to the
+character of many European nations, and that the character-traits
+of a race are less amenable to rapid changes than its intellectual
+standards. On the soul-organism of the Latin races the thousand
+years influence of monastic tyranny has left traces which the light of
+science will fail to efface for centuries to come. The propaganda
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>of a manlier creed has thus been defeated, not only by their ignorance,
+but by their aversion to mental efforts, by their habitual reliance
+on miracles, by their incurable indifference to the claims of
+truth and the merits of intellectual independence, by their hereditary
+mistrust in the competence of their natural instinct. To their moral
+palate a doctrine which nauseates their northern neighbors has become
+a pleasant narcotic; they have been forced to swallow the
+opium of pessimism till a craving for the repetition of the mind-enervating
+dose has become a second nature; they hug the cross
+that has proved a symbol of death to their noblest reformers.</p>
+
+<p>Against that influence of perverted instincts the logic of mental
+revelations avails but little. “Propositions which would appear
+self-evident to certain mental constitutions,” says Dr. Carpenter,
+“are apt to be very differently received by others, according to their
+conformity or discordance with that <i>aggregate of preformed opinion</i>
+which has grown up in the minds of each. For just as we try whether
+a new piece of furniture which is offered us does or does not fit into
+a certain recess in our apartment, and accept or decline it accordingly,
+so we try a new proposition which is offered to our mental
+acceptance. If it either at once fits in or can by argument or discussion
+be brought to fit in to some recess in our fabrics of thought,
+we give our assent to it by admitting it to its appropriate place.
+But if it neither fits in the first instance nor can by any means be
+brought to fit, the mind automatically rejects it.”</p>
+
+<p>It is true that logical demonstrations may become complete
+enough to defy dissent, but even from facts which force themselves
+upon the acceptance of every rational human being, different individuals
+will draw widely different inferences. That the mind of man
+may become a receptacle for irreconcilable doctrines is strikingly
+illustrated, by the simultaneous acceptance of the Old and New Testament
+of our heterogeneous scripture, and in the same way obstinate
+bigots manage to associate scientific truth and dogmatic absurdities.
+Darwin and Moses may occupy adjoining quarters in the fabric of
+the same cosmogony; the rule of three may become a passive concomitant
+of Trinitarian dogmas. The torch of truth may be permitted
+to flicker in a secluded recess of souls which refuse it the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>privilege of throwing its rays in certain directions. Education may
+fail to reclaim hereditary bigotry. In the winter of 1559 the rabble
+of Madrid assembled to witness the death of Don Carlos de Seso, a
+Spanish nobleman whose ancestors had fought at Granada and
+Toledo. His brother had been the favorite hunting-companion of
+Charles V.; one of his uncles had sacrificed his life in deciding the
+victory of Pavia; Don Carlos himself had acquired renown both as
+a soldier and a scholar, but in the latter capacity he had confessed
+his sympathy with certain doctrines of Martin Luther, and the Holy
+Inquisition had sentenced him to anticipate his doom in the flames
+of the stake. King Philip II. honored the <i>auto da fé</i> with his presence,
+and frowned in a way which the condemned freethinker mistook
+for a disapproval of his sentence. “O King! can you thus
+witness the torture of your subjects?” exclaimed De Seso. “Deliver
+us from so cruel a death which even our enemies admit we
+have not deserved.” “I would help carrying faggots to burn my
+own son,” replied the King, “if he had incurred your unspeakable
+guilt.” Yet Philip the Second was one of the best-educated princes
+of his century. In mathematics, astronomy, ancient and modern
+languages, geography, and history, he was far better informed than
+Landgraf Philip of Hessen, who would have risked his own life to
+save that of a loyal cavalier.</p>
+
+<p>There are mental mummies who cannot be revived by removing
+their grave-shrouds and clothing them in modern drapery; the principle
+of conservatism has penetrated their very veins and the marrow
+of their bones. It is by no means unconceivable that a popular
+leader like Garibaldi or Porfirio Diaz should succeed in persuading
+a million of his countrymen to renounce the yoke of Rome and build
+Protestant chapels, but the result would be largely limited to a
+change of nomenclature. Before long the dissenters would march
+in procession with a wonder-working tooth of John Wesley or kiss
+a shred from the petticoat of the Holy Maid of Kent. They would
+groan at the mention of Rome, but exorcise spooks with the initials
+of Ulric Zwingli, and abstain from work on the anniversary of every
+Protestant martyr. They would try to redeem drunkards by sprinkling
+them with consecrated water from the holy rivers of Kansas,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>and celebrate Arbor Day only by invoking the spirit of Prof. G. P.
+Marsh, as a patron-saint of climate-improving forests. Under the
+stimulus of industrial influences, they might transfer the cross from
+way-side shrines to telegraph-poles, but they would persist in the
+worship of sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>The creed which has turned the happiest countries of our globe
+into a grave of their former prosperity, is a medley of miraculism
+and anti-naturalism, and the experience of the last century has proved
+that both can survive the repudiation of Rome and even of Galilee.
+The mania of renunciation, after the abolishment of monasteries and
+nunneries, continued its dismal rites in Quaker-garb and Shaker
+temples of celibacy. The miracle-hunger of millions who have learned
+to scorn the clumsy tricks of the cowled exorcist, gratifies its appetite
+in the mystic gloom of the dark cabinet. Rustic supernaturalists,
+deprived of such luxuries, indemnify themselves by retailing
+the marvels of the serpent-charm and joint-snake superstition.</p>
+
+<p>A curious psychological problem suggests itself in the question
+how far the charm of the “sour-grape philosophy” may contribute
+to the persistence of certain forms of moral nihilism. Condemned
+criminals almost invariably “renounce the vanities” of a life which
+the Court of Appeals has refused to save, and in a scaffold-speech,
+quoted in Galignani’s <i>Messenger</i> of May 6th, 1837, the English murderer
+Joseph Greenacre expressed his conviction that his crime had
+been the means of saving his soul, because “death on the gibbet
+was one of the surest passports to heaven.”</p>
+
+<p>For similar reasons degenerate nations, after realising the doom
+of their national welfare, are apt to renounce the glory of a forfeited
+world, and to consider misery, poverty, and shame so many stepping-stones
+to the bliss of a better life beyond the grave. After habitual
+sins against the health-laws of nature have avenged themselves in
+cureless diseases, decrepit bigots may find solace even in that most
+insane tenet of their dualistic creed which teaches them to despise
+the body as the enemy of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>A natural effect of pessimism may thus, in course of time, become
+one of its perpetuating causes.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Felix L. Oswald.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_NERVOUS_GANGLIA_OF_INSECTS">THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>Although the internal structure of the brain of insects has
+been the object of numerous and important investigations,
+among which we must place those of Dietl, Flögel, Bellonci, and
+Viallanes (who have applied the method of sections to the study
+of this organ), no attention has as yet been paid to the other
+nerve-centres of insects, and in particular to the ganglia of the ventral
+chain. Writers have contented themselves with describing the
+external form of these ganglia, and their anatomical relations to the
+other organic parts; but nothing has been done to throw light upon
+their inward structure. All the knowledge which we have on this
+subject is very meagre and dates far back to the works of the old
+writers, who, like Newport, had at their disposal no other means of
+study than the microscopic examination of organs viewed either
+transparently or in dilacerated preparations. A method so defective
+could render but incomplete results, and indeed in many cases erroneous
+ones.</p>
+
+<p>We have sought to supply this much to be regretted lack of
+entomological knowledge, by applying to the ventral ganglia of insects
+the admirable method of sectional cutting, which has brought
+about such marked advances in contemporaneous zoölogy.</p>
+
+<p>I need hardly insist on the interest of this research. We shall
+only remark that all anatomical study bears an unfinished aspect, up
+to the moment at which we grasp the meaning of the organs which
+we describe; physiology is a necessary complement of anatomy, it
+is that which gives to it a meaning. Therefore, when we dissect an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span>organ, which, as in the case of an insect’s brain, is endowed with
+the most complex psychical properties of which these animals are
+capable, we find ourselves in the presence of parts whose functions
+almost entirely escape us. What is, for example, that peculiar organ
+to which we have given the name of the “pedunculate” body?
+Anatomists have described with the greatest care its connections
+and portrayed its external contour; but we cannot discover, or even
+conjecture its uses. It would be necessary to understand the habits
+of thought and the feelings of an insect, to be able to assign a rôle to
+parts so complex and so delicate as those contained within its brain.</p>
+
+<p>The study of the ventral ganglia seems to us to be capable of
+conducting us to a better result, for in everything that concerns these
+nerve-masses, physiology is more advanced, and, in all cases, clearer.
+The ganglia of the thorax, for example, are in the main motory centres;
+the principal nerves that are sent out from them are to be
+found in the wings and in the feet; the study of the terrestrial,
+aquatic, and aerial locomotion of insects has already formed the subject
+of quite a number of important scientific works; we are now
+upon well-known ground, and we may hope that it will be possible
+to establish some connection between the anatomical structure of
+ventral ganglia and the functions which these ganglia control.</p>
+
+<p>This hope appears to us to be the more legitimate, because we
+can make use of all the resources of comparative anatomy to work
+out the problem. If we consider any particular function, for example,
+that of flying, we notice that in species which resemble each
+other this function is exercised under totally different conditions;
+the same organ acquires different uses, and these variations become
+singularly instructive when we can trace their relationship to the
+particular structure of a nerve-ganglion. Thus, one of the large
+wings of the dragon-fly, which is almost like a bird in the range and
+power of its flight, becomes the elytrum of the beetle; the elytrum
+is a stiff wing covered by chitinised matter and serving as a protection
+to a part of the thorax and abdomen. Sometimes the elytrum is
+used in flying, as in the case of the cockchafer. In other lamellicorn
+insects, in the <i>Cetonia</i> for instance, the elytrum is not used in flight;
+it merely moves aside so as to allow the second pair of wings to unfold.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>Its rôle becomes still less active in the golden carabus, in <i>Procrustes</i>,
+in <i>Blaps</i>, and many other <i>Coleoptera</i>, whose two elytra are
+found on one vertical line, and form but one single and immovable
+portion; then the second pair of wings disappear; from the
+physiological point of view, the animal becomes apterous. In another
+and different order, the order <i>Diptera</i>, it is the second pair of
+wings that undergo an important modification; they cease to be used
+in flying, and are transformed into an organ of equipoise: they are
+used for maintaining equilibrium.</p>
+
+<p>All these physiological variations, taking place in the self-same
+organ, must in all probability have their counterpart in the internal
+anatomy of the ganglion that governs the organ, and the comparative
+study of this ganglion in different species will enable us perhaps
+to discover the functions of some of its parts. Thus, if we
+consider by hypothesis, as the nerve-centre of flight, some small lobe
+which is found occupying this or that place in a thoracic ganglion,
+the disappearance or modification of this lobe in species not possessing
+the faculty of flying, might serve to throw additional light
+upon such an interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>What we have just said with regard to flight is equally applicable
+to terrestrial locomotion, which also represents in itself many
+varieties. The typal insect possesses three pairs of feet, whence
+the name of hexapods, but there are particular species which drop
+a pair of feet, for instance, the <i>Lepidoptera</i> of the genus <i>Vanessa</i>; in
+others, the physiological function of the foot varies; in the case of
+the carrion-beetle (a necrophagus coleopter) it serves as an instrument
+of tillage, to dig with; for the cricket, the third pair of feet are used
+for the purpose of leaping; for the <i>Dytiscus</i>, it serves as an oar,
+and so on. We must also bear in mind the curious fact that there
+exists in the larvæ of certain insects what are called supplementary
+feet, having only a transient existence and disappearing at maturity;
+the caterpillar, the larva of the butterfly, has five pairs of supplementary
+feet. These notable facts demonstrated by comparative
+anatomy, cannot fail to furnish us with valuable information concerning
+the functions of the complex organs found in the ganglia
+of the thorax.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span></p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. We have not enumerated all the contributions
+of comparative anatomy to the problem which we are now about
+to consider; we may make use of the method of comparison without
+bringing the different types into juxtaposition, but by viewing the
+nervous system of only a single animal in its entirety. We know in
+fact that the body of an insect is formed by a definite number of
+segments, all constructed on the same fundamental plan and arranged
+in a linear series. Each one of these segments is joined to a nerve-ganglion,
+which is all its own and supplies it with sensibility and
+motility, the two elementary properties of nervous activity. In the
+course of development, these ganglia have the power of changing
+their positions; and it is not uncommon to find that the greater
+number of the abdominal ganglia move up into the thorax; each
+one, nevertheless, retaining its nerve-relationship to its own segment.
+Now all the segments of an insect’s body are not called upon
+to play the same rôle; a division of labor has been effected among
+them with regard to the functions which they are found to exercise:
+as we have already seen, the ganglia of the thorax are essentially
+centres of locomotion; in the head, one of the ganglia, the sub-œsophageal,
+furnishes the nerves of the buccal portions; the other
+one, the brain, is connected with particular nerves and becomes
+the centre of the highest form of psychical activity of which the
+creature is capable. We have here a number of modifications superadded
+to the original plan. Yet the original plan should again be
+met with in the ganglia that have been least differentiated, such as
+those in the abdominal region; and the comparison between an abdominal
+and a thoracic ganglion, for instance, is well calculated to
+show what are the primal and fundamental structures, and what
+are the secondary ones which have been superadded and have become
+necessary for the execution of the more complex functions.
+The study of embryonic and larval forms so easily observed in insects,
+will most probably conduct us to the same result. And thus
+perhaps by continuous efforts, all guided by the same governing
+idea, we shall ultimately arrive at the analogies that exist between
+the cerebroid ganglia and the humblest ganglia belonging to the ventral
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>chain, and thus finally be able to understand the action of the
+nerve-substance.</p>
+
+<p>The importance of this object, which, be it clearly understood,
+can never be attained except by the united effort of many workers,
+is well calculated to command our strenuous exertions and to encourage
+us in surmounting the difficulties of a study which is as yet almost
+entirely new.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>We shall restrict ourselves in this article to the consideration of
+one particular case; we shall describe a single ganglion of the insect.
+The type we have chosen, for reasons too lengthy to enumerate, is a
+Coleopter of the family of <i>Melolonthidæ</i>; the <i>Rhizotrogus solstitialis</i>,
+a small beetle very commonly found in the southwest of France.
+We will now proceed to the consideration of the first thoracic ganglion.</p>
+
+<p>The prothoracic ganglion in the rhizotrogus is joined by very
+short connective filaments to the second thoracic ganglion, and also
+to the sub-œsophageal ganglion; this latter ganglion, we must note
+<i>en passant</i>, being situated in the thorax. If with a pair of scissors
+we sever the head of the rhizotrogus, we find that the remainder of
+the body contains not only the thoracic ganglia, but also the sub-œsophageal;
+a peculiarity which, from a physiological point of view,
+is very interesting.</p>
+
+<p>The ganglion of the pro-thorax, which is greater in width than
+it is in length, bears a vague resemblance to a cone the base of
+which is turned towards the sub-œsophageal ganglion, whilst the apex
+points towards the second ganglion of the thorax. From the lower
+part spring two large nerves, their starting-point being nearer the
+ventral than the dorsal surface, a fact clearly comprehended when
+we find that the fibres of these nerves extend for the most part into
+the first pair of feet, that is to say, into those organs that lie underneath
+the horizontal plane of the ganglion. The connective filaments
+which penetrate the ganglion anteriorly enter it nearer the
+dorsal surface than the ventral, this last being extremely convex.
+Dissection throws no additional light upon the anatomy of the ganglion.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>But by means of a series of sections, we find that it is composed
+of a mass of fibrillar substance which occupies its centre portion
+and of a layer of nerve-cells surrounding the fibrillar substance.
+This fibrillar mass is, owing to its great volume, far the most important,
+and constitutes in itself alone about four-fifths of the organ.
+The fibrillary structure can only be satisfactorily analysed by using
+on it osmic acid, or other equivalent reagents which dissociate it and
+admit of its being reduced to a certain number of clearly differentiated
+elements. Whenever osmic acid or a similar reagent has not
+been employed, or has not sufficiently penetrated the ganglion, owing
+to the obstacle presented by a thick conjunctival covering or envelope,
+the fibrillar substance takes on a homogeneous aspect that
+effectually renders all analysis of it impossible. Everything depends
+on the employment of a good method of preparation.</p>
+
+<p>When the ganglion has been properly prepared, we perceive a
+very material difference in the appearance of the fibrillar substance
+when we compare the dorsal with the ventral region of the ganglion.
+We can do this very satisfactorily by a longitudinal section, extending
+through both regions. In such a section close to the median
+line but not confounded with it (see <a href="#plate3">Cut 16</a>)&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_9" href="#Footnote_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> we perceive that the ventral
+region is occupied by a cord or string of substance which owing
+to the action of the osmic acid has become very black, and which is
+formed of so dense a tissue, that we can with difficulty separate it
+into fibres and fibrillæ. This cord, which, by reason of its position and
+shape, I propose naming the <i>ventral column</i>, extends over the ventral
+surface of the ganglion in a longitudinal direction; at both its anterior
+and posterior extremities it is carried on by fibres extending into the
+ventral columns of the other ganglia, in such a manner that the entire
+series of ganglia are united by one continuous ventral cord.</p>
+
+<p>If we look at a transverse section (see <a href="#plate4">Cut 26</a>), the cord, which
+is recognised by its dark color and by its position near the ventral
+surface of the fibrillar substance, will be seen to have the form of
+two almost perfect circles. The ventral column thus presents a
+circular section, is duplex and symmetrical: there exist two separate
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>and distinct ventral columns, separate at least for a certain length;
+a fact which must be considered in connection with the primitive
+duality of the ganglion.</p>
+
+<p>In every section where the columns remain distinct from each
+other, they are separated either by fibres and conjunctival cells,
+or by nerve-fibres emanating from the cells of the ventral region
+and proceeding in an upward direction between the two columns.
+At the other points, the two columns join on the median line. This
+union is effected in different ways, either by the two columns coming
+directly together, thus merging into a single mass, or by a commissure
+which describes the arc of a circle underneath the two columns,
+or else by the inferior ventral lobule.</p>
+
+<p>We give the name of inferior ventral lobule to a small lobule
+of fibrillar substance, situated beneath the ventral column. When
+looked at in a horizontal section not passing through the median
+line (see <a href="#plate3">Cut 17</a>), this lobule presents the appearance of a rounded
+protuberance, breaking the almost rectilinear contour of the ventral
+column. As this characteristic peculiarity is repeated in the internal
+structure of all the ganglia, we may use it to ascertain the number of
+the ganglia, whenever these present the appearance of being fused
+into one compact mass; we may see the practical application of this
+remark by observing the sub-œsophageal ganglion.</p>
+
+<p>In a succession of horizontal sections, the starting point of which
+is the ventral region, the first mass of fibrillar substance met with
+by the knife is the inferior ventral lobule, which is formed (see <a href="#plate1">Cut 1</a>)
+by two rounded fasciculi, placed symmetrically on either side of the
+median line and joined together by a transverse commissure.</p>
+
+<p>In these sections, we also perceive fibres of the crural nerve,
+which, after having extended over a certain length of the ganglion,
+penetrate into the substance of the inferior ventral lobule (<a href="#plate1">Cut 2</a>).
+In transverse sections (<a href="#plate4">Cut 23</a>) we find the two ventral lobules placed
+beneath the two columns which they help to support, and into which
+they gradually merge; and we also perceive the transverse commissure
+which joins the two. We shall call this the <i>transverse commissure
+of the inferior ventral lobule</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now pass on to the examination of the upper surface of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>the ventral column. This surface is covered by a cluster of very fine
+fibrils rather sparsely disposed; we can clearly follow their course
+by means of a longitudinal section (<a href="#plate3">Cut 17</a>); we see them again in a
+horizontal section (<a href="#plate1">Cut 5</a>). To continue the general description of
+the ganglion we must now consider the dorsal region. It is, as we
+have previously stated, occupied by a fibrillar substance not so dense
+as that which composes the ventral column, and we will give the general
+name of dorsal lobe to this region, reserving the name ventral
+lobe for the region which embraces the ventral column and its adjoining
+parts. The dorsal lobe presents as its distinctive characteristic
+the feature that it is crossed longitudinally by a succession of connective
+filaments clearly seen in the longitudinal section of <a href="#plate3">Cut 16</a>.</p>
+
+<p>We have already stated that the ventral column receives fibres
+issuing from the ganglion in front and sends out others to the ganglia
+in the rear. We shall call the totality of these fibres <i>the connective
+ventral filaments</i>, and shall call the totality of those that traverse
+the dorsal lobe <i>the dorsal connective filaments</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The connective filaments which join the sub-œsophageal to the
+first thoracic ganglion, and which, between these two ganglia, are
+composed of a dense fasciculus of fibres, distribute these fibres, at
+the point at which they enter the prothoracic ganglia, in different
+directions; one set of fibres proceeds towards the ventral column,
+these are the ventral connective filaments; a second set traverses
+the dorsal lobe, and are the dorsal connective filaments.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst the ventral connective filaments soon merge into the
+very dense substance of the ventral column, the dorsal connective
+filaments, on the contrary, remain distinct from the organs which
+they traverse, and preserve their individuality throughout. They
+take directions in three different planes (see <a href="#plate3">Cut 16</a>), consequently
+they can be subdivided into superior, medial, and inferior dorsal connective
+filaments.</p>
+
+<p>Newport seems to have observed this distinction of fibres; and
+he has given the name of sensory column to this first division,
+and that of motor column to the second. Unfortunately the drawings
+and figures he has published, though schematically correct,
+are not clear. We do not adopt his terminology, in the first place
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>because he designates the organs after their supposed functions,
+and we have made it a rule never to use controvertible physiological
+suppositions to designate anatomical organs; and besides, though
+the name of column is applicable to the connective ventral filaments,
+we cannot apply it to the connective dorsal filaments, which are subdivided
+into three pairs of fibrous fasciculi and do not in the least
+resemble a column.</p>
+
+<p>In the study of <i>Melolontha vulgaris</i>, we have been able to establish
+in the most absolute manner that there exists a considerable
+histological difference between the connective filaments of the ventral
+region and those of the dorsal. Though we have not yet noticed
+this difference in <i>Rhizotrogus</i> in any marked degree, nevertheless it
+has seemed to us needful to point it out here, because the fact is of
+such vast importance that it cannot fail to be general. The dorsal
+connective filaments, whilst they preserve their individuality in
+their passage across the dorsal lobe of the ganglion, penetrate nevertheless
+into some small masses of dotted substance which are found
+in the path of their entrance into the ganglion. The mass annexed
+to the inferior dorsal connective filament, is above all very important
+and is directly connected with the ventral column. As the connective
+filaments are in pairs, each of these possesses a distinct
+mass of fibrillar substance and both the masses attached to the same
+pair of connective filaments are joined by a commissure.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now say a few words about the nerves which proceed
+toward the prothoracic ganglion. There exists here but one single
+pair of nerves, extremely important and very extensive. This is
+the crural nerve. To this nerve are attached the organs which are
+superadded to the primary structure of the ganglion, such as we
+have described it, and which in consequence renders the primitive
+structure more complex. We shall perceive the importance attached
+to the idea of a <i>superadded</i> organ, when we study the abdominal
+ganglia, where the organs we are about to describe are either completely
+wanting or are but imperfectly developed.</p>
+
+<p>If now we examine a transversal section taken a little in front
+of the place from whence the crural nerves emerge (<a href="#plate4">Cut 19</a>), we
+shall notice that the central part of the ganglion is occupied by the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>ventral column and the upper part by the dorsal lobe. In addition
+to this, in the lateral regions of the ganglion we find two important
+masses of fibrillar substance. At this point these two masses remain
+distinct from the parts we have just mentioned, and on the other hand
+they are in connection with the crural nerves. The latter send a part,
+and unquestionably the greater part, of their fibres into the lateral
+lobes. In a section slightly posterior to the preceding one, also transversal,
+a very important change has taken place; the two lateral lobules,
+always connected with the crural nerves, have also established
+connections with the centre of the ganglion, and in the sections further
+on the fusion is complete. As these lateral lobules possess the
+characteristics mentioned, only at the point at which the crural
+nerves emerge, we shall call them the <i>crural lobes</i>. Thus we find in
+the prothoracic ganglion three principal lobes: (1) the crural lobe,
+which is double, symmetrical, and lateral, (2) the dorsal lobe, (3)
+the ventral lobe. These two last, in contradistinction to the crural
+lobe, will be classed together under the common term <i>central lobe</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And now to finish this summary description of the prothoracic
+ganglion, we will point out an important disposition of the connective
+tissue which divides the ganglion into two halves, one anterior,
+the other posterior. We can easily understand this disposition by
+looking at a longitudinal section passing exactly through the median
+line. From the dorsal surface of the ganglion, may be seen descending
+a bundle of cells and connective fibres, which, in the form of
+a column, are directed toward the centre of the ganglion; these
+cells and fibres do not meet any important organ on their way, the
+dorsal connective filaments always taking a lateral course. A fasciculus,
+similarly composed of cells and conjunctival fibres, starting
+from the ventral surface of the ganglion, appears to meet this conjunctival
+column (<a href="#plate3">Cut 18</a>). This curious disposition appears to be,
+as M. Henneguy has ingeniously suggested to me, a trace of the anterior
+development of the ganglion which had been formed of two
+distinct portions that have been naturally <i>welded</i> together along
+the median line; the connective fasciculi corresponding to the point
+where the welding has been incomplete, and representing the survival
+of a portion of the walls of the two ganglia.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span></p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>As the ganglion which we have just described contains some
+structural difficulties not easy of comprehension, let us proceed
+with our description under another form, following the order of our
+illustrations.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#plate1">Figure 1</a> is the first horizontal section, cut through the ventral
+region of the ganglion; the knife has here met the lower ventral
+lobule, which at this point shows itself double; the two halves being
+joined by a double transversal commissure. <a href="#plate1">Section 2</a>, made at a point
+a little higher than the preceding one, shows us at the centre the
+lower ventral lobule as increased in size; and in the lateral part of
+the figure appears a new organ, the crural lobule, which is here entirely
+merged into the lower ventral lobule. The crural lobule is traversed
+by fibres from the crural nerve, which instead of being entirely
+lost in its substance, proceed still further, passing into the lower ventral
+lobule. <a href="#plate1">Section 3</a> merely brings into prominence an important
+transversal commissure. In <a href="#plate1">Section 4</a>, the inferior ventral lobule
+is replaced by the ventral column, which appears double, is symmetrical,
+and united by a transversal commissure; this commissure
+being formed of fibrillar substance. The ventral column is closely
+connected on each side with the crural lobule; it is besides crossed
+by the ventral connective fibres, which can be seen emerging from
+its anterior and posterior extremities. <a href="#plate1">Section 5</a> allows us to examine
+thoroughly the disposition of those ventral connective fibres; we see
+that while they penetrate the ganglion, they also pass through two
+symmetrical masses of fibrillar substance; these two masses, which
+we name the anterior ventral lobules, are joined together by a transversal
+commissure. After having traversed the anterior ventral lobules,
+to which it appears they give a portion of their fibres, the
+ventral connective filaments pass through the ganglion in an antero-posterior
+direction, and we see them penetrating the two posterior
+ventral lobules. The last named lobules, which remind us by their
+position and appearance of the anterior lobules, receive in addition
+fibres issuing from the crural lobules; but they do not receive them
+all, because we notice quite a number of these fibres advancing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>directly into the second thoracic ganglion. After emerging from the
+posterior ventral lobules, the ventral connective filaments pass into
+the second thoracic ganglion, where we see them penetrate into the
+anterior ventral lobules.</p>
+
+<p>With <a href="#plate1">Figure 6</a>, we leave the ventral lobe of the ganglion and
+come to the lower portions of the dorsal lobule. The important
+filaments crossing this section from the front to the back are called
+lower dorsal connective filaments. We notice as they proceed some
+small masses of dotted substance, and, in addition to these, dark
+colored dots which are the result of the knife having cut crosswise
+through several fascicles of ascending fibres. We shall find out by
+means of the sections taken from different parts and placed so as to
+allow of our better observation, what these ascending fibres are.
+The crural lobule, always exhibits the same characteristics. We
+have given it a homogeneous aspect in our drawing. As a fact it
+presents in its sections a vast number of structural details. But
+these details being very difficult to understand, we prefer not to dwell
+upon them.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#plate2">Section 7</a> passes through the very midst of the lower dorsal connective
+filaments; these filaments being in two pairs, one external
+and the other internal. The external pair, situated somewhat lower,
+has here disappeared, and the inner pair is the only one to be seen.
+Some transversal fibres, whose direction appears to me difficult to
+follow, divide the inside dorsal connective filaments at two different
+points, and assume the figure of a square; this square has two black
+dots, produced by the section of the ascending fibres.</p>
+
+<p>A little higher, in <a href="#plate2">Figure 8</a>, the lower connective filaments have
+disappeared and the fibrillar substance of the ganglion is furrowed
+by long transversal fibres, of which a part seems to serve the function
+of joining the two crural lobules, whilst the remainder, proceeding
+towards the black dots before mentioned, continue their progress
+with the fasciculi of ascending fibres. These are no other than
+ascending fibres which, having changed their direction at the plane
+of the section, proceed almost in a horizontal plane. In <a href="#plate2">Section 9</a> we
+follow the course of the medial dorsal connective filaments, separated
+from the lower connective filaments by the fibres having a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>transverse direction, seen in <a href="#plate2">Figure 8</a>. The medial dorsal connective
+filaments are four in number, an outer pair and an inner pair. At the
+moment when they leave the prothoracic ganglion, they cross a region
+where the fibrillar substance is both thicker and darker. In <a href="#plate2">Figure
+10</a> the medial connective filaments are on the point of disappearing;
+they receive certain fibres coming from the crural lobules, which
+are now reduced in dimensions. <a href="#plate2">Section 11</a> shows us the lower
+dorsal connective filaments, which are the slenderest of all and of
+which there are but one pair; the crural lobule now disappears. In
+the middle of the figure, we observe a small collection of conjunctival
+cells which, as we have supposed, indicates the point where in
+the course of development the two symmetrical portions of the ganglion
+have not been perfectly fused together. Finally <a href="#plate2">Section 12</a>
+shows two lateral masses of fibrillar substance, separated by a strip
+of conjunctival membrane.</p>
+
+<p>We will now take up the series of longitudinal sections, the study
+of which will demand very special attention. We shall there meet
+again with the organs which we have already examined in the horizontal
+sections; and we shall perceive that the alterations and modifications
+presented to us by the difference in our point of observation,
+bring out very important changes in the appearance of those
+organs. The sectional method of examination is also one of analysis.
+In order to reconstruct an organ in its complete form and to
+conceive of it in space, our mind must bring into a single focus what
+the sections have represented in a fragmentary manner: we must,
+in short, substitute synthesis for analysis.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#plate3">Figure 13</a> represents the first and exterior longitudinal section;
+it hardly touches the ganglion; in the front we see the starting
+point of the crural nerve, and also a portion of the periphery of
+the crural lobule. The crural nerve exhibits several roots, the
+most important of which occupy the ventral region. <a href="#plate3">Figure 14</a>,
+though very elementary, brings out many important points; we see
+here the crural lobule, which has increased in size and extends
+from the ventral to the dorsal region; a fact which has already been
+indicated in the horizontal sections, the crural lobule having been
+shown in them at all points. This lobule is almost circular in form.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>Along its ventral region, we perceive some of the fibres of the crural
+nerve which do not penetrate into the lobule; these are the ones
+we met with in the <a href="#plate1">figures 2 and 3</a>: they are the fibres which pass
+directly into the lower ventral lobule. With <a href="#plate3">Section 15</a>, we leave the
+lateral regions of the ganglion and come to the dorsal and ventral
+regions; we must notice that the crural lobule is continuous with the
+central fibrillar mass and has no precise limits. In <a href="#plate3">Section 15</a> the
+ventral column appears, reduced in size. In the front of it we observe
+an incisure through which certain nerve-cells send their prolongations
+into the fibrillar substance.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#plate3">Figure 16</a> shows us the complete junction of all the connective
+filaments traversing the ganglion; first the ventral column, with the
+connective ventral filaments starting from both its extremities; and
+then the three dorsal connective filaments, which preserve their individuality
+distinct, while they cross the dorsal lobe of the ganglion.
+The lower dorsal connective filament is distinguished from the others
+by a small compact mass of fibrillar substance through which it
+passes. We must note that the fibrillar substance becomes thicker
+at the point where the whole series of connective filaments enter the
+ganglion, and the same thing is repeated at the place where they
+leave the first thoracic ganglion to enter into the second. The ventral
+column is distinguished from the other parts of the ganglion by
+the dark color which it assumes through the action of the osmic
+acid; it presents black granules which, examined with a strong lens,
+show small fasciculi of fibres running in a parallel direction. The
+cells which line the lower surface of the ventral column do not throw
+out any prolongations; they are exceedingly small, but do not otherwise
+present any special feature.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#plate3">Figure 17</a> is but very slightly different from the preceding one:
+the ventral column is simply strengthened on its lower surface by the
+lower ventral lobule. The position of this lobule is interesting to
+note. We have already mentioned that each ganglion is divided
+into two halves by a column of conjunctival tissue, one anterior
+and the other posterior. In <a href="#plate3">Section 17</a> we see the granulated projection
+of the ventral portion of this conjunctival column. In order
+to simplify it we have shown no conjunctival tissue in our illustration.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>We may nevertheless notice, that the nerve-cells at the point
+marked <i>c. c.</i> seem to separate one from the other, and show a triangular
+space between them, filled with conjunctival cells. If the
+segment had not been cut so obliquely, (and this obliqueness in the
+sections is almost unavoidable when dealing with such very small
+organs,) we should also perceive on the dorsal line of the section the
+projection of the dorsal part of the conjunctival column; in fact we
+shall see this projection in the figure which follows. The presence
+of the conjunctival column separates, as we have said, each ganglion
+into two parts, one anterior the other posterior. These portions are
+not at all symmetrical. We see in <a href="#plate3">Section 17</a> that the lower ventral
+lobule is found only in the anterior part. Finally from the ventral
+column rises an important fasciculus of ascending fibres, which we
+have already seen in the horizontal diagrams; it is difficult for us
+to ascertain what these fibres are. In the <a href="#plate3">18th and last section</a> we
+approach nearer the median line. The ventral column at this level
+has the appearance of being divided into two trunks. The ventral
+connective filaments are clearly seen upon its upper surface. Among
+the dorsal connective filaments the middle one alone remains visible
+and receives a certain number of fibres from the ascending fasciculus.</p>
+
+<p>To complete our description let us glance at the series of transverse
+sections. In <a href="#plate4">Figure 19</a> the two crural lobules have not yet
+united and are not yet merged into the dorsal-ventral lobe. This
+junction does not take place until we come to <a href="#plate4">Figure 20</a>. Here, at
+this level, we see in addition the circular segment of the two ventral
+columns, which by their dark color are sharply outlined against the
+remainder of the fibrillar substance. To the right and left of these
+two columns we perceive small masses of dotted substance; we
+merely call attention to them and shall not describe them. <a href="#plate4">Figure
+21</a> furnishes no noteworthy modifications of the preceding. We
+simply see a few cells of the periphery sending out their prolongations
+into the fibrillar substance. The point at which they thus penetrate
+it has already been indicated in <a href="#plate3">Figure 15</a>. In <a href="#plate4">Figure 22</a> we
+have a section of several dorsal connective filaments; among others
+a lower root of the crural nerve is here seen to pass along the ventral
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>surface of the fibrillar substance without penetrating into the
+crural lobule. Does there exist an upper root of the same nerve,
+which follows the upper surface of the dotted substance? We do
+not dare to decide the question. One thing is certain, and that is
+that if the nerve does exist it is accompanied along its path by a great
+number of widely ramified tracheæ, of which we see a drawing in <i>tr.</i>
+In the three figures which follow (<a href="#plate4">23, 24, 25</a>) the ventral column
+presents an interesting series of modifications. First of all, in <a href="#plate4">Figure
+23</a>, it is surrounded by the lower ventral lobule, of which the two
+masses are in a lateral position, and whose commissures pass underneath
+the column. We see in the same <a href="#plate4">Figure 23</a> the two lower
+roots of the crural nerve, advancing towards the column. In the
+<a href="#plate4">24th section</a> the two roots have reached the column, and two other
+nerves cross the crural lobule; doubtless their destination is the
+lower dorsal connective filaments, but of this we have no clear indication.
+In the <a href="#plate4">24th section</a> two other crural roots also enter
+the lower ventral lobule. This section is very favorable for the examination
+of the ascending fasciculus which we have already noticed
+in the longitudinal sections. It seems to us certain that this fasciculus
+terminates in the middle dorsal connective filament. Its origin
+is more uncertain. It seems to spring from the ventral column, or
+else to come from crural roots which, after having traversed the
+crural lobule, reascend towards the dorsal lobe of the ganglion, describing
+a curve exteriorily concave. It is possible that this ascending
+fasciculus has both these origins. The <a href="#plate4">26th and last section</a>
+shows us the ventral column on a larger scale; the two columns
+being distinct from each other, though united at the lower extremity
+by a commissure. The <i>ensemble</i> of the figure strikingly reminds one
+of a section of the abdominal ganglion.</p>
+
+<p>Here our description ends. We have not sought to follow up
+every fibre in all its details, nor to describe completely the anatomy
+of each organ. Our intention has merely been to give a synthetic
+notion of a nervous ganglion. Subsequent studies made on other
+ganglia will demonstrate the general application of this idea.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Alfred Binet.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_9" href="#FNanchor_9" class="label">[9]</a> For the cuts, see the <a href="#plates">plates in the Appendix</a> of this number.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="HINDU_MONISM">HINDU MONISM.<br>
+<span class="smaller">WHO WERE ITS AUTHORS, PRIESTS OR WARRIORS?</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Among all the forms of government class government is the
+worst. Carthage was governed by merchants, and the mercantile
+spirit of its policy led finally to the destruction of the city.
+Sparta was governed by warriors, and in spite of the glory of Thermopylæ
+it was doomed to stagnation. India was governed by priests,
+and the weal of the nation was sacrificed with reckless indifference
+to their interests. It appears that for the welfare of the community
+the harmonious co-operation of all classes is not only desirable but
+also indispensable.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it is often claimed that mankind is greatly indebted to nations
+or states ruled by class government, for having worked out the
+particular occupation of the ruling class to a perfection which otherwise
+it would not have reached. This is at least doubtful.</p>
+
+<p>Carthage was eager to establish monopolies, but she contributed
+little to the higher development of commerce and trade among mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Sparta raised brave men, but was not progressive, even in the
+science of war, and was worsted by so weak an adversary as Thebes.
+Modern strategists could learn something from Epaminondas, but
+little, if anything, from the Lacedæmonians.</p>
+
+<p>Priestcraft has attained to a power in India unparalleled in the
+history of other nations, and it is no exaggeration to say that priest-rule
+was the ruin of the country. Yet the wisdom of the Brahmans
+has become proverbial. Their philosophy is praised as original and
+profound, and it is well known that the first monistic world-conception
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>was thought out in ancient India. But we shall see later on
+what the real share of the Brahmans in this great work has been.</p>
+
+<p>In the very earliest ages of Hindu antiquity, revealed to us in
+the songs of the Rig-veda, we meet with priests who claimed the
+power of making sacrifices to the gods in a manner especially acceptable
+to them, and who thus rose to great power, influence, and
+wealth. To this ancient period of Hindu history we can trace the
+origin of the Hindu castes, essentially a result of priestly egotism, and
+which up to this day has weighed down the Indian people like a
+nightmare. The organisation of the priestly class into an exclusive,
+privileged body, as well as the final development of the castes, did
+not, however, take place until the time represented by the second period
+of the ancient Hindu literature; by the literature, that is to say,
+of the Yajur-vedas or the Vedas of the sacrificial formulæ, and the
+Brâhmanas and Sûtras, both of which describe the sacrificial ceremonies,
+the former with, the latter without theological comments.
+The contents of these works illustrate the origin of the Hindu hierarchy
+and castes; but it is often necessary to read between the lines.
+The greatest authority on this rich literature, Prof. A. Weber, of
+Berlin, in the tenth volume of the series “Hindu Studies” which he
+edits, has published his inquiries concerning this subject in a very
+learned treatise, entitled “Collectanea über die Kastenverhältnisse
+in der Brâhmana und Sûtra,” of which I have made considerable use
+in the following pages.</p>
+
+<p>In these books the Brahmans assert their claims with startling
+candor. In several passages—to begin with the most striking feature—they
+announce themselves as real gods wandering on earth.
+“There are two kinds of gods,” it is said, “the true gods and the
+learned Brahmans, who recite the Veda.” “The Brahman represents
+all gods.” “He is the god of gods.” This is perhaps the most
+remarkable instance of priestly arrogance in all history. Thus it
+cannot at all surprise us that the Brahmans, as earthly gods, placed
+themselves above king and nobility; but it appears rather strange
+that the kings and warriors should have allowed to them the first
+place in the government. But as a matter of fact, they did do so
+and were compelled to do so. From mysterious legends in the great
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>Hindu epic poem we infer, that bloody wars have been waged for
+supremacy, in which the nobility was defeated.</p>
+
+<p>The legends of this epos are thus important additions to the
+sources with which we are concerned. This struggle, which the
+Brahmans in all likelihood caused to be fought out for them by the
+great masses of the people, has been ascribed to the warriors having
+robbed the priests of the treasures which the latter had acquired
+by the performance of the sacrifices; and this part of the legend is
+so highly probable that we cannot treat it as a pure myth, especially
+if we take into consideration the circumstances of those times. It
+was the first attempt at secularisation in the history of the world,
+and the results were very disastrous to those who were then in
+secular power.</p>
+
+<p>The Brahmans did not establish a social hierarchy or ecclesiastical
+ranks, nor did they participate in the government, except
+that the king was bound to employ a Brahman as Purohita or house-priest,
+who occupied as such the position of prime minister. If,
+however, they succeeded in dominating the nobility and the whole
+people, it was principally on account of their greater knowledge, of
+which they boasted, and especially on account of the sacrificial arts,
+by the proper exercise of which in those times, all favors could be
+obtained from the gods. For a duly performed sacrifice, which
+would last weeks, months, nay, years, the Brahmans charged of
+course a high fee. A fee of ten thousand oxen was prescribed for a
+certain ceremony, a hundred thousand for another one, and a later
+teacher of ritualism charged 240,000 for the same service. And this
+was not yet the climax of priestly avarice, which—to use an expression
+of Professor Weber—indulges in veritable orgies in these
+books. After one has gone through the endless description of a
+ceremony, one finds at the end the remark that the whole sacrifice
+has no effect, unless the proper fee be paid to the priest. And—to
+use a term of modern life—lest competition should reduce the prices
+or spoil the business, a rule was established, that no one should
+take a fee which another one had refused. (Weber, p. 54.)</p>
+
+<p>The sacrificial rituals, so trying and tedious for us, are the only
+literary production of these dull centuries before the rising of philosophical
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>speculation, and the great historical importance they possess
+is simply due to the light they throw on the moral depravity of
+the Brahmans as a class.</p>
+
+<p>The following fact will fully show to what extent sexual debaucheries
+were indulged in. The priest was enjoined, by a special
+rule, not to commit adultery with the wife of another during a particularly
+holy ceremony. But he who could not practice continence,
+was allowed to expiate his sin by an offering of milk to Varuna and
+Mitra.</p>
+
+<p>Numerous passages in the books on ritualism furnish us interesting
+illustrations of the great indulgence which the Brahmans had
+for each other’s weaknesses. The officiating priest is taught how to
+proceed during the sacrifice, if he wants to wrong the man who employs
+and pays him, or how to deviate from the prescribed rules,
+if he wants to rob his employer of his seeing, hearing, children,
+property, or position. The lack of confidence that resulted is best
+illustrated by a ceremony, the introduction of which, at the beginning
+of the sacrifice, became gradually necessary. By a solemn oath
+the officiating minister and the client bound themselves not to injure
+each other during the performance of the holy act. Consequently,
+the strange notions of right, which the Brahmans had in those times,
+will not surprise us. “Murder of any one but a Brahman is no murder.”
+“An arbitrator must decide in favor of the Brahman and not
+in favor of his opponent, if the latter is not a Brahman.” Such maxims
+are laid down in the texts with shameless insolence.</p>
+
+<p>It is plain that the caste system greatly contributed to increase
+the power and influence of the priests, because in a country where
+the people are divided into classes, the priest always succeeds in
+inciting at his wish the one against the other.</p>
+
+<p>After the Brahmans came as second caste the Kshattriyas (literally:
+the ruling class, i. e., king, nobility, soldiers); and as third
+caste the Vaisyas (the bulk of the people: farmers, merchants, etc.).
+The conquered non-Aryan aborigines were foreordained by the gods
+to serve the Aryan castes and especially the Brahmans. They were
+called Súdras (serfs) and had neither civil nor religious rights.
+“The Súdra is the servant of others; he can be cast out or killed.”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>By this humane maxim were the Brahmans guided in their conduct
+towards the aborigines.</p>
+
+<p>With such a state of things, as it appears in the old books, the
+priesthood ought to have been well pleased. But the Brahmans
+were not; they desired still greater advantages and carried out the
+caste system to a most absurd extent. The result is embodied in
+the famous law-book of Manu, the exact date of which we do not yet
+know, but which must be placed at the beginning of our era. The
+condition of things of which I shall now speak, was accordingly developed
+during the last centuries before Christ. Though we may suppose
+that some rules of this code have remained a mere theory and
+have never been carried out, there remains enough to show the
+social life of those times in a poor light. Köppen, in the first
+chapters of his book on Buddhism, has severely but justly judged
+the social organisation, as it appears in Manu’s law-book; but as
+the age of this code was overrated at his time, he was led to one
+erroneous conclusion: he attributes the historical process, of which
+we speak, to the period before Buddha, while it really took place
+after Buddha: L. von Schröder, in his work “Indian Literature
+and History,” in the twenty-ninth lecture, gives us a good view of
+those times.</p>
+
+<p>Different passages in Manu’s code show us that the claim of
+the Brahmans to divinity had not decreased in the course of the
+centuries. “The Brahmans are to be venerated at all times, as they
+are the highest divinity.” “By his very origin the Brahman is a
+god, even to the gods.”</p>
+
+<p>The many practical privileges they enjoyed were of still greater
+value. They were exempt from taxation under all circumstances,
+“even if the king should starve.” For the greatest crimes they could
+not be executed or chastised, nor was their property liable to confiscation,
+while at the same time the criminal law was very harsh
+towards the other castes and especially towards the Súdras. The
+penalties increased proportionately: the lower the caste to which the
+criminal belonged, the higher the punishment; and the fines also
+increased in proportion to the rank of the caste to which the injured
+man belonged. The money-lender was allowed to exact (monthly)
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>two per cent. of a Brahman, three of a Kshattriya, four of a Vaisya,
+five of a Súdra. All these laws show how the Brahmans understood
+the art of advancing their interests. The Súdra was by the code
+deprived of all rights. “The Brahman may consider him as a slave
+and is therefore entitled to take his property, as the property of the
+slave belongs to the master.” “The Súdra shall not acquire wealth,
+even if he be in a position to do so, as such conduct gives offense to
+the Brahman.”</p>
+
+<p>But all these things are harmless when compared with the principles
+by which the Brahmans reduced to the most miserable of
+lives numberless human creatures who had committed no wrong
+except that their origin did not agree with the political scheme of
+the priests. Formerly it had been lawful for the members of the
+three Aryan castes, after having married a girl of the same caste, to
+take other wives of a lower caste besides, and no disgrace attached
+to their children. The son of a Brahman and a Vaisya—or even of
+a Súdra woman—was therefore a Brahman. But this was no longer
+the case under the code of Manu.</p>
+
+<p>If the parents belonged to different castes, the children did not
+follow either father or mother, but they formed a mixed caste and
+the law distinctly regulates their occupations and trades. This
+theory gave birth to a great number of mixed castes, who were more
+or less despised. And the social standing of many of them grew still
+worse on account of an absurd maxim which degraded the Indian people
+to the level of grass and plants. Good seed in a bad soil gives of
+course a poorer return than in good soil; still the crop is endurable.
+But weed introduced into good soil produces weed abundantly.
+According to this theory of the Brahmans the children were below
+the father, if he had married a wife of a higher caste. The lowest
+and most execrable creature therefore is the son of a Súdra and a
+Brahman woman. The destiny of a Súdra was of course hard and
+unhappy, but the misery of the offspring of such a marriage, of the
+Chandâla, defies all description. “He shall live far from the abodes
+of other men and bear signs by which everybody can recognise and
+avoid him, as his contact pollutes. Only in daytime shall he be admitted
+into the villages, as then people can avoid him. He shall
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>possess but common animals like dogs and donkeys, eat out of broken
+plates, put on the dresses of the dead, etc. They were compelled
+to serve as executioners. To the utmost degree of contempt and
+misery has the proud Brahman reduced these poor creatures.”
+(Schröder, pp. 423-424.)</p>
+
+<p>But the Chandâla was not the last in the Brahmanic scale,
+which suppressed all dignity in human nature; his offspring, though
+he had only a wife of the Súdra caste, was necessarily still below
+him. Thus originated a great number of mixed castes, one more
+despised than the other, and despising one another. Most of these
+outcasts take their names from the Indian aborigines and are thus
+placed on the same level with the most contemptible tribes. Some
+of the things I have cited about the mixed castes, may have been
+merely a theory of the Brahmans; however, the actual existence of
+classes of people reduced by the clergy to a sort of animal life, has
+been sufficiently verified by foreign travellers.</p>
+
+<p>In modern times the separation of the people has been going
+on very rapidly; so much so, that nearly every trade or profession
+now forms a caste of its own, having no social intercourse with,
+nor patriotic feelings for the other castes. This condition of things
+is due to the influence of the Brahmans, for it has grown out of the
+social order they have founded.</p>
+
+<p>It is not my task to arraign the Brahmans for the sins they have
+committed; but simply to illustrate to my readers, how little they
+cared for and had at heart the interests of their people. One will,
+upon the whole, feel inclined to denounce the selfishness and immorality
+of the Brahmans, but on the other hand will acknowledge
+with admiration the intellectual work they have done, and forgive
+them much for the profound thoughts with which they have enriched
+their country and the whole world. Is it not the wisdom of
+the Brahmans that has given to the word India a sound that stirs
+the hearts of all to whom the struggle for the highest truth appears
+as the highest phenomenon in the history of civilisation? But suppose
+it can be shown that the greatest of all the wisdom of the Brahman,
+the monistic doctrine of the All-in-One, which has had the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span>greatest influence on the intellectual life of modern times, was not
+discovered by them?</p>
+
+<p>Before I enter on this question, of the greatest importance from
+an historical point of view, I will give a short sketch of the period
+of Indian history in which this doctrine was established.</p>
+
+<p>For centuries the Brahmans had heaped sacrifice on sacrifice
+and multiplied symbolical explanations without end. All this distinctly
+bore the stamp of priestly sophistry. Suddenly higher
+thoughts arise. The learning handed down by tradition and the
+sacrificial system are, it is true, not altogether abandoned; the mind,
+however, is no longer satisfied with the mysteries of the sacrifices,
+but aims at higher and more sublime truth. The age of intellectual
+darkness is followed by a new era, the characteristic of which is the
+ambition to solve the problems of life and to understand the relation
+of the individual to the absolute. All the efforts of the human mind
+are now bent on solving the question of the eternal Unity, from
+which all phenomena have emanated and which every one perceives
+within his own self. It is the age of the Upanishads, those famous
+books, which, as soon as they were known in Europe, filled all
+scholars with wild enthusiasm and admiration. I refer only to
+the old Upanishads, that date from the eighth to the sixth century
+<span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span>, not to the great number of books of the same name, but not of
+the same value—there are over 200 of them—which appeared after
+the Christian era. The Upanishads reveal the struggle of the mind
+to reach the highest truth. Though they indulge occasionally in
+strange speculations, still the idea of Brahma, of the universal soul,
+of the absolute, of the thing in itself, is the ever-recurring subject
+of their thoughts, which culminate in the idea that the Atman, the
+inner self of man, is naught but the eternal and endless Brahma. A
+wonderful pathos animates the language of the Upanishads and testifies
+to the sublime feelings in which the thinkers of those times
+sought the great mystery of existence. They look for all kinds of
+expressions, metaphors and figures, in order to couch in words what
+cannot be described by words. We read for instance in the venerable
+Brihadâranyaka Upanishad: “That which lives on the earth,
+but is different from the earth, that which is the moving power of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span>the earth, that is your Self, the inner immortal ruler.” The same
+is predicated of water, fire, ether, wind, sun, moon, and stars; and
+then the chapter ends as follows: “Unseen, he sees; unheard, he
+hears; unminded, he minds; unknown, he knows. There is none
+that sees but he; there is none that hears but he; there is none that
+minds but he; there is none that knows but he. He is thy soul, the
+inner ruler. Whatever is different from him, is perishable.”</p>
+
+<p>In the same celebrated Upanishad appears a woman, named
+Gârgî, and moved by thirst of knowledge she inquires of the wise
+Yâjnavalkya: “That which is beyond the sky and beneath the earth,
+and between sky and earth, that which is, was, and shall be, in what
+and with what is it interwoven (that is: in what does it live and
+move)?” Yâjnavalkya, in order to try the intellectual power of the
+woman, gives an evasive answer: “In the ether.” But Gârgî, perceiving
+that this answer did not contain the final truth, asks: “In
+what is the ether woven?” And Yâjnavalkya replied: “O Gârgî,
+that is what the Brahman calls the Eternal; it is neither big, nor
+small, nor large, nor short, without connection, without contact; by
+the Eternal are ruled heaven and earth, sun and moon, days and
+nights; the power of the Eternal directs the rivers south or west or
+to any other point of the compass. Whoever parts from this world
+without having understood the Eternal, is miserable.”</p>
+
+<p>In the Chândogya Upanishad, a book of no less importance,
+the same wisdom is taught by a man named Uddâlaka to his son
+Shvetaketu in the form of several parables. We see them standing
+in front of a Nyagrodha tree, that kind of fig-tree that everywhere
+sends roots from the branches down to the ground, thus producing
+new trunks, until in the course of time <i>one</i> tree resembles a green
+pillared hall. And in front of such a tree, the most beautiful symbol
+of ever-youthful nature, the following conversation takes place between
+father and son: “Get me a fruit of this tree.”—“Here it is.”—“Break
+it.”—“It is broken.”—“What do you see in it?”—“I
+see quite small kernels.”—“Break one of them.”—“It is broken.”—“What
+do you see in it?”—“Nothing.”—Then the father said:
+“The fine matter that you cannot see has produced this big tree,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span>and believe me, my dear son, this same matter, of which the earth
+is composed, is the Absolute, the Universal Soul,—it is you.”</p>
+
+<p>The eternal ground of all existence which every one carries in
+himself, Being as it is in itself, and as it is immediately perceived in
+thinking, was, accordingly recognised as the sole reality, and all
+the manifold changes of the phenomenal world were called Maya,
+a sham, a delusion, a mockery of the senses. We see, it is a consistent
+monism which is taught in the Upanishads.</p>
+
+<p>I do not intend here either to criticise the Brahman conception
+of monism or to contrast it with modern forms of monism. All
+monisms have at least one thing in common, viz. they all recognise
+the paramount importance of consistency of thought as a basic principle
+in philosophy. And to have propounded a monism for the first
+time is a feat which cannot be overestimated. What remains of this
+essay will be devoted to the investigation of the question, whether
+this feat is duly or unduly credited to the Brahmans.</p>
+
+<p>It may first be mentioned, that a few scholars like Weber, Max
+Müller, Regnaud, Deussen, and Bhandarkar, pointed out, a long
+time ago, certain facts which show that another class of the Hindu
+nation founded the monistic doctrine of the old Upanishads. But
+the attention of the great public has never been called to this subject,
+which deserves to be known by all interested in Indian history.</p>
+
+<p>In the second book of the Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, of which
+I have already cited two passages, is found the following story, of
+which also the fourth book of Kaushîtaki Upanishad gives a slightly
+different version.</p>
+
+<p>The proud and learned Brahman Bâlâki Gârgya comes on his
+journey to Ajâtashatru, prince of Benares, and says to him: “I will
+announce you the Brahma.” The king, highly pleased, promises
+him a great reward, a thousand cows. The Brahman begins to expound
+his wisdom: “The Spirit (that is the power) in the sun I
+venerate as the Brahma.” But the king interrupted him, saying
+that he knew that already. Then the Brahman speaks about the
+Spirit in the moon, in lightning, ether, wind, fire, water, but the
+king knows all that. And whatsoever the Gârgya might say, is not
+new to the king. The Brahman became silent. But Ajâtashatru
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>asked him: “Is that all?” and Gârgya answered: “Yes, that is all.”
+Then the king said: “Your little knowledge is not the Brahma;”
+whereupon Gârgya declared that he should like to be one of the
+king’s pupils. Ajâtashatru replied: “It is against nature, that a
+Brahman should learn from a warrior and depend on him for the
+understanding of the Brahma, but I will show it you nevertheless.”
+The king took him to a sleeping man and spoke to the latter; but
+he did not get up. When the king touched him with his hand, he
+arose. The king then asked the Brahman: “While this man was
+sleeping where was his mind, and whence did it return now?”
+Gârgya could not give an answer. Then the king explained to him,
+that the mind or the Self of the sleeping man was wandering around
+in dream, that all places were open to him, that he could be a great
+king or a great Brahman; but that there was still a higher condition
+of felicity, that is, absorption in dreamless sleep, without consciousness.
+In this condition the Self of man, not affected by the outside
+world, reposes in his true essence and knows no difference between
+Atman and Brahma.</p>
+
+<p>Another story, reported in the fifth book of Chândogya Upanishad
+and in the sixth book of Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, is perhaps
+of still greater importance.</p>
+
+<p>The young Brahman Shvetaketu comes to a convention, where
+the King Pravâhana Jaivâli asks him: “Has your father instructed
+you?”—“Yes, sir.”—“Do you know to what place the dead go?”
+And three more questions he put to the young Brahman, who was
+compelled to admit that he knew nothing about them. Discouraged,
+he returned to his father and reproached him: “Although you have
+not imparted any knowledge to me, you claim that you have instructed
+me. A <i>simple king</i> has asked me three questions and I could
+not answer a single one.” The father replied: “You have known
+me sufficiently to understand that I taught you all I knew. Come,
+let us go to the king and learn from him.” The king received the
+Brahman with great honors and requested him to select a present.
+But Gautama refuses all earthly gifts, gold, cows, horses, female
+slaves, and asks the king to answer the questions he had put to
+his son. At first the king was unwilling, but after a while he agreed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>to it and said, that no one on earth could give information on those
+subjects, except a warrior. And the following words of the king’s
+are very significant: “Would that neither you nor your ancestors
+had trespassed on us, that this truth might never have set up her
+residence among Brahmans. But to you, since you are so inquiring,
+I will communicate our wisdom.”</p>
+
+<p>Substantially the same story is found at the beginning of the
+Kaushîtaki Upanishad, except that the king appears under the name
+Chitra.</p>
+
+<p>Omitting points of less importance, I shall only give in a brief
+form the contents of the eleventh and the following chapters of the
+fifth book of the Chândogya Upanishad, where again a man of the
+warrior caste, Ashvapati, prince of the Kekaya, is shown in possession
+of the highest wisdom. A number of highly learned Brahmans
+were speculating on the following problems: “What is our Self?
+What is the Brahma?” and they decided to go to Uddâlaka Aruni,
+who, as they knew, was investigating the “Omnipresent Self.” But
+Aruni said to himself: “Now, they will ask me and I am not able
+to answer all their questions”; consequently he requested his visitors
+to go with him to Ashvapati. The latter receives them with
+great honors, invites them to stay with him, promising them presents
+as high as their fees for sacrifices. But they replied: “A man
+must communicate what he knows. You are just now seeking the
+‘Omnipresent Self’; disclose to us what it is?” The king, said:
+“I will answer you to-morrow.” The following day, without having
+received them among his pupils, that is, without a ceremonial reception
+as was usual, he asked them: “What do you venerate as
+the Self?” They replied: “Heaven, sun, wind, ether, water, earth.”
+The king reminded them that they were all mistaken in considering
+the Omnipresent Self as a finite and limited being; it was the infinite,
+the infinitely small and the infinitely great.</p>
+
+<p>The weight of these stories is very plain. Whether they refer
+to real facts or merely reflect the views of those times in the form of
+legends, cannot be decided. However, the question of the historical
+truth of these stories has no bearing whatever. The fact that they
+are to be found in genuine Brahmanic writings, in books which are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>considered in India as the basis of the Brahman caste, speaks a
+plain language. It shows, that the thought of claiming the monistic
+doctrine of the Brahma-Atman as the inheritance of their caste,
+did not occur to the authors of the old Upanishads, or that they
+dared not claim it; it may be that they did not yet realise the great
+importance of the same. Of course in the following ages this science
+became the exclusive property of the Brahmans and was cultivated
+and developed by them during twenty centuries—but this does
+not do away with the fact that it originated among the warrior
+caste. The men of this caste recognised at once the hollowness of
+the sacrificial system and its absurd symbolical character; and to
+them is due the credit of having disclosed a new world of thought
+and of having accomplished a revolution in the intellectual life of Ancient
+India. When we learn that the Brahmans continued the sacrificial
+system, even after having adopted the new creed, and by representing
+religious ceremonials as the first step to knowledge, thus
+combined two wholly heterogeneous elements; we may justly conclude
+that things have taken the same course in Ancient India as in
+other countries. Progressive ideas are first opposed by the priesthood,
+their born enemy, until they have become so powerful that
+they cannot be opposed any longer, whereupon the priest adopts
+them and tries to harmonise them with his superstitions.</p>
+
+<p>But the ideas mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, the substance
+of what is commonly called “Hindu wisdom,” are not all
+that the warriors have done for the religion and philosophy of the
+people. The noble Gautama of Kapilavastu, the best known of all
+Hindus, who established Buddhism about 500 years before Christ,
+was also a Kshattriya, and according to the more recent tradition,
+which alone was formerly known, the son of a king; but according
+to the earlier sources, disclosed by Oldenberg, he was the son of a
+landed proprietor. Buddha, “the Enlightened,” under which
+name he is known all over the world, most strenuously opposed the
+sacrificial system and the superstitions of the Brahmans. The ceremonies
+and the science of the priesthood seemed to him a perfect
+fraud, and the caste system an absurd institution; he taught that the
+final beatitude is within the reach of the lowest man, as well as of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>the Brahman and the king; that every one, without distinction of
+birth, can attain to “salvation” by contempt of the world, self-denial,
+and devotion to the welfare of his fellow beings.</p>
+
+<p>Oldenberg’s excellent book on Buddha, the newest standard
+work on this subject, makes it unnecessary for me to dwell at
+length on the doctrine of the greatest of all Hindus; only in regard
+to one important point, which has a direct bearing on the subject
+under consideration, do I differ from his opinion. According to the
+oldest sources, Buddha’s method of teaching is, to a great extent, beyond
+the understanding of the bulk of the people; not a popular, but
+an abstract philosophical one. For intrinsic reasons, I believe that
+the old sources do not give a correct report of this matter, and we
+must not forget that centuries separate them from Buddha. Oldenberg
+himself raises the point, whether the dry and tedious ecclesiastical
+style, in which Buddha’s thoughts are clothed by those sources,
+truly reflects the spoken word. He says on page 181: “Whoever
+reads the words which the sacred books attribute to Buddha will
+doubt that the form in which Buddha taught his precepts is to be
+identified with that abstract and sometimes abstruse metaphysical
+language. A youthful, invigorating spirit, pervading alike teacher
+and disciples, is the true picture of those times, admitting of no unnatural
+or artificial features.”</p>
+
+<p>In spite of this, he comes to the conclusion that “the solemn
+and stern way of speaking, peculiar to Buddha, has been better expressed
+by tradition than by what we would feel tempted to substitute.”
+I am not of this opinion. In India a great success could
+not have been obtained but by overpowering eloquence and a popular
+method, intelligible to all, and proceeding by parables and metaphors.</p>
+
+<p>If Buddha had only appealed to the intellect of his nearest surroundings,
+consisting merely of aristocratic elements, if he had not
+found his way to the heart of the people, his monastery would very
+likely have shared the destiny of the other religious congregations of
+his age, which have all disappeared, except one. As the doctrines of
+these monasteries or their founders do not substantially differ from
+each other, and as it cannot be ascribed to mere chance that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>Buddha’s doctrine has developed into a universal religion, having
+the greatest number of adherents, there remains but one hypothesis
+to account for this fact, and that is the superiority of Buddha’s way
+of teaching. The erroneousness of the generally prevailing opinion
+that Buddha was in his time the only founder of a new religion, and
+that he suddenly revolutionised the social organisation of the Indian
+people, has been clearly established by recent investigations. In fact,
+he was a “primus inter pares,” one of those numerous ascetics who
+were striving for and preaching “liberation” from the eternal transmigration.</p>
+
+<p>Besides Buddha’s, only one congregation has survived: the
+Jaina, having numerous members in the western part of India. The
+principles of the Jaina are very similar to those of Buddha; so much
+so that until recently it was considered merely as a sect of Buddhism,
+while it is really a religion of its own, founded by a contemporary
+or a predecessor of Buddha, named Vardhamâna Jnâtaputra—in
+the language of the people, Vaddhamâna Nâtaputta—in the same
+part of the country where Buddha rose. The only difference between
+the two religions is this: Vardhamâna lays great stress on
+castigation; while the more progressive Buddha declares it useless—nay,
+pernicious. The important point in regard to the object of
+our essay is this: that the founder of Jaina, which occupies a high
+place in the history of Hindu culture, was also a member of the
+Warrior Caste.</p>
+
+<p>We shall now have to consider another production of the Indian
+mind, the very name of which is unknown to most of our readers,
+although it offers the most interesting religious problems. I refer
+to the doctrine of the Bhâgavatas or Pâncharâtras. These names,
+of which the former is the earlier and original one, designate a religious
+sect in North India, whose existence in the fourth century <span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span>
+is authentically proved, but which can be placed with great probability
+in the time before Buddha. They professed a common-sense
+monotheism, independent of the traditions of the old Brahmans, and
+venerated God under different names: Bhagavant, “The Sublime,”
+whence their name is derived; Nârâyana, “Son of Man;” Purashottamma,
+“The Supreme Being”; but generally under the name
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>Krishna Vâsudeva, “Son of Vâsudeva”. The character of their worship
+produced feelings identical with the Christian love and devotion
+to God. The Hindu word for this feeling is Chakti, and for him who
+was penetrated by the same, Chakta. As the word Chakti cannot be
+found or has not been found in the Hindu literature earlier than the
+era of Christ, several scholars are inclined to attribute the Chakti to
+the influence of Christianity, especially Professor Weber, who deserves
+the highest praise for his researches concerning Krishna worship.
+Weber has proved in several of his books, especially in a
+highly interesting treatise on Krishna’s birth, that numerous Christian
+notions have entered into the later Krishna legends (the similarity
+of the names, Krishna and Christ, accounts for it): for instance,
+the birth of Christ among the shepherds, the story about the
+stable, and others of the same kind. In spite of this, I cannot embrace
+the opinion that the Chakti has been brought from a foreign
+country, because its first appearance belongs to a period in which
+Christian influences cannot be found. As I cannot go into details
+without discussing very difficult points, requiring a great deal of
+erudition, I will only say that whoever is familiar with the old
+Hindu civilisation will easily understand that the Chakti is of genuine
+Hindu origin. Monotheistic notions can be traced to the oldest
+periods of Hindu antiquity, and the Hindu mind has always been
+animated by a high aspiration towards God; so that it should not
+surprise us that this feature of the Hindu character has produced
+a religion popular and independent of philosophical speculation,
+consisting in love and devotion to God. The founder of this religion
+was Krishna Vâsudeva, afterwards raised to divine dignity, or
+rather identified with the deity; from his name and from the legends
+attached to his name, he was a member of the Warrior Caste. As
+early as the epoch of the Mahâbhârata, the great Indian epic poem,
+the Brahmans appropriated to themselves the name and work of
+Krishna, and transformed the venerated hero into the God Vishnu;
+thus increasing their strength by adopting a doctrine not of Brahmanic
+origin.</p>
+
+<p>We have thus found that the profound philosophical monism of
+the Upanishads, the highly moral religions of Buddha and Jaina,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>and last, not least, the creed of the Bhâgavatas, based on pure devotion
+to God, did not originate among the Brahmans.</p>
+
+<p>However favorably we may judge of the achievements of the
+Brahmans in all branches of science, and I am far from vilifying
+their merits, still it is certain that the greatest intellectual performances
+of India, nay, all such in India that have been beneficial to
+mankind, were accomplished by men of the Warrior Caste.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Richard Garbe.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_IDEA_OF_NECESSITY">THE IDEA OF NECESSITY, ITS BASIS AND ITS SCOPE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The idea of necessity, although a fundamental concept in philosophy
+and science, has not as yet been so clearly defined
+that all thinkers would agree as to its meaning and significance.
+Necessity is frequently identified with compulsion, and thus it is
+supposed to be incompatible with freedom of will. It is also identified
+with fate, as if it were a destiny that existed above the will of
+man and the powers of nature, similar to the Moira of the ancients.
+It is said to exclude chance in every possible conception of the term
+and to cause the evolution of the world to proceed by a predetermined
+arrangement, like the mechanism of a clock.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot endorse Mr. Charles S. Peirce’s objection to the
+doctrine of necessity, but we side with him when he denounces the
+mechanical philosophy for considering minds as “part of the physical
+world in such a sense that the laws of mechanics determine
+everything that happens.” Mr. Peirce is right when he rebukes the
+mechanical philosopher for “entering consciousness under the head
+of sundries as a forgotten trifle.” In some sense minds are parts of
+the physical, i. e. the natural, world, but they are not parts of that
+province of nature which constitutes the special domain of physics
+and mechanics. Ideas are not motions and cannot be explained by
+mechanical laws.</p>
+
+<p>Having criticised in a former article of ours Mr. Peirce’s position,
+and having rejected the indeterminism proposed by him, we
+shall discuss in the following pages the basis and scope of the idea
+of necessity.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span></p>
+
+<p>The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness,
+and we find that the existence of samenesses is a feature of the world
+in which we live. The existence of samenesses is a fact of experience,
+and upon the presence of this fact depends the possibility
+of the origin, the being, and the development of the thinking mind
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>Necessity, as we understand it, must be carefully distinguished
+from the idea of fate. Although we accept without reserve the doctrine
+of determinism, we do not mean to deny the important part
+that chance plays in the world—not absolute chance, which according
+to Mr. Peirce is exempt from law, but that same chance of which
+the throw of a die is a typical instance. And bearing in mind that
+necessity is not a power outside of nature and above the will of man,
+but that it resides in them as the quality of sameness, we abandon
+the view that identifies necessity with compulsion; recognising thus,
+that freedom of the will is not incompatible with our view of necessitarianism.</p>
+
+<h4>I. THE BASIS OF NECESSITY.</h4>
+
+<p>The standpoint from which we shall treat this subject is that of
+monistic positivism,—the method which accepts no doctrine, theory,
+or law unless it be a formulation of facts. Facts are the bottom-rock
+to which we can and must dig down. At the same time, wherever
+facts appear contradictory to one another, we should not be
+satisfied, but continue to investigate until they are systematised so
+as to form a unitary entirety.</p>
+
+<p>Before we begin our inquiry into the existence or non-existence
+of necessity, it is advisable to define the meaning of the term.</p>
+
+<p>The Latin word <i>necesse</i> is most probably a compound of the
+negative <i>ne</i> and the supine <i>cessum</i> from <i>cedere</i> to yield, to move.
+“Necessary,” according to this etymology, would mean that which
+does not yield but abides. Thus it is the inevitable; it is that which
+is or will be.</p>
+
+<p>It is in this sense that the word is still used, or at least ought to
+be used, and in this sense we shall also use it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span></p>
+
+<p>Every word naturally acquires by a more or less appropriate
+application a series of meanings. So “necessary” means also that
+which is needful, that which is essential, that which is indispensable
+and requisite; it also means that which is done under compulsion.
+It is understood that we exclude all the other meanings of necessary
+except the original one, which is its properly philosophical meaning.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of necessity is closely allied to the idea of sameness.
+In order to understand the former we must be clear concerning
+the meaning of the latter.</p>
+
+<h5>THE IDEA OF SAMENESS.</h5>
+
+<p>There exist a number of synonyms often used indiscriminately;
+they are: identity, sameness, equality, congruity, similarity, and
+likeness. By “identity” we generally understand a sameness in
+every respect, absolute sameness; by “equality”, a sameness that
+can be expressed in figures. Equality is always a measurable sameness,
+and refers to quantity, mass, size, length, height, age, etc.
+Likeness and similitude are samenesses of form or of proportion,
+albeit not of size. It is often used as a partial sameness of impressions,
+not so much as they are in themselves, but as they appear to
+the mind. Congruity is a synonym of sameness in the province of
+geometry, denoting the coincidence of figures when laid upon one
+another.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_10" href="#Footnote_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
+
+<p>The logical principle of identity, so-called, it appears to me,
+ought to be named the principle of sameness, for it has not reference
+to the absolute sameness of a thing with itself.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_11" href="#Footnote_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> The statement
+<i>A</i> = <i>A</i> does not mean that this particular thing <i>A</i> is itself and
+that therefore the one <i>A</i> is one and the same thing. It is a general
+statement and means that all <i>A</i>, in so far as they are <i>A</i>, are the
+same. The statement <i>A</i> = <i>A</i>, as I take it, presupposes the existence
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span>of a number of <i>A’s</i>; otherwise it would have no sense, and it
+would not only be empty, (as we know from Kant that all formal
+statements are,) but meaningless and useless. It would be of no
+avail either in logic or in science.</p>
+
+<p>In consideration of the fact that the idea of sameness is a fundamental
+concept in our scientific, logical, and philosophical reasoning,
+it is astonishing that no satisfactory definition of it is to be found.
+To define “same” as “one in substance; not other, ... of one nature
+or general character, of one kind, degree, or amount,” as is
+done in the “Century Dictionary,” is no improvement upon “Webster,”
+who defines it as “not different or other; identical. Of like
+kind, species, sort, dimensions or the like; not different in character
+or in the quality or qualities compared; ... like.” However,
+dictionaries are not encyclopædias; and they have perhaps a right
+to define same as identical, and identical as same.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. James Ward, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” (XVI, 81,
+in his excellent article on “Psychology,”) incidentally complains
+about the ambiguity of the word “same”; he proposes a distinction
+between “material identity” and “individual identity,” but this
+does not solve the difficulty. Flemming’s “Vocabulary of Philosophy”
+(4th ed. edited by Calderwood) contains several articles on
+“identical” and on “identity” without discussing in any one of
+them the meaning of “same” or of “identical.”</p>
+
+<p>What then is the meaning of same?</p>
+
+<p>Let us first consider the etymology of the word. The root of
+“same” is found in almost all Indo-European languages; it is preserved
+in the first syllable of the Latin “similis” and “simul,” in
+the second syllable of the German “Zu<i>samm</i>en”; in the Greek
+“ἅμα” and “ὅμοιος,” and the Sanskrit “sama,” all of which denote
+a togetherness. Thus the etymological meaning seems to signify
+what is classed in one category. Accordingly, the present
+meaning as defined by the dictionaries, as being that which is “of
+one nature or not different in character,” has not changed; at any
+rate if there is any change, it is slight. Yet it is desirable to bring
+out and set in a clear light the purport of the word and its essence.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span></p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the economic service and function of the idea of
+“sameness” in the household of thought?</p>
+
+<p>“Sameness” is that feature in two things or states of things, in
+two processes or modes of action, which brings it to pass that the one
+may be replaced by the other without altering for a certain purpose
+the state of things or affecting the result of the entire process. Popularly
+expressed, sameness is the capability of one thing’s being substituted
+for another.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need of discussing or proving the truism, that,
+properly speaking, there is no absolute sameness, no identity in
+the strict sense of the term. This was the meaning of Heraclitus’s
+idea of the perpetual flux of things, expressed in his πάντα ῥεῖ.
+There are no two moments in time, no two points in space, no
+two atoms of matter actually identical, and we cannot enter into the
+identical river twice.</p>
+
+<p>Cratylus tried to outdo Heraclitus, by saying that we cannot
+even enter once into the identical river, for while entering, not only
+the river changes but also we ourselves; and Cratylus is perfectly
+right.</p>
+
+<p>We have purposely substituted in Heraclitus’s proposition
+“identical” for “same,” because this change is needed to bring out
+the truth of the idea. Heraclitus and Cratylus cease to be right if
+we use the word same as above defined. We enter indeed the same
+river twice. The river of to-day is, for a certain purpose, quite the
+same as the river of yesterday, in so far namely as the river of to-day
+and the river of yesterday serve a certain and the same purpose:
+for other purposes this same river will perhaps not be the same.
+The geographer and historian speak of the Rhine as that stream of
+water which since time immemorial has flowed down from the St.
+Gotthardt to the North Sea. Accordingly, if we stand on the bank of
+the Rhine, it is quite correct to say that this is the same river that
+was crossed by Cæsar. Let the purpose of our thoughts be changed,
+and we shall no longer be permitted to speak of sameness. Suppose
+we had seen the Rhine for the first time in its beautiful emerald coloring,
+and had come again after a rainy day to admire its beauty,
+should we not be justified in exclaiming: This is not the same river!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span></p>
+
+<p>Sameness, accordingly, depends upon a special purpose. If in
+a chemical combination a metal is wanted, it may be all the same
+whether we use iron, zinc, lead, or gold. That is to say, it is all the
+same for bringing about a special result; yet it is not all the same
+in other respects. The weight and certain other qualities of the
+metals are different, and also the cost.</p>
+
+<h5>SAMENESS AND MIND.</h5>
+
+<p>Sameness depending upon a special purpose, the question
+arises, Is there any objective sameness in the world, or is sameness a
+mere subjective addition to things? Is sameness something “real”
+or is it purely mental?</p>
+
+<p>This is the old quarrel between the Nominalists and Realists
+among the Schoolmen. It lies at the bottom of the problem of universals
+and particulars, and we should say, it is only a special form
+of the question, “Are relations objective qualities of existence or
+are they products of the mind?” which was discussed in a former
+number (<i>The Monist</i>, II, 2, pp. 240-42). The idea of sameness represents
+the most important relation that exists; and if any relation
+is real, the relation of sameness must be real also.</p>
+
+<p>If sameness depends upon a special purpose, it appears that
+there can be no sameness without that purpose; and the purpose
+being purely mental, the sameness also would seem to be purely
+mental. But this is not so. Sameness is an idea, and it is no exception
+to other ideas. All ideas are mental symbols formed for a special
+purpose; but, being symbols of something, ideas are representative
+of some reality, or of some feature of a reality, or of some
+relation between two or several things. Every idea stands for something;
+and this quality of the significance of ideas is called their
+meaning or their import.</p>
+
+<p>The question now is, How does the idea of sameness originate
+in the world where, as we stated above, there is no absolute sameness,
+no identity? Our answer is that sameness, not identity, is a
+general feature of this world of reality, which impresses itself upon
+every mind from the very beginning of the mind’s origin.</p>
+
+<p>We can go farther in our statement and make it more emphatic:
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>Mind originates and grows only on the ground of the fact that sameness
+is a feature of the world, and is recognised as such by feeling
+substance.</p>
+
+<p>Two points or two congruent geometrical figures being in different
+places are not identical. But they are of such a nature that,
+so far as regards the purposes of geometry, one serves the purposes
+in question just as well as the other, or one can be replaced by the
+other; and this quality is called their sameness.</p>
+
+<p>Now as a matter of fact there are no two concrete things in
+the world in which there cannot be found some sameness. Both
+somehow affect sentiency; we say they consist of matter. Both
+can be measured in size, breadth, and height: we say, they are extended.
+Both are at any given moment in a certain relation to
+other things: we say, they are in space. Both have a definite form
+and consist of one or several special structures (i. e., so to say, inside-forms).
+All things can in some way or other be classed together
+under one heading. These samenesses of things go along with differences,
+and the degree of sameness in the different things varies
+greatly. Whether there is any sameness and difference at all in the
+world, cannot be decided <i>a priori</i>, but is a problem which can be
+solved only on the ground of, first, an <i>a posteriori</i> statement of the
+facts, second, a systematical arrangement of the facts. If this is
+accomplished we can venture into a methodical investigation as to
+the nature of the samenesses as well as the differences that obtain in
+the universe, and having arranged them in a system, we can apply
+<i>a priori</i> this system to facts with which we are not as yet acquainted.</p>
+
+<p>The many samenesses which are experienced are not purely
+mental additions; they are not mere subjective imputations transferred
+upon objective existence. They are real; i. e. there are in
+the objective things actual features which allow of certain substitutions.
+A ray of light awakens in some feeling substance the traces
+left by former rays of light; and this reawakening is called memory.
+The perception of sameness is the beginning of mind, and it
+involves the perception of difference as a natural consequence.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose that the stuff of which the world consists were capable
+of acquiring feeling, but there were no samenesses whatever;
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>which would mean that every smallest piece of the world-stuff were
+a particular thing by itself and in every respect unlike every other
+piece, of a different material or of no material at all, of different size
+or of no size at all, and also possessed of a different number of space
+dimensions. In such a world all the impacts made upon a sentient
+being would be different; not one would be like the other, and all
+feelings would present a chaos without uniformities, worse than the
+most complex crazy-quilt. Under such circumstances mind would
+be impossible: it would neither originate nor could it develop.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand suppose again that the stuff of which the
+world consists were capable of acquiring feeling in some certain
+formation, and that there were samenesses in the world and in the
+events of the world. Would not mind necessarily originate in such
+a world? Given feeling substance in a world of samenesses and
+differences, these samenesses will produce analogous samenesses of
+impression upon the feeling substance, which will be perceived as
+samenesses of feeling. The preservation of the traces left in the
+feeling substance (supposing this substance to live on indefinitely)
+will in the long run result in the formation of special sense-organs.
+It will later on, with the aid of word-symbolism, lead to the formation
+of universals, for universals are nothing but samenesses perceived.
+It will then create with the assistance of abstraction the
+realm of scientific thought, representing the uniformities of the events
+of the world in exact formulas.</p>
+
+<h5>THE EXISTENCE OF SAMENESSES A FACT.</h5>
+
+<p>The question whether there are samenesses at all in the world,
+is in our opinion settled. It is a fact that there are samenesses.
+The uniformities of the world are a matter of indubitable experience—indubitable
+because our very existence as thinking beings, as
+minds, is conditioned by this fact. We see the mind of every child
+develop out of his perception of samenesses. Our scientists teach
+us that the race-soul, like a great immortal individual, is the product
+of the accumulated experience of samenesses; and all future
+progress, in science as well as in civilisation, in mechanical invention
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>as well as in ethics, depends upon the trustworthiness of the samenesses
+stated to exist in the objective world.</p>
+
+<p>The question of the ultimate <i>raison d’être</i> of the samenesses and
+differences, is another question; and it would lead us too far here to
+discuss it. In several details the problem is not as yet ripe for solution.
+A full solution of the problem would be tantamount to the
+exposition of a complete knowledge of the world. Suffice it here to
+say that we have reasons to think of the world-stuff as being of the
+same nature throughout. The chemical elements seem to be different
+configurations of one and the same substance. In this way all
+difference would have to be explained as a difference of form.</p>
+
+<p>The form of reality possesses sameness and difference in all its
+parts. Space in its sameness is by experience found to be tri-dimensional,
+which means, it is determinable throughout by three coördinates;
+while its differences are due to the position of the points considered.
+For the purpose of the geometrician space is uniform, but
+for the purpose, say of the architect, it is not uniform. To the geometrician
+two congruent triangles, whether they are in the cellar or
+in the garret, are the same. However, to the architect the position
+of two congruent triangles in his design of a house is by no means
+the same. Every single point of space has its special and individual
+qualities.</p>
+
+<p>The whole business of science is to systematise the samenesses
+of experience, and to present them in such convenient formulas that
+they can be used for guidance in our actions.</p>
+
+<p>The most comprehensive formulation of the sameness of the
+universe as a whole has found its expression in the law of the conservation
+of matter and energy. This law rests upon the experience,
+corroborated by experiments, that causation is transformation. It
+states that the total amount of matter and the total amount of energy
+remain constant. There is no creation out of nothing and no conversion
+of something into nothing.</p>
+
+<h5>EINDEUTIG BESTIMMT.</h5>
+
+<p>After this sketch of the importance of sameness, (a subject which
+we have by no means exhausted,) we return to the idea of necessity.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>The ideas of sameness and necessity are closely related. A world
+of sameness is a world in which necessity rules, and necessity means
+regularity and order.</p>
+
+<p>German scientists have a very good expression to denote the
+formulation of events in a manner which describes them in their
+necessary course. If they have succeeded in finding the sameness
+in the instances of a certain class of events, they say that it is <i>eindeutig
+bestimmt</i>, which means, the sameness is determined in a way
+that admits of no equivocation; it is complete, representing solely and
+purely that feature upon the presence of which the result depends.
+Whatever is thus <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>, is recognised in its necessity.
+The presence of that feature which makes it <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>, determines
+the event to take place; and this being determined, its
+inevitableness, the <i>it will be</i> of the process, is all there is to necessity.</p>
+
+<p>All natural phenomena that can be <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i> are necessary
+in their happening. A world which with regard to the total
+amount of its matter and energy is the same to-day and yesterday
+and will be the same to-morrow, a world whose laws of form possess
+a sameness throughout, so that it allows of formulating and applying
+them in their rigidity to all facts present, past, and future, a world
+in which all the changes are transformations determinable with the
+assistance of formal laws, can be relied upon and the course of its
+events can be computed.</p>
+
+<p>Such <i>is</i> the world in which we live; and taking this ground I
+say, the world is a cosmos, it is no chaos; and noticing that being
+possessed of sameness is an intrinsic and inalienable feature of the
+world, I am inclined to add the world never was and never will be
+a chaos. And this, if it be true at all, is true not only in general
+and as it were wholesale, but in its minutest details. If there were
+deficiencies of this order in the unobservable details, they would not
+be diminished by being summed up in large and ever larger amounts;
+on the contrary, they would increase; they would grow in proportion.
+This not being the case, we have not the slightest reason
+to doubt that in those realms of minutest existence into which, from
+the grossness and the lack of precision of our organs and instruments
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>of observation, we cannot penetrate, the same order and regularity
+obtains as in those regions which lie open to our investigation.
+In other words: From this standpoint, existence is, so to say,
+permeated by law throughout; every event is determined and any
+kind of absolute chance is excluded.</p>
+
+<p>Following Kant’s etymology we understand by <i>a posteriori</i> the
+sensory elements, and by <i>a priori</i> the formal elements of our experience.
+The queer expression “a priori” is in so far justified as
+formal truths (such as geometrical, arithmetical, logical rules) are
+formulas expressing the universal samenesses of the form of existence.
+They contain the laws of form in a shape that is <i>eindeutig
+bestimmt</i>, so that an experimenter will know them <i>a priori</i> to be so.
+<i>A priori</i> means beforehand. An experimenter knows certain things
+even before he makes his experiments. The <i>a priori</i> elements of
+experience are by no means innate truths; nor are they the historical
+beginning of experience. On the contrary. In their abstract
+purity they appear as a very late product of man’s mental evolution.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>a priori</i> systems of thought are not arbitrary constructions;
+they are constructions raised out of the recognition of the formal,
+i. e. the relational, samenesses that appear in experience. All possibilities
+of a certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated
+in theorems. As such they can be used as references to assist
+in the explanation and determination of new experiences. We know
+some part of any new experience with which we are confronted
+even before we have investigated it. We know certain laws of its
+form, and by reference to these known laws we are enabled to reduce
+the unknown to the known, to analyse the process and set
+forth that feature of it which makes <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>.</p>
+
+<h4>II. THE SCOPE OF NECESSITY.</h4>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce objects to necessitarianism, and classes it together
+with materialism and the mechanical philosophy, speaking of the
+latter as the most logical form of necessitarianism. In consonance
+with the dictionary-definitions of these words, he contrasts them to
+the doctrine of the freedom of the will and also to miracles—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span>latter, we must confess, being a dangerous concession to certain theological
+conceptions.</p>
+
+<p>The “Century Dictionary” defines “necessitarianism” as</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The theory that the will is subject to the general mechanical law of cause
+and effect.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And “necessitarian” as</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“One who maintains the doctrine of philosophical necessity, in opposition to
+that of the freedom of the will: opposed to libertarian.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The word “determinism” is regarded as a synonym of necessitarianism.
+Its first definition in the “Century Dictionary” reads
+as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“A term invented by Sir William Hamilton to denote the doctrine of the necessitarian
+philosophers, who hold that man’s actions are uniformly determined by
+motives acting upon his character, and that he has not the power to choose to act
+in one way so long as he prefers on the whole to act in another way.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Hamilton’s definition as here presented is puzzling. If the
+words “choose” and “prefer on the whole” are <i>not</i> meant to be
+tautological, there is no sense in it; for no determinist denies that a
+man might “upon the whole” prefer to act this way, while he has
+the power to choose, and for special considerations perhaps does
+choose, to act in another way. However, if the words “choose”
+and “prefer on the whole” are meant to be tautological, the self-contradictoriness
+of the statement is too palpable for a Hamilton.
+Is there anybody who would maintain that a man who chooses to
+act in one way can at the same time, under the very same circumstances,
+and he remaining the very same man of the same character
+and intentions, choose to act in another way?</p>
+
+<p>While we accept determinism and also necessitarianism in the
+sense that all events (the actions of willing beings included) are determined,
+we cannot accept either the mechanical philosophy or
+materialism as the terms are commonly understood.</p>
+
+<p>We find materialism defined as</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The metaphysical doctrine that matter is the only substance, and that matter
+and its motions constitute the universe.” (“Century Dictionary,” 2d sense.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span></p>
+
+<p>The mechanical philosophy is explained <i>sub voce</i> “atomic” as</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“[The view that] from the diverse combination and motions of ... atoms all
+things, including the soul, were supposed to arise.” <i>Ibid.</i></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Determinism is simply the negation of absolute chance. It
+does not exclude chance in the original sense of the word as an unexpected
+event, as something that befalls one without his seeking it
+or making the event—chance being derived from ML. <i>cadentia</i>, i. e.
+the falling, as in a throw of dice.</p>
+
+<p>The “Century Dictionary” defines “chance” in sense 9, as</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Fortuity; especially the absence of a cause necessitating an event.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is absolute chance, the existence of which we deny. The
+“Century Dictionary” adds the following little note:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Absolute chance, the (supposed) spontaneous occurrence of events undetermined
+by any general law or by any free volition. According to Aristotle, events
+may come about in three ways: first, by necessity or an external compulsion; second,
+by nature or the development of an inward germinal tendency; and third, by
+chance, without any determining cause or principle whatever, by lawless, sporadic
+originality.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_12" href="#Footnote_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>We understand chance as being, from certain premisses, an incalculable
+coincidence, either not intended to be calculated, or, for
+certain reasons, from a given standpoint with a limited and definite
+amount of knowledge, not capable of calculation. Determinism, as
+we understand the term, does not imply as the “Century Dictionary”
+has it in its definition of necessitarianism, that “the law of
+cause and effect” is “mechanical.” It simply asserts that the law of
+cause and effect holds good universally, and that there is no effect
+that is not definitely determined, according to the nature of the
+things in action, by causes and all their circumstances.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span></p>
+
+<h5>NECESSITY AND CHANCE.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<i>All</i> the diversity and specificalness of events is attributable to chance—diversification,
+specificalness, and irregularity of things, I suppose is chance—and
+this diversity cannot be due to laws that are immutable.” (P. 332.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Our world-view leads us to other conclusions; we say:</p>
+
+<p>Every specificalness or particularity is such by possessing a
+certain form and standing in a definite relation (in time as well as
+space) to all other things of the universe. Of every concrete thing
+we can say it is now and here, or it was then and there. It is or
+was made up in this special way, and it stands or it stood in these
+special relations to its surroundings. Proportions, relations, forms—these
+are what account for the diversification and specificalness of
+all things in the universe; they are what explain the irregularities
+of individual cases and of all those events which appear as chance
+to him who, although he may be well informed about the nature
+of a thing, does not know the relation of its complex surroundings,
+exercising according to law their disturbing influence upon its actions
+which otherwise would be uniform.</p>
+
+<p>And since no two spots of space and no two instances of time
+are the same, since the relations of every atom are different in every
+position and at every moment of its existence, we need not be astonished
+to find diversity and specificalness in this world of samenesses.</p>
+
+<p>We do not believe in absolute chance, but we believe in chance.</p>
+
+<p>What is chance?</p>
+
+<p>Chance is any event not especially intended, either not calculated,
+or, with a given and limited stock of knowledge, incalculable.</p>
+
+<p>Gunpowder was, according to the legend, invented by chance.
+Berthold Schwartz intended to make gold, yet when the mixture
+was ignited, he began to understand that it was an explosive.
+When I say that I met a friend by chance, I mean that the meeting
+was unintentional. I had not foreseen it and perhaps could not
+foresee it. When we call a throw of dice pure chance, we mean
+that the incidents which condition the turning up of these or those
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>special faces of the dice have not been or cannot be calculated. We
+do not mean that the law of cause and effect is suspended; we mean
+that we are unable to determine the effect. That which would make
+this or that throw <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i> is either not known to us, or, if
+it were known, is of such a nature that we cannot produce the desired
+effect with any certainty. Matters are so arranged in the game
+of dice that the slightest incident changes the result, and these incidents
+are either not within our ken or not within the range of our
+power. Chance, accordingly, as we understand it, is no exception
+to necessity; it does not happen contrary to law, and is in each case
+the strict result of a definite cause under definite circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Absolute chance is something quite different. Absolute chance
+is that which is incalculable because of the absence of law. Mr.
+Peirce says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Another argument, or convenient commonplace, is that absolute chance is
+<i>inconceivable</i>. This word has eight current significations. The ‘Century Dictionary’
+enumerates six. Those who talk like this will hardly be persuaded to say in
+what sense they mean that chance is inconceivable.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Absolute chance is “inconceivable” as the word is defined by
+the “Century Dictionary” in the second sense: It is</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="noindent">“unacceptable to the mind because involving a violation of laws believed to be well
+established by positive evidence.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Absolute chance is not unthinkable in the sense of unimaginable.
+We can very well depict a case of absolute chance in our
+imagination, just as we can tell and describe in minutest details the
+fairy tale of Alladin’s lamp; just as we can in our imagination depict
+a creation out of nothing. But he who accepts that the world is
+in its innermost nature a cosmos, that its events are strictly and
+throughout regulated by law, cannot at the same time think that
+there are nooks and crevices in which the law does not operate. Absolute
+chance actually involves the idea of a creation out of nothing;
+and thus it stands in contradiction to the law of the preservation of
+matter and energy. Absolute chance which means that the very
+same thing under the very same conditions can act in this or in some
+other way, that it need not act in exactly the same way, involves a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span>belief in either the creation of a not existing quality out of nothing,
+or the disappearance of existing qualities into nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“It seems to me that every throw of sixes with a pair of dice is a manifest instance
+of chance.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Yes, of chance; but not of that chance the existence of which
+Mr. Peirce maintains—not of absolute chance. Every throw of dice,
+every toss of head or tail, are exactly determined by circumstances.
+We call it chance only in so far as we cannot calculate and predetermine
+the result.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose you take two large silver coins between your thumb
+and the first two fingers, one coin parallel to and a little above the
+other. Suppose tails are up in both. Drop the lower coin without
+an effort just as it would fall, about twenty inches, and you may be
+sure that, in spite of yourself, it will turn up head. Then drop the
+upper one and it will not turn, but plump right down showing tail.
+There are certain mechanical reasons for the one case as well as for
+the other. As soon as we know the law and can apply it, the case
+ceases to be an instance of chance.</p>
+
+<p>Dice, the roulette, and other games of chance are so arranged,
+that the determinating circumstances are too numerous and also too
+complex, one interfering with and being disturbed by the others, to
+admit of any adequate calculation or predetermination. An arrangement
+of conditions which in this way eludes the calculation of a
+definite set of possibilities, is called by Professor Kries <i>gleiche Spielräume</i>
+or equal chances. And the province of equal chances is and
+will remain the proper sphere of the calculus of probabilities.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Nitsche objects to Kries’s proposition, saying that
+absolutely equal chances are impossible and an equal chance (<i>ein
+gleicher Spielräume</i>) is nothing but the objectification of a judgment
+of equal value.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_13" href="#Footnote_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> We find no fault with Nitsche’s objection; there
+are no absolutely equal chances; and what is called “equal chance”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span>means that the strength of two or several anticipations is of the same
+degree; that our belief and doubt as to the turning up of one, two,
+three, four, five, or six spots of a die are equally justified. The objective
+conditions which justify such equality of several expectations
+is what Kries (if we understand him correctly) calls <i>gleiche Spielräume</i>.
+But <i>gleiche Spielräume</i> do not imply absolute chance. We
+might as well expect that all the six faces of a die should turn up
+simultaneously in one throw, as that any one of them should turn
+up by absolute chance.</p>
+
+<p>While absolute chance cannot be admitted, partly because we
+are not in need of it, (since the irregularities of nature can be sufficiently
+explained otherwise,) and partly because the idea of absolute
+chance if it were needed, is incompatible with our world-conception,
+we shall, nevertheless, have to concede to chance, as we understand
+the term, a very important rôle in the evolution of life. The formation
+of worlds and the history of mankind depend to a great extent
+upon chances similar to the throws of dice. There are many possibilities,
+and now this, now that, will, according to the circumstances,
+be realised—of course in each case with strict necessity.</p>
+
+<p>Let us illustrate this idea by an example.</p>
+
+<p>The formation of about seventy elements out of the original
+world-substance, which may be supposed to be homogeneous, does
+not appear to depend upon chance. Their universal appearance in
+all parts of the universe suggests the hypothesis that their formation
+is the inevitable result of a gradual condensation of nebular
+substances. We find everywhere, according to the stage of condensation,
+a gradual appearance, first of the lighter, then of the heavier
+elements. There seems to be no possibility of the formation of other
+elements than those known to us (including here the hypothetical
+elements which are still missing in the Mendeljeff series and at the
+same time, at least, not excluding a further continuance of the
+series). These elements or none, it appears, must be formed out of
+the original substance of our world. Let us here assume, for argument’s
+sake, that it were so beyond question, and that we knew the nature
+of the world-substance to be such as to condense, if it condenses
+at all, into no other but these forms, which we call chemical elements.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>This would be a limitation of possibilities. Exactly so the throws
+Of dice are limited. With the dice commonly in use we cannot
+throw fractions; nor can we throw either zero, or seven, or any other
+higher number. We can throw only whole numbers, integrals from
+one up to six. But while we thus assume that the formation of the
+elements is limited to those actually existing, the proportion in which
+the elements may be distributed in the different nebulæ and solar
+systems, is apparently very different. Suppose we had a full knowledge
+of the intrinsic nature of the world-substance and were standing
+outside the universe observing the process of world-formations;
+we could not from this knowledge alone predict all that would happen.
+We should on our assumption be able to predict <i>a priori</i> that such
+elements would be formed. But whether the different elements would
+be generated in these or in other proportions appears to depend upon
+the presence of certain conditions, perhaps the rapidity of motion, the
+heat produced by friction, the temperature of the surrounding cosmic
+space, any knowledge of which is not included in our knowledge
+of the nature of the world-substance. These conditions may vary,
+nay, so far as we can judge they actually do vary; and any apparently
+slight variation of them, or even one of them, will result in different
+effects of great consequence. Without a detailed knowledge
+of all these special conditions, simply from a supposed <i>a priori</i>
+knowledge of the world-substance, the idiosyncrasy of this or that
+particular solar system could not be <i>a priori</i> determined. Here it
+will be such, and there, under perhaps slightly different circumstances,
+it will be entirely other. Here the centre of gravity may
+be in one great mass, there again it may be divided in two, so that
+the planets circle around two suns.</p>
+
+<p>From this point of view we have to call these results products
+of chance.</p>
+
+<p>To a being who not only might be supposed to know the intrinsic
+nature of existence, but could have present before his mind every
+event of the great interacting cosmos in its entire complexity, this
+kind of chance would, of course, also disappear. To him all states of
+things would appear throughout as <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>. Yet, although
+in this way necessity permeates all events that take place, we do not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>intend to deny the irregularity of detail,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_14" href="#Footnote_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> the specificalness of the
+particulars, the diversity of individual incidents and existences. According
+to our conception of nature they must remain, and we need
+not attribute them to absolute chance. To attribute irregularities to
+absolute chance (as Mr. Peirce does) is actually an abandonment of
+explaining them. The specificalness and particularity of nature can
+be said to be due to chance in so far only as they do not depend
+upon and are not determinable by the nature of the things under
+consideration, but result (with strict necessity of course) from the
+ever-changing conformations of surrounding circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the fate of a man depends mainly upon his character,—the
+proverb says, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune”—but
+not entirely. There are sometimes coincidences determining
+the fates of men, and through them the fates of whole nations. And
+these coincidences do not result from their character.</p>
+
+<p>Let everybody think of his own fate. Part of his life has been
+what it was because he is such a man as he is; and we can, within
+certain limits, predict the fate of a youth with whose character we
+are familiar. But how much of our lives depends upon circumstances
+which could be foreseen only by an omniscient being, and which, as
+we might properly say, if we do not misunderstand the term, is due
+to chance!</p>
+
+<h5>FREE WILL.</h5>
+
+<p>Compulsion is generally considered as a synonym of necessity.
+But the usage of the term necessity in the sense of compulsion is,
+in our opinion, very inappropriate, because misleading. Necessity
+and compulsion should not be confounded; for compulsion excludes
+free will and “necessity” does not.</p>
+
+<p>A government compels its citizens to obey certain unpopular
+laws; the victorious army compels the enemy to surrender. The
+obedience of the citizens and the surrender of the enemy are acts
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>done under compulsion; they are not acts of free will. But a man
+of a certain character wills, under given circumstances and in the
+absence of compulsion, <i>necessarily</i> in the way in which he does. The
+determination of a free will is not a matter of chance but of necessity.
+Yet the determining factors are not outside but inside; they are not
+due to compulsion, not to the pressure of a foreign power, but to
+the nature of the willing being himself.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, is the definition of “free”: A being is free if it is
+unrestrained, so that it acts according to its own nature. As is its
+nature, so it wills; as it wills, so it acts. If we know the character
+of a man and the situation in which he is placed, we can predict his
+choice as the necessary result of his nature. His decision, although
+it is free and not under compulsion, is not an outcome of chance
+which might under the same conditions be different, but is the inevitable
+result of necessity.</p>
+
+<p>If by free will we had to understand that the decisions of the
+will are the result either of chance or of absolute chance, the foremost
+duty of the educator would be to make man unfree, to insert
+certain dominant ideas into his mind, destined to determine his will.
+The free man according to this definition of free will as being due
+to chance, would be a person whose actions are more whimsical than
+the fancies of lunatics. We reject this conception of the freedom
+of the will.</p>
+
+<p>In our opinion a will is free if it is unrestrained so that it can act
+according to its nature. Our conception of free will does not stand
+in contradiction to the doctrine of “determinism” as defined by the
+“Century Dictionary” in its second sense:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“In general, the doctrine that whatever is or happens is entirely determined by
+antecedent causes.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h5>THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY.</h5>
+
+<p>We distinguish between (1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical,
+(4) physiological, and (5) psychical events.</p>
+
+<p>A mechanical phenomenon is a change of place which does not
+involve a change of the constitution of the parts moved. E. g., a
+stone is pushed; its position is altered, but the stone remains the
+same.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[88]</span></p>
+
+<p>A physical phenomenon is an event in which the molecular
+state of the bodies in action is altered. Water heated becomes
+steam, frozen it becomes ice. The three states have different molecular
+configurations.</p>
+
+<p>Chemical phenomena are such in which the constitution of the
+atoms is altered. The characteristic qualities of hydrogen, for example,
+are different when combined with different elements or when
+isolated. Each combination is a peculiar substance with peculiar
+qualities and not a mixture or combination of the qualities of the isolated
+elements.</p>
+
+<p>Physiological processes are all those changes that take place in
+the living irritable substance of plants and animals, such as nutrition,
+growth, and propagation. Its characteristic features are (1) hunger
+or thirst, i. e. the want of certain materials (food), (2) the reception
+of the wanted materials by suction or other means, which in
+some cases are a quite mechanical or physical process, not unlike
+the afflux of oxygen caused by a burning candle or the suction of
+water by a sponge, and (3) the assimilation of food. The materials
+received are distributed in the places wanted, thus adding to the
+building up of the living substance according to the nature of its
+structure. This produces as a natural result (4) the phenomenon
+of growth with a preservation of form. (5) Propagation is a special
+kind of growth; it is the growth of a part that at some stage of its
+development becomes an independent individual.</p>
+
+<p>Psychical phenomena are such in which feelings and the meanings
+of feelings are the determinant factors.</p>
+
+<p>It is apparent that all these terms, mechanical, physical, chemical,
+physiological, and psychical, are mere abstracts. In describing
+a mechanical phenomenon, we limit our attention to the mechanical
+change. We do not mean to say that the body moved does not possess
+chemical, physical, perhaps physiological, or even psychical
+qualities. The calculation of the curve of a jump is a mechanical
+problem, although the jumping body may be a human being. However,
+the question why did the man jump, is a psychical question.
+The motive of the jump is an idea in that class of mental activity
+characterised as purpose. The man had an end in view. And this
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[89]</span>idea of an end to be realised is the combined result of special conditions
+and of the character of the man.</p>
+
+<p>The different spheres of mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological,
+and psychical actions being abstractions, it is obvious that
+science when dealing with so-called purely mechanical phenomena,
+has to do with a fiction. There are no purely mechanical phenomena.
+There are features of reality which are purely mechanical; and
+these we call motions. But the world does not consist of motions
+only. It also possesses other qualities.</p>
+
+<p>The mechanical philosopher assumes that the world consists of
+matter and motion only, and so he feels warranted in the hope that
+every event that takes place, the actions of man included, can be explained
+by the laws of motion. Yet the premiss is wrong, and we
+may anticipate that the conclusion also will prove erroneous. And
+so it is.</p>
+
+<p>The laws of motion are applicable to and will explain all motions;
+but they are not applicable to that which is not motion.</p>
+
+<p>It is inconceivable how we can hope to explain a feeling by the
+laws of motion; and so the fond hope of explaining the problems of
+the nature of the soul by mechanics is preposterous. No objection
+can be made to the possibility of explaining the delicate motions in
+the nervous substance of the brain by the laws of molar or molecular
+mechanics. But these explanations would throw no light upon the
+causation that takes place in the mind. The properly psychical phenomena,
+the properly intelligent action of thought, could not be explained
+in this way. For the world of mentality introduces quite a
+new factor into the sphere of being.</p>
+
+<p>What is this new factor?</p>
+
+<p>The nature of mental activity consists in the symbolism of feelings.
+Feelings, being different under different conditions and the
+same under same conditions, become representative of their corresponding
+causes, and thus the objects of experience are depicted in
+feeling symbols.</p>
+
+<p>Representativeness, accordingly, is the nature of mind.</p>
+
+<p>The question, How certain brain-structures operate, is a question
+of the mechanics of nervous substance, and further, the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[90]</span>question, How thought-operations take place, is a question, so to
+say, of logical mechanics. But the question, Why a certain idea
+responds to certain stimuli and not to others, does not admit of a
+mechanical explanation or formulation. The answer to this question
+will be a description of the nature of the idea; and the nature
+of the idea is not a motion: it is the meaning of which the idea is
+possessed.</p>
+
+<p>The action of a mind depends upon the meaning of certain symbols.
+A written or spoken word has a special meaning, and this meaning
+becomes the determinant factor of mind action. The meaning of
+a word is not a piece of matter, neither is it a motion. It is something
+<i>sui generis</i>. I do not say that there is any inexplicable mystery connected
+with it. On the contrary, wonderful as the fact is, it is not
+mysterious; it does not stand in contradiction to any other fact of
+nature. Symbols stand for something; they indicate, denote, or
+signify something. This significance is called their meaning; and
+mind is a system of symbols in states of awareness.</p>
+
+<p>Now, neither states of awareness are mechanical, nor is the
+meaning of words anything mechanical. How can we hope for a
+mechanical explanation either of the soul or the mind or of any
+mental action?</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, for instance, a general receives a message containing a
+few words. He opens the paper, he reads it, and all on a sudden,
+his mind is in a tumult of excitement. What is it that produces the
+excitement? Is it any motion? Yes! In a certain sense, it is a
+motion: it is the reading of the paper. This is the cause. Yet not
+the reading as such excites his consternation. He might read other
+messages all the day long without any such an effect. Plainly, the
+causative element of the cause is not the reading, not the motions of
+which the reading consists, not the shape of the written characters
+and their combinations in groups, called words. It is something
+more subtle even than that. It is the significance of the writing. It
+is the meaning of the written characters. It is the purport that is
+attached to the word-symbols.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of mind accordingly introduces a factor which has
+nothing to do with mechanics; and the simplest psychical reflexes,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[91]</span>including those physiological reflexes which we must suppose to
+have originated by conscious adaptation and then been submerged
+into unconsciousness, cannot be explained from mechanical or
+physical laws alone.</p>
+
+<h5>SPONTANEITY.</h5>
+
+<p>While we thus reject the conception of the mechanical philosophy
+and also of materialism, we do not say that there are motions
+either in the brain or anywhere else which form exceptions to the
+laws of mechanics. The laws of mechanics hold good for all motions.
+The laws of mechanics are formal laws: they do not explain
+why bodies gravitate; but they describe how they gravitate; and the
+latter is much more useful to know than the former. There is (as
+we conceive it) no deep secret in the problem why bodies gravitate;
+they gravitate because they possess a quality which attracts them to
+each other with a force directly as their masses and inversely as the
+squares of their distances. In a word, gravity is the intrinsic nature
+of masses, it is an inalienable part of their existence. Thus
+whenever bodies gravitate, we are confronted with an act of spontaneity.</p>
+
+<p>Attempts have been made to explain gravitation without the
+assumption of spontaneity, by the pressure of an atom-surrounding
+ether. But that only defers the question; for the spontaneity, in
+that case, would have to be placed in the ether. Whatever be the
+merits of the explanations of gravitation by a <i>vis a tergo</i>, we must
+recognise the fact that no motion can take place in the world, no
+pressure can be exercised, without there being somewhere some
+spontaneous something that moves or presses. Spontaneity is a
+universal feature of nature.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce uses the term “spontaneity” in a different sense
+from ours. He identifies spontaneity with absolute chance. He
+means by it the irregularities that arise without cause, thus producing
+departures from law. We call that action spontaneous which is not
+due to external influence but springs from the nature of the things
+in action.</p>
+
+<p>Spontaneous is derived from the Latin <i>spons</i>, “will,” which as
+a noun was obsolete at the classical period of Roman literature and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[92]</span>occurred only in such forms as <i>sponte</i>, “of one’s own will, of one’s
+own accord.” If a man acts of his own will, free from and not biassed
+by the influence of other men, his action is spontaneous. A free
+man’s action is not arbitrary, unless arbitrariness&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_15" href="#Footnote_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> be the character
+of the man; it is not an exception to law; it is, if the character of the
+man is known, calculable in advance, for every free action is spontaneous:
+it springs immediately from the character of the man; it is
+the direct expression of his will; it reveals the nature of his very
+being, thus showing the man himself, and not something beyond or
+outside of him.</p>
+
+<p>Taking the word spontaneity in this sense, we say: Masses
+gravitate spontaneously; they are self-moving; their motion is due
+to their gravity, and gravity is their intrinsic nature.</p>
+
+<p>Exactly as the laws of mechanics explain the “how” of motions
+but not why there is motion at all, the “why” depending upon the
+nature of each moving body, so the “how” of the brain-motions is
+explicable by mechanical laws, but the “why” depends upon the
+nature of the moving material. The brain-atoms are possessed of
+the same spontaneity as the atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there
+is present an additional feature; there are present states of awareness,
+and these states of awareness possess meaning, both of which are
+items which the chemist cannot find by chemical analysis. Neither
+states of awareness nor their meanings can be weighed on any scales,
+be they ever so delicate, nor are they determinable in foot-pounds.</p>
+
+<p>Yet while mechanics is not applicable to mental facts, the realm
+of mentality is by no means to be surrendered to indeterminism.
+Mr. Peirce describes the domain of mind as the absence of law and
+the prevalence of absolute chance, of an indetermined and indeterminable
+sporting. This is not so. While the fact must be recognised
+that the nature of the mind is not something mechanical, its
+action is nevertheless determined by laws—not by mechanical laws,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[93]</span>but by psychical and mental laws. These psychical and mental laws
+are in one respect of exactly the same nature as mechanical laws; they
+describe the samenesses of certain facts of reality. And the facts of
+the ideal domain of thought, the facts of subjectivity, are no less
+real than the grosser facts of mechanical motion, which are the facts
+of objectivity.</p>
+
+<p>The term mechanical is often used in the sense of “lacking life
+or spirit” (“Century Dictionary,” p. 3679). This is justifiable in
+so far only as when we speak of mechanical phenomena we do not
+mean psychical or any other phenomena. It is true that that which
+makes this or that idea respond to a certain stimulus is not a mechanical
+but a mental quality, but the action itself, in so far as it is
+a motion, is and remains mechanical. Thus it happens that the
+laws of mechanics, far from being anti-spiritual, are the means by
+which we learn to understand and objectively to represent the action
+of mental phenomena.</p>
+
+<p>In this connection attention may be called to the efforts of modern
+logicians to construct thinking machines which will perform the
+work of mental operations in a purely mechanical way. You propose
+the problem by adjusting certain indicators; then you turn the
+crank, and the machine does the rest. The results will come out
+with unfailing exactness.</p>
+
+<p>The attempt made to construct thinking machines cannot as
+yet be called successful. Nevertheless they are not impossibilities.
+Calculating machines of various constructions are in practical use
+and doing satisfactory work, not only in addition and subtraction
+but also in multiplication and division, and even in extracting roots
+and in raising numbers to higher powers. Calculations are undoubtedly
+one kind of thought, and if calculations can be performed
+by machines, there is no theoretical reason why we should not be
+able to construct logical machines, which shall perform the operations
+of deductive and even of inductive thought with perfect accuracy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[94]</span></p>
+
+<h4>CONCLUSION.</h4>
+
+<p>Determinism does not make freedom impossible and natural
+laws do not suppress the spontaneity of nature.</p>
+
+<p>Natural laws are not a power forcing a certain mode of action
+upon things; they are not an oppression of nature. Natural laws
+are simply a description of nature as nature is. There is no “must”
+in nature in the sense of compulsion, as if there were two things,
+(1) a master (i. e. the law) giving a command, and (2) a slave (i. e.
+the single facts) obeying the command. The situation is not dualistic,
+but monistic. There is an “is” in nature, and this “is” is
+constant. There is a certain sameness in nature. In spite of all
+changes it remains the same; and thus even the apparent irregularities
+preserve throughout an unvarying consistency. The facts of
+nature express the character of nature; they are nature herself.
+Briefly, the “is” of nature (if we are permitted to personify her)
+does not describe that which nature must do, but that which nature
+wills to do; it describes how she acts spontaneously, of her own free
+will, in conformity with her innermost being and consistently with
+her permanent character.</p>
+
+<p>The main difference that obtains between the actions of inanimate
+nature so-called and rational beings is not the absence and
+presence of spontaneity, (for spontaneity is in both,) but the absence
+and presence of mind: and mind is not only the subjectivity of existence;
+mind is not merely sentiency, i. e. the awareness of feelings;
+mind is the representative symbolism of subjectivity.</p>
+
+<p>There are sufficient reasons to assume that all objective existence,
+which appears to us as matter in motion, possesses a subjectivity,
+the nature of which depends upon the mode of the interaction
+of its elements. This subjectivity appears in organised substance
+as feeling and develops naturally into mind.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of nature, accordingly, is not materiality, but spirituality.
+Materiality is the character of nature as it affects sentient
+beings; but its innermost self, as it were, its subjectivity, its psychical
+aspect is revealed in the appearance of the spirit-life of rational
+beings—of minds.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[95]</span></p>
+
+<p>While we fully recognise the spirituality of nature as nature’s
+innermost essence and as an ineradicable feature of reality, we cannot
+with Mr. Peirce place mind at the beginning of the world. There
+is a great difference between spirituality and mind. One is the source
+and condition of the other. One is permanent, the other is transient.
+One is the abstract view of a universal quality of the world,
+eternal and everlasting, as much indestructible as matter and energy;
+the other is an individual formation that originates, grows, and develops;
+that can be broken and built again; that dies with the body
+and rises again in new generations; that decays, as the foliage of the
+trees falls in winter, yet reappears, as the verdure reappears in
+spring; for the life of nature is immortal.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce, regarding determinism as that view which does not
+recognise the freedom of will, has an original and in our conception
+a wrong view on the one hand of natural laws, which are to him mere
+habits acquired by the world, and on the other hand of chance, or
+arbitrary sportiveness, (i. e. that which is not determinable by law,)
+which he identifies with mind and with the spontaneity of freedom.
+Mind is to him the beginning of all. Mind remains mind, according
+to his view, so long as it is irregular, producing out of its own undetermined
+being sporadic effects without order or consistency. As
+soon as mind takes to habits, it grows mechanical; by creating regularity
+it disappears; and the result is matter in motion according to
+mechanical laws. Matter, accordingly, is said to be “effete mind.”
+Law in our view is the divinity of nature; according to Mr. Peirce
+it is the termination of nature’s irregularities: it comes to suppress
+her freedom and to supplant her mentality by mechanicalism. An
+element of pure chance, however, survives, which, appears in the
+free will of man, in miracles, and in nature’s irregularities, and this
+element of pure chance will remain until in the infinitely distant
+future, mind becomes crystallised into an absolutely perfect, rational,
+and symmetrical system. Such is in brief Mr. Peirce’s view of the
+rôle played by mind in the world-process.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s views of chance and law seem to come to the rescue
+of certain theological dogmas, which represent the world-order
+as the product of a divine mind. We doubt very much whether
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[96]</span>Mr. Peirce’s position be tenable even from the standpoint of the
+scientific theologian. For the order of the world, as it appears in
+natural laws, must be, and is recognised even by the theist, as part
+and parcel of God’s eternal being. The scientist who formulates
+<i>sub specie aeternitatis</i> certain facts of nature, say the “how” of gravitating
+bodies, describes a certain quality of God himself; he describes
+something that is immutable, eternal, everlasting; it is not
+the whole of God, but it is certainly one feature of Jahveh, of that
+which is, was, and will be as it is.</p>
+
+<p>In contradistinction to Mr. Peirce, we recognise, that the regularity
+of the whole is preserved in the specificalness of its individual
+particulars, that there are samenesses in this world of changes and
+diversities, and that if all reality is regarded as being essentially the
+same throughout, all the diversities and apparent irregularities can
+very well be explained as resulting from peculiar forms, combinations,
+and relations. Furthermore, we recognise that natural laws
+are compatible with the spontaneity of nature and that the necessity
+with which a free man acts according to his character, does not reverse
+his freedom of will.</p>
+
+<p>Nature is self-acting throughout; nature is free; even inanimate
+nature is spontaneous. But a higher freedom rises with the appearance
+of mind. And there are degrees of this higher freedom
+which can be determined with great exactness, for they correspond
+to the range of the mentality of each creature. Mentality develops
+by the observation of samenesses, and it reaches rationality by the
+recognition of natural laws. The recognition of natural laws is a
+view of some natural phenomena in their eternal aspect, and we
+call them truths. So much is natural law and freedom interconnected
+that the recognition of natural laws widens the range of freedom;
+and obedience to them raises man out of his dependence upon his
+surroundings to a state of dominion over the creation in which he
+becomes the master of natural forces.</p>
+
+<p>What a deep significance lies in the saying of the apostle:
+“The truth shall make you free!”</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Editor.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_10" href="#FNanchor_10" class="label">[10]</a> The adjective “like” is an abbreviation of “alike”; and “a-like” (M.E.
+<i>alyke</i>, A.S. <i>gelic</i>, O.H.G. <i>galih</i>, M.H.G. <i>gelich</i>, M.G. <i>gleich</i>) is a compound of the
+prefix a with <i>lic</i> body, shape, figure.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_11" href="#FNanchor_11" class="label">[11]</a> I am satisfied that logical identity is intended to mean sameness. I suppose
+that the word identity, being Latin and a kind of international term, appeared
+to logicians preferable to the Saxon word “sameness” or the German “Gleichheit.”
+We need not look for any deeper reason for the adoption of the term.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_12" href="#FNanchor_12" class="label">[12]</a> Knowing that Mr. Peirce is one of the most prominent contributors to the
+<i>Century Dictionary</i>, I may be pardoned for surmising that, perhaps with the exception
+of the parenthesised word “(supposed)” he is the author of this passage and very
+likely of most of the other quotations of philosophical terms we have adduced from
+the same source.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_13" href="#FNanchor_13" class="label">[13]</a> <i>Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung</i> by Johannes von Kries. See
+also Meinong’s review of the book (in <i>Gött. gel Anz.</i>, No. 2, p. 56 et seqq.) and Ad.
+Nitsche’s article on the subject (in <i>Vierteljahrsschrift für wiss. Phil.</i> of 1892. XVI.
+1, p. 26).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_14" href="#FNanchor_14" class="label">[14]</a> By irregularity of detail we understand simply a lack of uniformity, but not
+exceptions to law. If irregularity be defined as exception to law, we should say,
+There is no irregularity in the world, while at the same time nothing is uniform:
+for every particle of the world is in its time and space relations and otherwise different
+from every other particle.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_15" href="#FNanchor_15" class="label">[15]</a> Arbitrary, as used here, means capricious, uncertain, unreasonable. A man’s
+action is capricious if he is biassed by the present motive alone, without considering
+other motives which he would have under other circumstances. A deliberate man
+equalises, as it were, his actions by forming rules of conduct. An arbitrary man
+does not recognise rules or laws, made either by himself or by others.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[97]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="LITERARY_CORRESPONDENCE_I">LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="GERMANY_I">I.<br>
+<span class="smaller">RECENT EVOLUTIONARY STUDIES IN GERMANY.</span></h4>
+
+<p>Since Darwin’s death, his theory, which in Germany more than
+elsewhere received its development, has but few decisive steps in
+advance to point to, even though the circle of its adherents has
+been enlarged and though in many respects and in special directions
+it has been rendered more complete and placed upon a firmer foundation.
+It is a gratifying fact, that most, if not all, of the recent
+discoveries in zoology, palæontology, and particularly in developmental
+history, are easily and completely reconcilable with the principles
+originally established; so that the views which we have
+reached on this subject have lost more and more the characters of
+a purely hypothetical fabric.</p>
+
+<p>But the accurate investigations of developmental history have
+unquestionably furnished the most important material in proof of
+the theory in question, and the principles established in this department,
+in the main the results of the labors of German investigators
+(E. von Baer, Fritz Müller, E. Haeckel), have been verified in a
+truly surprising manner.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that Darwin himself in no way undervalued the importance
+of the results of the studies in question, but how little the
+facts known at the time of the enunciation of his theory of natural
+selection sufficed, is most clearly proved by the fact that E. von
+Baer and Louis Agassiz, who at that time were perhaps the greatest
+authorities in embryology, assumed a hostile attitude towards the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[98]</span>new Darwinian theory. Agassiz’s combination of the points of
+agreement of palæontology and embryology, his explanation of extinct
+forms as “prophetic types,” proved a veritable hindrance to the
+perception of the truth, and Carl Vogt, who was his co-worker at
+that time, appears to have been the last to set up any opposition to
+the “fundamental biogenetic principle,” that the development of the
+individual repeats in an abbreviated form the history of his race.
+Vogt, formerly the champion of advanced views, appears to-day as
+the leader of the small band of the opposition.</p>
+
+<p>If we compare the recently published fourth edition of Haeckel’s
+<i>Anthropogeny</i>, 1891, and the eighth edition of his <i>History of Creation</i>,
+with the early editions, we cannot help remarking, with considerable
+astonishment, despite the enormous increase of fresh
+material, the fact that little in the old plans and principles of the
+work needs correction. Even the bold generalisations, the inference
+as to the identity of form of the original beginnings of all of the middle
+or higher classes of animals, the “Gastræa Theory” of Haeckel,
+at first so violently opposed, the stress laid upon the equivalence of
+the blastoderms in the various orders of animals, nay, even many
+of the animal genealogies, really only asserted as a working hypothesis,
+have stood the test beyond all expectation; although Du
+Bois-Reymond insinuated that the pedigrees of the heroes of
+Homer were more worthy of credit. To appreciate the complete
+victory of these ideas one need but refer to the discourse <i>On
+Recapitulation in Embryology</i> with which A. Milnes Marshall opened
+the meeting of the Biological Section of the British Natural History
+Society at Leeds, September, 1890.</p>
+
+<p>The very conspicuous irregularities in the formation of organised
+bodies, which formerly were regarded as monstrosities, or as the
+freaks and riddles of the formative instinct, the hare-lips, the cleft
+palates, cases of microcephaly, etc., or the conspicuous want of
+symmetry in the physical structure of the plaice and sole, formerly
+made use of by Mivart and Schimper as unassailable counterproofs
+of Darwin’s doctrines, have shaped themselves into the most decisive
+verifications of his theory; as in fact, generally, a number of the
+most splendid evidences of the correctness of the theory have, as the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[99]</span>result of exact investigations in organic evolution, proceeded from
+the most obstinate of its supposed difficulties. Thus, for example,
+as proof that birds are far removed from the other classes of vertebrates,
+the circumstance had been cited that certain parts connected
+with the visual organs are in them situated at the side of the brain,
+instead of on the dorsal surface, as is the case with the other vertebrates.
+But a more exact observation has shown that this variation
+in formation is a secondary result, since in each previous period
+of development these same organs in the young birds lie, exactly as
+in the case of the other vertebrates, on the dorsal surface, and only
+shortly before leaving the egg do they move downward to the sides.
+In many cases where the development of parts preservable in fossil
+conditions is under consideration, as for instance portions of the
+skeleton, the hard integuments, and the teeth, a direct proof may,
+by comparison, be furnished of the truth of the fact of the correspondence
+of the embryological formations of living animals with
+the final and permanent forms of their extinct representatives, a fact
+which was indeed acknowledged by Agassiz and Vogt, but completely
+misunderstood. We need only to recall to mind the
+exact parallelism which Alexander Agassiz and Neumayer have
+demonstrated to exist in the case of echinoderms, Huxley, Marsh, and
+others in the formation of the wings of birds, the pelvis of birds, or
+the hoofs of horses, in order to stamp this view as one that cannot
+be refuted.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, those opposed to this view, as Carl Vogt, His,
+Heufen, and others, have not abandoned their position as a hopeless
+one, and in recent years have relied particularly upon those cases
+which Haeckel, and before him, Fritz Müller, characterised as a
+falsification (cenogenesis&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_16" href="#Footnote_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>) or a supplementary alteration and abbreviation
+of the natural process of development. “Nature is no falsifier,”
+these opponents proclaim with emphasis, and everything it
+does is correct and true, and “this false heart alone brings untruth
+and deceit into the true heaven,” they cry with Wallenstein. People
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[100]</span>who rely on verbal sophistries merely betray thereby their want of
+valid counter-arguments. A <i>mala fides</i> on the part of nature can of
+course never be the subject of discussion among reasonable beings,
+but a deviation in the process of development of certain varieties
+from the typical path of the development of the remaining varieties
+of the species, is <i>felt</i> as a falsification by every investigator who has
+thoroughly studied the regular processes, for the reason that it has
+a tendency to <i>obscure</i> the original facts. Thus, for example, in the
+embryos of certain vertebrates the æsophagus is temporarily completely
+closed, as Balfour has observed in young sharks, Bles and
+Marshall in frogs; and this state of affairs may well be considered
+as a falsification, since an animate being with a closed æsophagus is
+a natural contradiction, which can never have existed and here happens
+as a supplementary and temporary process.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule such deviations from the normal course may be classified
+as consequences of a prolonged residence of the animal germs
+in the egg or in the womb, the result of which is that owing to the
+presence of an abundant quantity of nourishing yolk, or through
+direct connection with the circulatory system of the mother, they in
+the early stages of their development are relieved of the necessity of
+acquiring nourishment through their own efforts, and therefore all
+the contrivances necessary to that purpose may be dispensed with.
+For this reason we find the primitive processes of development, as
+Professor Sollas has lately shown, most frequently preserved in
+marine animals which have never changed nor abandoned their element
+in the course of the history of their species, in the case of
+which, therefore, no occasion could ever have arisen for supplementary
+changes in the process of their development. Much more frequently
+do we meet with this change in the case of fresh-water
+animals, for often the rapid currents of their elements, for example
+a river, will not suffer these to leave the egg in any very helpless
+larval condition, and in addition fresh water is subject to other unfavorable
+changes, as the drying up of streams. Also the larvæ of
+carnivorous animals, which from the very beginning of independent
+life need more strength to acquire their means of existence, are so
+completely developed in the richly provisioned eggs in which they
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[101]</span>take their form, that they emerge therefrom in an almost perfected
+state of being, as, for example, young sharks and cephalopods. In
+this kind of animal life, as well as in the case of forms which are
+brought forth alive from the parent, although they see the light of
+day much later, comparatively, there takes place not only a great
+abbreviation of the first stages of existence in the entering upon a
+more direct path of development, but also changes occur in the form
+of the original designs because of the limitation of room due to the
+presence of yolk in the egg, the reason for which is easy to perceive.
+In many other cases the mechanical cause of the change in development
+can be directly recognised; for example, in the case of, the tree-toad
+of the Antilles (<i>Hylodes marticinensis</i>), which, owing to the absence
+of pools lasting through the dry season, is obliged of necessity
+to remain in the egg during its tadpole stage, that is to say, to
+skip this stage, as it were; for which reason the formation of external
+gills in its case is entirely omitted.</p>
+
+<p>The explanation of the origin of new organs seemed at first to
+afford an insuperable difficulty to the Darwinian theory, since, as
+Mivart objected, it was not possible to perceive how natural selection
+could be able to effect the formation of new organs unless they
+executed corresponding functions from the very beginning. This
+difficulty, however, has been completely overcome by the theory of
+altered functions (<i>Functionswechsel</i>) which was first proposed by
+Dorhn, and particularly in recent years by Kleinenberg. According
+to this theory, in all these cases we have simply to deal with a
+gradual change in form of already existing organs, which, originally
+being used to perform one set of functions, are modified so as to perform
+another. Thus the later developed organs of mastication and
+the feelers of insects were originally organs of locomotion, legs; and
+these in the still earlier stages of creeping motion performed appropriate
+functions as the crooked appendages of the body-rings. The
+wings of birds were, in their progenitors, forelegs; the tongue of
+air-breathing vertebrates originated from the fish-bladder, which before
+that was chiefly an organ of swimming.</p>
+
+<p>The knowledge thus acquired of the natural connection of the
+processes of evolution also explains, according to Kleinenberg, why
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[102]</span>organs which are at present completely useless, must yet necessarily
+appear in the formation of the embryo; for example, the gill-openings
+in the higher classes of vertebrates, which have no functions to perform
+at any stage of vertebral development, and which furnished
+Meckel the first intimation of the fundamental biogenetic law. But
+as soon as it was explained that the gill-openings furnished the foundation
+of the development of later-appearing organs with actual
+functions to perform, it was rendered clear why they should continually
+recur; namely, because they form the indispensable links
+of a chain which extends from the dim past of the type in question
+down to the present time.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that profounder researches in evolutionary
+history will furnish still more important results: for instance, the
+more perfect elucidation of the pedigree of mammals; for in this
+province even our domestic animals are not sufficiently investigated.
+Every new effort in this direction, for example the recent work of
+Klever on the evolution of the teeth of the horse, and other investigations
+concerning the formation of special organs, has invariably
+shown that much in this field yet remains to be discovered. We
+have only to recall to mind the recent investigations relating to the
+development of the pineal gland, which in the last decennium have
+also led to the discovery of a rudimentary occipital eye, which seems
+to have actually existed and performed functions in numerous early
+representatives of the vertebrates, but to-day is simply a fact of history,
+and has given rise to an organ which Descartes considered as
+the seat of the soul. We may here also refer to the recent investigations
+concerning the earlier developmental stages of the duckbills,
+which have completely confirmed what the theory asserted in advance
+and required; namely, that they fill the vacancy between the
+egg-laying reptiles and the mammalia which bring forth their young
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>Only a few years ago Carl Vogt vehemently opposed the opinion
+of the duckbills being transitional types, and sought to explain
+their inferior stage of organisation, which is also evidenced in their
+low blood temperature, as the results of a stunting process (degeneration,
+so called). They formed a degenerated branch of marsupials,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[103]</span>nothing more. Later, the remarkable yet long anticipated
+fact was revealed by Haacke and Caldwell, 1884, that the duckbills
+are egg-laying mammals, a character which certainly could not have
+been acquired through degeneration, but which simply shows that
+they are closely related to extinct reptilian forms. In one other respect,
+namely, with regard to their supply of teeth, the process of
+degeneration must indeed be admitted. On this point, Poulton and
+Thomas discovered a few years ago that in their early stages they
+really do possess true teeth, which, however, just as in the case of
+certain carnivorous cetacea, later completely disappear, and are replaced
+by a sort of horny teeth. This, however, is really not a true
+degeneration, but rather a special adaptation, doubtless beneficial
+to the animal in some way or other; and with as little reason as
+we may regard birds as a degenerated race in comparison with their
+progenitors, because they have lost the numerous teeth which these
+possessed, with just as little reason can we hold that the duckbills,
+in their general organisation, have suffered any retrogression worth
+mentioning. On the contrary, the recent investigations of Marsh
+and Lemoine concerning the mammals of the Jurassic and Cretaceous
+periods point more and more distinctly to the conclusion,
+that there existed among these mammals a very large number which
+possessed the same degree of organisation as the duckbills of to-day,
+now represented by only a few species; a supposition which
+the adherents of the theory of evolution made twenty-five years ago.
+I do not know that the pedigrees of the heroes of Homer have been
+so well preserved!</p>
+
+<p>In many other directions, however, speculation of late years
+in Germany has considerably digressed from the facts of experience
+and from all probability; especially with reference to the
+questions of propagation, variation, and heredity. Here, first of all,
+are to be mentioned the works of Weismann, <i>Ueber die Continuität
+des Keimplasmas</i> (1885), <i>Die Bedeutung der sexuellen Fortpflanzung
+für die Selectionstheorie</i> (1886), <i>Der Rückschritt in der Natur</i> (1886),
+<i>Die Bedeutung der Richtungskörperchen für die Vererbungstheorie</i>
+(1887), <i>Die Hypothese der Vererbung von Verletzungen</i> (1889), and
+<i>Ueber Amphimixis</i> (1891).</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[104]</span></p>
+
+<p>If we revert to the beginnings of this movement we shall find
+that it is intimately connected with the more exact study of the processes
+of fecundation as perfected through the researches of Strassburger,
+the Hertwigs, and other investigators. In connection with
+the ideas of Nägeli concerning the so-called idioplasm, the notion
+was reached that the matter determinative of heredity was contained
+in the nucleoli, and that by the union of the paternal and maternal
+nucleoli the sum-total of the parental hereditary tendencies is transmitted
+to the offspring. This view was to a certain degree verified
+by the experiments of the brothers Hertwig in removing the nucleoli
+of the eggs of the sea-urchin; the result being that eggs containing
+the nucleoli alone, furnished, through artificial impregnation, results
+resembling the female parent, whereas eggs from which the nucleoli
+had been removed, furnished germs completely corresponding to the
+traits of the male parent.</p>
+
+<p>Other processes of fecundation, to which we shall soon recur,
+had since 1876 produced the impression in the minds of a number
+of naturalists that the germ-material led an independent life in the
+bodies of organisms, that it possessed only an internal development,
+and required from the body nothing but nourishment in order
+to multiply itself, and to develop its internal powers uninfluenced
+by the various vicissitudes of the body. In the year 1876 Gustav
+Jaeger in Germany, and Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, almost
+at the same time in England, called attention to the observation
+made some time previously, that in certain animals, particularly
+in insects, the development of the egg into the young offspring
+begins with the withdrawal of a small portion of the germ from the
+component substance of the embryo, which remains at first unchanged
+and only later multiplies. This observation was generalised
+and accepted. At the commencement of every sexual multiplication
+the germ-substance, after impregnation, is divided into two
+parts, according to its future purpose; an ontogenetic or personal
+part, out of which the body is built up, and a phylogenetic or germinal
+part, which at first is stored up unused in the individual, but
+later furnishes new germ-cells. This idea led Weismann to his view
+of the continuity of the germ-plasm, which forms an unbroken line
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[105]</span>of descent from the first beginnings of the species and which is simply
+nourished by the organisms in which it has its temporary abode.
+From this germ-plasm spring <i>secondarily</i> the cells that go to make
+up the body (soma); but from these soma-cells no new <i>germ</i>-cells
+can originate, and consequently none of its inherent or adscititious
+qualities are capable of transmission. The somatic cells make up
+the mortal and perishable forms of life, while the germ-cells alone
+insure the further existence and immortality of the race.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to perceive that these views, if they could be maintained,
+would completely transform the Darwinian theory. Since,
+if the somatic cells, that is, the body-parts of animals and plants,
+with all their adaptations to soil and climate, to definite modes of
+life, etc., are to be deprived of every power to transmit hereditary
+characters, then the so-called Lamarckian theory, which should
+really bear the name of Erasmus Darwin, would be deprived of
+every foundation which it possesses. Neither the increase in
+strength of the members of the body, acquired by use and practice,
+nor their weakness created by their non-use could be inherited; and
+in just as small a degree could changes caused by external influences,
+bodily injuries, sickness, entail consequences which were inheritable.
+This being the case, then also all those views would be untenable
+which seek to explain the important effects of time as the result
+of the accumulation and augmentation of the minute impressions
+of the external environment. If the variations which are generated
+by means of external influences are not capable of transmission,
+then the direct adaptation must commence at the beginning in the
+case of every following generation; an accumulation is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>We can observe, however, in every particular case, the complete
+harmony in which every living being exists with its surroundings
+and mode of life; and observe in closely related species the
+most various adaptations to the elements in which they live: climate,
+food, nay, even to the particular companions with which they associate;
+with the result that many plants have shaped the structure of
+their flowers to conform to the physical anatomy of the insect which
+ordinarily effects their fertilisation, and that animals assume the figure
+and form of some associate who is safe from hostile assaults, or even
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[106]</span>completely adopt different modes of life where it is necessary to
+enter a life-partnership with a strange animal or plant. But, granting
+that the most widely extended capability of adaptation is a thing
+of daily experience, there still arises the question how we shall explain
+this quality, which can only be brought about by slow degrees,
+without taking into account the factor of heredity in the transmission
+of acquired qualities. The theory of Weismann attempts this,
+in that it takes for granted an infinite variability in the germ-formative
+materials, and guides the new forms and variations thus begotten
+into the really true path, that is, into the most successful
+paths, through the process of natural selection (that is, through the
+survival of the fittest as regards environment and all other things).
+According to this doctrine, external circumstances have no direct
+influence whatever upon the variation of species, as Erasmus Darwin,
+Lamarck, and the founder of the theory of natural selection
+and all his followers up to that time supposed, but we have to
+have recourse to a pure theory of natural selection, and call to our
+aid an, even now, rather obscure phenomenon, occurring in connection
+with sexual impregnation, which has been called “the expulsion
+of the polar bodies,” an extrusion of minute qualities of
+germ-plasm from the germ-cells while in union. By the processes
+of crossing, which continually recur, a vast number of the most
+manifold hereditary tendencies are united in the germ-material.
+Then certain of these are ejected, so that others acquire supremacy;
+and in this manner the way is opened for the origination of a vast
+number of possible combinations. In this way the path is clear to a
+theory of perfect mechanical variability, in which the germ-material
+has only to transmit the characters which spontaneously arise in it,
+and yet affords an investigator endowed with any imagination the
+possibility of understanding the origin of the great variety and final
+purpose of the world. It is Frohschammer’s “principle of the imagination
+as the creator of the world” translated into comprehensible
+formulæ. The simplicity thus reached by the elimination of all
+direct influences from the external world, has won the adherency of
+many investigators following in Darwin’s steps, particularly in England;
+but whilst Wallace, Galton, Ray Lankester, and others have
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[107]</span>expressed their full assent to it, other and not less eminent authorities,
+as Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, Fritz Müller, and Virchow,
+have emphatically rejected it.</p>
+
+<p>The reasons in favor of this assumption are, as is indeed the
+whole view itself, mainly of a theoretical nature; the arguments of
+the opposition are divided into philosophical and experiential propositions.
+The philosophical opposition is mainly based on the fact
+that, from the very beginning, there is assigned to the germ-material,
+as it unceasingly continues its existence, an infinite variety of
+capacities which the external world cannot affect, and that all progress
+and advancement takes place as the result of the <i>loss</i> of the
+originally endowed powers and tendencies. On this theory a family
+of acrobats or race-horses would not acquire their powers through
+the gradual augmentation by practice of their feats of skill and endurance,
+but because these powers were originally resident in them,
+and every factor incompatible with them was gradually eliminated.
+On the other hand, these views approach in a dangerous degree to
+the theories of predestination and preformation, the overthrow of
+which has been justly regarded as one of the greatest advances of
+science.</p>
+
+<p>Still more important must be considered the objections of empirical
+science, which up to this time was completely convinced of
+the heredity of acquired qualities. Popular experience, as well as
+that of physicians, universally speaks of inherited disease-germs, and
+in certain cases, particularly in mental diseases, physicians are so
+thoroughly convinced of their inheritability that the first question
+put to the relatives of such sufferers usually is whether the disease
+has ever appeared in the parents or family of the patient. This
+fact is so deeply grounded in the general belief, that the modern
+naturalistic school of novelists, the school of Zola, Ibsen, and their
+associates, are wont to devote their main efforts to the problem of
+inherited evils. Now the inheritability of certain evil conditions,
+even though proved, would not by any means be an absolute disproof
+of Weismann’s theory; for, inclined as much as we may be to
+derive diseases from mistakes and sins against a natural mode of
+life, such as colds, drunkenness, dissipation, mental and bodily
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[108]</span>over-exertion, we yet cannot deny <i>a priori</i> that blastogenic diseases,
+or diseases originating in the germ-plasm, may exist, which without
+any doubt would then be transmissible. It also does not lie
+beyond the realms of possibility that congenital malformations, such
+as hare-lips, supernumerary fingers, and the defects which show a remarkable
+disposition to heredity, fall into this category. These
+blastogenic germs of disease would then, of course, have to be distinguished
+from the somatogenic diseases (or the diseases produced
+in the body by external causes), which never could be inherited.</p>
+
+<p>From this point of view the question as to the hereditary consequences
+of external injuries has given rise to great efforts to prove
+experimentally the truth of this belief, which has existed for centuries.
+In almost every part of the globe we meet with the assertion
+that hornless cattle, such, for example, as are bred in South
+America, or the tailless cats of the Isle of Man, or other domestic
+animals with similar deficiencies, are descended from a progenitor
+which lost its horns or its tail through disease or other mishap.
+Since now, recently, similar assertions have again been put forward
+to the effect that tailless cats are found among the descendants
+of feline progenitors who have been robbed of their posterior ornaments
+by an act of violence, and these cases have been discussed in
+connection with the pangenesis theory of Darwin, according to which
+each part of the body is believed to supply material contributions to
+the germ-plasm, Weismann determined to institute experiments on
+this point. He started the breeding of white mice whose tails were
+regularly cut off, without finding as a result, from among 840
+young ones derived from such mutilated progenitors, a single one
+having a malformation or missing tail. However, even this experiment
+cannot be regarded as an absolute proof, as it at first view
+might seem, and the negative result was foreseen by the writer of
+these lines. It is a clear conclusion that if in the case of many
+vertebrates, for example, salamanders and lizards, as well as in the
+case of most invertebrates, missing limbs and tails are renewed in
+the course of their lifetime, it would indeed be very remarkable if
+their renewal should not take place, at least in the case of the complete
+rejuvenation of new birth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[109]</span></p>
+
+<p>Darwin himself had concluded, from his own experience and
+that of others, that injuries and similar inflicted acts of violence are
+the cause of hereditary consequences only in cases where they bring
+about some long-continued and wasting disease, and thus produce
+some permanent effect on the bodily constitution. For this reason,
+especially injuries to main nerve-tracts in parts near the centres are
+readily accompanied by hereditary consequences, because they interfere
+with the nutrition of the members supplied by them.
+Brown-Séquard has observed in a great number of cases of guinea
+pigs whose nerve-roots he had severed, that the offspring of the animals
+operated upon developed diseases of the eyes, ears, and other
+organs which conformed regularly to the character of the operation,
+and could therefore be predicted; and also noted malformations
+and deficiencies, amounting even to the complete disappearance of
+the eye-balls, such as never arise or have been observed in these
+animals without violent interference. His positive results regarding
+the hereditability of the evil consequences of disturbing operations
+have a decided advantage in numbers and scope over the negative
+results of Weismann; and it is not clear how the belief in the
+non-hereditability of somatic conditions will accommodate itself to
+them.</p>
+
+<p>But if conditions of the body produced by such sudden interferences
+have under certain circumstances entailed hereditary consequences,
+how much more should we expect this same result from
+slowly effected constitutional changes, which external influences,
+working uninterruptedly for hundreds of years, bring about in an
+organism which has been transported into a new element, into new
+surroundings, or into a different climate. Not at all infrequently
+does the coming together and union of two new organisms beget
+hereditary changes which can be explained only through the direct
+influence of the one upon the other. Thus, for example, in the
+case of plants in hot countries which are protected against the assaults
+of leaf-devouring ants by body-guards of smaller ants, and
+also in species of quite different families, as, for example, in <i>Cecropia</i>
+of the order <i>Euphorbiaceæ</i>, and in some <i>Triplaris</i> species among
+the <i>Polygonaceæ</i>, we find little chambers, approachable through
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[110]</span>small openings in the stems, which serve the ants protecting the
+plants as dwelling and breeding places. Are we to believe now, in
+regard to this fact, that these plants, so different in their nature,
+have produced through voluntary variations the stems which contain
+these openings, or are we to believe we have to deal here with
+openings acquired through inheritance which originally were bored
+in the stems by the ants at the most appropriate points? Surely
+the first conclusion, which would uphold Weismann’s theory, has
+but a very slight degree of probability in its favor, whilst the latter,
+which would overthrow his view, is very highly probable. And
+such examples could be cited in great numbers.</p>
+
+<p>It is also to be remembered that the power of variation is not
+exhibited solely in sexually created individuals, as it should be according
+to Weismann’s theory, but frequently also in non-sexual
+multiplication, where no amphimixis (mingling) occurs. It is well
+known that the majority of the sporting varieties of our trees, for
+example, <i>Fagus sanguinea</i>, and the so-called weeping varieties, that
+is, abnormal varieties with pendent twigs, forms with split, spotted,
+or white leaves, are wont first to appear on single branches of old
+trees, in which the continuity of the protoplasm unquestionably existed,
+but no amphimixis or extrusion of the polar bodies took place.
+It is also the generally received opinion of naturalists that the lowest
+classes of animal and plant life are universally multiplied by
+non-sexual means. And if this is so, it is not clear how higher
+forms which sexually propagate can be derived from them, if the
+latter have originally to furnish the fundamental conditions of variation.
+The adherents of Neo-Darwinism will, accordingly, have to
+furnish many additional facts if they wish to invest their theory
+with any degree of probability.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Carus Sterne.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_16" href="#FNanchor_16" class="label">[16]</a> <i>Cenogenesis</i>, from κενός, empty, fruitless (and γένεσις, birth); not from κοινός,
+common, the derivatives of which are sometimes written “c<i>e</i>no.”—<span class="smcap">Ed.</span></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[111]</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="FRANCE_I">II.<br>
+<span class="smaller">FRANCE.</span></h4>
+
+<p>The study of personality, from the point of view of pathological
+psychology, has already supplied us with numerous books.
+<span class="smcap">M. Alfred Binet</span>, in his fine work, <i>Les Altérations de la Personnalité</i>,
+has undertaken to present systematically to us these alterations
+in their entirety, while restricting himself to ascertained results, and
+avoiding disputed points. He exhibits to us the “dismemberment
+of the ego” in diseased states, the frequent rupture of that “unity
+of consciousness” which is the principal attribute of the normal individual.</p>
+
+<p>Clinical observation has established the existence in certain
+subjects of successive personalities, and in others that of co-existing
+personalities; the experiences of suggestion have at last allowed of
+analogous morbid phenomena being provoked, in such a manner
+that cases may be varied and rendered still more instructive. The
+simple movements provoked in normal persons in states of distraction,
+of which many very curious examples may be found in M. Binet’s
+book, are the recognised mark of a subconsciousness; but it
+is often possible, under the same conditions and with the same processes,
+to provoke in a hypnotisable hysteric individual an actual
+sub-personality, that is to say, to augment the phenomena which
+attentive observers have long since remarked in every-day life.</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be doubted that, on the one hand, it is possible to
+produce in an insensible limb a great variety of subconscious actions,
+and all sorts of reactions; and when they are recorded by the
+graphic method, it is perceived that with the fingers of his insensible
+hand, the subject has made movements the form of which varies
+according to the receiving apparatus (the dynamograph, drum,
+pencil, etc.). These movements thus exhibit the truly psychological
+marks of adaptation, and seem to reveal the existence of an intelligence
+which is other than that of the ego of the subject, and which
+acts without his assistance and even unknown to him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[112]</span></p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, numerous experiences of very different kinds
+show that the subject whose anæsthetic arm, for example, is pricked,
+can have an idea of the stimulation, although he does not perceive
+it. He does not feel the prickings, but the excitation calls forth the
+idea of their number: he counts them as a normal individual would
+do; “only, in hysterical individuals, the first part of the process
+occurs in one consciousness, and the second in another.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_17" href="#Footnote_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
+
+<p>It can hardly be denied that these different consciousnesses are
+distinct; since experience proves that each can have its own perceptions,
+its own memory, and even a moral character. However,
+their relative value with respect to each other matters little. We are
+compelled to consider, with M. Ribot, the ego as a “coördination”
+of states of consciousness, admitting of infinitely variable groupings.
+According to the old conception of the ego, the personality, with respect
+to secondary consciousnesses, was compared to a coachman
+who had ceased to have control over his horses. This comparison
+is now insufficient, since it may happen that the coachman falls
+asleep on the box, and that one of the horses then governs the set,
+regulating, more or less perfectly, the pace of the others by its own
+gait. Spiritualists, however, will never consent to put the ego in
+the place of the coachman. “A stone detached from the complex
+structure of the personality,” M. Binet now tells us, “can become
+the starting point of a new structure, which rises rapidly by the side
+of the old. Whereupon a disaggregation of the psychological elements
+is produced.” This comparison is certainly more precise and
+more in accordance with facts.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, there remains to be explained how the mental compound
+which constitutes the ego has been constructed from its elements.
+M. Binet shows, <i>à propos</i> of this question, that the association
+of ideas is powerless to explain the genesis of personality;
+associations alone, as proved by the experiences of suggestion,
+are not sufficient to restore forgotten memories. Neither is memory
+the sole factor in personality; since, in certain conditions a person
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[113]</span>may, while preserving the consciousness and the memory of certain
+of his mental states, nevertheless repudiate these mental states and
+consider them as foreign to himself.</p>
+
+<p>This question is still an open one. But there exist certainly
+some grounds for our seeking in the division of consciousness the
+key to certain psychological facts, like unconscious cerebration.
+Such a key would be the action of detached consciousnesses and detached
+memories, that afterwards immediately enter the current of
+general consciousness. Finally, “it is possible,” as M. Binet says
+in conclusion, “that consciousness may be the privilege of certain
+of our psychic acts; it is possible also that it exists everywhere in
+our organism, and it may be even that it accompanies every manifestation
+of life.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In his new work, <i>Agnosticisme</i>, <span class="smcap">M. de Roberty</span> studies with special
+care the position of modern doctrines with regard to the unknown,
+the great <i>x</i> of philosophic speculations—God, Idea, Matter,
+Noumenon or Unknowable. Although perhaps a little hastily written,
+and somewhat obscure, his book nevertheless enforces conviction.
+“Our conception of the world,” says M. de Roberty, “embraces solely
+the things that we <i>know</i> (feel, perceive, imagine, analyse, compare,
+etc.), and does not comprise the least jot or tittle of what we <i>do not
+know</i>. <i>For us</i>, therefore, there can be no question of any relations
+except between two classes of <i>known</i> elements: that which constitutes
+the object of scientific research, and that which is outside of
+science. The latter class represents <i>our</i> unknown, which is always
+<i>relative and purely human</i>.” Here, indeed, we have the true point
+of view, that which we shall all reach, though perhaps at first unknown
+to ourselves; and I shall be much surprised if the philosophers
+do not at last decide to wipe out the formidable <i>Unknowable</i> set up by
+Spencer as the ultimate entity. We shall speak no more of the
+fathomless universe, but of the still unexplored universe; of the unknown,
+not of the unknowable.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, another aspect of the question. Let us suppose
+the unknown got rid of; or to be more precise,—and if we regard
+with M. de Roberty the psychic centres as special receivers in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[114]</span>which the cosmical energy empties itself, resolving itself into sensation
+and idea, and from whence it spreads itself anew as motion,—let
+us suppose that we have summed up all the energies received
+and emitted, and verified the law which reduces memory to the conservation
+of energy; let us suppose in fine that philosophy shall
+have found in the ego the synthesis of the non-ego, expressed “in
+symbolic abbreviations and in signs,” and shall have realised the
+“logical monism” which reduces things to their ideas: would the
+intellect—and would the sensibility—even then be completely satisfied?
+Can we conceive a state in which the curiosity of man as to
+all that concerns himself will be at rest, and when he will cease to
+be disquieted about the cause of suffering and of life? Kant long
+ago propounded this question. But, according to M. de Roberty,
+the thinker who is “a prey to the afflux of emotion referred to by
+Kant,” the man “given over to the desire for another kind of knowledge
+than that of experience,” are, in the category of intellectual
+emotions, diseased and “perverted” persons. “The sentiments,
+so varied in aspect and in strength, which inspire us,” writes he,
+“the contemplation of the unknown, determine the mental illusion
+which materialises, so to say, our ignorance and transforms the unknown
+into the unknowable.”</p>
+
+<p>Would it be inconsistent, however, to preserve the emotion of
+the unknown without “materialising” it, without pronouncing any
+dangerous scientific <i>ignorabimus</i>? M. de Roberty does not accept
+this situation,—which was that of Littré. I do not know whether
+any one will discover the “vaccine,” as he calls it, “of the pessimist
+emotion which has produced agnosticism or latent religiosity.” If
+this constitutes a mental malady, I fear much that it will be incurable.
+As long as there is unhappiness in life, there will also be
+unsatisfied curiosity, and for a very long time to come, inquietude.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The last publication of <span class="smcap">Lombroso</span> and <span class="smcap">Laschi</span>, <i>Le Crime politique
+et les Revolutions, par rapport au droit, à l’anthropologie criminelle
+et à la science du gouvernement</i> (Political Crime and Revolutions,
+in their Relation to Law, Criminal Anthropology, and the Science
+of Government) of which we here have a French translation, is, I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[115]</span>will not say, the worst written, but the most confused work imaginable.
+Its arrangement is clear, but its examples are given without
+any order whatever. The facts presented are abundant, but they are
+taken rather too much at haphazard, and often too uncritically. The
+worst is that its very thesis is weak, badly formulated or elusive in
+places. What a pity it is that so much erudition should be expended,
+and so many valuable data be brought together without better success
+in displaying to the best advantage these riches, and also, let me
+say, without so many times having had occasion to appear so clearly
+in the wrong! M. Lombroso remains unmoved, unfortunately, in his
+high sounding and unqualified hypothesis of “diseased genius.” He
+continues to develop it and to defend it in this latest book of his,
+which is replete with instructive details, and which is undoubtedly
+the first considerable attempt at an etiology of revolutions and of
+political crime.</p>
+
+<p>The complex doctrine of Lombroso could be sufficiently summed
+up, if I am not mistaken, by uniting word to word—by the mathematical
+sign of equality—philoneism (or the love of novelties) with
+the revolutionary spirit, the revolutionary spirit with genius, genius
+with insanity, insanity with criminality, and criminality, finally, with
+progress. But what a detestable thing progress would then be!
+We should have to protect ourselves against it as we do against a
+pestilence. The evolution of societies does not take place without
+great waste and loss, as we all know. It should be carefully shown
+what these losses are. The study of the conditions of social progress
+ought to be made in greater detail than is here found. The terms
+of the imagined equation, which here hovers before our eyes, should
+in fine, if any comparison is to be effected between them, be subjected
+to a much more exact quantitative and qualitative analysis.</p>
+
+<p>For example, let us take genius. Of what kinds of genius does
+Lombroso speak? It seems to be sufficient for him that a man has
+attracted attention, and made himself talked about, to entitle him
+to be called great, while perhaps he is only a blusterer, a braggart,
+a servile imitator, a mere <i>homunculus</i>. In this way the quantity of
+geniuses and talented individuals he has unearthed is something
+extraordinary. The result of this is a radical error in his tables of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[116]</span>the distribution of geniuses. The superiority that he attributes, in
+this respect, to certain of our southern departments, as compared
+with the Norman departments, for example, would have to be reversed
+if we considered the relative quality and kind of the genius
+involved. For the same reason, the relation established between
+genius and republican modes of government is undoubtedly not so
+precise and simple as is stated. But the worst of it is that in thus
+augmenting the number of men of genius, it is found that we have,
+in consequence of the above mentioned equation, also increased the
+number of the demented and the degenerate!</p>
+
+<p>If, moreover, it is true that the conservative mind, with less
+genius, insanity, and criminality, is evidence of the senility of the
+race, how can we accept the thesis that genius and the spirit of
+innovation are also absolute evidence of a neurasthenic condition?
+Shall we deny sound nerves to robust and vigorous youth? This,
+indeed, is not what Lombroso wished to assert. Yet the famous
+thesis always confronts us: <i>Latet anguis in herba</i>. The least sign of
+degeneracy is enough for him to brand a man, and not only are all
+geniuses in his eyes unbalanced, but even the insane are without
+any ado baptised geniuses; with the result that all is heaped together
+in one great mass—genius, insanity, and spirit of revolution.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not dwell any longer on these criticisms. They are
+simply intended as an admonition to the learned M. Lombroso
+against the allurements of a badly founded theory, and against the
+dangers arising from a too hasty preparation of his books. Whatever
+may be its defects, he has at least brought together in his
+present book many ideas. I advise all to read with care what he
+says about women (and how many will find him misoneistic on this
+point!), concerning their great influence in <i>rebellions</i>, which are
+always barren of results, and their impotence in <i>revolutions</i>, which
+are always productive of good. In the second part of his work,
+namely, in the section entitled <i>Juridical and Political Applications</i>,
+nearly all he says is to be commended. I agree with the authors—or
+I do not wish to forget M. Laschi—as to what they tell us in relation
+particularly to pettifogging parlementarianism and public
+instruction. Their conclusions are perhaps not connected with the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[117]</span>thesis in any very intimate manner. But this is not of much consequence,
+as they possess an independent value of their own.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In a previous communication I referred to the work of Savvas-Pacha
+on Musulman jurisprudence. I have now to announce a
+work entitled <i>Souvenirs du Monde musulman</i>, by <span class="smcap">M. Ch. Mismer</span>,
+(published by Hachette,) the fourth and last volume of a valuable
+series which is greatly deserving of attention. M. Mismer, who has
+lived a long time in the East—at Constantinople, in Crete, and in
+Egypt—and was acquainted with the leading personages of the
+Empire, does not hesitate to return here to the theory which he set
+forth more than twenty years ago in his <i>Soirées de Constantinople</i>, his
+theory, namely, of the social advantages, and even the superiority,
+of Islamism over Christianity; subject however to the special worth
+of the races which belong to either of these two forms of religion.
+This opinion is not lightly uttered, and it will appear the more
+striking in view of the present crisis of social and moral decomposition
+which is now spreading throughout the western nations.</p>
+
+<p>In the work of M. Mismer will be found some of the great and
+striking qualities of the observing and thoughtful mind. In connection
+with a special problem of great importance in public instruction,
+that of heredity, I shall call to the attention of my readers
+the following statement, made with reference to the young men of
+the “Egyptian Mission” in France, directed by M. Mismer for ten
+years. “The capacity of a pupil,” says he, “was always found to
+be intimately connected with the cerebral culture of his ancestors
+and the faculties constituting the superiorities of his race.” “It was
+the same,” adds he, “from the moral standpoint.” Undoubtedly,
+if M. Mismer had taken the pains to make a note of the facts
+summed up in his statement, and to present the full case of the numerous
+pupil’s that he has had under his care, he would have been
+able to furnish science with data of the greatest value. Let us at
+least receive his lessons as he offers them to us. They are the fruit
+of the experience of a “man of action,” and it speaks well for an
+observation that it has rendered good service in practice.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Lucien Arréat.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_17" href="#FNanchor_17" class="label">[17]</a> The hypothesis of the division of consciousness explains, consequently, much
+better than that of the motive force of mental images, the facts of automatic writing
+(spiritism). [The works of Binet, Roberty, and Lombroso are published by Alcan.]</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[118]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CRITICISMS_AND_DISCUSSIONS_I">CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="COMTE_AND_TURGOT">COMTE AND TURGOT.</h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent"><i>To the Editor of The Monist</i>:</p>
+
+<p>Your “note of inquiry” mentioned on p. 611 of the last <i>Monist</i> is answered in
+full by Littré in <i>Auguste Comte et la Philosophie Positive</i>, where Turgot’s name
+heads the third chapter. He shows that the latter discovered the law of the three
+stages, theological, metaphysical, and positive, by the following quotation from his
+<i>Histoire des progrès de l’esprit humain</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“While the connection between physical effects was yet unknown, nothing was
+more natural than to suppose that they were produced by intelligent beings, invisible
+and resembling ourselves; for what else could they have resembled? Everything
+that happened without the intervention of man, had its god, whose worship was
+soon established by fear or hope, and this worship was conceived in accordance
+with the deference accorded powerful men; for the gods were only more powerful
+men and more or less perfect according as they were the product of an age more or
+less enlightened as to the true perfections of humanity. When philosophers had
+recognised the absurdity of these fables, without however having obtained true
+light upon natural history, they imagined an explanation of the causes of phenomena
+by abstract expressions, such as essences and faculties: expressions that nevertheless
+explained nothing and that were reasoned about as if they had been beings,
+new divinities substituted for the old ones. These analogies were followed out, and
+faculties were multiplied to account for each effect. It was only very late, in observing
+the mechanical action that bodies have upon one another, that other hypotheses
+were drawn from this mechanics, (<i>de cette mécanique</i>) which mathematics
+could develop and experience verify.”</p>
+
+<p>Littré calls attention to “the great sureness of judgment” that led Turgot to
+cite only physical phenomena when he spoke of those that had ceased to be interpreted
+either theologically or metaphysically. “When he wrote this passage, positivity
+(I use this word, a necessary creation of M. Comte’s) was only beginning to
+reach chemical phenomena and had not yet attained those of biology and sociology.”</p>
+
+<p>But, says Littré, “after reserving the rights of priority for this eminent thinker,
+there is nothing to prevent M. Comte from keeping all the part that he had made
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[119]</span>himself and that belongs to him. Three principal points mark Comte’s independence
+of Turgot. The latter saw in the conception nothing more than an idea to
+meditate upon; Comte saw in it a sociological law; Turgot did not attach to it a
+sketch of human development; Comte developed with the aid of this law the whole
+historical series; Turgot did not perceive that he held one of the necessary elements
+of a philosophy; Comte, in the same flight of thought, went from history become
+science to philosophy become positive. The sociological law, isolated in Turgot,
+makes part, in Comte, of a vast whole: there were therefore two independent creations.
+Either M. Comte had not read Turgot, or, more probably, he had read him
+at a time when this passage, which to-day awakens attention, had no particular
+significance.”</p>
+
+<p>The fourth chapter in Littré’s Life of Comte has for heading the names of Kant
+and Condorcet. The whole of the former’s remarkable sketch of general history is
+given and reference is made to the letter in chap. viii, where Comte, in 1824, being
+twenty-six years old, says to M. d’Eichthal, his former pupil, “I have read and
+reread with infinite pleasure Kant’s little treatise; it is prodigious for the epoch,
+and if I had known it six or seven years sooner it would have saved me trouble. I
+am delighted that you have translated it; it can contribute very efficaciously to preparing
+minds for positive philosophy. Its general conception or at least its method
+is still metaphysical, but the details show the positive spirit at every instant. I had
+always regarded Kant not only as a very strong head, but as the metaphysician that
+approaches the nearest to positive philosophy. But this reading has greatly fortified
+and especially given precision to my conviction in that regard. If Condorcet
+had had knowledge of this writing, which I do not believe, very little merit would
+remain to him, since he can pretend only to that of the conception, which is almost
+as firm and, in some respects, even clearer in Kant. As for me, after this reading
+I can find in myself, up to the present time, no other value than that of having
+systematised and fixed the conception that had been sketched by Kant unknown to
+me, which I owe chiefly to a scientific education; and even the most positive and
+distinct step that I have taken after him, seems to me only the discovery of the law
+of the passage of human ideas through the three stages, theological, metaphysical,
+and scientific; a law that appears to me to be the foundation of the work whose
+execution Kant has counselled. I thank my lack of erudition to-day; for if my
+work, such as it is now, had been preceded by a study of Kant’s treatise, it would
+have lost much of its value in my eyes. I conceive now, as you said, that, for the
+German philosophers that are familiar with this treatise, my work will really have
+a great effect only with the second part.” This work was a short one reprinted in
+Saint-Simon’s <i>Catéchisme des industriels</i> and called “A System of Positive Politics.”
+It had been inserted two years before, under the title of “A Plan of the
+Work Necessary for the Reorganisation of Society,” in a pamphlet of Saint-Simon’s,
+without Comte’s name, and it was because the latter insisted, this time, upon an
+acknowledgment of his authorship that Saint-Simon broke with him. The “second
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[120]</span>part,” which was to produce the great effect upon the German philosophers, never
+appeared; or rather, it soon grew to be the <i>Course of Positive Philosophy</i>, begun on
+the 2d of April, 1826, before Humboldt, Blainville, and other celebrated listeners.</p>
+
+<p>The term <i>positive philosophy</i> had long been used by Saint-Simon and his school,
+Comte among the rest, not in the special sense that the latter now gave it, but as a
+“generic name for the whole of science.” The first use of the words as we now
+understand them is in a letter from Comte to M. d’Eichthal, dated Aug. 5, 1824.
+“I cannot help recalling your judicious reflection upon the influence that social
+physics, once formed, will have upon scientific philosophy. I go even further than
+you, for I think that it will be only then that a veritable philosophy of the sciences
+can exist. All the philosophical ideas that are there to-day, although very precious
+up to that time, appear to me to have nothing more than a simply provisory (provisoire)
+character. I shall speak a little about this relation in the general preface
+that I announce to you, where I shall explain that the true title of my work would
+be <i>positive philosophy</i>, and that if I preferred <i>politics</i>, it is because that is the most
+urgent philosophical application and the one that is to found the science, but that
+later I or you or others will complete this system of ideas by the encyclopedic re-coinage
+of all our positive cognitions (connaissances), which ought really to be conceived
+as a single mass, although, for good culture, it is indispensable to preserve
+and to push even, in one sense, further than it is, the division of labor, so that each
+special savant can always, subsequently, conceive the relation of his branch and
+even of his twig to the universal trunk.”</p>
+
+<p>In a letter of about this date Comte refers to his habit of never rewriting anything.
+His memory permitted him to look upon a volume as finished when it had
+been thought out and before a line had been written. But even in his letters we
+notice some of the disadvantages of this procedure, which, while conducive to unity,
+sacrifices literary form.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that Comte studied under Saint-Simon; but, according to Littré, his
+purely philosophical dependence was very slight, while his influence upon his
+master was important. “What forms the distinguishing characteristic of Saint-Simon
+at the epoch when he lived, is the social destination that he assigns without
+hesitating to the ideas that preoccupy him. He has, as we have seen, only the most
+confused notion of what this philosophy will be; but, no matter what it is to be, he
+consecrates it in advance to the reorganisation of society.”</p>
+
+<p>As regards Condorcet, Comte enthusiastically acknowledges his indebtedness
+to the “Sketch of an Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind,” and
+even goes beyond the facts, as he did in his praise of Kant.</p>
+
+<p>Littré makes a fair division of credit among others as well as those already
+named, and concludes as follows: “Turgot had discovered that human conceptions,
+at first theological, afterwards become metaphysical and end by being positive.
+Kant had known that history is a natural phenomenon, subjected to a determinate
+course, and Condorcet, pushed harder than his predecessors by advancing time,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[121]</span>(he had been condemned to death) “had attempted to trace a table that should put
+in evidence the enchainment of the progresses of civilisation. These are great
+things, but they are still only rudiments; for neither Turgot nor his successors
+make use of the discovered law to found upon this general fact evolution; Kant,
+who perceives clearly the necessity of conceiving history as regulated by the conditions
+inherent to humanity, is unable to base this important notion on anything better
+than an <i>à priori</i> idea” (the metaphysical principle that nature does nothing in
+vain, and that as human faculties do not reach their development in the individual,
+who is ephemeral, they must do so in the species, which is durable) “and thus he
+leaves it incapable of fixing the attention of a century whose tendencies were more
+and more positive; lastly Condorcet has no other guide than the negative philosophy
+of the eighteenth century in a work to which it could bring only contradiction.”</p>
+
+<p>John Stuart Mill says of Comte that “far from pretending to originality when
+he had really no right to do so, he was eager to attach his most original thoughts
+to every germ of a similar idea that he met with among his predecessors.”</p>
+
+<p>Speaking for himself, Littré says of the law of the three stages, “I do not reject
+it, I restrain it. As long as we remain in the scientific order and consider the conception
+of the world first theological, then metaphysical, finally positive, the law of
+the three stages has its full efficacy in directing the speculations of history....
+But in history all is not comprised in the scientific order. M. Comte, who has said
+somewhere that it is necessary to suppose, at the beginning of humanity, certain
+notions that were neither theological nor metaphysical, has indicated the germ, I
+will not say of my objection, but of my restriction. In fact this law of the three
+stages comprehends neither industrial, nor moral, nor æsthetic development. It has
+however, the excellent character of being relative to the speculations in which evolution
+by filiation is most manifest and consequently of giving a positive notion of
+the march of history.”</p>
+
+<p>Is it true, as stated on p. 565 of <i>The Monist</i> for July, that Stuart Mill adopted
+Hume’s “erroneous conception of causality” to the extent implied in the following
+passage? “This idea of ‘sequence’ however was exactly Hume’s mistake, adopted
+by Mr. Mill, and through Mr. Mill popularised among English thinkers. If the
+nature of cause and effect were really constituted by invariable sequence, then the
+night might be called the effect of the day because night is invariably consequent
+upon day.”</p>
+
+<p>The only authority at hand on the island from which I write is Clemenceau’s
+translation of Mill’s “Auguste Comte and Positivism,” where, on p. 61, I read as
+follows, “The succession of day and night is just as much an invariable succession
+as the alternate exposition of the earth’s two opposite sides to the sun. Yet day
+and night are not the cause of each other; why? Because their succession, although
+invariable, according to our experience, is not so unconditionally: these phenomena
+succeed each other only upon the condition that the presence and the absence of
+the sun succeed each other; and if this alternation were to cease, day and night
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[122]</span>would not follow each other. There are thus two kinds of uniformities of succession,
+one without conditions, the other dependent on the former: laws of causation,
+and other successions which depend on these laws.”</p>
+
+<p>In a note Mill refers to his <i>System of Deductive and Inductive Logic</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Louis Belrose, Jr.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="SOME_REMARKS">SOME REMARKS UPON PROFESSOR JAMES’S DISCUSSION OF ATTENTION.</h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In his recent treatise on psychology Professor James discusses in an interesting
+and suggestive way the relation of ideation to attention, maintaining that “ideational
+preparation ... is concerned in all attentive acts.” Attention is “anticipatory
+imagination” or “preperception” which prepares the mind for what it is to experience.
+Thus the schoolboy, listening for the clock to strike twelve, anticipates in
+imagination and is prepared to hear perfectly the very first sound of the striking.</p>
+
+<p>It is undoubtedly true that in the form of attention we term expectant, where
+we are awaiting <i>some given impression</i>, there is a representing, antedating experience,
+which may be a preparatory preperception. But with a wrong imaging of what is
+to be experienced there is hindrance, as when in a dark quiet room we are led to
+expect sensation of light but actually receive sensation of sound. Very often, indeed,
+our anticipations make us unprepared for experience. Further, the experiments
+adduced by Professor James from Wundt and Helmholtz are in the single
+form of expectant attention, and we must remark that in these experiments the reagent
+is also experimenter, and this introduces a new attention, consciousness of
+consciousness, and that of a peculiar kind, which complicates an already complex
+consciousness. In general we may say that experimentally incited consciousness is
+artificial, at least as far as it feels itself as such, and for certain points like simple
+attention this tends to vitiate results. Self-experimentation or experiment on those
+conscious of it as such may mislead in certain cases, and must, so far as this element
+of consciousness of experiment is not allowed for. In physical science things
+always act naturally whether with observation or experiment, but in psychology
+observation, other things being equal, is more trustworthy than experiment.</p>
+
+<p>In all cases of expectant or experimentally expectant attention, the attention
+does not, however, lie in the expectancy or in the imaging as such, but it is merely
+the will effort concerned in these operations. Yet as we may expect without effort,
+and preconceive without volition, attention is necessarily involved in neither. A
+perception or a preperception is an attention only as accomplished by will with
+effort, but only an unattention when purely involuntary. Professor James’s use of
+attention as preperception brings us back to the common idea of attention, as any
+consciousness which cognises something. This is so inbred in thought and language
+that it is most difficult to avoid using the term in this sense. Many psychologists
+like Mr. James and Mr. Sully frequently mention attention as a will phenomenon
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[123]</span>but they do not treat it under will, and they constantly return to the cognition meaning.
+Höffding, however, treats attention under psychology of will. Attention as
+the exercise of will in building up and maintaining cognitive activity, is naturally
+treated under cognition; but it is on the whole safer and better to discuss attention
+under will so as to keep it sharply distinguished from the presentation form which
+it vitalises. I have endeavored to hold the term strictly to this sense, yet it is not
+unlikely I may sometimes unwittingly countenance the common confusion, but trust
+the instances will be few.</p>
+
+<p>When we have, then, a case of expectant attention we must distinguish the attention
+in the imaging from the attention in the actual cognising. It is, indeed,
+true for us almost invariably that cognitive strain without immediate realisation is
+incentive to ideating. In listening in the night in vain for a sound we hear in imagination
+many sounds, and we form preparatory ideas of what we are to hear.
+Sense-adjustments call up a train of sensations in ideal form. But it is obvious that
+low intelligences which have no power of expectancy or ideation do yet really attend.
+The very first cognitions and all early cognitions by their very newness and
+difficulty were attentions long before ideation was evolved. With low organisms,
+as cognitive power extends only to the present in time and space, immediacy of reaction
+is imperatively demanded, and every tension of cognitive apparatus is immediately
+directive of motor apparatus so that suitable motion is at once accomplished.
+The cognition, though dim and evanescent factor, is yet powerfully energised,
+and so a true attention. Always with lowest sentiencies, and often with
+higher, pain is suddenly realised without anticipation, followed quickly by attention
+as strong effort to cognise the nature and quality of the pain-giver and so to effectually
+get rid of pain-giver and pain.</p>
+
+<p>Preliminary idea, then, cannot occur in early attentions and in late attentions
+it is by no means necessary. It is said that we see only what we look for, but it
+must be answered that seeing commonly happens without any looking for. The
+kindergarten child, Professor James to the contrary notwithstanding, is not confined
+in his seeing to merely those things which he has been told to see and whose names
+have been given him. A child continually asks, What is that? and is quick to discern
+the absolutely new and strange. He accomplishes a wide variety of attentions
+without ideas and gives himself almost entirely to immediate presentations.</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, every one sees only what he is prepared to see, only what is made
+possible for him by his mental constitution as determined by his own pre-experience
+and the experience of his ancestors, but this does not signify ideation. Every cognising
+is conditioned by the past, but this does not call for a reawakening and projecting
+in ideal form at every instance of cognitive effort, before any real cognition
+is reached.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, many, if not the most of our attentions, are merely intensifyings of
+some present cognition, of some cognitive psychosis which has simply come or happened.
+Take the instance of attention to marginal retinal images, this certainly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[124]</span>does not always imply preperception, the forming of an idea of what we are to see,
+though in the cases mentioned by Professor James it may. For example, I was
+writing the above seated with my profile to the window when I became suddenly
+aware, through the physiological agency of a marginal image, of a moving object to
+my right. This perception of bare undefined object was spontaneous, a pure given;
+I exercised no will in attaining it, and so the state of cognition was not an attention.
+However, by attending, by intensifying the cognition by will effort, I perceive that
+the indefinite object is a man walking on the sidewalk, who is of a certain height,
+clothed in a certain way, etc. I do not trace the least ideation in the whole process,
+the slight attending as act of will did not imply any anterior or posterior idea
+or representation. The reason for the will act was the intrinsic interest of movement,
+and this intrinsic interest arises in the fact that moving objects have had for
+all life a special pleasure-pain significance, the moving object is the most dangerous,
+and so motion perceived has become ingrained in mind as a special stimulant of attention.
+This habit of attentiveness to things in motion survives and continues for
+cases where it is of no use and even of harm; thus, in the present instance, it diverts
+me from my work. It is obvious that attention often occurs in the same way
+for other senses without preliminary idea.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole we must conclude that attention is a much abused term, and it is
+to be hoped that psychologists will for the future keep to the definite and best use
+of the term; namely, to denote cognitive effort in all its degrees and modes.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Hiram M. Stanley.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="IS_MONISM_ARBITRARY">IS MONISM ARBITRARY?</h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In Vol. II, No. 3, of <i>The Monist</i>, a very kind criticism appeared from the pen
+of Mr. Francis C. Russell of the doctrine of a double-faced unity of mind and matter.
+It was said that this doctrine is very far from inducing that final satisfaction which
+we rightly expect of a competent theory, and the critic propounded as a possible
+explanation of mental phenomena the postulate of a conservation of spirit. He calls
+spirit the elementary basis of consciousness considered as a quality. Spirit would
+be the subjectivity of nature, the elements of feeling, or as Professor Morgan calls it
+metakinesis; and consciousness would originate in the same way as electricity, i. e.,
+by rending spirit asunder into positive and negative spirit so as to produce a tension.
+This would account for the appearance and disappearance of consciousness in that
+spiritual “dynamo” which is called the nervous system.</p>
+
+<p>This proposition seems to be highly acceptable because it stands upon the principle
+of a conservation of substance and attempts to represent the phenomenon of
+consciousness as due to a transformation. But does it for that reason remove the
+difficulties of the doctrine of a double-faced unity of nature, which, as Mr. Russell
+says, “is open to the charge of being arbitrary and brings no access of insight”?
+Is not perhaps the term double-faced unity (which is none of my invention, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[125]</span>which I have been careful to avoid) a misleading and unsatisfactory term? Why
+should nature be double-faced? Why are feeling and motion the only two attributes
+of natural phenomena? Is this not arbitrary? Could nature not be just as
+well a treble or quadruple-faced unity. Nature might possess, as Spinoza actually
+declares, infinite attributes of which these two only, viz. extension and thought, i. e.
+motion and feeling, happen to be known to us.</p>
+
+<p>It is this apparent arbitrariness which bars our insight and deprives us of the
+satisfaction that ought to attend the real solution of a problem. But let us avoid
+the term double-faced unity; let us speak of the subjectivity and the objectivity of
+nature, and the clouds will disappear.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine of a double-faced unity has been criticised as dualism, and the
+proposition that nature consists of two radically different attributes—exactly of two,
+not more and not less—must most decidedly appear as dualism. But is it dualistic
+to say that every subject appears to its objects not as a subject but as an object
+among other objects? Certainly not.</p>
+
+<p>The relativity of the terms subject and object affords us the key to a comprehension
+of the situation. This world of ours is a world of relations. The phenomena
+of nature exhibit an unceasing activity; they consist of constant changes, and every
+change, every motion, has a whence and a whither. Every transformation is a
+series of events among which any prior one is called cause and any subsequent one
+effect.</p>
+
+<p>If we regard feeling and motion as two attributes of nature, we are actually on
+the brink of dualism, and we shall understand how Spinoza, in order to escape from
+dualism and arrive at a monistic view, assumed without any plausible argument the
+existence of an infinite number of attributes. This assumption however is of no
+avail, for the problem would arise: How is it that we know only two of all these
+infinite attributes? Why do we not know any other? and why are we unable to
+form even a dim notion of any other? If they exist why do they exhibit no effects
+upon us? Perhaps because we ourselves and this world of ours consist only of
+two! And if they exhibit no effects upon us and upon our world, can they be said
+to exist at all? Might we not, in that case, consider them as non-existent and count
+the two known attributes alone as actual realities? Thus the dualism would remain;
+and Spinoza’s monism is only apparent.</p>
+
+<p>The same objection cannot be made if we remain conscious of the fact that
+feelings are as much abstracts as motions. Subjectivity and objectivity are correlative
+terms. There is as little a duality in the idea, that subjects presuppose objects
+as that effects presuppose causes. There are not causes in the world which
+are nothing but causes, nor are there effects which are nothing but effects. Take for
+instance an historical event. Was Cæsar’s death a cause or an effect? Plainly,
+this depends upon the view we take. As the sequence of the wounds which Cæsar
+received from his assassins it was an effect; as the beginning of the civil war consequent
+thereupon it was a cause. If I look at you, you are the object and I am
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[126]</span>the subject. If you look at me, it is the reverse. Thus the relation of a certain
+thing to its surroundings makes of it a subject, while the surroundings are its objects.</p>
+
+<p>Subject and object being correlatives, we can very well understand why there
+are no “subjects in themselves”; every subject is at the same time an object in
+the objective world. We can further understand, why every subjectivity except
+our own withdraws itself from direct observation. We can observe the movements
+of organisms like ourselves and judge by way of analogy that they feel pain or enjoy
+pleasure. We see their motions which betray certain feelings, but we can never
+see the feelings themselves; and even supposing that we could enter into the brain
+of a man and that the whole mechanism of brain-action were laid open to our inspection
+in its minutest details, we should see motions, combinations and separations,
+integrations and disintegrations, we should see the oxydation of the gray substance,
+which would appear as a great turmoil and excitement, but we should see
+(as Leibnitz says) no thoughts, no perceptions, no feelings. That it cannot be
+otherwise is obvious when we consider that our objects will always present to us the
+character of objectivity.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose We were an atom of oxygen and entered into the process of brain-action
+as an active factor, our subjectivity would soon become absorbed and welded
+into a higher unity with the subjectivity of the other atoms. We should then, as a
+part of that brain’s consciousness, feel these feelings, perceptions, and thoughts; we
+should, then, <i>be</i> the subject which we could not see and which we were searching
+for in vain in the world of objectivity.</p>
+
+<p>This conception of the correlation of subjectivity and objectivity does not only
+convincingly explain the unity of feeling and motion, it does not only establish a
+satisfactory monism, it throws light also on some other of the questions that puzzle
+us. How is it that we do not feel our brain-motions to be brain-motions? We feel
+our feelings only; and when feeling our feelings we do not so much feel <i>that</i> we feel
+as <i>what</i> we feel. In other words, we feel the contents of our feelings; we feel their
+import, their meaning; we are aware of their significance; our consciousness is
+conscious of the object, the presence of which is indicated by this special feeling.
+Our attention is concentrated upon the messages conveyed by and contained in the
+different feelings.</p>
+
+<p>These messages of certain feelings are the interpretations given either to certain
+sense-impressions or they are the thought-symbols representing some abstracts, representing
+certain features of sense-impressions.</p>
+
+<p>How little we feel our brain-motions when we think, can be learned from the
+fact that some nations place the seat of thinking in the heart, others in the stomach
+or even the bowels, while even so great a naturalist as Aristotle regarded the brain
+as cold and insensible; he made the observation that man is in possession of the
+relatively largest brain, but he understood its function so little that he thought it
+served to cool the warmth rising from the heart.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[127]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is strange that every subjective feeling so long as it remains within itself can
+neither be localised nor determined. We know nothing whatever of the brain-motion
+that thinks a certain idea. We can fairly assume that every idea is in its
+objective existence a peculiar kind of brain motion taking place in a particular part
+of the brain, but we are not conscious of the brain-motion as a special and localised
+motion. We are quite unable to tell the difference that we must suppose to exist
+between the forms of the brain-structures or combinations of brain-structures and
+their motions when we think say for instances of virtue and of vice. We are conscious
+only of the idea and not of their objective correlates.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever we know of our body, we know only through sensation; i. e., by
+the same means by which we know of other things. Our body is to us, and is represented
+with the assistance of the senses, as an object in the objective world. As
+such it is localised and all its relations and activities are determined. Whatever
+subjective feeling we have concerning any state of ourselves, remains indistinct
+until with the help of the senses it is made an object to our observation. Who has
+not as yet made the experience that he was unable to localise a toothache. The
+pain itself gives no information either as to its nature and cause or as to the seat of
+the suffering. The pain itself is purely subjective. All the objective facts have to
+be localised with the assistance of the senses. The suspected regions must be made
+the object of experiments and if any irritation of a certain spot increases the ache,
+it will be assumed to be the seat of the pain. And even then how often is a patient
+mistaken not only almost always as to the nature but often also as to the seat
+of the pain.</p>
+
+<p>These facts appear strange, but they cease to be strange, when we consider
+that the nature of subjectivity is feeling. Subjectivity can as little become directly
+conscious of its own objectivity as an eye can look at itself. However, an eye can
+look at its image in the mirror. So the complex of subjective existence, which is
+through the interaction of an organism united in what we call a soul, can and does
+turn the channels of its own senses back upon itself and thus forms an opinion
+concerning its own objectivity. Man’s knowledge of his own objective existence is
+not due to any internal and direct perception of self, but solely to the same experience
+through which he receives information concerning the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. C.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="A_REPLY_TO_A_CRITIC">A REPLY TO A CRITIC.<br>
+<span class="smaller">WITH A DISCUSSION OF NECESSARY TRUTHS.</span></h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent"><i>To the Editor of The Monist</i>:</p>
+
+<p>I hope it is not a breach of etiquette to ask you to forward to your reviewer the
+following remarks in reply to his criticism of my work (<i>The Foundations of Geometry</i>,
+reviewed in Vol. II, No. 1, of <i>The Monist</i>). If he is good enough to review my
+second book also, I think they will clear up some misunderstandings.</p>
+
+<p>Your reviewer commences with some general remarks, against which I have
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[128]</span>nothing to say. He then proceeds to consider my “requirements for a logical definition.”
+Here he seems to find a difficulty—which may be due to my not having
+expressed myself clearly. If so I hope he will read what I say on the same subject
+in my <i>Essay on Reasoning</i>, which I cannot believe he will find “indefinite” or
+not well “issuable.” But indeed I cannot see where his difficulty comes in with my
+old statement of the case. I state perfectly clearly that requirements (3) and (4) are
+not <i>logically</i> necessary for a definition, but are only required if that definition is intended
+to give a <i>particular meaning</i> to the word. He tries to reduce my argument
+<i>ad absurdum</i> by giving a definition of “troft.” But so far from being absurd his
+definition is perfectly good. According to it “troft” would include in its denotation
+all our percepts and concepts. When however he goes on to say “... These significant
+names must be so used that the intellectual sensibility shall be excited to
+perceive that which is intended to be defined,” I differ from him entirely. This is only
+required for a <i>description</i>, not for a <i>definition</i> (see <i>Essay on Reasoning</i>, p. 53).</p>
+
+<p>Your reviewer’s only solid objection to my “requirements” seems to be that
+the fourth includes all the rest. This is only true if the term proposed for definition
+has an import which has already been determined; but even in such a case it is
+better to consider the requirements separately, as I have given them. For the force
+of objections under the different headings varies enormously. An objection under
+heading (1), if established, would be fatal to any definition whatever. One under
+heading (2) so far from being fatal would only be a suggestion for the improvement
+of the definition. Objections under either of the headings (3) and (4) would only be
+to the effect that the term as defined meant something different from what it was
+desired that it should mean. It is however convenient to consider (3) and (4) separately
+as it would generally be possible to decide (3) at once, whereas if a doubt
+were raised under heading (4) it might lead to a prolonged discussion before it could
+be laid. I do not however pretend that the “requirements” are laid down in my
+<i>Foundations of Geometry</i> in the best possible form. Indeed I have altered the form
+in my second essay. There is moreover one requirement for a logical definition
+which is not included in my heading (1) in the <i>Foundations of Geometry</i>, though it
+is included in (4). This defect is remedied in the <i>Essay on Reasoning</i> (p. 55). It is
+curious that your reviewer should have missed this point, as it is the very one on
+which he attacks my definition of “direction.” It is that the assertions in a definition
+must not be <i>independent</i> of the meaning of the term defined. If they were, the
+assertion would be equally true (or false) whatever meaning the term might have.
+The <i>import</i> of the term would therefore be unlimited. In the case of explicit definitions
+a similar error is called <i>circulus in definiendo</i>.</p>
+
+<p>When your reviewer goes on to attack my definition of “direction” why does
+he change his front all at once, and disregard all the considerations he has just been
+discussing? Why does he not apply my, or his own, requirements for a definition
+to the case in point? The criticism he actually does put forward will not bear a
+moment’s investigation. If my definition is “circular,” the assertion must be equally
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[129]</span>true whatever meaning is ascribed to the term. Well, then, let us try the effect of
+giving to it the meaning we ordinarily ascribe to “cheese.” Is it equally true that
+“a cheese may be conceived to be indicated by naming two points, as the cheese
+from one to the other”? Clearly not. But not only does this one assertion out of
+my definition exclude the import of “cheese” from the meaning of “direction,” but,
+more particularly, it distinguishes between the “three distinct but closely associated
+notions” which your reviewer quite rightly says “become confused in thought and
+expression unless the most solicitous care is taken to distinguish them.” This is exactly
+the care which I <i>have</i> taken, by framing my definition.</p>
+
+<p>I need not say much about the rest of the criticism. Your reviewer’s remarks
+on my definition of “angle” are simply due to the fact that he has not read the
+definition carefully, and probably has not read the note on the top of page 36 at all.
+It may make it clearer to him if I point out that if “we imagine a northeast-southwest
+line cutting an east-west line,” we imagine <i>four</i> different directions and therefore
+(4⋅3)/(1⋅2) = 6 angles. Two of these are the straight angles between the opposite
+directions of each of the two lines. The other four are what Euclid calls “the
+angles between the lines.” As an angle, according to my definition, has no local
+habitation in space, it is, <i>prima facie</i>, meaningless to talk of the “right hand upper
+angle.” But if this is only an abbreviation for “the angle between the directions
+upwards and to the right,” then “the right hand upper angle” means the same as it
+would in Euclid.</p>
+
+<p>With the remarks about the nature of the challenge I have thrown down I
+heartily agree. May I however suggest that I have a right to expect that criticism
+should be, not only “competent and candid,” but careful? It is a difficult subject,
+and <i>I</i> at least am not always able to express myself in such a way that my meaning
+cannot be misunderstood by any one. I think if your reviewer looks at what I have
+said again, with the aid of what I say further in my <i>Essay on Reasoning</i>, he will see
+that his criticisms have really originated in misunderstandings, and perhaps he will
+alter his judgment that I have “come short of the high result to which I aspired.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_18" href="#Footnote_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<p>But my chief object in writing to you to-day is to bring specially to your notice
+my ideas on the nature of so-called “necessary truths.” I am not quite clear how
+far you will find my views harmonise with your own. To a great extent I am inclined
+to think they are simply a further analysis of the views you express in <i>The Monist</i>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[130]</span>and in your <i>Fundamental Problems</i>. I will briefly sketch my own ideas and you
+can then judge whether they are yours also or not.</p>
+
+<p>In my <i>Essay on Reasoning</i> I classify assertions as Truisms (assertions whose
+truth depends solely on the definitions of their terms) and Real Assertions,
+which convey some real subjective or objective information. I show that the validity
+of all purely formal knowledge depends on the fact that it is deduced from definitions
+alone, which are laid down <i>arbitrarily</i> and that the supposed peculiar certainty
+of the theorems of pure mathematics is merely due to the fact that they are
+all truisms. Thus, I think it a misnomer to call such theorems “necessary” truths.
+It would be nearer the mark to call them “arbitrary” truths.</p>
+
+<p>There is no <i>necessity</i> whatever about the theorem “twice two is four.” “Two”
+is defined as 1 + 1; “twice,” as the operation of adding a thing to itself. It follows
+from this that “twice two” is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1; and this, by <i>definition</i>, is “four.” If
+“four” were defined as 1 + 1 + 1, (and there is no “necessary” reason why it
+should not be,) then “twice two” would <i>not</i> be “four.” The assertion “twice two
+is four” conveys no real information whatever—at best it could only tell us what
+one of its terms meant if they had not all been previously defined.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot insist too strongly on the importance of a proper understanding and
+use of logical definition. If you desire to know whether a given assertion is true or
+false, <i>a priori</i> or <i>a posteriori</i>, the first step in the investigation <span class="smcap">must</span> be to find out
+how its terms were defined. If it turns out that the truth (or falsehood) of the assertion
+can be formally deduced from these definitions, then the assertion is a truism
+(or contradiction in terms): in either case it can give no real information, and even
+if true cannot be a “necessary” truth. Only if the definitions of the terms are both
+independent and consistent is it open to discussion how we might come to a knowledge
+of the fact it expresses.</p>
+
+<p>I may briefly indicate here how I think the problem ought to be attacked.
+“Objective facts” can only be established by induction. I do not mean by that
+term necessarily the process described by Mill, but some similar process, based ultimately
+on <i>inductio per enumerationem simplicem</i>. Now no such process can ever
+lead to a necessary truth. The most fundamental and certain induction which can
+be made, that which induces us to believe in the objectivity of our environment,
+does not lead to a “necessary truth”; and much less can any other induction based
+upon this one do so. “Objective facts” then may be established with greater or
+less probability, but can never be <i>necessarily</i> true. But all inductions are based on
+our perceptions, that is ultimately on our subjective sensations. And a man can,
+nay, must be, absolutely certain of the reality of his own sensations though he cannot
+be certain of the interpretations he puts upon them. If I have a toothache I
+cannot be absolutely certain that I have a tooth, but, at least while the pain lasts,
+I am <i>absolutely</i> certain that I have an ache. And so of any subjective sensation.</p>
+
+<p>I can similarly be absolutely certain that I entertain a given concept, while that
+concept is before my mind; though of course it is possible that if I assert the possession
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[131]</span>of that concept I may do so in language which may be misunderstood by the
+person I am addressing. If then a man has certain concepts which he can call up
+at will, the reality of those concepts, <i>qua</i> concepts, is to him a <i>necessary truth</i>. He
+may lay down such necessary truths as axioms, and by their aid he may give real
+subjective import to a symbolic argument, and so obtain new and complicated assertions
+which are also to him necessary truths. This is what I do in my subjective
+theory of geometry. That theory might be regarded as purely symbolic—the axioms
+might have been left out, and all its conclusions looked upon as mere truisms. The
+conclusions of geometry of four or more independent directions can perhaps <i>only</i> be
+regarded as truisms. But by the aid of the axioms, geometry of two and three independent
+directions can be given real subjective import, and its conclusions therefore
+regarded as necessary truths, as long as they are only taken subjectively. They
+may further be applied objectively by the aid of objective facts established by induction,
+but in this case their validity is no greater than that of the primary facts,
+the counterparts of the subjective axioms, which are employed to give the theory
+objective import.</p>
+
+<p>I confess I have not studied Kant sufficiently to say that his views differ, materially
+from mine, though I always thought they did until I read your interpretations
+of them. Perhaps I misunderstood the sense in which Kant used the term
+<i>a priori</i>. The term has been used in so many different senses that I prefer myself
+to drop it altogether. If it merely refers to priority in time there can be no practical
+doubt that, whether in the case of the human race or of an individual thinker,
+a large amount of sense-experience must have preceded even so simple an <i>a priori</i>
+judgment as “twice two is four.” If the term merely refers to priority in logical validity
+it seems to me better to say that “such and such assertions are not dependent
+upon experience.” But Kant says of the assertion “7 + 5 = 12” that it is not only
+“<i>a priori</i>” but “synthetic”. By the latter term he means that its truth was <i>not</i>
+deduced from definitions alone, and that the assertion therefore conveys real information.
+In this I believe he was wrong, and though he afterwards declares that
+“all knowledge <i>a priori</i> is empty and cannot give information about things,” unless
+the true nature of <i>a priori</i> knowledge is made more clear, people will inevitably continue
+to believe the contrary—and to believe moreover that Kant taught so.</p>
+
+<p>Any language which seems to imply that there is some dread necessity about
+mathematical truths—that they could not be otherwise if they would—is very misleading.
+Of course it is necessarily true that <i>if</i> you have seven objects and add
+five more to them you will have in all twelve objects. But the whole objective
+difficulty is begged by the supposition. “Much virtue in if!”</p>
+
+<p>As I understand it the essence of the “laws” of pure mathematics is that they
+are verbal, that is they are only abbreviated expressions of the results of certain
+verbal processes. If the processes are repeated and the results similarly expressed,
+the results must always be the same. Our reason cannot “inform us about the form
+of existence” unless it is first given, as the <i>data</i> or facts which correspond to the definitions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[132]</span>of our symbolic arguments. It is only because our reasoning faculties are
+limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at all—that it is not evident to us at
+once that the conclusions of the most intricate mathematical calculations are given
+to us along with the <i>data</i>. Given the data, then in all possible worlds the conclusions
+must indeed follow, but only because they really are already <i>in</i> the data which
+were given.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that you will not only agree with all I have said, but have already
+said much of it yourself. But there are some passages in your <i>Fundamental Problems</i>
+which seem to imply otherwise. I think the great objection I have to urge
+against Kant, and also perhaps against you, is that you do not distinguish as clearly
+as I could wish between symbolic argument and real, though subjective, knowledge.
+And the only way to distinguish between them is by inquiring into the definitions of
+the terms.</p>
+
+<p>For example, on p. 165 of <i>Fundamental Problems</i> you say that to four-dimensional
+beings Kepler’s third law “would most probably appear as ‘the cubes of
+their times of revolution being proportional to their mean distances to the fourth
+power.’”</p>
+
+<p>Now what sort of assertion do you take Kepler’s law to be? Originally it was
+a purely empirical law obtained by pure induction. If the four-dimensional people
+obtained their law the same way why should the result appear different to them?
+Or do you conceive the law to be deduced from Newton’s theory of gravitation? But
+even so the law of the inverse square was obtained empirically. If you think that
+law can be explained (as the analogous law for the distribution of light can) by the
+supposition that the integral of the force over all points at a given distance from the
+origin is constant, still this supposition is purely gratuitous unless established by induction
+from experience. If you grant any one of these suppositions you can by
+symbolic argument obtain the law corresponding to Kepler’s for a four-dimensional
+space. But I may mention that in no case does the result you anticipate come out.
+On the first two suppositions the law would be unaltered. On the last supposition
+the law of gravity would be changed to the inverse cube; but after that the solution
+of the problem has nothing to do with four dimensions—it is a two-dimensional
+problem only. The result is that in general planets could not move in closed orbits
+at all. They might conceivably revolve in circles, but such a condition would be
+unstable, and if it obtained their periodic times would vary as the squares of their
+distances.</p>
+
+<p>Again you say (p. 74) “the doctrine of the ‘conservation of matter and energy,’
+although it has been discovered with the assistance of experience, can be proved in
+its full scope by pure reason alone.” I should very much like to see your proof
+(which I cannot find in <i>Fundamental Problems</i>). How do you define the terms of the
+doctrine? Do you deduce the proof from these definitions—that is do you make it
+a truism? Or do you base it upon subjective axioms as I do my geometry? Or if
+you base it on objective facts, how do you prove those facts by pure reason alone?
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[133]</span>And if it is purely a subjective proof, how, can you say the doctrine is proved “in its
+full scope”? Surely objective applications come within its scope?</p>
+
+<p>It would not be fair in me to ask you to publish my reply to your reviewer’s
+criticisms, though if that reply is justified the criticism must have done the prospects
+of my book some injury, seeing from what a quarter it comes. But I hope you will see
+your way to publishing the latter part of this letter in <i>The Monist</i>, together with
+your reply to it, if you think it worthy of such a distinction.</p>
+
+<p>I have just come across, in this month’s <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, another remarkable
+instance of reasoning which seems to be rendered entirely nugatory by the want of
+proper definitions. It is asserted that conceptual thought is impossible without
+language. At first sight this would certainly appear to be a real assertion. It follows
+from it that since dogs have no language they have no “conceptual thought.”
+But it may be plainly shown that dogs do entertain “general notions,” which in ordinary
+English would be included under the head of “conceptual thought.” The
+apparent contradiction is however explained when it appears that the author distinguishes
+general notions as “concepts” or “recepts,” according as they <i>are</i> or <i>are
+not named</i>. This being his definition of “conceptual thought” as opposed to other
+thought, it appears that the assertion is only a truism after all, and conveys no real
+information whatever. To discuss it further is then mere waste of time. The author
+of the assertion doubtless <i>wished</i> it to convey some information, but he did not
+attend to his definitions and so failed to attain his object.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Edward T. Dixon.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_18" href="#FNanchor_18" class="label">[18]</a> The reviewer of Mr. Dixon’s book has read these remarks on his criticism (<i>The Monist</i>,
+Vol. II, No. 1, p. 126) and has given them what seems to him full consideration. He confesses that
+he misunderstood what Mr. Dixon meant by “a direction.” (See the article “Logic as Relation-Lore”
+to be published in a subsequent number.) In regard to the requirements for a logical definition
+he must still abide by his former opinion. The need of a definition arises either from the inaccuracy
+in the application of a term or from a supposed lack of knowledge as to its signification.
+Hence to use the term itself in its own definition is to import into the definition the same vagueness
+or ignorance which it is the very office of a definition to correct. When Mr. Dixon says that
+it is requisite for a logical definition that the defining assertions “must not be <i>independent</i> of the
+meaning of the term defined,” what is that but to say that the same must be <i>dependent</i> upon that
+meaning? which, unless the reviewer again misunderstands the author, is to say that we must
+understand the meaning of the term before we can understand the definition.</p>
+
+<p class="right">ρσλ.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="MATHEMATICS">MATHEMATICS A DESCRIPTION OF OPERATIONS WITH PURE FORMS.<br>
+<span class="smaller">IN REPLY TO MR. EDWARD DIXON.</span></h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It is true, as Mr. Dixon says, that “Any language which seems to imply that
+there is some dread necessity about mathematical truths is very misleading.” But
+to say, as Mr. Dixon does in another passage, that the truisms of mathematics are
+arbitrary truths, is more misleading still. The theorems of the formal sciences are
+not “assertions whose truth depends solely on the definition of their terms.” They
+are “real assertions which convey some real subjective or objective information.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dixon objects to Kant’s assertion that 7 + 5 = 12 is not only <i>a priori</i> but
+also synthetic. He declares, in contradistinction to Kant, that it is deduced from
+definitions alone; that therefore it is empty, and cannot give any information about
+things. This latter proposition, which is a phrase of Kant’s, appears in this context
+as an inconsistency of Kant’s. And it would be an inconsistency, if it had to be understood
+in the sense in which Mr. Dixon quotes it. We construe Kant’s phrase that
+“the <i>a priori</i> is empty, and cannot give information about things,” in a different
+way. We think that Kant intends to say that the <i>a priori</i> imparts real information
+concerning relations and forms; but that it does not impart real information concerning
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[134]</span>substances or the materiality of things. It is apparent that the assertion
+7 + 5 = 12 cannot be derived from the definitions of 7 or 5. Similarly, the ideas of
+higher mathematics are not deduced from the few definitions of elementary mathematics
+that tell what points, lines, parallels, etc., are. Of what, then, are these
+complex theorems of mathematics, products? They are not derived from sense-experience,
+nor from the definitions of their ultimate elements.</p>
+
+<p>Is their origin mysterious? Here Kant leaves us in the lurch; he simply declares
+that formal truth is <i>a priori</i> and transcendental; and those of his disciples who call
+themselves, with preference, transcendentalists, have ample occasion to introduce
+in this <i>lacuna</i> of Kantian thought, all the mysticism they please.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of the origin of the truths of formal sciences is not so difficult as it
+is sometimes represented. The theorems of higher mathematics are the products of
+certain <i>operations</i> performed with the elementary forms described in the definition
+with which the mathematician starts. These operations are not arbitrary; they
+are not merely verbal processes; they are realities of highest importance. Not material
+realities, but realities, nevertheless. They are functions, and mathematics
+deals with the products of functions. It is true that we might call twice two by
+any other name than four; we might call it <i>vier</i>, or <i>quatre</i>, but the operation
+1 + 1 + 1 + 1 would remain the same, by whatever name we call its result. Mathematical
+truths, accordingly, are not empty in the sense that they are meaningless;
+for they are significant in the highest degree. They give real information, not
+about things, but about certain relations that obtain among things. They describe
+certain operations in which formal relations are traced. And they describe them
+exhaustively, so that the result is, as the Germans call it, <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>, and
+the result will, under all circumstances, be the same. Twice two <i>will always be</i> the
+same as 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. This “it will always be,” is called necessary. There is
+nothing dreadful about it, nor is there any mystery connected with it. It is not an
+awful fate that decrees it, but it is the nature of sameness, that the same is and will
+be the same, so long as it remains the same.</p>
+
+<p>It is often overlooked that every number in arithmetic is the result of an operation
+which is symbolised by a certain figure. Numbers are not concrete things; and
+as soon as we forget that they are products of a function, we are liable to lapse into
+mistakes. This happens most frequently with the numbers “zero” and “infinite.”
+The latter of these two symbols is often looked upon as a concrete thing; and because
+the infinite, with actual reality, is, in its completeness, inconceivable, it has
+made, of every one who stumbled over this stone of offence, a mystic, and many a
+radical, fearless thinker bows down to worship before the idea of infinitude-function
+as it would be if it were a real thing.</p>
+
+<p>Says Mr. Dixon, “Our reason cannot inform us about the form of existence,
+unless it is first given.” This is very true. The form is given, and formal systems
+such as the numerical system and the lines and figures of mathematics are mental
+constructions built of the stones quarried out of the relational given in experience.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[135]</span></p>
+
+<p>Form being given, we can reason about the form of existence in general. We
+can have ready in our minds systems of pure forms to apply to all the various
+cases of our experience. And this will help us in unravelling the problems of reality,
+and in extending our knowledge in those fields with which we are little acquainted.
+Far be it from us to consider the definitions, the operations, and the results of the
+formal sciences as purely verbal; if they were, mathematics would lose all the great
+importance which it undeniably possesses, and become mere verbiage.</p>
+
+<p>I confess that I do not understand Mr. Dixon when he says: “It is only because
+our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic arguments are necessary at
+all.” In my opinion all mental activity is symbolic. Every idea is a symbol that
+signifies something. It is not because our reasoning faculties are limited that symbolic
+arguments are necessary at all, but symbolism is the nature of our mind, and
+symbols are the elements with which our reasoning faculties have to deal. In this
+sense, every argument is symbolic. If it symbolises sense-experience, it represents
+our knowledge of what may be called the materiality of things. If it symbolises
+operations with pure forms, it represents the purely formal relations of mathematics
+logic, algebra, etc.</p>
+
+<p>The doctrine of the conservation of matter and energy in reality means nothing
+more or less than that there is no increase or decrease in the world at large. Nothing
+originates out of, and nothing disappears into, nothing. It means that twice
+1 + 1 is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, neither more nor less; or, in other words, it means that all
+events are transformations. New things originate, but their newness consists in
+their forms. In this sense the law of the conservation of matter and energy would
+have to be called, from Mr. Dixon’s standpoint, other differences neglected, a
+truism. It is not a truism, in the sense of being arbitrary, but in the sense of being
+a purely formal truth, as are all mathematical theorems.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dixon refers to a passage in <i>Fundamental Problems</i>, in which I say that
+“To four-dimensional beings, Kepler’s third law would most probably appear as the
+cubes of the times of revolutions of the planets being proportional to their mean distances
+to the fourth power.” His questions, “What sort of an assertion do you take
+Kepler’s law to be?” and “Why should the result appear different to them?” show
+that Mr. Dixon has overlooked the condition on which this proposition was made.
+The first sentence of this paragraph begins with the words, “If space inhered, as
+Kant maintains, in the thinking subject only, spatial relations and laws would appear
+different to four-dimensional beings.” Space relations are not subjective, in my
+opinion, but objective. Therefore, since space relations do not inhere in the thinking
+subject only, because they are a feature of the objective world, and inhere in the
+thinking subject in so far as it is at the same time an object in the objective world,
+Kepler’s law would appear to four-dimensional beings, if they could exist at all, just
+the same as it does to us three-dimensional beings.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. C.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[136]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_REVIEWS_I">BOOK REVIEWS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Social Statics.</span> Abridged and Revised; together with <span class="smcap">The Man versus The
+State</span>. By <i>Herbert Spencer</i>. New York: D. Appleton &amp; Co., 1892.</h4>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Justice.</span> Being Part IV of the Principles of Ethics. By <i>Herbert Spencer</i>. New
+York: D. Appleton &amp; Co., 1891.</h4>
+
+<p>Among Mr. Spencer’s most important books are those entitled <i>Justice</i> and
+<i>Social Statics</i>. The latter, which first appeared in 1850, has just been republished
+in about one-half of the original size, some parts having been transferred to the book
+on <i>Justice</i>, and others omitted altogether. “One difference,” as he says, “is that
+what there was in my first book of supernaturalistic interpretation has disappeared,
+and the interpretation has become exclusively naturalistic—that is, evolutionary.”
+Another change is that a demonstration of the injustice of socialism is substituted
+for his former arguments, plainly repudiated in <i>Justice</i>, against private ownership
+of land. Equally important is the omission of the chapter asserting “The Right to
+Ignore the State.”</p>
+
+<p>The demand for Woman Suffrage has also been withdrawn from the new edition
+of <i>Social Statics</i>, though it retains the original protest against “the reign of
+man over woman,” and asserts an “equality of rights in the married state.” Here
+again, Spencer’s final position must be sought in his <i>Justice</i> where it is urged
+that women cannot justly have equal powers with men unless they have equal responsibilities.
+They cannot serve their country as men do; and if they take an
+equal share in the government, “their position is not one of equality but one of
+supremacy.” Even in time of peace, they are, he thinks, too impulsive to vote
+judiciously, too sympathetic to oppose “fostering the worse at the expense of the
+better,” and too fond of “a worship of power under all its forms” to protect individual
+liberty against the encroachment of authority. This objection seems particularly
+strong, because there is still great danger of the growth of state despotism
+at the expense of personal freedom, even in republics. Many recent instances are
+given by Spencer in “The Man versus the State,” now reprinted in the same volume
+with <i>Social Statics</i>; and it is urged in <i>Justice</i>, that even in the United States
+“universal suffrage does not prevent an enormous majority of consumers from being
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[137]</span>heavily taxed by a protective tariff for the benefit of a small minority of manufacturers
+and artisans.”</p>
+
+<p>Our voters are much too ready to follow hasty impulses and unscrupulous
+leaders; and both faults are most common among the most ignorant. How strongly
+education encourages independence was acknowledged by those slave-holders who
+said, “Our negroes shall not learn to read, for that makes them run away.” Public
+schools have found their worst enemies among Popes and Czars, and their best
+friends in the statesmen most honored by republics. There is no other institution
+for whose advantages Americans are practically unanimous. The necessity of popular
+education at the public cost is acknowledged by Huxley, Mill, and other advanced
+thinkers so generally, that Spencer’s exceptionally hostile opinion ought not to be
+taken as a self-evident truth.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Spencer’s examination of this subject does not appear to have been so
+thorough as the occasion demands. In denying that education prevents crime, he
+relies mainly on Joseph Fletcher, who, as stated in both editions of <i>Social Statics</i>,
+“has entered more elaborately into this question than perhaps any other writer
+of the day,” and who admits that there is a “superficial evidence against instruction.”
+Spencer takes no notice of Fletcher’s having succeeded completely in breaking
+down this superficial evidence. In elaborate papers, published in the tenth,
+eleventh, and twelfth volumes of <i>The Journal of the London Statistical Society</i>,
+and illustrated by many tables and maps, Fletcher shows that the proportion to the
+population, in various parts of England, of people unable to sign their names, corresponded
+everywhere to the proportion of illegitimate births as well as of commitments
+for crime. Separating these latter into classes according to degree of guilt,
+he proves that the worst crimes are most common where there is the most ignorance.
+Thus he is enabled to say, “The conclusion is therefore irresistible that education
+is essential to the security of modern society.” That this testimony of Spencer’s
+principal witness is really the truth can be further proved by the statistics in the
+<i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i>, showing that between 1841 and 1876, while the percentage
+of illiterates to population in England and Wales was reduced one-half,
+that of criminals was reduced to one-third of what it was originally. (Vol. VIII,
+pp. 221 and 249-251.)</p>
+
+<p>Spencer also refers to the fact that schools have sometimes been carried on in
+the interest of despotism; but most kinds of food are easily adulterated; and education
+is valuable, notwithstanding, as food for liberty. This last consideration disposes
+completely of his comparison of state-churches with state-schools; and the
+fact, mentioned in the revised but not in the original edition of <i>Social Statics</i>, that
+opinions differ about the best methods of education, is really an additional instance
+of the encouragement given by our system of public schools to independence of
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer’s chief objection to this system is that it does not fit his theory that
+“the liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of all, is the rule in conformity
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[138]</span>with which society must be organised,” (p. 45). Such a “law of right social relationships,”
+(p. 55) would, he admits, require us to repeal our laws against indecency,
+abolish our Boards of Health, and close our poorhouses, postoffices, banks, and
+lighthouses, except in so far as these institutions, like our streets and roads, might
+be cared for by benevolent individuals. He does not tell us how a government,
+thus limited to managing the police, army, and navy, could keep up a fire-department,
+nor how new streets, roads, railways, or canals could be opened, in case the
+owners of land put their prices too high for the projectors; but the most unfortunate
+application of his theory would be to close our public schools.</p>
+
+<p>There is no danger of this, however; and the principal evil likely to result
+from his pushing his theory so far, is that he prevents people from seeing its real
+value, as indicating the direction in which our race has advanced and must make
+all further progress. We shall keep on diminishing the power of the state over the
+man, as well as that of the man over the child, but neither authority will ever be
+abolished entirely. We shall dispense, sooner or later, with some of the public institutions
+which Spencer condemns; but our common schools will, I think, last as
+long as government itself. The abolitionists helped the slave to freedom by pointing
+out the North Star; but they did not advise him to quit solid earth. This mistake,
+although we grant that Spencer shows us our North Star, is sometimes made
+in <i>Social Statics</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Timely help, too, is given by him, in a thoroughly practical way, to those reformers
+who are passing out from under the cloud with a silver lining into a Cleveland
+summer and a fair prospect of a Harrison fall. Among the words best worth
+putting into actions at once, are these: “The right of exchange is as sacred as any
+other right, and exists as much between members of different nations as between
+members of the same nation. Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries.” ...
+“Hence, in putting a veto upon the commercial intercourse of two nations,
+or in putting obstacles in the way of that intercourse, a government trenches
+upon men’s liberties of action, and by so doing directly reverses its function. To
+secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his faculties, compatible with
+the like freedom of all others, we find to be the state’s duty. Now trade prohibitions
+and trade restrictions not only do not secure this freedom, but they take it
+away. So that in enforcing them the state is transformed from a maintainer of
+rights into a violator of rights.” ... “Whether it kills, or robs, or enslaves, or
+shackles by trade regulations, its guilt is alike in kind, and differs only in degree.”
+(<i>Social Statics</i>, ed. of 1850, pp. 326, 327; ed. of 1892, p. 137).</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">F. M. H.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">An Essay on Reasoning.</span> By <i>Edward T. Dixon</i>. Cambridge (Eng): Deighton,
+Bell, &amp; Co. 1891. Pp. 88.</h4>
+
+<p>Some years ago the author of this essay made public certain views of his, on
+“Geometry of Four Dimensions.” He was surprised to find that though his arguments
+were received with incredulity they were not refuted. This result appeared
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[139]</span>to him to be due to the fact that he was not understood, that his views on geometry
+of even two and three dimensions being different from those commonly entertained,
+he had failed of being understood, because he had not begun his explanation at the
+beginning.</p>
+
+<p>He therefore set to work to analyse those views and ultimately published a book
+on the subject. This book, <i>The Foundations of Geometry</i>, was reviewed by us in
+<i>The Monist</i> of October, 1891. But now again the author regards himself as not
+understood. He rested the positions and arguments of his book upon certain views
+of logic and especially of definition, which depart from the orthodox views, and he
+misjudged the fullness of explanation that would therefore become needful. Hence
+this little essay.</p>
+
+<p>The proper approach to the views of the author is through his doctrine of definition.
+Usually definition is regarded as finding its main motive and utility in the
+convenience of social converse. The meaning of any term is regarded as resting
+not in the choice of him who utters it, but in the suppositions of those who are addressed.
+It is true that a license is accorded to any one upon a sufficient occasion
+to give a special intent to some word, but only upon condition that that intent shall
+be made sufficiently express, in other words well understood by those addressed.
+Hence definition is usually taken to mean the recital or the precision of the meaning
+of a term by means of language naturally apt for that end. There is no good sense
+in pretending to effect either one of these ends by language that lacks natural ability
+on that behalf.</p>
+
+<p>Now Mr. Dixon holds, if we understand him, that conventional usage is of very
+subordinate consequence in this matter, that it pertains to the prerogative of an author
+to throw upon those whom he addresses the task of gathering his meanings as
+best they can; that even when he professes to explain his meanings he need not
+seek and employ any plain, direct speech, but may supply his instruction indirectly:
+may ask his audience to solve a problem, or to rightly guess what certain hints
+mean; may require them to extract the meaning in question out of a set of assertions
+that involve the same in a collateral way only. This he calls “implicit definition.”
+It is analogous, he tells us, to an unsolved equation or set of equations in algebra. So
+far as we are aware no one can claim priority of the author in respect to this expedient.
+He seems to regard it as of great importance, and proposes by its aid to overcome
+the difficulties that environ the fundamentals of geometry.</p>
+
+<p>We think that the author is led to put undue confidence in his implicit definition,
+by his peculiar views upon propositions. He holds that all propositions can,
+without loss or gain in the meanings as originally stated, be reduced to statements of
+strict identity. This done, propositions can, as he thinks, be operated upon after the
+fashion usual with equations. But we submit that between a logical proposition
+and an algebraic equation there is a difference that is in general irreducible. For
+example take this proposition, Every parent loves children. To alter this to, Every
+parent is identical with some [or every] person that loves children, as is, we think,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[140]</span>the prescription of Mr. Dixon, will not serve; for by reading our identity in the reverse
+order we have: Some [or every] person that loves children is identical with
+every parent.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Dixon’s views in respect to terms and to the doctrine of denotation and
+connotation depart as widely from the suppositions usually held, as do his views regarding
+propositions and definition. To follow out the consequences of his proposed
+innovations in any adequate fulness is forbidden to us by lack of space. We feel
+sure that further reflection will lead him to much modification of his doctrines.</p>
+
+<p class="right">ρσλ.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion.</span> By <i>Hermann Lotze</i>. Edited by <i>E. C.
+Conybeare</i>, M.A. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, &amp; Co. New York: Macmillan
+&amp; Co. 1892. Pp. 176.</h4>
+
+<p>This book is an excellent translation of one of the most important works of a
+prominent philosopher, who made an unusually strong impression upon the minds
+of his contemporaries. Almost every line of this clean, accurate, and charming
+translation betrays the translator’s devotion to the subject, for he has taken the utmost
+care to bring out the ideas of the author in the same brilliant style for which
+Professor Lotze is justly famous.</p>
+
+<p>The translator says in the preface: “I have completed and venture to publish
+the following translation of Hermann Lotze’s <i>Lectures upon the Philosophy of
+Religion</i> in the same hope in which it was undertaken by my late wife, that it
+may be of use to some who cannot read the German original, and yet desire a concise
+statement of the form in which one of the clearest-minded of our later thinkers
+put to himself those great questions—as to the origin and destiny of the spirit of
+man, as to life in general, and the meaning of the material universe—which occupy
+us all at some time or another, many of us as soon as we have won food and shelter
+for our bodies.”</p>
+
+<p>We do not share Mr. Conybeare’s and his deceased wife’s enthusiasm for the
+author. Although we are not blind to the great deserts of Professor Lotze, his
+amiable personality, the depth of his religious and emotional nature, the breadth of
+his scholarly erudition, and the brilliancy of his ingenious, not to say poetical, presentation
+of philosophical subjects, we cannot conceive that his work is come to
+abide. On the contrary, we consider his philosophy as antiquated in many respects.
+He considers problems that originate from a mere confusion of ideas, as
+being insolvable in their nature, and attempts the solution of other problems with
+inadequate methods. His thoughts still remind us of the ontological spirit of past
+philosophies, and his principles are not in agreement with positivism and the
+methods of scientific research.</p>
+
+<p>As an instance, we quote the following passage: “We must ever set aside any
+attempt to describe in positive terms, or to construct in thought, the process by
+which this absolute being came to be not only one, and that unconditionally, but
+at the same time a many of things which condition one another reciprocally.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[141]</span></p>
+
+<p>Lotze still believes in an “absolute unity” as something prior to the world of
+reality, and he declares that “We cannot Know or Explain how this Absolute
+Unity is also Many” (Sec. XXI); and even if an unconscious being could be a
+Many-in-One, yet it could not, according to Lotze, generate consciousness (Sec.
+XXV). We do not believe that this problem is insolvable, and do not, as does Lotze,
+feel constrained to fall back on idealism. In fact, our position is so different from
+Lotze’s that in spite of the full recognition of his genius, we feel as much severed
+from him as if he belonged to ages long gone by.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Conybeare’s translation is most certainly an invaluable work and is indispensable
+for any English student of Lotze’s philosophy.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">On the Perception of Small Differences, With Special Reference to the
+Extent, Force, and Time of Movement.</span> By <i>George Stuart Fullerton</i> and
+<i>James McKeen Cattell</i>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
+1892. Pp. 159.</h4>
+
+<p>This volume of the Philosophical Series of Publications of the University of
+Pennsylvania gives an account of a large number of experiments made for the purpose
+of testing the perception of small differences of movement, of weight, and of
+light. The most noticeable conclusion arrived at by the authors, is that they cannot
+accept any of the received explanations of Weber’s law. They found from their
+experiments, by the method of estimated amount of difference, that “we tend to
+estimate the intensity of sensation as directly proportional to the intensity of the
+stimulus; consequently, in so far as any deduction concerning quantitative relations
+in sensation can be made from such estimation, the sensation increases as the stimulus
+and not as its logarithm,” thus invalidating Fechner’s law. The authors believe
+also that Weber’s law does not hold for the perception of movement, as they
+find that the error of observation usually increases “as the stimulus is taken greater
+but more slowly,” and that it is proportional to the square root of the stimulus.
+Accordingly, they substitute for Weber’s law the following: “The error of observation
+tends to increase as the square root of the magnitude, the increase being subject
+to variation, whose amount and cause must be determined for each special
+case.” It is proper to add, that Professor Fullerton gives only a qualified assent to
+these conclusions, on the grounds that mathematicians are not agreed as to the
+soundness of the theory upon which the law is based, and that the errors in question
+may not be independent errors. He considers, however, the results obtained
+by the authors “as sufficiently in accord with the laws to justify them in holding it
+tentatively, and subject to criticism.”</p>
+
+<p>As Fechner’s law rests on that of Weber, and on assumptions which appear to
+be incorrect, it also fails, and it follows that the psycho-physical, physiological, and
+psychological theories put forward to account for the supposed logarithmic relation
+between mental and physical processes are superfluous. From these conclusions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[142]</span>we may judge of the importance of the experiments made by Professors Fullerton
+and Cattell, whose work requires to be carefully studied by all those interested in
+the special questions to which it relates.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Psychologie du Peintre.</span> By <i>Lucien Arréat</i>. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892. Pp.
+<span class="smcap">lix</span>, 264. Price, 5 fr.</h4>
+
+<p>The author of this interesting work informs us that it does not aim at being a
+natural history of society, nor is it even a study in professional psychology. This
+is hardly correct, however, as such a study must be based on that of individuals,
+and a writer of M. Arréat’s reputation cannot treat of a large group of individuals
+without throwing light on the psychology of the whole class to which they belong.
+He very aptly likens artists as a whole to a large family, the artist in design to a
+genus of this family, and painters to a species. This has its varieties, and it is by
+the study of these that the author seeks to arrive at a knowledge of the psychology
+of the painter.</p>
+
+<p>Believing that there exists a relation between the temperament and the qualities
+of the mind and that this is influenced by heredity, he devotes the first part
+of the work to questions of physiology and heredity. The second part deals with
+the painter’s vocation, his æsthetic sentiments, his professional memory, and, as the
+evolution of art is connected with the progress of visual analysis, with his sense of
+sight. Then comes an examination of the general mental qualities of the painter,
+his intellectual character, his various phases of memory and aptitudes, and the influences
+which affect his work. The fourth part of the book treats of the painter’s
+character, his egoistic and sympathetic traits, his will, and his moral and social
+traits. And finally reference is made to questions of pathology, particularly defects
+of vision, and to “the miseries of genius.”</p>
+
+<p>On all these subjects M. Arréat has many acute remarks supported by numerous
+facts, often derived from painters themselves, who thus, says the author, will
+be found “living and speaking on each page, just as they are, and making themselves
+known by their works, sympathetic or disagreeable, indifferent or superior, but always
+interesting.” It is noticeable, in connection with the important subject of
+heredity, that in a list of about three hundred painters almost two-thirds are sons
+of painters or of workers in art, and M. Arréat thinks that if more complete information
+were obtainable the proportion would be increased.</p>
+
+<p>In the chapter on the miseries of genius, the author takes exception to the view
+expressed by M. Lombroso that the creative inspiration of genius is, at least in
+some cases, the equivalent of epileptic convulsion. That genius may lead to insanity
+is true; and M. Arréat admits that remarkable aptitudes have often appeared
+in a family at the beginning of its degeneracy. But he adds that painters are for
+the most part healthy, and they show hardly any more singularity than other men
+may have. He concludes his work with the following words: “Genius makes use of,
+as we have sufficiently shown, faculties which are common to nearly all men, if they
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[143]</span>are unequally strong and variously distributed with each. Genius, moreover, in
+the most elevated sense that it can be understood, is an exception among artists
+themselves, and even in genius, the meeting together of several happy gifts is exceptional.
+But it is willingly attributed to all those, whatever may be their art,
+whose works are able to touch the human cords that vibrate the most profoundly.
+Painters appear to us to compose a well-marked type among such. The reader has
+seen the characters of it brought together and discussed in this volume: he will
+preserve its living image after having closed the book.” This in itself furnishes a
+sufficient recommendation for the perusal of M. Arréat’s work, which apart from its
+psychological value, is a perfect mine of gracefully written information about painters
+and their peculiarities.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Physiologie de l’Art.</span> By <i>Georges Hirth</i>. Traduit de l’Allemand et précédé
+d’une Introduction par <i>Lucien Arréat</i>. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1892. Pp. 247.</h4>
+
+<p>We have now occasion to review a work on a subject much akin to the preceding—a
+work which has been translated from the German by the same author, M. Lucien
+Arréat, and supplied by him with a very interesting introduction. This Introduction
+is in reality a résumé by M. Arréat of a series of studies by M. Hirth on
+physiological optics. These studies are of great importance and are classed by the
+French editor under the three heads of Form, Illumination, and Movement. The
+first of these comprises the subjects of monocular and binocular vision, the depth
+and the bilateral enlargement of the visual field, perspective and identical points.
+Under the head of illumination the effect of the “double bath of light” through
+the two eyes, the “luminous equation,” and the problems connected with optical
+measurement are considered.</p>
+
+<p>We have not space to exhibit fully the author’s ideas on these topics, but we
+can state what are regarded by M. Arréat as the two principle propositions which
+give to them their life and unity. One of these propositions is, that the first function
+of our dioptric apparatus consists in furnishing to our central visual organ,
+which M. Hirth terms the <i>internal eye</i>, material which the latter has to interpret.
+The other is that it is necessary to get rid of mathematical concepts, which are
+much too rigid to be applied to the delicate problems of vision, and to fall back on
+visual sensation such as it is. These propositions imply, moreover, the admission
+of an electro chemical process, “without which the properties of the eye and the
+marvels of vision remain inexplicable.” This last conclusion has a bearing on the
+nature of memory, or the recollection of the impressions received by the nerves and
+brain after the original excitation has disappeared. Thus, M. Hirth suggests that
+when we know the physiological procedure in the impregnation of cerebral molecules,
+or in their electric charging, memory will be found to be only the prolongation
+of the duration of consecutive images.</p>
+
+<p>The inquiries of M. Hirth throw great light on the difference between monocular
+and binocular vision, for information as to which and other details of his optical
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[144]</span>theory we must refer our readers to M. Arréat’s Introduction. This concludes with
+a consideration of the perception of light-movement, the reproduction of which is
+said to require a special exercise of attention, direct or indirect. Here we have
+the third degree of attention, according to the views of M. Hirth, who regards it as
+artistic apperception, having its end in itself and capable of being reproduced through
+co-ordination of the movements perceived.</p>
+
+<p>A considerable portion of the second and principal part of this work is occupied
+with the psychology of attention and of the related subject memory. The latter is
+defined by M. Hirth as “a sum of states of perception gradually accumulated by
+the various organs of sense,” and it is thus not a special faculty of the mind. The
+mental condition which results from the action of memory is what is known as <i>disposition</i>.
+This disposition is transmitted from one generation to another, and becomes
+innate as the memory of the species. But it is intimately connected with the
+nervous system, and with the brain regarded as the electric storehouse of memories.
+It is in accordance with these ideas that the author explains the transmission of
+hereditary qualities, the problem which is at present engaging so much attention.
+The innate organisation is a conservation of nervous quality or temperaments associated
+with the anatomical disposition of the nervous system, and a certain condition
+of electrical tension among the cerebral molecules. The transmission of ancestral
+qualities depends, however, on the vigor and good condition of the germ, and
+as the organisation received from our earliest ancestors is the most persistent, the
+primitive “disposition” will subsist even without exercise whilst nutrition and circulation
+assure the continuance of molecular growth.</p>
+
+<p>It is with the visual memory that the author is chiefly concerned, and he affirms
+that the optical phenomena referred to in the Introduction compel us to admit the
+existence in the brain of a central organ, which he terms the internal eye. In order
+to determine the position of this organ, which is the real seat of visual perception,
+to the exclusion of the retina, whose function has been overestimated, M. Hirth
+considers the anatomical and physiological aspects of the question, and he accepts
+the conclusion arrived at by H. Munk in his <i>Functions de l’écorce cerebrale</i>, that
+perception is the function of a particular portion of the cerebral cortex. There
+thus exist two visual centres or “internal eyes,” one in each convexity of the occipital
+lobes, as shown in Plate V. of the present work. Munk’s researches would seem to
+prove, moreover, that not only is there a general localisation of visual memories,
+but that each memory is fixed in a precise and determined place. The centres of
+memory and the centres of perception, which M. Hirth supposes to be simply a
+phase of memory, are the same. Moreover attention is connected with perception,
+but it is an imperfect state of memory. Attention requires the expenditure of force,
+while perfect memory acts spontaneously; and it is only in this form, “exempt from
+fatigue, that it becomes the passive servant of our instincts and sensations, of our
+voluntary acts, of our labor.” Memory when perfect is automatic, and according
+to the theory of M. Hirth, who does not accept M. Ribot’s monoideistic theory, it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[145]</span>is accompanied with automatic attention, which is the result of a gradual transformation
+of “energetic” attention, and attains in a normal adult an incredible development
+both in quantity and quality. This <i>latent</i> attention is required by the
+existence of latent memory, which is properly spoken of by M. Hirth as an organic
+attribute of the highest moment, seeing that it forms the basis of all individual acquirements.
+It would seem to answer, however, to what is often spoken of as the
+subconsciousness.</p>
+
+<p>We can understand how this doctrine of latent memory and latent attention
+can have an important bearing on the question of the origin of the artistic sense,
+especially as each brain centre may be supposed to have its own memory, and each
+fundamental memory its special temperament. The activity of such centres is due
+in great measure, as pointed out by M. Ribot, to nutrition and blood-circulation
+but M. Hirth adds a third factor, electrical tension. According to his theory, cerebral
+activity rests ultimately on electricity, the invisible currents of which, maintaining
+the whole system in a state of tension, are “the inferior currents of the latent
+memory,” the brain centres being electrical accumulators. This idea, which the
+author applies also to the explanation of colored visual memories, is open to strong
+critical objections. In relation to the particular subject of art, the author shows
+that the hereditary transmission of talent depends on the active maintenance of the
+special temperament of certain fundamental memories and their associations, and
+talent itself therefore depends on the existence of such a temperament. We here
+come in contact with M. Lombroso’s theory of the physiological degeneracy of genius,
+which M. Hirth opposes with much force, and we think on the whole with success.
+This discussion occupies the last chapter of a work that, as our readers will be able
+to judge from the glance given here at some of its leading topics, has a scientific
+value quite apart from the special subject of art which it is intended to illustrate,
+and which it goes far towards establishing on a physiological basis.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Les Altérations de la Personnalité.</span> By <i>Alfred Binet</i>. Paris: Félix Alcan
+1892. Pp. 323. Price, 6 fr.</h4>
+
+<p>In the present work, the accomplished director of the laboratory of physiological
+psychology at the Sorbonne has brought together and systematised all the most
+reliable phenomena bearing on one of the most curious subjects of inquiry now engaging
+attention. Notwithstanding the disagreement between different experimenters
+as to particular facts, all have arrived at the conclusion that, under special conditions,
+the normal unity of consciousness may be broken, and that then there is the
+production of several distinct consciousnesses “each of which can have its perceptions,
+its memory, and even its moral character.” No one is better fitted than M.
+Binet to perform the eclectic work he has undertaken of discussing the recent researches
+on the alteration of personality, without regard to the special views of particular
+schools.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[146]</span></p>
+
+<p>The subject is considered by him under the three heads of Successive Personalities,
+Coexisting Personalities, and The Alterations of Personality in the Experiences
+of Suggestion. The two first parts deal chiefly with phenomena presented by somnambulic
+and hysteric subjects. In the third part M. Binet applies the fact of the
+duplication of personality to the explanation of the phenomena of spiritism, the
+term he very properly gives to so-called spiritualism. He regards the supposed
+spirit agent as the subconscious personality of the medium acting under the influence
+of suggestion, a view which undoubtedly meets most of the actual facts of
+spiritism.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the divisibility of the ego, there can be no doubt of the unity
+of the personality under normal conditions. The question is as to the nature of this
+unity, and the author follows M. Ribot in affirming that it consists in the coördination
+of the elements which compose it. He repudiates the idea that memory is the
+sole foundation of consciousness, as not only may one memory embrace different
+states, but the same individual may have several memories, several consciousnesses,
+and several personalities. For the opinion of M. Binet on other points we must
+refer our readers to the work itself, which forms an important addition to the International
+Scientific Library.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">L’Homme dans la Nature.</span> By <i>Paul Topinard</i>. With 101 Illustrations in the
+text. Paris: Félix Alcan. 1891. Pp. 350. Price, 6 fr.</h4>
+
+<p>The present is the third work in which Dr. Paul Topinard, the well-known
+pupil and successor of M. Broca, the founder of French Anthropology, has given
+to the public his general ideas in relation to the science of which he has made so
+profound a study. In 1876 he published his <i>Anthropologie</i>, which reflected in
+great measure the teaching of his master, Broca. Ten years later, in 1886, appeared
+his larger and more important work, <i>Eléments d’anthropologie générale</i>,
+which treated of the history and methods of anthropology, with various other subjects.
+Now Dr. Topinard gives us his matured ideas on “Man in Nature,” by
+which is meant physical nature, the object of the present work being to show the
+place that man occupies physically among animals, and his probable origin or descent.
+It is not surprising that a writer who was the pupil of Professor de Quatrefages
+as well as of Professor Broca should declare himself a supporter of the principle
+of unity of composition, formulated by M. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,
+from which flows that of evolution, that is the natural derivation of beings from
+one another. As to the means by which this is brought about, the author reserves
+his opinion until the publication of a further work which he has in preparation.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Topinard devotes the second chapter of the present work to a consideration
+of the position to be accorded to anthropology in relation to the other sciences.
+He declares it to be a pure, concrete science, essentially anatomical and observatory,
+and thus distinguishes it from ethnography, which has to do with peoples under
+all their aspects. Both alike are branches of the science of man in its broadest
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[147]</span>sense. If anything can be added to the author’s explanation, it is that anthropology
+has to do with mankind as a series of <i>individuals</i>, while ethnography is concerned
+with the <i>groups</i> into which such individuals are collected. This is not inconsistent
+with Dr. Topinard’s definition of anthropology as the science “which
+studies human races, the human species, and the place of man in the classification
+of animals.” For all the facts on which it is based are derived from the observation
+of individuals, and when races are compared with each other, they are compared
+as ideal individuals, formed by a generalisation of certain prevailing qualities,
+just as mankind by a similar process becomes an ideal individual, a scientific
+Adam, who is compared with other animals. There is an apparent difficulty in relation
+to psychology which Dr. Topinard claims entirely for anthropology, but it
+disappears when we see how closely he associates psychology with physiology. He
+says, and we quite agree with him, that “characters of a psychological nature, reduced
+to their most simple expression, whether attributed to human races, or to
+the general human type, belong to ordinary physiological characters; the corresponding
+anatomical part takes its place by the side of other physical characters;
+the theory and explanation of intellectual operations, of feelings and volitions, belong
+to the special physiology of man and to the application of the ideas of general
+physiology.”</p>
+
+<p>While accepting as correct the division of anthropology, in its restricted sense
+into general and special, as proposed by Broca and Bertillon, the author thinks it
+does not conform to the plan which should be adopted if it is desired to proceed,
+by the method of analysis and synthesis, from the known to the unknown. The
+plan adopted by Dr. Topinard is, by analogy with the procedures of general zoölogy,
+to begin by recalling the general notions applicable to his subject as to the
+distribution of animals by groups of varying values, the choice of characters on
+which they repose, and the differences between the race, the species, the family,
+and the order, these last forming the pivoting point of his views as to the place of
+man in classification. Then commences the study of characteristics, the mode of
+ascertaining them, of putting them to use and of appreciating their value, accompanied
+by examples, drawn from special anthropology, proper to illustrate the
+methods employed. Finally, a parallel is drawn between man and animals, that a
+conclusion may be arrived at as to the place of man in the series of beings, and his
+probable genealogy.</p>
+
+<p>All these points are carefully considered by the author, who has framed a
+canon of the medium adult man of the European type, a figure based on which
+forms the frontispiece to the work. The proportions of this figure are derived from
+a comparison of all the most authentic published measurements, and the canon
+framed from them conforms closely to that recognised in artists’ studios, except that
+in the latter the arm is too short and the neck too long.</p>
+
+<p>The most generally interesting subjects discussed by the author are those connected
+with the relationship of man to other animals, and particularly the structure
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[148]</span>of the brain. Dr. Topinard makes a careful comparison of the cerebral convolutions
+of various animals and man, with numerous illustrations, and he arrives at
+the conclusion that none of the characters said to distinguish man from the anthropoid
+apes are absolute; all are reducible to a question of degree of evolution, the
+superior degree being sometimes found among the anthropoids, and the inferior degree
+with man. The cerebral type of the anthropoids is a human type not completely
+developed, or the cerebral type of man is a developed simian type. Man
+thus undoubtedly belongs to the order of the Primates. After considering the form
+and volume of the simian and human brains, the author remarks that “man alone
+has a frontal lobe developed in all its parts, and filling up a large, concave, and
+deep frontal shell which externally gives place to the forehead, one of the characteristics
+of man.”</p>
+
+<p>Connected with the form and volume of the brain is the transformation of the
+animal skull into the human skull, and the relation of this transformation to the
+facial characteristics of man. These points, and also various questions connected
+with the bipedal or quadrupedal attitude, and with the attitude and function of
+prehension, are treated in detail, as are certain other distinctive simian and human
+characters. A chapter is devoted to a consideration of the important subject of retrogressive
+anomalies and rudimentary organs. In his concluding chapter Dr.
+Topinard points out the place of man in animal classification, and refers to the
+questions of his single or multiple origin, his genealogy and his future. In connection
+with the subject of classification, the author dwells on the fact that man is not
+the only relatively perfect animal, and yet that none of the mammalia, which we
+admire for their beauty or for their usefulness, equal the monkeys in the possession
+of a brain approaching the human type. The brain, the hand, and the attitude
+are the three characteristics which especially connect man with the monkey, and
+particularly with the anthropoids, and the question has long been agitated whether
+in these particulars the last named is allied more closely to man or to the other
+monkeys. Dr. Topinard affirms that in all these particulars the anthropoids should
+be classed with the other monkeys, and therefore that man stands alone.</p>
+
+<p>As to the descent of man, the French anthropologist would seem to agree with
+M. Vogt that the type from which man has developed was also the source of the
+monkey and anthropoid types, and that it first appeared at the commencement of
+the Miocene period, when the earliest monkeys succeeded to the Lemurian of the
+preceding Eocene epoch. Dr. Topinard remarks that this conclusion is agreeable
+to that of the eminent American palæontologist, Professor Cope, who makes man
+descend directly from the Lemurian without passing through the monkeys and the
+anthropoids, basing his opinion chiefly on dentition. The question of the descent
+of man is connected with that of the singleness or multiplicity of his origin, and on
+this point the author does not express a decided opinion. He says that all existing
+types of humanity could be reduced to three, the Europo-Semitic, the Asiatico-American,
+and the Negro; if not to two, the White and the Negro. He adds that,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[149]</span>nevertheless, “in losing oneself in the depths of time, we can conceive the Negro,
+born the first, giving birth successively to the Australoid with frizzled hair, to one
+of the forms of the Brown stock with straight or wavy hair, and finally to the white
+European.” Probably his actual opinion is to be gathered from his final statement
+when comparing the order of the Primates to a tree, that the Lemurians are its roots
+giving birth to several stems, of which one is that of the monkey, from which
+branched the anthropoids, and another, whose point of contact with the first is unknown,
+gives the actual human branch, which runs parallel to that of the anthropoids
+without being connected with it, and goes beyond it.</p>
+
+<p>As to the future of the human race, Dr. Topinard affirms that the volume of the
+brain will notably increase, that dolichocephaly will give place to a universal brachycephaly,
+and that the cellules of the brain will be perfected in quality. As the human
+brain is being thus perfected, the animals nearest to the human type will disappear,
+and then man will really think himself the centre round which the universe
+gravitates, the sovereign for whom nature has been created. But even then the
+anatomist will bring him to himself by uttering the words of Broca, “Memento te
+animalium esse.” This work, which forms volume seventy-three of the International
+Scientific Library, is sure to be widely read, and it will be indispensable to the
+student of anthropology, who will find in it all the information he requires on the
+methods of the science.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Die Urheimath der Indogermanen und das europäische Zahlsystem.</span> By
+<i>Johannes Schmidt</i>. Berlin, 1890. Pp. 56.</h4>
+
+<p>This essay is an important contribution to the problem of the place of origin of the
+Indo-Germanic languages. The author is confident that while nothing certain was
+known before, he has established at least one fact which will give us a clue to the
+solution of the problem. This fact is the interference of the duodecimal system
+with the decimal system. The former is of Babylonian origin, but its effects are
+noticeable upon almost all the Aryan tongues. The duodecimal system is not
+original with the Goths or with any of the Teutons, which can be proved by the fact
+that 60 or a <i>Schock</i> was a round number, but not twelve, the etymology of twelve
+(<i>twa-lif</i>) being two above a <i>lif</i>, which latter means a certain set. Thus when the
+Gothic hundred as a rule meant 120, when for a long time they distinguished between
+great hundreds (i. e. 120) and small hundreds (i. e. 100), this was due to
+foreign influence. For if twelve had been the basis of their number system, a <i>lif</i>
+would have meant twelve and the numerical arrangement would have progressed not
+in 10 × 12 but consistently in 12 × 12 or 144. Everything points to the supposition
+that the Babylonian <i>sossos</i> is still preserved in the German <i>Schock</i> (60). Accordingly,
+says Schmidt, the Europeans must have been exposed to a strong influence of the
+sexagesimal system; they must have been nearer to the centre of Babylonian civilisation
+than are the valleys of the Indus and the Eastern Iran. Professor Schmidt
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[150]</span>considers Penka as refuted and also all those who regard Europe as the home of
+Indo-Germans.</p>
+
+<p>We have to add that the eminent philologist when, discussing the problem of
+the cradle of the Indo-Germanic languages does not touch upon the other problem
+of the home of the Aryans, the latter being mainly an anthropological question.
+Schmidt says (p. 13): “I do not intend to enter into the problematic domain of anthropology.
+The original race-characters of the Indo-Germanic nations, their
+causes and the home in which they were moulded, also the physical conditions
+and mixtures of the races which speak our languages, undoubtedly can be treated
+with success only by the representatives of physical anthropology. But exactly
+so the problem of the cradle of the original Indo-Germanic speech and the evolution
+of its several languages, as they are known in history, can be solved only by
+philologists.”</p>
+
+<p>This is very true. Perhaps we shall approach the subject with better success
+if we learn to distinguish between the anthropological problem of the origin of the
+Aryan race and the philological one of the origin of the Aryan languages. A European
+origin of the one might not exclude an Asiatic origin of the other, and it
+still remains possible, that European Aryans when migrating south and east developed
+through their intercourse with semitic and other races the beginning of a civilisation
+which powerfully affected all the Aryans, since there is ample evidence
+that even in olden times a lively commerce took place between them. When Prussian
+amber is found in Pelasgian graves, why should not the sexagesimal system of the
+wealthy nations of the south have spread over northern countries?</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in das neue Testament.</span>
+By <i>Heinrich Julius Holtzmann</i>. Dritte verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage.
+Freiburg, i. B.: J. C. B. Mohr. 1892. Pp. 508. Price, 9 M.</h4>
+
+<p>It has been said that the scientific purpose of an academical text-book should
+be to educate the student to scientific independence, and its practical purpose to
+make it available for the adherents of all parties and denominations; and these two
+purposes are the surer attained the less the author represents his own conception as
+that which alone can be justified. This is the principle according to which Professor
+Holtzmann’s <i>Lehrbuch</i> has been written. That he has fully attained his
+aim, will not be doubted by those who know his previous and painstaking labors,
+in which he proves himself as a theologian fully imbued with the spirit of science
+and scientific critique.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of this work appeared in 1885, the second in 1886, and the
+present and third edition can make the just claim of being carefully revised and
+perfected in every respect, so that it is to be regarded as a comprehensive, concise,
+and clear review of the critical materials of the New Testament. There is no
+doubt that the work as it now stands will remain the best book for reference of its
+kind.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[151]</span></p>
+
+<p>Professor Holtzmann in a brief introduction of seventeen pages sketches the history
+and literature of New Testament criticism. The book is divided into two parts,
+the first treating the subject in a general way, the second entering into its several
+details. In the first part the author presents us with a history of the text and of its
+traditions, explaining the causes of the alterations that were introduced either unintentionally
+or by mistake; he reviews the critical apparatus for text-revision and also
+the history of the printed and revised editions up to the present attempt at emendation.
+Then a history of the canon is given, from the oldest Christian literature down
+to the radical criticisms of the present time. In the second and special part we find a
+careful compilation of all the criticisms concerning the single books and epistles of
+the New Testament. The first chapter treats of St. Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians,
+Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, to Philemon, the Colossians, Ephesians,
+Philippians, the pastoral epistles; further, the epistle to the Hebrews, which is non-Paulinian,
+the two epistles of St. Peter, the epistle of St. Jude, and that of St.
+James. The second chapter introduces us into the historical books of the synoptic
+gospels and the Acts, where, in a brief review of fifty-seven pages, we find the same
+data presented which are more fully explained in another publication of our author,
+reviewed in <i>The Monist</i>, Vol II, No. 2.</p>
+
+<p>A new period in the development of Christian literature begins with all those
+writings which go under the name of St. John. A discussion of these books is contained
+in the third chapter, which treats of the apocalypse, the fourth gospel, and
+St. John’s epistles. Not the least interest attaches to the fourth chapter, the subject
+of which is the vast domain of the apocryphal books of the New Testament,
+the number of which has, of late, been greatly increased by several new discoveries.
+The subject divides itself naturally into apocryphal gospels (Chap. II), apocryphical
+stories about the lives and deeds of the apostles (Chap. III), apocryphical epistles
+(Chap. IV), and apocryphical apocalypses (Chap. V).</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Sammlung von populär-wissenschaftlichen Vorträgen über den Bau und die
+Leistungen des Gehirns.</span> By Professor <i>Theodor Meynert</i>. Vienna and
+Leipsic: Wilhelm Braumüller. 1892. Pp. 253.</h4>
+
+<p>This latest publication of Professor Meynert’s was mentioned in the last number
+of <i>The Monist</i> by Mr. Christian Ufer, in the department “Literary Correspondence.”
+Since its appearance Professor Meynert has died. His name has stood foremost for
+a great number of years in the ranks of psychiatrical investigators, and his contributions
+to the science to which he was devoted, have, perhaps more than those of
+any other, tended to its permanent advancement. The activity of his life has extended
+over a great number of years, and his labors have not only been applied to
+the theoretical interests of his science alone, but have also been directed—and this
+is the most important part of every scientist’s work—to bringing the results of
+his investigations into connection with the great body of knowledge at large, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[152]</span>especially to putting in popular form, and bringing within the reach of the general
+reader, the facts of the science which he contributed so much to establish.</p>
+
+<p>The present lectures date from the year 1868. They owe their origin to the
+identification in later years of the interests of medicine with the interests which
+every human being has at heart, of resolving the mysteries of mental operations generally.
+Their main subject is the description and investigation of the structure of
+the cerebral organs; and the elucidation in the light of such description of the psychical
+operations of the brain. The fundamental facts of this province are not
+difficult. The main thing required is to free ourselves from the impediments which
+artificial thought on this subject has at all times imported into the consideration of
+intellectual facts. Our knowledge in this domain is founded on observation and
+introspection; not upon dialectics. Phenomena, simply, are presented to observation,
+and not the ultimate essences of forces. So, too, the apparatus of observation and introspection
+give only their own phenomena. Their contents are the animated external
+world as it affects conscious beings, and involves, besides intuition, the facts of memory.
+Unpersonal inherited memories, which take the form of instinct, are not forthcoming.
+The present lectures do not pretend to give instruction in the anatomy of
+the brain <i>per se</i>, but simply in so far as it is necessary to the understanding of the
+brain’s mechanism. All things viewed, all things intuited are contents of consciousness,
+which in its limitations to the sense-impressions of the individual being, we
+term the ego, or <i>I</i>. In so far as the external world is the intuited contents of consciousness,
+the extent of the latter is increased, the ego, the <i>I</i>, expands into the
+secondary ego, or <i>I</i>. In this doctrine of a secondary ego the problems which grow
+out of the behavior of individuals towards the external world are resolved in the
+single explanation that the ego of each particular group of things seeks to preserve
+itself by internal and external motions. The ego is simply in the possession of itself
+in every extension which it acquires; if such extension consists of a common possession,
+its desire and tendency to preserve such is simply explained by the fact that
+such possession is the ego itself. Amongst the intuited objects of the ego are to be
+classed also as component parts of the secondary ego of every individual, the other
+living individualities of the world. From the point of view of this fact, the ego
+appears in its social rôle. The present lectures consequently extend to the consideration
+of the interactions of brains in society, to culture and civilisation, and seek
+to establish the phenomena of these domains as facts of physical knowledge. The
+method of physical inquiry is that of comparison by the alteration of the attendant
+circumstances in which the psychical mechanism acts. Physiology bases it on experiment.
+Nature also supplies experiments with the results that also embrace
+phenomena of culture. In the directions indicated here, the diseases of the mind
+afford a comparative means for the investigation of the phenomena of consciousness,
+a doctrine of natural cerebral experiments, and a foundation for a knowledge of the
+phenomena of mind.</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[153]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="PERIODICALS_I">PERIODICALS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 5.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber ein optisches Paradoxon.</span> By <i>Franz Brentano</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Flatternde Herzen.</span>” By <i>Adolf Szili</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber Begründung einer Blindenpsychologie von einem Blinden.</span> By
+<i>Friedrich Hitschmann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Bemerkungen über die von Lipps und Cornelius besprochene Nachbilderscheinung.</span>
+By <i>Otto Schwarz</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 6.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Beiträge zur Dioptrik des Auges.</span> By <i>M. Tscherning</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Optische Streitfragen.</span> By <i>Th. Lipps</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 1 and 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber die Schätzung kleiner Zeitgrössen.</span> By <i>E Schumann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Zum Begriff der Lokalzeichen.</span> By <i>C. Stumpf</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Zur Kenntniss des successiven Kontrastes.</span> By <i>Richard Hilbert</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The first article is on an optical paradox. Let two equal parallel lines be
+drawn, as in the cut below; then let two small straight lines be drawn from the extremities
+of these in such a way that in the first they form acute angles with the
+line and in the second, obtuse angles. The first, it will be seen, appears shorter
+than the second. What is the explanation of this phenomenon?</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="cut1" style="max-width: 35.9375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cut1.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Cut 1.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[154]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp62" id="cut2" style="max-width: 15.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cut2.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Cut 2.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp37" id="cut3" style="max-width: 9.375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cut3.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Cut 3.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="cut4" style="max-width: 40.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cut4.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Cut 4.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="cut5" style="max-width: 50.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cut5.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Cut 5.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The author’s answer is, that this phenomenon is a consequence of the well-known
+fact that we overestimate small angles, and underestimate large ones. The
+presence of the lines has nothing to do with the optical illusion, as the inserted
+cut, in which the lines are omitted, shows. (<a href="#cut2">Cut 2.</a>) The optical illusion is also not
+present when the lines are rectangularly attached, as is <a href="#cut3">Cut 3</a>. These facts prove
+that angular <i>inclination</i> is the decisive factor. The following cuts show this, the
+first in a more and the second in a less marked degree. (<a href="#cut4">Cuts 4, 5.</a>) The simplest
+case in which the explanatory factor of this phenomenon is involved, is that of the
+estimation of the distance of an isolated point from the extremities of a short straight
+line. The estimation of this distance is dependent upon our estimation of the angle
+made by lines drawn from the point to the extremities of a short line. If this estimation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[155]</span>is false, it produces by an exact trigonometrical law, an error in the estimation
+of the corresponding distance. This explains all. In our first figure the factor
+of illusion is eight times presented: hence its marked character.</p>
+
+<p>The second article consists of a rather long series of experiments on the so-called
+“flatternde Herzen” by Adolph Szili.</p>
+
+<p>The third article is on the foundations of a psychology of the blind, by a blind
+man, Friedrich Hitschmann, of Vienna. This article contains a number of interesting
+facts concerning the sensory, intellectual, and emotional life of blind people,
+and affords a great many valuable hints for the development of the special psychology
+which the author has in view.</p>
+
+<p>The first article of No. 6 of the <i>Zeitschrift</i> is a very exhaustive one, some sixty
+pages in length, filled with special and technical investigations concerning the dioptrics
+of the eye. When light passes from one refracting medium into another it is
+partially reflected at the dividing surface, and transmits by reflection the objects
+from which it has proceeded. This is also the case with the human eye, which is
+itself a lens. The refracted pictures are the only pictures of importance to the possessor
+of the eye; but just as in the construction of optical instruments, the reflected
+or “lost” images are of supreme importance to the optician in the determination
+of the properties of his productions, so these same pictures in the human eye
+are of supreme importance to the physiologist and the psychologist. This is the
+subject of Dr. Tscherning’s researches.</p>
+
+<p>In the second article Dr. Th. Lipps discusses some mooted questions of optics.
+The first part of the article is a reply to Schwarz’s criticism in the preceding number
+of the <i>Zeitschrift</i>. The second part is a review of Franz Brentano’s explanation
+of the optical paradox, discussed in the second paragraph of this notice. Lipps declares,
+that, though there is some truth in Brentano’s explanation, it is nevertheless an
+error to believe that acute angles, <i>as such</i>, are overestimated, and obtuse angles, as
+such, are underestimated. On the contrary, every time such errors in estimation
+occur, there exist particular reasons for it, the character of which renders the attempt
+impossible to derive the estimation of distance directly from the estimation
+of angles. Lipps supports his position by actual facts. His chief and most philosophical
+remark is, that it is a perilous and improper thing to do to explain isolated
+optical illusions by isolated and independent hypotheses; optical illusions are not
+exceptions: they constitute a class of phenomena in themselves, and they should
+be considered in their natural and logical connection. (Hamburg and Leipsic:
+Leopold Voss.).</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4>VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Vol. XVI. No. 3.</h4>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber Real- und Beziehungs-Urtheile.</span> By <i>J. v. Kries</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Was ist Logik?</span> By <i>A. Voigt</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Zur Psychologie der Landschaft.</span> By <i>R. Wlassak</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Des Nic. Tetens Stellung in der Geschichte der Philosophie.</span> By <i>M.
+Dessoir</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The articles of this magazine are usually very rigorous and learned; and the
+contents of the present number are in keeping with its reputation. Prof. J. v.
+Kries discusses in an essay, evoked by the recent articles of Riehl, the subject of
+“real and relational judgments”; his object is to establish a classification, and display
+the logical connection, of judgments generally. Real judgments are predications
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[156]</span>concerning reality or actual facts; relational judgments predicate simple relations
+of concepts, etc. The first requisite of a scientific exactness of thought, says Kries,
+is the distinction and determination in any given case of judgments which are real
+and judgments which are relational. In the second article, which is long and exhaustive,
+Dr. Voigt endeavors to determine the characters and functions of the
+different kinds of logic. In view of the great prominence into which algebraical
+logic of late years has come, this article is one of considerable interest. Voigt defines
+the pretensions and powers of the two opposing systems of philosophical and
+algebraical logic, and attempts to set forth the justification of each. Voigt, as
+opposed to Husserl, cordially recommends the study of algebraical logic to philosophers,
+that both disciplines may profit by the intercourse. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4>PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE. Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 5 to 8.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Nos. 5 and 6.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die Wirklichkeit als Phänomen des Geistes.</span> (Concluded.) By <i>A. Rosinski</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Wesen und Bedeutung der Impersonalien.</span> By <i>R. F. Kaindl</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Zur Geschichte und zum Problem der Aesthetik.</span> By <i>E. Kühnemann</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Nos. 7 and 8.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber die Grundformen der Vorstellungsverbindung.</span> Psychologische
+Studie. By <i>M Offner</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Zur Geschichte und zum Problem der Aesthetik.</span> (Concluded) By <i>E.
+Kühnemann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Werke zur Philosophie der Geschichte und des socialen Lebens</span> (Second
+Article: <i>G. de Greef, Introduction à la sociologie</i>). By <i>F. Tönnies</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Recensionen.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>A. Rosinski’s contribution is a metaphysical essay on reality viewed as a phenomenon
+of the mind. The results of his discussion are these: that the world of
+experience, with all its laws and phenomena, and all we assume to exist <i>per se</i>, is
+referable wholly to ourselves; that the primal source and cause of all reality is not
+a something which lies absolutely outside us, but is simply our own self, or ego. In
+what sense reality is reality, the author proposes to discuss in future articles.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Raimund Friedrich Kaindl discusses, in the second article, the character
+and meaning of the impersonal verbs. The discussion is made both from the psychologico-logical
+point of view, and from the point of view of comparative philology.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Philosophische Monatshefte</i> contain, in each issue, a very exhaustive
+bibliography of all the works which have appeared during the month in the provinces
+connected with philosophy. This department is conducted by Dr. Ascherson,
+the librarian of the Berlin University library, and forms a very important and valuable
+feature of this magazine. (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 100. Nos. 1 and 2.</h4>
+
+<p>This well-known magazine, formerly edited by Dr. J. D. Fichte and Dr. Ulrici, is
+now presided over by Dr. Richard Falckenberg, of Erlangen. It has reached its hundredth
+volume, and with the present two numbers begins a new series. Its reviews
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[157]</span>and lists of newly published works are comparatively complete. Its articles, though
+generally tinged with scholasticism and chiefly treating of philosophico-historical
+subjects, deal, nevertheless, with some modern and living questions; for example,
+Dr. Max Schasler’s discussion of the proceedings on the recent Prussian school law;
+Dr. Eugene Dreher’s consideration of the law of the conservation of force; and Dr.
+Nikolaus von Seeland’s discussion of the deficiencies of the current theory of force.
+The other articles are contributed by A. Wreschner, G. Frege, J. Zahlfleisch, and
+Robert Schellwien. (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4>THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. August, 1892. Vol. IV. No. 4.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Extent of the Cortex in Man, as Deduced from the Study of Laura
+Bridgman’s Brain.</span> By <i>Henry H. Donaldson</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Some Influences which Affect the Rapidity of Voluntary Movements.</span>
+By <i>F. B. Dresslar</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Experimental Research Upon the Phenomena of Attention.</span> By <i>James
+R. Angell</i> and <i>Arthur H. Pierce</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Some Effects of Contrast.</span> By <i>A. Kirschmann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Report on an Experimental Test of Musical Expressiveness.</span> By <i>Benjamin
+Ives Gilman</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Psychological Literature.</span> (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>MIND. New Series. No. 3. July, 1892.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lotze’s Antithesis between Thought and Things.</span> (I.) By <i>A. Eastwood</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Festal Origin of Human Speech.</span> By <i>J. Donovan</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Logical Calculus.</span> (III.) By <i>W. E. Johnson</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Field of Æesthetics Psychologically Considered.</span> (I.) By <i>H. R.
+Marshall</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Discussions</span>: The Influence of Muscular States on Consciousness. By <i>Edmund
+B. Delabarre</i>; Dr. Münsterberg and his Critics. By <i>E. B. Titchener</i>. The
+Definition of Desire. By <i>Henry Rutgers Marshall</i>. Feeling, Belief, and
+Judgment. By <i>J. Mark Baldwin</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Critical Notices.</span> (London: Williams &amp; Norgate.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. July, 1892. Vol. II. No. 4.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Natural Selection in Morals.</span> By <i>S. Alexander</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">What should be the Attitude of the Pulpit to the Labor Problem?</span> By
+<i>W. L. Sheldon</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ethics of the Jewish Question.</span> By <i>Charles Zeublin</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Machiavelli’s Prince.</span> By <i>W. R. Thayer</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On the Founding of a New Religion.</span> By <i>B. Carneri</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">An Analysis of the Idea of Obligation.</span> By <i>Frank Chapman Sharp</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Reviews.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[158]</span></p>
+
+<p>Prof. S. Alexander, in his lecture delivered before the Ethical Societies of
+Cambridge and London, here reproduced, points out that the growth and change
+of moral and social ideals are the result of a process of mental conflict. Professor
+Sheldon thinks only a partial solution of the labor problem is possible until the
+second coming of men somewhat of the type of St. Francis of Assisi, “who will
+sacrifice their personal opportunities, abandon their station in the world, and go
+down to apply their gifts and acquirements to the cause of the lower stratum of society.”
+The religious as well as economic opposition to Judaism, according to Mr.
+Charles Zeublin, is caused by the exclusiveness of the Jew, and his ultimate welfare
+and that of his neighbors requires a humanitarian treatment within and without Judaism.
+Mr. William R. Thayer shows that Machiavelli merely described things as
+they were in his time, and deduced the laws which actually controlled the public
+deeds of rulers; and that it is now “the duty of all men to sweep away the old
+falsehood that rulers and governments are absolved from paying heed to those
+ethical principles to which every individual is bound.” According to Mr. B. Carneri,
+the living at peace with oneself and one’s fellow-men is possible only without
+religion, “because there is no morality without contentment, and it is the highest
+degree of discontent to strive for something beyond this world.” Mr. Frank Chapman
+Sharp concludes that when the element of <i>the good</i> is taken out of the conception
+of obligation, this degenerates into mere submission to an arbitrary imperative;
+the foundation for the distinction between right and wrong must be sought in
+something that appeals to us as good, and its ultimate criterion can be given only
+by our chosen ideal. (Philadelphia: <i>International Journal of Ethics</i>, 118 S.
+Twelfth Street.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4>THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. July, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.</h4>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Inhibition and Freedom of the Will.</span> By <i>Dr. James H. Hyslop</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Classification of Cases of Association.</span> By <i>Mary W. Calkins</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Origin of Pleasure and Pain.</span> By <i>Dr. Herbert Nichols</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On Primitive Consciousness.</span> By <i>Hiram M. Stanley</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Reviews of Books.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Summaries of Articles.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The confusion incident to the old controversy about freedom is due, says Dr.
+James H. Hyslop, to a failure to distinguish between the <i>proof</i> of freedom and the
+<i>conditions</i> of it, that is, “the circumstances that are necessary to it, or the characteristics
+that constitute it.” Freedom consists in “self-initiative and independence
+of external causes, whether there be any choice between alternatives or not,” and
+inhibition and deliberation bring about both of these circumstances. Miss Mary
+W. Calkins rejects the ordinary division into association by contiguity and association
+by similarity, and gives detailed summaries of the fundamental characteristics
+of consciousness on which association depends and of the characteristics of association
+proper; the ultimate fact of association, whether it be psychical or physical or
+both, we do not understand. Dr. Herbert Nichols, in the first part of his article
+on the “Origin of Pleasure and Pain,” considers the phenomena of pleasure and
+pain associated with the action of the senses, and concludes that there is no “tangible
+evidence indicating that pleasures and pains are inseparable attributes of other
+senses or polar complements of each other,” and that separate sensations of pain
+and of pleasure are probable. Mr. Hiram M. Stanley regards pure pain as primitive
+mind, and pleasure as the polar opposite to it, although they are neither absolutely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[159]</span>essential one to the other, pleasure being traced to “an intermediary feeling
+between pain as produced by excess, and pain from lack as differentiated form.”
+Consciousness is fundamentally pain and pleasure as serving the organism in the
+struggle for existence. (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn &amp; Company.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4>THE NEW WORLD.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Social Plaint.</span> By <i>E. Benjamin Andrews</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Religious Evolution.</span> By <i>Minot J. Savage</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Origin and Meaning of the Story of Sodom.</span> By <i>T. K. Cheyne</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Foundation of Buddhism.</span> By <i>Maurice Bloomfield</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Imagination in Religion.</span> By <i>Francis Tiffany</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The next Step in Christianity.</span> By <i>S. D. McConnell</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Implications of Self-Consciousness.</span> By <i>Josiah Royce</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">How I came into Christianity.</span> By <i>Nobuta Kishimoto</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">New Forms of Christian Education.</span> By <i>Mrs. Humphry Ward</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Essence of Christianity.</span> By <i>Otto Pfleiderer</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ecclesiastical Impedimenta.</span> By <i>J. Macbride Sterrett</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">New Testament Criticism and Religious Belief.</span> By <i>Orello Cone</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Thomas Paine.</span> By <i>John W. Chadwick</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Social Betterment.</span> By <i>Nicholas P. Gilman</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Rôle of the History of Religions in Modern Religious Education.</span>
+By <i>Jean Réville</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Poet of His Century.</span> By <i>E. Cavazza</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Divine Love and Intelligence.</span> By <i>James C. Parsons</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Book Reviews.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Summaries of Articles.</span> (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, &amp; Company.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: June, 1892. No. 198.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Existence et développement de la Volonté.</span> I. Existence de la Volonté.
+By <i>A. Fouillée</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sur quelques Idées du Baron d’Holbach.</span> By <i>A. Lalande</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Essai sur la Philosophie de Proudhon.</span> By <i>G. Sorel</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Travaux du Laboratoire de Psychologie Physiologique.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: July, 1892. No. 199.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">L’inconnaissable dans la philosophie moderne.</span> By <i>G. Fonsegrive</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La musique d’après Herbert Spencer.</span> By <i>J. Combarieu</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Essai sur la philosophie de Proudhon</span> (concluded). By <i>G. Sorel</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: August, 1892. No. 200.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Étude critique sur le mysticisme Moderne.</span> By <i>Rosenbach</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le développement de la volonté.</span> By <i>A. Fouillée</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La beauté organique: étude d’analyse esthétique.</span> By <i>A. Naville</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Analyses et Comptes Rendus.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>According to M. Fouillée, the principle which tends to dominate psychology
+and physiology is the ubiquity of will and of feeling, and consequently of consciousness.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[160]</span>Psychology will end by recognising the continuity and the transformation of
+modes of psychical energy, as physics recognises the continuity and the transformation
+of modes of physical energy, and philosophy will see in physical energy the
+external expression of will.</p>
+
+<p>M. Fonsegrive maintains that the rejection of metaphysics as science, which
+marks the modern theory of the unknowable, is the consequence of Kant’s <i>a priori</i>
+theory as to the origin of our knowledge. The laws of the mind have no real existence
+prior to experience, and universal and necessary notions can be discovered
+only by mental analysis. In this manner the existence, and even the essence, of
+metaphysical beings may be known, but only of such as experience puts in communication
+with ourselves. Thus we know God as the necessary first cause, although
+our notion of God is one of negation, of experimental notions.</p>
+
+<p>After showing that Spencer’s theory of music had numerous antecedents, and
+that its conclusions are unacceptable on various grounds, M. Combarieu affirms
+that the secret of the musical art is the identity of the musical idea with the imitation
+or expression of the real world. All music contains a double verity; it is the
+meeting place of the senses and of the rational world confounded in a unity which
+is the work of art, as man is the combination of a soul and a body confounded in
+the real unity of life. Spencer is an excessive simplifier, and does not see the complexity
+of certain questions, which he seeks to resolve by undervaluing them. But
+he has thrown light on one of the aspects of the musical problem.</p>
+
+<p>In this final essay on the philosophy of Proudhon, M. Sorel considers the theory
+of justice by the light of the notion of free will. He differs somewhat from Proudhon,
+and affirms that “the just man is the upright man such as our ideal conception
+of antiquity represents him to us, but transformed by our consciousness as refined
+by the influence of Christianity.” In dealing with the real organisation of societies
+it is necessary to distinguish between matters of justice and those of right, which
+includes that of force, of which war is an application. After showing the connection
+of the economic <i>contradictions</i> of Proudhon with the state of war, and the value of
+education for the realisation of equilibrium in the state. M. Sorel affirms that education
+ought to be based on manual labor, for the explanation of which science
+should be taught; and that instruction should endure throughout life, so that men
+can elevate themselves and that an equilibrium may be obtained between knowledge
+and industrial needs. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="plates">APPENDIX.<br>
+<span class="smaller">PLATES BELONGING TO THE ARTICLE “THE NERVOUS GANGLIA OF INSECTS.”</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>KEY TO THE PLATES.</h4>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>col. ven.—ventral column.</li>
+  <li>lob. dors.—dorsal lobe.</li>
+  <li>lob. ven.—ventral lobe.</li>
+  <li>lob. v. inf.—inferior or lower ventral lobule.</li>
+  <li>lob. cr.—crural lobule.</li>
+  <li>con. dors. sup—superior (or upper) dorsal connective filaments.</li>
+  <li>con. dors. moy.—medial dorsal connective filaments.</li>
+  <li>con. dors. inf.—inferior (or lower) dorsal connective filaments.</li>
+  <li>con. v.—ventral connective filaments.</li>
+  <li>n. cr.—crural nerve.</li>
+  <li>n. al.—alary nerve.</li>
+  <li>lob. al.—alary lobule.</li>
+  <li>rac. sup—upper (or superior) root.</li>
+  <li>rac. moy.—medial root.</li>
+  <li>rac. inf.—lower (or inferior) root.</li>
+  <li>fa. as.—ascending fasciculus.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp46" id="plate1" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/plate1.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>PLATE I.</p>
+      <p><i>Rhizotrogus solstitialis.</i> First thoracic ganglion. (Horizontal sections.)</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp46" id="plate2" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/plate2.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>PLATE II.</p>
+      <p><i>Rhizotrogus solstitialis.</i> First thoracic ganglion. (Horizontal sections.)</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp46" id="plate3" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/plate3.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>PLATE III.</p>
+      <p><i>Rhizotrogus solstitialis.</i> First thoracic ganglion. (Longitudinal sections.)</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp46" id="plate4" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/plate4.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>PLATE IV.</p>
+      <p><i>Rhizotrogus solstitialis.</i> First thoracic ganglion. (Transversal sections.)</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[161]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="masthead">
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Vol. III.</span>
+<span class="smcap spacer">January, 1893.</span>
+<span class="smcap">No. 2.</span></p>
+
+<h2>THE MONIST.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_DOCTRINE_OF_AUTA">THE DOCTRINE OF AUTA.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the “Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society”
+(Vol. VI, Part IX, p. 475, 1890), Dr. Johnstone Stoney, F. R. S.,
+published an interesting and carefully-reasoned paper “On the Relation
+between Natural Science and Ontology.” The same author
+had previously (1885), in a Friday evening discourse at the Royal
+Institution of London, discussed the problem, “How Thought Presents
+Itself Among the Phenomena of Nature.” Dr. Stoney’s communications
+have not (I venture to think) received the consideration
+to which they are entitled alike on the score of their logical consistency,
+if his premisses and assumptions be granted, and by reason
+of the author’s scientific eminence as a physicist. I therefore propose,
+first, to endeavor to set forth his monistic <i>Doctrine of Auta</i>;
+and secondly, to offer some criticisms thereon. Unfortunately Dr.
+Stoney’s pages bristle with new technical terms, which, though no
+doubt they have been serviceable to him in the attainment of precision
+of thought, make his paper hard reading. Some of these I
+shall introduce; others which seem less essential to the argument I
+shall omit. It would be scarcely fair on the reader’s teeth or on the
+author’s store to transfer all these hard nuts from Dublin to Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>No philosophical discussion of a problem involving perception
+can be regarded as complete without the introduction of an orange.
+Dr. Stoney, indeed, substitutes a fire; but this, though it shows
+philosophical independence, cannot for a moment be sanctioned by
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[162]</span>any good Berkeleyan. An orange then, as such, is a phenomenal
+object formed, in a way we need not now consider, by the synthesis
+of perceptions. These perceptions, themselves synthetic, Dr. Stoney
+calls “tekmeria,” since they are signs within my mind that events
+are happening in a part of the universe that is distinct from my
+mind. The phenomenal object is supposed by men untrained in
+inquiries relating to the mind to have a non-egoistic existence—that
+is, an existence independent of the percipient mind. But this
+supposition is found on careful scrutiny to be an error. It is a product
+of mental synthesis, and is therefore termed by Dr. Stoney a
+“syntheton.” It is also termed a “protheton” in contradistinction
+to an “antitheton,” which we shall come to shortly.</p>
+
+<p>Now if the phenomenal orange is a “syntheton”—that is, a
+product of perceptual synthesis—it clearly cannot be regarded as
+the <i>cause</i> of the perceptions, through and by means of which it is
+constructed in mental synthesis. Here popular thought and ordinary
+language are apt to mislead us. For ordinary language is
+throughout built upon the popular belief that the objects of the phenomenal
+world are non-egoistic or independent <i>existences</i>, and, moreover,
+that they are the cause of the perceptions which come into existence
+when we exercise our senses. This is, however, “to put
+the car before the horse.” It is to imagine that a structure built up
+out of the effects of a thing can be the cause of those effects. The
+phenomenal orange is built up of perceptions instead of being the
+cause of them. Their cause is therefore to be sought elsewhere
+than in the phenomenal world of objects. The orange, <i>qua</i> orange,
+is therefore a “syntheton,” and cannot as such be the cause of the
+perceptions or “tekmeria,” which go to its synthesis.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now look at these perceptions or “tekmeria” from
+another point of view. They are states of consciousness: they are
+<i>thoughts</i>, if we use this word in its widest extension to embrace
+everything of which I or my fellow-men or the lower animals are
+conscious. But my own thoughts are, so long as they last, things
+that exist. They may be representative of something outside me,
+but they <i>are</i> also <i>real existences</i>. While they last they constitute a
+part of the universe of existing things. They are, in Dr. Stoney’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[163]</span>terminology, <i>auta</i> (τά ὄντα αὐτά), the very things themselves. An
+<i>auto</i> (we shall throughout <i>italicise</i> all that belongs to this autic order
+of existence) is a <i>thing which really exists</i>, and in no wise depends
+on the way we, human minds, may happen to regard it. Our impressions
+or beliefs about it may be correct or may be erroneous;
+but the term <i>auto</i> means the <i>thing itself</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Perceptions, then, inasmuch as they are thoughts, are <i>auta</i>.
+They belong, moreover, to that class of real existences which, since
+they are woven into the tissue of <i>minds</i> (my mind and the minds of
+my fellow-men and of the lower animals) are termed <i>egoistic auta</i>.
+They do not remain, however, persistent and unchanged; for perceptions
+come and go and are modified as they pass like waves over
+the surface of consciousness. What causes this coming and going,
+and these changes in the <i>egoistic auta</i> we call perceptions? Not, as
+we have already seen, the world of phenomenal objects! What
+then, but other <i>auta</i>, which, since they produce effects upon men’s
+minds through their senses, may be termed <i>sense-compelling auta</i>?
+The phenomenal orange is thus a “syntheton” produced through a
+synthesis of the effects wrought upon my <i>mind</i> by an autic existence,
+called by Mr. Stoney the <i>onto-orange</i>. The phenomenal orange is,
+as we have seen, a “protheton”; the <i>onto-orange</i> is its <i>antitheton</i> in
+the universe of real existences.</p>
+
+<p>We are now beginning to open up Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s conception
+of the relation of the autic <i>universe</i> to phenomenal Nature.
+Nature is the totality of phenomenal objects; but corresponding
+with each phenomenal object or “protheton” there is an <i>onto-object</i>
+or <i>antitheton</i>; and the totality of <i>antitheta</i> constitute the <i>universe</i>.
+<i>Minds</i>, mine and those of other beings, constitute the egoistic part
+of the universe; the rest of the universe is constituted by <i>sense-compelling
+auta</i>.</p>
+
+<p>We may liken the <i>sense-compelling universe</i> to a great machine in
+motion, and the <i>tekmeria</i> or perceptions which it produces within
+our minds to shadows cast by it. The laws of the movements of
+the machine are the real laws of the universe—laws of nature are
+but the laws of the changes which the shadows in consequence
+undergo. It is these shadow laws alone which natural science can
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[164]</span>reach: the real laws of the <i>universe</i> of which these are shadows are
+beyond its grasp. In Nature the reflective eye of science sees not
+only phenomenal objects, but the relations which they bear to each
+other. But such relations are themselves phenomenal; they are
+protheta of which the <i>onto-relations</i> of the real <i>universe</i> are the
+<i>antitheta</i>. Every space-relation, therefore, in Nature—for instance,
+that my foot is at present three yards from the fender—has a real
+autic relation in the sense-compelling <i>universe</i>, which is its <i>antitheton</i>;
+an <i>onto-relation</i> between the <i>onto-foot</i> and <i>onto-fender</i>, meaning by
+these terms the <i>auta</i> which send men the tekmeria which, when
+synthesised, furnish these two phenomenal objects. The space-relations
+of Nature are but the shadows cast by the <i>autic relations</i>
+within the <i>minds</i> of men, and perhaps some other animals.</p>
+
+<p>But among these shadows there can be no efficient causation.
+When a change takes place in the sense-compelling <i>universe</i>, the
+mighty machine will cast one shadow before the change and another
+after. The second shadow will accordingly succeed the first in orderly
+sequence, but the relation between the shadows is not the
+relation of cause and effect. Accordingly, in the laws of Nature
+which have been discovered by scientific investigation, we find
+abundant instances of unfailingly concomitant events and of uniformities
+of sequence, but not one single instance of cause and effect.
+There is nothing competent to cause one body to exclude
+another from the space it occupies. A statement of the fact is one
+of the laws of Nature. If a stone be allowed to drop in the vicinity
+of the earth, its downward speed is accelerated by a perfectly definite
+law. This law is one of the Uniformities of Nature which scientific
+inquiry has brought to light. But within the domain of Physics
+there is no cause of acceleration. The facts as to what occurs in
+Nature can be observed; the circumstances under which they occur
+can be investigated; similar cases can be compared; and the laws
+to which the simultaneous or successive events conform may be
+brought to light. But here our knowledge ends. Physical science
+has said its utmost.</p>
+
+<p>Now all this is changed when we turn to the only field of observation
+accessible to us in which we are dealing directly with <i>auta</i>.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[165]</span>The <i>thoughts</i> of which <i>I</i> consist, the thoughts which are my <i>mind</i>,
+are <i>auta</i>; a very small group of <i>auta</i>, no doubt, in the mighty <i>Universe</i>,
+but still an actual sample, though a very special and one-sided
+sample of what <i>auta</i> really are. Now in the operations that go on
+in my mind I do find instances, some few instances, of causes producing
+effects. The familiar case of a geometrical demonstration
+producing in a man’s mind a belief in the truth of the conclusion is
+a case in point. Here the understanding of the proof is the efficient
+cause of the belief in the conclusion which accompanies that understanding.
+A wish to accomplish something, and a knowledge of
+how to go about it, both of which are <i>thoughts</i> in the <i>mind</i>, are a
+part of the efficient cause of subsequent events, unless counteracted
+by other causes. A few other examples can be obtained from the
+same small field of observation; and this is all that man, in his
+isolated position, has any right to expect; for the bulk of his thoughts
+are due, at least in large part, to autic causes which lie outside
+his mind, and it is there also that those of his thoughts that are
+known to be causes, usually exhibit their effects. When perceptions
+arise in my mind, the effect indeed is within my mind, but the
+cause is beyond it; and when I move my muscles the cause is within
+my mind, but it is outside the mind that it operates. The instances
+are indeed few where the causes and the effects are both within my
+tiny group of <i>auta</i>, and it is only in these cases that I can have the
+process of causes producing effects under my inspection.</p>
+
+<p>But since cases can be cited, however few, they suffice to establish
+the fact that the relation of cause and effect, in its full sense,
+does exist in some instances in the autic <i>universe</i>; whereas it has nowhere
+any place within the domain of physical science. The relation
+of cause and effect among other <i>auta</i> cannot from the nature of
+the case be proved. But from its occurrence in that small part of
+the <i>universe</i> which we do know, we may fairly assume its occurrence
+in all parts of that <i>universe</i>. Such an assumption is at any rate
+justifiable by scientific method.</p>
+
+<p>We must now pass to another point. The scientific analysis of
+Nature by the physicist has led to an hypothesis which may be regarded
+as the utmost simplification of which the shadows cast within
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[166]</span>the human mind by the sense-compelling autic <i>universe</i> are susceptible.
+This Dr. Stoney calls the Diacrinomenal Hypothesis;
+according to which Nature is made up of objects each of which consists
+of almost inconceivably minute and swift motions. The phenomenal
+orange is a group of molecular motions; and if I bowl it
+across the table the visible molar motion is a secondary motion of
+that group of primary molecular motions which constitutes the phenomenal
+object as such. And not only is the phenomenal object a
+group of minute and swift motions, but all the steps between that
+object and our brain, all that takes place in the air or æther, in our
+organs of sense and nerves, can also be represented in terms of
+motion. And finally a change consisting of motions takes place in
+the brain itself, whereupon we become conscious of thought. That
+change which would be appreciated as motions by a bystander who
+could search into our brains while we are thinking, we should experience
+to be <i>thought</i>. Thus we find that in certain cases the <i>autic
+existence</i> that corresponds with motion, namely in the motions of
+our own brain molecules, is <i>thought</i>. And the most probable hypothesis
+as to the true relation of phenomenal Nature and the autic
+<i>universe</i> is that what we have found to be true in some cases is
+always true, and that in every case it is <i>thought</i> (or rather a change
+in the causal relation in which thought stands to thought) which is
+the <i>antitheton</i> of motion; so that the totality of all actual existences,
+the <i>universe</i>, is in fact identical with the totality of existing <i>thought</i>.
+Of course all this <i>thought</i>, with the exception of that tiny group that
+is my <i>mind</i>, is as much outside my consciousness as are the thoughts
+of my fellow-men and of the lower animals.</p>
+
+<p>Under this view the <i>minds</i> of men and of other animals are specialised
+specks, as it were, of a vast ocean of <i>thought</i>, to which they
+bear a like inconspicuous proportion to that borne by the few brain
+motions of which they are the <i>antitheta</i>, to the totality of motions
+throughout Nature. Under this view the laws of the <i>universe</i> are
+the laws of <i>thought</i>. This is a very different thing, be it noted, from
+saying that they are the laws of human thought. The laws of human
+thought bear to them the same small proportion which the laws of
+the action of the wheels of a watch upon one another bear to the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[167]</span>entire science of dynamics. The science of dynamics could never
+be evolved from a study of these laws. But perhaps it may not be
+hopeless for man to attain some sound knowledge of the laws of
+cosmic <i>thought</i>, inasmuch as we have some few instances of the
+way <i>thought</i> acts upon <i>thought</i> open to our investigation in our own
+minds, and since this is supplemented by our knowledge of the physical
+laws of nature, which are a shadow, a probably complete shadow,
+of all the laws of causation which operate throughout the <i>universe</i>,
+throughout the all-embracing <i>Mind</i> of the great <i>Autos</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Such is Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s conception of the relation of
+Natural Science to Ontology. I have presented it partly in his own
+words, partly in mine. It has been my conscientious endeavor to
+put it in as strong and favorable a light as possible, and not in any
+way to weaken the strength of its logical consistency. The main
+thesis may now be briefly summarised in the following propositions:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="hanging">The phenomenal object is a syntheton or product of mental
+synthesis.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">Its efficient cause is a <i>real existence</i> or <i>antitheton</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">Nature is the totality of phenomenal syntheta.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">The <i>universe</i> is the totality of autic <i>antitheta</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">There is no causation in Nature; but the Uniformities of Nature
+are the shadows of the causal Laws of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>Thought</i> has no place in Nature: it is part of the autic <i>universe</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">The syntheton of which <i>thought</i> is the <i>antitheton</i> is the motion
+of brain molecules.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">It is a probable hypothesis that the <i>antitheta</i> of which the
+motions of Diacrinomenal Nature are the syntheta, are
+<i>thought</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging">This is the monistic hypothesis, that there is but one kind of
+existing thing, viz. <i>thought</i>; in contradistinction to the
+dualistic hypothesis that there are two kinds of existing
+things, <i>thought</i> and <i>motion</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I now pass from the attitude of expositor to the attitude of critic.
+And first I will attack a quite outstanding position, namely Dr.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[168]</span>Stoney’s assumption that Clifford’s hypothesis which he supports
+and extends is <i>the</i> monistic hypothesis, and by implication that it is
+the <i>only</i> monistic hypothesis. In opposition to this I venture to
+affirm that there are several forms or phases of monism. I have not
+space to discuss the matter; and must content myself with a bare
+enumeration of some of the logically possible forms of Dualism and
+of Monism.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="hanging">1) <span class="smcap">Dualism.</span></p>
+
+<blockquote class="sub">
+
+<p><i>A.</i> <i>Synthetic Dualism</i>: according to which there are two entities,
+the mind and the body; and these</p>
+
+<blockquote class="sub">
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>a</i>) either work side by side, without interaction, in pre-established
+harmony (<i>philosophic dualism</i>),</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>b</i>) or interact the one on the other (<i>empirical dualism</i>).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><i>B.</i> <i>Analytic Dualism</i>: according to which there are two elements
+as the result of analysis; <i>motion</i> (with or without a material basis)
+and <i>consciousness</i>; the two elements being related in such a way that
+consciousness is inseparably associated with certain complex modes
+of motion.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="hanging">2) <span class="smcap">Monism.</span></p>
+
+<blockquote class="sub">
+
+<p><i>A.</i> <i>Synthetic monism</i>: according to which there is but one entity.
+And this entity may be:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="sub">
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>a</i>) The body, of which consciousness is a product (<i>materialistic
+or physical monism</i>);</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>b</i>) The mind, of which the body in common with the world of
+phenomena is a fiction (<i>idealistic monism</i>);</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>c</i>) The conscious organism, exhibiting certain transformations of
+energy which are felt as psychical states (<i>scientific monism</i>).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><i>B.</i> <i>Analytic monism</i>: according to which analysis discloses but
+one element; and this may be</p>
+
+<blockquote class="sub">
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>a</i>) <i>motion</i>, of which (or of one phase of which) consciousness is
+merely the psychical aspect (<i>analytic materialism</i>);</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>b</i>) <i>consciousness</i>, of which motion is merely the phenomenal aspect
+(<i>analytic psychism</i>);</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>c</i>) <i>x</i> (<i>the unknowable</i>) of which motion is the physical aspect and
+consciousness the psychical aspect (<i>monistic agnosticism</i>).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[169]</span></p>
+
+<p>Such are some of the forms or phases of monism as compared
+with those of dualism. It will be seen that Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s
+speculations fall under the head of what I have termed analytic
+psychism, according to which the sole ultimate reality disclosed by
+analysis is consciousness or thought. So far I have only reminded
+my readers that this, though one form of monism, is not the only
+form. To which Dr. Stoney may very possibly reply that it matters
+not to him whether there are five or fifty-and-five monistic heresies
+besides the true creed of which he is the prophet. He is only concerned
+with the establishment of the true monistic faith. And as
+herein I should very heartily agree with him, I will pass on without
+delay to criticise an assumption that lies close to the heart and centre
+of his hypothesis.</p>
+
+<p>On the first page of Dr. Stoney’s essay we read: “Let us, for
+convenience, call these real existences <i>auta</i>—the very things themselves.
+An <i>auto</i> is a thing that really exists, and in no wise depends
+on the way we, human minds, may happen to regard it.” And on
+the second page we read: “My own thoughts are, at all events,
+things that exist: they at least are <i>auta</i> so long as they last. They
+are, accordingly, while they last, a part of the <i>universe of existing
+things</i>.” No proof is offered of this latter assumption that my
+thought, human thought, is part of the universe of <i>auta</i>. I venture
+to call this assumption in question. I demand proof of its validity.
+Nay, I am ready to go further and roundly assert that my thoughts
+are not <i>auta</i>, and furnish no evidence whatever as to the nature of
+such <i>auta</i>. I am quite aware that I may seem to be giving the lie
+to a direct deliverance of consciousness; and that it will be said that
+it is obviously impossible to deny the existence of thought without
+at the same time exercising that, the existence of which is denied—a
+dictum which contains a very pretty play upon two different uses of
+the word “existence.”</p>
+
+<p>I go back to the orange, without which as a philosopher I am
+lost. I hold it in my hand, look steadfastly at it, and drink in with
+my nostrils its fragrant aroma. What says consciousness? That
+the phenomenal object I call an orange exists. It says nothing
+about independent existence, nothing about <i>auta</i>. The direct deliverance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[170]</span>of consciousness is that an object-in-consciousness exists.
+If a “plain man” says that the orange has a real existence, as such,
+independent of consciousness, he is going beyond the direct deliverance.
+And if a philosopher says that consciousness has a real existence,
+as such, independent of the object, he too is going beyond
+the direct deliverance. And if, as would seem to be the case, Dr.
+Stoney relies on the deliverance of consciousness for the justification
+of his statement that “perceptions, while they last, are <i>auta</i>,
+real existences,” I submit that he is relying on a misinterpretation
+of the deliverance of consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>The existence of the object-in-consciousness is the datum from
+which plain man and philosopher alike must start. On this foundation
+we must base all our reasonings and speculations. Physical
+science directs its attention to the “object” side of the given relation.
+And it reaches its “diacrinomenal” result that the orange
+may for physical purposes be represented as a group of swift and
+rapid molecular motions. But can physics at any stage of its analysis
+shake itself free from the “consciousness” side of the relation?
+Assuredly not. All that it can do is to represent the object-in-consciousness
+we call an orange in terms of other objects-in-consciousness
+we term molecular motions. Psychology directs its attention
+to the “consciousness” side of the given relation. It analyses the
+object-in-consciousness into percepts, sensations, and so forth. But
+can psychology at any stage of its analysis shake itself free from the
+“object” side of the relation? Assuredly not. All that it can do
+is to represent the consciousness-of-the-object we call an orange, in
+terms of the objects-in-consciousness we term sensations, relations
+between sensations, and so forth.</p>
+
+<p>The relation of the consciousness-of-an-object to the object-in-consciousness
+may be made clear by the analogy, which is something
+more than an analogy of vision and the visual field. For clear
+and distinct vision, a well-illuminated object of vision, and a healthy
+organ of vision are necessary as coöperating factors. So, too, for
+distinct consciousness a definite object-in-consciousness and a well-defined
+consciousness-of-the-object are necessary as coöperating factors.
+More than this. Unless there be some object of vision, however
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[171]</span>vague, and some organ of vision, however dim, no vision at all
+is possible. The coöperation of the two factors is essential. So,
+too, unless there be some object-in-consciousness, however vague,
+and some consciousness-of-the-object, however dim, no consciousness
+at all, in anything like the human sense of the word “consciousness,”
+is possible. Here, again, the coöperation of the two
+factors is essential. <i>And neither factor is ever given in experience
+without the other.</i></p>
+
+<p>Writing as I am, for readers of <i>The Monist</i>, I need hardly turn
+aside to explain what I mean by an object-in-consciousness. And
+yet perhaps a few words on the subject may not be out of place, and
+may prevent possible misunderstanding. An object-in-consciousness
+is not necessarily a tangible, visible object, like an orange. The
+yellowness, the sweetness, the weight, the bare existence of the
+orange, may each in turn be an object in consciousness. For the
+physicist the tangible orange may be represented in terms of swift,
+infinitesimal motions; and these, not less than the phenomenal
+orange, are objects in consciousness. A conception of consciousness
+itself, an imperfect conception, but the best we can frame, may
+be an object of consciousness, just as a reflected image of the eye
+may be to the eye an object of vision.</p>
+
+<p>It is generally believed by modern psychologists that all objects-in-consciousness
+are derivable by processes of abstraction, generalisation,
+and so forth, from the primitive datum of a perceptual object.
+And it must be remembered that it is only in abstraction that
+we distinguish between the object-in-consciousness and the consciousness-of-the-object.
+The two terms of this, for us, inevitable
+relation are given in inseparable coördination. But in abstract
+thought we can distinguish the inseparable terms; distinguish in
+thought, that is to say, what is inseparable in actual experience.
+To continue the analogy of vision, we can make the one term focal,
+while the other term remains marginal in the field of view. And
+we can neglect, for the purposes of our thought and reason, the
+marginal term. But we cannot get rid of it. We may deal, as in
+physics, with motion, neglecting the consciousness in and through
+which it is appreciated; but we cannot get rid of this consciousness.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">[172]</span>Or we can deal, as in psychology, with the consciousness, neglecting
+the object-in-consciousness; but we cannot get rid of this object.
+The object-out-of-consciousness and the consciousness-without-an-object,
+are alike unknown—or, if the reader prefers it, unknowable,
+which he may write with as many capital letters as seemeth to him
+good. The common-sense realist believes in the existence of objects-out-of-consciousness.
+The analytical psychist believes in the
+existence of consciousness-without-an-object. Both are, if the views
+here advocated be sound, attributing independent existence to that
+which, so far as human knowledge is concerned, has only dependent
+or relative existence.</p>
+
+<p>It is unfortunate that the terms “real” and “reality” should
+ever have been applied to the independent existence of so-called
+things-in-themselves. I think such terms as Dr. Stoney’s “autic”
+and “autic existence” would be far preferable. For the word “real”
+has a meaning and force which is quite definite. The orange that
+I hold in my hand and see with my eyes is as real as real can be.
+And if a philosopher steps in and says, “My dear sir, <i>that</i> is not real!
+The real reality is, according to some, mind-stuff or consciousness;
+according to others, motion of—well I don’t quite know what, so let
+us simply call it motion; and according to others this real reality is
+unknowable”—I say if a philosopher steps in and talks like this, one
+is reminded of Lamb’s remark on Coleridge. Coleridge had been
+maundering on, as was his wont, on “subject” and “object” and
+all the rest of his second-hand German metaphysics, when Lamb
+broke in, with his forcible stammer, in a stage whisper: “N-n-n-never
+mind C-c-c-coleridge; it’s only his f-f-f-fun.”</p>
+
+<p>I repeat that the orange I hold in my hand and see with my
+eyes is as real as real can be; and that we have here the standard
+and criterion of reality not only for plain men but for philosophers.
+In the perceptual object we have reality given in its clearest, fullest,
+and most forcible form. Every step in the analysis of the perceptual
+object-in-consciousness; every step in the analysis of the consciousness-of-the-object
+takes us so far further from reality at its best. The
+orange as an object-in-consciousness is far more real to me than
+either the swift infinitesimal motions of the physicist, or the “syntheton”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[173]</span>of related and integrated sensations of the psychologist.
+And when we reach the autic existence which is supposed to underlie
+both motion and consciousness, we seem to get just as far as it is
+possible for the human mind to get from the real orange with which
+we started. And yet it is to this autic existence that metaphysicians
+apply the term “real” in a different sense. For so far I have used
+the word “real” for that which is given in experience. But metaphysically
+the word “real” is used to indicate independence of experience.
+I repeat that for this independent existence some such
+word as Dr. Stoney’s “autic” would be far better and less misleading.
+It would emphasise the distinction between <i>real</i>, that is to
+say given in direct experience, and <i>autic</i>, that is to say independent
+of experience.</p>
+
+<p>Accepting at any rate for our present purpose this distinction,
+we have as coördinate realities the object-in-consciousness and the
+consciousness-of-the-object. And these two are only different aspects
+of the one great reality, the reality of experience. Of these two
+aspects neither is more real than the other. The object-in-consciousness
+is every bit as real as the consciousness-of-the-object; the
+orange as real as our perception thereof. Both are intensely and
+vitally real; but—here I am in opposition to Dr. Stoney—<i>neither is
+autic</i>. I can find no warranty for such autic existence in direct experience
+or the so-called deliverance of consciousness. Nor am I
+aware of any process of reasoning by which it can be demonstrated.</p>
+
+<p>But, it may be said, is it not in accordance with scientific method
+to make an assumption and then see how far such assumption is
+justified by the results it enables us to reach? Assuredly such procedure
+is allowable and often fruitful. It is not on such grounds,
+however, that Dr. Stoney, if I rightly understand him, bases his
+doctrine of the psychical nature of <i>auta</i>. Let us, nevertheless, pay a
+moment’s attention to this assumption and the correlative assumption
+of analytic materialism. Consciousness and matter-in-motion
+(or bare motion perhaps) are the ultimate elements reached by the
+psychologist on the one hand and the physicist on the other. Neither,
+if he knows his business, pretends by this analysis to have reached
+autic existence. But it is open to each to make an assumption. The
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">[174]</span>materialist says: I assume that motion is the true autic existence, of
+which, under appropriate conditions, human consciousness is merely
+a psychical aspect. The psychist says: I assume that consciousness
+is the true autic existence, of which motion is merely the phenomenal
+aspect. I confess that if I were forced to choose one of these two,
+(which fortunately I am not,) I should elect to throw in my lot with
+the materialists. For if justification by results is to be the criterion,
+I hold that the results the materialists have to show far outweigh
+any results which the analytic psychists can produce. But the fact
+of the matter is that in neither case do the results flow from the
+autic assumption. All the results are equally valid for the student
+who holds fast to the relativity of object-in-consciousness to consciousness-of-the-object.
+Since therefore the assumption is valueless
+so far as practical results are concerned, and since it is somewhat
+repugnant to sound reason to assume that either term of a given relationship
+is the same out of relationship as it is in relation to its
+fellow, I contend, as against both materialist and psychist, that it
+fails to make good its claim to acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>What shall we say then of <i>auta</i> or <i>things in themselves</i>? Simply
+that we do not know anything about them—that they are outside
+the pale of human knowledge. If we even say they exist we are
+using the word “exist” in an autic and unreal sense. It is phenomenal
+Nature which constitutes the real Universe; of its autic <i>shadow</i>,
+supposing that there be such a <i>shadow</i>, we know nothing. Need
+we then stay to criticise this unknown <i>shadow</i>?</p>
+
+<p>Even if we take Dr. Johnstone Stoney’s hypothesis as it stands
+we find a marked distinction between the sense-compelling <i>auta</i> and
+the egoistic <i>auta</i>, or between the sense-compelling aspect of <i>auta</i>
+and the egoistic or perceptive aspect. How is this distinction to be
+explained and accounted for? I can see no answer to this question
+save that the distinction is a matter of experience. Why not, then,
+trust experience fully? Why go beyond it at all? Why not say that
+both the sense-compelling aspect and the perceptive aspect are part
+of the relation which is given in experience? If Dr. Stoney could
+only see his way to this concession and could be led to adopt scientific
+monism, which is based on relativity, he would still secure all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[175]</span>that is valuable in his hypothesis, and at the same time get rid of
+the difficulties which as it stands encumber it. But it would no
+longer be a doctrine of <i>auta</i>.</p>
+
+<p>For scientific monism is not a doctrine of <i>auta</i> but a doctrine of
+phenomena—phenomena regarded not only in their physical but
+also in their psychological aspect. Unifying these two diverse
+aspects, it contends that the conscious organism is one and indivisible;
+that it is a product of evolution; that in its physical or material
+aspect this evolution has given rise to the body and brain;
+that in its psychical or immaterial aspect it has given rise to the
+mind and human consciousness; that these two aspects, though distinguishable
+in analytic thought, are inseparable in phenomenal existence;
+that just as the complex modes of energy of the human
+brain have been evolved from the simpler modes of energy that are
+found throughout organic and inorganic nature, so too the complex
+modes of consciousness of the human mind have been evolved from
+the simpler modes of infra-consciousness&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_19" href="#Footnote_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> that are associated with
+merely organic and inorganic modes of energy. The last clause is
+admittedly hypothetical. But it is submitted that the hypothesis is
+one that is founded on strictly scientific and in no sense metaphysical
+or autic analysis.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">C. Lloyd Morgan.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_19" href="#FNanchor_19" class="label">[19]</a> See <i>Mental Evolution</i> in <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, No. 2 (Jan. 1892), p. 161.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[176]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="EVOLUTIONARY_LOVE">EVOLUTIONARY LOVE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>AT FIRST BLUSH. COUNTER-GOSPELS.</h4>
+
+<p>Philosophy, when just escaping from its golden pupa-skin,
+mythology, proclaimed the great evolutionary agency of the
+universe to be Love. Or, since this pirate-lingo, English, is poor
+in such-like words, let us say Eros, the exuberance-love. Afterwards,
+Empedocles set up passionate-love and hate as the two coördinate
+powers of the universe. In some passages, kindness is the word.
+But certainly, in any sense in which it has an opposite, to be senior
+partner of that opposite, is the highest position that love can attain.
+Nevertheless, the ontological gospeller, in whose days those views
+were familiar topics, made the One Supreme Being, by whom all
+things have been made out of nothing, to be cherishing-love. What,
+then, can he say to hate? Never mind, at this time, what the scribe
+of the apocalypse, if he were John, stung at length by persecution
+into a rage unable to distinguish suggestions of evil from visions of
+heaven, and so become the Slanderer of God to men, may have
+dreamed. The question is rather what the sane John thought, or
+ought to have thought, in order to carry out his idea consistently.
+His statement that God is love seems aimed at that saying of Ecclesiastes
+that we cannot tell whether God bears us love or hatred.
+“Nay,” says John, “we can tell, and very simply! We know and
+have trusted the love which God hath in us. God is love.” There is
+no logic in this, unless it means, that God loves all men. In the preceding
+paragraph, he had said, “God is light and in him is no darkness
+at all.” We are to understand, then, that as darkness is merely
+the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[177]</span>ἀγάπη and ἀγαθόν, love and loveliness. This concords with that
+utterance reported in John’s Gospel: “God sent not the Son into
+the world to judge the world; but that the world should through
+him be saved. He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth
+not hath been judged already.... And this is the judgment,
+that the light is come into the world, and that men loved darkness
+rather than the light.” That is to say, God visits no punishment on
+them; they punish themselves, by their natural affinity for the defective.
+Thus, the love that God is, is not a love of which hatred is
+the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a coördinate power; but it is
+a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it, an Anteros—yea,
+even needs hatred and hatefulness as its object. For self-love is
+no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he loves must be defect
+of love; just as a luminary can light up only that which otherwise
+would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It is no
+doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in
+another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing
+can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose
+tenderness <i>ex vi termini</i> must be reserved only for what intrinsically
+is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” This is from “Substance
+and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation.” It is a
+pity he had not filled his pages with things like this, as he was able
+easily to do, instead of scolding at his reader and at people generally,
+until the physics of creation was well-nigh forgot. I must deduct,
+however, from what I just wrote: obviously no genius could
+make his every sentence as sublime as one which discloses for the
+problem of evil its everlasting solution.</p>
+
+<p>The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse
+projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.
+This seems complicated when stated so; but it is fully
+summed up in the simple formula we call the Golden Rule. This
+does not, of course, say, Do everything possible to gratify the egoistic
+impulses of others, but it says, Sacrifice your own perfection to
+the perfectionment of your neighbor. Nor must it for a moment be
+confounded with the Benthamite, or Helvetian, or Beccarian motto,
+Act for the greatest good of the greatest number. Love is not directed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[178]</span>to abstractions but to persons; not to persons we do not
+know, nor to numbers of people, but to our own dear ones, our
+family and neighbors. “Our neighbor,” we remember, is one whom
+we live near, not locally perhaps, but in life and feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula
+of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes
+only from love, from—I will not say self-<i>sacrifice</i>, but from the ardent
+impulse to fulfil another’s highest impulse. Suppose, for example,
+that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my
+creature; for as shown in last July’s <i>Monist</i>, it is a little person. I
+love it; and I will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing
+out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow,
+but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my
+garden. The philosophy we draw from John’s gospel is that this is
+the way mind develops; and as for the cosmos, only so far as it yet
+is mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution. Love,
+recognising germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it
+into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which
+every careful student of my essay “The Law of Mind,” must see
+that <i>synechism</i> calls for.</p>
+
+<p>The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and
+we all begin to review its doings and to think what character it is
+destined to bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of
+future historians. It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century;
+for political economy has more direct relations with all the
+branches of its activity than has any other science. Well, political
+economy has its formula of redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence
+in the service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts,
+the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and
+leads to the <i>summum bonum</i>, food in plenty and perfect comfort.
+Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence. I do
+not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate conclusions of
+political economy, the scientific character of which I fully acknowledge.
+But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will often temporarily
+encourage generalisations extremely false, as the study of
+physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[179]</span>the great attention paid to economical questions, during our century
+has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of
+the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy
+which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great
+agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>I open a handbook of political economy,—the most typical and
+middling one I have at hand,—and there find some remarks of which
+I will here make a brief analysis. I omit qualifications, sops thrown
+to Cerberus, phrases to placate Christian prejudice, trappings which
+serve to hide from author and reader alike the ugly nakedness of the
+greed-god. But I have surveyed my position. The author enumerates
+“three motives to human action:</p>
+
+<p>The love of self;</p>
+
+<p>The love of a limited class having common interests and feelings
+with one’s self;</p>
+
+<p>The love of mankind at large.”</p>
+
+<p>Remark, at the outset, what obsequious title is bestowed on
+greed,—“the love of self.” Love! The second motive <i>is</i> love. In
+place of “a limited class” put “certain persons,” and you have a
+fair description. Taking “class” in the old-fashioned sense, a weak
+kind of love is described. In the sequel, there seems to be some
+haziness as to the delimitation of this motive. By the love of mankind
+at large, the author does not mean that deep, subconscious
+passion that is properly so called; but merely public-spirit, perhaps
+little more than a fidget about pushing ideas. The author proceeds
+to a comparative estimate of the worth of these motives. Greed,
+says he, but using, of course, another word, “is not so great an evil
+as is commonly supposed.... Every man can promote his own interests
+a great deal more effectively than he can promote any one
+else’s, or than any one else can promote his.” Besides, as he remarks
+on another page, the more miserly a man is, the more good he does.
+The second motive “is the most dangerous one to which society is
+exposed.” Love is all very pretty: “no higher or purer source of
+human happiness exists.” (Ahem!) But it is a “source of enduring
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[180]</span>injury,” and, in short, should be overruled by something wiser.
+What is this wiser motive? We shall see.</p>
+
+<p>As for public spirit, it is rendered nugatory by the “difficulties
+in the way of its effective operation.” For example, it might suggest
+putting checks upon the fecundity of the poor and the vicious; and
+“no measure of repression would be too severe,” in the case of
+criminals. The hint is broad. But unfortunately, you cannot induce
+legislatures to take such measures, owing to the pestiferous “tender
+sentiments of man towards man.” It thus appears, that public-spirit,
+or Benthamism, is not strong enough to be the effective tutor
+of love, (I am skipping to another page,) which must therefore be
+handed over to “the motives which animate men in the pursuit of
+wealth,” in which alone we can confide, and which “are in the
+highest degree beneficent.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_20" href="#Footnote_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> Yes, in the “highest degree” without
+exception are they beneficent to the being upon whom all their
+blessings are poured out, namely, the Self, whose “sole object,”
+says the writer in accumulating wealth is his individual “sustenance
+and enjoyment.” Plainly, the author holds the notion that some
+other motive might be in a higher degree beneficent even for the
+man’s self to be a paradox wanting in good sense. He seeks to gloze
+and modify his doctrine; but he lets the perspicacious reader see
+what his animating principle is; and when, holding the opinions I
+have repeated, he at the same time acknowledges that society could
+not exist upon a basis of intelligent greed alone, he simply pigeonholes
+himself as one of the eclectics of inharmonious opinions. He
+wants his mammon flavored with a <i>soupçon</i> of god.</p>
+
+<p>The economists accuse those to whom the enunciation of their
+atrocious villainies communicates a thrill of horror of being <i>sentimentalists</i>.
+It may be so: I willingly confess to having some tincture
+of sentimentalism in me, God be thanked! Ever since the French
+Revolution brought this leaning of thought into ill-repute,—and not
+altogether undeservedly, I must admit, true, beautiful, and good as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[181]</span>that great movement was,—it has been the tradition to picture sentimentalists
+as persons incapable of logical thought and unwilling to
+look facts in the eyes. This tradition may be classed with the French
+tradition that an Englishman says <i>godam</i> at every second sentence,
+the English tradition that an American talks about “Britishers,”
+and the American tradition that a Frenchman carries forms of etiquette
+to an inconvenient extreme, in short with all those traditions
+which survive simply because the men who use their eyes and ears
+are few and far between. Doubtless some excuse there was for all
+those opinions in days gone by; and sentimentalism, when it was
+the fashionable amusement to spend one’s evenings in a flood of tears
+over a woeful performance on a candle-litten stage, sometimes made
+itself a little ridiculous. But what after all is sentimentalism? It
+is an <i>ism</i>, a doctrine, namely, the doctrine that great respect should
+be paid to the natural judgments of the sensible heart. This is what
+sentimentalism precisely is; and I entreat the reader to consider
+whether to contemn is not of all blasphemies the most degrading.
+Yet the nineteenth century has steadily contemned it, because it
+brought about the Reign of Terror. That it did so is true. Still,
+the whole question is one of <i>how much</i>. The reign of terror was
+very bad; but now the Gradgrind banner has been this century
+long flaunting in the face of heaven, with an insolence to provoke
+the very skies to scowl and rumble. Soon a flash and quick peal
+will shake economists quite out of their complacency, too late. The
+twentieth century, in its latter half, shall surely see the deluge-tempest
+burst upon the social order,—to clear upon a world as deep in
+ruin as that greed-philosophy has long plunged it into guilt. No
+post-thermidorian high jinks then!</p>
+
+<p>So a miser is a beneficent power in a community, is he? With
+the same reason precisely, only in a much higher degree, you might
+pronounce the Wall Street sharp to be a good angel, who takes
+money from heedless persons not likely to guard it properly, who
+wrecks feeble enterprises better stopped, and who administers wholesome
+lessons to unwary scientific men, by passing worthless checks
+upon them,—as you did, the other day, to me, my millionaire
+Master in glomery, when you thought you saw your way to using
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[182]</span>my process without paying for it, and of so bequeathing to your
+children something to boast of their father about,—and who by a
+thousand wiles puts money at the service of intelligent greed, in his
+own person. Bernard Mandeville, in his “Fable of the Bees,” maintains
+that private vices of all descriptions are public benefits, and
+proves it, too, quite as cogently as the economist proves his point
+concerning the miser. He even argues, with no slight force, that
+but for vice civilisation would never have existed. In the same
+spirit, it has been strongly maintained and is to-day widely believed
+that all acts of charity and benevolence, private and public, go seriously
+to degrade the human race.</p>
+
+<p>The “Origin of Species” of Darwin merely extends politico-economical
+views of progress to the entire realm of animal and vegetable
+life. The vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold
+the opinion that the true cause of those exquisite and marvellous
+adaptations of nature for which, when I was a boy, men used to extol
+the divine wisdom is that creatures are so crowded together that
+those of them that happen to have the slightest advantage force those
+less pushing into situations unfavorable to multiplication or even kill
+them before they reach the age of reproduction. Among animals,
+the mere mechanical individualism is vastly reënforced as a power
+making for good by the animal’s ruthless greed. As Darwin puts
+it on his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he should
+have added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the
+Devil take the hindmost! Jesus, in his sermon on the Mount, expressed
+a different opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress
+comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy
+with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the
+nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every
+individual’s striving for himself with all his might and trampling his
+neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may
+accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.</p>
+
+<p>Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could
+not conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession
+will probably shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[183]</span>is in itself, I think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic
+theory of evolution,—so far as it may be presumed to bespeak
+the normal judgment of the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were
+possible to believe in agapasm without believing it warmly, that fact
+would be an argument against the truth of the doctrine. At any
+rate, since the warmth of feeling exists, it should on every account
+be candidly confessed; especially since it creates a liability to one-sidedness
+on my part against which it behooves my readers and me
+to be severally on our guard.</p>
+
+<h4>SECOND THOUGHTS. IRENICA.</h4>
+
+<p>Let us try to define the logical affinities of the different theories
+of evolution. Natural selection, as conceived by Darwin, is a mode
+of evolution in which the only positive agent of change in the whole
+passage from moner to man is fortuitous variation. To secure advance
+in a definite direction chance has to be seconded by some action
+that shall hinder the propagation of some varieties or stimulate
+that of others. In natural selection, strictly so called, it is the crowding
+out of the weak. In sexual selection, it is the attraction of beauty,
+mainly.</p>
+
+<p>The “Origin of Species” was published toward the end of the
+year 1859. The preceding years since 1846 had been one of the most
+productive seasons,—or if extended so as to cover the great book
+we are considering, <i>the</i> most productive period of equal length in
+the entire history of science from its beginnings until now. The idea
+that chance begets order, which is one of the corner-stones of modern
+physics (although Dr. Carus considers it “the weakest point in
+Mr. Peirce’s system,”) was at that time put into its clearest light.
+Quetelet had opened the discussion by his “Letters on the Application
+of Probabilities to the Moral and Political Sciences,” a work
+which deeply impressed the best minds of that day, and to which Sir
+John Herschel had drawn general attention in Great Britain. In
+1857, the first volume of Buckle’s “History of Civilisation” had
+created a tremendous sensation, owing to the use he made of this
+same idea. Meantime, the “statistical method” had, under that very
+name, been applied with brilliant success to molecular physics. Dr.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[184]</span>John Herapath, an English chemist, had in 1847 outlined the kinetical
+theory of gases in his “Mathematical Physics”; and the interest
+the theory excited had been refreshed in 1856 by notable memoirs
+by Clausius and Krönig. In the very summer preceding Darwin’s
+publication, Maxwell had read before the British Association the
+first and most important of his researches on this subject. The consequence
+was that the idea that fortuitous events may result in a
+physical law, and further that this is the way in which those laws
+which appear to conflict with the principle of the conservation of
+energy are to be explained, had taken a strong hold upon the minds
+of all who were abreast of the leaders of thought. By such minds,
+it was inevitable that the “Origin of Species,” whose teaching was
+simply the application of the same principle to the explanation of another
+“non-conservative” action, that of organic development, should
+be hailed and welcomed. The sublime discovery of the conservation
+of energy by Helmholtz in 1847, and that of the mechanical theory
+of heat by Clausius and by Rankine, independently, in 1850, had
+decidedly overawed all those who might have been inclined to sneer
+at physical science. Thereafter a belated poet still harping upon
+“science peddling with the names of things” would fail of his effect.
+Mechanism was now known to be all, or very nearly so. All this
+time, utilitarianism,—that improved substitute for the Gospel,—was
+in its fullest feather; and was a natural ally of an individualistic
+theory. Dean Mansell’s injudicious advocacy had led to mutiny
+among the bondsmen of Sir William Hamilton, and the nominalism
+of Mill had profited accordingly; and although the real science that
+Darwin was leading men to was sure some day to give a death-blow
+to the sham-science of Mill, yet there were several elements of the
+Darwinian theory which were sure to charm the followers of Mill.
+Another thing: anæsthetics had been in use for thirteen years. Already,
+people’s acquaintance with suffering had dropped off very
+much; and as a consequence, that unlovely hardness by which our
+times are so contrasted with those that immediately preceded them,
+had already set in, and inclined people to relish a ruthless theory.
+The reader would quite mistake the drift of what I am saying if he
+were to understand me as wishing to suggest that any of those things
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[185]</span>(except perhaps Malthus) influenced Darwin himself. What I mean
+is that his hypothesis, while without dispute one of the most ingenious
+and pretty ever devised, and while argued with a wealth of
+knowledge, a strength of logic, a charm of rhetoric, and above all
+with a certain magnetic genuineness that was almost irresistible,
+did not appear, at first, at all near to being proved; and to a sober
+mind its case looks less hopeful now than it did twenty years ago;
+but the extraordinarily favorable reception it met with was plainly
+owing, in large measure, to its ideas being those toward which the
+age was favorably disposed, especially, because of the encouragement
+it gave to the greed-philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Diametrically opposed to evolution by chance, are those theories
+which attribute all progress to an inward necessary principle,
+or other form of necessity. Many naturalists have thought that if
+an egg is destined to go through a certain series of embryological
+transformations, from which it is perfectly certain not to deviate,
+and if in geological time almost exactly the same forms appear successively,
+one replacing another in the same order, the strong presumption
+is that this latter succession was as predeterminate and
+certain to take place as the former. So, Nägeli, for instance, conceives
+that it somehow follows from the first law of motion and the
+peculiar, but unknown, molecular constitution of protoplasm, that
+forms must complicate themselves more and more. Kölliker makes
+one form generate another after a certain maturation has been accomplished.
+Weismann, too, though he calls himself a Darwinian,
+holds that nothing is due to chance, but that all forms are simple
+mechanical resultants of the heredity from two parents.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_21" href="#Footnote_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> It is very
+noticeable that all these different sectaries seek to import into their
+science a mechanical necessity to which the facts that come under
+their observation do not point. Those geologists who think that the
+variation of species is due to cataclasmic alterations of climate or of
+the chemical constitution of the air and water are also making mechanical
+necessity chief factor of evolution.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[186]</span></p>
+
+<p>Evolution by sporting and evolution by mechanical necessity
+are conceptions warring against one another. A third method, which
+supersedes their strife, lies enwrapped in the theory of Lamarck.
+According to his view, all that distinguishes the highest organic forms
+from the most rudimentary has been brought about by little hypertrophies
+or atrophies which have affected individuals early in their
+lives, and have been transmitted to their offspring. Such a transmission
+of acquired characters is of the general nature of habit-taking,
+and this is the representative and derivative within the physiological
+domain of the law of mind. Its action is essentially dissimilar
+to that of a physical force; and that is the secret of the repugnance
+of such necessitarians as Weismann to admitting its existence. The
+Lamarckians further suppose that although some of the modifications
+of form so transmitted were originally due to mechanical causes, yet
+the chief factors of their first production were the straining of endeavor
+and the overgrowth superinduced by exercise, together with
+the opposite actions. Now, endeavor, since it is directed toward an
+end, is essentially psychical, even though it be sometimes unconscious;
+and the growth due to exercise, as I argued in my last paper,
+follows a law of a character quite contrary to that of mechanics.</p>
+
+<p>Lamarckian evolution is thus evolution by the force of habit.—That
+sentence slipped off my pen while one of those neighbors whose
+function in the social cosmos seems to be that of an Interrupter, was
+asking me a question. Of course, it is nonsense. Habit is mere inertia,
+a resting on one’s oars, not a propulsion. Now it is energetic
+projaculation (lucky there is such a word, or this untried hand might
+have been put to inventing one) by which in the typical instances of
+Lamarckian evolution the new elements of form are first created.
+Habit, however, forces them to take practical shapes, compatible
+with the structures they affect, and in the form of heredity and otherwise,
+gradually replaces the spontaneous energy that sustains them.
+Thus, habit plays a double part; it serves to establish the new features,
+and also to bring them into harmony with the general morphology
+and function of the animals and plants to which they belong.
+But if the reader will now kindly give himself the trouble of turning
+back a page or two, he will see that this account of Lamarckian evolution
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</span>coincides with the general description of the action of love,
+to which, I suppose, he yielded his assent.</p>
+
+<p>Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too,
+the continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution
+takes on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can
+achieve almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a
+cubit to one’s stature, as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any
+of the Muses by merely straining for it, before it is ready to come.
+We haunt in vain the sacred well and throne of Mnemosyne; the
+deeper workings of the spirit take place in their own slow way, without
+our connivance. Let but their bugle sound, and we may then
+make our effort, sure of an oblation for the altar of whatsoever divinity
+its savor gratifies. Besides this inward process, there is the
+operation of the environment, which goes to break up habits destined
+to be broken up and so to render the mind lively. Everybody
+knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic,
+while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the
+ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there
+is the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and
+sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is
+open, but slumbering when it is closed. Few psychologists have
+perceived how fundamental a fact this is. A portion of mind abundantly
+commissured to other portions works almost mechanically.
+It sinks to the condition of a railway junction. But a portion of mind
+almost isolated, a spiritual peninsula, or <i>cul-de-sac</i>, is like a railway
+terminus. Now mental commissures are habits. Where they abound,
+originality is not needed and is not found; but where they are in
+defect, spontaneity is set free. Thus, the first step in the Lamarckian
+evolution of mind is the putting of sundry thoughts into situations
+in which they are free to play. As to growth by exercise, I
+have already shown, in discussing “Man’s Glassy Essence,” in last
+October’s <i>Monist</i>, what its <i>modus operandi</i> must be conceived to be,
+at least, until a second equally definite hypothesis shall have been
+offered. Namely, it consists of the flying asunder of molecules, and
+the reparation of the parts by new matter. It is, thus, a sort of reproduction.
+It takes place only during exercise, because the activity
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</span>of protoplasm consists in the molecular disturbance which is its
+necessary condition. Growth by exercise takes place also in the
+mind. Indeed, that is what it is to <i>learn</i>. But the most perfect illustration
+is the development of a philosophical idea by being put
+into practice. The conception which appeared, at first, as unitary,
+splits up into special cases; and into each of these new thought
+must enter to make a practicable idea. This new thought, however,
+follows pretty closely the model of the parent conception; and thus
+a homogeneous development takes place. The parallel between this
+and the course of molecular occurrences is apparent. Patient attention
+will be able to trace all these elements in the transaction
+called learning.</p>
+
+<p>Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us;
+evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity,
+and evolution by creative love. We may term them <i>tychastic</i> evolution,
+or <i>tychasm</i>, <i>anancastic</i> evolution, or <i>anancasm</i>, and <i>agapastic</i>
+evolution, or <i>agapasm</i>. The doctrines which represent these as severally
+of principal importance, we may term <i>tychasticism</i>, <i>anancasticism</i>,
+and <i>agapasticism</i>. On the other hand the mere propositions
+that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love, are
+severally operative in the cosmos, may receive the names of <i>tychism</i>,
+<i>anancism</i>, and <i>agapism</i>.</p>
+
+<p>All three modes of evolution are composed of the same general
+elements. Agapasm exhibits them the most clearly. The good result
+is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous
+energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition
+of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and
+thus to subserve the general purpose. In order to express the relation
+that tychasm and anancasm bear to agapasm, let me borrow
+a word from geometry. An ellipse crossed by a straight line is a
+sort of cubic curve; for a cubic is a curve which is cut thrice by a
+straight line; now a straight line might cut the ellipse twice and its
+associated straight line a third time. Still the ellipse with the straight
+line across it would not have the characteristics of a cubic. It would
+have, for instance, no contrary flexure, which no true cubic wants;
+and it would have two nodes, which no true cubic has. The geometers
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</span>say that it is a <i>degenerate</i> cubic. Just so, tychasm and anancasm
+are degenerate forms of agapasm.</p>
+
+<p>Men who seek to reconcile the Darwinian idea with Christianity
+will remark that tychastic evolution, like the agapastic, depends
+upon a reproductive creation, the forms preserved being those that
+use the spontaneity conferred upon them in such wise as to be drawn
+into harmony with their original, quite after the Christian scheme.
+Very good! This only shows that just as love cannot have a contrary,
+but must embrace what is most opposed to it, as a degenerate
+case of it, so tychasm is a kind of agapasm. Only, in the tychastic
+evolution progress is solely owing to the distribution of the napkin-hidden
+talent of the rejected servant among those not rejected, just
+as ruined gamesters leave their money on the table to make those
+not yet ruined so much the richer. It makes the felicity of the
+lambs just the damnation of the goats, transposed to the other side
+of the equation. In genuine agapasm, on the other hand, advance
+takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among the created
+springing from continuity of mind. This is the idea which tychasticism
+knows not how to manage.</p>
+
+<p>The anancasticist might here interpose, claiming that the mode
+of evolution for which he contends agrees with agapasm at the point
+at which tychasm departs from it. For it makes development go
+through certain phases, having its inevitable ebbs and flows, yet
+tending on the whole to a foreordained perfection. Bare existence
+by this its destiny betrays an intrinsic affinity for the good. Herein,
+it must be admitted, anancasm shows itself to be in a broad acception
+a species of agapasm. Some forms of it might easily be mistaken
+for the genuine agapasm. The Hegelian philosophy is such
+an anancasticism. With its revelatory religion, with its synechism
+(however imperfectly set forth), with its “reflection,” the whole idea
+of the theory is superb, almost sublime. Yet, after all, living freedom
+is practically omitted from its method. The whole movement
+is that of a vast engine, impelled by a <i>vis a tergo</i>, with a blind and
+mysterious fate of arriving at a lofty goal. I mean that such an
+engine it <i>would</i> be, if it really worked; but in point of fact, it is a
+Keely motor. Grant that it really acts as it professes to act, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</span>there is nothing to do but accept the philosophy. But never was
+there seen such an example of a long chain of reasoning,—shall I
+say with a flaw in every link?—no, with every link a handful of sand,
+squeezed into shape in a dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard model
+of a philosophy that in reality does not exist. If we use the one
+precious thing it contains, the idea of it, introducing the tychism
+which the arbitrariness of its every step suggests, and make that the
+support of a vital freedom which is the breath of the spirit of love,
+we may be able to produce that genuine agapasticism, at which
+Hegel was aiming.</p>
+
+<h4>A THIRD ASPECT. DISCRIMINATION.</h4>
+
+<p>In the very nature of things, the line of demarcation between
+the three modes of evolution is not perfectly sharp. That does not
+prevent its being quite real; perhaps it is rather a mark of its reality.
+There is in the nature of things no sharp line of demarcation
+between the three fundamental colors, red, green, and violet. But
+for all that they are really different. The main question is whether
+three radically different evolutionary elements have been operative;
+and the second question is what are the most striking characteristics
+of whatever elements have been operative.</p>
+
+<p>I propose to devote a few pages to a very slight examination of
+these questions in their relation to the historical development of human
+thought. I first formulate for the reader’s convenience the
+briefest possible definitions of the three conceivable modes of development
+of thought, distinguishing also two varieties of anancasm
+and three of agapasm. The tychastic development of thought, then,
+will consist in slight departures from habitual ideas in different directions
+indifferently, quite purposeless and quite unconstrained
+whether by outward circumstances or by force of logic, these new
+departures being followed by unforeseen results which tend to fix
+some of them as habits more than others. The anancastic development
+of thought will consist of new ideas adopted without foreseeing
+whither they tend, but having a character determined by causes
+either external to the mind, such as changed circumstances of life,
+or internal to the mind as logical developments of ideas already accepted,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</span>such as generalisations. The agapastic development of
+thought is the adoption of certain mental tendencies, not altogether
+heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly by the mere force of
+circumstances or of logic, as in anancasm, but by an immediate attraction
+for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind
+possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity
+of mind; and this mental tendency may be of three varieties,
+as follows. First, it may affect a whole people or community in its
+collective personality, and be thence communicated to such individuals
+as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with the collective
+people, although they may be intellectually incapable of attaining
+the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps of consciously
+apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person
+directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or to
+appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his
+neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development
+of thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an
+example of what is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently
+of his human affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises
+upon his mind, even before he has comprehended it. This is
+the phenomenon which has been well called the <i>divination</i> of genius;
+for it is due to the continuity between the man’s mind and the Most
+High.</p>
+
+<p>Let us next consider by means of what tests we can discriminate
+between these different categories of evolution. No absolute
+criterion is possible in the nature of things, since in the nature of
+things there is no sharp line of demarcation between the different
+classes. Nevertheless, quantitative symptoms may be found by
+which a sagacious and sympathetic judge of human nature may be
+able to estimate the approximate proportions in which the different
+kinds of influence are commingled.</p>
+
+<p>So far as the historical evolution of human thought has been
+tychastic, it should have proceeded by insensible or minute steps;
+for such is the nature of chances when so multiplied as to show
+phenomena of regularity. For example, assume that of the native-born
+white adult males of the United States in 1880, one fourth part
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</span>were below 5 feet 4 inches in stature and one fourth part above 5
+feet 8 inches. Then by the principles of probability, among the
+whole population, we should expect</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">216</td>
+    <td>under</td>
+    <td class="tdr">4</td>
+    <td>feet</td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td>inches,</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">216</td>
+    <td>above</td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td>feet</td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td>inches.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">48</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">4</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">5</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">48</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">7</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">9</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">4</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">4</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">9</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">8</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>less&nbsp;than</td>
+    <td class="tdr">2</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">4</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">3</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td>less&nbsp;than</td>
+    <td class="tdr">2</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">9</td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>I set down these figures to show how insignificantly few are the
+cases in which anything very far out of the common run presents
+itself by chance. Though the stature of only every second man is
+included within the four inches between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 8
+inches, yet if this interval be extended by thrice four inches above
+and below, it will embrace all our 8 millions odd of native-born
+adult white males (of 1880), except only 9 taller and 9 shorter.</p>
+
+<p>The test of minute variation, if <i>not</i> satisfied, absolutely negatives
+tychasm. If it <i>is</i> satisfied, we shall find that it negatives anancasm
+but not agapasm. We want a positive test, satisfied by tychasm,
+only. Now wherever we find men’s thought taking by imperceptible
+degrees a turn contrary to the purposes which animate them, in spite
+of their highest impulses, there, we may safely conclude, there has
+been a tychastic action.</p>
+
+<p>Students of the history of mind there be of an erudition to fill
+an imperfect scholar like me with envy edulcorated by joyous admiration,
+who maintain that ideas when just started are and can be
+little more than freaks, since they cannot yet have been critically
+examined, and further that everywhere and at all times progress has
+been so gradual that it is difficult to make out distinctly what original
+step any given man has taken. It would follow that tychasm
+has been the sole method of intellectual development. I have to confess
+I cannot read history so; I cannot help thinking that while tychasm
+has sometimes been operative, at others great steps covering
+nearly the same ground and made by different men independently,
+have been mistaken for a succession of small steps, and further that
+students have been reluctant to admit a real entitative “spirit” of
+an age or of a people, under the mistaken and unscrutinised impression
+that they should thus be opening the door to wild and unnatural
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</span>hypotheses. I find, on the contrary, that, however it may be with
+the education of individual minds, the historical development of
+thought has seldom been of a tychastic nature, and exclusively in
+backward and barbarising movements. I desire to speak with the
+extreme modesty which befits a student of logic who is required to
+survey so very wide a field of human thought that he can cover it
+only by a reconnaisance, to which only the greatest skill and most
+adroit methods can impart any value at all; but, after all, I can
+only express my own opinions and not those of anybody else; and
+in my humble judgment, the largest example of tychasm is afforded
+by the history of Christianity, from about its establishment by Constantine,
+to, say, the time of the Irish monasteries, an era or eon of
+about 500 years. Undoubtedly the external circumstance which
+more than all others at first inclined men to accept Christianity in
+its loveliness and tenderness, was the fearful extent to which society
+was broken up into units by the unmitigated greed and hard-heartedness
+into which the Romans had seduced the world. And yet it was
+that very same fact, more than any other external circumstance, that
+fostered that bitterness against the wicked world of which the primitive
+Gospel of Mark contains not a single trace. At least, I do not
+detect it in the remark about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,
+where nothing is said about vengeance, nor even in that speech
+where the closing lines of Isaiah are quoted, about the worm and
+the fire that feed upon the “carcasses of the men that have transgressed
+against me.” But little by little the bitterness increases
+until in the last book of the New Testament, its poor distracted
+author represents that all the time Christ was talking about having
+come to save the world, the secret design was to catch the entire
+human race, with the exception of a paltry 144000, and souse them
+all in brimstone lake, and as the smoke of their torment went up for
+ever and ever, to turn and remark, “There is no curse any more.”
+Would it be an insensible smirk or a fiendish grin that should accompany
+such an utterance? I wish I could believe St. John did not
+write it; but it is his gospel which tells about the “resurrection
+unto condemnation,”—that is of men’s being resuscitated just for
+the sake of torturing them;—and, at any rate, the Revelation is a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[194]</span>very ancient composition. One can understand that the early Christians
+were like men trying with all their might to climb a steep declivity
+of smooth wet clay; the deepest and truest element of their
+life, animating both heart and head, was universal-love; but they
+were continually, and against their wills, slipping into a party spirit,
+every slip serving as a precedent, in a fashion but too familiar to
+every man. This party feeling insensibly grew until by about <span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span>
+330 the lustre of the pristine integrity that in St. Mark reflects the
+white spirit of light was so far tarnished that Eusebius, (the Jared
+Sparks of that day,) in the preface to his History, could announce
+his intention of exaggerating everything that tended to the glory of
+the church and of suppressing whatever might disgrace it. His
+Latin contemporary Lactantius is worse, still; and so the darkling
+went on increasing until before the end of the century the great library
+of Alexandria was destroyed by Theophilus,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_22" href="#Footnote_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> until Gregory
+the Great, two centuries later, burnt the great library of Rome, proclaiming
+that “Ignorance is the mother of devotion,” (which is true,
+just as oppression and injustice is the mother of spirituality,) until a
+sober description of the state of the church would be a thing our not
+too nice newspapers would treat as “unfit for publication.” All
+this movement is shown by the application of the test given above
+to have been tychastic. Another very much like it on a small scale,
+only a hundred times swifter, for the study of which there are documents
+by the library-full, is to be found in the history of the French
+Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>Anancastic evolution advances by successive strides with pauses
+between. The reason is that in this process a habit of thought having
+been overthrown is supplanted by the next strongest. Now this
+next strongest is sure to be widely disparate from the first, and as
+often as not is its direct contrary. It reminds one of our old rule
+of making the second candidate vice-president. This character,
+therefore, clearly distinguishes anancasm from tychasm. The character
+which distinguishes it from agapasm is its purposelessness.
+But external and internal anancasm have to be examined separately.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[195]</span>Development under the pressure of external circumstances, or cataclasmine
+evolution, is in most cases unmistakable enough. It has
+numberless degrees of intensity, from the brute force, the plain war,
+which has more than once turned the current of the world’s thought,
+down to the hard fact of evidence, or what has been taken for it,
+which has been known to convince men by hordes. The only hesitation
+that can subsist in the presence of such a history is a quantitative
+one. Never are external influences the only ones which affect
+the mind, and therefore it must be a matter of judgment for which
+it would scarcely be worth while to attempt to set rules, whether a
+given movement is to be regarded as principally governed from without
+or not. In the rise of medieval thought, I mean scholasticism
+and the synchronistic art developments, undoubtedly the crusades
+and the discovery of the writings of Aristotle were powerful influences.
+The development of scholasticism from Roscellin to Albertus
+Magnus closely follows the successive steps in the knowledge
+of Aristotle. Prantl thinks that that is the whole story, and few men
+have thumbed more books than Carl Prantl. He has done good solid
+work, notwithstanding his slap-dash judgments. But we shall never
+make so much as a good beginning of comprehending scholasticism
+until the whole has been systematically explored and digested by a
+company of students regularly organised and held under rule for that
+purpose. But as for the period we are now specially considering,
+that which synchronised the Romanesque architecture, the literature
+is easily mastered. It does not quite justify Prantl’s dicta as to the
+slavish dependence of these authors upon their authorities. Moreover,
+they kept a definite purpose steadily before their minds, throughout
+all their studies. I am, therefore, unable to offer this period of
+scholasticism as an example of pure external anancasm, which seems
+to be the fluorine of the intellectual elements. Perhaps the recent
+Japanese reception of western ideas is the purest instance of it in history.
+Yet in combination with other elements, nothing is commoner.
+If the development of ideas under the influence of the study of external
+facts be considered as external anancasm,—it is on the border
+between the external and the internal forms,—it is, of course, the
+principal thing in modern learning. But Whewell, whose masterly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">[196]</span>comprehension of the history of science critics have been too ignorant
+properly to appreciate, clearly shows that it is far from being
+the overwhelmingly preponderant influence, even there.</p>
+
+<p>Internal anancasm, or logical groping, which advances upon a
+predestined line without being able to foresee whither it is to be carried
+nor to steer its course, this is the rule of development of philosophy.
+Hegel first made the world understand this; and he seeks
+to make logic not merely the subjective guide and monitor of thought,
+which was all it had been ambitioning before, but to be the very
+main-spring of thinking, and not merely of individual thinking but of
+discussion, of the history of the development of thought, of all history,
+of all development. This involves a positive, clearly demonstrable
+error. Let the logic in question be of whatever kind it may,
+a logic of necessary inference or a logic of probable inference, (the
+theory might perhaps be shaped to fit either,) in any case it supposes
+that logic is sufficient of itself to determine what conclusion
+follows from given premises; for unless it will do so much, it will
+not suffice to explain why an individual train of reasoning should
+take just the course it does take, to say nothing of other kinds of
+development. It thus supposes that from given premises, only one
+conclusion can logically be drawn, and that there is no scope at all
+for free choice. That from given premises only one conclusion can
+logically be drawn, is one of the false notions which have come from
+logicians’ confining their attention to that Nantucket of thought, the
+logic of non-relative terms. In the logic of relatives, it does not hold
+good.</p>
+
+<p>One remark occurs to me. If the evolution of history is in considerable
+part of the nature of internal anancasm, it resembles the
+development of individual men; and just as 33 years is a rough but
+natural unit of time for individuals, being the average age at which
+man has issue, so there should be an approximate period at the end
+of which one great historical movement ought to be likely to be supplanted
+by another. Let us see if we can make out anything of the
+kind. Take the governmental development of Rome as being sufficiently
+long and set down the principal dates.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[197]</span></p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">753,</td>
+    <td>Foundation of Rome.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">510,</td>
+    <td>Expulsion of the Tarquins.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">27,</td>
+    <td>Octavius assumes title Augustus.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">476,</td>
+    <td>End of Western Empire.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">962,</td>
+    <td>Holy Roman Empire.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">1453,</td>
+    <td>Fall of Constantinople.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="noindent">The last event was one of the most significant in history, especially
+for Italy. The intervals are 243, 483, 502, 486, 491 years. All are
+rather curiously near equal, except the first which is half the others.
+Successive reigns of kings would not commonly be so near equal.
+Let us set down a few dates in the history of thought.</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">585,</td>
+    <td>Eclipse of Thales. Beginning of Greek philosophy.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">30,</td>
+    <td>The crucifixion.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">529,</td>
+    <td>Closing of Athenian schools. End of Greek philosophy.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">1125,</td>
+    <td>(Approximate) Rise of the Universities of Bologna and Paris.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">1543,</td>
+    <td>Publication of the “De Revolutionibus” of Copernicus.
+    Beginning of Modern Science.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="noindent">The intervals are 615, 499, 596, 418, years. In the history of metaphysics,
+we may take the following:</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">B. C.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">322,</td>
+    <td>Death of Aristotle.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">1274,</td>
+    <td>Death of Aquinas.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td><span class="allsmcap">A. D.</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr">1804,</td>
+    <td>Death of Kant.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="noindent">The intervals are 1595 and 530 years. The former is about thrice
+the latter.</p>
+
+<p>From these figures, no conclusion can fairly be drawn. At the
+same time, they suggest that perhaps there may be a rough natural
+era of about 500 years. Should there be any independent evidence
+of this, the intervals noticed may gain some significance.</p>
+
+<p>The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be
+distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the development
+of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic
+comprehension and recognition of it, by virtue of the continuity
+of thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of
+thought has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my
+paper on the “Law of Mind” in <i>The Monist</i> of last July. Even if
+those arguments are not quite convincing in themselves, yet if they
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">[198]</span>are reënforced by an apparent agapasm in the history of thought,
+the two propositions will lend one another mutual aid. The reader
+will, I trust, be too well grounded in logic to mistake such mutual
+support for a vicious circle in reasoning. If it could be shown directly
+that there is such an entity as the “spirit of an age” or of a
+people, and that mere individual intelligence will not account for all
+the phenomena, this would be proof enough at once of agapasticism
+and of synechism. I must acknowledge that I am unable to produce
+a cogent demonstration of this; but I am, I believe, able to adduce
+such arguments as will serve to confirm those which have been drawn
+from other facts. I believe that all the greatest achievements of
+mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals; and I
+find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic
+considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements,
+direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and
+in their occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of
+individuals of no extraordinary general powers. The pointed Gothic
+architecture in several of its developments appears to me to be of
+such a character. All attempts to imitate it by modern architects
+of the greatest learning and genius appear flat and tame, and are
+felt by their authors to be so. Yet at the time the style was living,
+there was quite an abundance of men capable of producing works of
+this kind of gigantic sublimity and power. In more than one case,
+extant documents show that the cathedral chapters, in the selection
+of architects, treated high artistic genius as a secondary consideration,
+as if there were no lack of persons able to supply that; and
+the results justify their confidence. Were individuals in general,
+then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high intellect?
+Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.</p>
+
+<p>How many times have men now in middle life seen great discoveries
+made independently and almost simultaneously! The first
+instance I remember was the prediction of a planet exterior to Uranus
+by Leverrier and Adams. One hardly knows to whom the
+principle of the conservation of energy ought to be attributed, although
+it may reasonably be considered as the greatest discovery
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[199]</span>science has ever made. The mechanical theory of heat was set forth
+by Rankine and by Clausius during the same month of February,
+1850; and there are eminent men who attribute this great step to
+Thomson.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_23" href="#Footnote_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> The kinetical theory of gases, after being started by
+John Bernoulli and long buried in oblivion, was reinvented and applied
+to the explanation not merely of the laws of Boyle, Charles,
+and Avogadro, but also of diffusion and viscosity, by at least three
+modern physicists separately. It is well known that the doctrine of
+natural selection was presented by Wallace and by Darwin at the
+same meeting of the British Association; and Darwin in his “Historical
+Sketch” prefixed to the later editions of his book shows that
+both were anticipated by obscure forerunners. The method of spectrum
+analysis was claimed for Swan as well as for Kirchhoff, and there
+were others who perhaps had still better claims. The authorship of
+the Periodical Law of the Chemical Elements is disputed between a
+Russian, a German, and an Englishman; although there is no room
+for doubt that the principal merit belongs to the first. These are
+nearly all the greatest discoveries of our times. It is the same with
+the inventions. It may not be surprising that the telegraph should
+have been independently made by several inventors, because it was
+an easy corollary from scientific facts well made out before. But it
+was not so with the telephone and other inventions. Ether, the first
+anæsthetic, was introduced independently by three different New England
+physicians. Now ether had been a common article for a century.
+It had been in one of the pharmacopœias three centuries before. It
+is quite incredible that its anæsthetic property should not have been
+known; it was known. It had probably passed from mouth to ear
+as a secret from the days of Basil Valentine; but for long it had
+been a secret of the Punchinello kind. In New England, for many
+years, boys had used it for amusement. Why then had it not been
+put to its serious use? No reason can be given, except that the motive
+to do so was not strong enough. The motives to doing so could
+only have been desire for gain and philanthropy. About 1846, the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[200]</span>date of the introduction, philanthropy was undoubtedly in an unusually
+active condition. That sensibility, or sentimentalism, which
+had been introduced in the previous century, had undergone a ripening
+process, in consequence of which, though now less intense than
+it had previously been, it was more likely to influence unreflecting
+people than it had ever been. All three of the ether-claimants had
+probably been influenced by the desire for gain; but nevertheless
+they were certainly not insensible to the agapic influences.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt if any of the great discoveries ought, properly, to be
+considered as altogether individual achievements; and I think many
+will share this doubt. Yet, if not, what an argument for the continuity
+of mind, and for agapasticism is here! I do not wish to be
+very strenuous. If thinkers will only be persuaded to lay aside their
+prejudices and apply themselves to studying the evidences of this
+doctrine, I shall be fully content to await the final decision.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Charles S. Peirce.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_20" href="#FNanchor_20" class="label">[20]</a> How can a writer have any respect for science, as such, who is capable of
+confounding with the scientific propositions of political economy, which have nothing
+to say concerning what is “beneficent,” such brummagem generalisations as
+this?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_21" href="#FNanchor_21" class="label">[21]</a> I am happy to find that Dr. Carus, too, ranks Weismann among the opponents
+of Darwin, notwithstanding his flying that flag.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_22" href="#FNanchor_22" class="label">[22]</a> See <i>Draper’s History of Intellectual Development</i>, chap. x.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_23" href="#FNanchor_23" class="label">[23]</a> Thomson, himself, in his article <i>Heat</i> in the <i>Encyclopedia Britannica</i>, never
+once mentions the name of Clausius.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[201]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="RENAN">RENAN.<br>
+<span class="smaller">A DISCOURSE GIVEN AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, LONDON, OCTOBER, 9, 1892.</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>“Be calm and resigned,” said Renan to his weeping wife.
+“We undergo the laws of that nature of which we are manifestations.
+We perish, we disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and
+the march of time goes on for ever.”</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to-day to respond to these last words of the dying
+philosopher. Heaven and earth remain, but they seem cold and grey
+when the great heart in which they were united has ceased to beat,
+and when our sweet English singer has gone silent. By the passing
+away of the two highest-mounted minds in Europe this society is
+especially bereaved. The earliest welcome given to the genius of
+young Tennyson came from the pen of William Johnston Fox, the
+first Minister of this Chapel; here has his spiritual pilgrimage been
+followed, and its songs here sung as hymns. But for their magnitude
+Tennyson and Renan might have been considered together.
+They were children of the same spiritual epoch; the son of the
+Catholic Church, and the English Rector’s son, were fellow-pilgrims
+on the painful road of scepticism; they encountered the same phantoms,
+were attended by the same mighty shades, and found no altar
+but such as their own genius could raise and their glowing hearts
+kindle in the wilderness of doubt and denial. Alike they distrusted
+democracy, and dreamed of the ideal monarch,—as of Arthur, “flower
+of kings,” whom ancient legends of Britain and Brittany said would
+some day return to lead up the Golden Year. Renan loved to tell
+the story of how Tennyson, roaming in Brittany, stopped at an inn
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[202]</span>in Lannier, birthplace of Renan’s mother. In the morning the poet
+demanded his account, but the hostess said, “There is nothing to
+pay, Monsieur. It is you who have sung of our King Arthur.”</p>
+
+<p>But the people have a greatness of their own. They enshrine
+Tennyson in Westminster Abbey, Renan in the Pantheon. The
+career of Renan is a triumph of republican France. Under the Empire
+he was deprived of his professorship, and of his office in the
+Imperial Library, for writing the “Life of Jesus.” But the Republic
+made him President of the College of France, gave him every honor,
+in life as in death. The national homage to that ex-priest, that outspoken
+rationalist, who flattered not the masses nor fawned on
+power, is a high water-mark of civilisation. For it marks the rise
+of a steady tide of liberty, and not the mere leap of waves under
+some tempest of momentary emotion. The great fact is that this
+unique heretic, thinker, and scholar, has been able, without compromising
+his independence, without help of any sect or school, to
+live his life, think his thought, and round out his life-work with completeness,
+on the scene of a thousand martyrdoms.</p>
+
+<p>In Renan’s “Feuilles Détachées,” which appeared last spring
+but is not yet translated, there are outbursts of gratitude to his time,
+which, he says, has been good to him, and pardoned many faults.
+He had just finished, he says, his “History of the People of Israel”—“the
+serious work of my life.”</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The bridge which it remained to me to build between Judaism and Christianism
+is built.... In the ‘Life of Jesus’ I tried to exhibit the majestic growth of the
+Galilean tree from the stock of its roots to the summit, where sing the birds of
+heaven. In the volume just finished I have sought to make known the subsoil in
+which shot the roots of Jesus. Thus my principal duty is accomplished. At the
+Academy the work on the Rabbins also nears conclusion, and the <i>Corpus Inscriptionum
+Semiticorum</i> is in excellent hands. So that now, having paid all my debts, I
+am free enough to amuse myself a little, and without scruples to indulge myself with
+the pleasure of gathering these leaves, often light enough.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>So radiant was the author, at sixty-nine, having achieved the
+main schemes of a life which, at forty, was threatened with ruin by
+intolerance. Of course it was but a small part of what he would
+fain have accomplished. Last year (September 11) there was a festival,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[203]</span>in the Island of Bréhat, where Renan was the chief speaker.
+In the course of his address he said:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Every year I used to come hither with my mother to visit my aunt Périne,
+who loved me much, for she thought me like my father. Here on your rocks, and
+in your paths, I formed plans and dreamed dreams, of which I have realised a third
+or a quarter. That is much; I consider myself fortunate; I hold myself among the
+privileged ones of life. I have been more sad than now, for I feared I might die
+young (misfortune notably not arrived) and never produce what was in my mind.
+Oh certainly, could I live a long time yet, I would know what to do. I have schemes
+of work for three or four lives. I would write a history of the French Revolution,
+showing it an attack of fever, grand, strange, horrible, and sublime; the foundation,
+let us hope of something better. I would compose a history of Athens, almost day
+by day; also a history of science and freethought, telling by what steps man has
+come to know something of how the world is made; I would write a history of Brittany
+in six volumes. I would study Chinese, and review critically all the problems
+of Chinese history and literature. Of all that I would make nothing. There is a
+crowd of things I wish to know and shall never know. But why reproach nature
+for refusing me? Let us recognise what she has given us. I have traversed the
+world at an interesting moment in its development, and, after all, have seen enough.
+After my time humanity will do surprising things: I can rest content during eternity.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The happiness of this venerable author, conscious that his life
+is closing, his work ended,—a happiness not derived from any hope
+of future reward, or even existence,—is a salient testimony of our
+time. In one of these recent addresses Renan says: “Let us die
+calmly, in the communion of humanity, the religion of the future.”
+The dying Voltaire was fed with a wafer, even while he ridiculed it.
+Renan partakes the communion of humanity, the religion of the
+future. It may appear cold comfort to the superstitious, for they
+comprehend not that to such a man the communion of humanity implies
+an eternal life.</p>
+
+<p>In one sense Renan lived not quite threescore years and ten; in
+another he lived ages on ages. By his mastery of Eastern and Oriental
+languages and literatures, by his studies of ancient and modern
+systems, he had familiarly dwelt among primitive tribes, with them
+set up their sacred dolmens, knelt at their altars, travelled with their
+migrations in India, Persia, Egypt, Syria, shared their pilgrimages
+from lower to higher beliefs, listened to their prophets, visited the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[204]</span>home of Mary and Joseph, walked with the disciples, conversed
+with Jesus, witnessed the crucifixion, journeyed through the middle
+ages, reached the Renaissance, passed through Protestantism, gathered
+every spiritual flower of the nineteenth century. Such long
+experience of the past, such knowledge of the attractions of humanity,—predicting
+its fulfilments,—carry the thinker equally far into
+the future. Knowing the angles of convergence in time’s rising
+pyramid, he can calculate the apex, and look down from it. He is
+able to rejoice in realisations of ideals now mere tendencies. His
+immortality is present. Such to Renan meant that communion of
+humanity, into which he entered by patient studies, and by the devotion
+of his life to the spiritual essence of the world. And this
+vision sustained him in his last hour.</p>
+
+<p>And let me here say, that Renan’s optimism was not based in
+any belief in a superhuman providence, or any dynamic or compulsory
+destiny in nature. It was his faith in the heart and brain of
+man. In his last work he reminds youth that their efforts at new
+abstractions and theologies are idle: the new notions will follow the
+old into extinction. “Dear children,” he says—</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Dear children, it is useless to give yourself so much headache to reach only a
+change of error. Let us die calm, in the communion of humanity, the religion of
+the future. The existence of the world is assured for a long time. The future of
+science is guaranteed, for in the great scientific book everything adds itself and
+nothing is lost. Error is not deep; no error lasts long. Be tranquil. Before a
+thousand years, let us hope, the earth will find means to supply its exhausted coal,
+and, in some degree, its diminished virtue. The resources of humanity are infinite.
+Eternal works accomplish themselves without loss to the fountain of living forces,
+ever rising again to the surface. Science, above all, will continue to astonish us by
+its revelations, substituting the infinite of time and space for a poor creationism that
+can no longer satisfy the imagination of a child. Religion also is true to the infinite.
+When God shall be complete, he will be just. I am convinced that virtue will find
+itself one day clearly to have been the better part. The merit is in affirming duty
+against the apparent evidences. [As for the future] denying not, affirming not, let
+us hope. Let us keep a place at our funerals for the music and the incense.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>It will be seen that Renan’s deity is the brother of man’s divinity.
+God is as dependent on man as man on God. Natural evil is God’s
+incompleteness: when man is complete God will be complete: there
+will be no more injustice.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[205]</span></p>
+
+<p>But I must warn you that while this is the way in which Renan
+impresses me, he is not a man to be caught or held in any one
+theory. He is the many-sided man of our time. When I heard his
+lectures in his college, two years ago,—his French was so clear and
+expressive that even a limping listener could follow him tolerably,—he
+impressed me as a sort of Buddha. Buddha is supposed by some
+to have got his large form by sitting so long in contemplation, by
+others his size is regarded as a protest against the meagreness of
+ill-fed ascetics. The unfurrowed serenity of Buddha’s face, his infantine
+smile, were those of Renan, also the remembered music of
+his voice. This association has been extended to Renan’s spiritual
+nature by a letter of his to a friend, in his “Feuilles Détachées.”
+He is fascinated by the legends of Buddha and Krishna which describe
+them as multiplying themselves. When Buddha was born
+into this world, ten thousand women entreated to be his nurses, and
+Buddha multiplied himself into ten thousand babies. Each woman
+believed that she alone had nursed the true Buddha. In the legend
+of the god Krishna, he first appeared to some shepherdesses who
+were dancing. The beautiful god multiplied himself into as many
+forms as there were maidens, so that each believed, that she alone
+had danced with Krishna, and through life kept her heart sacred to
+him. Writing of these legends, Renan says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The ideal loses nothing by dividing itself: it is entire in each of its parts.
+We live that part of Krishna which we assimilate according to our genius. The
+ideal is for all partakers, like morsels modified to each taste. Each creates his divine
+dancer. One refinement I would introduce into the legend of Krishna, should
+I ever make it into a drama, or, better, a philosophic ballet: at the time when the
+shepherdesses believed they were singly dancing with Krishna, he should find that
+they were in reality dancing with different Krishnas. Each had made her Krishna
+to her fancy, and when they came to describe to each other their heavenly lover,
+they should find their visions in nowise alike; and nevertheless to each it was always
+Krishna.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The legend which thus charmed Renan has many correspondences
+in religious history; in Christianity, for instance, where we
+to-day find a hundred and fifty sects, each believing that it alone
+has the true Christ for partner. But it applies to all great personalities,
+and to all spiritual influences. The finest spirits frame no
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[206]</span>systems, found no schools. They are akin to the sun and rain which
+nourish and paint innumerable and diverse growths. It was so with
+Emerson. Dean Stanley said that he heard many different preachers
+in America, but their sermons were generally by Emerson. It was
+preëminently the case with Renan. The Catholic, the Protestant,
+the idealist, the sceptic, the man of the world, the mystic, the conservative,
+the radical, provided they are unsophisticated like the
+shepherdesses, not champions of some sect or party, find that Renan
+has spoken better for them than they can for themselves; he knows
+their secret heart, is their partner by unbounded sympathies. Yet
+it is always the same Renan, full and entire in each and all of his
+manifestations.</p>
+
+<p>Some time ago, when his friend Littré, the Positivist, was buried
+by his family with Catholic rites, the aspersoir passed round the
+grave, and came to Renan, who, like the rest, sprinkled holy water
+on the coffin. There were cries of “Shame” among the freethinkers
+present; but really it was the act of a man less sectarian than themselves.
+The same tenderness that could not wound the family parting
+for ever from their beloved, is visible in the gentleness with which
+he treats old beliefs, when it is a question of affection or sentiment,
+not of dogma and authority. They have died out of his mind utterly;
+he sees the creeds already in their graves; he no longer fears
+them, but is glad to soothe those who cling to their lifeless forms by
+speaking kindly of their virtues in the past. His “Life of Jesus”
+is, in large part, a wreath of immortelles laid on the tomb of a faith
+to him utterly dead,—that is, faith in a supernatural Christ. He
+once told me of a little island on the coast of his native Brittany,
+from which some medieval saint was supposed to have driven monstrous
+serpents, or worms. To that island the peasants still repair
+to get a little of the soil to use as a—vermifuge. To similarly small
+size had shrunk, in Renan’s view, the greatest dogmas and superstitions
+of Christendom. Others might still compliment them with
+fear and wrath, but Renan was tender to them because of their smallness.
+He was endlessly good-natured with his ignorant opponents,
+from whom he often received warning letters. Of one who wrote
+him simply the words, <i>Remember, there is a Hell</i>, he said that this
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[207]</span>monitor did not terrify him as much as he may have supposed. He
+(Renan) would be rather glad to know for certain that there was beyond
+the grave even a hell. And if he should go there he felt certain
+that he would be able to address to the deity such subtle arguments
+to prove that he ought not to remain there, but to be transferred to
+paradise; (only he feared his exhorter’s paradise would be very dull,)
+that he would presently be released.</p>
+
+<p>One purpose of the “Life of Jesus” has been mentioned, but
+that work had also another and a higher aim. With a love like that
+of Mary Magdalene, in whose rapt vision Jesus rose from the tomb,
+to be transformed into a supernatural Christ, Renan sought to raise
+out of the grave of that supernatural Christ the human Jesus. He
+had travelled through Palestine, visited every spot associated with
+the great teacher, and drew the most realistic portraiture he could
+of the parents, home, friends, disciples, and daily life of Jesus. The
+outcry against that book was a confession by theology of its utter
+loss of the human personality of Jesus. There had been a time
+when the religious heart loved to dwell on the sweet humanities of
+Jesus. In the seventeenth century the poet, Thomas Dekker, wrote:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent28">“The best of men</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The first true gentleman that ever breathed.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And such remembrance of Jesus, in his life among the people, his
+friendships, smiles and tears, are found in the sermons of Tillotson,
+South, Jeremy Taylor. But the descended God gradually consumed
+the humanity. In the last century it became a heresy to consider
+Jesus as a man. The man was crucified on a cross of dogmas; he
+lay dead and buried under a stony theology, until Renan rolled away
+the stone, raised him to life, clothed him with flesh and blood, invested
+him with beauty, and said once more to the Pharisee, the
+sceptic, the scoffer—<i>Behold the man!</i> For writing that book,—just
+after Strauss had shown the Christ of Christendom a mythological
+figure,—the churches should have clasped Renan’s knees. But for
+it they heaped him with abuse, declared that Jewish bankers had
+bribed him to write it, drove him from his professorship of Hebrew,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[208]</span>reduced him to poverty. The Pope denounced him as “The European
+Blasphemer.” He has been terribly avenged in his own country,
+where every educated man has abandoned the church. And he
+lived to see the Christianity of England striving to gain a new hold
+on the people by following his brave gesture,—rationalising away
+the supernatural Christ, and exalting the humanity of Jesus as the
+sign of his divinity. The criticism of that work is not at all so destructive
+as that of many who have written in the generation that has
+elapsed since its appearance,—of Dr. Martineau, for instance, on
+whom Oxford has conferred a doctor’s degree. Indeed, in reading
+Renan’s “Life of Jesus” now, one is surprised by its concessions.
+He accepts the four Gospels as coming from the first century, a belief
+which even the learned theologians have abandoned. Some
+newspaper has said that Renan borrowed from Strauss; on the contrary,
+the fault of the book is that it did not borrow from Strauss,
+and from English authors, who had proved that the Gospels are all
+of the second century. That would have relieved him of the necessity
+of apologising for Jesus in some matters of which Jesus never
+heard, of which Paul in the first century knew nothing, as when he
+intimates that Jesus may have once lent himself to an amiable deception.
+No miracle was ever ascribed to Jesus by any writer of
+his own century. In several other respects Renan’s “Life of Jesus,”
+on its negative side, is behind the advance of research and criticism.
+But those are small details compared with the spirit and general
+purpose of the work. In this moment, when we are celebrating the
+discovery of a western world, we may well pay homage to the scholar
+who rediscovered and exhumed an eastern world, long buried under
+débris of mythology and rubbish of superstitions. This Renan has
+done in his series of works on the “Origins of Christianity,” beginning
+with the “Life of Jesus,” dealing with the “Apostles,” with
+“St. Paul,” with “Antichrist,” and other studies, leading up to his
+“History of the People of Israel.”</p>
+
+<p>In all these works there is not a line that is not interesting, alike
+to learned and unlearned. As some one has said, Renan could
+make Hebrew roots blossom with roses and lilies. But that super-fine
+art of his was carrying the cause of intellectual and religious
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[209]</span>emancipation. For these works concerned the constitution of
+Europe. This Great Britain, with all its physical freedom, is religiously
+a mere dependency of Judea. Here men were formerly
+burnt, until lately imprisoned, and even now denied equal advantages,
+not in accordance with what Englishmen think, but with the
+opinions of some ancient Jews. The voice of the Jews was the voice
+of God. But Judea, like the Grand Llama, could rule only while
+veiled. Renan unveiled it. He did it all the more effectually because
+in the literary and philosophic spirit. All the ages of Judea,
+from the first tribal groups to the movement of John the Baptist and
+Jesus, are assigned their exact place as successive chapters of human
+history, the natural origin of their mythology is explained, Jehovah
+takes his seat beside Jupiter and Brahma, Jesus is revered with
+Buddha and Zoroaster; and all this is done, not by mere opinion,
+but by impregnable facts, unwearied researches, inflexible veracity.
+It was also done lovingly. A superstition can survive combat, but
+not explanation. Renan did much to remove Christianity from the
+field of militant camps to the quiet province of literary investigation.
+In the Republic of Letters there is no arbitrary authority. The
+combat is left to salvation armies,—“theirs not to reason why.”</p>
+
+<p>There is a large Renan literature. More than three hundred
+works represent the efforts of theology to get the resuscitated human
+Jesus back into his grave again. Renan’s accessible life-work is
+represented by about twenty-five volumes, of which some are philosophic
+diversions written amid the heavy labours of his College,
+and while collecting and preserving for scholars the whole body of
+Semitic inscriptions. For more than twenty years Renan has been
+training the young scholars of France—those who are to fashion
+France in the future, and influence mankind. Those acquainted
+with his larger works can realise his immense service in elevating
+the standard of criticism, and establishing the method of exact research
+and exact thought. But there are other works of Renan,
+notably his <i>Philosophic Dramas</i>, not yet translated, from which may
+be better gathered the great variety of his ability, the poetic play of
+his genius, and the charm of his personality, which some of us have
+personally felt, and which so won all hearts that even the priesthood
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[210]</span>have not raised discordant notes in the homage and emotion with
+which his nation has laid him in an honored grave.</p>
+
+<p>Farewell, great heart, and great leader! On your coffin I laid a
+wreath of immortelles for friendship, for the homage of America,
+and for the sake of this free English Society. For your victory is
+ours also: your triumph is that of every independent mind on earth.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Moncure D. Conway.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[211]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="INTUITION_AND_REASON">INTUITION AND REASON.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The question whether we act more frequently from intuition or
+reason, and the question that follows it, which faculty is the
+more noble guide to conduct, would have no more interest for the
+general public than any other of the subjects which the metaphysician
+exercises his ingenuity upon,—than the question, for instance,
+whether we execute a greater number of analytic or of synthetic
+judgments in the course of the day,—were it not that there is an ancient
+opinion to the effect that reason and intuition are marks respectively
+of the manner of working of men’s and of women’s minds.
+The opinion is wholly unfounded, and could only have had its origin
+at a time when the psychology of the working of the human mind
+was thoroughly misunderstood. As the very terms in which the
+opinion is expressed make plain, it dates from the period when it
+was the custom to speak of the human mind as having a lot of
+separate “faculties” under its control, and of calling up now one
+and now another of them to do its bidding. It is time that the belief
+in the different quality of men’s and of women’s minds should
+follow the whole antiquated machinery of “faculties” into the limbo
+of old and worn-out fashions of thought and of speech.</p>
+
+<p>This illusion, however, like most of the illusions that have had
+a firm foot-hold in their day, has a perfectly comprehensible reason
+for its existence. It is not true that men’s minds and women’s
+minds have a different way of working; but it is true that upon certain
+occasions (and by far, the greatest number of occasions) we all—men,
+women, and negroes alike—act from intuition, and that the
+circumstances of women’s lives have hitherto been such as to make
+their interests lie somewhat more exclusively in those regions in which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[212]</span>conduct is intuitive than in those in which it is long thought out. It
+is not true that the Creator has made two separate kinds of mind for
+men and for women; but it is true that society, as at present constituted,
+offers two somewhat separate <i>fields of interest</i> for men and
+for women, and that the nature of their conduct is of necessity determined
+by the character of the action which is demanded of them.</p>
+
+<p>What is the difference for the psychologist, between the mental
+state of a being who acts from reason, and of one who acts from intuition?
+It is not a difference of the <i>kind of mind</i> which controls
+him, but of the <i>kind of knowledge</i> upon which his present conduct is
+based. If one individual has got at his command a lot of general
+propositions bearing upon the case in hand, and if his familiarity
+with them is not such that they flow together without conscious effort,
+then he must laboriously piece them together, and think out
+the conclusions which they necessitate. If another individual, having
+led a different life, has had a lot of experiences which cover just
+such cases as this, and if he has been taught by thousands of instances
+that under these circumstances a certain course of conduct
+will nearly always lead to good results, then he can trust to his hands
+or his feet to execute that course of conduct without a moment’s aid
+from conscious reflection; he can go on with his novel, or whatever
+other pleasant occupation engages his attention, without the wear
+and tear of mind which is involved in consciously thinking about
+the circumstances in question.</p>
+
+<p>Now the differences in the mental processes of men and women
+are exactly of this nature. They are differences dependent upon the
+fact that the <i>knowledge</i> at their command—that is, the stored up
+premises upon which action is based—is, to a certain extent, of a
+different kind, and got from different sources. So far as the knowledge
+is not of a different kind, the character of the action is not of
+a different kind. There is an immense number of conclusions which
+men and women alike “jump at,” every hour in the day; and some
+of them represent reasoning so fixedly instinctive, that even the
+closest attention does not enable us to drag it up into the light of
+consciousness. How many people know that a certain feeling of
+strain in the muscles which move the eyes is a sign of a certain distance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[213]</span>of an object looked at, and a different feeling of strain, a sign
+of a different distance; and that when the eyes are fixed upon one
+point, objects in the lateral field of view are judged to be nearer or
+farther away than that point, according as the two disparate images
+which they cast upon the two retinas are, the right-hand one or the
+left hand one, the brighter? The common man <i>knows</i> that one object
+is near and the other far, but he is not <i>conscious</i> even of the feeling
+of strain, nor of the existence of double images; the physiological
+psychologist knows the unconscious syllogism by which he
+<i>must</i> reach his conclusion, but even he cannot, by any possibility,
+make it cease to be instinctive,—that is, make himself conscious of
+its different steps. On the other hand, no one, whether man or
+woman, can pass from one proposition in geometry to another by a
+process which is in any sense unconscious, though one person may
+be obliged to give a much more strained attention to what he is
+doing than another.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is very possible that a greater <i>number</i> of the actions of
+women have their ground in unconscious causes than of the actions
+of men. The subjects upon which action is of vital concern to them
+have been different subjects, and hence their stored-up stock of
+knowledge is knowledge about different subjects. To the woman of
+the past, who was to a great extent confined to her own home, the
+temper of her house-mates was what her happiness depended upon
+more than anything else in the world. It was impossible that she
+should not acquire a keen intelligence in interpreting every slightest
+shade of expression upon the human face. But this sort of knowledge
+is always instinctive, whether it is practised by men or by women.
+If the eyes of the most reasonable man in the world should
+chance to show him a certain curve of the lip and a certain elevation
+of the posterior angle of the alæ of the nostrils on the face of the
+fair lady to whom he was talking, would he try to call to mind the
+pictures in Sir Charles Bell’s great work on expression and the general
+theorems in Darwin’s book on the same subject, and piecing
+this and that laboriously together, would he try to arrive at some
+just conclusion regarding the contents of the fair lady’s mind?
+Would he not, rather, instinctively change the subject of conversation,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[214]</span>or even discreetly beat a retreat, long before he had time to
+<i>think</i>? Women’s interests have been so exclusively social that they
+have developed a sense for the physical expression of emotion which
+makes society for them a matter of complicated relations, of delicate
+susceptibility to play of feeling, which—except in the hyper-sensitive
+period of courtship—is not common among men. But there
+are men who are quite the equals of women in this respect; and if
+any man is markedly deficient in these qualities, we recognise him
+as belonging to a low and brutal type which is in process of extinction.
+If a woman on the other hand, goes into business, she does
+not fix the prices of her straw hats each morning in accordance with
+the feelings which straw hats awaken in her when she first looks at
+them, but in accordance with the fluctuations of the market. The
+President of a New Hampshire Street Railway did not carry through
+her improvements by her intuitions, but by a plain, common-sense
+weighing of reasons. Nor are all masculine occupations under the
+guidance of the reasoning faculty. If you go to a stove-man and
+ask him to mend your smoking chimney, does he do it by reason?
+Not a bit of it! There may be stove-men who have enough knowledge
+of the laws which regulate the movements of masses of hot air
+to be able to apply general principles to particular instances, but in
+the course of a long and checkered experience with stove-men, it
+has not been my lot to fall in with them. Their knowledge of chimneys,
+such as it is, is got by experience and applied by intuition,
+and nothing is farther from their minds than any trace of deductive
+reasoning. It is not that there are men’s minds and women’s
+minds, but that there are theoretical subjects and practical subjects,
+and that knowledge is not the same kind of knowledge in both.</p>
+
+<p>Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing male
+and female minds, is a word of double meaning: it covers those actions
+which we go through with by instinct, or inherited experience
+ingrained from the beginning in our nervous structure, and those
+which we perform automatically, or by individual experience become
+so familiar that it can act as a guide without the aid of conscious
+reflection. The relative distances of objects looked at we
+know instinctively; the trained musician with mind intent upon expression,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[215]</span>reads his notes automatically; the beginner at the piano
+goes through a painful process of syllogism before each key is struck.
+All is, at bottom, reason; in one case it is conscious; in another it
+is unconscious, but can be forced into consciousness; in another, it
+is unconscious and cannot by any effort be made conscious. Because
+a woman’s interests lie more than a man’s in regions in which
+thought is instinctive and automatic, it does not follow that she has
+developed any peculiar powers of intuition. Nor is there any possibility
+that mothers should occasionally transmit their powers of
+intuition to favored sons, as Mr. Grant Allen, in the course of his
+apotheosis of the uneducated woman, has somewhere suggested;
+some men have poetic and æsthetic minds, and in regions of poetry
+and art mental activity is largely of the instinctive kind. It is different
+with powers of reasoning. Good powers of reasoning may be transmitted
+from mother to son, but that is merely saying metaphorically
+that a good firm texture of mind may be transmitted. Hume and
+James Mill are two men who are supposed to owe much to their
+mothers, but their peculiar powers are not usually considered to lie
+in regions of intuition. No mother has ever produced an intuitive
+mathematician. Nor would any one who knew anything about the
+higher mathematics for a moment suppose that when a great mathematician
+leaves out intermediate steps in a printed book, he had
+jumped at his conclusions by instinct. It is simply that, with his
+thorough knowledge of this particular subject, the intermediate steps
+have seemed to him too easy to set down. If his book is hard to
+read, it is simply because he has assumed a greater amount of
+learning in his readers than they are in possession of.</p>
+
+<p>The question whether intuition or reason is the nobler faculty
+is an exceedingly meaningless question. All knowledge which finds
+frequent occasion to be put in practice has a tendency to become
+first automatic and then instinctive. Human progress consists in
+making conscious action automatic as soon as it can be done with
+safety, and in setting free consciousness to attend to more and more
+complicated combinations of circumstances. After the musician has
+learned to read his notes mechanically, shall we urge him to go
+back to the period of conscious linking of note to key, because reason
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[216]</span>is a diviner gift than intuition? Is it desirable to turn the act
+of walking into a conscious fitting of muscular tension to variations
+in the position of the centre of gravity in order to distinguish ourselves
+the more effectually from the brutes that perish? Reason is
+merely intuition in its formative stage, and the sooner all our present
+reasoned convictions become mechanical, and conscious thought
+is set free to bring in more and more far reaching considerations to
+bear upon our actions (including in that term our conclusions), the
+sooner will a higher form of life be reached.</p>
+
+<p>Wundt’s students have made some experiments in his laboratory
+in the last two or three years, which throw a great deal of light
+upon this question,—they have caught automatism in the very act
+of formation. It has been noticed that different observers differed
+very much in the reaction time which they assigned to the several
+senses,—that is, the time required, for instance, to hear the tap of
+a bell, and to press a button in response. Wundt’s students found
+that there are two different reaction times,—in one, time is taken to
+bring the tap of the bell into the focus of consciousness and to decide
+consciously what to do in response; in the other, the process
+is unconscious. The first is nearly twice as long as the second, and
+both are very constant quantities, for the same sense. The exact
+figures are, in seconds:</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <th></th>
+    <th>FULL.</th>
+    <th>SHORT.</th>
+    <th></th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sound</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.216</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.127</td>
+    <td>N. Lange</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.235</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.121</td>
+    <td>Belkin</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.230</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.124</td>
+    <td>L. Lange</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Light</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.290</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.172</td>
+    <td>L. Lange</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.291</td>
+    <td class="tdr">.182</td>
+    <td>Martius</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="noindent">It may be inferred from this that, even in the simplest matters intuition
+is very nearly twice as valuable a “faculty” as reason, as
+far as economy of time is concerned. (It would be interesting to
+determine the difference in fatigue.) But the interesting point is
+that the experimenter can teach himself to give either reaction time
+at his pleasure. If he thinks of his ears, he has a feeling of strain
+in them, and a long reaction time; if he directs his attention to his
+fingers (or if he thinks of indifferent matters) he is unconscious of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[217]</span>what is going on, and his reaction time is short. It is plain that the
+more of these educated brain-reflexes we can produce, the fuller and
+more complicated lives we shall be capable of carrying on. It may
+also be assumed that the ideal human being is the one who has
+many brain-reflexes, but who is capable of bringing them all into
+consciousness upon occasion. Connections that we cannot make
+conscious are a frequent source of illusion. When we move the
+eye-ball about by the will, objects seem to remain stationary; but
+when, putting the finger on the under eyelid, we push the eye-ball
+up and down in the socket, we cannot help <i>perceiving</i> that objects
+are moving up and down. Prof. William James suggests as a good
+experiment that some one who has eyes that he is not afraid of injuring
+should do this pushing several hours a day, and see if he cannot
+force conscious reason to do her work and to make him <i>see</i> that
+the objects are not moving.</p>
+
+<p>For perfectly regular circumstances,—that is, for the world of
+nature or of human character so far as is governed by fixed laws,—reflex
+action presents an immense economy of time and work. To
+provide against extraordinary emergencies, it would seem to be desirable
+that we should have the power of interposing consciousness
+in the chain which begins with stimulus and ends in action. Whenever
+a large number of considerations, or considerations of an abstract
+character, have to be weighed and balanced, then reason is
+the only sufficient guide.</p>
+
+<p>That women have no deficiency in the power of putting this
+and that together, when <i>this</i> and <i>that</i> are pieces of knowledge which
+are in their possession, is absolutely proved by a single circumstance.
+Geometry is a branch of learning which is entirely built
+up out of abstract reason, pure and undefiled. Geometry is studied,
+in the United States, in high schools, and it must not be forgotten
+that there are in this country (according to the Report of the Bureau
+of Education) <i>three times</i> as many girls as boys who take the high
+school course. It cannot be said, therefore, (as is said of girls who
+go to college) that the girls who go to the high school are a selected
+lot; they are the very bone and fibre of the women who make up
+the country. Now if women could not reason, we ought to hear a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[218]</span>great hue and cry from the teachers of the geometry classes about
+the difficulty of teaching that subject to girls, and the girls ought to
+lament and moan over the impossibility of getting safely through
+with their demonstrations. Is this the case? I have never met with
+a teacher of geometry who thought his boys did better than his girls,—I
+have met with several who thought the reverse. As long ago
+as 1865, Her Majesty’s Inspector of schools, after travelling through
+this country, said: “The teachers all tell me that the girls do fully
+as well as the boys in mathematics,—fully.” Nor are any sad effects
+noticeable upon health or spirits. Day after day an army of girls
+goes smiling into the class-room and comes smiling out, utterly unaware
+that an unnatural wrench has been given to their delicate
+minds, and that they are being rapidly transformed into monstrous
+products of over-reason.</p>
+
+<p>If girls show no defect in reason in the class-room, neither do
+boys show any defect in intuition,—in fact, their intuition about
+stretched strings and lines on balls are usually better than those of
+girls. I have kept a record for many years of errors committed by
+boys and by girls, and I have not been able to detect any difference
+in their character. It is true that it was a boy who once failed to
+get a problem in trigonometry for a week, because it was not expressly
+stated in the book that the milestones to which the problem
+related were a mile apart. My intimate acquaintance with the character
+of his mind prevented me, however, from attributing this failure
+in intuition to his superior reasoning powers.</p>
+
+<p>The simple matter is that a good <i>mind</i> has good reasons and
+good intuitions both. Both qualities are summed up in the expressive
+popular phrase, “having your wits about you.” If you are in
+full possession of your wits, you will trust to your instincts, when
+you must; to your acquired reflexes, when there is no sign of danger;
+and to your reason, when the question requires debate. It
+would be greatly for the good of the race if the common virtues
+should become more instinctive in men; and if women should be
+put into a position in which they can reflect more wisely upon the
+virtues which are only just in process of getting known to be such.
+The only reason that women do not guide themselves by far-reaching
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[219]</span>principles in their every-day conduct, is that they have not made
+themselves acquainted with the doctrines of political economy and
+of abstract ethics. When women are in full possession of the higher
+education, there is no danger that they will not put it into practice,
+so far as it leads to practice. The human mind is so constituted
+that it cannot help taking account of all its knowledge. Propositions
+merely learned by rote, or the truth of which it is not absolutely
+convinced of, it may leave one side, but not what it really
+<i>knows</i>. Nor is there any danger that woman will lose her powers of
+intuition. The knowledge and skill which she has acquired in social
+matters will not desert her because she has made herself familiar
+with the speculations of philosophers, and can turn to them for
+guidance in the intricate questions of conduct which the complexities
+of modern life give rise to. So long as a woman’s highest duty
+was to please her lord and master, her task was simple, but women
+are now awake to a sense of wider responsibilities. They are now
+aware that it is their highest duty <i>to be</i> the best possible kind
+of a human being, and <i>to do</i> whatever lies within their strength towards
+making the world the best possible kind of a world to live
+in. For this end they have urgent need of <i>all</i> the gifts that God has
+given them; and he who would cripple their reason on the ground
+that intuition is a pleasing and a poetic guide, would do them a
+grievous wrong.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Christine Ladd Franklin.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[220]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CRUELTY_AND_PITY_IN_WOMAN">CRUELTY AND PITY IN WOMAN.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.<br>
+CRUELTY.</h4>
+
+<p>Spencer says&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_24" href="#Footnote_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> that among savage nations the women are as
+perverse as the men, and that if they do not work so much evil
+it is because they are less able to do so. This is not entirely true;
+doubtless women among savages are much more inclined to cruelty
+than to pity, but, generally speaking, woman even at the very beginnings
+of human evolution is less cruel than man.</p>
+
+<h5>WOMAN AND WAR.</h5>
+
+<p>Woman, even among savage nations, is rarely a warrior. In
+the Antilles, the women watched over the safety of the islands whenever
+their husbands went to war with the neighboring islands; they
+were brave, strong, courageous, nearly equalling the men in their
+cleverness in handling weapons.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_25" href="#Footnote_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Amongst the ancient Bretons,
+armies were always commanded by women. In Dahomey, the élite
+of the army is composed of a troop of six or seven thousand Amazons,
+who are very ferocious, particularly in the mutilation of dead
+bodies; women then become tigers, is a popular saying. Among the
+ancient Scots, women followed the army, and cruelly mutilated the
+prisoners. Among the Botocudos, when war breaks out between
+the tribes, the men fight the men with sticks, and the women fight
+the women, by scratching and by tearing the <i>botoques</i> (cylinders of
+wood) from their ears and lips.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_26" href="#Footnote_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> But these are all exceptional cases.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[221]</span>Generally speaking, the savage woman plays a secondary part in
+war; she acts as an auxiliary, picks up arrows, throws stones from a
+distance, and carries the provisions etc.</p>
+
+<h5>REVENGE.</h5>
+
+<p>It is above all in revenge, that feminine cruelty shows itself the
+most terrible. Man is capable of destroying whole families or nations,
+to satisfy a particular revenge; but nothing equals the ingenuity
+of woman, in slowly tormenting her victim, in gloating over his
+sufferings and lengthening them out in order that her enjoyment of
+vengeance may endure as long as possible.</p>
+
+<p>In Tasmania, when the <i>black war</i> broke out between the English
+and the aborigines, the Tasmanian women terribly tortured the
+prisoners, in order to avenge their companions who had been carried
+off by the English. We must also attribute to the desire for vengeance,
+the torments inflicted by the women upon prisoners of war
+among the Red Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth of Russia, betrayed by her lover, obliged him to
+marry a deformed dwarf, and to pass his wedding night in an ice
+palace, where the furniture and the bed were all of ice. The next
+morning, attended by her Court, she went to present the newly wedded
+pair with a bouquet. She found them, stretched out upon their
+bed of ice, nearly frozen. She then banished her rival to Siberia
+first causing her ears and nose to be cut off.</p>
+
+<p>A wealthy Russian Prince, in love with a very beautiful peasant
+girl of fifteen, took her to live with him for five years; at the
+end of which time, wishing to contract an alliance, he paid her a
+sum of money in dower and obliged her to marry a peasant. The
+young girl made no sign for ten years, until the death of her husband;
+but after the lapse of that period, a rising having taken place among
+the peasantry against the nobles, she excited them and led a body
+of peasants to the castle of her ancient lover, had him taken and
+dragged into his <i>izba</i>, harnessed him to the plough instead of the
+oxen, and for three days obliged him thus to work, lashing him with
+the whip each time that he fell to the ground. At night she led him
+to the stable and made him lie down with the oxen; compelling him
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[222]</span>to eat fodder with the beasts and making merry over his sorry plight.
+This amusement lasted for three days, at the end of which time, the
+man fell dead in one of the furrows he was ploughing.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_27" href="#Footnote_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p>
+
+<p>A Russian, an idle and worthless fellow who had let his wife
+suffer hunger, proposed to her that she should be sold as a slave to
+the Sultan. After some hesitation, she accepted and they started
+off; but when they had gone about half the way, the husband having
+fallen asleep intoxicated, the idea came into her mind to sell him
+for a slave, in her place. She then tied him on the horse, started
+off again on the road and arriving at the place of rendezvous, she
+delivered her husband to the merchant, and remained to watch the
+Turk push the half-awakened man into the boat, laughing whilst he
+showered blows upon him.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_28" href="#Footnote_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<p>A young Russian peasant woman lived with a small land-owner,
+who betrayed her; at last she took refuge with a band of brigands,
+who treated her like a queen. One day she caused two of them to
+capture her old lover, and had him brought to the camp where she
+used him as a kind of living foot-stool: when she sat down she covered
+him with a carpet and put her feet upon him, and when she
+wanted to go out she made him carry her on his shoulders.</p>
+
+<h5>CRUELTY TO THE HELPLESS.</h5>
+
+<p>Woman sometimes displays the same amount of ingenuity in tormenting
+the helpless creatures who may be in her power. I do not
+know, says Bourgavel, any one more perfidious, immoral, or perverse
+than the New Caledonian woman. In certain portions of Australia
+women are mortal foes to each other. When the men wish to punish
+any one of them, they turn her over to her companions, who
+inflict upon her horrible tortures.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_29" href="#Footnote_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Sitting on her body, they cut her
+flesh with sharpened stones.</p>
+
+<p>In Tasmania, as amongst the ancient Saxons, the unfaithful
+wife was punished by her companions; she was not killed, but
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[223]</span>she was tortured for a long time with sharp pointed stones or knives,
+in all parts of her body.</p>
+
+<p>Women have often been cruel mistresses to their slaves. A lady
+in Guiana, being envious of a very handsome mulatto slave, had her
+branded on the mouth, cheeks and forehead. In the case of another
+slave, who was also very beautiful, she had the tendon of Achilles
+cut thus causing her to become a deformed and crippled monster.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_30" href="#Footnote_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is a notorious fact that Roman and Greek ladies often inflicted
+most terrible punishments on their slaves, and that it was more
+particularly towards the female slaves, the <i>ancillæ</i>, that the cruelty of
+their mistresses was shown. The Roman ladies, if, while they were
+having their hair dressed, they were vexed with their attendants, used
+to thrust pins into their arms and breasts. Darwin relates that at
+Rio Janeiro, an old lady possessed a kind of thumb screw which
+she had had made expressly to crush the fingers of her slaves.</p>
+
+<h5>EPIDEMIC CRUELTY.</h5>
+
+<p>During periods of great national excitement, such as revolutions,
+feminine cruelty shows how far it can go.</p>
+
+<p>The women, writes M. Du Camp, were the fiercest heroines of
+the Commune; it was a woman who incited the assassination of the
+Dominicans. When the hostages were shot, they surpassed the men
+in cruelty; they taunted them with not knowing how to kill. When
+employed to seek out the insurgents they were implacable; when
+acting as infirmarians, they killed the wounded by giving them brandy
+to drink.</p>
+
+<p>At the time of the French Revolution, on the days of execution,
+writes M. Legouvé,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_31" href="#Footnote_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> the front rows nearest the guillotine were reserved
+for the women of the political clubs. They even hung on to
+the boards of the scaffold, in order the better to witness the death
+throes of the condemned, and drowned the cries of the victims by
+their peals of laughter.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[224]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.<br>
+PITY.</h4>
+
+<p>But again we find a series of contradictory facts, which bear
+witness that the sentiment of pity also is much keener in woman
+than in man.</p>
+
+<p>Even with animals, we observe this phenomenon. Hens often
+separate two young cocks who are fighting together. Sir George
+Le Grand Jacob has observed females of the wild goat (Steinbock)
+raise with their heads he-goats that had been shot, support them
+and help them to escape. Romanes relates, that sometimes the
+female gibbon, takes great care of all the members of the troop
+when they are wounded, even if they are not related.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_32" href="#Footnote_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>The savage woman also is very often kind and good. It is notorious
+that the explorers of savage countries have often escaped
+serious perils, thanks to the kindness of the native women. Australasian
+women have often revealed to European travellers the plots
+laid against them by the men of their tribe: they have even risked
+their own lives for that purpose.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_33" href="#Footnote_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> Stanley, at the island of Bambyrch,
+on the Nyanza, was roughly greeted by the natives, who were
+desirous of exterminating his expedition; but a woman came to warn
+him and to advise him to perform a certain ceremony with the King
+Shekka by which he would acquire his friendship. In Senegambia
+an old woman, meeting Mungo Park, who was half dead of starvation
+and had just been despoiled by a negro king, gave him food,
+and went away without waiting to be thanked. Another time the
+same traveller, being left with nothing but his saddle, was hospitably
+entertained by some women, whom he heard chant these words
+as he fell asleep: “The winds roared and the rain beat, the poor
+white man came and sat down under our tree, he had no mother to
+give him milk, no wife to grind him corn. Let us take pity on the
+white man, he has no mother, etc., etc.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_34" href="#Footnote_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> Michelet says that woman
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[225]</span>was the first physician; and certainly she fulfils the office of infirmarian
+among many savage peoples, the Esquimaux, the Mincopies,
+etc. etc.</p>
+
+<p>In war the Samoan woman often interferes to make peace between
+the belligerents. Among the Khonds, also, when two tribes
+quarrel, the women sometimes make peace, calling in the intervention
+of a third tribe. Quite recently, among the Montenegrins and
+Albanians, fierce strife broke out between different families, but in
+these fights, if a man took refuge with a woman and she covered
+him with her apron, he was safe. Among the Bedouin Arabs a
+woman can save the life of the condemned man who implores her
+protection. So it also was among the Roman Vestals, when in the
+streets they accidentally met a man condemned to death; it was required,
+however, that the meeting should be evidently a chance
+one, for it was feared that the privilege might be carried too far.
+Among civilised nations this sentiment of pity becomes naturally
+more developed. Christianity owed a great deal of its success among
+women to the fact, that it knew how to make use of their pity, by
+organising those associations of women which are its greatest ornament.
+From the earliest years after the death of Jesus, in the cenobitic
+form of society lived by the disciples of the Messiah, they
+made use of the charitable sentiment of childless widows and created
+the order of Deaconesses, which was devoted to the care of the poor
+and the sick.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_35" href="#Footnote_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> Legouvé says: “Women offered their services to
+Christianity like a volunteer battalion consecrated to charitable work.
+In the Apostles’ time their mission was one of sympathy and watchfulness,
+a mother’s vocation; in the time of the Martyrs they remained
+womanly in their modesty, while exhibiting a manly courage; in the
+time of the Doctors, whilst orators speak and learned men write,
+women continue to love and console.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_36" href="#Footnote_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a></p>
+
+<p>This Christian tradition has survived and is still powerful,
+thanks to the deeply laid sentiment of pity in the heart of woman.
+“Private charity in Paris,” writes M. du Camp,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_37" href="#Footnote_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> “is almost entirely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[226]</span>in the hands of women. There are in Paris women of the world,
+young and beautiful, born for pleasure, accustomed to every luxury,
+who visit the poor, nurse the sick, rock little motherless children,
+and all this they do simply without a word of self-praise.”</p>
+
+<p>The society of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” in Paris, is composed
+of widows, who, without binding themselves by religious vows, engage
+to nurse the sick gathered into the hospitals of the association,
+poor outcasts attacked by loathsome diseases—cancer, for example.
+Women of wealth and belonging to great families often obtain admission
+to this society. Female religious orders are rarely contemplative;
+they are nearly always charitable in aim. “The Daughters
+of Charity” possess establishments all over the known world; they
+migrate, says M. du Camp, “like benevolent birds, carrying with
+them the principle of self-sacrifice and the love of those that suffer.
+In all countries I have visited, among sects most antagonistic to
+their religion, I have beheld them at work; their faces shadowed by
+the immense cap, which resembles the wings of a white swan; instructing
+children, visiting the sick, caring for the plague-stricken,
+blessed by our sailors whom they nurse in the French hospitals in
+foreign lands.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_38" href="#Footnote_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p>
+
+<p>Pity in woman is sometimes so powerful a sentiment that it supplies
+the place in her of a higher faculty, intelligence. It was thus that
+a humble servant-maid, without learning, who could neither read nor
+write, founded one of the most prominent nursing sisterhoods in
+France, “Les petites Soeurs des Pauvres,” which to-day numbers
+3,400 sisters, and possesses 207 houses, where more than 25,000 old
+men are received and cared for. In the first half of this century there
+was such misery in Brittany that the old men were literally abandoned
+by all. Jeanne Jugau, whose earnings hardly sufficed to maintain
+herself, took in one, then two, then a number of them, without a
+thought of her own poverty, slaving might and main for their support.
+Two women, Virginie Tredaniel and Marie Catherine, helped
+her; a priest, Le Pailleur, took the direction of their work, and in
+a short time the order was founded, and grew apace. There, where
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[227]</span>genius might have failed, the love and pity of a servant-maid succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>Another heroine of charity, though of a different type, was
+Jeanne Garnier. She was perpetually haunted by a desire to do
+good, to help and succour the unfortunate. M. du Camp has portrayed
+her character in a most graphic manner: impulsive, prone
+from childhood to adopt extreme measures, while in the convent she
+was given to rebellious and untractable conduct, for which she was
+sent away. When she was twenty years old she married; the love
+she bore her husband and two sons was deep and ardent. Three
+years after her marriage she had the unspeakable grief of losing both
+husband and sons at one fell stroke. After this occurrence her life
+had but one aim, ceaselessly and untiringly to succour and help the
+sorrowful. One day she was told that a woman, disfigured by a cutaneous
+disease, was lying in an attic in Lyons, abandoned by every
+one. She went at once to her, ministered to her, and every day went
+to wash her sores. Thus was suggested to her the founding of the
+association of “Les Dames du Calvaire,” of which we have already
+spoken, and the idea of pressing into the service of the sick, widows
+who found themselves in the same position as herself. She was not
+rich, but being an untiring and determined worker, capable of attacking
+the same person ten times a day, she obtained money. When
+they had to convey the sick to the new hospital, there was among
+them one woman so horribly disfigured by burns that no conveyance
+could be found whose driver was willing to take her. Jeanne Garnier
+then took her on her own shoulders and carried her there herself.
+The association of “Les Dames du Calvaire” was not the only charitable
+work which owes its existence to her. She conceived a great
+many other plans, of which many were carried out, for she never
+ceased working, up to the moment of her death, which occurred at
+forty-two years of age, of exhaustion.</p>
+
+<p>In the United States, where woman enjoys much greater freedom
+than in Europe, she makes an excellent use of her liberty. In fact,
+all associations of women have a charitable end in view; and these
+societies not being subjected to the severe rules of Catholic religious
+orders, and not requiring from their members so absolute a renunciation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[228]</span>of the pleasures of life, exhibit the most perfect and most modern
+form of charitable associations, which have been known up to the
+present day. The first woman’s club that was founded in that country,
+the Sorosis, has for its object the amelioration of the condition
+of shop-girls: it has also founded asylums for homeless children.
+The Temperance Union, founded by women, seeks to stem the tide
+of intemperance. The Women’s League has obtained the admission
+of women on commissioners boards for schools and hospitals. The
+College Settlement Girls, composed of female graduates from universities,
+carry help into the purlieus of the city.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_39" href="#Footnote_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a></p>
+
+<h5>CRUELTY, PITY, AND THE MATERNAL SENTIMENT.</h5>
+
+<p>Is woman kind or cruel? Can we reconcile these two series of
+facts, so contradictory in themselves? That is the question which
+now comes before us. Let us seek, first of all, the origin and the
+genesis of feminine cruelty. We have seen women exhibiting great
+ingenuity in torturing; she does not wish to destroy her enemies, but
+to torment and torture them; she seeks to protract their pain as
+long as possible, and to lengthen out her enjoyment of vengeance.
+On this point woman goes much further than man: for among savages
+men do not amuse themselves by prolonging the miseries of
+their enemies; they rather wreak their vengeance by killing them
+at one stroke. Savages often make a wholesale carnage, massacring
+whole tribes and nations. But it is always the woman who practices
+the art of killing a man by inches, over a slow fire, as it were.
+Thus we find that the redskins give their prisoners of war over to
+their women. Notice, even at the present day, the difference between
+the quarrels of men and women. Women scratch each other,
+tear out the hair, fly at the eyes of their adversaries, trying to inflict
+some painful wound: men give blows and stabs; they strive to disable
+or stun their enemy, or to destroy him. There is the same
+difference but on a smaller scale. This aptitude in inflicting pain is
+an outgrowth of weakness. We know from the Darwinian theory of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[229]</span>natural selection, and from the struggle for life, that every living
+being must be provided with a certain number of means of defense
+and offense, and amongst these means must be classed many instincts
+and sentiments which spring from natural selection, adaptation,
+and heredity. The cruelty of woman is one of these instincts
+and sentiments. Woman not being powerful enough to destroy her
+enemies, had to seek for the means of defending herself, by wounding
+their more delicate organs, by inflicting such acute pain as would
+serve to disable them. This tendency to protect one’s self by such
+means has become instinctive by heredity; and so much the more
+since the woman who was able thus to defend herself, had at the
+outset of man’s evolution a far better chance of survival.</p>
+
+<p>All this is so true, that we find other weak creatures also to be
+cruel. Children take pleasure in tormenting insects, birds, or little
+dogs, and are very cruel to each other. I knew a child who used to
+cut his nails like the teeth of a saw, in order to inflict more painful
+scratches on his companions. Humming birds, says Brehm, are
+the smallest and the cruelest of birds. When they are attacked by
+a more powerful enemy they try to peck out his eyes with their long,
+sharp beaks. The struggle for life and natural selection has provided
+their weakness with this means of defense, and they are even cruel to
+each other when they fight, to such an extent has the sentiment of
+cruelty in them become instinctive.</p>
+
+<p>And now we must seek for the genesis of the other phenomenon,
+pity. It is a notorious fact, that maternity being the great
+function of woman, through the whole order of animal life, with the
+exception of some few fishes, it is always the female who is thus the
+benefactress of the race. Maternity is always an altruistic function;
+in the inferior orders this altruism is a purely physical act, and consists
+merely in a material sacrifice; (the detaching of a portion of
+the maternal body, under the form of bud, or egg;) in the higher
+orders, this altruism becomes psychical and consists in a conscious
+sacrifice of self and of vitality in the interests of the race.</p>
+
+<p>What then is the essential nature of these altruistic sacrifices?
+Maternity is protection given to weakness; for the infant is above
+all other created things a being requiring succour.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">[230]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is thus that, the images relating to the state of weakness being
+in great numbers strongly impressed on the mind of woman, when
+one of them presents itself to her, by the law of association it
+awakens all those maternal sentiments whose function it is to help
+the weak. At first, motherhood only extends from a woman’s own
+children to those of others; this is the first stage of pity, such as we
+find it in the animals and among many undeveloped savage peoples.
+Afterwards in a region of higher psychical development the sentiment
+of pity broadens till it embraces a wider group, the sick, the
+aged, those condemned to death; for all those unfortunates who
+claim the pity of woman are the weak appealing for help to the
+strong. It is only the weak who can inspire pity. Thus pity, in
+woman, is but the outgrowth of the maternal sentiment applied to
+a larger class of helpless people. “Woman,” says M. du Camp,
+“may bind herself by the religious vow of chastity; but she is a
+born mother and remains a mother, even though circumstances may
+have broken the physical law of her sex. The Little Sisters of the
+Poor, call their pensioners ‘the good little old men,’ and themselves
+‘the good little sisters,’ their superior ‘the good little mother.’
+With them everybody is good and little; all these expressions are
+the reflection of maternal love.”</p>
+
+<p>We must mention also, that one cause of a livelier sense of pity
+in woman, is her own weakness and her lower intellect. “Anger,”
+writes A. Bain, “the passion for war, are bound up with activity and
+strength; conditions of weakness and of repose are favorable to the
+softer sentiments.” Strong men who display great muscular or mental
+activity, and who often experience the satisfactions arising from
+power, only realise with extreme difficulty the feelings of the weak;
+for, as H. Spencer remarks,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_40" href="#Footnote_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> “to feel pity for any suffering which
+we witness, we must have experienced it ourselves to the same extent
+or in an approximate degree.” Thus healthy persons become,
+after a serious sickness, more feeling than they formerly were for
+those who are suffering; women are continually in a state of ill-health.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[231]</span></p>
+
+<p>Besides which women have not been involved in the struggle
+for life, as have men during the whole process of evolution: this
+struggle for life implying, as it does, the necessity of pursuing one’s
+own object irrespective of the ills which it may entail on the unhappy
+competitors, and often rendering a man insensible to the sorrows of
+those around him. To this we add, that love for man has not been
+without influence in developing the sense of pity in woman. The
+main characteristic of the love of woman towards man, is self-abnegation
+and devotion; woman finds her happiness in devotion to the
+man she loves and in making for him the most painful sacrifices.
+Read the “Letters of Heloise,” the “Life of Carlyle,” or the “Life
+of Mme. de Lespinasse.” Each woman, carries hidden in her heart,
+an inexhaustible treasure of devotion which heredity has added to
+through all the centuries, during which woman has lived in contact
+with man and sought to win his good-will, displaying an affection
+and an ardent zeal in his behalf; nothing then is easier than to spend
+this treasure on the unhappy, when she has not found the man on
+whom to lavish it.</p>
+
+<p>The close relationship between pity, maternity, and love, is also
+shown by this fact, that the heroines of charity are almost always
+widows without sons, or unmarried women. When a woman has a
+husband or sons to love and cherish, she does not feel the same tenderness
+towards the suffering; this goes to prove that if these two
+sentiments are interchangeable, they are but two different forms of
+the same thing.</p>
+
+<h5>PITY AND CRUELTY.</h5>
+
+<p>We are now in a position to answer the question: Is woman
+kind or cruel? Pity and cruelty coexist together in her; we might
+call this state in woman a state of unstable equilibrium; to-day she
+is kind, divinely good, charitable; to-morrow she will be perverse
+and cruel. On one side her feebleness renders her cruel, and her
+impulsive nature prevents her from repressing the outbursts of anger
+and of vengeance; on the other hand, the gentle habits of maternal
+affection, her lower intelligence, and even the weakness of her nature
+develop in her kindly sentiments. Woman may experience the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[232]</span>strongest feelings of maternal affection at the sight of a helpless
+creature; but that will not prevent her from cruelly persecuting a
+rival, especially if she has been wounded in her sentiments of wife or
+mother. Thus woman, who is the natural protector of the weak,
+treats them oftentimes with a cruelty of which man is totally incapable.
+Woman loves, hates, consoles, inflicts pain, according as
+she finds herself in the presence of a friend, an enemy, a helpless
+being, or of a rival.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the fiercest heroines of the Paris Commune, had been
+trained nurses during the war, and distinguished for their devotion to
+the sick. There is nothing astonishing in this, for contradiction in
+feeling is so often a psychical law that a great Italian philosopher,
+Robert Ardigò, has said that man is not a logical being.</p>
+
+<p>We have noticed before that weakness is in part the cause of
+cruelty and partly also of pity, and this accounts for the co-existence
+of the two contrary sentiments. They coexist because they have a
+common origin. But this instability of equilibrium is lessened by
+evolution, and pity becomes stronger than cruelty. Among civilised
+nations the cruelty of women has become merely a moral attitude:
+the civilised woman, less powerful than her savage sister, no more
+subjects her enemies to physical pain, does not shed their blood;
+she contents herself with slandering them, turning them into ridicule,
+and humiliating them. The diminution of muscular strength is in
+itself favorable to the softening of female character.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, sexual selection also helps in this; in the human
+race as civilisation advances the male assumes more and more the
+right of selection, and man shrinks instinctively from meeting in a
+woman a high development of the qualities which he himself possesses,
+for he wishes to dominate her and to be her superior. This explains
+to us the singular fact, which we notice every day, that of a
+<i>savant</i> marrying a stupid or unintelligent wife; this is why the normal
+man, as also the vicious, choose gentle and good women when
+they desire to found families. If sometimes the choice falls on a
+wicked woman, it is because the man desires to form a criminal co-partnership,
+such as was perhaps the normal condition of family life
+during the early days of human evolution. Many of the domestic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[233]</span>tragedies which we witness to-day can be traced to no other cause
+than this <i>penchant</i> of the male, even of the vicious, to choose the
+woman who appears to be the most gentle. Women with their clear
+penetration and sure instincts have seized upon this inclination in
+man and made capital out of it with infinite ability: do we not see
+many young women simulate a gentleness, a sweetness, and kindness
+which they do not naturally possess in order to capture the good-will
+of men? Women have thus practised the habit of repressing their
+evil <i>penchants</i>, through interested motives, because they saw that
+men chose the most gentle among them as wives.</p>
+
+<p>Besides sexual selection, physical grace plays a conspicuous
+part, as well as those psychical qualities which are associated with
+it. Man having set a high value on graceful demeanour, woman
+sought and still seeks with all her strength to adorn herself with it.</p>
+
+<p>We know that by the law of association between the emotional
+states and their outward expression, which mutually correspond,
+each gesture, each attitude, and each graceful expression of the
+countenance has a tendency to throw the mind into some sweet and
+peaceful condition; this is why the culture of physical grace has
+been for woman an exercise of goodness. This fostering of physical
+beauty has had a beneficial influence on her moral character. We
+might say that as woman grew in beauty, she became better. Finally
+woman being in the present day more respected than in former times,
+she has less often the occasion to exercise her instinctive cruelty,
+which on this account is being gradually obliterated. Pity each day
+becomes more and more the normal state of the feminine mind, and
+cruelty the exception. In order to be cruel, a woman’s character
+must be perverted, as is the case in female criminals, whose vice exceeds
+that of man in similar circumstances. Or she must have received
+some deep provocation, wounding her profoundly in her
+deepest and tenderest sentiments, which has awakened the original
+cruelty slumbering latent in the depths of her heart.</p>
+
+<p>We may thus predict that in the ages to come, woman will
+become entirely good.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Guillaume Ferrero.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_24" href="#FNanchor_24" class="label">[24]</a> Spencer. <i>Principles of Sociology</i>, II., p. 361.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_25" href="#FNanchor_25" class="label">[25]</a> Irving. <i>Hist. of the Life and Voyages of Chris. Columbus</i>, II., p. 15.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_26" href="#FNanchor_26" class="label">[26]</a> Hovelacque. <i>Les débuts de l’humanité</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_27" href="#FNanchor_27" class="label">[27]</a> Sacher-Masoch. <i>Rev. des Deux Mondes.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_28" href="#FNanchor_28" class="label">[28]</a> Sacher-Masoch. Ibid.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_29" href="#FNanchor_29" class="label">[29]</a> Letourneau. <i>Evolution de la Morale</i>, p. 122.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_30" href="#FNanchor_30" class="label">[30]</a> Mantegazza. <i>Fisiologia etc.</i> Milan. 1889.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_31" href="#FNanchor_31" class="label">[31]</a> <i>Histoire morale des femmes.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_32" href="#FNanchor_32" class="label">[32]</a> Romanes. <i>Animal Intelligence</i>, Vol. II.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_33" href="#FNanchor_33" class="label">[33]</a> Hovelacque. <i>Op. cit.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_34" href="#FNanchor_34" class="label">[34]</a> Letourneau. <i>La Sociologie d’après l’ethnographie.</i> Paris, 1884.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_35" href="#FNanchor_35" class="label">[35]</a> Renan. <i>Les Apôtres.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_36" href="#FNanchor_36" class="label">[36]</a> Op. cit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_37" href="#FNanchor_37" class="label">[37]</a> <i>La charité privée à Paris</i>, 1887.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_38" href="#FNanchor_38" class="label">[38]</a> Op. cit.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_39" href="#FNanchor_39" class="label">[39]</a> <i>The Forum.</i> 1891.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_40" href="#FNanchor_40" class="label">[40]</a> Spencer. <i>Principles of Psychology</i>, II, p. 648.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[234]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="PANPSYCHISM_AND_PANBIOTISM">PANPSYCHISM AND PANBIOTISM.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I. PROFESSOR HAECKEL’S PANPSYCHISM.</h4>
+
+<p>Professor Haeckel, in his article “Our Monism,”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_41" href="#Footnote_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> propounds
+the theory of Panpsychism, which he considers as an
+essential feature of Monism. He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be that I regard
+<i>all</i> matter as <i>ensouled</i>, that is to say, as endowed with feeling (pleasure and pain)
+and with motion, or, better, with the power of motion. As elementary (atomistic)
+attraction and repulsion these powers are asserted in every simplest chemical process,
+and on them is based also every other phenomenon, consequently also the
+highest developed soul-activity of man.</p>
+
+<p>“Simplest example: sulphur and quicksilver rubbed together form cinnabar,
+a new body of entirely different properties. This is possible only on the supposition
+that the molecules (or atoms) of the two elements if brought within the proper distance,
+mutually <i>feel</i> each other, by attraction move toward each other; on the decomposition
+of a simple chemical compound the contrary takes place: repulsion.
+(Empedocles’s doctrine of ‘the love and hatred of atoms.’)”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Not being able to accept Professor Haeckel’s doctrine of Panpsychism,
+I propose what might best be called Panbiotism, briefly
+set forth in the maxim πᾶν βιωτόν; that is, everything is fraught
+with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live.</p>
+
+<p>The word βιωτός is mostly used by Greek authors in the negative,
+as in the phrase βίον οὐ βιωτόν, an unlivable life, in the sense
+of a life unendurable or not worth living. Thus Sophocles and others.
+The word βιωτός is embodied in the term Panbiotism in its etymological
+sense of “livable.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[235]</span></p>
+
+<p>I am willing to concede to Professor Haeckel that all nature is
+alive. Indeed, I have most emphatically insisted on the doctrine
+that there is a spontaneity pervading all nature. (See “Fundamental
+Problems,” 2d ed., pp. 110 et seqq.)</p>
+
+<p>By spontaneity is to be understood that kind of activity which
+springs from the nature of the being or thing which is active. A motion
+that is caused by pressure or push is not spontaneous; but a motion,
+the motive power of which resides in the moving object, is spontaneous.
+Thus a cart rolling down a hill by its own weight performs
+a spontaneous motion, but when drawn by horses moves, or rather
+is moved, by pull without any spontaneity.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_42" href="#Footnote_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> Now everything that
+exists is possessed of certain qualities; its existence is of some definite,
+peculiar kind, and this its peculiar kind is the character of the
+thing. In the character of a thing lies the source of its spontaneous
+actions. The spontaneous actions of the chemical elements depend
+upon their qualities, which always react under certain circumstances
+in a definite way, and under the same conditions in the same way.
+The action of sulphur and quicksilver lies in the nature of these elements.
+Their union is not passive, but active. They <i>are</i> not combined,
+but they <i>do</i> combine. He who observes and studies nature
+cannot be blind to the fact that an inalienable, intrinsic power is
+resident in every thing that exists. This is true not only of organised
+life, but also of the chemical elements as well as of gravitating masses.
+The motion of a falling stone can, no more than the actions of
+oxydising substances, be considered as ultimately due to an extraneous
+pressure that makes them move by push, or to a <i>vis a tergo</i>
+acting upon inert matter. These motions must be spontaneous;
+they are due to powers inherent in the nature of reality. They are
+self-motions, and in this sense we say that all nature is alive.</p>
+
+<p>The term “life” is here used in a broader sense than ordinarily.
+It means spontaneity or self-motion, while in its common signification
+the term “life” is restricted only to the spontaneous action of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[236]</span>organised beings, i. e. of plants and animals. In order to distinguish
+life in the broader sense from the narrower or common acceptance
+of the term, we call the latter “organised life.”</p>
+
+<p>It is not impossible, and I consider it even as most probable,
+that the difference between Professor Haeckel and myself rests on
+a different usage of the term soul. But a vague or inconsistent
+usage of the term, unless we are especially careful in so defining it
+as to prevent misunderstandings, will inevitably beget errors. Thus
+the doctrine of Panpsychism is liable to lead to fantastic ideas, and
+to cause great confusion concerning the activity of what is generally
+called inanimate nature.</p>
+
+<p>Soul (as I understand the term) is a system of sentient symbols.</p>
+
+<p>The problem of the origin of the soul is solved as soon as we
+understand how feelings can acquire meaning.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose we have some sentient substance exposed to the impressions
+of the surrounding world. The sense-impressions of the surrounding
+world leave traces in the sentient substance; these traces,
+which are structures of a certain form corresponding exactly to the
+various impressions, are preserved and constitute a predisposition to
+being very easily revived by impressions of the same kind. The revival
+of feeling in traces left in the sentient structure from former
+impressions is called memory. If a new impression of the same kind
+as the traces of the former impressions affects a sentient being, the
+new impression already finds a convenient path for its reception prepared.
+Its peculiar vibration fits in the old trace and thus runs along
+very easily in the memory-grooves of former impressions, reviving at
+the same time the feelings perceived at their original formation. The
+feeling thus caused is composed of several elements, which naturally
+melt into one: first, there is that kind of feeling which is produced
+by the present impression; secondly, there is the revival of former
+feelings or memory-sensations; and thirdly, there is a feeling of congruence
+resulting from the combination of these two. This third
+element is a new and a very important feature. We suppose that it
+is extremely insignificant in the beginning, but being a constantly
+growing factor, it rapidly increases in importance. The stronger
+and the more independent the memory-structures become, the more
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[237]</span>clearly will their congruence with fresh sense-impressions be felt as
+a congruence.</p>
+
+<p>This feeling of congruence is the simplest form of what psychologists
+generally call “recognition.”</p>
+
+<p>The recognition of a sense-impression, as being the same as
+some former sense-impression, adds to the feeling a new quality; it
+imparts meaning to it. This feeling of a special kind will now stand
+for something. In this way impressions upon sentient substance
+will, in the course of their natural development, simply by the repetition
+of similar and same impressions, come to indicate the presence
+of certain conditions that cause the impression. This act of indicating
+something, of symbolising the presence of a reality, of possessing
+meaning, is the birth of soul. Sense-impressions that have acquired
+meaning are called sensations. A sensation standing for a special
+object symbolises that object. Abstract ideas are symbols of a higher
+degree, but they remain symbols just the same. And it is the sentient
+symbols which constitute the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Those actions which are regulated by the meanings of sentient
+symbols of which a soul consists should alone, according to a strict
+terminology, be called “psychical.” The falling stone, the chemical
+elements, when combining or separating, etc., are alive; there is a
+spontaneously acting power even in unorganised nature; but the actions
+of unorganised nature are not determined by the meaning of
+feelings, and, in truth, we have no reason to believe that their feelings—granting
+that they really do possess feelings of some kind—are
+freighted with even so much as the slightest inkling of significance.
+In a word, there is no soul in the stone; there is no mind in the
+water-fall; and there is nothing psychical in either oxygen or hydrogen.
+But there is soul wherever meaning can be found as the regulating
+motive of actions; there is purpose. And wherever purpose
+is, there is mind.</p>
+
+<h4>II. PLEASURE AND PAIN.</h4>
+
+<p>Professor Haeckel goes still farther in the application of his
+theory of Panpsychism: he speaks of the atoms not only as feeling
+each other, but also as having pleasure and pain. This indicates
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[238]</span>either that he is serious in his belief in the psychical nature of all
+things, or it proves how dangerous it is to introduce an allegorical
+expression the allegorical character of which is from the beginning
+lost sight of.</p>
+
+<p>What are pleasure and pain?</p>
+
+<p>Pleasure and pain are known to us by experience; they are
+feelings. Pleasure is an agreeable, pain a disagreeable feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Pleasure and pain are different from sensation. Sensations are
+representative of certain somethings called objects. Pleasures and
+pains, however, are not representative, they are purely subjective
+states. There may be pleasurable or painful sensations, and there
+may be pain indicating the presence of pain-producing objects, but
+that does not concern us now. When speaking of pleasure and pain
+we do not refer to the representative value of feelings, but consider
+a merely subjective aspect, pleasure being the agreeableness, pain
+the disagreeableness of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly pleasure and pain presuppose the existence of an
+organised system of feelings. An isolated feeling, we have learned,
+is meaningless; it is still less pleasurable or painful. In order to
+agree or disagree, there must be something with which to agree or
+disagree. Therefore, although pleasure and pain are not symbols
+indicative of some objective presence, they can take place only in
+sentient organisms, in systems of feelings, in souls. Where these
+complex conditions, indicative of the presence of a soul, are absent,
+we have no right to speak of the presence of pleasure and pain.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot interpret the phenomena of unorganised nature as
+being endowed with feelings of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and
+pain are psychical phenomena, and psychical phenomena can take
+place in souls only.</p>
+
+<p>We might as well speak of the presence of positive and negative
+electricity in the cataract, the water-power of which is employed
+to produce electricity. Electricity is, in such a case, transformed
+water-power; but can we, for that reason, say that the motion of
+water is either positive or negative electricity?</p>
+
+<p>All the motions of the objective world must be supposed to
+have their subjective correlates; but the simplest forms of objective
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[239]</span>phenomena cannot have those subjective correlates which, according
+to our experience, appear and have their conditions of appearance
+only in the most complex and highest developed forms of existence—in
+organised nature.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The physiological conditions of pleasure and pain are now just
+beginning to be investigated (see Goldscheider’s article in Dubois-Reymond’s
+<i>Archiv</i>, 1891), and most philosophical theories concerning
+the nature of pleasure and pain are mere assumptions. Almost
+all the views that are now current attempt an explanation by generalising
+the idea of pleasure and pain so as to regard the feelings
+of pleasure and pain as a universal feature of nature. This vicious
+method of generalisation at the cost of discrimination has produced
+much confusion in the world; and its influence is the more pernicious
+as average minds are easily satisfied with generalities.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the theory of making pleasure and pain universal features
+of existence is a palpably erroneous theory; it is a wrong generalisation.
+It is true that sentient beings naturally seek pleasure and
+avoid pain. But are we allowed, according to the laws of logic, to
+transfer the special feature of the case to the whole class of all processes
+where a seeking and an avoiding can be observed? Certainly
+not. Because sentient beings are repelled by pain and attracted by
+pleasure, we cannot say that every repulsion is due to pain and
+that every attraction is due to pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>The theory according to which pleasure and pain alone are the
+causes of attraction and repulsion we may fairly consider as a poetical
+license justifiable within certain narrow limits, and actually justified
+in so far as there is in every natural process some peculiar
+feature that is analogous to the feelings of sentient beings. This
+peculiar feature—viz. its subjectivity—is, as we have seen, not visible,
+not observable; yet it exists: it is that something which in
+the course of evolution becomes, in special combinations, first feeling
+and then consciousness. But for that reason it is not as yet
+either consciousness or feeling.</p>
+
+<p>While on the one hand the theories of pleasure and pain that
+regard pleasure and pain as universal features of natural phenomena,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[240]</span>are arrived at by a wrong method of generalisation, we find
+on the other hand they do not agree with facts. They neither explain
+nor account for the appearance or disappearance of real pleasures
+and pains such as take place in animal life.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Starting from merely theoretical considerations, Kant defines
+pleasure as a feeling of furtherance, pain, as a feeling of hindrance
+of life; and so prominent a physiologist and psychologist as Alexander
+Bain says that “States of pleasure are connected with an increase,
+states of pain, with an abatement of some or of all the vital
+functions.”</p>
+
+<p>A consideration of the actual causes of our pleasures and pains
+will prove the incorrectness of these views, which are also due to
+wrong generalisations. An increase of the vital functions and a further
+growth, either of the organs or of the whole organism, is very
+often accompanied with pain. A growing tooth causes, as a rule,
+as much pain as a decaying tooth. And if by some drug the decay
+is hastened and the nerve is killed, there is, connected with the suppression
+and sometimes with the mere abatement of the vital function,
+an abatement of the pain also.</p>
+
+<p>Feelings of pleasure and pain presuppose that habits have been
+formed in a sentient organism.</p>
+
+<p>Pain is not always a hindrance of life, nor is every hindrance
+of life painful. Pain is not an abatement of the functions of life,
+not a decay, nor a destruction. But pain is always a disturbance of
+life and of the habits that have been formed.</p>
+
+<p>Growth is, under certain circumstances, as much a disturbance
+as is decay. And decay, if it is simply an abatement or cessation of
+function, is not accompanied with pain.</p>
+
+<p>While pain is always a disturbance of the functions of an organism,
+pleasure is simply the gratification of wants; functions and
+wants being formed by habits, we may briefly say that pleasure is
+agreement, pain disagreement, with habits.</p>
+
+<p>There are natural wants and unnatural wants. There are habits
+beneficial to the furtherance of life, and there are habits injurious
+to the furtherance of life. The pleasure connected with the gratification
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[241]</span>of wants does not depend on its being a furtherance or a
+hindrance of life, but solely on the intensity of the want. And
+the intensity of the want, again, depends on the degree to which a
+habit has become inveterate.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_43" href="#Footnote_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a></p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The theory of pleasure and pain which regards pleasure as indicative
+of the growth, and pain, of the decay of life, leads ultimately
+to the ethics of hedonism, which identifies the good with the pleasurable.
+However, if our view of pleasure and pain be correct, it is
+apparent that the pleasure theory in ethics is wrong in its very foundation.
+The pleasurable would cease to be a criterion of goodness;
+for many things are pleasurable that are bad, and many things are
+painful that are good. Growth, development, progress, evolution
+have often been, nay must mostly be bought with great pain, tribulation,
+anxiety, and also with the renunciation of pleasures. On the
+other hand the fulness of pleasure is always a very dangerous symptom
+for any state of existence.</p>
+
+<p>The seeking of pleasure and the avoiding of pain are certainly
+very questionable guides in determining what right conduct is. In
+adopting pleasure and pain as the principles of ethics, we adulterate
+the nature of morality; for morality exists and has been called into
+being simply to counteract the dangerous allurances of that which
+promises to produce pleasure and to avoid pain. Ethics has to teach
+us how to live, how to develop, how to grow, how to make our lives
+useful and serviceable. If ethics were simply a method of how to
+obtain the greatest amount of pleasure, we might better openly confess
+that there is no moral goodness but only pleasurableness, and
+consequently that morality is a chimera and ethics a farce.</p>
+
+<p>A defender of the pleasure theory in ethics writes in reply to
+this criticism of his view: “To seek pleasure and to avoid pain is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[242]</span>not wrong. Why shall we deprive men of their enjoyments?” Certainly,
+everyone has a right to enjoy himself; every one has a right
+to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. But seeking pleasure and avoiding
+pain is not as yet ethical. Under ordinary circumstances it is
+right enough to follow the natural impulses of seeking pleasure and
+avoiding pain. But there are cases where seeking pleasure, be it for
+ourselves or for others, and avoiding pain, be it for ourselves or for
+others, become actual wrongs; not because present pleasures will
+lead to future pains, but because certain pleasures are a hindrance
+to the higher evolution of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>It is often said that the renunciation of pleasures is richly made
+up for by the pleasures which are afforded in a more fully developed
+life. But this, in my opinion, is not true. The adult has rather less
+pleasures than the child, and the civilised or highly cultured man
+does not enjoy himself as much, as easily, and as cheaply as does the
+savage, the uncultured, the fool.</p>
+
+<h4>III. MR. THOMAS A. EDISON’S PANPSYCHISM.</h4>
+
+<p>Some time ago Mr. Thomas A. Edison was interviewed on the
+question, “What is life?” Mr. Edison answered the question; and
+his view is quite in accord with Professor Haeckel’s idea of panpsychism.
+The article appeared first in a daily newspaper. Being remarkable
+for its coincidence with the views of a great scientist, and
+coming from the pen of so interesting a man as the famous inventor
+of the phonograph, we deem it best to republish it in full, with Mr.
+Edison’s permission, who, at the same time, acknowledged the copy
+we sent him as correct.</p>
+
+<p>This is the article:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<h5>INTELLIGENT ATOMS.</h5>
+
+<p class="center">BY THOMAS A. EDISON.</p>
+
+<p>My mind is not of a speculative order, it is essentially practical, and when I am
+making an experiment, I think only of getting something useful, of making electricity
+perform work.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t soar; I keep down pretty close to earth. Of course there are problems
+in life I can’t help thinking about, but I don’t try to study them out. It is necessary
+that they should be studied, and men fitted for that work are doing it. I am not fitted
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[243]</span>for it. I leave the theoretical study of electricity to the physicists, confining my
+work to the practical application of the force. It is my belief, however, that every
+atom of matter is intelligent, deriving energy from the primordial germ. The intelligence
+of man is, I take it, the sum of the intelligences of the atoms of which he
+is composed. Every atom has an intelligent power of selection and is always striving
+to get into harmonious relation with other atoms. The human body is, I think,
+maintained in its integrity by the intelligent persistence of its atoms, or rather by
+an agreement between the atoms so to persist. When the harmonious adjustment
+is destroyed the man dies, and the atoms seek other relations.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot regard the odor of decay but as the result of the efforts of the atoms
+to dissociate themselves; they want to get away and make new combinations. Man,
+therefore, may be regarded in some sort as a microcosm of atoms agreeing to constitute
+his life as long as order and discipline can be maintained. But, of course,
+there is dissatisfaction, rebellion and anarchy leading eventually to death, and through
+death to new forms of life. For life I regard as indestructible.</p>
+
+<p>All matter lives, and everything that lives possesses intelligence. Consider
+growing corn, for example. An atom of oxygen comes flying along the air. It seeks
+combination with other atoms and goes to the corn, not by chance, but by intention.
+It is seized by other atoms that need oxygen, and is packed away in the corn where
+it can do its work. Now carbon, hydrogen and oxygen enter into the composition
+of every organic substance in one form of arrangement or another. The formula
+<i>CHO</i>, in fact, is almost universal.</p>
+
+<p>Very well, then, why does a free atom of carbon select any particular one out
+of 50,000 or more possible positions unless it wants to? I cannot see how we can
+deny intelligence to this act of volition on the part of the atom. To say that one
+atom has an affinity for another is simply to use a big word. The atom is conscious
+if man is conscious, is intelligent if man is intelligent, exercises will-power if man
+does, is, in its own little way, all that man is. We are told by geologists that in the
+earliest periods no form of life could exist on the earth.</p>
+
+<p>How do they know that? A crystal is devoid of this vital principle, they say,
+and yet certain kinds of atoms invariably arrange themselves in a particular way to
+form a crystal. They did that in geological periods antedating the appearance of
+any form of life and have been doing it ever since in precisely the same way. Some
+crystals form in branches like a fern. Why is there not life in the growth of a
+crystal? Was the vital principle specially created at some particular period of the
+earth’s history, or did it exist and control every atom of matter when the earth was
+molten? I cannot avoid the conclusion that all matter is composed of intelligent
+atoms and that life and mind are merely synonyms for the aggregation of atomic
+intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Of course there is a source of energy. Nature is a perpetual motion machine,
+and perpetual motion implies a sustaining and impelling force.</p>
+
+<p>When I was in Berlin I met Du Bois-Reymond, and, wagging the end of my
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[244]</span>finger, I said to him, “What is that? What moves that finger?” He said he didn’t
+know; that investigators have for twenty-five years been trying to find out. If anybody
+could tell him what wagged this finger, the problem of life would be solved.</p>
+
+<p>There are many forms of energy resulting from the combustion of coal under
+a boiler. Some of these forms we know something about in a practical way, but
+there may be many others we don’t know anything about.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps electricity will itself be superseded in time, who knows? Now, a beefsteak
+in the human stomach is equivalent to coal under a boiler. By oxidisation it
+excites energy that does work, but what form of energy is it? It is not steam pressure.
+It acts through the nerve-cells, performs work that can be measured in foot
+pounds, and can be transformed into electricity, but the actual nature of this force
+which produces this work—which makes effectual the mandate of the will—is unknown.</p>
+
+<p>It is not magnetism, it doesn’t attract iron. It is not electricity—at least such
+a form of electricity as we are familiar with. Still, here it is necessary to be guarded,
+because so many different forms of electricity are known to science that it would be
+rash to say positively that we shall not class vital energy as a form of electrical
+energy. We cannot argue anything from difference in speed. Nerve-force may
+travel as fast as electricity, once it gets started. The apparent slowness may be in
+the brain. It may take an appreciable time for the brain to set the force going.</p>
+
+<p>I made an experiment with a frog’s leg that indicates something of the kind. I
+took a leg that was susceptible to galvanic current. The vibration produced a note
+that was as high as a piccoto. While the leg was alive it responded to the electrical
+current; when it was dead it would not respond. After the frog’s leg had been
+lying in the laboratory three days I couldn’t make it squeal. The experiment was
+conclusive as to this point: The vital force in the nerves of the leg was capable of
+acting with speed enough to induce the vibration of the diaphragm necessary to produce
+sound.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly this rate of speed is greater than physiologists appear to allow, and
+it seems reasonable that there is a close affinity between vital energy and electricity.
+I do not say they are identical; on the contrary I say they are very like. If one
+could learn to make vital energy directly without fuel, that is without beefsteak in
+the stomach, and in such manner that the human system could appropriate it, the
+elixir of life would no longer be a dream of alchemy. But we have not yet learned
+to make electricity directly, without the aid of fuel and steam.</p>
+
+<p>I believe this is possible; indeed, I have been experimenting in this direction
+for some time past. But until we can learn to make electricity, like nature, out of
+disturbed air, I am afraid the more delicate task of manufacturing vital energy so
+that it can be bottled and sold at the family grocery store will have to be deferred.</p>
+
+<p>Electricity, by the way, is properly merely a form of energy, and not a fluid.
+As for the ether which speculative science supposes to exist, I don’t know anything
+about it. Nobody has discovered anything of the kind. In order to make their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[245]</span>theories hold together they have, it seems to me, created the ether. But the ether
+imagined by them is unthinkable to me. I don’t say I disagree with them, because
+I don’t pretend to have any theories of that kind, and am not competent to dispute
+with speculative scientists. All I can say is, my mind is unable to accept the theory.
+The ether, they say, is as rigid as steel and as soft as butter. I can’t catch on
+to that idea.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that there are only two things in the universe—matter and energy.
+Matter I can understand to be intelligent, for man himself I regard as so much matter.
+Energy I know can take various forms, and manifest itself in various ways.
+I can understand also that it works not only upon, but through, matter. What this
+matter is, what this energy is, I do not know.</p>
+
+<p>However, it is possible that it is simply matter and energy, and that any desire
+to know too much about the whole question should be diagnosed as a disease; such
+a disease as German doctors are said to have discovered among the students of their
+universities—the disease of asking questions.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h5>THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Thomas A. Edison’s article is full of suggestions which invite
+further discussion. We must here limit ourselves solely to those
+which touch the problem of Panpsychism and Panbiotism.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who has read Mr. Edison’s article will be struck with
+the strange coincidence that obtains between his and Professor
+Haeckel’s views. The famous naturalist considers what he calls
+panpsychism as the corner-stone of his monism: he says that atoms
+possess souls; and in a similar way the famous inventor believes in
+the intelligence of atoms, he declares that atoms are endowed with
+minds. There is certainly a deep truth in this conception of nature;
+and yet we cannot accept it in the way it is presented by either Professor
+Haeckel or Mr. Edison.</p>
+
+<p>With reference to Professor Haeckel’s views we have explained
+why atoms, the actions of which are not endowed with meaning,
+have no soul, and also why they cannot feel pleasure and pain. It
+remains for us to explain why atoms are not in possession of intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>What is intelligence?</p>
+
+<p>That reaction upon a stimulus which takes place in the way it
+does because of the presence of meaning, is called mental, or intelligent
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[246]</span>action; and the ability to adjust action to mental representations
+is intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>Intelligence is a psychical quality, and the psychical process
+which is preparing to act with intelligence is called deliberation.
+Deliberation is the successive revival of several soul-structures, either
+of memories of former experiences, or of rules derived therefrom,
+or of advice formerly received, including also new combinations of
+these mental structures, and keeping in view the probable results of
+the intended action. In a word, deliberation is thought, and thought
+is an interaction among meaning-freighted feelings.</p>
+
+<p>Among these ideas, which in so far as they can influence action
+(i. e. purposive motions) are called “motives,” the strongest one will
+determine the result. Now, any atom of non-organised matter, say
+an atom of hydrogen, acts (as we said above) with spontaneity. It
+is in this sense as much alive as is any ever so complex vegetable or
+animal substance. It is self-acting, and its action reveals the innermost
+nature of its being just as much as the action of the man shows
+the character of the man.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, a great difference between the action of animal
+beings whose action is regulated by the meanings of their feelings,
+which in their totality we call the soul, and the actions of inorganic
+matter, of crystals, minerals, gases, chemical elements, and
+gravitating masses, all of which we comprise under the name “inanimate
+nature.” The stone’s fall does not depend upon any representative
+feeling; it depends solely upon that quality of the stone
+which we popularly call its weight. Nor has the falling stone any
+choice whether to fall or not to fall. Under certain circumstances
+it falls. There is no act of deliberation preceding the fall. Nor has
+it any choice concerning the direction of its fall. The surrounding
+conditions, viz., its position with regard to the centre of the earth together
+with its mass, determine the process. The stone’s action can
+satisfactorily be explained without attributing to it psychical qualities.
+The stone possesses no soul; it is void of mentality; and although
+we believe that everything, organised or unorganised, is endowed
+with subjectivity (by which we understand the conditions of
+psychical life, or the potentiality of feeling and consciousness), this
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[247]</span>subjectivity can only be analogous to the blind impulse of the stone’s
+mass. If some other, psychical or mental, subjectivity were present,
+we should say that it apparently does not enter as a factor in
+the determination of the event. Accordingly such an assumption is
+gratuitous. There is subjectivity, but there is no intelligence. There
+is potentiality of feeling, but there is no consciousness. There is
+present the elementary condition of that something which is going
+to develop into mind, but there is no mind; there is no meaning-freighted
+awareness of the surrounding conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Says Mr. Edison:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The intelligence of man is, I take it, the sum of the intelligences of the atoms
+of which he is composed.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The sum total of the intelligences of the atoms in a human body
+(if, in this connection, for the sake of argument, we grant that atoms
+are intelligent) would not as yet make up the intelligence of man.
+Suppose we are contemplating a mosaic picture or inscription. Are
+such compositions really only the sum of the little stones? Are they
+not rather a certain peculiar form in which these colored stones are
+arranged? It is not the sum of the stones that makes the picture,
+but the form of their composition. The picture is not contained in
+any single one of them, nor is it the whole number of all the single
+stones: it originates through their peculiar combination and consists
+of the form in which they are combined.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Edison’s explanation of the soul, applied to this example of
+a mosaic picture, would be as follows: Every little stone is in itself
+a little mosaic picture. The whole picture of the mosaic is the sum
+of the little pictures of the stones of which it is composed.</p>
+
+<p>The intelligence of the soul, however, is not even as yet the
+form in which feeling structures combine; it originates with the representative
+faculty of the feeling structures. The soul is the organised
+totality of a set of images and abstract mental symbols representing
+the qualities, the influences, and the interactions of the different objects
+of the surrounding world, the thinking subject included.</p>
+
+<p>Says Mr. Edison:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Every atom has an intelligent power of selection, and is always striving to get
+into harmonious relation with other atoms.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">[248]</span></p>
+
+<p>The latter is true; the former is an error. Every atom “is always
+striving to get into harmonious relation with other atoms”;
+this is its nature; and its nature being stable, consisting of certain
+inalienable and intrinsic qualities, the atom acts with consistency.
+Certain atoms, say atoms of hydrogen, are of such a nature
+as to combine with certain other atoms, say atoms of oxygen, into
+molecules that form a certain substance of peculiar properties, which,
+if each atom of oxygen combines with two atoms of hydrogen, would
+be <i>H₂O</i>, or water. This substance again, having certain definite
+qualities, will in a temperature below freezing point crystallise at a
+definite angle. The angle of crystallisation being the same for all
+molecules <i>H₂O</i>, the result will necessarily be one of most marvellous
+regularity. And not being able to observe the atoms in their secret
+activity, not knowing all the details of nature’s marvellous laboratory,
+we are astonished to find such a wonderfully harmonious relation.
+And yet, considering the nature of things, we are urged to confess
+that it is the result of an inevitable necessity, which takes place according
+to strict mathematical laws.</p>
+
+<p>Although every atom strives, according to its nature, to get into
+harmonious relation with other atoms, we do not see any “intelligent
+power of selection” in the province of inorganic nature. Every atom
+of inorganic substances acts according to its nature in one and the
+same way throughout. There is no choice, no selection, allowed.
+Choice and selection are faculties that are reserved for the higher
+domains of psychical life, which originates in the domain of animal
+existence when meaning, conditioned by the presence of sentiency,
+rises into being and creates the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Supposing that through some combination of atoms their subjectivity
+be combined in such a form as to produce sentiency or feeling,
+we can very easily understand how this feeling will in time become
+representative of the conditions by which it is affected. The
+soul does not consist of the atoms of its organism, nor of the sum of
+the qualities of the atoms. The soul consists of something more
+subtle than matter: the soul consists of the meaning that is attached
+to the different forms of the feelings which obtain in living organisms.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[249]</span></p>
+
+<h5>THE PROBLEM OF THEISM.</h5>
+
+<p>The problem as to whether or not there is an element of feeling
+present in the unorganised realm of nature, is connected also with the
+problem of theism. The monistic view of the world, which considers
+nature as alive throughout, can neither accept the old supernaturalism,
+nor the materialistic theory of atheism. Theism, as it is usually
+conceived, believes in a personal creator and ruler of the world.
+Materialism denies the existence of any God; it regards matter and
+its actions as the only reality.</p>
+
+<p>Monism does not regard mental phenomena as an incidental by-play
+of blindly operating forces. It regards mind as a necessary product
+of reality. Mind and the peculiar qualities of mind are characteristic
+of the world-tree, of which it is the highest efflorescence we
+know. From the fruit we can know the root, from the product we
+can judge of the factors, in the creature we see the creator.</p>
+
+<p>That great something which has produced us, the All-power in
+which we live and move and have our being, and obedience to the
+laws of which are the conditions of life, of welfare, and of an advance
+to higher life, is called with a popular religious name “God.”</p>
+
+<p>Let us comprise under the name “theism” all those views
+which recognise any conception of God, and reserve the term anthropotheism
+for that view which regards God as a person, a mind,
+a conscious being, or a world-ego. Atheism in that case will be a
+negation of the existence of God in any form, a negation of the All-power
+of which we are parts and to which we have to conform; and
+accordingly atheism will be also a negation of any authority of moral
+conduct.</p>
+
+<p>We call attention to the fact that many who call themselves
+atheists, simply because they do not believe in anthropotheism, are
+according to this definition not to be classed among the atheists.</p>
+
+<p>What has monism to say, on the problem of the existence of
+God?</p>
+
+<p>Prof. George J. Romanes, in an article which appeared some
+time ago in the <i>Contemporary Review</i> under the title “The World as
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">[250]</span>an Eject,” declares that monism has left the problem of theism in
+the same state it was in before. He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The views of the late Professor Clifford concerning the influence of monism
+on theism, are unsound. I am in full agreement with him in believing that monism
+is destined to become the generally accepted theory of things, seeing that it is the
+only theory of things which can receive the sanction of science on the one hand, and
+of feeling on the other. But I disagree with him in holding that this theory is fraught
+with implications of an anti-theistic kind. In my opinion, <i>this theory leaves the
+question of theism very much where it was before</i>.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_44" href="#Footnote_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> That is to say, while not furnishing
+any independent proof of theism, it likewise fails to furnish any independent
+disproof.</p>
+
+<p>“As a matter of methodical reasoning it appears to me that monism alone can
+only lead to agnosticism. That is to say, it leaves a clear field of choice as between
+theism and atheism.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_45" href="#Footnote_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Clifford says in the passage referred to by Professor Romanes:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex which is made
+up of elements themselves not rational, not intelligent, not conscious.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Rational, intelligent, conscious beings, so far as their material
+existence is concerned, are made up of elements not rational, not intelligent,
+not conscious. But mind, reason, intelligence are not at all
+made up of material elements; they are neither latent nor germinal
+and least of all fully developed properties of the single atoms. Reason
+can in our conception never be explained as a complex result of
+the interaction of absolutely irrational elements. The material elements
+of the world, it is true, are not intelligent, not conscious; but
+the world as a whole (although <i>not</i> conscious and <i>not</i> endowed with
+purposive volition) is at least <i>not ir</i>rational and not void of determination.
+On the contrary the world as a whole is the prototype of
+all rationality, and human reason is a mere image of the world-order.
+What is the reason of a rational being but an incarnation of this
+world-order?</p>
+
+<p>Reason is not a thing of matter; exactly so the world-order is
+not a thing of matter. But it exists none the less; it is a reality.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[251]</span>On the other hand, the world-order need neither be a personal being
+nor the work of a personal being. The order that prevails in the
+real world and in the laws of nature appears also in the ideal world,
+in the laws of formal thought, in mathematics, and its kindred
+sciences; and the same rationality that obtains in the ideal domain
+permeates the realms of reality, the universe of objective existence.</p>
+
+<p>The idea that God created the world-order and dictated its laws
+is a fanciful and poetical allegory; it is as such a pagan notion which
+belongs in the same category with Hesiod’s Cosmology, but it is
+scientifically and philosophically unthinkable. For God is eternal and
+God’s being is eternal. God has not created his own attributes and
+the world-order is simply an attribute of God; it is part and parcel
+of his nature. Or can you think of God without that attribute of
+irrefragable order that appears to science as necessity, to religion
+as holiness, to ethics as justice, to art as the law of beauty, to the
+mystic as the key to all the wonders of existence which though solving
+all the problems remains most wonderful itself?</p>
+
+<p>The world as a whole, the cosmos, God, or whatever we call
+the One and All, is the prototype of all reason, but he is not a mind;
+he is not a system of sentient symbols; he is not a soul. Minds are
+a special kind of God’s creatures; but God is not a creature: he is
+the condition of the existence of creatures, he is the creator.</p>
+
+<p>The objection is made from materialistic quarters: “What is
+the world as a whole but the sum of all atoms!” This is an error.
+The world is not merely the sum of all its atoms; the universe does
+not consist of innumerable little particles which in their combination
+form the All. On the contrary: the world as a whole, existence in
+its oneness, or speaking religiously God, is alone the only true reality;
+all other things and beings are parts of him. Atoms are abstract
+concepts; the existence of an atom and of its actions presupposes
+the existence of the great whole of which it is a part, and without
+which it would have no reality. There are no atoms in themselves.
+Atoms regarded as things in themselves are a scientific superstition.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Romanes advances the proposition, that cosmical
+events, being as highly complex as nervous phenomena, might be
+possessed of a similar subjectivity. The nervous phenomena which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[252]</span>constitute the physiological action of mind in the province of objectivity
+are, it is true, very complex, but complexity does not constitute
+that characteristic feature on the presence of which depends the
+origin of mind.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Romanes says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Both mind and matter in motion admit of degrees: first as to quantity, next
+as to velocity, and lastly as to <i>complexity</i>. But the degrees of matter in motion are
+found, in point of observable fact, not to correspond with those of mind, save in the
+last particular of complexity, where there is unquestionably an evident correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>“Now, if we fix our attention merely on this subject-matter of complexity, and
+refuse to be led astray by obviously false analogies of a more special kind, I think
+that there can be no question that the macrocosm does furnish amply sufficient opportunity,
+as it were, for the presence of subjectivity, even if it be assumed that subjectivity
+can only be yielded by an order of complexity analogous to that of a nervous
+system. For, considering the natural and dynamical system of the universe
+as a whole, it is obvious that the complexity presented is greater than any of its
+parts. Not only is it true that all these parts are included in the whole, and that
+even the visible sidereal system alone presents movements of enormous intricacy,
+but we find, for instance, that even within the limits of this small planet there is
+presented to actual observation a peculiar form of circumscribed complex, fully comparable
+to that of the individual brain, and yet external to each individual brain.
+For the so-called ‘social organism,’ although composed of innumerable individual
+personalities, is, with regard to each of its constituent units, a part of the objective
+world—just as the human brain would be, were each of its constituent cells of a
+construction sufficiently complex to yield a separate personality.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The so-called social organism which is composed of innumerable
+personalities undoubtedly yields a peculiar spiritual existence,
+which cannot be explained solely as the sum of the parts and actions
+of its constituent individuals. The relations in which the members
+of society stand to each other are of an analogous importance to
+the relations of the cells and organs in an organism. It is the form
+that constitutes this or that kind of an organism, not the sum of
+atoms, nor the intricacy or complexity of their combinations. Different
+forms of perhaps the same material amount, and of the same
+intricacy of combination, yield quite distinct types of individuality,
+and every state, every nation, every society possesses, as it were a
+personality of its own.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[253]</span></p>
+
+<p>Mind is not constituted by complexity. Mind is a system of
+sentient symbols. Wherever we find organisms acting in such a way
+that their actions depend upon the <i>meanings</i> of certain stimuli, we
+have to attribute to them that characteristic feature which we call
+mind, or soul. The action of a falling stone is explainable without
+attributing to it any mentality. There is no representative value,
+no meaning in that quality of the stone which, under certain conditions,
+makes the stone fall. However, if a man acts, the motive
+of his action does not consist in the gravity of certain material particles
+of his brain. It consists in the meaning that resides in certain
+feelings. Without taking into consideration the meaning that dominates
+the man’s motives, we cannot explain his action, and it is the
+meaning of feelings that the soul consists of. Only where and when
+we can discern the presence of meaning as the raison d’être of actions,
+are we justified in calling phenomena mental. When the
+action that takes place in response to a stimulus depends solely upon
+the significance of a symbol, the inference is legitimate, nay, it is inevitable
+and conclusive, that we have to deal with a mind. The motion
+of a comet, which depends perhaps not only upon the gravity
+of its mass, but also upon the chemical actions and explosions of its
+constituent elements during its approach to the sun, may be ever so
+intricate; but this does not in the least justify the assumption of the
+presence of mind in the comet.</p>
+
+<p>The assumption of mind in inorganic nature is not only fantastical,
+it is also needless. Facts are better explained without this
+speculation.</p>
+
+<p>The world as a whole is not bare of subjectivity. In this we
+agree with both Clifford and Romanes. But we do not identify
+subjectivity and mind, the latter being a special and indeed a very
+complex form of subjectivity. We suppose that subjectivity pervades
+also all the processes of unorganised nature, and no less the
+cosmic events; but be they ever so much more complex than nervous
+phenomena, there is present only a non-mental subjectivity.</p>
+
+<p>Yet although the phenomena of so-called inanimate nature, be
+they motions of celestial bodies or physical and chemical processes,
+are non-mental, there is in every one of them present that grand
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[254]</span>feature which is as it were the breath of God. This feature appears
+in all the phenomena of nature, but in none of them more gloriously
+than in the soul of man. Even the cosmical events of marvellous
+sublimity appear as a mere prelude to the appearance of soul-life,
+for in soul-life is focused all the divinity of nature. Reason is the
+reflex of the world-order and thus a rational being is made in the
+likeness of God.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="diagram" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/diagram.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p>Professor Romanes presents the problem of the subjectivity of
+existence by the adjoined diagram, which he explains as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Following Clifford, I will call these inferred subjectivities by the name of
+‘ejects,’ and assign to them the symbol <i>Y</i>. Thus in the following discussion <i>X</i> =
+the objective world, <i>Y</i>, the ejective world, and <i>Z</i>, the subjective world. Now, the
+theory of monism supposes that <i>X</i>, <i>Y</i> and <i>Z</i> are all alike in kind, but presents no
+definite teaching as to how far they may differ in degree. We may, however, at
+once allow that between the psychological value of <i>Z</i> and that of <i>X</i>, there is a wide
+difference of degree, and also that while the value of <i>Z</i> is a fixed quantity, that of
+<i>Y</i> varies greatly in the different parts of the area <i>Y</i>.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The deep shading of <i>Z</i> indicates consciousness, and consciousness
+is that form of subjectivity which constitutes our mind. <i>Z</i> is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[255]</span>not, as Professor Romanes asserts that it is, a fixed quantity; it
+varies greatly, as every one knows from his own experience. It is
+lowest in trance or swoon or profound sleep. It is highest in
+the state of concentrated attention. The ejective element, which we
+assume to be present as a correlative concomitant in the objective
+world, we assume, with Professor Romanes, varies greatly in the
+different parts of the area <i>Y</i>. Like Professor Romanes, we also do
+<i>not</i> assume the existence of any unshaded <i>X</i>. There is no objectivity
+without its subjective correlate. But, according to the theory
+of monism, the nature of the concomitant subjectivity is not unknowable:
+it can be inferred from the nature of objective existence. The
+subjectivity of the falling stone is most elementary, and <i>not mental</i>;
+its action is not prompted by meaning. That something which impels
+the stone to fall, and which science calls gravity, does not possess
+any representative element. There is no symbolism involved
+in gravity. There is no soul in the stone. The stone is not incited
+to falling by any purpose; it has no end in view. Purpose originates
+with and through the presence of representative symbols. According
+to the theory of monism the shading of the surrounding zones is not
+a matter concerning which we have to suspend our judgment. If
+monism is true, we know very well how deeply we have to shade the
+different phenomena of objective nature.</p>
+
+<p>Taking this view, we object to Professor Romanes’s conclusion
+when he says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Without in any way straining the theory of monism, we may provisionally
+shade <i>X</i> more deeply than <i>Z</i>, and this in some immeasurable degree.</p>
+
+<p>“Monism sanctions the shading of <i>X</i> as deeply as we choose; but the shading
+which it sanctions is only provisional.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>While the presence of mind in the phenomena of the stellar
+universe and of inorganic nature must decidedly be denied, I would
+not, for that reason, declare that monism is atheistic.</p>
+
+<p>Monism is decidedly theistic although not anthropotheistic. It
+is monotheistic in so far as it recognises that the all-existence in
+which we live and move and have our being is the ἙΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΝ,
+the One and All. But there is not the slightest reason for the theory,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[256]</span>and there are sufficient reasons against it, that the universe is possessed
+of a huge world-ego, that it is a person or a mind.</p>
+
+<p>We maintain on the one hand that the laws of nature are not
+designs arranged With consciously preconceived purposes. Yet on
+the other hand, we do not forget, that the world-order possesses
+quite definite features and that the course of evolution runs in a very
+unmistakable direction. We can plainly decipher its character, and
+the great religious teachers of mankind have with a truly prophetic instinct
+proclaimed the ethical injunctions to be derived therefrom—injunctions
+which, millenniums after them, science has discovered
+to be founded in the nature of things.</p>
+
+<p>God is no mind, yet God is mentality, the source of all mind:
+God is not a spirit, but he is spirituality. The subjectivity of the
+universe from which all consciousness rises is part of his being, and
+whatever that subjectivity, considered as a whole, be or be not, that
+much is certain, that in grandeur it corresponds to the objectivity of
+the world. It does not think in symbols as a man does; it is not a
+mind: but it exists nevertheless. Whatever it is like we learn from
+the revelation of its appearance in objective existence, from the cosmic
+order, the laws of nature, and the moral ideas of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge of nature means knowledge of God, for nature is
+God as he appears and the objectivity of being is the revelation of
+God.</p>
+
+<p>We would not limit God to the subjectivity of nature: God is
+both subjectivity and objectivity combined. He is that All-power
+that is, was, and will be, thus being the ultimate authority of conduct.</p>
+
+<p>God is not a mind, he is more than a mind; God is not a system
+of symbols, he is the reality symbolised in mind. He is not a person,
+he is super-personal.</p>
+
+<p>He who does not see that the God of monism is greater than
+the God of anthropotheism, had better believe in a personal God,
+until he appreciates the truth that God is not personal but super-personal.
+For after all anthropotheism is nearer the truth than
+atheism, for atheism (well understood, the atheism of our definition
+above) is a moral nihilism devised to shake off all ethical obligation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[257]</span>so as to make the lust of the moment and the pleasure of the individual
+the supreme rule of action.</p>
+
+<p>Monism, accordingly, does not leave the problem of theism where
+it was before. Monism proves that God is not to be conceived in
+the likeness of man, but the reverse: man, being a system of symbols
+representing the world, is to be conceived as having been made
+or rather as having originated in the likeness of God. God is the
+original, man is the copy. God is the whole, man is the part, in
+which the whole finds a more or less correct representation. The picture
+is not perfect, but the grandest duty a man has is the constant
+approach to a greater perfection. Man is the temporal, God is the
+eternal. Man is limited, God is the infinite.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Editor.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_41" href="#FNanchor_41" class="label">[41]</a> <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, No. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_42" href="#FNanchor_42" class="label">[42]</a> Spontaneous motion (as here defined) does not mean action without a cause;
+nor does the spontaneity of the cart exclude the co-operation of other spontaneities
+(<i>e. g.</i> the attraction of the earth) entering as factors in bringing about the final
+result.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_43" href="#FNanchor_43" class="label">[43]</a> This theory of pleasure and pain was first set forth in an editorial article
+of No. 120 of <i>The Open Court</i>, which has been republished in the chapter “Pleasure
+and Pain,” pp. 338-345, of <i>The Soul of Man</i>. A correct view of the nature of
+pleasure and pain is of great importance, especially in ethics. Notwithstanding the
+palpable erroneousness of the old view, several articles written by prominent authors
+have appeared of late, that continue in the old strain without taking notice of the
+criticism that overthrows the basis of their theories.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_44" href="#FNanchor_44" class="label">[44]</a> <i>Italics are ours.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_45" href="#FNanchor_45" class="label">[45]</a> This same position is maintained with equal vigor in Professor Romanes’s
+latest work <i>Darwin and After Darwin</i>, pp. 412-442. The Open Court Publishing
+Co., 1892.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[258]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="LITERARY_CORRESPONDENCE_II">LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="FRANCE_II">I.<br>
+<span class="smaller">FRANCE.</span></h4>
+
+<p>Dr. Paul Sollier has just published, in the Bibliothéque
+Charcot-Debove,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_46" href="#Footnote_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> a new and excellent work, <i>Les troubles de la
+memoire</i>. This work is not identical in its purpose with that of M. Ribot;
+it corrects the latter in certain points, completes and corroborates
+it in others. M. Sollier set out to discuss this question solely
+from a medical standpoint, which was intentionally passed over by
+M. Ribot, but he has also necessarily touched upon its psychological
+aspects, and, as he informs us himself, he was obliged on the whole
+to make a medico-psychological study of the question.</p>
+
+<p>The subject is a vast one; one could include in it aphasia and
+all the weaknesses resulting from the destruction of the brain-centres,
+whether those of motion or of sensation. M. Sollier has taken the
+pains to reduce it, however, to definite limits. He studies especially
+the subject of acquired amnesia (diminutive changes and disaggregations
+of the memory). He does not consider the subject of congenital
+amnesia, which is an absence and not a loss of memory. Strictly
+considered, the only cases of true amnesia, or <i>organic</i> amnesia, are
+those which result from the destruction of the nerve-centres, since
+in this case there is an absolute loss of the power of forming mental
+images, and not simply an enfeebling or forgetting of them, which is
+characteristic of <i>functional</i> amnesia. From a clinical standpoint amnesia
+exists only in the last case. Though the effect may be the same
+in both cases, the causes are not identical.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[259]</span></p>
+
+<p>Clinical investigation cannot, however, overlook the diminutive
+changes which take place in the memory and which, as early as
+1817, were called by Louyer-Villermay dysmnesia, and which are
+always closely allied to organic modifications of the brain. As regards
+amnesia itself, it is important to distinguish simple amnesia
+from retrogressive and progressive amnesia. M. Sollier explains the
+motive causes of these different conditions with great lucidity, and
+renders them easy of comprehension by means of ingenious illustrations.</p>
+
+<p>I call attention to the information he gives us as to the conditions
+under which a revival of mental images takes place, p. 30;
+to his criticism of Ribot’s opinion, according to which the power of
+correctly locating events in the scale of time is the true characteristic
+of psychical memory: it is quite enough if it reproduces events
+as in the past, that is to say if there exists a conscious knowledge which
+shows that the mental conception belongs to the past, or is, simply,
+a remembrance, p. 35 and 40; to his remarks on the strengthening
+of mental images due to the repetition of remembrances, the necessary
+sequence of which is that a weakening of old memories follows
+the destruction of accumulated mental images, p. 48; to his explanation
+of the processes of retrogressive amnesia (coming suddenly after
+an attack of vertigo, a blow, etc.) which he bases upon a supposition
+of a group of mental conceptions in touch with one another, in such a
+way that the loss of one leading conception in a group deprives this
+group of sufficient consistency to form a conscious synthesis, p. 70.</p>
+
+<p>As regards the classifications of amnesia M. Sollier censures
+that of M. Ribot as being neither openly psychological nor openly
+clinical, and of taking successively as bases the extent of an observed
+phenomenon, its evolution, its location in time. Moreover, from a
+clinical standpoint it has led to a joining together of totally incongruous
+disorders. M. Sollier therefore rejects it, and contents himself
+with adopting first of all, with M. Falret, the natural classification
+of general amnesia and of partial amnesia. Moreover, in taking
+account of the systematising of lost remembrances, he proposes to
+make a distinction as to the two varieties of systematised (functional)
+and of non-systematised (organic) amnesia, considered from the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[260]</span>purely psychological standpoint, p. 59. We should thus have, firstly,
+the classification of general amnesia, including (A) true organic amnesia
+(destruction of the centre of mental images), and, under the
+classification of the systematised, (B) functional, or apparent, amnesia
+(imperfect performance of the functions of the centres): this
+latter subdividing into two groups, (<i>a</i>) amnesia with its varieties (<i>a´</i>)
+simple, (<i>b´</i>) retrogressive, (<i>c´</i>) progressive, and (<i>b</i>) paramnesia: (<i>a´</i>)
+that of locality, (<i>b´</i>) that of exactness; to which it is proper to add
+(<i>c</i>) dysmnesia, which is organic-functional. Secondly, the classification
+of partial amnesia whether systematised or not, which may be
+either organic or functional. M. Sollier abandons, moreover, every
+pathological or etiological classification as being exceedingly unsatisfactory.
+In the presence of a patient, he justly remarks, the physician
+can only employ semiology.—I will not enter here into the details of
+the inquisitor-like investigation entered upon by the author. I must
+even proceed without stopping through the observations intended for
+medical men, which form the second part of the work, but I judge
+that every reader will also find therein many facts which may prove
+of interest. After having read it, one is more impressed than ever with
+the importance and delicacy of the motive forces of the memory, in
+noting the frequency and the varieties even of its sources of weakness.
+M. Sollier has the credit of pointing them out—in the shape
+of “defects in synthetical power” and in “will power”—in the
+sources of weakness where one had not been accustomed to look for
+them. It would be interesting, he thinks, to find out what part
+amnesia may perhaps take in the pathogeny of certain nervous disorders,
+and the influence which it has on their evolution. Specialists
+for the insane might find therein a new subject of study, and psychology
+will profit, on the other hand, by that which clinical experience
+offers it. Is not its main object to learn to understand life as
+a unit at the same time that it analyses it as a diversity?</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>When one passes from a book like that of M. Sollier to the work
+of M. l’Abbé <span class="smcap">Maurice de Baets</span>, <i>Les bases de la morale et du droit</i>,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_47" href="#Footnote_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[261]</span>one is impressed by the change of method. It has become impossible
+for us to consider pathology as unallied to questions of morality; and
+we have accomplished this great object of studying matters pertaining
+to the moral world, the evolution of law, without seeking our
+base of support in a religious faith or in a metaphysical affirmation.
+Even M. l’Abbé de Baets himself declares emphatically that he desires
+to adopt only one starting point from among those we are acquainted
+with,—the verification of facts,—and truly he shows a good
+will and knowledge; nevertheless the ground which he considers
+so firm has, as we believe, no stability. All seems strange to us, if
+I may so speak, in books of this description. The tone which is
+peculiar to them, the nature of the facts cited, the progress of the
+reasoning, impeach them just as surely as the blue color of his costume
+reveals afar off an inhabitant of the Celestial Empire. I
+am not an impassioned adversary of the clergy; far from it. I appreciate
+their intentions and esteem their persons as one should, but
+I am unable to share their opinions, and I consider indeed that they
+deceive themselves when they think that faith has ever given to the
+world an absolute assurance. It has not given it because it has not
+proved sufficient. Mankind, variable and vacillating though it may
+be, does not change its beliefs because of fickleness of heart: its
+mental evolution takes place too slowly for that, and is also too
+painful. The Catholic church of to-day has adopted as its watch-word
+the return to St. Thomas of Aquinas; it will gain by this
+unity of effort, without succeeding however in leading back the minds
+of men to its point of view. The diverse ways we follow tend doubtless
+as a matter of fact toward the same objective point, and run
+more or less in the same direction; but humanity scarcely ever
+passes back again over the paths which it has once traversed.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>We have another little volume by <span class="smcap">M. Lombroso</span>, <i>Les applications
+de l’anthropologie criminelle</i>; a sequel to <i>Nouvelles recherches</i>,
+which I have mentioned before. We find here interesting pages in
+regard to transportation and reform schools, and a criticism of the new
+theories of the penal code (Garofalo, Tarde, Sighele, Onanoff and
+Blorg, Ferri)—a part of the question considered in the Congress.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[262]</span>A chapter indeed is devoted to the subject of criminal anthropology
+in modern literature, in regard to which it seems to me M. Lombroso
+always makes more of a question than is desirable, but which
+he well understands how to criticise. Then follow several pages on
+the criminal type in art, after a work of Dr. Edward Lefort; then
+comes a description of anthropological instruments and methods. I
+will not affirm that this last work brings us much of novelty; it is
+chiefly a new and energetic presentation of his views, and M. Lombroso
+has no doubt whatever that by dint of striking the nail upon
+the head he will succeed in driving it into the wall of his adversaries.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The work of <span class="smcap">M. B. Bourdon</span>, <i>L’expression des emotions et des
+tendances dans le langage</i>, is certainly one of the most curious books
+one can read. He treats in an original manner of phonetical questions,
+which are less rife in France than in England and Germany,
+as to what sounds signify, or speech; what is their worth in intensity,
+elevation, form or quality, duration; what phenomena are shown by
+successions of intensity, of elevation, of elementary articulation, of
+syllables, of words, etc., of duration; what are the relations of these
+phenomena to versification and what comparison one can make between
+writing and speech: such are the problems particularly studied,
+at times with the aid of very simple but instructive facts culled
+from experience.</p>
+
+<p>These studies—I need scarcely add that they are comparative
+ones—are of interest for various reasons. They lead up to new ideas
+of grammar and of language, and furnish arguments for a reform in
+orthography of which M. Bourdon is a very warm partisan. His
+readers will not be slow to notice for the matter of that, that he is
+in regard to this frankly revolutionary; and it may seem paradoxical
+to say to them, for example, that “the distinction between analytical
+and synthetical languages is absolutely artificial, and could only be
+produced through our bad systems of writing.” Writing, M. Bourdon
+indeed remarks, introduces separations in places where spoken
+language makes no pause. The English write <i>I will go</i>, they pronounce
+it <i>Iwillgo</i>. The analysis which pertains to writing masks
+the true cohesion of the spoken language, and “if in the past all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">[263]</span>series of articulations had been written as a single word which were
+in fact pronounced as a single word, we should not have known
+the error which consists in opposing certain languages classed as
+synthetical to others which we class as analytical.” The argument
+is perhaps not a decisive one, and in the neo-Latin languages, for
+example, one can scarcely deny that the analysis of the written language
+has conformed to the work of decomposition of the antique
+forms, so as to adapt itself to the new groupings of their essential
+elements, groupings wherein these elements remain variable because
+speech separates them effectively, in many cases by interpolating
+governing words or others.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not my intention to enter into these detailed discussions.
+I leave M. Bourdon in further calling attention to his last
+chapter, <i>Ecriture</i>. Persons curious as to graphology will find in it
+some good ideas concerning this method of “character reading.”
+The author does not tell everything, and I have a suspicion that he
+greatly despises certain signs valued by the graphologists, and arrived
+at empirically, but we should note what he has actually said.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Under the title, <i>Le monde physique, Essai de conception expérimentale</i>,
+M. Dr. <span class="smcap">Julien Pioger</span> offers to the public a sketch of a
+world-system. This system is summed up in the expression of “Universal
+Solidarity,” and is based on the idea of infinitely minute
+matter-particles, or “infinitesimals,” the mutual relations of which,
+and their equilibrium, constitute the machinery of the universe.
+The atomic-mechanical hypothesis, says M. Pioger, is wrong in
+resolving matter into perfected differential particles and in assigning
+to its atoms qualities which make of them either true material corpuscules
+or a real entity, “a thing in itself.” On the contrary, far
+from intending to assign a limit to materiality, the hypothesis of infinitesimals
+confines itself to limiting the conception which we may
+have of it. The infinitesimal corresponds to the infinitely small,
+that is to say to the non-perfected, to the non-differentiable, beyond
+our cognisance and our perceptivity; it expresses the most reduced
+condition of the affinities which constitute matter; it is the expression
+of the infinitesimal existence of that which we call motion, extension,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">[264]</span>ponderability, under the general name of matter. Now the
+most simple thing which can be conceived of in the physical world,
+is the <i>couple</i> formed by the essential equipoise of two infinitesimals.
+In developing the couple it becomes possible to form the universe
+in all its great variety. The solidarity of the parts in the whole appears
+as the essential condition of existence of all that which Is—the
+necessary condition of all individuality.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion I call attention to two new editions, one the well-known
+work of <span class="smcap">M. Bernard Pérez</span>, <i>Les trois premières années de l’enfant</i>,
+fifth edition, revised and supplied with an introduction by Mr.
+James Sully; the other <i>Les functions du cerveau</i>, by <span class="smcap">M. Jules Soury</span>,
+a work highly esteemed, embodying the most recent researches.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Lucien Arréat.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_46" href="#FNanchor_46" class="label">[46]</a> Rueff, publisher.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_47" href="#FNanchor_47" class="label">[47]</a> This book and the following ones are published by F. Alcan.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="GERMANY_II">II.<br>
+<span class="smaller">GERMANY.</span></h4>
+
+<p>One of our foremost psychiatrists, Professor v. Krafft-Ebing of
+Vienna, says in his celebrated text-book on psychiatry: “If Pedagogy
+made a more serious study of the character of man in his
+psychopathological relations, many of the mistakes and severities
+of our system of education would be removed, many an unsuitable
+choice of vocation would be left unmade, and thus many a psychical
+existence rescued.”</p>
+
+<p>Any one who is at all familiar with the most important doctrines
+of the diseased phenomena of mental life, and who knows how
+frequently psychical disturbances of a more or less serious nature
+occur during childhood, will fully agree with Krafft-Ebing, and will
+only regret that pedagogy, in this important direction, has completely
+neglected its task.</p>
+
+<p>Although lately the necessity of psychiatric knowledge for the
+pedagogue has been insisted upon in professional circles, for instance,
+by Professor <span class="smcap">Struempell</span> in his <i>Pedagogic Pathology</i> (comp. <i>The
+Monist</i> II, 106), yet instruction in this department occupies a wholly
+subsidiary place in pedagogic education, and has not been made as
+it should have been, an organic part of the same. The writer of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">[265]</span>these lines has accordingly discussed this subject in a special treatise,
+maintaining that the most important diseased phenomena of
+mental life might be treated as a part of pedagogic psychology
+(comp. <i>The Monist</i> I, 619).</p>
+
+<p>The demands made were met in different ways. While the
+English and American press accepted these demands without reserve
+(for instance, in <span class="smcap">Hall’s</span> <i>Pedagogical Seminary</i>, I, 297), in Germany
+there has been more caution displayed, inasmuch as the opposing
+difficulties were regarded as greater than they probably were (Professor
+<span class="smcap">Rein’s</span> <i>Pädagogische Studien</i>, 1892, Heft I).</p>
+
+<p>We have, however, simply to call to mind the doctrine which
+more than twenty years ago Maudsley in his “Physiology and Pathology
+of the Mind” laid such special emphasis upon, that psychic
+laws are the same in healthy and diseased phenomena, only that
+they do not operate under the same conditions and therefore produce
+different symptoms. Far from its being true, therefore, that
+the introduction of psychopathology into psychology can be opposed
+by any especially well-founded objections, such a procedure will, on
+the contrary, be found to be, just as Maudsley said, an appropriate
+and absolutely indispensable auxiliary of the study of this science.
+And that which was emphasised by Maudsley, and lately also by
+<span class="smcap">Muensterberg</span> in the treatise already discussed in <i>The Monist</i> (II,
+289), <i>On the Problems and Methods of Psychology</i> (Leipsic, 1891, Abel),
+Ziehen has done in his “Outlines of Physiological Psychology” in
+a manner which will be full of suggestions for the pedagogue (comp.
+<i>The Monist</i> I, 598).</p>
+
+<p>To be sure, the work of Ziehen is very far from supplying all
+that the pedagogue needs. We have in this work a vast mass of
+valuable observations, which will have to be elaborated in a manner
+that accords with the needs of pedagogy, if this science is to derive
+any material profit from psychiatry. For the bibliography of this
+subject we shall refer the reader to a former correspondence of ours
+(<i>The Monist</i> II, 103), and select at present for examination one province
+only,—a province which is deserving of especial consideration,
+inasmuch as the phenomena which occur in it are phenomena which
+most frequently confront the pedagogist, and are most likely to be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">[266]</span>overlooked by the untrained eye. We refer to the <i>psychopathic subsidiary
+phenomena</i> of <span class="smcap">Dr. Koch</span>, by which expression this author comprises
+all the psychical irregularities, be they natural or acquired,
+affecting the life of the human personality, which, though not even
+in the severest cases amounting to actual mental disorders, yet in
+the most favorable instances so affect the persons afflicted that they
+appear as lacking the full possession of mental normality and capacity.
+The second part of Koch’s work, mentioned in <i>The Monist</i>
+in the place above cited, has just now appeared. (Ratisbon, 1892,
+Otto Maier). Having discussed in the first part of his work inherited
+and chronic psychopathic subsidiary phenomena, the author
+now proceeds to discuss acquired subsidiary factors, and holds out
+the prospect of a third part, on the appearance of which we shall
+have occasion again to discuss the entire work from a different point
+of view. For the present, only the pedagogic aspect of the question
+interests us. On many readers, Koch’s book must have made the
+impression,—to judge from his concluding remarks,—that the author
+shares Lombroso’s point of view, and to very many pedagogues
+such a position would be, from the very outset, a bad recommendation,
+for it would necessarily, in the very nature of the case, involve
+the pedagogue in great embarrassment, in the same way as it has
+involved the philosophical jurist. But embarrassment is no reason
+why we should close our ears to the truth, and if Lombroso should
+be right in all his teachings, pedagogy would also be obliged to accommodate
+its doctrines to his. Upon the whole, however, Koch is
+opposed to him. Thus when he says: “What I commend Lombroso
+for is that he has observed much, has collected rich materials,
+and has been the source of great incentives in many directions, and
+has worked suggestively in many ways; what I reproach him with
+is that he has confounded the healthy with the diseased, and has
+brought under one and the same category without sufficient and appropriate
+tests, psychotic phenomena and phenomena which are
+psychopathically merely of a subsidiary order; what I reject is his
+theory of degeneration and his peculiar views of philosophy.”</p>
+
+<p>Material, such as Koch and others offer, must first be elaborated
+into a pedagogic psychopathology—or better still into a pedagogic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">[267]</span>pathopsychology—before pedagogy, as a whole, can assume
+in this direction the proper form. Though we consider, now, this
+preparatory work as indispensable, we can, nevertheless, not think
+of denying the value of works which, without any profession of far-reaching
+psychological analysis, put in effective and available form
+for pedagogy the diseased phenomena of the mental life of children.
+The first German work of this kind, so far as we know, is from the
+pen of a Leipsic teacher, <span class="smcap">Gustav Siegert</span>, and bears the title <i>Problematische
+Kindesnaturen</i>.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_48" href="#Footnote_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> This little work is now followed by a
+more comprehensive treatise, published by a Bremen alienist, Dr.
+<span class="smcap">Scholz</span>, already known to the readers of <i>The Monist</i> (II, 104), and
+bearing the title <i>Die Characterfehler des Kindes, eine Erziehungslehre
+für Schule und Haus</i>.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_49" href="#Footnote_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> Such books are valuable not only for the observations
+they offer and the isolated explanations and pedagogic
+advice they present, but also for the suggestions which the attentive
+and psychologically cultivated reader can always receive from them.</p>
+
+<p>Like Siegert, Scholz principally shows us isolated child-types
+wherein diseased qualities play a more or less pronounced rôle. But
+while the former’s presentation is somewhat journalistic in style, that
+of the latter is more didactic; although this tendency is not an absolutely
+rigid one, as the author counts mothers as readers of his book.
+But if the form of presentation leads one to infer greater profundity
+in Scholz than in Siegert, this is in still higher degree the case with
+the arrangement of the material. While Siegert strings his child-pictures
+loosely together, Scholz arranges them according to real
+psychological points of view, so that (remarkable to say) the faults
+of children are discussed, first, in the province of feeling and sentiment,
+then in that of representation, and finally in that of volition
+and action. The introductory and concluding chapters show, also,
+that Scholz attempts to enter more profoundly into the subject than
+Siegert proposes, and we cherish the hope that, now that this popular
+work has appeared, Scholz will very soon present us with a strictly
+scientific book, in which he shall have occasion to deal with some
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">[268]</span>particular points, such as, for instance, falsehood and unchastity,
+more comprehensively than was perhaps possible in a book intended
+for his present circle of readers.</p>
+
+<p>With respect, now, to all systematic presentations of pedagogy,
+psychopathology can, as we have before indicated, never attain in
+them its proper position, until the above-mentioned preparatory
+work has been completed. But this fact should not preclude one’s
+calling especial attention to the importance of this province, at least
+in some incidental manner.</p>
+
+<p>In such a work as the <i>Allgemeine Pädagogik</i> of <span class="smcap">Ziller</span>,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_50" href="#Footnote_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> for instance,
+the third edition of which has just been published by F. Mattes
+of Leipsic, there surely was abundant opportunity to do this—an
+opportunity which one might say almost amounted to obligation.
+For Ziller treats hereditary and acquired characteristics in
+great detail, and such treatment remains necessarily a one-sided
+one, if abnormal traits are not considered in it. Ziller, with Herbart,
+demands that individuality always be taken as the starting-point.
+But how many child-individualities are there, which, in the different
+periods of their development, may be regarded as fully normal!</p>
+
+<p>The reason of this omission must be looked for partly in the
+circumstance, that Ziller, as well as the new editor of this otherwise
+valuable work, belongs to the Herbartian school. If, namely, we
+compare the psychological literature of the Herbartian school with
+the publications of French, English, and American writers, or even
+with the works which in recent times have issued from other philosophical
+quarters of Germany, it will be unmistakably seen that
+the pathological conditions of the mind have been little considered
+by the followers of Herbart. Nor have voices been wanting, that
+would make Herbart himself responsible for this error. He did not,
+they say, sufficiently appreciate the importance of the pathological
+phenomena of mind, and his pupils were in this respect influenced
+by him. But this reproach will be found, on close examination, to
+be untenable. Herbart, it is true, did express himself repeatedly
+against the overestimation of “rare and curious phenomena,” unusual
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">[269]</span>mental states and such things,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_51" href="#Footnote_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> and his warning is applicable
+also to our epoch, which produces many psychological works in
+which remarkable things are to be read but which contribute nothing
+worth mentioning towards the explanation of even comparatively
+simple events. Herbart holds, that the psychology of the normal
+and ordinary states should be the first and principal object of scientific
+attention; the explanation of much that is extraordinary will
+then follow. With regard to this latter point, he remarks very positively:
+“I do not, however, wish by this, to gainsay the value of
+any real psychological observation. There must be a welcome place
+in science for every experience.” It will be seen, therefore, that
+Herbart is not at all far from the point of view of Maudsley and other
+investigators. We find, in fact, that he mentions repeatedly abnormal
+mental conditions, and also systematically treats them, even
+quoting such celebrated alienists as Reil and Pinel (<i>Text-book of Psychology</i>,
+§§ 142-149). The probability is, therefore, that psychopathology
+would have been properly employed in Herbart’s psychology,
+if it had been at all elaborated in his day, and its influence would
+through Herbart have been directly felt in pedagogy, as no pedagogist
+has made better or more careful use of psychology than he.</p>
+
+<p>But Herbart’s pupils have done no further work in the province
+pointed out by him. It is true, his psychology has been made use
+of by physicians like Griesinger and Spielmann, and recently also
+to some extent by Krafft-Ebing, but the works of these men have
+had no influence on the psychological text-books of the Herbartian
+school, and consequently the science has up to the present day exerted
+no noticeable influence on pedagogy, either in Waitz, in Stoy,
+or in Ziller. In other pedagogic schools, this has, it is true, also
+been the case; but in these, who make no pretensions of relying on
+the teachings of psychology, the sin is more easily pardoned. But
+this is not the only respect in which Ziller’s <i>Pedagogy</i> is not up to
+the times. Ziller defined pedagogy as the influences, formed according
+to ethical points of view, which are brought to bear on the
+mind of the pupil, and would not admit influences brought to bear
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">[270]</span>on the body, in so far as such should enter into the pedagogic system.
+This misconception also springs from Ziller’s adherence to
+the Herbartian school, which represents, as we well know, a metaphysical
+pluralism; but it is in a still higher degree due to the
+fact, that in Ziller’s day both the intimate relation between physiological
+and psychological processes had not been satisfactorily established,
+and also were not sufficiently known to him. If it were
+otherwise, his pluralism need by no means have necessarily led him
+into such one-sidedness, for this metaphysical pluralism does not
+exclude a monistic conception of <i>phenomena</i>; even assuming this
+doctrine, one may say that motion and feeling are two different but
+inseparable sides of the same phenomenon. The “real things” produce
+by their interaction, simultaneously and of necessity, both an
+inner side and an outer; for which reason one of our foremost psychologists,
+Volkmann of Volkmar, explicitly terms Herbart’s psychology
+monistic (<i>Text-book of Psychology</i>, second edition, I, 63).</p>
+
+<p>A psychologico-physiological work, from which the new editor
+of Ziller’s <i>Pedagogy</i> might have extracted many valuable things, is
+the book of the Italian <span class="smcap">Mosso</span>, <i>On Fatigue</i>, which has just been
+translated into German,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_52" href="#Footnote_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> and which will excite much attention owing
+to the present active discussion of the question of overwork.</p>
+
+<p>Supplementary to this work I will also mention a little tract by
+<span class="smcap">Dr. Burgerstein</span> of Vienna, entitled <i>Die Arbeitskurve einer Schulstunde</i>.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_53" href="#Footnote_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a>
+This tract is a lecture, which the author gave at the Seventh
+International Congress for Hygiene and Demography at London,
+and in which he seeks to find by statistical methods, the duration
+of a “school-period”—a very laboriously composed treatise
+and one difficult to read, but possessed of high interest in psychological
+and pedagogic respects.</p>
+
+<p>From pedagogy to evolution is but a step, at least it is in Ziller’s
+development of Herbart’s ideas. It is true, Ziller has taken a
+decided stand against Darwinism, for Ziller works with two contradictory
+ideas; but his theory of education possesses points of resemblance
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">[271]</span>and analogy to the Darwin-Haeckel theory of development.
+According to Ziller, each individual passes, also intellectually,
+through all the stages of development that mankind at large
+has passed through, only in a shorter time; and it is in conformity
+with such succession that the order of the various courses of a pedagogical
+system is to be arranged. Following Ziller’s precedent,
+<span class="smcap">Professor Vaihinger</span>, of Halle, in his treatise <i>Naturforschung und
+Schule</i> (Science and the Schools), has taken up the school-reform
+initiated by Professor Preyer, and has expressly transferred the fundamental
+law of biogenesis to pedagogy. How instruction is to be
+arranged under this point of view, cannot be explained in this letter,
+which is already long enough. We shall simply remark that the idea
+has found in Germany a large number of both friends and opponents.</p>
+
+<p>The opponents have recently been joined by a natural scientist,
+<span class="smcap">Dr. Hamann</span>, professor of zoology in Göttingen, who has just published
+a book under the title <i>Entwicklungslehre und Darwinismus</i>
+(Evolution and Darwinism),&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_54" href="#Footnote_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> in which he does not combat the theory
+of evolution itself, but simply the Darwin-Haeckelian form of
+that theory, placing himself in the ranks of His and Hensen. The
+book appeared almost simultaneously with the fourth edition of
+<span class="smcap">Haeckel’s</span> <i>Anthropogeny</i>,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_55" href="#Footnote_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> but the author, nevertheless, in his supplementary
+remarks, discusses the “apology” which Haeckel subjoined
+to his work. Haeckel’s book needs no recommendation in
+scientific circles; it will be sufficient to state that the work has been
+subjected to essential alterations, but that its fundamental features
+have remained the same.</p>
+
+<p>A new psychology, on the Darwinian basis, by Prof. <span class="smcap">Fritz
+Schultze</span> of Dresden, is now in course of publication, entitled <i>Vergleichende
+Seelenkunde</i> (Comparative Psychology&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_56" href="#Footnote_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a>). The first part,
+which treats of the fundamental principles of physiological psychology,
+has already appeared. On the completion of the work we shall
+have occasion to return to it.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Chr. Ufer.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_48" href="#FNanchor_48" class="label">[48]</a> <i>Problematic Child-natures.</i> Leipsic, 1890, Robert Vogtländer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_49" href="#FNanchor_49" class="label">[49]</a> <i>Faults of Character in Children, A System of Instruction for School and Home.</i>
+Leipsic. Eduard Heinrich Mayer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_50" href="#FNanchor_50" class="label">[50]</a> Compare also, <i>The Educational Review</i> (New York), Vol. II, page 30.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_51" href="#FNanchor_51" class="label">[51]</a> <i>Psychologie als Wissenschaft</i>, § 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_52" href="#FNanchor_52" class="label">[52]</a> Salomon Hirzel, Leipsic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_53" href="#FNanchor_53" class="label">[53]</a> Hamburg, 1891, Leopold Voss.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_54" href="#FNanchor_54" class="label">[54]</a> Jena, 1892, Hermann Costenoble.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_55" href="#FNanchor_55" class="label">[55]</a> Leipsic, 1892, Engelmann.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_56" href="#FNanchor_56" class="label">[56]</a> Leipsic, 1892.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">[272]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CRITICISMS_AND_DISCUSSIONS_II">CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="A_LETTER_FROM_MR_HERBERT_SPENCER">A LETTER FROM MR. HERBERT SPENCER.</h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent"><i>To the Editor of The Monist</i>:</p>
+
+<p>As I feel it a duty to reserve, for other purposes, the very small power of work
+now left to me, I am obliged to decline entering upon a controversy. I must leave
+readers to examine for themselves—little hoping, however, that they will do so.</p>
+
+<p>One point only I wish to note. The use of the expression “forms of thought,”
+instead of “forms of intuition,” was simply an inadvertence; as will be manifest
+on observing that though I have used the wrong expression in the note, I have used
+the right expression in the text (p. 203), as also throughout my criticism of Kant’s
+doctrine in <i>The Principles of Psychology</i>, Part VII, Chapter IV, “The Reasonings
+of Metaphysicians,” § 399.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Herbert Spencer.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="LOGIC_AS_RELATION-LORE">LOGIC AS RELATION-LORE.</h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the French <i>Revue Philosophique</i>, in the August and September 1891 numbers
+of the same, M. George Mouret has an essay entitled “Mathematical Equality”
+in the course of which and as though subsidiary to his ostensible purpose he
+discourses upon the topics of relations and concepts and upon the fundamental
+elements of logic in general. His essay is really more important as a contribution
+to logical doctrine than as a treatment of mathematical equality.</p>
+
+<p>The scope of his discourse will be seen by reference to his closing paragraphs
+in which he sums up what he considers to be the results achieved by him in his
+essay. Therein, he says that he has “treated of the general theory of the composition
+of concepts and relations and set the foundations of the logic of analysis and
+the logic of definition.”</p>
+
+<h5>I. THE SPENCERIAN AXIOM.</h5>
+
+<p>The determining factor of every philosophical dissertation is of course some
+very general supposition which is taken as established and which exercises a controlling
+influence over all the observations of its author.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">[273]</span></p>
+
+<p>In this case this determining supposition is found in what M. Mouret calls his
+“<i>axiom</i> of <i>symmetry</i>.” The same is thus stated by him “<i>Two things which have
+the same symmetrical relations to a third thing have between them that same relation.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>M. Mouret is not one of those scholars that lack hospitality for other writings
+than those of their own nationality. From this fault so noticeable in the work of so
+many of the French scholars M. Mouret himself seems to be free. Indeed so far
+as regards the previous work done in the domain he sets himself to examine, he accords
+almost exclusive esteem to the writings of English thinkers. In fact he declares
+himself so far as regards his present topic a disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer
+and puts his “axiom of symmetry” as an adaptation of that maxim of his said
+master which is of the tenor as follows, viz: “<i>Things which have a definite relation
+to the same thing have a definite relation to one another.</i>” This maxim, as Mr.
+Spencer tells us, was suggested to him by a remark of the late eminent author who
+is known to the world under the pseudonym of George Eliot, who herself stated it
+under the form “<i>Things that have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant
+relation to each other.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Those who are well acquainted with the psychology of Mr. Spencer will recognise
+that this maxim of his is made by him the very backbone of all his observations
+upon reasoning. If it has the validity which he imputes to it, it has an importance
+which it will be hard to overestimate, but if on the contrary, and as we
+shall submit, it is in every form in which it has been stated, certainly unsound and
+misleading, it is high time that its virtue should be brought into question.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>dicta</i> of the masters whether they first enounce the same or whether they
+only give currency thereto by their ratification are always proper subjects for special
+scrutiny. There is always found a disposition to accept them on their mere <i>ipse dixit</i>
+without any attempt at criticism or independent observation. This is decisively <i>not</i>
+the scientific mood or mode. The spirit of that modern leaven that is currently referred
+to under the name of Science is characteristically a critical one, and one
+that is considerably irreverent in regard to the authority of mere personality. In
+this it is happily distinguished from the spirit that has marked the past history of
+what may be called the “regular” schools of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>M. Mouret is not alone in his inadvertent esteem for the maxim in question.
+In the issue of <i>Mind</i> for October 1891 Mr. L. T. Hobhouse publishes an article entitled
+“Induction and Deduction,” in which he gives an undue appraisal to the
+worth of the maxim under consideration, even though the author of the article
+seems to be well aware that said maxim stands in much need of qualification.</p>
+
+<p>We venture to say that this maxim in all its forms has gained whatever currency
+it has enjoyed in virtue alone of the incompetent comprehension that too generally
+prevails in regard to the nature and characteristics of that sort of things that are
+relations.</p>
+
+<p>A notable example of this lack of comprehension is supplied in the logical treatise
+of Mr. Carveth Read, a work ostensibly founded upon the significance of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">[274]</span>category of relation and yet in which at the very start the author tells us that a relation
+is something which is indefinable.</p>
+
+<h5>II. IMPORTANCE OF RELATION-LORE.</h5>
+
+<p>This topic of relations is one that is neglected in a degree that reflects no credit
+upon the pretensions of those who undertake to instruct others in matters logical and
+philosophical. The thing itself is in the thinking of every one and the term and its
+derivations are in universal use. They are used as though they imported an idea
+that no one was liable to misapply or to misunderstand. The truth, however, is
+that of all the stock terms in our graver discourse this very word “relation” and
+its derivatives are the ones that are oftenest heard and read without any lucidity of
+mind concerning their proper intent as a part of their context. They are used with
+an assortment of meanings and non-meanings that are quite distracting to try to follow
+and quite vain to try and reconcile. In particular the difference between <i>relationship</i>
+and <i>relation</i>, between the <i>ground</i> or <i>foundation</i> of the relation and the relation
+itself, between the plural fact, whether of tendency, interaction, transition, or
+<i>status</i>, that is a co-condition with the relations, and the relations that co-condition
+that same plural fact, is constantly ignored in thinking and in the expression thereof,
+to the more or less confusion in, and inconsequence of, the whole discourse delivered.</p>
+
+<p>It is no slight commendation of the perspicacity of M. Mouret to observe that
+he has discovered that the way towards a resolution of the problems he sets himself
+to work out lies through what to him appears the altogether unexplored regions of
+relation-lore, for it is evident that he regards himself as a pioneer in this field.</p>
+
+<h5>III. WORKS ON RELATION-LORE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.</h5>
+
+<p>In observing this we cannot but hold M. Mouret unfortunate in not having been
+put upon better lines of inquiry. He seems to have been wholly unaware of the
+treasures of investigation in this domain that exist in the English language and that
+for many years have been available for the student. His case in this respect is seen
+in the exaltation which he gives to the semi-popular discourses of Mr. Spencer and
+Mr. Read, as contrasted with the profound researches of DeMorgan and Boole and
+their disciples. It is evident that he has judged concerning the comparative quality
+of the various lines of English research not after an examination of his own, but
+after the current popular renown. For example, he speaks of the work of DeMorgan
+and Boole as presenting “only a simple mode of representing some of the logical
+laws” and as being “surrounded with a formidable and complicated apparel which
+disguises the value of their tentatives.”</p>
+
+<p>Since M. Mouret is manifestly an earnest student of the topic of relation-lore
+this language shows that he has at best only a second or third-hand knowledge of
+what DeMorgan and Boole really did. He ought to have known that in the recondite
+field of research in question all really competent treatment of the same would be
+very far from having any “popular” quality. For a man to discourse of relation-lore
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">[275]</span>in ignorance of what DeMorgan, the very father of the “Logic of Relatives,”
+accomplished is like discoursing of Darwinism in ignorance of “The Origin of Species.”</p>
+
+<p>We opine that when M. Mouret shall have consulted the great memoir of
+DeMorgan in the tenth volume of the “Cambridge Philosophical Transactions” or
+better, when he shall have become acquainted with the more developed work of
+Mr. C. S. Peirce, to whom beyond question relation-lore is most indebted for its
+present state of progress, he will have a better esteem for the value of the “tentatives”
+of DeMorgan and Boole and their disciples. Mr. Peirce has published three
+principal papers on the subject in question. The first of these was published in 1870
+in the ninth volume of the “Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and
+Sciences.” Then in 1880 and in 1884, while Mr. Peirce was lecturer on logic at
+Johns Hopkins University, he published in the <i>American Journal of Mathematics</i>
+two papers dealing more or less extensively with relation-lore. One of these his
+“<i>Hauptwerk</i>” as it is called by Professor Schroeder of Carlsruhe, appears in the
+third volume of the journal mentioned and the other in the seventh volume of the
+same. Mr. Peirce was one of the contributors to our new American “Century Dictionary,”
+and in that work under the definitions of Relation and Relativity there appears
+a summary treatment of the subject which is as we take it the work of Mr.
+Peirce and which might have given to M. Mouret hints which he would have appreciated.
+Also the editor of this magazine in his article “Are there Things in
+Themselves?” in the January 1892 number thereof incidentally touches upon the
+topic under consideration in such a way as to correct some of the more inveterate
+misconceptions.</p>
+
+<h5>IV. M. MOURET’S THEORY OF RELATIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>The article of M. Mouret is in so many points so excellent a discourse that the
+chief reflection one is inclined to make is that upon its own principles it ought to
+have been better. He seems to have been widely awake to the primordial nature
+of relations as philosophical data. He says: “Every notion or relation is a <i>function</i>
+of relations more directly known and enters as a relational element into other
+relations less proximate to the common sources,” and also that “every concept or
+notion ought to resolve into a group of relations.”</p>
+
+<p>By such tokens as these we naturally look to see M. Mouret making it his
+very first concern to explain fully the nature of those primordial data that are
+relations. Indeed he seems himself to be fully aware of this natural expectation
+for he says: “What then is a relation; what is a concept or notion? To this
+double question an answer is necessary and a precise answer not consisting in the
+substitution of one form of words for another form of words bearing the same
+meaning or no meaning at all.”</p>
+
+<p>We cannot however find that he has done this. Instead of it and almost
+while saying that every concept and notion ought to resolve in a group of relations
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">[276]</span>he announces, “What I have to examine is the constitution, the structure of these
+<i>relation-generating groups</i>.” Thus he starts with a synthesis when what is needed
+is analysis. He starts with supposing a group of relational elements indeterminate
+in number and proceeds to inquire as to the conditions that must subsist with regard
+to them, respectively and in combination, in order that a <i>definite</i> relation may
+subsist as to a pair of the relational elements. These conditions he finds to be four
+in number. First, he finds that—</p>
+
+<p>“It is necessary that every one of the terms of the group should be connected
+one to the other by <i>definite relations</i>; that between any two terms there must always
+be intermediate terms that connect them in a continuous way.” This he
+calls the condition of “Solidarity.” Secondly, he finds that there must obtain the
+condition of <i>Co-Existence</i>. By co-existence he intends—</p>
+
+<p>“Not a definite co-existence in time, that is to say, a relation of simultaneity
+or concomitance, nor yet that established co-existence which constitutes the causal
+relation, but an indefinite co-existence independent of the order of its terms and of
+all consideration of time or duration.”</p>
+
+<p>Having thus supposed his group all well stocked with relations, he proceeds to
+relegate most of them to the limbo of inconsequence by invoking a <i>principle</i> which
+he calls the principle of <i>indetermination</i>. By virtue of this principle in every particular
+case the <i>particular determinations</i> of all the terms become indeterminate and
+those of the intermediate terms doubly so. Thus the supposed facts of the case
+become fit for the existence of the <i>Third</i> condition, that of <i>Abstraction</i>, and for the
+arising of a general concept or notion.</p>
+
+<p>But corresponding to every concept or notion is its negative or opposite concept
+or notion. As this negative depends necessarily upon certain <i>particular determinations</i>
+of the same terms that bear the <i>particular determinations</i> and which being
+singly indeterminate admit of the positive concept or notion, there necessarily
+must obtain two systems of singly indeterminate <i>particular determinations</i> relative
+to but incompatible with one another, and so relative that the negation of one set
+entails the obtaining of the other set, or in other words either set being negated entails
+the obtaining of the other set. These facts constitute what M. Mouret calls
+the <i>principle</i> of <i>incompatibility</i> and involve his <i>Fourth</i> condition of <i>Relativity</i>
+stated by him as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“All the particular determinations of the extreme terms must not be compatible
+with the system and the negation of certain relations of the system must entail
+the negation of the relation which they make between the extreme terms.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h5>V. REFLECTIONS ON M. MOURET’S THEORY.</h5>
+
+<p>Now we cannot regard this as a successful attempt to explain the nature and
+characteristics of relations, or to unfold the involutions of relation-lore.</p>
+
+<p>We fully realise that if every concept or relation resolves into a group of relations
+we must in some form or other take what are relations in reality as data to begin
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">[277]</span>with, but this does not prevent us from taking our datum terms for our turn of
+explanation as not requiring at present any recognition other than as relational elements.
+What is needful as a prime requisite on the very start of any research in
+relation-lore is to obtain a clear idea of what is meant by a relation. Meanings are
+primarily matters of mental status. We have to determine the relation that subsists
+between the mind and the object through the mediating interpretation of a
+word, and the mental affection lies nearest and logically comes first. It may very
+well be that the mental affection requires correction, but this cannot take place until
+its faults are observed, and these cannot become evident until the mental affection is
+itself duly understood.</p>
+
+<p>The disciples of that school of logic in which DeMorgan and Boole, both eminent
+mathematicians, hold so exalted a rank as discoverers, regard cognition as arising
+in consequence of brain functioning or <i>mental operation</i> and study the results of
+this operation as yielding their import in dependence upon and only in dependence
+upon the proper operation in virtue of which they arise.</p>
+
+<p>Now no cognition whatever, even of the most elementary sort, arises except in
+connection with and in consequence of that operation of the sensibility which is
+<i>distinction</i>. Distinction is of multitudinous and manifold aspects. In all its phases
+whether it be passive or active it is naught else than the arising or the assigning of
+relations. The attempt to posit an unqualifiedly absolute—that is, an unqualifiedly
+unrelated—universe of discourse must be futile and blank, necessarily and insuperably.
+Any form of notation that pretends to express such a universe of discourse,
+is only saved, if at all, from being unqualifiedly nonsensical, by standing as antithetical—that
+is, by being <i>related</i> to forms of notation that express relation and
+nothing else than relation. This rigorously prime operation of distinction is not
+only pure relation-ing but it is of that sort of relation-ing that is at once a distinguishing
+and a conjoining. The “One and the Many” are insuperably implicit
+therein. Distinction having operated to various extents, and thereby various relations
+having come into view, we become aware of those items of experience
+that are objects or facts. Each and every one of these objects or facts are in truth
+distinguished and are therefore in no strict sense <i>indiscernible</i> from each other, but
+since no science can possibly obtain in relation to mere particulars we find it useful
+to disregard various points of distinction that obtain in respect to various objects
+and facts and to converge our regard upon the points wherein distinction, not absolutely
+vanishes, but <i>tends to vanish</i>.</p>
+
+<p>By this operation, which is <i>abstraction</i>, various objects and facts become in
+mental regard fit and useful to be taken as copies of one another and as indifferent
+for use in most of the turns of mental life.</p>
+
+<p>There are indeed various relations, objects, and facts, with respect to which no
+further operation or operations of distinction than the mere distinctions of the time,
+the place, or the occasion of their various manifestations have been applied nor
+can without great difficulty be applied. But we are therefore by no means entitled
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">[278]</span>to say that such are in truth irresolvable. Contrarily, and reasoning inductively
+we are justified in concluding that every relation, object, and fact will under analysis
+of adequate power resolve without limit into other relations, objects, and facts.</p>
+
+<p>We are not yet prepared to see that the ultimate components of relations, objects,
+and facts resolve into relations, and nothing but relations, because we are not
+yet prepared with an explicit idea of the nature and characteristics of these elementary
+objects.</p>
+
+<p>The study of M. Mouret since it starts with relations combining them under
+the conditions of Solidarity Co-Existence, Abstraction and Relativity, (which are
+nothing else than other relations or compounds of relations,) does not seem to us to
+advance us at all in the most fundamental requisite. He says no more than to say
+that in order for the groups of relations to generate further definite relations the
+relations thus grouped together must be related to one another and then that most
+of these relations must be disregarded.</p>
+
+<p>M. Mouret distinguishes, with respect to a relation three factors, the <i>Matter</i>, or
+the relational elements grouped together, the <i>Form</i>, or the order in which the relational
+elements are arrayed, and the <i>Foundation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As his study of the topic of relations is professedly for the purpose of enabling
+him the better to solve the nature of the relation of mathematical equality, his success
+may be estimated by reference to his conclusions in regard to that relation.
+These are as follows: “The relation of equality is formed of undetermined matter,
+it possesses a binary form, and has for a condition a relation of indiscernibility
+between the two elements.”</p>
+
+<p>Such conclusions appear to us to be impotent not to say erroneous. If two
+things obtain at all, they obtain as two and not one, in very virtue of being distinguished
+the one from the other. Except with regard to some more or less arbitrary
+distinctions, like the distinction between coincident points, all distinctions obtain
+only in virtue of some relation that can be nothing else than a point of <i>discernibility</i>.
+Numbers and other mathematical things are taken as not-different not because
+they are in truth indiscernible but because for the turn in hand their points of
+difference are irrelevant.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning the much mooted question of the proper field of logic as a science
+M. Mouret holds it to be the “science of relations and general concepts.” Although
+we hold that logic is particularly concerned with the lore that is more directly
+related to the phenomena of erroneous thinking and its correction, the view of M.
+Mouret is not unacceptable. “Reasoning consists in the observation that where
+certain relations subsist certain others are found,” as Mr. Peirce has remarked.</p>
+
+<h5>VI. CONCERNING MEANINGS AND EXPLANATIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>As preliminary to our account of relations we will make an observation which
+seems to us of considerable use in connection therewith. It is not without its bearing
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">[279]</span>on the theory of definition or rather upon the broader theory of explanation. With
+M. Mouret we hold that every concept and relation resolves into a compound of
+relations. Since relations are data that are absolutely elementary at least so far
+as we are at present instructed they are of course not subsumable under any other
+sort of data that are better known. Moreover, whatever explanation we here make
+must needs be made by means of written words. Thus an important question arises as
+to what method is to be pursued in this special exigency. The theory of definition
+leads us to the same difficulty, for although the meanings of many words can be defined
+in terms that are more proximate to the elementary relations, we will always
+come at last to terms that admit of no improved explanation by such a method. There
+is no device of words that can evade or supersede the ultimate recourse to things. Now
+the significations of words are learned in most cases not so much by definitions and
+verbal descriptions as by <i>the observation of the various applications of the words</i>. Indeed
+this is the primitive way in which the meanings of words are found out. The
+child knows nothing of what, say, the word <i>horse</i> means until some one shows it an
+actual horse and may be pointing to it says repeatedly, <i>horse</i>, in such a way as to
+excite the observation of the child to the intended application of the word to the
+thing. This is because the relation of every general sign to its object subsists only
+in consequence of a mental association, and until this mental association is created
+the sign has no meaning. The methods of evoking these mental associations are at
+present quite unmethodical and do not receive the attention which their importance
+merits. One feasible method is to present or to state a number of scenes that shall
+present the object in various ways in connection with the sign thereof, and thus to
+excite attention to the proper application of the sign. The geometer does this by
+means of his diagrams without which or their mental counterparts all his mere
+words would be in vain.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Edward T. Dixon has lately published a work on the “Foundations of
+Geometry” in which he would introduce as a fundamental datum what is really an
+altogether new and exceedingly abstract conception which he calls by an old name,
+that of <i>direction</i>. The old term has never been as yet taken in any abstract universal
+sense because apart from definite right lines showing it as an attribute any
+abstract universal meaning is wholly unassignable. But the conception that Mr.
+Dixon would instal is removed in abstractness from such a universal yet one more
+step in universality. A three-fold infinity of right lines differing in direction can
+be drawn in ordinary space to each of which pertain two corresponding universals
+of direction, one converse to the other. Now the conception of direction that
+Mr. Dixon proposes for service as an elementary geometrical datum is the universal
+that subsumes all these lower ranking universals as particulars. Of course
+he has difficulty in even trying to explain what he means. Realising the impossibility
+of subsuming it in any way he takes a method which if it were more thoroughly
+applied, and wholly emancipated from the lingering notion of definition,
+might have been more successful. As he actually left the matter his real meaning
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">[280]</span>can only be drawn from close study of the way in which he applies the term in his
+discourse in general.</p>
+
+<p>Owing to its excessive abstractness his conception is wholly unfit for service in
+elementary geometry. One has to become a good geometer before the conception
+can even be approached.</p>
+
+<h5>VII. ANOTHER THEORY OF RELATIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>We shall proceed to explain what we regard as a true and adequate notion of a
+relation by stating some scenes that display the same. We do not regard it as
+needful to state many of them and we take for our first one, the common transaction
+of making a donation. We have here for relational elements or terms as they
+are usually called a set of three. Separately, or as not yet brought into relation in
+virtue of the giving, there may be, say <i>G</i> an owner of <i>W</i> a watch and <i>R</i> the intended
+beneficiary. The plural fact of the giving is the <i>relationship</i> or the <i>foundation</i>
+of the <i>relations</i> that arise in virtue of said giving. This <i>foundation</i> becomes to
+be in virtue of the creation of such relations by the giving. Either one of the set of
+three may be taken as the datum of reference and according to the election in this
+respect, the relations may differ and the technical names we are about to give will
+vary in their application. Since simplicity will be gained thereby and also our
+present turn fully subserved we will take <i>G</i> as the datum term of reference. So
+taking it <i>G</i> is called the <i>relate</i> and both <i>W</i> and <i>R</i> are called the <i>correlates</i>. For
+this present turn and in very virtue of the giving and only in virtue thereof <i>G</i> becomes
+related to <i>W</i> and <i>R</i> in a certain relation one of the names of which is giver.
+When <i>W</i> or <i>R</i> are taken as relates certain other relations appear, some of the
+names of which are respectively <i>present</i> and <i>recipient</i>. In relation to the relation of
+giver the relations of present and recipient are named <i>converse</i> relations, as are
+likewise the relations of present and giver to the relation of recipient and the relations
+of giver and recipient to the relation of present. Here are three distinct relations
+growing out of the same relationship or foundation. As each relational element
+has its corresponding negation, the true logical system of a set of three terms
+involves not less than eight relations.</p>
+
+<p>We take for our second scene the case of a boundary. This might be a surface
+or a point but we will take the special case of a line on a surface. Here we have
+again a set of three, the spread on one side, <i>A</i>, the opposite spread, <i>B</i>, and the
+line <i>L</i>. <i>A</i> has a certain relation, say above, to <i>L</i> and <i>B</i>, <i>B</i> has the certain relation,
+below, to <i>A</i> and <i>L</i>, which relation is converse to the relation above: and <i>L</i>
+has the certain relation, boundary, to <i>A</i> and <i>B</i> which relation is converse to the
+relations above and below.</p>
+
+<p>The two examples now given are cases of the <i>conjugative</i> kind. The relationship
+is a conjugative one and the relations are conjugative relations. The distinguishing
+characteristic of a conjugative case is the fact essentially involved of the
+mediation between relational elements by another certain element, or in other
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">[281]</span>words the bringing of diverse relational elements into relation by the function of another
+relational element. Without the mediation or function of this conjugating
+element neither the relationship nor the conjugative relations can exist. There is
+reason to believe that all conjugative cases can be certified as cases of three relational
+elements or as compounds of a number of such sets of three. To ordinary
+uncritical thought which is largely constrained by the trammels of ordinary language
+the most abundant sort of relations appears to be of that sort that are taken
+to involve only two relational elements. These are cases of what are called <i>dual</i>
+relationships and the relations that arise out of them are called <i>dual</i> relations. Such
+are those like father, son, husband, wife, etc. Strictly viewed they ought to be regarded
+as <i>degenerate</i> relationships and relations just as a pair of lines is regarded as
+a degenerate conic.</p>
+
+<h5>VIII. CAUTIONS AND APPLICATIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>Now besides the error of confounding relations with relationship, it is a very
+common fault to think and speak of a relation as being <i>between</i> two or more terms.
+This imports into thought the thoroughly misleading idea of an intervening independent
+existence for relations. Relations are attributive predicates of terms and
+each one of them pertains strictly to its proper term or combination of terms, in
+the same sense for this turn (<i>pro hac vice</i>) that qualities are held to pertain to their
+so-called substances. And yet relations so pertain to their proper terms not in
+virtue of such terms separately but in virtue of their membership in the plural fact
+which obtains as the <i>relationship</i> or <i>foundation</i>. The notion of a relation as a
+“betweenness” has perhaps been fostered by the exact coincidence of relations
+pertaining to the several members of the same relationship. When on contemplating
+the connection, say of two points, we observe that the distance of one from
+the other is apparently indistinguishable from the distance of the other from the
+one, we naturally overlook the fact that we are truly to regard the connection as the
+coincidence of two really distinct relations, and regarding the pair of relations as
+one thing and finding it not attributable to one point more than to the other we dissociate
+it from both. But when we consider a pair of relations that are converse
+to one another and that arise out of a dual relationship like that of husband and
+wife we may see that there is <i>no</i> betweenness, no single relation that interlies, but
+two relations, one the relation of husband and the other the converse relation of
+wife.</p>
+
+<p>An interaction, say like that of approach under the influence of gravitation, is
+a relationship. Each body stands in the relation of a <i>puller</i> of the other and the
+mediating term which we find impossible to argue out of the account we call the
+attraction of gravitation. In this case the relation of action of the one body is not
+usually distinguished from the relation of action of the other one. Indeed this is
+the case in all cases of mechanical action and we lay it down as a maxim that action
+and reaction are equal but they are not alike since their directions are opposite.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">[282]</span>Sensation is a relationship, since it is our interaction. The object interacts with
+the brain. As to the conjugating term we are as yet in the dark and so we are in
+the habit of regarding this case as a dual relation. The relation of the brain to the
+object is that of a <i>knower</i> and that of the object to the brain that of a <i>stimulater</i>.
+Each character or mark of the object that becomes apparent gives rise to relations
+and their respective converses each correlative pair of which are respectively so
+many distinct interactions of detail in the entire interaction. Whatever an object
+as known to us is, it is in virtue of those relations of brain action and detailed object
+stimulation, which are relations and always relations. Since consciousness
+exists only by the arising of relations of distinction, supposably in consequence of
+internal brain interaction, is it presumptuous to allege that consciousness consists of
+relations or a complex of relations?</p>
+
+<h5>IX. NATURE OF OBJECTS.</h5>
+
+<p>With regard to the object no one can prevent whoever may be so disposed,
+from imputing to it various points of possession that do not and cannot interact with
+the brain. So far as such imputed points are regarded as merely not yet interacting
+but possible to interact with knowing substance such points in no wise differ in essential
+nature from the known attributes. They are potential relations and nothing
+else. But in so far as they are regarded as essentially impossible of ever interacting
+with knowing substance in any possible stage of its development such regard is pure
+nonsense and utterly without any assignable meaning. There is no occasion whatever
+for such an imputation, for the existence of interaction actual or potential is
+fully adequate to explain all that will ever present itself to be explained.</p>
+
+<p>At this point let us instruct ourselves with an example of the reasonings of a
+much and deservedly honored philosopher. He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“In the most general predicate which is determined Being or existence—for all
+things in the universe are determined beings—we have an evident two-foldness (a
+composite nature) which allows of a further analysis into pure Being and determination.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>We will parallel this analysis. For the sake of simplicity we will take a limited
+right line. It has the determinations straight and long, not length in the sense of
+measure, for length is ambiguous in its intent, but length in its qualitative sense—its
+linearity so to speak. Now separate from it first its straightness without however
+giving to it any other determination, and then its quality of longness. We have
+then a <i>pure</i> line, that is neither straight, nor long, nor anything else. Such is an example
+of “Pure Being.” <i>We</i> say however that its very being as a line is absolutely
+dependent on its determination as a long line; that such a determination alone constitutes
+it a line, is at once its determination and its being, that there is no two-foldness
+at all but only two names, and that as one-fold its determination as long
+and its being vanish together. What is true of a line is true of all relations and
+compounds of relations whatever.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">[283]</span></p>
+
+<p>Thus not only all knowledge but all existence so far as that term can ever have
+any meaning is relative; relative to all intents and for every possible turn.</p>
+
+<p>To those who accept the essentials of this account of relations it will be easy
+to see what is the nature of an object and that of a concept or notion. An object is a
+relation or some congeries of relations that usually present themselves as a coherent
+whole to our sensibility or to consciousness. This is primarily effected in virtue of
+some efficacy which we cannot appropriate to ourselves, and so we distinguish our
+own personality from that manifold that we call the objective world. It is pure
+self-stultification after having made this most useful distinction to try and abolish
+it. Nothing but an utter abolition of all useful thought can result from so taking
+the data of experience.</p>
+
+<h5>X. NATURE OF A CONCEPT.</h5>
+
+<p>But objects are individual and generally found with various points of distinction
+some of which are irrelevant to most of the turns of mental life. We therefore
+neglect the irrelevant points and take many objects as copies of one another. This
+process is <i>not</i> the formation of the concept or notion but it suggests and prompts that
+formation. We cannot but regard it as an error to take a conception as a <i>sum</i> of
+individuals. It seems to us to be rather in the nature of a <i>locus</i>. A curve contains
+an infinity of points and yet the curve is not any sum of points even though it is
+often allowable to speak of it as the sum of all its points. So any concept, say,
+man, is not all the men that now live nor yet all the men that eternity both backwards
+and forwards has contained and will contain. A concept is a manifold and
+strictly universal and infinite in respect to the particulars it subsumes. We speak
+of the infinitive mood of a verb because the meaning of the word as thus taken is
+not put under any modification. In like manner the meaning of any concept though
+subject to various limitations in its applications is as a concept merely to be regarded
+as obtaining in a purely infinitive sense. Professor Jevons found a difficulty in
+classifying what he called <i>material</i> terms, such as stone, sand, water, etc. Other
+logicians have put such terms as singular terms, while still others have classed them
+as general terms. There is a great variety of such terms. Potatoes, wheat, butter,
+ice, cattle, water, hydrogen, the names of all the elements, ether, electricity, time,
+space, love, virtue, etc., are instances. It seems to us that such terms are the normal
+types of general terms and that the canonical forms of our universal propositions
+ought to be unquantified not only as regards the predicates but also as regards
+the subjects. Why not “man is animal” just as “lard is grease” or “man is
+mortal” just as “butter is cheap”?</p>
+
+<p>Moreover the distinction between a general concept and one that is called
+singular is only one of degree and not of kind. Every so-called singular term is
+potentially at least only an individual instance under a possible general or universal
+concept. A striking example of this potentiality is furnished by the modern generalisations
+of that formerly singular term, space. If these observations are well
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">[284]</span>founded, the universals of thought even though arising out of the facts of experience
+and rigidly beholden to experience for every last element out of which they are constructed,
+form nevertheless a Formal-Thought-World, and the mind of man in virtue
+of its powers of imaginative construction and generalisation has a constitution that
+enables it to subsume the actual objective universe as only one particular of a universality
+of a higher rank.</p>
+
+<p>Under such a conception of the objective world and the world of thought and
+their relations the old dispute of realism versus nominalism would take a new aspect.
+<i>Universals in re</i> even though they were admitted to exist would become universals
+no longer in the higher universe of thought. True universals would only subsist as
+universals of the world of mind. The laws of Form and Formal Thought would
+thus become of chief moment in philosophy and no one could be recognised as properly
+laying claim to the title of philosopher without proficiency therein.</p>
+
+<h5>XI. FALLACY OF THE SPENCERIAN AXIOM.</h5>
+
+<p>Concerning the “axiom of symmetry” only a few examples of its fallacy are
+needful. Mutual friendship is certainly a “symmetrical” relation, but <i>A</i> and <i>C</i> may
+be mutual friends and <i>B</i> and <i>C</i> mutual friends also, but it in no wise follows that <i>A</i>
+and <i>B</i> are friends. They may be decidedly unfriendly as we often see the case.
+Take a case of equilibrium the cases of which seem to be favorite ones with M.
+Mouret. We suppose that planets may be regarded as in a relation of equilibrium
+with the sun and yet these mere equilibrations with the sun do not make any equilibrium
+between them. They do not knock together it is true but this is due to
+their own direct relations and not their relations of equilibrium with the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The distances of points from each other is a “symmetrical” relation and yet
+point <i>A</i> may be from point <i>C</i> the very same distance that point <i>B</i> is from <i>C</i>, but
+the distance of points <i>A</i> and <i>B</i> from one another may vary from coincidence to
+double the distance <i>A C</i>-<i>B C</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>XII. NATURE OF ARITHMETICAL EQUALITY.</h5>
+
+<p>Concerning the relation of “mathematical equality” there is no single relation
+that obtains throughout mathematics as such. There is numerical equality upon
+which the equality in service in numeric algebra is founded, and there is geometric
+equality, the equality of vectors, etc., all different from one another. M. Mouret
+seems to have only numeric equality in view. He claims this relation to be not only
+of a very simple nature but that it is the very foundation of the notions of magnitude
+and quantity. He even declares that mathematics could not exist without this
+relation. Did he lose sight of the usual proof of Fourier’s celebrated theorem?</p>
+
+<p>As we have explained, things that are distinguished are not really alike but
+only for certain turns taken to be so. This assimilation of things is of various
+grades. In arithmetic, meaning arithmetic in its most general sense, the only logical
+comprehension that the various numbers possess is respectively their greater
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">[285]</span>or less partitionability; <i>m</i> is the same as <i>n</i> means in arithmetic that whatever has
+the numerical rank of <i>m</i> has also precisely the numerical rank of <i>n</i> no matter what
+summations or other numerical operations <i>m</i> or <i>n</i> may represent. Identity of this
+sort is arithmetical equality. It seems a simple relation for the reason that its intervention
+very decisively simplifies our arithmetical comprehensions. It is however
+a coincidence of two relations that are converse to one another. These relations are
+“not less than” and “not greater than.” It is universally admitted that the more
+inclusive a notion or concept is in extension, the more simple and primary it is than
+any other notion or concept included as an instance under it. Now all equality is
+“not less than” but not all “not less than” is necessarily equality; hence, “not
+less than” is a wider and more primary notion than equality. On the same considerations
+“not more than” is in the same case. Equality is the limiting case between
+the variable and logically more simple cases of “not less than” and “not
+more than.” The notion of quantity emerges on comparison however vague between
+any two objects that have size, independently of the notion of equality. If
+this were not true how could we have the notions of infinitely large and infinitely
+small.</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed true that without the notion of equality the theory of numbers and
+the mathematical analysis could subsist in a rudimentary state only, but to say that
+they would not exist at all is rash and not maintainable. The relations “not less
+than” “not more than” would still allow of some truly mathematical propositions,
+operations, and calculations. In that essentially qualitative notation that is ordinary
+language the relation that corresponds to equality is of very limited range but a
+relation that is analogous to “not less than,” viz., supersumption, is very efficient.</p>
+
+<p>With a theory of numbers and a mathematical analysis using only the relations
+“not less than” “not more than” in lieu of the relation of equality the fundamental
+operations, addition and substitution, would find some scope of application
+and hence the derivative operations, multiplication, powering, etc., and their inversions,
+subtraction, division, etc., would obtain in some fashion and to some extent.
+This can readily be seen by any one who is familiar with the way in which
+expressions of inequality are used in modern mathematical analysis.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Francis C. Russell.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="OBSERVATIONS">OBSERVATIONS ON SOME POINTS IN JAMES’S PSYCHOLOGY.</h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<h5>II. EMOTION.</h5>
+
+<p>Nothing in Professor James’s work will be likely to strike the average reader as
+more paradoxical than his views on the subject of Emotion, which he must be allowed
+to state in his own words. After premising that he will limit his discussion,
+in the first instance, to what may be called the coarser emotions, as fear, grief,
+rage, love, in which every one recognises a strong organic reverberation, he goes on
+to say:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">[286]</span></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental
+perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that
+this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary,
+<i>is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the existing fact,
+and that our feeling of the same changes, as they occur, is the emotion</i>. Common
+sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened
+and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to
+be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state
+is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first
+be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry
+because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that
+we strike, cry, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may
+be. Without the bodily state following on the perception, the latter would be
+purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might
+then see the bear and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to
+strike, but we should not actually <i>feel</i> afraid or angry.</p>
+
+<p>“Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet with immediate
+disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched considerations are required to
+mitigate its paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction of its truth.</p>
+
+<p>“To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be inclined to doubt
+the fact that <i>objects do excite bodily changes</i> by a preorganised mechanism, or the
+farther fact <i>that the changes are so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire
+organism may be called a sounding-board</i> which every change of consciousness, however
+slight, may make reverberate....</p>
+
+<p>“The next thing to be noticed is this, that <i>every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever
+it be, is <span class="smcap">felt</span>, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs</i>....</p>
+
+<p>“I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is this: <i>If
+we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it
+all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind</i>, no ‘mind-stuff’
+out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state
+of intellectual perception is all that remains. It is true that, although most people
+when asked say that their introspection verifies this statement, some persist in saying
+that it does not. Many cannot be made to understand the question. When you
+beg them to imagine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from
+their consciousness of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the
+feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything more than the perception
+that the object belongs to the class ‘funny,’ they persist in replying that the
+thing proposed is a physical impossibility and that they always <i>must</i> laugh if they
+see a funny object. Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing
+a ludicrous object and annihilating one’s tendency to laugh. It is the purely speculative
+one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from an emotional state supposed
+to exist in all its fulness, and saying what the residual elements are. I cannot
+help thinking that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree with the
+proposition above laid down. What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the
+feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling
+lip nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings,
+were present, it is quite impossible for me to think. Can one fancy the state of
+rage and picture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of
+the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their
+stead limp muscles, calm breathing and a placid face? The present writer, for one,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">[287]</span>certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called
+manifestations, and the only thing that can be supposed to take its place is
+some cold-blooded and dispassionate sentence, confined entirely to the judicial realm,
+to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins. In
+like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of
+the heart, its pang in the breast-bone? A feelingless recognition that certain circumstances
+are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells the
+same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is a non-entity.” (P. 449 seq.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>It is, of course, impossible for me to give all the arguments by which Professor
+James attempts to establish his position; the above quotations will make it clear
+what it is—namely, that all our “feelings” are sensations.</p>
+
+<p>Before proceeding to consider some of the objections to this view of the matter,
+it may be well to notice briefly what seems to be a gap in the author’s treatment of
+it. In adult human beings, very few, comparatively, of what are ordinarily recognised
+as emotions follow directly upon the perception of their objects, in the ordinary
+sense of the word. His theory might perhaps suffice, without further explanation
+for such cases as the “spitting” of blind kittens at the smell of a dog, or the
+rage of a bull at the sight of a red cloth, or the startled feeling that we experience
+at a loud and unexpected sound, if the latter should be called an emotion. But in
+the immense majority of instances the emotions of which he treats arise in a very
+different way.</p>
+
+<p>Some of his own illustrations will serve as well as any to show this. For instance,
+neither running nor any other of the symptoms of fear which he enumerates
+is the necessary result of seeing a bear. A chained or caged bear may excite only
+feelings of curiosity, and a well armed hunter might experience only pleasurable
+feelings at meeting one loose in the woods. It is not, then, the perception of the
+bear that excites the movements of fear. We do not run from the bear unless we
+suppose him capable of doing us bodily injury. Why should the expectation of being
+eaten, for instance, set the muscles of our legs in motion? “Common sense”
+would be likely to say it was because we object to being eaten, but according to
+Professor James, the reason we dislike to be eaten is because we run away. So,
+again, striking is not a reflex act, following on the hearing of an insult as sneezing
+does on taking snuff. Whether the muscular movements or the emotions are the
+primary thing, what both shall be depends on many things besides the words that
+are spoken. To be accused of drunkenness or unchastity, for instance, would dispose
+some persons to violence, but others might feel only the stirrings of pride at
+what they would consider a tribute to their manhood. In those who considered
+such a charge opprobrious, it might excite feelings of amusement, contempt, pity,
+or grief towards the one making it, according to the estimation in which he was
+held. To say that if it makes us strike we shall be angry, if it makes us laugh we
+shall be amused, if it makes us weep we shall be grieved, does not go to the bottom of
+the matter. According to the theory, the thought of the estimation in which we
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">[288]</span>are held by others is, in itself, entirely indifferent to us, and only affects our feelings
+through the muscular movements it excites.</p>
+
+<p>In view of the variety of these movements in response to the same physical
+stimulus in a case like this, the statement that objects excite bodily changes by a
+preorganised mechanism explains nothing. We want to know why in one case a
+given perception excites one set of movements, and in another an entirely different
+set. Without attempting to decide whether or not a satisfactory explanation can be
+given on Professor James’s hypothesis, I will only say, that, so far as I can see, he
+nowhere attempts it. In his section on “The Genesis of the Various Emotions,”
+(pp. 477 seq.), he only discusses the question how the various feelings come to be
+associated with their respective movements. How the movements come to be associated
+with the perceptions, he does not discuss at all.</p>
+
+<p>Turning now to the considerations which Professor James urges in support of
+his theory, quoted above, the first two—that objects excite bodily changes and that
+these changes are more or less distinctly felt—may pass unchallenged. I am disposed
+to go as far with him as to admit that these feelings, in the cases which he
+describes, may properly be considered components of the emotional state. But
+when he affirms that there is nothing else—that if we subtract our consciousness of
+peripheral sensations there would be no emotion left—it seems to me that he is going
+very much too far. I should have no hesitation in saying that such a statement
+of the case is contradicted by my consciousness, but as that would be merely setting
+up my consciousness against his, without the possibility of an umpire, I will call attention
+to some other considerations which seem to me to render it improbable.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, it is to be noticed that the cases he instances in illustration
+of his position are all of violent emotions. Admitting that we cannot have these
+emotions, in such degree, without movements such as he describes, nor even imagine
+how they would feel if such a thing were possible, it does not follow because they
+cannot be separated that they are identical. We do not reason in this way in regard
+to those feelings which are not commonly called emotions. I can no more imagine
+myself in intense bodily pain without a tendency to groan and writhe than deeply
+grieved without a tendency to weep, and yet no one, probably, would say that the
+pain consisted solely in my consciousness of the groaning and writhing. If grief is
+a kind of pain, it is to be expected that, in a high degree, it will produce bodily
+movements more or less similar to those excited by other sorts of pain. All these
+emotions, however, are capable of infinite gradations in intensity. The fear of losing
+one’s pocket handkerchief is an emotion of the same kind as the fear of losing one’s
+fortune. In Professor James’s description of fear, it is evident that he has abject
+terror in mind; I hardly think it probable that he has any such sensations, when
+he fears, for instance, that he will be late to dinner, and yet he must be differently
+constituted from many of his fellow-men if his state of mind in such a case is merely
+a cold, intellectual cognition of the fact that such a state of affairs would be undesirable.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">[289]</span></p>
+
+<p>The same is true of the other emotions he mentions. The feeling of the ludicrous
+is, perhaps, the strongest case he cites, but in my own case slight degrees of
+amusement do not excite laughter, or even any conscious disposition to laugh.
+There is, at the most, in such cases, a tendency to smile, which may be overpowered
+by some other emotion, without in the least impairing my feeling of amusement. It
+seems to me certain that slight degrees of all the emotions mentioned may be unaccompanied
+by any distinct consciousness of reflex movements. In such cases it is
+only by a pretty strong effort of attention that we are able, if at all, to determine
+what the bodily changes are, although we are distinctly aware of the emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it is to be noticed that many actions, similar in character to those we
+have been considering, are not associated with what are commonly called emotions.
+Laughing and sobbing, for instance, are spasmodic movements of the muscles of
+respiration, not strikingly different from hiccuping, and there seems no good reason
+why the consciousness of the former two should usually be felt as strong emotional
+excitement, while the latter is not. In some cases, movements identical with those
+accompanying particular emotions may occur entirely independently of them. Shivering
+from cold, for instance, is the same sort of a movement as may occur in violent
+fright, but it does not make us feel frightened. The laughter excited in children
+and sensitive persons by tickling of the skin is not necessarily accompanied by any
+mirthful feelings. The act of vomiting may be the accompaniment of the most extreme
+disgust, or it may occur without a trace of such emotion. Professor James
+himself gives an instance of this sort that can hardly be bettered:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The writer well remembers his astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight,
+at fainting when he saw a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in
+it, and if memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from the
+stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the world grew black
+before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew no more. He had never heard
+of the sight of blood producing faintness or sickness, and he had little repugnance
+to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at
+that tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the mere
+physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in him such formidable
+bodily effects” (p. 457).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Here we have a condition such as is sometimes experienced in connection with
+the most extreme degree of fear or grief unaccompanied by any emotion except astonishment
+at its occurrence. I presume that if a person should faint on hearing
+bad news, Professor James would consider that one of the causes of his intense
+emotion. Why did it have no such effect in this case?</p>
+
+<p>Assuming that the emotions are the effects and not the causes of what are usually
+reckoned as their “expression,” it seems evident that a given movement or set
+of movements must uniformly, at least in the same subject, give rise to the same
+feeling, and that in the case of opposite emotions such as joy and grief, hope and
+fear, the more intense the emotion, the more unlike must be the actions from which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">[290]</span>it arises. Neither of these is the case. On the contrary, it would seem to be the
+fact that the actions accompanying emotion tend to become more alike in proportion
+to its intensity. It is not at all uncommon for people to weep from excess of joy as
+well as of grief. Pallor and trembling are frequent accompaniments of the extremes
+of hope as well as fear. The naturalist Wallace gives an account of his feelings on
+capturing a rare and beautiful butterfly, which is worth quoting in this connection:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a
+naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length
+captured it. On taking it out of the net and opening the glorious wings, my heart
+began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt more like fainting
+than I have done when in prospect of immediate death. I had a headache the rest
+of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people
+a very inadequate cause” (“Malay Archipelago,” p. 342).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Here it is evident that a feeling of intense exultation gave rise to sensations
+very similar, to say the least, to those of extreme fear.</p>
+
+<p>One other argument brought forward by the author deserves special notice in
+this connection:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect on
+the nerves is furnished by <i>those pathological states in which the emotion is objectless</i>.
+One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose, seems to be that we
+can so easily formulate by its means pathological cases and normal cases under a
+common scheme. In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear,
+anger, melancholy, or conceit, and others of an equally unmotived apathy, which
+persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the former
+cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be so ‘labile’ in some one
+emotional direction that almost every stimulus (however inappropriate) causes it to
+upset in that way, and to engender the particular complex of feelings of which the
+psychic body of that emotion consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability
+to draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric
+change felt as ‘precordial anxiety,’ with an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat
+crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral processes
+not now known, all spontaneously occur together in a certain person; his feeling of
+their combination is the emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as
+morbid fear” (p. 458).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Now, it is evident, of course, in such a case as this, that such a combination of
+feelings as is here described is not a fortuitous coincidence of so many independent sensations.
+They must have a common starting-point, which cannot well be elsewhere
+than in the brain. But if this is the case, it seems to me to be begging the question
+to assume that the sensations and not the emotion are the primary thing. On the
+assumption that fear, in the normal condition, is the cause of the disturbances of
+respiration, circulation, and the like, which accompany it, it is as easy to formulate
+normal and pathological cases under a common scheme, by supposing it to be the
+cause of the like disturbances in cases of morbid fear, as on the theory of Professor
+James.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">[291]</span></p>
+
+<p>It seems to me, then, that the theory does not satisfactorily account for the
+facts, so far as the involuntary, reflex accompaniments of motion are concerned.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty is greatly increased when we consider the relations of emotion to
+voluntary action. We have seen that reflex acts, similar to, or identical with those
+in which Professor James believes emotion to consist, may occur independently of
+emotion, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, at least. Strictly voluntary acts, on
+the contrary, are always the concomitants of emotion of some sort. In the great
+majority of the ordinary actions of life, they are the only motor phenomena of which
+we are aware in this connection. Our whole daily conduct, in our business and
+pleasure, our incomings and our outgoings, our downsittings and uprisings, is inseparably
+associated with our likings and dislikings, our hopes and fears. What is
+the nature of this association?</p>
+
+<p>Under the theory we are considering, two relations of voluntary acts to emotion
+are possible. They may, like the involuntary reactions, constitute the emotion, or
+unlike them, result from it. Professor James does not express himself on the general
+question, but some of his illustrations seem to favor the former view. If the
+man who meets a bear is frightened because he runs, or the one who is insulted,
+angry because he strikes, the voluntary acts of running and striking must, in part,
+at least, constitute the emotions of fear and anger in these cases. Let us, then, consider
+this case first.</p>
+
+<p>If I see a shower coming up, and run for a shelter, the emotion is evidently of
+the same kind, though perhaps less in degree, as in the case of the man who runs
+from the bear. According to Professor James, I am afraid of getting wet because
+I run. But supposing that, instead of running, I step into a shop and buy an umbrella.
+The emotion is still the same. I am afraid of getting wet. Consequently,
+so far as I can see, the fear, in this case, consists in buying the umbrella. Fear of
+hunger, in like manner, might consist in laying in a store of provisions; fear of
+poverty, in shoveling dirt at a dollar a day, and so on indefinitely. Anger, again,
+may be associated with many other actions than striking. Shylock’s anger at Antonio’s
+insults induced him to lend him money. Did the anger, or revengefulness,
+or whatever we may call the passion, consist in the act of lending the money? I
+hardly think it necessary to multiply instances in illustration of the fact that the
+same act is often associated with the most contradictory emotions, and acts which
+are ordinarily indifferent with the most intense feeling; that, in fact, there is no
+such uniformity in the associations of emotion with voluntary conduct as the hypothesis
+would seem to require. I incline to think that most people will believe, in
+the cases cited by Professor James, that the running and the striking are the results,
+not the causes of the fear and anger.</p>
+
+<p>If we assume such to be the case, we are no better off under the hypothesis we are
+considering. Excluding voluntary movements, there is nothing left of the emotion, according
+to Professor James, but the consciousness of involuntary, reflex acts resulting
+from perception. The voluntary acts must, then, be directly caused by these. Now,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">[292]</span>in the first place, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to tell what these actions are.
+What are the involuntary muscular contractions that impel a day-laborer to go to
+the place of his work, and keep his voluntary muscular system in strenuous activity
+all day, enduring fatigue and all the discomforts of the summer’s heat or winter’s
+cold? It would probably puzzle him very much to tell, although he has a very clear
+idea of why he does it. I doubt if, on his own hypothesis, Professor James himself
+would find it easy to explain the constituents of the emotions which impel him to go
+to the class-room at the appointed hour and conduct a recitation. But even in cases
+in which we are distinctly conscious of involuntary action, there seems to be no
+connection between it and the voluntary acts accompanying the emotion. In the
+case of the man running from the bear, for instance, trembling lips, weakened limbs,
+goose-flesh and visceral stirrings have nothing to do with running, but, on the contrary,
+would rather tend to prevent it. In fact, it may be said, in general, that the
+two classes of emotional activities are mutually antagonistic. The more involuntary
+the action, the less efficient the voluntary activity is apt to be, as any one knows who
+has had an attack of the “buck ague.” We should have, therefore, diminution of
+the effect with increase of the cause.</p>
+
+<p>It seems, then, on the hypothesis, impracticable to account for the association
+of voluntary action with emotion either on the supposition that the former is the
+cause or the result of the latter. A third alternative—that there is no relation of
+cause and effect in the case, and that the phenomena of emotion and action, although
+constantly associated, are really independent, I will not discuss, as it does not commend
+itself to my mind, and Professor James, elsewhere, expressly repudiates it.
+It seems to me that the only reasonable conclusion is that emotion is something different
+from either involuntary or voluntary muscular activity, and which may be
+the cause of either or both.</p>
+
+<p>Professor James, after admitting that the view of the subject which he advocates
+is only a hypothesis, and that much is lacking to its definitive proof, goes on
+to say:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The only way coercively to <i>dis</i>prove it, however, would be to take some emotion
+and then exhibit qualities of feeling in it which should be <i>demonstrably</i> additional
+to all those which could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the
+time. But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of feeling would
+obviously be a task beyond human power....</p>
+
+<p>“A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be given, if we could
+find a subject absolutely anæsthetic inside and out, but not paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring
+objects might evoke the usual bodily expressions from him, but who,
+on being consulted, should say that no subjective emotional affection was felt. Such
+a man would be like one who, because he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry,
+but who afterwards confesses that he had no appetite at all.” (P. 455.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Whether the truth of the first of the above paragraphs is to be conceded or not,
+depends, I suppose, on the strength of proof necessary for coercion. The only way,
+for instance, coercively to disprove the once prevalent theory that “lunacy” is due
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">[293]</span>to the influence of the moon would be to abolish the moon. Most intelligent people,
+however, at the present day, accept the fact that there seems to be no coincidence
+between the moon’s phases and the phenomena of insanity as sufficient proof
+for practical purposes of the incorrectness of that theory. It seems to me that the
+facts to which I have called attention show a somewhat similar lack of correspondence
+in the case we have been considering. I am, however, unable to see why a
+case of complete anæsthesia, such as is supposed in the second paragraph, would
+not answer nearly as well for one side of the question as the other, according to the
+presence or absence of emotion. To suppose that cutaneous and visceral sensations
+are preserved unimpaired for purposes of emotion, while absolutely abolished
+for all other purposes, would be putting a pretty severe strain on the faculty of
+belief.</p>
+
+<p>Such cases, as Professor James says, are hard to find. He refers to one, reported
+by Strümpell, in which a boy, anæsthetic within and without, with the exception
+of one eye and one ear, was stated to have manifested shame, grief, surprise,
+fear, and anger. He goes on, however, to say: “In observing him, however, no
+such theory as the present one seems to have been thought of; and it always remains
+possible that, just as he satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold
+blood, with no inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have been accompanied
+by a quite cold heart.”</p>
+
+<p>Since Professor James’s work was published, two cases have been reported by
+Berkley,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_57" href="#Footnote_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> which, although not, perhaps, conclusive, are of interest in this connection.
+In the first, the patient, a woman of English birth, age not stated, had complete
+loss of sense of pain, heat and cold, pressure and equilibrium, of smell, taste,
+and sight. The sense of touch, although not completely abolished, was very greatly
+impaired. She recognised a hat, for instance, only after feeling of it for a long
+time and then seemed doubtful about it. Her sense of the position of the extremities
+was also very imperfect, although not entirely abolished; and there was some
+deafness, although not enough to render her incapable of conversation. With regard
+to her mental state, Dr. Berkley says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The psychical condition has undergone but slight change, she is possibly a
+little apathetic, with some slight tendency towards a melancholic tone, but when
+aroused and induced to converse for some time, this in great measure passes away.
+The memory is quite good.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Dr. Berkley was kind enough to give me the following additional information
+about this patient, who, at the time of writing, was still under observation:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Since the coming on of the dullness in hearing there has been a considerable
+degree of apathy manifest. She is no longer conscious of the smaller noises that
+occur around her, but is very readily aroused by the voice, and then takes a lively
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">[294]</span>interest in what is said to her: for instance a few days ago the resident physician
+remarked to her that he was going to obtain a pair of crutches for her use; she
+laughed heartily at the idea, and said she would fall and break her leg at the first
+step.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>In response to further inquiries, he writes as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“1) Visceral sensations. The clearest evidence of visceral sensation I have
+noted in my article,” [warning of the necessity of evacuating the bowels and bladder
+by a pricking pain in the lower part of the abdomen,] “no others were sufficiently
+definite to be described. For two years there has been no feeling of hunger
+or thirst, and as the diet has only been a few mouthfuls of milk at a time for nearly
+that period, there has been no feeling of repletion.</p>
+
+<p>“2) When the patient laughs at a joke, there is a slight flushing of the face,
+besides the ordinary contraction of the facial muscles; she is aware that she is
+laughing, but besides acknowledging that she perceives no difference between the
+act now, and some years ago, she is unable to describe the sensation further.</p>
+
+<p>“3) Anger. As I think I mentioned in my last letter, the patient has been a
+person of unusually equal temper; an outbreak of real passion has never been observed
+with her. When annoyed or teased by some of the other women, there is a
+distinct corrugation of the forehead, accompanied by an exceedingly slight general
+movement as if of aversion, no words, movement of the chest, clenching of the
+hands, etc. She describes the sensation as one of repulsion.</p>
+
+<p>“Like Strümpell’s case she shows definitely shame, grief, surprise, fear, and
+substituting for anger, repulsion.</p>
+
+<p>“My own impression derived from observation of the patient is, that all mental
+emotional sensibilities are present and only a little less vivid than in the unanæsthetic
+state; and that emotions are approximately natural, and not at all coldly dispassionate.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>In the second case, that of a Russian woman, aged thirty-five, there was complete
+loss of cutaneous sensibility in all its qualities: the sense of position (“muscular
+sense”) was almost completely abolished; the sense of taste was absent in the
+anterior two-thirds of the tongue. Smell, sight, and hearing were preserved. She
+had left the hospital before the article was written. In regard to her case, Dr.
+Berkley writes:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“While in the most absolute state of anæsthesia (auditory and visual excepted)
+there was no departure from a normal psyche; the woman would sometimes be
+angered when she did not understand a question, at others would smile or shake her
+head, and would frequently laugh and talk with another Russian woman in the
+same ward. There was never the slightest apathy manifest after the first few days
+of febrile movement.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I give these cases for what they are worth. In the first, it is evidently impossible
+to entirely exclude the presence of sensations caused by the reflex acts, and
+the second, not having, apparently, been examined with special reference to the
+subjective side of her emotional manifestations, may be open to the same objection
+which Professor James makes against Strümpell’s case. To me it seems extremely
+unlikely that, if the theory under discussion is correct, such an amount of anæsthesia
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">[295]</span>as existed in these cases would have produced no obvious effect on the emotions.
+The fact that voluntary acts were performed by both these patients as well as by
+Strümpell’s case, seems to me conclusive as to the existence of emotions of some
+sort in all of them.</p>
+
+<p>It seems clear to me, from the foregoing considerations, that there are serious
+difficulties in the way of accepting Professor James’s theory as an adequate explanation
+of all the phenomena of emotion. On the other hand, I think it contains an
+important truth, and that, by calling attention to it, he has rendered a real service
+to psychology. In order to make it clear how far I agree with him, it will be necessary
+to consider just what feelings are to be classed together under the head of
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p>If we touch our fingers to a live coal, we are conscious of a sensation of heat,
+and also of pain. If we take quinine into our mouths, it tastes bitter, and also disagreeable.
+So in regard to a very large proportion of our sensations, we recognise
+two elements—one which has to do with the qualities of the object, and, another
+consisting of the pleasurable or painful way in which those qualities affect us. The
+former may be called the objective element in sensation. We think of the heat as
+residing in the coal, whether we are touching it or not, but it never occurs to us to
+think of the coal as in pain. The pain is in us—an entirely subjective feeling.
+Doubtless there is no more reason to think of heat, as it is appreciated by our
+senses, as a property of the coal, than pain, but that is the way in which we naturally
+think of it. That these two elements are really distinct is evident from the
+fact that the different senses furnish them in different proportions. Comparatively
+few sights, for instance, give any such sensuous pain to the eye as the sensation produced
+by getting a grain of sand under the lid, which gives us very little information
+in regard to the qualities of the offending substance. In fact, it is generally true
+that intensity of pleasurable or painful sensation is a hindrance to exact knowledge
+of its object. It is further evident from the fact that, in disease, one form of sensibility
+may be abolished while the other is retained. A person may be able to feel
+the slightest touch, and to recognise perfectly the size, shape, and texture of the
+objects he handles, and yet feel no pain when cut, struck, nor burned, or he may have
+even heightened sensibility to painful impressions with loss of the power to recognise
+the sensible qualities of objects.</p>
+
+<p>Now, although we are accustomed to distinguish between emotions and purely
+sensuous pleasures and pains, there are some points, at least, at which it is not easy
+to draw the line. My pleasure in the anticipation of a good dinner is undoubtedly
+an emotion. Is not my pleasure in eating it entitled to the same name, and does
+not the latter consist in the reality of the sensations which in the former case were
+enjoyed in imagination? Is not the enjoyment we feel in the smell of mignonette,
+the tone of a sweet voice, the color and form of the rainbow, emotion? Yet it consists
+largely, if not entirely, in the agreeableness of the sensations. Most people
+would probably think it strange to hear hunger and thirst spoken of as emotions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">[296]</span>but would readily agree that desire of food or drink is as much an emotion as any
+other desire. Is the desire in this case anything more than the hunger or thirst?</p>
+
+<p>I am inclined to think that it is proper to call such pleasures and pains as I
+have instanced above emotions, and if so, I see no reason for denying the name to
+any sensuous pleasures and pains. If Professor James’s view is that all feeling is
+sensation, I should say that all feeling is emotion. Whether this view is correct or
+not, I do not see how Professor James can consistently refuse to accept it. On his
+theory, the emotions which he discusses must owe their pleasurable or painful quality
+to the pleasurable or painful nature of the sensations in which they consist. I
+can see no valid ground for saying that some such feelings are emotions and others
+are not. But the essence of emotion is pleasure or pain. Abstracting these qualities,
+it would be an indifferent emotion, which, I think all would agree, is a contradiction
+in terms. Possibly he might wish to limit the use of the term to those pleasurable
+and painful feelings, which arise not directly, but in a reflex way. He might
+say, for instance, that the disagreeableness to the ear of the creaking of an ungreased
+axle is not, but the shudder which it gives a sensitive person is, emotion.
+In that case, it must be admitted that a sneeze is emotion. His contention is that
+we have no other pleasures or pains than those of sensation. If this be true, a setting
+off of some sensations as emotions is, if not an arbitrary, a comparatively useless
+procedure.</p>
+
+<p>My own view, then, is that the elements of sensation which I have spoken of as
+objective and subjective might, with equal propriety, be characterised respectively
+as intellectual and emotional, and that in this direction the theory under discussion,
+although true as far as it goes, does not go far enough.</p>
+
+<p>However this may be, the admission or denial that these feelings are emotions
+does not necessarily affect the question whether or not this is the only origin, of
+pleasure and pain. As has already been said, those feelings to which no one will
+deny the name of emotions are not usually, in adult human beings, at least, direct
+reactions on sensation. If it be true that the start we give at the unexpected slamming
+of a door is a sort of fright, it is a very rudimentary sort compared with that
+which one feels when the cry of fire is raised in a crowded theatre. “A burnt
+child dreads the fire.” It is not the sight of the fire, but the thought of the burning,
+that arouses the emotion. When a man reads in the newspaper of the death
+of a friend, or a rise in the value of property in which he is interested, it is not the
+sight of the black marks on the white paper, but the beliefs which, through a long
+and intricate series of associations they call up, which move his feelings. If he could
+not read, he would see the same announcement without any emotion. The usual
+origin of the emotions <i>par excellence</i> is by way of association.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose that I have taken a nauseous dose, and made a wry face over it. No
+one, I presume, would question that the disagreeableness lay in the unpleasant
+taste, and not in the distortion of the countenance. Now, suppose I have to repeat
+the dose, and my face takes on a similar expression at the anticipation to that which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">[297]</span>it wore when I took it originally. How does this come about? If I can trust my
+own consciousness, it is because the vivid reproduction, in memory, of the unpleasant
+taste is itself unpleasant. I do not see how it can well be otherwise. Professor
+James says (p. 649) that “the first element of memory is the revival in the mind of
+an image or copy of the original event.” How can I have a copy in my mind of a
+pain if it is not painful? Take away the painfulness of it and there would be
+nothing left. I might remember the circumstances under which it occurred, and
+judge from them that I must have suffered pain, but I could not, it seems to me, remember
+the pain itself. Whether that is possible or not, I feel sure that the fact,
+in my own case, is, that my memory of a pain resembles it in the same way that my
+memory of the circumstances in which it occurred resembles them. If this be the
+fact, what can be more natural than that it should excite the same sort of associated
+movements that were excited by the original sensation? I cannot make it seem any
+more credible, to return to the example mentioned above, that my repugnance to a
+repetition of the dose is due to my involuntary movements than that my discomfort
+in taking it originally was due to the similar movements that occurred then.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose that a child who has eaten and enjoyed an orange is offered another.
+The sight of it calls up the recollection of the agreeable taste, and the expectation
+of a repetition of the pleasant experience excites expressions of pleasure. If the
+fruit is snatched away, the disappointment at the loss of the expected pleasure is
+distressing, and very probably may result in his weeping. I hardly think that any
+one who will consult his own consciousness will say that the reason he likes the
+taste of an orange is that it makes him laugh or smile to get it. He likes it because
+it tastes good, and is sorry to lose it for the same reason. The laughing or weeping
+is, I think, unquestionably the result of the pleasure or grief, not of the mere perception
+of an object in itself indifferent.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that emotions of this sort do not always arise by way of personal association.
+Young children are apt to be afraid of strangers, of large animals, and of
+loud noises. I can remember being frightened at my first sight of a locomotive.
+Here we come upon the questions of inherited experience and natural selection,
+which can hardly be discussed in an article like this. The objects of which young
+children are instinctively afraid, as a rule, are either dangerous themselves, or more
+or less similar to dangerous objects. I see no more difficulty in supposing that
+mental pleasure and pain, on the sight of special objects, may be a matter of organisation
+than in the case of the analogous physical sensations.</p>
+
+<p>My view of the matter, then, is that emotion in the sense in which the word is
+commonly used bears the same relation to perceptions or beliefs that feelings of
+physical pleasure or pain do to the objective or intellectual quality of sensations.
+I am inclined to think it proper to class all pleasurable and painful feelings together
+as emotions. If this view is correct, it would, of course, include those feelings to
+which Professor James would confine the term. I should not at all hesitate to admit
+that the emotional state of a person who trembles and turns pale with fear is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">[298]</span>different from that of one who preserves his self-possession in the presence of a danger
+that he realises and dreads. I think it is true that the voluntary actions
+prompted by an emotion have some tendency to intensify it. But, so far as I can
+analyse my own feelings, the pleasures and pains of memory and imagination seem
+to me just as real as those of sensation, and not at all to be confounded with them.
+When I try to subtract all motor reactions and resulting sensations from the feeling
+of fear, for instance, there remains not merely the intellectual perception that the
+event dreaded is not desirable, but the perfectly distinct emotional consciousness
+that I do not desire it.</p>
+
+<p>This view seems to be favored by the analogy between the relations of sensation
+to reflex movement on the one hand, and of perception to voluntary movement
+on the other, which will, I think, be found to be very complete. We have reflex
+acts which are useful, such as breathing, the beating of the heart, swallowing and
+coughing; and others, like groaning, weeping, and trembling, which seem to be useless.
+In like manner, emotions of hope or fear may give rise to voluntary acts calculated
+to enable the subject of the emotion to secure or avoid its object. If I burn
+my fingers, my hand is involuntarily snatched away. Such would not be the case
+if the burn caused no pain. If I see that the house is on fire, I try to escape, either
+by extinguishing the fire or by getting out of the house. It seems to me evident
+that I should not do so if the thought of being burned were not painful. Such emotions
+may also occasion useless acts, more or less similar to those mentioned above.
+A person who saw no way of escape from a burning house might tremble, weep, or
+groan from fear.</p>
+
+<p>On the evolutionary hypothesis, it seems easy to understand how the reproduction,
+by memory or imagination, of certain feelings might bring about movements
+like those excited by the original feelings. Professor James would have us
+believe that this reproduction is always, in itself, indifferent, that is, merely intellectual;
+but that it is, nevertheless, capable of setting up the movements which, in
+the case of peripheral stimuli, are the results of pleasure and pain, and that the consciousness
+of these movements is, in such cases, the sole cause of the emotional condition.
+Such a reversal of relations seems to me highly improbable. Each one
+must decide for himself which view is more in accordance with the facts of his own
+consciousness.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">W. L. Worcester.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_57" href="#FNanchor_57" class="label">[57]</a> <i>Two Cases of General Cutaneous and Sensory Anæsthesia, without Marked Psychical Implication.</i>
+By Henry J. Berkley, M. D., Baltimore. [Brain, Part IV. 1891.]</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="PROFESSOR_ERNST_MACHS_TERM_SENSATION">PROFESSOR ERNST MACH’S TERM SENSATION.<br>
+<span class="smaller">SUPPLEMENTARY TO HIS CONTROVERSY WITH THE EDITOR.</span></h4>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><i>The Monist</i>, Vol. I, No. 3, contains a controversy between Prof. Ernst Mach
+and myself on some questions of psycho-physics in which Professor Mach, having
+reference to an editorial article on “Feeling and Motion,” regards sensations as the
+“elements of reality,” “while motion,” he says, “is a mere mental auxiliary, an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">[299]</span>artificial expedient.” “Physicists,” we are told, “have accustomed us to regard the
+motions of atoms as more real than the green of trees. In the latter I see a (sensory)
+fact, in the former a <i>Gedankending</i>, a thing of thought.”</p>
+
+<p>In contradistinction to Professor Mach I maintained that our scientific terms,
+although abstract concepts and things of thought, or noumena, are after all descriptive
+of actual facts; they are symbols representing features of reality. Motions,
+i. e., that which is meant by the term motion, is a reality, and what the chemist
+calls atoms is a definite quality of certain facts of experience. Atoms are not things
+in themselves, as the name seems to suggest, but rather proportional relations conveniently
+so expressed as if they were ultimate units or concrete little bodies of a
+definite mass or weight. What atoms are, aside from representing the proportions
+in which elements combine, we do not know. We may define “atom” as the minimal
+weight in which an element enters into chemical combinations, but such atoms
+have never been an object of observation. For aught we know, they may as little
+be discrete bodies as a curve consists of discrete straight lines, which, as such,
+would be unobservable only because infinitesimally small. The infinitely small
+straight line into which a curve is analysed by mathematicians is a fiction, wisely
+devised for calculating the path of the curve. This fiction is as Professor Mach
+says, an artifice only, not a reality, or as I say, an allegoric expression to characterise
+not whole concrete realities, but certain features of reality in their abstractness.</p>
+
+<p>Scientific terms are comparable to myths that contain deep religious truths.
+The fiction of the myth is only the vehicle of its meaning. The naked meaning in
+its abstract purity may be difficult to grasp. Thus our imagination steps in and
+completes the picture so as to render it concrete and easily thinkable.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when several months ago I met Professor Mach at Prague, our conversation
+naturally touched upon the problems which had formed the subject of our discussion.
+Professor Mach assented to my speaking of scientific terms as abstracts.
+That, accordingly, must be considered as the point of agreement. But when I proposed
+that the term sensation also was according to my terminology an abstract term
+representing one feature of reality only and excluding other features, Professor
+Mach took exception to it, saying that he understands by sensation reality itself.
+Very well then, this is the difference; and this difference is after all a difference of
+terms only. I understand by sensation the psychical feature of the data of experience
+only, to the exclusion of what may be called its physical aspect. Sensation
+accordingly, as I use the term, is not the whole of the given reality but only one of
+its qualities. If, as Professor Mach uses the term, sensation is another name for
+reality, the main difference between our views appears to be removed.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. Carus.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">[300]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_REVIEWS_II">BOOK REVIEWS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele.</span> By <i>Wilhelm Wundt</i>. Zweite
+umgearbeitete Auflage. Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>The new edition of Wundt’s <i>Menschen- und Thierseele</i> is one of the best existing
+general introductions to psychology. It preserves nearly the just mean between
+the purely introspective and abstract treatment and the substitution of physiology
+for psychology with which recent treatises have familiarised us. The author
+has completely rewritten the edition of 1863, which he regards as a youthful indiscretion
+(<i>Jugendsünde</i>)—retaining only such chapters as could be brought into harmony
+with his maturer views and with the developed science of psycho-physics that
+has taken the place of the <i>Zukunftsprogramm</i> of thirty years ago. He has wisely
+omitted all the superficial and diffuse chapters on comparative psychology and ethnology
+which cumbered the original work; has silently ignored the fantastic speculations
+as to the identity of electricity and nerve-force (one of the worst of the aforesaid
+youthful sins); and practically abandoned (perhaps as too esoteric for popular
+exposition) the elaborate reduction of sensations and perceptions to unconscious
+judgments and inferences.</p>
+
+<p>The first thirteen or fourteen chapters offer a very clear and interesting résumé
+of the chief doctrines of the <i>Physiologische Psychologie</i> in regard to sensations generally,
+their measurements and qualities, Weber’s and Fechner’s laws, the special
+sensations of color, hearing, and the muscular sense, and the problem of space perception.
+Following the plan of the original work in these chapters, the author aims
+less at completeness of statement than to present clearly the distinctive doctrines of
+modern psychology. In the treatment of certain themes, e. g. Fechner’s law, and
+the perception of space, he neglects, for the sake of clearness, qualifications of detail
+which the special student must look for in the larger work. The last sixteen chapters
+deal with the feelings, the will, consciousness, attention, association and apperception,
+conception, abnormal and animal psychology and instinct, concluding
+with two notable lectures on the “Freedom of the Will” and the “Immortality of
+the Soul.” It is to these chapters that we must look for Wundt’s general psychological
+and philosophical system. Profiting by recent criticisms he has here set
+forth his characteristic doctrines in so clear and definite a final statement that further
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">[301]</span>misconception of them is hardly permissible. The remainder of this notice
+will be devoted to what is perhaps the most interesting question thus suggested:
+Wundt’s relation to the associationist psychology of Spencer on the one side, and to
+the younger German school of experimental psychologists on the other. Wundt
+ignores the Spencerian form of the associationist psychology, and the young psychologists
+do injustice to Wundt, neither side apparently condescending to read with
+attention the writings of the other. The debate, so far as it is not merely verbal,
+springs from two real differences of method: (1) Wundt in his psychological analysis
+habitually takes account of the problems of the theory of knowledge (<i>Erkenntnisstheorie</i>),
+or ultimate metaphysics, which the young psychologists endeavor (not always
+with success) systematically to exclude. (2) Wundt, gifted with superior powers of
+introspection, is more aware than the young psychologists of the infinite complexity
+and subtlety of mental states. He prefers, therefore, to a schematic simplification
+of the phenomena a terminology and descriptive analysis that reflect in some measure
+their manifold diversity. And thus while Wundt finds the pure associationist
+psychology barren and tautologous, the young psychologists see in Wundt’s complicated
+terminology only a shamefaced reversion to the discarded psychology of a substantial
+soul endowed with autonomous “faculties.” But the analysis of our mental
+states which Wundt gives by means of this terminology is really only a subtler restatement
+of the analysis of Mill, Spencer, and Taine, to which the new psychology
+has not been able to add anything of moment. It is true that he proclaims the inadequacy
+of association, even when translated into the diagrams of a hypothetical
+cerebral anatomy, to “explain” fully our conscious active mental life. But in this
+he is at one with Spencer (ultimate scientific ideas), J. S. Mill (Examination of Hamilton),
+and Schopenhauer (<i>Epiphilosophie</i>). It is gross injustice to stigmatise as an
+abandonment of the scientific attitude of mind this occasional passing recognition of
+the seeming ultimate inexplicability of things. In no single concrete instance can
+it be shown that Wundt now sacrifices the recognised methods and postulates of
+modern scientific investigation to the psychological hypostisations which his opponents
+detect in his terminology.</p>
+
+<p>In confirmation of these statements I will give a brief summary of Wundt’s
+doctrine of association and apperception with an occasional indication of its relation
+to the psychology of Spencer. Wundt distinguishes the totality of mental states
+which are perceived from the presentation at the focus of consciousness which is
+apperceived. In this way (substituting everywhere <i>dunkel bewusst</i> for <i>unbewusst</i>)
+he avoids the metaphysics of the unconscious, while getting the benefit of the entire
+analysis of its advocates. I do not think the ultimate difficulty can be evaded in this
+way, but will not stop to argue the point. A further advantage of this distinction
+is that it makes possible a dynamic treatment of mental states as “events” in place
+of the crude psychology that deals with the conditions of any mental state as so
+many ready-made parts externally dovetailed into the completed product. The active
+side of consciousness is taken into account from the outset. The mental state
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">[302]</span>at any moment is described by indicating the presentation which is then at the focus
+of consciousness (apperceived) and the accompanying faintly conscious presentations
+that qualify its tone and total effect. The given mental state is “explained” by
+tracing out the dynamic readjustments that brought this particular presentation to
+the focus, and grouped the faintly conscious presentations about it. Now the bringing
+of a presentation to the focus of conscious attention is the primitive psychical
+activity, the elementary act of will,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_58" href="#Footnote_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> and since Wundt places this at the beginning
+he rejects all evolution of will or instinct from reflex action, and thus, it will be
+said, here at least puts himself in distinct opposition to advanced scientific thought.
+Let us distinguish. So far as we are dealing with the developed minds we know,
+Wundt’s distinction is merely the expression of an observed psychological fact. External
+volition does go back to internal voluntary attention and this to a focussing
+of consciousness for which apperception is as good a term as another. Such focussing
+of the attention is for us now the primary reaction of the “self” on its received
+impressions. Out of a given group of presentations I apperceive by preference one
+and you another, because at the time my “self,” my mind, differs from yours. This
+self may be only a convenient shorthand expression for a passive product of external
+forces. The feeling of the reaction of the self may be an illusion, and its activity
+may be merely the mechanical action of a relatively coherent group of presentations
+when a new presentation is introduced among them, and the whole process
+may be explicable in terms of associations. But the feeling exists, and Wundt has
+described and analysed it better than any of his critics.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, if the question is of the hypothetical origin of mind, we are
+at once brought face to face with an ultimate metaphysical problem which the new
+psychology impatiently ignores, which Spencer grudgingly acknowledges, but which
+Wundt and Kantians like Riehl find confronting them at every stage of their analysis.
+Conscious mind cannot conceive of its own origin, and therefore all psychological
+theories of development must postulate in some form the elements of consciousness
+and will. Nothing that I could add to the dialectics of this question would
+influence those who feel no difficulty here. They require a long course of Kantian
+criticism or its equivalent. At any rate it is not fair polemic to class a thinker as
+unscientific merely because he recognises this difficulty and gives it expression in
+his psychology, instead of contemptuously relegating it to metaphysics.</p>
+
+<p>After thus laying the foundations in the doctrine of apperception for the psychology
+both of cognition and of the will, Wundt proceeds to restate the associationist
+analysis of Mill and Spencer in a more elaborate terminology but in substantial
+agreement with Spencer till he reaches the “concept,” when the introduction
+of apperception gives rise to a seeming difference. Spencer distinguishes simultaneous
+from successive association as carefully as Wundt. What Wundt, after
+Herbart calls “complications,” namely the joint reference to one object of a number
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">[303]</span>of disparate presentations of sense, is clearly described by Spencer (“Principles
+of Psychology,” §§ 315-355); and Wundt’s “assimilations” do not differ
+appreciably from Spencer’s “still less conscious” processes of “organic classification”
+(“Principles of Psychology,” § 320). Into the metaphysics of the ultimate
+relations of contiguity and similarity as laws of association I cannot enter here.
+Similarity will always be recognised as ultimate by those who, like Spencer, approach
+the problem first from the psychical side, while a purely materialistic treatment
+in terms of nervous currents, such as we find in James, will endeavor to do
+away altogether with similarity, which simply cannot be expressed in terms of
+nerve-structure without reasoning in a circle. Wundt retains similarity but endeavors
+to coördinate it with contiguity. The problem is really identical with the
+final question of the relations of “mind” and “body,” and cannot be profitably
+discussed apart from that question.</p>
+
+<p>Coming now to the concept and the judgment, we find Wundt affirming that
+the different forms of simultaneous and successive association (as he has defined
+them) are not an exhaustive classification of mental processes—that they do not include
+the concept. Well, he is at liberty to define his own terms, and before we
+accuse him of hypostasising a new faculty to account for the concept, let us scrutinise
+his meaning. We shall find that he merely repeats, in a subtler terminology of
+his own, the analysis of Berkeley, Mill, Taine, Spencer, and Romanes. These writers
+treat the concept as a complicated associational group held together by the
+word. Now Wundt, while conceding the theoretic admissibility of this form of
+statement, holds that such groups present so many distinct characteristics that all
+delicacy of psychological discrimination is sacrificed by confounding them under one
+denomination with other associational complexes. He does not, like Professor James,
+bid introspective psychology “throw up the sponge” here, but wishes to carry his
+analysis into recesses which the instruments of the associationists are too clumsy to
+explore. In the interests of this analysis he limits the term association to combinations
+mediated by a limited number of elements. The (apperceived) concept, on the
+other hand, is the product of the reaction of the total mind. This distinction (whatever
+we may think of its absolute validity) expresses a finely observed psychological
+truth. The distinctive quality of a concept consists, Wundt says, “<i>in dem begleitenden
+Bewusstsein, dass die einzelne Vorstellung einen bloss stellvertretenden Werth besitze</i>.”
+This feeling he calls the <i>Begriffsgefühl</i>, meaning thereby exactly what Professor
+James means when he says that “the thoughts by which we know that we
+mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other,” and that
+“a polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of ‘Hollo! thingumbob again!’
+ever flitted through its mind.” Only, instead of “throwing up the sponge,” Wundt
+goes on to give a very interesting account of this feeling in its various degrees of
+clearness between the conceptual polyp and the conceiving man. Apperception is
+invoked only to name and emphasise the feeling of activity of the self that enters
+into the <i>Begriffsgefühl</i>, distinguishing it as a reaction of the total consciousness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">[304]</span>from the relatively passive associations of what Romanes would call “recepts.”
+Psychologists, however, will continue their fruitless debates on questions of terminology
+and will still imagine that Wundt is a belated reactionist.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Paul Shorey.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie.</span> By <i>Hugo Münsterberg</i>. Heft 4.
+Freiburg i. B. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>Münsterberg’s fourth <i>Heft</i> begins with studies in association. If <i>a</i> and <i>b</i> have
+been independently associated with <i>m</i>, can <i>a</i> call up <i>b</i> without the appearance in
+consciousness of <i>m</i>? The affirmative answer of common experience was confirmed
+by Scripture’s experiments. Associating five Japanese symbols with two series of
+five German words, he found that a word of one series tended (without conscious
+recollection of the Japanese symbol) to revive the particular word in the other series
+that had been associated with the same symbol. Münsterberg, after repeating and
+varying the experiment in a number of fields, denies that any such relation can be
+observed. He may very well be right on the question of facts. It is <i>a priori</i> improbable
+that a transitory and arbitrary association of a meaningless symbol could
+modify appreciably the independent and accidental associative attractions of familiar
+words and presentations. The philosophic interpretation is another question.
+For our real knowledge it is a matter of indifference whether we fill out “missing
+links” with “<i>dunkel bewusst</i>,” “<i>unbewusst</i>,” or “cerebral processes that have no
+psychical correlates.” And yet how much of contemporary psychologising is a logomachy
+raging around just this question.</p>
+
+<p>Münsterberg’s second series of experiments show clearly the part played by such
+missing links in perception. A word is called out just before a complicated picture
+is exhibited to the subject. He will usually perceive first in the picture some object
+naturally associated with the word, even though the word has aroused no conscious
+associations.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly (III) a hastily seen misprinted word will be interpreted variously according
+to the associations of another word called out to the subject in advance.</p>
+
+<p>Another series of experiments has for result that even the most commonly associated
+word-couples, as table and chair, have no fixed, unconditional associative
+attraction for each other in the same or in different minds, but that the unit of attraction
+is the “associative constellation.” This is only common sense, and artificial
+experiments will never reveal anything in this field that we cannot learn quite as
+well in the class room. “Table” will suggest “logarithm” if the boy is fresh from
+the class in trigonometry.</p>
+
+<p>“The difference between men is in their principle of association” said Emerson
+long ago. Münsterberg, who has in his archives records of fifty thousand experiments
+in verbal associations, presents a table of the comparative frequency with
+which substantives are associated with superior (more general) or inferior class
+names, with adjectives or with verbs to which they stand in the relation of subject
+or of object. His chief result is that minds which associate a noun with its higher
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">[305]</span>class name (<i>Ueberordner</i>) think of it as the subject of a verb and do not associate it
+with an adjective. The <i>Unterordner</i> thinks of the noun as object of a verb and associates
+it with an adjective. The adjective, then, is not the higher class to which
+the substantive belongs, but a limitation of the substantive. The French, if they
+please, may use this conclusion to refute Spencer’s contention that “white horse”
+is a more natural order than <i>cheval blanc</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The first topic in “memory studies” is the persistence in the psycho-physical
+mechanism of the disposition to an acquired automatic movement, even after the
+memory of the nerve has been seemingly displaced by the habit of its contrary. The
+experiments were trivial, such as shifting the position of an inkstand from right to
+left in alternate months, or wearing a watch alternately in the right or left fob. The
+result, a progressive diminution of the mistakes made after every change, may plausibly
+be explained by the stimulated attention and consequent care of the experimenter.
+The second topic treats of the effect of a time interval on the exactness of
+our memory of sensations of movement in eyes and limbs. The section on “chain
+reactions” is a methodological study of the various applications of this experimental
+method. “The influence of nervous stimulants on psychic activities” is rather interesting
+reading, but yields no important results. Alcohol depresses, tea and coffee
+heighten the powers of memory and perception for an hour or two after absorption.
+But the harmful effect of the alcohol sometimes passes away after the first hour.
+<i>Grössenschätzung</i> is a study of our estimates of distances on a surface, made by passing
+the hand over it at arm’s length, at half arm’s length, etc. From experiments
+as to the estimate of absolute tone-distances (as distinguished from musical intervals)
+Münsterberg concludes that pure measurements are not possible with three tones
+only. Experiments with four tones do not, he says, confirm the law that distances
+corresponding to equal differences of vibration are felt as equal.</p>
+
+<p>Physiologists have assumed that the symmetrical movement of the limbs as in
+swimming or rowing is the natural one; and the alternating or independent movements,
+as in walking or writing, are an acquisition involving inhibitions of the natural
+innervations. “Even in adult life,” says Professor James, “there is an instinctive
+tendency to revert to the bilateral movements of childhood.” Professor
+Münsterberg was led to doubt this view by observing the unsymmetrical motions of
+a baby in a warm bath, and experiment has confirmed his scepticism. Complicated
+joint motions of both hands (tracing circles or other geometrical figures on a
+surface) do not exhibit any tendency, when the attention is distracted, to assume
+the symmetrical form. They rather tend to compensate each other in such a way
+as to preserve equilibrium with the minimum strain on the other muscles of the
+body, and this law leads as often to alternating as to symmetrical movements of the
+arms or legs. The case is different of course with the muscles of the trunk, and may
+be different in birds, as it would in us if we spent our lives in swimming or rowing.</p>
+
+<p>A new method of attacking the problem of localisation is to observe the effect of
+altering the circulation in different parts of the brain. Tentative experiments on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">[306]</span>one subject seem to show that verbal associations are readiest when the victim lies
+on his left side, which is a happy coincidence with the localisation of the speech
+centres in the left frontal convolutions. If these statistics can be trusted, it is inadvisable
+to undertake hard mental labor with the head hanging back over the edge
+of a chair!</p>
+
+<p>In the last chapter, certain simple experiments in our estimates of voluntary
+movements in varying conditions of mind and body are made the basis of a far-reaching
+theory of pleasure, pain, and judgment, the elements of which can be found
+in Aristotle, Herbert Spencer, and James. Münsterberg found by repeated experiments
+that the accuracy of attempted reproduction of a fixed and familiar amount
+of centripetal or centrifugal movement of finger and thumb along a rod perpendicular
+to his waistcoat varied with his condition of fatigue, pleasure, or pain. In a
+pleasurable state of consciousness the centrifugal movement was exaggerated while
+the centripetal fell short. In pain the reverse relation obtained. Hence he infers
+a connection between pain and muscular flexion and pleasure and muscular extension,
+or rather, he distinguishes the mere sensation of pain (<i>Schmerz</i>) and pleasure
+(<i>Lust</i>) which may depend on integrations and disintegrations in the nerve-tissue,
+from the accompanying feelings of agreeableness (<i>Wollust</i>) or disagreeableness
+(<i>Unlust</i>) which are due to sensations aroused at the centres by movements of flexion
+and extension throughout the body. He thus attaches his special theory of pleasure
+and pain to Lange’s and James’s theory of the identity of the emotions with their
+bodily concomitants—though he protests against the metaphysical implications of
+the doctrine. The origin of the existing coördination of muscular flexions and extensions
+with pleasure and pain, he explains teleologically on the principles of the
+Spencerian psychology of evolution. He then proceeds, after Sigwart and Brentano,
+to revive the old idea of Aristotle (whom he does not mention) that the judgment
+(affirmative or negative) is rather the assumption of an attitude toward a presentation
+(<i>Stellungsnehmende Akte</i>) than a mere conjunction of presentations. The affirmative
+judgment is a faint incipient represented movement of the self towards a
+suggested conjunction of presentations. The negative judgment is a similar movement
+in the opposite direction. Ontogenetically these inchoate movements are later
+than the movements of acceptance or rejection called forth by a painful or pleasurable
+stimulus, and must therefore be treated as derivative phenomena. But the
+Kantians may derive some comfort from Münsterberg’s final assurance that he too
+believes that “<i>Erkenntnisstheoretisch das Urtheil primär ist</i>.”</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Paul Shorey.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.</span> By <i>Josiah Royce</i>, Ph. D. Boston and New
+York: Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co.</h4>
+
+<p>We are told by Professor Royce in the preface to this book, that we are indebted
+for it to the lady friend to whom it is gracefully dedicated, who asked him
+“for some account of the more significant spiritual possessions of a few prominent
+modern thinkers,” to be related “in comparatively brief and untechnical fashion.”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">[307]</span>The larger portion of the work is taken up with that subject, exhibiting the general
+growth of modern philosophical thought beginning with Spinozism, and terminating
+with Monism as the outcome of the doctrine of Evolution. The author’s purpose
+is constructive, however, as well as expository. He has his own philosophical
+creed, suggested by what he knows of the progress and outcome of modern thought,
+and the second portion of the work is the expression of his thoughts on the world-conception
+which he regards as embodying the true spirit of modern philosophy.
+Professor Royce justly lays stress on the fact that the theory of evolution is the
+product of a genuine and continuous growth. He dwells particularly, moreover,
+on the distinction between the <i>epistemological</i> sense of idealism, which “involves a
+theory of the nature of our human knowledge,” and its <i>metaphysical</i> sense, in which
+it is “a theory as to the nature of the real world, however we may come to know
+that nature.” It is in accord with the latter sense that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
+and their allies, as believing matter to be an expression of the world-spirit, are referred
+to as the idealistic school; and it is in the metaphysical and not the epistemological
+sense that the term idealism has been used since Hegel. The opposite of
+a metaphysical idealist is “one who maintains the ultimate existence of wholly unspiritual
+realities at the basis of experience and as the genuine truth of the
+world—such unspiritual realities for instance as an absolute ‘Unknowable,’ or,
+again, as what Hobbes meant by ‘Body.’” This is not, however, the view of
+the author, who thinks that the metaphysical idealist alone is in possession of a
+successful solution for the epistemological problem.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Royce divides modern philosophy into three great periods, of which
+the first was one of pure and simple naturalism. The supernatural had then only a
+secondary interest, and thought was governed by three ideas—“that nature is a
+mechanism, that human reason is competent to grasp the truth of nature, and
+that, since nature’s truth is essentially mathematical, geometry is the model science,
+whose precision and necessity philosophy, too, must imitate.” During the second
+period of modern philosophy there was a gradual change of thought objectivity.
+Reason was still the instrument, but it was employed on the mind itself. It
+came to be recognised that if man is part of nature’s mechanism, he is a knowing
+mechanism. The age was, however, more than one of self-analysis. Rousseau
+introduced a sentimental tendency from which came “a revival of passion, of poetry,
+and of enthusiasm, whose influence we shall never outgrow.” To it is traceable
+the French Revolution which overthrew all the mechanical restraints of civilisation,
+and “demonstrated afresh to the world’s outer sense the central importance
+of passion in the whole life of humanity.”</p>
+
+<p>The period of modern philosophy, which still continues, began with the publication
+of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” the essential doctrine of which is that
+man’s nature is the real creator of man’s world, that visible nature is the expression
+of the human spirit, the inner structure of which is therefore the deepest truth
+for us. This idea is “as old as deeper spiritual faith itself,” and yet it is the very
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">[308]</span>soul of all our modern life because it is “the essentially humane view of reality.”
+For fifty years Kant’s ideas ruled philosophic thought, and then, through the progress
+of science, the doctrine of evolution received formulation, and confirmation
+and “external nature has once more gained for us an imposing authority which
+makes us in many ways sympathise afresh with the pure naturalism of the seventeenth
+century.” We are compelled to omit any account of the author’s study of
+the philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and Berkeley, or the philosophic systems of
+Kant and his successors of the German School of Idealists. Nor can we say anything
+as to the doctrine of Evolution, which Professor Royce rightly regards as
+having had its rise long before Darwin or Herbert Spencer. Before proceeding to
+state his own views, the author takes a cursory glance at modern empirical monism
+which he affirms to be rather a suggestion than a philosophy. It is not surprising,
+therefore, that he is not content with it although he makes use of its ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now see what are the “Suggestions” which Professor Royce offers as
+his contribution towards the formation of a world-conception. These occupy the
+last four chapters of the work, which are supplemented by a general summary in
+the appendix, to the book. For the sake of conciseness we will make use of this
+summary, according to which there are two phases of idealistic doctrine, the Analytic
+Idealism of Berkeley and the Synthetic Idealism of Kant and his successors.
+The former shows that if the world is to be knowable at all, it must be, in its deepest
+nature, a world of ideas, that is, it exists “only in so far as beings with minds actually
+<i>know it to be</i>.” The objection that nobody can <i>know</i> any reality beyond his
+own self, is met by the synthetic phase of idealism which shows us that “there is
+but one self in the world, the logos or world-mind. The <i>finite</i> self knows truth
+beyond its own limitations, just because it is an organic part of the complete Self.”
+What are the demands of idealism as thus stated? They have relation, first, to the
+interpretation of the facts of experience, which must be in terms of the doctrine of
+the world-mind, and, secondly, to experience itself, on which we depend “for the
+revelation of that truth which, for us finite beings, must remain a fast ‘outer’ truth,
+just because it is the content of other mind than our own bits of selfhood, and is
+universally true for all intelligences.” The philosophy of experience having to do
+with facts and with the interpretation of facts, it is necessary to distinguish between
+what is really “outer” and what is “inner” about our finite experience. The
+former embraces the world of facts, and a fact is something which must be describable
+in some sort of universal terms. The principle of ordinary realism, “that you
+must not be sentimental or otherwise emotional in your account of the truth of
+things, but rather <i>exact in your descriptions of what things are</i>,” has a thoroughly
+idealistic justification. Not appreciation, but description gives us outer truth, and
+this is the characteristic presupposition of all natural science, which is concerned
+with the universal aspects of things, as opposed to momentary and transient aspects.
+That presupposition involves the assumption that the world is <i>essentially describable</i>.
+But as only the well-knit, the orderly, that which conforms to law, can be described
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">[309]</span>science assumes the universality and rigidity of the laws of nature. It assumes
+further, since the most exact descriptions are possible only in the case of processes
+in Space and Time, of a mechanical type, that everything including man himself,
+is a part of nature’s mechanism. A closer analysis, however, shows that, as one
+can only describe what has been first appreciated, there must be universal types of
+appreciation, and therefore, that “Ideals must be deeper than Mechanism, so that,
+in order to be relatively describable, nature must embody purposes, and so be possessed
+of worth.” The author’s conclusion is that the natural order is also a moral
+order, and that therefore “the world of absolute self must appear to us as having
+two aspects, one a temporal, the other an eternal aspect, one of law and one of
+worth. Man then turns out to be at once a part of nature’s mechanism, and a
+part of the moral order; at once temporally determined and morally free.”</p>
+
+<p>The final lecture presents the author’s views as to the solution of the problem
+of evil. Professor Royce believes that all evil is part of a good order, and hence he
+agrees with Hegel, who declared that life, however good, will always be restless,
+longing, suffering, and who gloried in the paradox as the very essence of spirituality;
+rather than with Schopenhauer, whose recognition, in another light, of the
+universality of the same truth led him to abandon all hope in life. The justification
+of the existence of an evil impulse comes just at the instant when it is hated and
+condemned. Thus “condemning and conquering the evil will, makes it part of a
+good will”; as pain and suffering have their compensation in their chastening
+effect on the spirit. But to the enlightened soul it is not so much the painfulness
+as “the blind irrationality of fortune that seems to drive God out of our thoughts
+when we look at our world.” It is the capriciousness of life, arising from human
+stupidity, that really makes it seem like an evil dream. What is the explanation of
+this caprice given by the author? It is to be found in the creed of his idealism,
+“This world is the world of the Logos.” It is “the suffering God, who is just our
+own true self, who actually and in our flesh bears the sins of the world, and whose
+natural body is pierced by the capricious wounds that hateful fools inflict upon
+him.” And as our defeats are his, so his triumph and his eternal peace are ours also.</p>
+
+<p>Prof. Royce in making “only one more effort to define a ‘double-aspect’
+theory of the relations of the physical and the moral and æsthetic worlds,” affirms
+that our philosophic insight teaches us that the world of matter in motion is simply
+an external aspect of the appreciable world, that is, of the world of the Logos.
+Of this, it is such an aspect “as can be expressed by finite consciousness in terms
+of the space and time forms, and of the categories of empirical science.... Consequently
+all its laws, all its necessity, its causation, its uniformity, belong, not to
+its inner nature as such, but to the external show of this nature.” That which
+actually appears to us is matter in motion, which furnishes the fact of the double
+aspect, the inner intelligibility of which fact is problematical to us, but not so for
+the Logos, who is our true Self, and who “completes the insight that for us is so
+fragmentary.” This true Self, the Logos, is the only Self, and with it the deeper
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">[310]</span>self of man is identical. That this deeper self is “the self that knows in unity all
+truth,” is declared to be no hypothesis, and therefore the existence of the Infinite
+Self is perfectly sure. This Self “infinitely and reflectively transcends our consciousness,
+and therefore, since it includes us, it is at the very least a person, and
+more definitely conscious than we are; for what it possesses is self-reflecting knowledge.”
+Finally, the true world, that is the world of appreciation, is the system of
+the thoughts of the Logos, whose unity we know, just so far as we ourselves consciously
+and rationally enter into it and form part of it. Therefore “in so far as we
+have inner unity of thinking, in so far as we commune with our fellows, and in so
+far as we rightly see significance in the outer universe, we are in and of the world
+of appreciation that embodies the thought of the Logos.”</p>
+
+<p>Ingenious as this theory is, and notwithstanding the elements of truth it possesses,
+we cannot accept it as conclusive. Its weakness is revealed in the last line
+of the paragraph just quoted. If only the world of appreciation embodies the
+thought of the Logos, what becomes of the world of fact? The latter is said to be
+the outer aspect of the former, a notion which is apparently derived from the association
+with man of body and mind. But the existence of mind, which we must
+understand by the term Logos, in nature, although declared by Professor Royce to
+be the only thing certain, is a mere inference, and even if the analogy of the human
+organism justifies such an inference; it would require that if priority has to be
+given to mind or matter in the universe it must be allowed to the latter. At birth
+a human being has no mind, properly so-called, since it is the result of the activity
+after birth of the organism, through the agency of the brain. It is true that the
+human body possesses from the first the elements of the mind, or rather of the
+feeling which thus exhibits itself; or, better still, the organic structure of which
+feeling is the general function. The utmost that can be properly asserted of the
+universe, therefore, is that it possesses a certain organic arrangement of its parts,
+and therewith such a condition of feeling, or, what in this relation would be a better
+term, sensitiveness, as is required by its organic character. In relation to such a
+state of things the terms thought, consciousness, reflection, have no meaning so far
+as we can judge. That organic aspect of the universe, moreover, leaves no room
+for duality. Just as the human organism constitutes a perfect unity, although it is
+made up of various organs and exhibits the properties attributed to both mind and
+matter, so must the universe be such a perfect unity whatever its nature and attributes.
+The human organism may, however, be strictly described as matter under
+organic conditions, a description which is equally applicable to the universe, without
+determining what those conditions are. Professor Royce objects to the Unknowable
+of Herbert Spencer, but there is very little practical difference between
+it and his own true Self, which, as the Absolute, is unknowable, although he is known
+in the inner self of man, as Spencer’s Unknowable is known in the human consciousness.
+Both Absolute and Unknowable are, however, merely names for Organic
+Nature, which is seen in all things visible and is known by all her operations.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">[311]</span>These are governed by the laws of her very existence, and it is the uniformity of
+which those laws are the expression which constitutes the moral law of the universe,
+the breach of whose eternal order, whether this is established in the world of
+matter or in the human mind, must be attended with consequences that are designated
+by man as evil. We find only a world of description, which is nevertheless
+one of moral order.</p>
+
+<p>Widely as we disagree on the grounds stated with the conclusions of Professor
+Royce’s work, it is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the discussion of the
+world-problem. Its description of the characteristics of the philosophy of Kant and
+of the German idealists is clear, though not intended to do more than exhibit the
+spirit of their teaching, and it is written in a style which renders it easy reading.
+It is a pity, therefore, that it is disfigured with such colloquialisms as <i>you’ll</i>, <i>isn’t</i>,
+<i>can’t</i>, <i>don’t</i>, words which neither sound well, nor look well in print.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Die Aristotelische Auffassung vom Verhältnisse Gottes zur Welt und zum
+Menschen.</span> By <i>Dr. Eugen Rolfes</i>. Berlin: Mayer &amp; Müller. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This book is a scholastic “survival.” The author believes that Zeller’s interpretation
+of Aristotle is wrong, and in five formal theses he endeavors to prove
+<i>secundum artem</i> that the philosopher was a theist who taught the creation of the
+world from nothing, and the immortality of the soul. In the defence of his theses
+he manifests some ingenuity and industry, but no criticism. The work has no scientific
+significance.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. S.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche.</span> Erscheinungen des modernen Geistes
+und das Wesen des Menschen. By <i>Robert Schellwien</i>. Leipsic: C. E. M.
+Pfeffer, 1892. Price 2 m 60 pf.</h4>
+
+<p>Individualism is the spirit of the age, and among all the champions of individualism
+the most original, the most consistent, the boldest, are perhaps Max Stirner
+and Friedrich Nietzsche. Robert Schellwien, in sketching their views in great outlines,
+partly admires these courageous thinkers who dare to draw the consequences
+of their principles to the very last even though they will appear absurd to the
+world, partly censures the rashness with which they arrive at, and the superciliousness
+with which they sometimes state, their opinions. Upon the whole the
+author succeeds in impressing the reader that there is in these two peculiar geniuses
+a gigantic strength, and that their views of truth, morality, and justice
+deserve a greater attention than they have received. The reviewer is no admirer
+of either Stirner or Nietzsche; he believes nevertheless that a careful analysis of
+their erratic minds and lives will be very instructive. It will be first of pathological
+and then even of more than pathological interest. The actual objective value of
+the ideals truth, morality, and justice, will be best illustrated by showing all the consequences
+of a consistent individualism. We hope that this pamphlet will grow
+into a more comprehensive work; and in that case we should advise the author to
+add short biographies of his heroes.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">[312]</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">The Sources and Development of Kant’s Teleology.</span> By <i>James Hayden Tufts</i>.
+Chicago: University Press. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This little tract is an inaugural dissertation presented by Mr. Tufts to the University
+of Freiburg for the attainment of the doctorate of philosophy. It is written
+in English. Mr. Tuft’s dissertation is wholly historical. He simply seeks to expound
+Kant’s true views. In this respect the work bears the marks of much research
+and of a thorough exploitation of Kant’s works. Mr. Tuft’s concluding
+words are that “with every new discovery of science, every advance in the ideals of
+art and of the conduct of life, every development in religious faiths, comes anew
+the task for philosophy to criticise, and through criticism to make a fresh attempt
+to interpret from the unity of reason the manifold of life.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs.</span> By <i>Alfred Sidgwick</i>. London: Longmans,
+Green, &amp; Co. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This work might be described as an inquiry into the conflict between philosophy
+and common sense, and its central idea as the continuity of nature. What bearing
+this idea has on the inquiry is shown by the statement, that the distinction between
+philosophy and common sense is only one of degree. And yet, regarded as methods,
+or attempts to follow ideals, they may be sharply contrasted. This implies the existence
+of distinctions, and hence arises the question how far distinction is consistent
+with continuity in nature. The recognition of such a continuity requires the admission
+of the unreality of distinctness, but this fact is not inconsistent with the use
+of rough distinctions, which give rise to what the author terms effective ambiguity.
+Here we have the field of the operation of common sense, which exhibits itself as
+tact in the use of rough distinctions, while, on the other hand, philosophy may be
+said to be concerned with the continuity which, from a superficial glance, might be
+supposed to stand in opposition to distinction.</p>
+
+<p>The ultimate result which Mr. Sidgwick has in view is the reconciliation of philosophy
+and common sense, although it is incidental to his main purpose, which is
+the discussion of the best way of dealing with ambiguity, that is, of using rough distinctions.
+The improvement suggested is the substitution of “reasoned discrimination”
+for “haphazard tact,” and it is based on the doctrine that “the validity of
+all distinctions is relative to the purpose for which they are used at the time.” This
+cannot mean that distinction is merely relative, as it is said that there is no distinction
+which is quite safe against being broken down. The implication is that a safe
+distinction is possible, although difficult to find, and consistently with that view, the
+doctrine has the double aim of repressing excessive belief in distinctions which are,
+at least for the moment, invalid, and, on the other hand, of “enabling us to justify
+for a passing purpose, distinctions which are faulty on the whole.” The justification
+here arises from the use, and not from the distinctions themselves, although it
+is evident there must be some basis for them, or they would be invalid. The element
+of truth is derived from the continuity of nature, with which philosophy is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">[313]</span>concerned, and hence the improvement in the method of common sense is to be
+effected through its regulation by the method of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>The justice of this view may be tested by its consequences, which are stated by
+the author in reviewing the chief incidental aims of his book, as being those which
+have to do with controversy, the faults of language, and the conflict between the
+rival ideals, faith and doubt. “Philosophy,” we are told, “is doubt, just as science
+is knowledge,” (a description which like many other things in this book we cannot
+endorse,) and the true centre of philosophical interest in regard to rival ideals is
+“to harmonise the dispute by seeking how to limit each ideal by its opposite.”
+This is the aim of all real philosophy, which recognises that every ideal has an
+element of truth. Philosophy is thus explanation, and Mr. Sidgwick avers one of
+the great dividing forces in philosophy has always been “the rivalry between two
+opposite methods of general explanation—that which explains small things by great
+ones, the part by the whole, the many by the one (e. g. all earthly facts as related
+to their one cause and substance); and that which explains great things by small
+ones, the whole by its parts, the one by the many (e. g. the system of nature as a
+‘concourse of atoms’).” Thus regarded, the distinction between philosophy and
+common sense is simply one of method; and it may be said to consist in the use by
+the former of rational doubt based on scientific knowledge, as distinguished from
+the belief founded on popular wisdom which distinguishes the latter. Both alike,
+however, are the fruit of observation, pushed further, nevertheless, in the one case
+than in the other, which is practically the view expressed by the author.</p>
+
+<p>In considering the nature of philosophy, we have given the gist of Mr. Sidgwick’s
+reflections on controversy, which is treated as the opposition of ideals. This
+conflict is kept alive chiefly by doubt as to how abstract notions should be applied
+in concrete cases, and largely owing to “the absence of that kind of sharp distinction
+which is applicable, not only to the notions themselves, but to the actual facts
+to which they pretend to refer.” This view is ably enforced, as well as the necessity
+of applying to the conflict between ideals the rule laid down as to the purposive
+validity of distinctions. The operation of this rule would be attended with concession
+instead of assumption, there being, however, the admission, which is equivalent
+to an assumption, that neither side of any ideal dispute is devoid of some truth as
+well as some error. This is really required, if not by the continuity of nature,
+yet by continuity in our interpretation of nature. This is continuity in thought, and
+hence arises the difficulties connected with language which it is one of the author’s
+incidental aims to point out. He supposes that language acts as a drag on the progress
+of knowledge, owing to the <i>clumsiness</i> of words arising from the fact that
+“things spoken of are always more full of change and movement than the words we
+can use in speaking of them.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sidgwick insists upon continuity, yet change itself may be evidence of at
+least partial discontinuity. Our author remarks, in an appendix note on the continuity
+of nature, that every change, as such, is a <i>saltus</i>, however small it may be,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">[314]</span>and that the same is true of any gap between the two extremes of nature and the intermediate
+region. That such an intermediate region exists, is required by the continuity
+of nature, which again is evidence of change, on the principle that every chain
+is made up of a series of links. But as in the chain there is no real gap between the
+links, so there is no actual discontinuity consequent on change in nature. The two
+extremes may be regarded as prolongations of the intermediate region, and the
+changes to which such prolongation is due may so occur that there may be discontinuity
+between certain parts, as between the fibres of which a hempen rope is made,
+and yet there be a perfectly continuous whole. We have an example of such a discontinuous
+<i>continuum</i> in a beam of ordinary light, which presents not the slightest
+gap, and which yet is made up of numberless undulations in different ratios representing
+the six spectrum colors, each of which is, moreover, spread throughout the
+whole of the beam. Here we see that continuity is quite consistent with distinction.
+The latter may be regarded as discrimination of the various phases of the former,
+and the distinction remains valid or otherwise according to the accuracy of the discrimination
+or not. But constant change of distinction is required by progress in
+knowledge which may be regarded as a thought representation, by discontinuous
+steps, of the continuity of nature.</p>
+
+<p>As to the conflict between faith and doubt, the author considers the function of
+scepticism as the search for grounds of belief, and thus doubt is said to be “rather
+a friend than an enemy to those who remember that there is still some truth, on
+any subject, for fallible men to learn,” as well as to those who are more interested
+in the discovery of truth than in supporting their own beliefs.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Vorlesungen über Geometrie</span>, unter besonderer Benutzung der Vorträge von
+Alfred Clebsch. By <i>Dr. Ferdinand Lindemann</i>. Leipsic: B. G. Teubner.
+1891.</h4>
+
+<p>This first part of the second volume of Alfred Clebsch’s Lectures has been arranged
+and treated by Professor Lindemann in the same way as the first, except
+perhaps that the editor has extended his independent investigations rather further
+than before, owing mainly to the fact that he had in addition to his own notes when
+attending Professor Clebsch’s lectures in 1871-1872, only five folio pages of the late
+master’s manuscript at his disposal. The present volume is divided into three parts.
+I. The Point, Plane, and Straight Line. II. Surfaces of the Second Order and of
+the Second Class. III. Fundamental Conceptions of Projective and Metrical Geometry.
+Historical notices and references are added in foot-notes. Considering the
+prominence of the editor as a mathematician, it would be a presumption on our part
+to praise his work.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">An Introduction to General Logic.</span> By <i>E. E. Constance Jones</i>. London: Longmans,
+Green, &amp; Co. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This work is another witness of the great interest now being taken in all that
+pertains to the methods of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">[315]</span></p>
+
+<p>Miss Jones, the author, is lecturer on logic at Girton College, Cambridge. During
+an experience of several years in teaching, certain difficulties have very forcibly
+pressed themselves upon her attention. She hopes by her book to aid in removing
+these difficulties.</p>
+
+<p>It is certainly a good augury for women when their intellectual representatives
+begin to show the disposition to turn towards the “dry light.” Logic and mathematics
+are “dry” to be sure; that is, they are very apt to be <i>found</i> dry, very dry,
+by beginners, and always by those who lack that real intellectual robustness which
+is alone fit to meddle with fundamental problems. Hence these sober and severe
+disciplines find little favor among those who seek merely for “showy” attainments,
+those to whom whatever is “uninteresting” is intolerable, and those who regard
+obscurity as inseparable from profundity. When then we find scholarly women
+manifesting a real relish for this “dry light,” it gives promise of a coming day when
+the intellectual appetite will rise above the level of mere entertainment, the level of
+the playhouse and the circus, and take kindly, and perhaps zealously, to real edification.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Jones makes but very modest claims on behalf of her treatise. She has
+not undertaken to innovate to any great extent upon the regular scheme. If in her
+changes there is that which might especially provoke criticism, it is perhaps in the
+nomenclature which she adopts. The traditional logic forms a system which has
+its own proper merits and defects. It is of great historical interest, and its regular
+terminology is almost indispensable for the proper illustration of its doctrines.</p>
+
+<p>We think also that the author fails to state the case in all its amplitude, when,
+she lays it down as one of the most absolute and ultimate of all logical principles
+that the self-evident ought to be believed. The truth is, as we conceive it, that the
+self-evident is sure to be believed, and that in the face of any proposition that truly
+bears its own justification along with it, any doctrine of logic is either useless or impertinent.</p>
+
+<p class="right">ρσλ.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Hypnotismus und Suggestion.</span> By <i>W. Wundt</i>. Leipsic: Wilhelm Engelmann.
+1892.</h4>
+
+<p>A Greek student translates κλεινός ‘small’; “You are thinking of the German
+<i>klein</i>,” says the teacher quickly. Another renders ἡμείς γὰρ ἁγνοί, ‘we are lambs,’
+misled by a chance cross association with the Latin <i>agni</i>. Every careful self-observer
+knows that there is no combination of memories, images, and resultant incipient
+acts too absurd for some moments of confusion and mental fatigue. We
+account for such confusions of thought by citing parallel cases and adding generally
+that normal associations are liable to disintegration and abnormal recombination in
+fatigued or excited conditions of the brain. If we seek a causal scientific explanation,
+two methods are open to us: (1) we may attempt to map out in detail and describe
+for all similar cases the pathways of association, or (2) we may endeavor to
+define their physiological conditions and accompaniments in the nervous system.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">[316]</span>The first leads us at once into the metaphysics of the unconscious. The second
+method, when we attempt to pass from a general to a specific correspondence, leads
+to a hypothetical restatement of the observed psychological facts in terms of the latest
+cerebral anatomy and physiology Now all serious scientific thinkers are fast coming
+to the conclusion (on which Wundt’s book is based) that the phenomena of
+dreams and of hypnotism are to be explained by the general laws of association as
+revealed especially in the confused and obstructed associations of the normal state.
+The critical and destructive part of Wundt’s sensible and timely work has two aims:
+(1) to discriminate the attested phenomena of hypnotism from the alleged phenomena
+of thought-transference, telepathy, and “possession” on which no serious
+student will waste his words; and (2) to point out the confusions of thought in current
+explanations of hypnotic phenomena, which either confine themselves to restatements
+of the observed facts in terms of a hypothetical anatomy, or at any rate in
+Wundt’s opinion base their physiological hypotheses on an inadequate psychological
+analysis. His own constructive work is an attempt to supply the missing analysis
+and accompany it with the most plausible physiological theory that our imperfect
+science allows. Dreams and the illusions of the hypnotic subject are doubtless explicable
+generally as derangements of the associative machinery. But they are
+specific forms of abnormal association, the special characteristics of which we wish to
+define. Suggestion, Wundt says (with James), is association accompanied by a
+“limitation of consciousness to the images aroused by the association.” The scientific
+problem is: <i>Wie entsteht die Einengung des Bewusstseins?</i> This narrowing of
+consciousness manifests itself in a diminished sensibility to all impressions outside
+of the suggestions. Dreams show the same features, accidental impressions of sense
+or changes in the nutritive processes here taking the place of direct suggestions from
+without. But in sleep and dreams the limitation of consciousness is conditioned by
+general fatigue of the nervous system. In the hypnotic state it results not from
+fatigue, but from neuro-dynamic and vaso-motor changes in the distribution of
+tensions in the brain. Hence the superior intensity and vividness of the presentations
+that are allowed to develop themselves. This altered equilibrium of the forces
+of the brain is brought about by the suggestions of the operator, which are generally
+guided by him to a more or less definite end. The resulting derangements of
+normal associations are consequently less lawless than is the case in dreams. On
+these principles Wundt explains the chief facts of hypnotism as follows: Automatic
+obedience to the commands of the operator results simply from the fact that
+every idea tends to realise itself in action, is an incipient act; and in the narrowed
+consciousness of the hypnotic subject the idea suggested by the operator finds no
+competitors in the struggle for existence as a reality. This explanation (which is
+really as old as Spinoza) accounts also for positive hallucinations—there are no reductors,
+as Taine would say. Negative hallucinations (the non-existence of an
+existing door) may be explained sometimes by a contradictory positive hallucination
+(as of a curtain covering the door) more often in the same way as hypnotic analgesia
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">[317]</span>by the familiar analogy of our insensibility to the toothache when the attention is
+elsewhere strongly engaged. This is favored by the generally diminished sensibility
+of the hypnotic subject. Post-hypnotic suggestions are associations depending
+on partial memories, such as we have in the normal state when we merely recall an
+image or an object without time-and-circumstance localisation. The subject who is
+to execute a post-hypnotic suggestion at 7 o’clock is reminded by the striking of the
+clock of an image of a thing to be done which the original command of the operator
+associated with the stroke of seven. All else is forgotten. When the time limit is
+not thus definitely marked, the process must be analogous to that whereby some
+persons are able to waken at a predetermined hour in the morning. A latent association
+is aroused into full activity by naturally recurring conditions of internal
+physiological processes or external surroundings. Courtesy or prudence are perhaps
+all that prevent the best explanation of certain extreme cases being the old one:
+“the boy lied.” Wundt rejects the claim that suggestion is the experimental method
+in psychology <i>par excellence</i>, for the very sufficient reason that the phenomena experimented
+with are only very partially in the control of the operator and are
+furthermore mainly pathological. He is far from disputing the practical efficacy of
+hypnotic therapeutics in functional disorders, but he regards the hypnotic sleep as
+a dangerous remedy, the employment of which should be limited to trained practitioners.
+The subjection of the hypnotic subject to the will of the hypnotiser is <i>a
+priori</i> an immoral relation to obtain between man and man unless justified by superior
+medical necessities, but, quite apart from <i>a priori</i> ethics, indiscriminate hypnotisation
+is to be discouraged as a direct cause of nervous degeneration. The book
+closes as it began With a dignified but severe reprobation of those thinkers who in
+the interests of occultism magnify the psychological significance of hypnotism and
+disseminate superstition in the name of science.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Paul Shorey.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfasslicher Darstellung.</span> By <i>Dr. Hans Schmidkunz</i>.
+Stuttgart: A. Zimmer (E. Mohrmann). 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This book (266 pp.) is a popular compendium of hypnotism. The author, beginning
+(I) with the hypnosis of common life, goes over the whole field as follows:
+(II) the phenomena of hypnosis, (III) its application, (IV) the “beyond” of hypnotism,
+(V) the conceptions of hypnotism, and (VI) its dangers. The seventh and last
+chapter is a short history of the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Schmidkunz, Docent of philosophy at the University of Munich, is one of
+the few who believe that there is a “beyond” in hypnotism. He says on p. 65:
+“A hypnotised person was led through a room while sleeping. The experimenter
+made a few passes over his head and then violently whirled his arm around in a
+vertical direction before his subject. When the subject approached the marked
+place, he recoiled from it crying with pain.” Our author asks, “what is this magnetic
+wall to be regarded as? As a charm, as an obstacle of occult power, from
+which the body recoils as from a wall of stone? If not, was it the subject’s soul that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">[318]</span>recoiled? Was it the hypnotised person’s belief which created the wall?” etc. The
+two interpretations, the one attributing the effect to a magnetic power, the other to
+suggestion are typical. The former is bolder: he goes “beyond” hypnotism.</p>
+
+<p>Our author is one of those who go beyond hypnotism, and is not satisfied with
+the theory that suggestion explains all. We may add that he regards telepathy as
+a sufficiently established fact. Telepathy finds little support among scientists in
+Germany, and Dr. Schmidkunz complains, in a circular letter to “Professor Wundt’s
+and other Savants’ Critical Saltomortales” of the cool and depreciative treatment
+which his book <i>Psychologie der Suggestion</i> received at the hands of men of science.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">L’Hypnotisme devant les Chambres legislatives Belges.</span> Par <i>J. Delbœuf</i>.
+Paris: Félix Alcan. Pp. 80.</h4>
+
+<p>In a recent number of <i>The Monist</i> Prof. J. Delbœuf gave the reasons which
+have induced him to come to the conclusion that “persons in an hypnotic condition
+preserve at least a sufficient portion of their intelligence, their reason, together
+with freedom of action, to prevent them from committing deeds that neither their
+conscience nor their habits approve of.” This opinion is entertained by many other
+hypnotists, but the more general opinion is that “suggestion” may be made use of
+for criminal purposes: Such is the case especially in France and in Belgium; and
+acting on that supposition the medical faculty of the latter country promoted in the
+legislative Chamber a law interdicting public hypnotic séances, and reserving the
+practice of hypnotism as a therapeutic measure exclusively to medical men, as well
+as the treatment of insane persons and those under twenty-one years of age. Professor
+Delbœuf, who is not a medical man, naturally objects when those who but a
+few years ago would have classed him and his fellow hypnotists as charlatans, seek
+without reason to reserve for themselves the promising field of labor opened up by
+the researches of others. He maintains that men are born hypnotisers as they are
+born artists, and therefore to exclude all but medical men from the application of
+the hypnotic power will often prevent its use for curative purposes. Moreover it is
+a serious question for those who possess this natural gift. They might perform the
+most praiseworthy actions and yet be subjected to a legal penalty. Professor Delbœuf
+states that by hypnotism he cured a youth eighteen years of age of a mania for
+stealing (<i>la manie du vol</i>), and thus saved him from unmerited dishonor. On another
+occasion he had charge of a young wife who was possessed with the idea of
+murdering her children, and after all other means had failed he was able to remove
+the idea by suggestion extending over a period of eight days. He properly asks
+whether the performance of such actions ought to be treated as criminal.</p>
+
+<p>The real question to be considered, however, is whether the practice of hypnotism
+is likely to be made use of for criminal purposes if it is permitted to every one.
+We much doubt whether any actual case of such an abuse has been legally established,
+or whether suggestion could lead to the perpetration of a criminal act unless
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">[319]</span>there was a predisposition in that direction. Professor Delbœuf makes use, however,
+of an apparent paradox which would seem to render abortive any such law of prevention
+as that above referred to. It is that there is in reality no such thing as
+hypnotism. M. Bernheim writes in a letter given in the present work, “for my
+part, in the thousands of hypnotisations I have practised, I have never seen the least
+inconvenience result. Undoubtedly very impressionable subjects can, under the
+emotional influence of auto-suggestion, present certain nervous troubles; but these
+a prudent operator can always calm by suggestion.” Professor Delbœuf relates
+several cases of this kind within his own experience, which shows that severe nervous
+pain can be removed by simple assertion that it does not exist. He affirms that
+“the so-called hypnotic sleep is only a sign of suggestibility, and that it is not at all
+necessary to suggestive therapeutics.”</p>
+
+<p>We may conclude this notice of a very interesting contribution to the discussion
+as to the true nature and operation of hypnotism, by quoting the conclusions arrived
+at by the author as to the proper mode of regulating its practice. He suggests
+that representations of hypnotism should be permitted subject to the measures which
+regulate public spectacles; that any one should be allowed to become a hypnotiser,
+as he can become a shampooer or a truss-maker; that the hypnotist who gives remedies
+should be punishable, since he exercises the art of curing without a diploma;
+that he should not be allowed to hypnotise minors without the consent of the family;
+and that he should be forbidden to treat a sick person without the written authorisation
+of a medical man and under his direction. This rule Professor Delbœuf,
+although he disapproves of the law which forbids the practice of medicine to those
+who have not a diploma, has always acted on. He thinks that if medical men then
+studied hypnotism and practised it themselves, hypnotisers who had no diplomas
+would soon have nothing to do. This spirited defence by Professor Delbœuf of his
+views will be widely read. Not the least interesting portion of it is the criticism,
+with which it ends, of “the affair of the brothers Vandevoir,” where we read that
+he is designated by his opponent M. Masoin “<i>doux et bon vieillard</i>” and “<i>l’homme
+cheveu</i>”!</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Ueber den Hautsinn.</span> By <i>Dr. phil. et med. Max Dessoir</i>, Privatdocenten an der
+Universität zu Berlin. Separat-Abzug aus Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie.
+Physiologische Abtheilung. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This pamphlet, a reprint from the <i>Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie</i> of
+1892, is an elaborate and careful investigation into the <i>modus operandi</i> of skin sensations.
+The first part is a discussion of the theory of sensation in general containing
+(1) an analysis of the ideas <i>Gefühl</i>, <i>Empfindung</i>, and <i>Wahrnehmung</i>, (2) a
+critique of Johannes Müller’s doctrine of specific energies, (3) an exposition of the
+objectification of sensations. Feeling (<i>Empfindung</i>), according to the author, is, no
+magnitude, its main feature is intensity, quality becomes important only in sensation
+(<i>Wahrnehmung</i>). For the psychology of skin-sensations, we have to note the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">[320]</span>great influence of accompanying feelings (<i>Mitempfindungen</i>). The second part is
+devoted to the author’s investigations of the sense of temperature. Dr. Dessoir rejects
+Blix’s point theory; he regards the idea of two different end-apparatuses for
+warm and cold sensations as an unfounded assumption, and claims that the temperature
+sense is one mode of sensation possessing two qualities. The intensity of
+temperature sensations depends not only upon the <i>vis viva</i> of the heat in the
+stimulus; but also upon five other factors (1) the size of the surface affected, (2) the
+duration of the affect, (3) the thickness of the epidermis, (4) its conductibility, and
+(5), last not least, its temperature.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Recherches d’optique physiologique et physique.</span> By <i>Clémence Royer</i>. Brussels
+Imprimerie Veuve Monnom. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>The first part of this brochure consists chiefly of an examination of the theories
+of M. M. Hirth and Chauveau on chromatic sensation. The talented authoress
+disagrees with the view entertained by M. Chauveau, that the sensations of contrast
+which are fused cerebrally, so as to give, when viewed with both eyes, a white
+image, are subjective in an intellectual sense. The result is purely physico-physiological,
+as it is even assuming the intervention of M. Hirth’s <i>interior eye</i>. Mad.
+Royer regards the eyes organised so as to effect a fusion of the colors and forms
+depicted on the two retinas, and she accepts the conclusion of M. Hirth, that they
+lessen the real polychromism of objects, the inability to perceive the infra-red and
+the ultra-violet rays concealing from us a considerable part “of the palette of
+nature and of its chromatic scale.” The authoress refers with approval to the
+theory of M. Charpentier that the complementary colors correspond to inverse undulatory
+phases, which are destroyed by interference in the field of vision.</p>
+
+<p>The second part of Mad. Royer’s pamphlet is devoted to a consideration of the
+photography of colors, and the theory of light. It points out that the photography
+of colors, which has been effected to some extent by M. Lippmann, must be a physical
+and not a chemical process. It is the result of the periodic compressions of
+the sensitised silver-surface, due to the shocks it receives from the light undulations
+of the ether, which so modify the surfaces of the silver atoms that they reflect
+colored rays identical with those received from the object photographed. With
+reference to the propagation of light, the authoress affirms that the atoms of matter,
+as well as those of the ether, which differs from matter only in being imponderable
+and without inertia, are centres of emanation of a continuous and impenetrable
+fluid, which is however indefinitely expansible or compressible. The size and
+form of atoms will thus depend on the compressions they receive, and they will be
+able to accommodate themselves to the spaces to which they are confined by the
+resistance of the atomic groups by which they are surrounded. But the world may
+be regarded as consisting of three sorts of atoms: (1) those of the ether which possess
+their primordial unity of expansive force and are endowed with perfect elasticity;
+(2) those of ponderable matter, which have lost a portion of their expansive
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">[321]</span>force and elasticity; (3) those which are called vitaliferous, because they have regained
+their expansive force, and are thus capable of autonomous movements
+necessary to resist the compressions of the ether and to oppose the inertia of matter.
+They thus answer to the cell-souls of Haeckel.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Die Bewegung der lebendigen Substanz.</span> Eine vergleichend-physiologische
+Untersuchung der Contractionserscheinungen. By <i>Max Verworn</i>, Dr.
+med., Privatdocent der Physiologie an der Universität Jena. Mit 19 Abbildungen.
+Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>The mechanism of muscle contraction and expansion and the motions of
+amœboid substance have been recognised as one and the same problem; and several
+naturalists, foremost among them Hofmeister, Engelmann, and Edmund
+Montgomery have investigated it, fully aware of the enormous importance of the
+subject. The present pamphlet is small, it contains only 103 pages, but it contains
+the statement of the problem, a description of the author’s experiments, and his
+solution so lucidly that one cannot read it without great satisfaction. Both processes,
+expansion as well as contraction, are, according to Verworn, spontaneous
+motions, and both are to be explained by chemotropy. Expansion, i. e., in
+amœba the protrusion of pseudopodia, is due to the plasma’s hunger for the
+oxygen, which is contained in the surrounding medium. Every irritation (electric
+shocks, concussions, injuries etc.) causes a chemical decomposition of the oxygenised
+plasma; it loses carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, (as we know from the
+waste products, carbonic acid, creatine, lactic acid,) and these substances are
+exactly those which are most prominent in building up living substance. Irritations
+without exception cause the plasma to return to the nucleus. The chemical
+change in the plasma makes it hungry for the nuclear substances. The vital
+process, accordingly, is an interaction between the nucleus, the plasma, and the
+medium, so that in the constant exchange of materials the old structure is preserved;
+and the fundamental features of the vital process are first the plasma’s
+chemotropy for oxygen, causing centrifugal motions, and then its chemotropy for
+nuclear substance, causing centripetal motions. The plasma saturated with nuclear
+substances, shows a chemotropy for the oxygen of the medium; it moves in a
+centrifugal direction, and the oxygenised plasma has become so unstable that it
+breaks down on the slightest provocation. The decomposed plasma exhibits a
+chemotropy for nuclear substance and thus returns in contripetal motions to the
+centre. Without entering into details we may mention that this accounts also for
+the fact that dying protoplasm always assumes a globular shape, until it crumbles
+to pieces. The <i>rigor mortis</i> is the last vital action of living substance. The
+plasma seeks once more the nuclear substance, but not finding sufficient material
+for being built up again into a substance endowed with a chemotropy for oxygen
+remains rigid until it decays.</p>
+
+<p>The author finds his theory to hold good for the actions of the striated and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">[322]</span>nonstriated muscles, and also of ciliated tissues. Having shown that the vital functions
+are due to the same forces that are observable in the retort of the chemist, he
+adds: “The savage accordingly was not quite wrong when he drew no distinct line,
+considering everything moving as alive. Life is motion. That old poetical view
+of all nature being animated with life throughout was in possession of a germ of
+truth, and our proud civilisation has actually made a retrogressive step in abandoning
+this view.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Graber’s Leitfaden der Zoologie für die oberen Classen der Mittelschulen.</span>
+Vienna and Prague: F. Tempsky. 1892. Price 1 fl. 60 kr.</h4>
+
+<p>We had occasion in a recent number of <i>The Monist</i> to review an excellent text-book
+of physics published by this same house. The present work on zoology is in
+its second edition, and is intended, like the above-mentioned work of Professor
+Mach’s, for high-school instruction. Professor Graber, its author, died before the
+completion of the second edition, and the work was finished by J. Mik.</p>
+
+<p>Graber’s Zoology is unique in its class; it covers, within the restricted limits of
+two hundred and sixty-one pages, the whole field of elementary biology, human physiology,
+and zoology, as it is usually exploited in such books, and thus combines in
+a single volume what is usually contained in two or three. The human organism
+(Part 1) is made the starting-point of study in the work, and the explication of the
+physiological and mechanical functions of animals are thus all grouped about this
+central figure. In a concise form (55 pages) this book contains about all of human
+anatomy and physiology that is usually learned in high-schools. Part 1 also contains,
+at the end of the discussions, brief dietetic suggestions. “Systematic Zoology”
+is taken up in the Second Part. This part is well analysed and arranged. The cuts
+are also excellent. Attached to the book is a “Picture-Atlas.” This atlas contains
+a number of colored plates, which depict various physiological and anatomical organs,
+and also four beautiful representations of scenes from the Naples Aquarium.
+Although this book will not be used by English school-students, it may be recommended
+to students of scientific German who wish a good introduction into the
+technical vocabulary of German biology and zoology, which to the foreigner is very
+difficult.</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">L’Anthropologie du Bengale.</span> By <i>Paul Topinard</i>. Extracted from <i>L’Anthropologie</i>
+for May-June, 1892. Paris: G. Masson.</h4>
+
+<p>The present contribution to the science of Anthropology by the Editor of <i>L’Anthropologie</i>,
+is based on the anthropometric inquiries of Mr. H. H. Risley made
+under instructions from the government of Bengal. The conclusions deduced by
+Dr. Topinard from the large mass of material brought together by Mr. Risley, and
+which relates to members of all the castes to be met with in Bengal, are of great
+interest. He finds that the populations are much mixed, but that they may be divided
+into three types, one tall and dolichocephalic, that of the Aryans; another short and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">[323]</span>brachycephalic, derived from northern Asiatics; and the third short and dolichocephalic,
+or that of the native blacks. India is a world by itself, and most of its
+inhabitants belong to races of which there is no specimen in Europe. Dr. Topinard
+naturally attaches more importance to physical than to ethnographical characters
+as evidence of anthropological descent, and he is justified by Mr. Risley’s researches,
+of which he speaks very highly; although he thinks they would have been more
+fruitful if the anthropometrical instructions prepared by the French Anthropologist
+had been more strictly adhered to. That they were not so is the more surprising as
+Mr. Risley’s work is dedicated to Dr. Topinard himself.</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Ueber sittliche Dispositionen.</span> By <i>Dr. Anton Oelzelt-Newin</i>, Privatdocent an
+der Universität in Bern. Graz: Leuschner &amp; Lubensky. 1892. Price Mk. 2
+70 Pf.</h4>
+
+<p>The main idea of this book is to prove that there are certain innate dispositions
+forming the elements of morality. The elements of morality are according
+to Dr. Oelzelt-Newin the attitudes of fear, anger, love, sympathy, shame, and pride.
+Conscience is a complex which has developed from these six dispositions. Having
+stated sufficient evidences for the heredity of moral dispositions and illustrated
+the parallel phenomena of bodily states in their reference to moral alienation, the
+author treats the six elements of morality in single chapters, explaining their causes
+and the influence of conditions under which they develop either into virtues or
+crimes. The essay (92 pp.) is a contribution to that ethical determinism which regards
+evil as the necessary result of given factors. “Religious people should say:
+Not Only the stone which falls from the roof and kills a just man, but also the will
+of a criminal and the punishment of the judge are inscrutable ordinances of God.
+That alone is a true theodicy.” As an optimist the author trusts that the evil
+of the world will be conquered with legal means and enjoins priests to revise in
+this sense their creed, jurists their law, and all men their love of mankind.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">The Beauties of Nature.</span> And the Wonders of the World We live in. By Sir
+<i>John Lubbock</i>. New York: Macmillan &amp; Co. 1892. 429 pages. Price $1.50.</h4>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Natur und Kunst.</span> Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kunst. By <i>Carus
+Sterne</i>. Berlin: Verein für deutsche Literatur. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>The first of these two books is a delightful compilation by Sir John Lubbock.
+It is another addition to that series of popular works which this well-known naturalist
+is now giving to English-speaking peoples. It makes no pretension of being
+scientific: it simply takes the world which science has revealed and shows us its
+wonders and its beauties. Yet it insinuates many a scientific fact and inculcates
+many a moral lesson. No one will regret the few hours that can be spent in its
+perusal, and the stimulus derived from it will heighten the pleasure which every
+religiously-minded heart takes in the contemplation of natural grandeur and truth.
+In the main, it is intended for unscientific readers. It requires hardly any preparatory
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">[324]</span>knowledge to be understood; yet it sometimes touches on a truth that even
+great thinkers overlook. Thus, <i>à propos</i> of the capacity for intact divisibility which
+some life-forms possess, Sir John remarks that these considerations introduce “much
+difficulty into our conception of the idea of an Individual.” “In fact,” he says,
+“the realisation of the idea of an individual gradually becomes more and more difficult,
+and the continuity of existence, even among the highest animals, gradually
+forces itself upon us. I believe that as we become more rational, as we realise more
+fully the conditions of existence, this consideration is likely to have important moral
+results.” The work is divided into the following chapters: “Animal Life,” “Plant
+Life;” “Woods and Fields,” “Mountains,” “Water,” “Rivers and Lakes,” “The
+Sea,” “The Starry Heavens.”</p>
+
+<p>The second of the two books that head this review is by Carus Sterne. Few
+men possess the wide technical knowledge and the same command of the historical
+literature of his subject, that this investigator and writer possesses. Carus Sterne
+unites with a rigorous scientific training the rare qualities of philosophical insight
+and sound erudition. He possesses the scientific facts on which to base valid judgments,
+and he deduces from these facts the inferences that affect the most important
+problems of life—its culture and morality. We have had occasion before, to refer
+to these phases of Carus Sterne’s activity as an author.</p>
+
+<p>In the present work the author of <i>Werden und Vergehen</i> discusses the relations
+which obtain between nature and art. Here is not the place to give even a synopsis
+of the great wealth of material which this book of 395 pages contains; we are allowed
+simply to hint at its purport and methods. Carus Sterne defines the artistic
+impulse in man to be a longing of the mind to rise above the ordinary routine of
+physical existence. It is a lifting ourselves out of our every-day life. This cannot be
+accomplished by the simple reproduction of the things of nature; such reproductions
+have not in themselves an elevating effect. Art is not imitative, art is creative. It
+uses color, form, space, merely as a means to give “local habitation” to an idea.
+The imitation of actually existing things is the beginning of art; but it is its lowest
+stage. Nature must be our guide, our norm, not our model. Here the middle road
+is taken between the old and the new idea of art. That was ultra-idealistic, this is
+ultra-realistic. The author then proceeds to discuss the notion of beauty in art and
+nature (Part I) and finally takes up generally (Part II) the subject of the artistic
+contemplation and reproduction of the world. All these topics, with their many
+subdivisions, are treated in Carus Sterne’s best and most fascinating style. The work
+is well illustrated, and all interested in the natural history of art will find in it a
+storehouse of valuable material.</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_58" href="#FNanchor_58" class="label">[58]</a> Cf. Ward, <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i>, Vol. XX, p. 44.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">[325]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="PERIODICALS_II">PERIODICALS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. IV. No. 3.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber die sogenannte Conscience musculaire</span> (<span class="smcap">Duchenne</span>). By <i>A. Pick</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Eine neue Theorie der Lichtempfindungen.</span> By <i>Christine Ladd-Franklin</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span> (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin (a contributor to this number of <i>The Monist</i>) is
+one of those few women who have actually won a well deserved reputation as a
+thinker and scientific worker. She is an American by birth and the wife of an American
+savant. It is pleasant to find her name in a German periodical among whose
+editorial writers are men so prominent as Ebbinghaus, König, Exner, Helmholtz,
+Hering, Kries, Lipps, G. E. Müller, Pelman, Preyer, and Stumpf. Mrs. Ladd
+criticises Helmholtz and Hering, and thinks that the theories of Donders (in Gräfe’s
+“Archiv,” 1884) and Göller (in Du Bois-Reymond’s “Archiv,” 1888) have not received
+sufficient attention. In accord with their propositions, she sets forth an exceedingly
+simple hypothesis which attempts an explanation of the three main colors
+by atomic motions in the three different dimensions of space.</p>
+
+<h4>PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XXVIII. Nos. 9 and 10.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber die Grundformen der Vorstellungsverbindung.</span> Psychologische
+Studie. (Concluded.) By <i>M. Offner</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Begriff der Verschmelzung und damit Zusammenhängendes in
+Stumpf’s “Tonpsychologie,” Band II.</span> By <i>Th. Lipps</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Werke zur Philosophie der Geschichte und des socialen Lebens</span> (Third
+Article: <i>J. S. Mackenzie</i>, An Introduction to Social Philosophy; <i>J. H. Ferguson</i>,
+The Philosophy of Civilisation; <i>W. A. Macdonald</i>, Humanitism). By
+<i>F. Tönnies</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XXIX. No. 1 and 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die moderne Energetik in ihrer Bedeutung für die Erkenntnisskritik.</span>
+By <i>K. Lasswitz</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die sittliche Frage eine sociale Frage</span> (I). By <i>F. Staudinger</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Religionsphilosophische Thesen.</span> By <i>E. von Hartmann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span> (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">[326]</span></p>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK. Vol. 101. No. 1.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Psychologische Aphorismen.</span> By <i>Otto Liebmann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Unterhalb und oberhalb von gut und böse.</span> By <i>Eduard von Hartmann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jahresbericht über Erscheinungen der anglo-amerikanischen Litteratur
+aus der Zeit von 1890-1891.</span> By <i>Friedrich Jodl</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Zur Begrüssung des zweiten Hunderts der Bände dieser Zeitschrift.</span> By
+<i>Prof. Dr. Rud. Seydel</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Recensionen.</span> (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. October, 1892. Vol. V. No. 1.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Disturbance of the Attention During Simple Mental Processes.</span> By
+<i>Edgar James Swift</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pseudo-Chromesthesia, or the Association of Colors with Words, Letters,
+and Sounds.</span> By <i>William O. Krohn</i>, Ph. D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Report on an Experimental Test of Musical Expressiveness.</span> (Part II.)
+By <i>Benjamin Ives Gilman</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The present investigation made by Mr. Edgar James Swift shows that a disturbance
+of the attention through sight is more effective in lengthening the reaction
+time than when the disturbance comes through the sense of hearing; but whenever
+the reaction follows a slight sensation, the time of choice is less affected by disturbances
+of the attention than if the excitation is a sound. Dr. William O. Krohn concludes,
+after carefully studying several hundred cases of pseudo-chromesthesia, that
+a greater per cent. of them arise from some sort of cerebral work due to the close
+relation of the cortical centres. Mr. Gilman concludes from experiments made with
+various persons, that musical expressiveness has been overestimated, and that on
+the emotional theory of its nature the importance of the art has also been overestimated.
+(Worcester: J. H. Orpha.)</p>
+
+<h4>MIND. New Series. No. 4. October, 1892.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Field of Æsthetics Psychologically Considered, ii.</span> By <i>Henry
+Rutgers Marshall</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lotze’s Antithesis between Thought and Things, ii.</span> By <i>A. Eastwood</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Study of Crime.</span> By <i>Rev. W. D. Morrison</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On the Properties of a One-dimensional Manifold.</span> By <i>Benj. Ives
+Gilman</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>In his present article Mr. H. R. Marshall finds a basis for the differentiation
+of Æsthetics from Hedonics, in “pleasure permanency in revival” as belonging
+particularly to the former. Mr. Eastwood criticises Lotze’s antithesis between
+thoughts and things which is closely connected with his erroneous opinion that
+time is a property of things in themselves. The study of crime by Mr. W. D. Morrison
+discusses crime under the three heads of the movement of crime, its causes, and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">[327]</span>its repression, of which the last deals with the theory, the methods, and the efficacy
+of punishment. In his discussion of the properties of a one-dimensional manifold,
+examples of which are time, the straight line, quantity, intensity, number, and
+pitch, Mr. B. I. Gilman, who was a pupil of Mr. C. S. Peirce, seeks to give a
+formulation of one-dimensionality in which the general notion of relation and
+converse relation is substituted for that of greater and less difference. This
+number of <i>Mind</i> contains a voluminous note on the blind deaf-mute child, Helen
+Keller, by Prof G. C. Robertson, the late editor, whose death is announced in the
+same number. (London: Williams &amp; Norgate.)</p>
+
+<p class="right">Ω.</p>
+
+<h4>INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. October, 1892. Vol. III. No. 1.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The National Traits of the Germans as seen in their Religion.</span> By
+<i>Prof. Otto Pfleiderer</i>, D. D., University of Berlin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Philanthropy and Morality.</span> By <i>Father Huntington</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">International Quarrels and their Settlement.</span> By <i>Leonard H. West</i>,
+LL. D., London University.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">1792.—Year 1.</span> By <i>David G. Ritchie</i>, Jesus College. Oxford.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Utilitarianism.</span> By <i>A. L. Hodder</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Book Reviews.</span></p>
+
+<p>(Philadelphia: <i>International Journal of Ethics</i>, 118 S. Twelfth Street.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 5.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Psychogenesis.</span> By <i>President David J. Hill</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Problem of Epistemology.</span> By <i>Professor Andrew Seth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Origin of Pleasure and Pain, (II.)</span> By <i>Dr. Herbert Nichols</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Discussions: Reality and “Idealism.”</span> By <i>F. C. S. Schiller</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Reviews of Books.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Summaries of Articles.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 6.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Green’s Theory of the Moral Motive.</span> By <i>Prof. John Dewey</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Thought before Language.</span> By <i>Prof. William James</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pleasure-Pain, and Sensation.</span> By <i>Henry Rutgers Marshall</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Reviews of Books.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Summaries of Articles.</span></p>
+
+<p>(Boston. New York, Chicago: Ginn &amp; Company.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE NEW WORLD. December, 1892. Vol. I. No. 4.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Brahmo Somaj.</span> By <i>Protap Chunder Mozoomdar</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Future of Christianity.</span> By <i>William M. Salter</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Progressive Orthodoxy.</span> By <i>Egbert C. Smyth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Michael Servetus.</span> By <i>Joseph Henry Allen</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">[328]</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Present Position of the Roman Catholic Church.</span> By <i>G. Santayana</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Church in Germany and the Social Question.</span> By <i>John Graham Brooks</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A World Outside of Science.</span> By <i>Thomas Wentworth Higginson</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Birth and Infancy of Jesus.</span> By <i>Albert Réville</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Monistic Theory of the Soul.</span> By <i>James T. Bixby</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The last article is a criticism to the point, discriminating and fair. The author
+takes special notice of Dr. Carus’s position, whose views are recapitulated with accuracy,
+but not accepted as convincing. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, &amp; Co.)</p>
+
+<h4>REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: September, 1892. No. 201.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La personnalité dans les rêves.</span> By <i>J.-.M. Guardia</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Histoire et philosophie religieuses.</span> By <i>M. Vernes</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sur la terminologie philosophique.</span> By <i>Durand (de Gros)</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Comptes rendus et notices bibliographiques.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: October, 1892. No. 202.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Du trouble des facultés musicales dans l’aphasie.</span> By <i>Dr. Brazier</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le développement de la volonté.</span> (Concluded.) By <i>A. Fouillée</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le mouvement pédagogique.</span> By <i>E. Blum</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Analyses et comptes rendus.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Revues des périodiques étrangers.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: November, 1892. No. 203.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La psychologie de W. James.</span> By <i>L. Marillier</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">De l’unité de la science: les grandes synthèses du savoir.</span> By <i>E. de Roberty</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sur les diverses formes du caractère.</span> By <i>Th. Ribot</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Variétés.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Analyses et comptes rendus.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Revue des périodiques étrangers.</span> (Paris: Félix Alcan.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH. Vol. V. No. 4.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS:</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die neueste Phase des Schopenhauerianismus.</span> (Concluded.) <i>Bäumker.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die speculativen Grundlagen der optischen Wellentheorie.</span> (Concluded.)
+<i>S. J. Linsmeier.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Religion und Entwickelungstheorie.</span> (Concluded.) <i>Schanz.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Substanzbegriff bei Cartesius im Zusammenhang mit der scholastischen
+und neueren Philosophie.</span> (Continued.) <i>S. J. (C.) Ludewig.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Recensionen und Referate.</span> (Fulda: Fuldaer Actien-Druckerei.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">[329]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="masthead">
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Vol. III.</span>
+<span class="smcap spacer">April, 1893.</span>
+<span class="smcap">No. 3.</span></p>
+
+<h2>THE MONIST.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="RELIGION_AND_MODERN_SCIENCE">RELIGION AND MODERN SCIENCE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>The ancient conflict between religion and science is now, at the
+close of the nineteenth century, more animated than ever before.
+This conflict has formed the intellectual pivot of civilisation
+ever since Christianity first afforded the western peoples of Europe
+the inconsistent spectacle of a religion which made abundant use in
+its dogmatic constructions of the theories of contemporary science,
+and yet assumed a hostile attitude towards the fundamental principle
+of all science, the spirit of research and unbiassed judgment generally.
+Rightly has one of the acutest modern critics of Christianity,
+Ludwig Feuerbach,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_59" href="#Footnote_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> maintained, that the Christian sophistic
+philosophy is the necessary outcome of this inconsistency, which proclaims
+as absolute truth a definite, historical revelation, such as is
+found in the Bible, and simply assigns to the reason the subordinate
+and improper office of harmonising and defending what is there laid
+down.</p>
+
+<p>There are, it is true, a great number of people, who are not disposed
+to see the bitterness of the conflict now raging. It has become
+customary for us to look upon the nineteenth century as an
+age of the comprehension of religion, and to distinguish it from the
+eighteenth century, which is regarded as a period of mere religious
+criticism. We boast of having rediscovered religion, and of having
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">[330]</span>secured to it a permanent province in the dominion of the mind.
+But the facts of our public life stand in curious contradiction to these
+assertions. In all civilised nations, in literature, in parliamentary
+procedures, in all questions that relate to religious and moral life
+or to education, the attentive observer will find that a profound
+chasm divides humanity. Every one feels the desirableness of bridging
+over this chasm, that the members of society may be united in
+common labor; but again and again we are made to experience how
+irreconcilable the respective claims of the opposed parties are. He
+who has studied the bulls and encyclical letters of the last two popes,
+Pius IX. and Leo XIII., and the commentaries on these utterances
+in the <i>Civiltà Cattolica</i>, the official organ of the curia; he who is acquainted
+with the polemical diatribes of the French Catholics against
+the positivists and freethinkers, and against the school and church
+legislation of the third republic; he who has any knowledge of that
+mass of controversial literature, which the proclamation of the doctrine
+of papal infallibility in the year 1870 evoked; he who has followed
+the eventful and varied history of the so-called “Culturkampf”
+in the German Empire, from the era of the minister Falk, down to the
+recent bill for a new School-law in Prussia, defeated amidst the
+greatest excitement in all parts of Germany; he who is the least bit
+at home in the literary feuds which are being fought out in the domain
+of historical theology concerning the validity and credibility of
+the original sources of Christianity; he, finally, who will place the
+writings of Cardinal Newman or of the Jesuits Pesch and Cathrein
+by the side of those of Huxley and Spencer, by the side of those of
+Du Bois-Reymond, Strauss, and Dühring: he, I say, who has gone
+through with a critical spirit all that I have cited in the preceding
+sentences, will surely not be apt to contradict this assertion of mine
+that civilised humanity to-day is separated into two groups which
+no longer understand each other, which do not speak the same language,
+and which live in totally different worlds of thought and sentiment—at
+least so far as this one critical point is concerned of man’s
+relation to religion.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Wie Ja und Nein sind sie,</i></div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Wie Sturm und Regenbogen.</i>”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">[331]</span></p>
+
+<p>Have we, then, learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the
+days of rationalism? The tremendous labors which our own century
+has devoted to the investigation of religion in all its forms, to the
+unfolding of its connection with racial mind and sentiment, and of
+its relation to civilisation generally, and finally to the elucidation of
+the origin and development of the great forms of religion: has all
+this had no other result than that we, after a century of the most
+laborious research, again find ourselves in the same attitude of unintelligent
+hostility towards religion and Christianity in which the
+eighteenth century revelled, and out of which we have only fought
+our way by the united efforts of a host of profoundly enlightened
+minds?</p>
+
+<p>This argument has been advanced in opposition to the leaders
+of the rationalistic movement and to the work of the eighteenth
+century in varying forms, by the party which seeks to ally the science
+of the present and the religion of the past. It is seriously said and
+enjoined that only they who are far behind the science of the times
+and hold aloof from the true spirit of the age can still assume the
+repugnant attitude toward religion which was characteristic of the
+mind of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>It is high time to point out the crude confusion of ideas which
+lies at the basis of this argument. It confounds the historical understanding
+of a thing with the philosophical approval of it. But
+these are two totally distinct things. We understand a phenomenon
+historically, when we are clear in our minds concerning the external
+conditions and habits of thought of humanity from which it sprung;
+when its main-springs of action and its purposes, as well as the effects
+which have proceeded from it, are distinctly traceable. The
+more closely our mental pictures of these things correspond to the
+facts as they actually were at the origin, and the more they conduct
+us from the mere surface of phenomena into the secrets of their psychological
+and sociological connection, and teach us to understand
+these things as products of mind and of society, the higher will our
+historical knowledge of them be rated. In this sense the knowledge
+which the eighteenth century had of religious phenomena was undoubtedly
+very imperfect. True, even here great advances beyond
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">[332]</span>the age which preceded, are noticeable. People had ceased to regard
+the origin of the Jewish and Christian religion as a supernatural
+event and as the immediate work of God; all religions were
+placed upon the same footing, as species of the same kind; and efforts
+were made to discover their common characteristics and the
+law of their origin. But the people of that period were not yet able
+to arrive at the true essence of religious ideas and sentiments. They
+were hardly in a position to describe them properly, let alone to explain
+them. Of the hypotheses devised to throw some light into the
+darkness that hung over the beginnings of religions, not one proved
+itself competent to supply what was hoped for. All that they could
+derive from these fictions was that notable caricature of religion
+which their age had directly before its eyes, and to free themselves
+from which they strained every nerve. With the keen vision of
+hate they uncovered all the infirmities of religion, all the terrors and
+iniquities which have followed in its train, all the injurious effects
+to civilisation which have proceeded from it. They created a negative
+picture of religion, which has lost nothing of its partial historical
+truth by the fact that many of its features are farther withdrawn
+from our immediate experience than they were from that of the
+times in question.</p>
+
+<p>But it was the nineteenth century that first worked out the true
+psychology of religious man, and again came into possession of that
+spirit of congeniality which is absolutely necessary to our entering
+into the mental life of far-distant times. To the men of the rationalistic
+age the history of religion was simply the history of the obscuration
+of the pure, natural religion, which was supposed to be
+constituted of a rational idea of God and a system of humane ethics,
+and which was indistinctly conceived at times as the logical, and at
+times as the historical, antecedent of the concrete religions. The
+latter appeared as the corruption of the natural and simple order of
+things—a corruption produced by superstition, by the wily exploitation
+of human credulity and human needs, by the scheming machinations
+of the founders of religions and of priests, by human delight
+in the marvellous, by the falsification of the natural moral sentiments,
+and by the stirring into life of fanatical passions. We know
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">[333]</span>to-day that this so-called natural religion is nothing more than a
+product of late abstraction and reflection; that the motives and
+selfish interests above cited have been abundantly at work in religious
+history, but are nevertheless unable to explain the internal
+motive force and tremendous vitality of these spiritual products.
+We know to-day that religions spring with the same necessity and
+in conformity with similar laws from the depths of the human mind
+as language and art, and that they form an integral constituent part
+of the structure of civilisation and an important weapon of humanity
+in the struggle for existence. In symbolical form they embody the
+highest treasures and highest ideals of national existence; in its
+gods humanity beholds the imaginative perfection and explanation
+of its view of the world; and in its religious practices, in its worship,
+in prayer, it strives to realise the wishes and aspirations which
+seem to lie beyond the reach of its powers.</p>
+
+<p>Many a riddle still remains to be solved, as is natural in a domain
+that extends into the most hidden recesses of the human soul,
+and whose obscurity is augmented by the fact that in the majority
+of cases the most important and significant elements must be collected
+with infinite pains from the rubbish of fantastic traditions.
+But upon the whole the active labors of a century which calls itself
+with pride “the historical century,” have borne their fruits. With
+respect to the intrinsic character and the significance of religion for
+civilisation, there is now every reason why a unity of opinion should
+prevail among all who take their stand on the common ground of
+modern scientific research, whether they be friends or opponents of
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>But how does a knowledge of what religion has been in the
+past affect our estimate of it in the present? Do we approve of an
+institution or phenomenon, because we understand how it was once
+possible, nay, must have existed, and what it signified? We understand
+to-day the Roman law, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the scholastic
+philosophy, feudalism, and absolute monarchy, thoroughly;
+we know the conditions which gave rise to them, the necessity of
+their appearance, and the measure of their performances; but does
+it occur to us, for these reasons, to perpetuate and make them immortal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">[334]</span>because they had once an historical significance? What an
+institution in its essence is, what in past times it has accomplished,
+is an inquiry that must be conducted with quite different means
+from that whether it is applicable to a definite present set of relations
+and necessities. The historian can render this task more easy
+by teaching us to understand the general laws and necessities of national
+life from the analogies of the past; but as a prophet he will
+always be one that looks backwards, and it is ever to be feared that
+he, too, will see the present in the light of the past. For to him
+alone does the past lift its obscuring veil, who, forgetful of self and
+unmindful of sacrifices, can listen to the voices of remote times and
+peoples, who with a mind of Protean cast has the power to transform
+his intellectual being into that to which, solely by description,
+he seeks to give new life and form. The past becomes a part of
+him; he loves it, he admires it. And from the reanimation of the
+past in historical pictures to the attempt of a renewal of it in life is
+but a single step.</p>
+
+<p>Innumerable are those who have succumbed to this temptation.
+The entire religious tendency of the nineteenth century exhibits this
+process on a grand scale. This tendency is based on profound antiquarian
+studies of the past—on that newly awakened historical
+interest, which aims not only to criticise but to understand religion
+and ecclesiastical institutions. Much that in the previous century
+seemed dead or destined to perish, had been restored to life by it.
+The whole historical structure of the Christian religion, which at
+the close of the age of rationalism only existed, it would seem, as
+an artificially preserved ruin, has received, through the instrumentality
+of these methods of thought, new supports, and has again
+been made habitable for the human mind. Unmindful of the complaints
+of churchmen, the future historian of civilisation will have
+to characterise the second half of the nineteenth century as a period
+of religious renaissance. And it is no accident, but a symptom of
+deep import, that this century has completed almost all the great
+cathedrals which were left unfinished and in partial ruins by the
+middle ages, and placed them in their colossal grandeur before the
+world as lasting monuments of its habits and tendencies of thought.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">[335]</span></p>
+
+<p>Yet the spirit of science has also not been inactive. Political
+progress has freed it from the despotic police supervision which
+even in the eighteenth century heavily oppressed it. In principle
+at least, freedom of thought and inquiry are to-day acknowledged by
+all governments, with the single exception of the Roman curia, although
+in practice there are by no means few efforts made, by influencing
+its representatives, to have that proclaimed which it is
+desired should be proclaimed. Infinitely great has the number of
+workers grown, the instruments of inquiry, the confidence of the
+human mind in itself, and our power generally. And if formerly
+people could conceive of no other science than such as stood in the
+service of the church, to-day science claims it most emphatically
+and confidently as its privilege and duty to search and test the logical
+truth of the most sacred traditions, and thus to base the thought
+of future generations, not on the naïve faith of their fathers, but on
+the demonstrable truths of actual present knowledge.</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>Between the two groups of modern humanity, of which the one
+seeks to retain the Christian religion in its historical form as the
+precious, heritage of the past, and the other to supplant it by a new
+Idealism formed in harmony with the spirit of science, a third class
+stands, which plays the part of a mediator. This class concedes
+that the traditional forms of religion are in great part unadapted to
+the modern mind, and that historical Christianity is in need of improvement,
+but contends that religion is an ineradicable constituent
+of all higher civilisation, and must remain so, and, particularly, that
+Christianity is the absolute religion, that is to say, that in Christianity
+as rightly understood and naturally developed all the necessary
+elements of the true religion of the future are contained.</p>
+
+<p>I should like, in the following pages, to subject the contentions
+of this mediatory group to a critical examination, and to discuss the
+question whether it is at all possible for one who resolutely takes
+his stand on the ground of modern scientific thought, logically to
+have religion in the historical sense at all.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">[336]</span></p>
+
+<p>In effecting a mediation between the religious and scientific
+views of the world,—views which appear to be separated from each
+other by a profound intellectual abyss,—two ways may, generally
+speaking, be pursued. Both have been frequently trodden since the
+days of rationalism. I shall discuss each separately.</p>
+
+<p>The attempt may be made to resume, in a form more adapted
+to modern times, the work of the reformers of the sixteenth century;
+to go back even more thoroughly than they did to the original and
+simplest forms of Christianity, to remove <i>in toto</i> the superstructure
+which has been reared upon it in the course of time, and to exhibit
+to humanity “the pure doctrine of Christ” as the source from which
+to-day, as a thousand years ago, true comfort may proceed, as the
+simplest, purest, and most exalted expression of the divine and human
+that has ever yet been discovered. Many of the most erudite
+workers in the field of critical theology which this century can show
+have placed themselves in the service of this idea, which is preached
+with particular enthusiasm by the so-called “free-religious” and
+Unitarian confessions, and which at times has also exhibited a noble
+and conciliatory activity in the homiletical work of some mild-minded
+and liberal clergymen in the evangelical churches. But our special
+inquiry here must be concerning the logical and scientific foundation
+of this modernised primitive Christianity, and on this point it must
+be frankly stated that the more faithfully such a Christianity reflects
+the biblical character, the remoter it is from our modern thought,
+and the more it is dominated by modern ways of thinking, the more
+unhistorical and hence the more unchristian it becomes.</p>
+
+<p>The “pure doctrine of Christ,” the genuine, primitive form of
+Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism. What we actually
+possess, in the form of historical documents, is that conception of
+the doctrines and life of Christ which was put in writing several
+generations after his death, and which, from amid a much greater
+number of contemporaneous attempts, met by preference with the
+approbation of the church. It is a hopeless task to attempt from
+these late records, which betray the most various intellectual influences,
+to derive the authentic doctrines of the oldest form of Christianity.
+No method, subjective prepossession only, can here render
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">[337]</span>a verdict. The things that appear especially consistent and homogeneous
+to individual theologians and critics are stamped as the
+genuine utterances of the Master. As every time has done, so ours
+also constructs its picture of Christ to conform with its wishes and
+wants.</p>
+
+<p>But granting even that there is nothing objectionable in this,
+and that this procedure is perfectly justified, a number of difficulties
+still stand in the way of this movement which have stamped the procedure
+of even the most ingenious of its representatives as the outcome
+of pure subjective caprice. All the written sources which we
+possess of the life and teachings of Christ contain much that is in
+the highest degree repugnant to the modern mind. I refer particularly
+to the miracles. The difficulties which they present may be
+disposed of in various ways; as, to give an example, by the method
+of the early rationalistic thinkers, who accepted the miracles as facts,
+but sought to give them a rational explanation, or by that of Strauss,
+who held that they were the mythical and poetical raiment of religious
+ideas and sentiments. Yet no art of interpretation will banish
+from the world that fact which the poet expressed in the words:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind.</i>”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">The fact that the entire cast of thought and sentiment of early Christianity
+is saturated with the belief in the marvellous, and with the
+expectations, nay, with the actual need of miracles, and that this is
+not an adscititious ornament which can be doffed at pleasure, like a
+dress which we have outgrown, but is of the very essence of Christianity.
+Here is rooted that childlike and simple belief in the limitless
+and God-coercing power of prayer, for which no natural laws
+nor force of necessity exists, which is omnipotent as the Godhead
+itself, and as all-powerful as desire. Here is rooted that ardent conviction
+of the near collapse of the entire world, of the coming kingdom
+of perfection which shall proceed, not from deeds and thought,
+but from faith and grace, and shall crown all human desires with
+glory. And intimately connected with all this stands the idea, visible
+in the background of all the moral prescripts of the gospels, and
+painted in the strongest colors, of a system of punishments and rewards
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">[338]</span>in the world beyond; which makes of a God of love, a pitiless,
+infuriate God of vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes of
+thought of the synoptic writers that it is impossible to separate them
+therefrom without doing violence to the internal connection of their
+doctrines. They who seek after a more spiritual conception may,
+it is true, find it in the gospel of John. But this book is so completely
+dominated by the metaphysical-religious speculation of the
+second century, and by the effort to bring the history of the life and
+doctrines of the Nazarene in the service of the Logos idea, that the
+modern mind can only with great difficulty find a common ground
+of understanding with it.</p>
+
+<p>The task of the modern reformers is, for these reasons, a very
+difficult one. They cannot but concede that Christianity, even in
+its purely evangelical form, contains much that is foreign to us, and
+that the elements of which it is composed must in part be excised
+and in part improved by criticism and interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>But the more the critical sense which is brought to bear upon
+this task is developed in the spirit of modern scientific thought, the
+more will historical Christianity shrink to the form of a mere colorless
+abstraction, and ultimately nothing remains of its exuberant yet
+visionary mental world but the picture of a philanthropic life joined
+to a strongly developed consciousness of God, which proclaims a
+popular morality in commandments and parables. But even this
+latter is inevitably exposed to the same fate as the other ideas. It
+is dominated throughout by the extremest notions of rewards and
+punishments, which the expectation of the doom of the world places
+in the very immediate future. It is impossible to take the system as
+a whole, and it must be made the subject of violent interpretation
+to acquire any fitness for the needs of modern life. Its principles are
+systematically turned and twisted till they have acquired in some
+direction practical utility. And who at this day can forget, that this
+system of morality, wherever and whenever attempts have been
+made literally and faithfully to imitate it in practical life, has led
+only to wretched caricatures? Moreover, it is again and again freely
+remodelled in the spirit of modern ethics, its offensive elements charitably
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">[339]</span>cloaked, its useful ones developed to the utmost, and finally
+here too a complete set of wholly modern ideas consecrated by the
+borrowed authority of a venerable antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>And therefore I repeat my contention, that the modern reformation,
+this modern, pure, and scriptural Christianity, will, the honester
+it is, all the more surely lead its adherents away from Scripture
+and from Christianity and ultimately bring them to the adoption of
+a popularly expounded, but philosophically established, ethical
+system.</p>
+
+<p>I shall now take up the second of the two methods above mentioned.
+That which we have just considered was known and affected
+even by the eighteenth century. The discovery of the second is a
+merit of the present time. The honor belongs in a pre-eminent degree
+to the speculative philosophy of Germany, and to the intimate
+relations with theology which this philosophy, especially in the
+school of Hegel and Schleiermacher, entered into in the first half of
+the century. (Kant’s philosophy was not put to similar use until
+later.) All these movements, whose rich literary ramifications and
+development may be followed to the present day in Otto Pfleiderer’s
+excellent and erudite work, “The History of Protestant Theology
+in Germany Since Kant,”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_60" href="#Footnote_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> have also begun in recent times, through
+Green, Caird, A. Seth, J. Martineau, R. Flint, and F. Robertson,
+to exert an influence on Anglo-American intellectual life.</p>
+
+<p>The common fundamental feature of this second movement is,
+that it proposes to accept as pure Christianity, not only the most
+ancient forms of Christian doctrine accessible to us, but also the
+entire system of dogmatic thoughts which in the course of the centuries
+primitive Christianity has produced. Christianity, these men
+say, has historically existed and acted in these maturer notions. It
+is not permissible arbitrarily to separate them from it, and to reverse
+by any authoritative edicts the real historical development. On the
+contrary, we now may and must continue the process which, by the
+tenor of dogmatic history, is the process which has continued for
+centuries, and give to the dogmas the form which best accords with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">[340]</span>modern spiritual needs. To-day as in the days of incipient Christianity,
+we see by the side of the naïve literal belief, which takes no
+offence at incomprehensible things if they only suit the needs of its
+heart, a gnosis arise which strives to reconcile faith and knowledge,
+religion and intellectual culture; a gnosis which to the unbelieving
+sceptic quotes the words of the poet:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;</i></div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Dein Sinn ist zu; dein Herz ist todt!</i></div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen</i></div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenroth!</i>”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is perhaps even more difficult to give a succinct and comprehensive
+notion of the ideas of this speculative theology, than of the
+results of the New Testament exegesis of which we spoke above.
+All gradations are here represented, from tender, conservative regard
+for the traditional beliefs of the sects and the needs of the pious heart
+to the boldest speculative interpretations and critical restrictions of
+dogma, which utterly discard the historical form and hold fast only
+to a central germinal truth. The present inquiry will restrict itself
+to those representatives of this gnosis, who as a matter of principle
+grant the greatest field of action to the rational development of
+dogma, and represent its philosophical elaboration in its finest and
+most complicated form. I shall attempt to signalise the ideas which
+may to-day be designated as the most spiritualised expression of the
+Christian view of the world.</p>
+
+<p>And first let us hear a greater mind speak. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s
+essays on the nature of religion and Christianity the following
+sentences occur:</p>
+
+<p>“The Christian religion is the revealed inwardness, the objectively
+expressed self of man; the contents of his highest aspirations;
+the essence of man purified and freed from the limitations
+of individuality; yet all subjectivised, that is intuited, known, and
+worshipped as a separate, independent entity, wholly distinct from
+himself. Religion is essentially dramatical. God himself is a
+dramatical creation, that is to say, a personal being opposed to
+man. He who takes from religion this idea, takes from it the gist
+of its being, and holds but the <i>caput mortuum</i> in his hands.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">[341]</span></p>
+
+<p>These sentences of Feuerbach express with the greatest generality
+and precision the innermost nature of the Christian view of
+the world. They characterise excellently the point that cannot be
+given up without destroying the religious view as such. What I refer
+to is dualism, the dualism of the divine and the human, of the world
+beyond, and the world that is, of holiness and sin; dualism conceived
+not merely as a mode of view and of conceptual distinction,
+as a working contrariety in things that by their nature are one, but
+as a metaphysical difference, an actual contraposition of two worlds,
+of two kingdoms of existence, which are totally separate, no matter
+how extensive the relations of the one to the other may be. Only
+on such a supposition is that possible which Feuerbach, with inimitable
+aptness, called “the dramatic element” of religion. The history
+of humanity, the history of its religious life particularly, is no
+monologue of humanity with itself into which life and advancement
+enter solely through the multitude of the ideas created by individuals
+within the race itself. It is an action or process in a higher sense,
+an interactivity between two worlds, in which, it is true, humanity,
+to a certain extent, shapes its own fortunes and destiny, but at the
+same time is also constantly exposed to the interferences of a power
+which stands beyond and above it and to which it has to accommodate
+itself. And whatever artifices and care many of the representatives
+of the modern gnosis may employ to conceal this fundamental
+assumption, and to substitute for it the point of view of the immanence
+of this power in the world, still any radical breach with it is
+impossible without endangering the very foundations of the religious
+sense of humanity itself.</p>
+
+<p>The indispensability of this dualistic opposition and separation
+is equally well exhibited whether we take as our starting-point the
+existence of the world at large or the individual consciousness of
+man. The religious mode of view knows of no other way of asserting
+the rights and activity of the mind in the All than by making
+all existence assume a personal life in an infinite, self-conscious, and
+ethically perfect being. The emotions and experiences of one’s
+heart, its vacillations between humility and exaltation, remorse at
+the consciousness of one’s own imperfections, the inspired flight of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">[342]</span>the soul to higher realms of existence, appear as the intercourse of
+man with some extraneous power, allied to man and yet above him,
+in which the sum of all excellence to which thought and experience
+have ever led man, has its eternal source.</p>
+
+<p>These ideas constitute the point of view which is decisive of the
+history of humanity, particularly in what concerns religion. The
+history of religion is, in accordance with these ideas, conceived as a
+continuous self-revelation of God in the world of man. True, this
+view seems to be contradicted by the fact that the self-revelation of
+this infinitely good power is effected in the case of by far the greater
+part of mankind in a very insufficient manner—in the form, namely,
+of crude and superstitious notions which stand in need of constant
+purification by reason. But the explanation of this fact is sought
+in the idea of a divine pedagogical training of the human race, and
+in the theory that religion is not an immediate self-revelation of the
+absolute, but passes through the medium of the human mind and
+consequently must be conditioned by its character.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity, now, especially appears as the highest form of this
+self-revelation of God in humanity, that is to say as the absolute religion,
+which, in its historical forms, it is true, is as little free from
+adscititious ornaments and transient obscurations as other religions,
+yet in its essence can be as little improved as it can be discarded.
+This innermost essence of Christianity the majority of the representatives
+of this modern gnosis declare to be the conviction that all
+men are from the beginning children of God. In this idea two things
+are contained: submission to the will of God who is conceived as a
+kind parent and who in pity and love does everything for the best;
+and the imitation in our own thought and conduct of the ethical
+perfection conceived incarnate in God. The entering of man into
+this relation is designated the kingdom of God—a notion which constitutes
+the ideal goal of history. The condition of mind on which
+the kingdom of God rests is prefigured in a typical manner in the
+founder of the Christian religion. His person and his life are a
+guarantee of the possibility of this ideal, and exhibit at the same
+time the means of its accomplishment: namely, the helping love of
+God, which has infused into this one individual the whole plenitude
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">[343]</span>of its being, so far as this is at all possible with human capacities,
+that humanity may have in it a direct living picture of the highest
+fulfilment of its religious and moral destiny. The historical Christ
+is the ideal of humanity, supported and ensouled by the spirit of
+God.</p>
+
+<p>The modern gnosis here goes back to the Paulinian interpretation
+of the Christ-idea. The consideration of the speculative difficulties
+of the idea of the Trinity is thus rendered superfluous for it.
+This notion is treated by the majority of its representatives simply
+as a dogmatic antiquity; its place is taken by the modern ideas of
+a distinction between the person of Jesus and the principle or spirit
+of Christianity, which is synonymous with the contrast of the idea
+and its revelation, the eternal and the temporal, of the inward essence
+and its historical realisation. That it employs the notions of idea,
+principle, and essence wholly in a Platonic sense, as the highest
+metaphysical realities, is self-evident.</p>
+
+<p>More distant still is the attitude which this speculative theology
+assumes towards another idea which proceeded from the Rabbinical
+school of thought of Paul: the notion of salvation or redemption in
+its connection with the expiatory death of Christ. From these conceptions
+of punitive suffering, of a vicarious atonement of God in
+his own person—conceptions of such juristical refinement as to be
+wholly unacceptable to modern modes of thought—the modern
+gnosis has upon the whole resolutely turned away and taken refuge
+in that more spiritual and more profound idea which in early Christian
+times the author of the gospel of St. John promulgated. The
+death of Christ is redemptive only in the sense in which Christ’s
+total history is redemptive, as the direct and prefigurative incarnation
+of the true religious relation between God and man. This is,
+it is true, applicable in a quite special sense to the Death; for it
+was by this that the eternal truth was manifested, that not only does
+all salvation accrue to man from the sacrifice of his own self in
+duteous and patient love, but that all the life of God is an emanation
+of this self-surrendering excellence, of this bliss of self-sacrifice.
+Still, there is one thing that is common to all the representatives of
+this movement as distinguished from the former, and that is this:
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">[344]</span>they do not content themselves with picturing the activity of Jesus
+Christ in general outlines solely as one which is blessed and significant
+by example and doctrine for humanity, but they assume a continuous
+and active presence of the Christian principle in humanity,
+by means of which the moral discord in individuals is overcome, and
+in the personal spiritual life of individuals divine and human nature
+are united. This is the most speculative interpretation we have of
+the old dogmatic notion of redemption, which from its original character
+as a single isolated phenomenon of history has here become
+the constant activity of a Christian principle, and an ever-living
+precedent of Christian life.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a prolix and wearisome task to go through in this
+way the whole dogmatism of this speculative theology. The fundamental
+ideas which we have discussed will suffice to show the manner
+in which, on the one hand, it spiritualised the allegorical notions
+of popular Christianity, but on the other left untouched the
+gist of the religious view and the dramatical or dualistic opposition
+of the divine and human. The notions of grace and sanctification,
+the notion of the church as a living, organised instrument of salvation,
+spring directly and logically from these fundamental ideas.</p>
+
+<p>In the province of ethics this movement has a much easier task
+than the churches based on the New Testament. As it seeks to establish,
+not a primitive Christianity, but a modernised Christianity
+developed in the spirit of recent times, there is no necessity of its
+being incommoded by the ethical crudenesses of early Christianity,
+but it is in the same position to work these crudenesses over critically
+as it did the asperities of the old dogmas. It can assimilate
+most of what it needs from modern philosophical ethics, and content
+itself with giving to what it has thus borrowed a metaphysically religious
+background derived from dogmatic traditions.</p>
+
+<p>That this modern gnosis is in a constant state of vacillation with
+respect to the practical things of life, is a necessary consequence of
+its fundamental assumptions and of its position towards the doctrines
+of the church. Its foremost representatives acknowledge
+without any reserve that the true source from which religious emotions
+and sentiments flow is the symbolic or imaginative faculty of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">[345]</span>man. The grandly simple pictures in which the ancient Christian
+faith found satisfaction are now in the course of time inevitably disintegrated
+by the critical reason. The speculative theology itself
+proclaims that its vocation is one of coöperation towards this end.
+But it maintains nevertheless that the fruits of this work, the speculative
+interpretation of the dogmas, their exaltation into the sphere
+of the Idea, are fit only for initiated minds, and are caviare for the
+general. The general, the people, want and will use religion in the
+form which its fancy has created, and it cannot be revealed to it in
+any other. Progressive in its theories, this gnosis is in its ecclesiastical
+practice thoroughly conservative. It thinks two kinds of
+thought, and speaks two kinds of languages, according as it finds
+itself in the pulpit or in the professorial chair. And it is in just this
+procedure that it assumes a position which it is very difficult to attack.
+He, who working for a sound and progressive popular enlightenment
+on the ground of a unitary view of the world, opposes
+the further use of the antiquated and effete allegories of the old religions,
+is told that he is behind the times, and that religion, nurtured
+by the spirit of modern science, has become something different
+from what it formerly was. In very strict ecclesiastical quarters
+this gnosis is looked at askance, and accused of insincerity, nay, of
+secret alliance with unbelief; but the movement never allowed itself
+to be led astray by these accusations, and has never failed to
+assert its right of coöperation in the common work of the Christian
+church. For though it pretends to be in the hands of the thinking
+theologian a means of bringing into harmony the faith which he
+must confess and the thought which he cannot abandon, it yet admits,
+that with the majority of mankind the allegory will always remain
+an essential element of religion, and that therefore the task of
+scientific theology can never be to destroy these vessels of religion,
+but only to exercise a watchful care, that with the form the spirit
+also may not be lost.</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>The question now arises,—and this brings us back to the considerations
+of the first part of this essay,—Does this rationalised
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">[346]</span>Christianity of to-day really meet the demands of science, and if it
+does not, is it in the power of the modern scientific world-conception
+to furnish from its own resources some substitute for the religious
+views of the past?</p>
+
+<p>My answer to this question will be short and concise; for the
+existence of <i>The Monist</i>, the fundamental idea of its management,
+and the total character of the efforts which it has hitherto made,
+speak with sufficient emphasis. And we may, therefore, with the
+greatest respect for the scientific zeal and the personal ability of
+many of the representatives of this mediatory theology, say, without
+further ado: This rationalised Christianity of yours also is myth and
+symbol; it still adheres to that “dramatic” division of the world
+which our imaginations produced, and to the metaphysical dualism
+of God and man; it cannot lift itself to a rigorous conception of the
+All in One, for which God is in the same sense a simple function of
+human thought as thought is a function of the human organism.
+The God on whom all depends in religion, the God whose name is
+“Father,” the God of love and goodness, the God from whom all
+great thoughts and all grand resolves spring, the God who sanctifies
+us and lifts us above the earth—to displace this God from the world
+in which he has no place, into the inward being of humanity seems
+at this day so strange, nay, inconceivable, only because we have accustomed
+ourselves (and down to the times of Mill and Feuerbach,
+even strict monistic thinkers like Spinoza fell victims to this illusion)
+to mingle together in the idea of God two wholly distinct ideas—the
+ideas, namely, of nature and of an ethical ideal. To preserve this
+latter inviolate, and to secure it from all encroachments of human
+caprice, one thing alone seemed to the naïve dramatic modes of
+thought of early times a competent safeguard: the ideal must in
+some locality be real; the highest to which human thought and aspiration
+can exalt itself must be sought and must exist in some superhuman
+reality. And what reality could be better adapted to this
+than one on which even nature was conceived to be dependent?
+The entire history of the development of the idea of God in the
+Græco-Roman and Hebrew worlds, the confluence of these two
+streams of thought in Christian speculation, exhibit in the clearest
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">[347]</span>possible manner these motives, which here I can only lightly touch
+upon.</p>
+
+<p>But this combination of the law of nature and the law of ethics
+in the idea of God, although solving some of the difficulties of humanity,
+has plunged it into incomparably greater ones. Through
+all the centuries of Christian thought a succession of desperate attempts
+may be traced to establish a theodicy, that is to say, attempts
+to demonstrate the existence in nature and in history of a God which
+harmonises with the ethical ideal. Even Kant could undertake to
+demonstrate the “necessary failure of all attempts at a theodicy,”
+and whoever might still have entertained any doubt as to the correctness
+of this demonstration, such a one must surely have been
+convinced of it by the scientific development of the past century.
+That which was indissolubly welded together in the Christian idea
+of God is to-day disintegrated into its component elements. The
+Lord <i>above</i> nature, the Spirit <i>behind</i> nature, have been rendered inconceivable
+by the modern notions of the conformity to law of all
+natural occurrences and of the unity of all existence. The spirit immanent
+in the All no thinker will deny, for this spirit manifests itself
+in an indisputable manner in the fact that this All is a cosmos,
+not a chaos, that not only the caprice of chance but also the laws of
+necessity rule in it, and that the personal self-conscious mind springs
+from its midst. But from this recognition of mind in the All, there
+is no bridge that leads to the old idea of God. We cannot worship
+the All as a moral ideal. We involve ourselves in absurd complications
+when we attempt to derive the actions of natural events and
+their conformity to law from ethical categories, and it is no less a
+desperate undertaking to imagine that we can draw impulses for our
+moral thought and conduct from nature. The adaptation of means
+to ends, the teleology, that rules in the All, is veiled for us in the
+deepest obscurity. All that we can unravel of it has no resemblance
+to that which, according to our notions, is ethical:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Denn unfühlend ist die Natur</i>,”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">she does not know what love or mercy is; she knows only the omnipotent
+power of universal laws; she knows only the rights of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">[348]</span>whole, to which she sacrifices with unconcern the individual; she
+revels in the double pleasure of unceasing creation and unceasing
+destruction; she arms unpityingly the strong against the weak; in
+crises of annihilation she restores the disturbed equilibrium of things;
+but the palm of peace no one has ever seen in her hand. And we?
+We stand amazed at her might and greatness, at the plentitude of
+her powers of creation, at her myriad play of forces, at the inexhaustible
+wealth of the relations with which she binds being to
+being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst the most varied
+change and alternation, ever remains one and the same! But our
+prototype, our God, she can never be. To him we must look up;
+but on nature, despite her might, despite her stupendous grandeur,
+we look down. She did not whisper in our ears that in us which is
+best and highest. That did not come to us from heaven; <i>we ourselves</i>
+won it by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed discipline.
+It is not <i>of</i> nature; it is <i>above</i> nature. Through <i>us</i> something
+has come into the world that before us did not exist—something
+that the most exuberant creative magic, or nature’s grandest
+mechanical dreams, could never replace. The day on which first a
+human being pressed his weaker fellow-man to his breast and said,
+“Brother, not mine, but thy will be done; I will give up my desires
+that thou also mayst be glad”; the day on which man first lifted up
+his head and said, “Let us make the world <i>good</i> in the likeness of the
+picture that has become living in us, just as it should be”; this is
+the great and sanctified day in the history of our race on earth, the
+Christmas day on which God was born. But not as the religious
+fancy has expressed it, the day on which God became man, but the
+day on which man began to become God, that is the day on which
+he began to feel spiritual powers in his breast that transcended his
+animal impulses—powers to which the majority of humanity was
+still as remote as heaven from earth.</p>
+
+<p>This strict anthropological conception of God as the ideal which
+is always newly creating itself in the struggles of humanity, which
+is no Being but a Becoming, solves the innumerable difficulties
+which the idea of God has hitherto placed in the way of rigorous
+scientific knowledge and the construction of a unitary conception of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">[349]</span>the world. This God has nothing to do with the All. We need
+not seek him in the All or behind the All, and need not fear that
+any progress of our knowledge will make his existence a matter of
+doubt with us. Concerning the real validity of this idea we need
+not bother ourselves with more or less weak and insufficient demonstrations:
+the whole history of humanity is evidence of it if we but
+know how to rightly interpret it, and the stumbling block of the old
+theological idea of God has become the corner-stone upon which
+the new scientific conception is built.</p>
+
+<p>Nature and human history the work of an omnipotent and all-kind
+being that is mediately and immediately active in all events,
+nay, sacrificed himself in his own person that he might realise in
+this world his purposes! Compare the principle, the active force
+of this world-drama, pictured by the religious fancy as the highest
+power, the highest wisdom, and all-merciful love, with the real
+spectacle of the world! Is there anywhere a more pronounced contradiction,
+an obscurer riddle, a more inconceivable contrast between
+purpose and accomplishment? This world of cruelty and woe, in
+which one creature feeds on the heart-blood of another, in which here
+and there from seas of mud and dirt a form of light springs up, in
+which every nobler production must be bought with torrents of blood
+and tears; this revelation and self-manifestation of God in humanity,
+which everywhere appears joined to definite historical suppositions,
+which lacks all the conditions of true universality and of indisputable
+evidence, so that instead of forming a means of union it has
+become the source of dreadful contentions; this work of salvation
+and sanctification which is so restricted in its effects that “the kingdom
+of God” is still a dreamy vision of humanity, so restricted that
+we still see the majority of men, despite the most extraordinary supernatural
+dispositions, still remain far behind the simple ideals of
+natural ethical commandments, that hate and dissension, cruelty
+and selfishness, perform their unhallowed work—is this the work of
+infinite power and infinite wisdom? What claims theodicy makes
+on human thought! And how different the picture is, the moment
+we abandon the false theocentric point of view and assume the anthropocentric!
+Instead of a belief which all facts contradict—an
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">[350]</span>idea which elucidates them all. No one can say how we are to interpret
+facts as the work of a holy and absolutely perfect being; but
+it can be shown, step by step, how in this, our human world, more
+perfect things spring from imperfect things, moral and mental laws
+from the blind play of natural forces and powers, the conscious energy
+of will from blind and unreasonable impulse, law and love of man
+from the selfishness and warring of all against all, and the notion of
+the unity of the race from infinite disruption and disunion. We must
+not allow ourselves to be led astray or discouraged here by the changing
+undulations and tremendous crises of this battle for the good.
+The ideal springs out of a dark abyss. The roots of our being are
+deep laid in nature, yet we struggle to exalt ourselves above it. No
+wonder, therefore, that time and again it draws us back.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest and sublimest spectacle! A tragical one, one filled
+with struggle and suffering, and yet one infinitely full of hope. For
+it shows us the inexhaustible grandeur of the human mind; it shows
+us the good, the ideal, as a tremendous real power, a power eternally
+becoming, surely forming itself out of an infinitude of individual
+deeds, a power fully incarnate in no one person, yet active and living
+in humanity. Not a tangible activity, and yet one of the realest of
+facts. A supersensuous, nay, if you will, a supernatural realm of
+thought; not the faded reflection or shadow of a grandeur and power
+beyond us, but the fruit of the noblest activities and powers of this
+given, existing world, antagonised in life, but grand and powerful
+in thought; imperfect even in its boldest flights, but bearing within
+it the germ of greater things to come.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the true point of union for Christian dogma and science.
+Here is the God in which science also may, nay, must, believe. Not
+humanity in its empirical reality, but the ideal world developed
+within the human realm of things—the spirit of humanity. This is
+the only true object of worship. Before it we are humiliated, and
+by it we feel ourselves exalted. From it we receive all the good that
+life bestows upon us; it gives us light and peace and lucid thought.
+And what higher, nobler thing can a life produce than the feeling
+that it has not been unworthy of this great ancestry, that it has
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">[351]</span>helped to keep alive this holy fire, that it has helped, perhaps, to
+fan by its own life this living flame to greater heights?</p>
+
+<p>Here is the true source of the ideas of accountability and of salvation.
+We are not responsible to a being outside and above us,
+but to our own selves and to humanity, from which we have received
+the best that it had to give, and for which we must return what we
+ourselves have produced. This consciousness of being thrown utterly
+on the resources of one’s own self, on one’s own powers, was
+first created in the human mind by science and the technical arts,
+(as that most venerable and most sacred of all myths, the legend of
+Prometheus, so profoundly indicates,) and this consciousness will,
+by the progress of knowledge and power, be made more and more
+the dominating one of humanity. This is not a consciousness of
+omnipotence; it does not exclude the subjection of man to the inexorable
+laws of the universe; but it demands the enlistment of all
+the powers of the race: for nature does not give us more than we
+wrest from her by arduous toil.</p>
+
+<p>And as humanity is accountable only to itself, so do the means
+of its salvation lie only in itself. Not in any one individual, but in
+the spirit in it which ever works onward and upward. Yet this
+spirit is not an unpersonal existence; it must be possessed again and
+ever again by living men. And no one can serve humanity or augment
+its spiritual treasures or reincarnate in himself its holiest possessions
+without first having and feeling within himself the blessing
+of what he has done. And thus the profoundest significance of human
+life on earth may be formulated and embraced in that saying
+of the poet which was throughout conceived in the spirit of our
+times, and would have been wholly incomprehensible to the mind
+of those who gave us our faith—in the words:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Erlösung dem Erlöser.</i>”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">F. Jodl.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_59" href="#FNanchor_59" class="label">[59]</a> <i>Wesen des Christenthums.</i> First edition. 1841. Pp. 288-289.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_60" href="#FNanchor_60" class="label">[60]</a> Translation published by Swan, Sonnenschein &amp; Co., London, 1891.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">[352]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_RELIGION_OF_SCIENCE">THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Are religion and science indeed as contrary as they are often
+represented to be, and is the proposition to reconcile them
+a hopeless and futile undertaking? Professor Jodl, in his article
+“Religion and Modern Science,” (pp. 329-351 of this number,)
+says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“That civilised humanity to-day is separated into two groups which no longer
+understand each other, which do not speak the same language, and which live in
+totally different worlds of thought and sentiment.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>There are those who cling to the old religions and those who
+supplant it by a new idealism. Between both, he adds:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“A third class stands which plays the part of a mediator.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Professor Jodl does not approve of reconciling the historical
+forms of religion with science. He rightly says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The ‘pure doctrine of Christ,’ the genuine, primitive form of Christianity, is
+a Utopia of biblical criticism.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>We heartily agree with him in his remarks concerning the part
+which the miraculous and supernatural play in the Gospels:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes of thought of the
+synoptic writers that it is impossible to separate them therefrom without doing violence
+to the internal connection of their doctrines.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>We also concur upon the whole with Professor Jodl in his criticism
+of the methods of Speculative Theology. No compromising
+with traditional errors, no covering or extenuating of the results of
+historical criticism is allowable merely for the love of tradition and
+for the preservation of errors that have become dear to a large number
+of people.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">[353]</span></p>
+
+<p>We do not condemn the work of any mediator; on the contrary,
+we rather encourage it. We observe with pleasure in the
+latest phases of the religious evolution of Speculative Theology the
+prevalence of a more modern spirit, and we follow with a keen interest
+also the progress of biblical critique in its truly valuable
+labors: but we do not expect that either the one or the other will
+accomplish any regeneration of religion.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Jodl knows very well that the editors of <i>The Monist</i>
+and <i>The Open Court</i> have not undertaken any work of compromising
+between the errors of the past and the ideal of the future. Our
+idea of a reconciliation between religion and science is of a different
+nature. We are not blind to the errors of the old religions, and we
+do not mean to gloss them over, or to make old-fashioned views
+acceptable by presenting them in a new garment. We do not even
+stop to bury the dead, for we have better things to do than to
+trouble with problems that have been definitely settled. We keep
+our hands to the plough to accomplish the work needed to-day.</p>
+
+<p>While we are not blind to the errors of the old religions, we
+recognise at the same time that they contain in the language of
+parables some great truths which will remain forever. These truths
+constitute the backbone of religion, and we regard it as a very important
+duty of ours to preserve them. These truths must be preserved,
+not because they were believed in by our fathers, nor from
+any respect for tradition, nor from any regard for our sentiments, but
+simply because they are truths, because they can be proved to be
+true according to the methods of scientific inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>What is religion? Religion consists of all those ideas which
+regulate our conduct. In the savage these ideas are very crude and
+superstitious, and often self-contradictory. The higher a man rises,
+the clearer, the more scientific and consistent do these ideas become,
+until they develop into a systematic world-conception. Every scientific
+idea that changes our world-conception will change also our religion
+and with it our rules of conduct. Thus, for example, the idea
+of evolution has become to us an eminently religious idea.</p>
+
+<p>In order to indicate that the criterion of truth for religion is the
+very same thing as the criterion of truth for science, we have proposed
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">[354]</span>to call the religion we advocate, “The Religion of Science.”
+(For details see the editorial of Vol. VII, No. 1, of <i>The Open Court</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>Our procedure appears to many as an annihilation of religion
+in favor of science. But it is not. And why not?</p>
+
+<p>We have learned many truths first from religion, long before
+science could ever think of proving them. In several respects science
+took the lead, and religion remained at a long distance behind, awkwardly,
+very slowly, and unwillingly limping onward on the road of
+progress. Instances are, the acceptance of the Copernican system
+and of the evolution theory. But in other respects religion took the
+lead, and science was unable to follow its ingenious flight. As instances
+of this we cite such moral truths as the love of enemies, which
+were not preached by scientists as scientific truths, but by religious
+teachers, by Confucius, Buddha, and Christ. There are scientists
+even to-day who regard what we would call “moral truths” as maxims
+that are contrary to the established views of science. Professor
+Huxley, for instance, is very emphatic in his declaration that the
+facts of nature do not teach morality.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_61" href="#Footnote_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a></p>
+
+<p>This leads us to a point in which we disagree with Professor
+Jodl. He speaks of the illusion “of mingling together in the idea of
+God two wholly distinct ideas—the ideas namely of nature and of
+an ethical ideal”—an illusion to which “even strict monistic thinkers
+like Spinoza fell victims.”</p>
+
+<p>Professor Jodl’s position reminds us of John Stuart Mill’s
+“Essay on Nature,” in which he exposes the old doctrine <i>naturam
+sequi</i> in all its absurd meanings and carefully avoids a discussion of
+the only rational conception of the precept. Thus his tirades appear
+most convincing, and to be sure they are quite correct—so far
+as they go. Says Mill:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for
+doing to one another, are nature’s every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal
+act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives....</p>
+
+<p>“Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured
+by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first
+Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">[355]</span>by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous
+deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never
+surpassed.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mill must indeed have felt the need of beginning these sentences
+with the words “In sober truth”; otherwise he might be
+suspected of humor.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly comical is Mill’s proposition to regard every voluntary
+action of man as a direct infringement upon nature. Man’s
+reason in that case would be the most unnatural phenomenon in the
+world, and the term “nature” would be confined to the lowest
+realms of existence exclusively. If the usage of reason were indeed
+an infringement upon nature, man’s appearance upon earth would
+mark the beginning of a supernatural realm; and Professor Jodl
+seems to accept this consequence when he says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“It is not <i>of</i> nature, it is <i>above</i> nature.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>If man’s rationality and his ethics were not born of nature, if
+their conditions were not founded in the very existence of nature, if
+they were not the natural product of evolution, then indeed I see no
+escape from a dualistic world-conception, in which a supernatural
+God introduces the spark of divinity which appears in the soul of
+man from spheres beyond.</p>
+
+<p>We have devoted to these vagaries of John Stuart Mill an
+elaborate discussion in another place and do not feel the need of repeating
+our arguments in this connection.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_62" href="#Footnote_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a></p>
+
+<p>We agree with Professor Jodl that no rationalising of old dogmas
+will help us in the establishment of “a new idealism, formed
+in harmony with the spirit of science.” We must build our religion
+anew (as every generation had to build its religion anew) out of the
+best materials which are furnished by the maturest and most reliable
+knowledge of to-day. Says Professor Jodl:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Through <i>us</i> something has come into the world that before us did not exist—something
+that the most exuberant creative magic, or nature’s grandest mechanical
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">[356]</span>dreams, could never replace. The day on which first a human being pressed his
+weaker fellow-man to his breast and said, “Brother, not mine, but thy will be
+done; I will give up my desires that thou also mayst be glad”; the day upon which
+man first lifted up his head and said, “Let us make the world <i>good</i> in the likeness
+of the picture that has become living in us, just as it should be”; this is the great
+and sanctified day in the history of our race on earth, the Christmas day on which
+God was born.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Certainly the origin of man on earth, and again the evolution
+of the moral man, is something quite new, which before did not
+exist. But did humanity originate out of nothing, as sometimes the
+imaginations of a poet are supposed to be created, or is there a prototype
+in whose image man has been created? Man’s reason, his
+ethics, and his humanity are something that did not exist before,
+but there is a feature in existence which makes it possible that rational
+and moral beings develop. Should there be sentient beings
+on other planets, and we have little reason to doubt it, we can be
+sure that they also will develop rational minds, and that they also
+will learn, perhaps as we did, through many bitter experiences, the
+same truths which constitute our main maxims of morality,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_63" href="#Footnote_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> including
+such precepts as the love of enemies. And why are we sure
+that on other planets not only reason, but also the fundamental
+rules of ethics will be the same as with us here on earth? Simply
+because we know that there is a certain feature in reality which
+creates rational beings and moral beings as naturally as it creates
+rocks and seas on the surface of planets. Man’s reason and also
+man’s morality are not original inventions of his, but the result of
+many experiences which he had to learn. And the world in which
+he lives is such that he can acquire reason and morality, and if a
+being should acquire a wrong kind of reason or a wrong kind of
+morality, it will by and by be blotted out of existence. Accordingly
+there is a prototype of reason and of morality, and this prototype
+of the humanity of man is exactly that which in the language
+of the old religions has received the name “God.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">[357]</span></p>
+
+<p>We must make a distinction between ideals and dreams. Those
+creations of our fancy which are woven without any regard to reality
+are dreams. They have no value beyond whiling away a leisure hour
+or pleasing our imagination. But those creations of our mind which
+construct realisable formations such as machines or clocks or higher
+conditions of human society, are not mere dreams, they are ideals.
+What, then, is the difference between a dream and an ideal? A
+dream is a useless ebullition of an idle brain composed of ideas to
+which there is no correspondent reality; but an ideal is a potent
+factor in the living presence to shape the future: it is a combination
+of ideas which are correct descriptions of actual realities. The
+moral aspirations of mankind are not empty dreams, they are true
+and veritable ideals. There are certain qualities in nature which
+make their realisation possible and these qualities constitute the
+Divinity of nature.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Jodl speaks of the origin of morality as of the birth
+of God on earth. Truly that is the meaning of Christianity. But
+this birth of God into the world of human evolution as “the Son of
+Man” is possible only because of the existence of the God in nature
+whom Christian mythology so beautifully calls God the Father. The
+appearance of the Son of Man upon earth, the birth of morality, is
+a revelation of the divinity of nature.</p>
+
+<p>True enough, as Professor Jodl says, that we ourselves won the
+best and highest we have by hard struggles, by terribly severe, self-imposed
+discipline. As Prometheus says:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“<i>Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,</i></div>
+      <div class="verse indent0"><i>Heilig glühend Herz!</i>”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">That, too, is part of the divinity of nature, that every creature has to
+work out its very being itself, and that man must search for the way
+of salvation with great anxiety, under bitter tribulations and through
+extreme afflictions. But he cannot invent a new way of salvation,
+he has to find it, and there is but one that is the right one. The
+nature of morality is such as it is, and no other morality could be invented
+to replace it. And this feature of existence which makes
+morality quite a determined thing is a real presence in the world, it
+is an actual quality of the universe.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">[358]</span></p>
+
+<p>Some of our liberal friends, foremost among them Professor
+Haeckel, deny the existence of a personal God and then proceed to
+declare that the God of science is nothing but matter and energy.
+We agree with Professor Haeckel in his rejection of anthropotheism;
+God is no supernatural being nor is he a huge world-ego. But
+we cannot accept his view of God as being only matter and energy.
+The idea of God is and always has been a moral idea. Thus we
+have come to regard all those features of nature as divine which
+condition the origin and existence of morality and we define God as
+the authority of moral conduct. This authority is not a person, not
+a sentient being, let alone a sentimental philanthropist; but it is,
+nevertheless, a reality, and, indeed, a stern reality.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the God of science. God is that quality of existence
+through which we originated as feeling, thinking, and aspiring beings.
+He is the prototype of the human soul, and the condition under
+which develop man’s reason and morality. Obedience to him is indispensable
+for a continued existence, for further progress and a
+higher evolution of the human soul. That these features of reality
+can by a great number of keen and fearless modern thinkers be supposed
+to be a non-entity is difficult to understand. This negation
+of the reality of qualities of existence which are not individual things
+but intrinsically inherent in all the individual things, it appears to
+us, is an old heirloom of nominalism. The nominalistic philosophy
+represented by Roscellinus was suppressed at the council at Soissons
+1092, only to rise more powerfully in the fourteenth century in William
+of Occam, and finally to exterminate realism with all its rubbish
+of errors together with the truth contained in these errors. Kant
+marks in many respects the culmination of the victorious movement
+of nominalism. With all the benefits modern thought derived from
+the philosophical work of nominalism, a reaction is needed against
+its purely negative spirit. There is a truth in the old realism which
+cannot be neglected with impunity.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_64" href="#Footnote_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">[359]</span></p>
+
+<p>God (viz., the name of God) is, as Kant said, a noumenon, a
+thing of thought, an abstraction. God is not a thing, a concrete object,
+or an individual person. All the views of God which regard
+him as an individual being of some kind, or as a person only of infinite
+dimensions, are, closely considered, pagan notions which belittle
+God. But the name of God as a noumenon, a thought, an
+abstract idea, has a meaning. Abstract ideas are not nonentities,
+they represent some real features, some actual qualities, or properties,
+or relations; otherwise they would not be ideas, but unmeaning
+sounds.</p>
+
+<p>Some of our abstract ideas are of a very delicate fibre, so that
+the coarse mental vision of the average Philistine is unable to see
+them in their reality and potency. But it so happens that exactly
+they are of a more important, more powerful, and inevitable presence
+than the simple generalisations of things that visibly and corporeally
+surround us. This, their peculiar nature, makes such ideas mysterious
+to those who instinctively feel their reality without being
+able to point it out and understand it. And the most subtle, imponderous,
+and sublimated of all ideas is the idea of God.</p>
+
+<p>We have defined God as the ultimate authority of conduct, as
+the condition of our existence as rational and moral beings, as the
+all-power that enforces obedience, etc.; but we cannot in any one of
+our definitions exhaust the significance of the idea. We would by
+no means exclude from the idea of God anything without which reality
+would cease to be real. The qualities of matter and energy constitute
+that element in the God-idea which justify the old religions
+in speaking of him as omnipotent and everlasting. Thus they ought
+not to be excluded. But these qualities alone are insufficient to
+characterise his being. The sum-total of matter and energy as such
+and as such alone does not constitute any moral authority. Nature
+in her immeasurable greatness and oppressive vastness affects us
+with awe; but, after all, we look down upon her massive sublimity.
+Man is more than the biggest heap of crude matter and unintelligently
+operating energy. Says Professor Jodl:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“We stand amazed at her might and greatness, at the plentitude of her powers
+of creation, at her myriad play of forces, at the inexhaustible wealth of the relations
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">[360]</span>with which she binds being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst
+the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and the same! But our
+prototype, our God, she can never be.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This grandeur of nature is part of her divinity, but it alone does
+not constitute the character of God. Yet, observe that throughout
+nature there is an imponderable quality present which makes every
+atom move in a definite way, so that the whirl of gaseous masses,
+apparently a chaos, will be recognised as a cosmic whole developing
+in a certain way and describable in what is generally called natural
+laws. This subtle quality is the condition of the regularities which are
+found in all the infinite varieties and innumerable particularities,
+and all these regularities conceived in their systematic unity are
+called the order of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>Man exists as a thinking being only because the immeasurable
+universe of which he is a part possesses this quality of order, and
+his reason is closely considered only a copy of it. Man’s reason was
+shaped into the image of the cosmic order, and suppose—a supposition
+which is very difficult to make and regarded by many as impossible
+or inconceivable—yet suppose that the world-order were radically
+different from what it actually is, man’s reason would accordingly
+be different too. Further, suppose that the whole frame and
+fundamental interrelations of the particles of reality were different
+from what they are, would not correspondingly the basic rules of
+conduct be changed too?</p>
+
+<p>The author of this article, in the eyes of the so-called orthodox
+Christian, is most certainly an atheist. And if theism means the belief
+in a personal or extramundane God he is an atheist indeed. If there is
+any opprobrium in the name atheism we are willing to accept it;
+and certainly, we do not reject the label of atheism in order to escape
+any odium attached to that name. We do reject atheism simply because
+we see a great and potent truth in the idea of God which is
+but too often disregarded.</p>
+
+<p>With Professor Haeckel and Professor Jodl we reject the conception
+of an anthropomorphic Deity. The anthropomorphic idol
+is doomed before the tribunal of science. But we see a deeper meaning
+in the idea of God which has formed through millenniums the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">[361]</span>very centre of the greatest religions on earth. Science has to recognise
+the reality of an all-presence in existence which is analogous to
+that which in a religious language is called God.</p>
+
+<p>Considering the fact that humanity owes many great truths to
+religion, let us not be hasty in condemning the religions of the past
+as pure superstition. There are valuable seeds in the chaff. If we
+discard the wheat together with the tares, we shall have to rediscover
+them, for it is little probable that humanity can for any length
+of time be satisfied with beautiful phrases or live in its moral aspirations
+in a realm of mere dreams.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Editor.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_61" href="#FNanchor_61" class="label">[61]</a> For a discussion of this point see <i>Fundamental Problems</i>, pp. 219-226.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_62" href="#FNanchor_62" class="label">[62]</a> See the article in Nos. 239, 241, and 242 of <i>The Open Court: Nature and
+Morality</i>. An Examination of the Ethical Views of John Stuart Mill. I. The
+Meaning of Basing Ethics Upon Nature. II. The Ethics Taught by Nature. III.
+Intelligent Action and Moral Action. IV. The Anthropomorphic Standpoint of
+Mill.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_63" href="#FNanchor_63" class="label">[63]</a> I purposely do not say <i>all</i> maxims of conduct, because we can very well
+imagine that different conditions may produce some very important variations in the
+rules of conduct; but the main foundation of morality would be the same.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_64" href="#FNanchor_64" class="label">[64]</a> There are two men at present who boldly fly the flag of the old realism again,
+both having our full sympathy in their aspirations, although we cannot agree with
+many of their teachings. The one is Mr. Charles S. Peirce, the other Dr. Francis
+E. Abbot.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">[362]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_SUPERSTITION_OF_NECESSITY">THE SUPERSTITION OF NECESSITY.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_65" href="#Footnote_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Lest my title give such offense as to prejudice unduly my contention,
+I may say that I use the term in the way indicated by
+its etymology: as a standing-still on the part of thought; a clinging
+to old ideas after those ideas have lost their use, and hence, like
+all superstitions, have become obstructions. For I shall try to show
+that the doctrine of necessity is a survival; that it holds over from
+an earlier and undeveloped period of knowledge; that as a means of
+getting out of and beyond that stage it had a certain value, but,
+having done its work, loses its significance. Halting judgment
+may, indeed, at one time have helped itself out of the slough of uncertainty,
+vagueness, and inadequacy on to ground of more solid
+and complete fact, by the use of necessity as a crutch; once upon
+the ground, the crutch makes progress slower and, preventing the
+full exercise of the natural means of locomotion, tends to paralyse
+science. The former support has become a burden, almost an intolerable
+one.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning of wisdom in the matter of necessity is, I conceive,
+in realising that it is a term which has bearing or relevancy only
+with reference to the development of judgment, not with reference to
+objective things or events. I do not mean by this that necessity refers
+to the compelling force with which we are driven to make a given
+affirmation: I mean that it refers to the content of that affirmation,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">[363]</span>expressing the degree of coherence between its constituent factors.
+When we say something or other <i>must</i> be so and so, the “must”
+does not indicate anything in the nature of the fact itself, but a trait
+in our <i>judgment</i> of that fact; it indicates the degree with which we
+have succeeded in making a whole out of the various elements which
+have to be taken into account in forming the judgment. More specifically,
+it indicates a half-way stage. At one extreme we have
+two separate judgments, which, so far as consciousness is concerned,
+have nothing to do with each other; and at the other extreme we
+have one judgment into which the contents of the two former judgments
+have been so thoroughly organised as to lose all semblance of
+separateness. Necessity, as the middle term, is the midwife which,
+from the dying isolation of judgments, delivers the unified judgment
+just coming into life—it being understood that the separateness of the
+original judgments is not as yet quite negated, nor the unity of the
+coming judgment quite attained. The judgment of necessity, in
+other words, is exactly and solely the transition in our knowledge
+from unconnected judgments to a more comprehensive synthesis.
+Its value is just the value of this transition; as negating the old
+partial and isolated judgments—in its backward look—necessity has
+meaning; in its forward look—with reference to the resulting completely
+organised subject-matter—it is itself as false as the isolated
+judgments which it replaces. Its value is in what it rids judgment
+of. When it has succeeded, its value is nil. Like any go-between,
+its service consists in rendering itself uncalled for.</p>
+
+<p>All science can ultimately do is to report or describe, to completely
+state, the reality. So far as we reach this standpoint regarding
+any fact or group of facts, we do not say that the fact <i>must</i> be
+such and such, but simply that it <i>is</i> such and such. There is no
+necessity attaching to the fact either as whole or as parts. <i>Qua</i>
+whole, the fact simply is what it is; while the parts, instead of being
+necessitated either by one another or by the whole, are the analysed
+factors constituting, in their complete circuit, the whole. In
+stating the whole, we, as of course, state all that enters into it; if
+we speak of the various elements as <i>making</i> the whole, it is only in
+the sense of making it <i>up</i>, not of causing it. The fallacy of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">[364]</span>necessitarian theory consists in transforming the determinate in the
+sense of the wholly defined, into the determined in the sense of
+something externally made to be what it is.</p>
+
+<p>The whole, although first in the order of reality, is last in the
+order of knowledge. The complete statement of the whole is the
+goal, not the beginning of wisdom. We begin, therefore, with fragments,
+which are taken for wholes; and it is only by piecing together
+these fragments, and by the transformation of them involved
+in this combination, that we arrive at the real fact. There comes a
+stage at which the recognition of the unity begins to dawn upon us,
+and yet, the tradition of the many distinct wholes survives; judgment
+has to combine these two contradictory conceptions; it does
+so by the theory that the dawning unity is an effect necessarily produced
+by the interaction of the former wholes. Only as the consciousness
+of the unity grows still more is it seen that instead of a
+group of independent facts, held together by “necessary” ties, there
+is one reality, of which we have been apprehending various fragments
+in succession and attributing to them a spurious wholeness and independence.
+We learn (but only at the end) that instead of discovering
+and then connecting together a number of separate realities, we
+have been engaged in the progressive definition of one fact.</p>
+
+<p>There are certain points upon which there is now <i>practical</i> agreement
+among all schools. What one school has got at by a logical
+analysis of science, another school has arrived at by the road of a
+psychological analysis of experience. What one school calls the
+unity of thought and reality, another school calls the relativity of
+knowledge. The metaphysical interpretation further given to these
+respective statements may be quite different, but, so far as they go,
+they come to the same thing: that objects, <i>as known</i>, are not independent
+of the process of knowing, but are the content of our judgments.
+One school, indeed, may conceive of judgment as a mere
+associative or habitual grouping of sensations, the other as the correlative
+diversification and synthesis of the self; but the practical
+outcome, that the “object” (anyway as known) is a form of judgment,
+is the same. This point being held in common, both schools
+must agree that <i>the progress of judgment is equivalent to a change in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">[365]</span>the value of objects</i>—that objects as they are for us, as known, change
+with the development of our judgments. If this be so, truth, however
+it be metaphysically defined, must attach to late rather than
+to early judgments.</p>
+
+<p>I am fortunate in being able to quote from authors, who may
+be taken as typical of the two schools. Says Professor Caird in his
+article upon “Metaphysic,” (lately reprinted, “Essays in Philosophy
+and Literature,”):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Our first consciousness of things is not an immovable foundation upon which
+science may build, but rather a hypothetical and self-contradictory starting-point of
+investigation, which becomes changed and transformed as we advance.” (“Essays,”
+Vol. II, p. 398.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>On the other hand, Mr. Venn writes (in the first chapter of his
+“Empirical Logic”):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Select what object we please—the most apparently simple in itself, and the
+most definitely parted off from others that we can discover—yet we shall find ourselves
+constrained to admit that a considerable mental process has been passed
+through before that object could be recognised as being an object, that is, as possessing
+some degree of unity and as requiring to be distinguished from other such
+unities.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>He goes on to illustrate by such an apparently fixed and given
+object as the sun, pointing out how its unity as a persistent thing
+involves a continued synthesis of elements very diverse in time and
+space, and an analysis, a selection, from other elements in very close
+physical juxtaposition. He goes on to raise the question whether a
+dog, for example, may be said to “see” a rainbow at all, because
+of the complex analysis and synthesis involved in such an object.
+The “mental whole” (to use Mr. Venn’s words, the “ideal unity”
+as others might term it) is so extensive and intricate that</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“One might almost as reasonably expect the dog to ‘see’ the progress of democracy
+in the place where he lives, of which course of events the ultimate sensible
+constituents are accessible to his observation precisely as they are to ours.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>As Mr. Venn is not discussing just the same point which I have
+raised, he does not refer to the partial and tentative character of our
+first judgments—our first objects. It is clear enough, however, that
+there will be all degrees between total failure to analyse and combine
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">[366]</span>(as, say, in the case of the dog and rainbow) and fairly adequate
+grouping. The difference between the savage whose synthesis is so
+limited in scope that he sets up a new sun every day and the scientific
+man whose object is a unity comprehending differences through
+thousands of years of time and interactions going on through millions
+of miles of space is a case in point. The distinction between
+the respective objects is not simply a superimposition of new qualities
+upon an old object, that old object remaining the same; it is
+not getting new objects; it is a continual qualitative reconstruction
+of the object itself. This fact, which is the matter under consideration,
+is well stated by Mr. Venn, when he goes on to say:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The act of predication, in its two-fold aspect of affirmation and denial, really
+is a process by which we are not only enabled to add to our information <i>about</i> objects,
+<i>but is also the process by the continued performance of which the objects had
+been originally acquired, or rather produced</i>” (italics are mine).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This statement cannot be admitted at all without recognising
+that the first judgments do not make the object once for all, but that
+the continued process of judging is a continued process of “producing”
+the object.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the confused and hypothetical character of our first
+objects does not force itself upon us when we are still engaged in
+constructing them. On the contrary, it is only when the original
+subject-matter has been overloaded with various and opposing predicates
+that we think of doubting the correctness of our first judgments,
+of putting our first objects under suspicion. At the start,
+these objects assert themselves as the baldest and solidest of hard
+facts. The dogmatic and naïve quality of the original judgment is
+in exact proportion to its crudeness and inadequacy. The objects
+which are the content of these judgments thus come to be identified
+with reality <i>par excellence</i>; they are <i>facts</i>, however doubtful everything
+else. They hang on obstinately. New judgments, instead of
+being regarded as better definitions of the actual fact and hence as
+displacing the prior object, are tacked on to the old as best they
+may be. Unless the contradiction is too flagrant, the new predicates
+are set side by side with the old as simply additional information;
+they do not react into the former qualities. If the contradiction is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">[367]</span>too obvious to be overlooked the new predicate is used, if possible,
+to constitute another object, independent of the former. So the
+savage, having to deal with the apparently incompatible predicates
+of light and darkness, makes two objects; two suns, for two successive
+days. Once the Ptolemaic conception is well rooted, cycles and
+epicycles, almost without end, are superadded, rather than reconstruct
+the original object. Here, then, is our starting point:
+when qualities arise so incompatible with the object already formed
+that they cannot be referred to that object, it is easier to form a new
+object on their basis than it is to doubt the correctness of the old,
+involving as that does the surrender of the <i>object</i> (the fact, seemingly)
+and the formation of another object.</p>
+
+<p>It is easier, I say, for there is no doubt that the reluctance of
+the mind to give up an object once made lies deep in its economies.
+I shall have occasion hereafter to point out the teleological character
+of the notions of necessity and chance, but I wish here to call
+attention to the fact that the forming of a number of distinct objects
+has its origin in practical needs of our nature. The analysis and
+synthesis which is first made is that of most practical importance;
+what is abstracted from the complex net-work of reality is some net
+outcome, some result which is of value for life. As Venn says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“What the savage mostly wants to do is to produce something or to avert something,
+not to account for a thing which has already happened. What interests him
+is to know how to kill somebody, not to know how somebody has been killed.” (P.
+62 of “Empirical Logic.”)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And again:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“What not only the savage, but also the practical man mostly wants, is a <i>general</i>
+result, say the death of his enemy. It does not matter whether the symptoms,
+i. e., the qualifying circumstances, are those attendant on poison, or a blow from a
+club, or on incantation, provided the death is brought about. But they do desire
+<i>certainty</i> in respect of this general result.” (P. 64.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Now it is this “general result,” the net outcome for practical
+purposes, which is <i>the</i> fact, <i>the</i> object at first. Anything else is useless
+subtlety. That the man is dead—that is the fact; anything
+further is at most external circumstances which happen to accompany
+the fact. That the death is only a bare fraction of a fact; that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">[368]</span>the attendant “circumstances” are as much constituent factors of
+the real fact as the mere “death” itself (probably more so from the
+scientific point of view)—all this is foreign to conception. We pluck
+the fruit, and that fruit is the fact. Only when practical experience
+forces upon us the recognition that we cannot get the fruit without
+heeding certain other “conditions” do we consent to return upon
+our assumed object, put it under suspicion and question whether it
+is really what we took it to be. It is, we may presume, the savage
+who in order to get his living, has to regulate his conduct for long
+periods, through changes of seasons, in some continuous mode, who
+first makes the synthesis of one sun going through a recurring cycle
+of changes—the year.</p>
+
+<p>As time goes on, the series of independent and isolated objects
+passes through a gradual change. Just as the recognition of incompatible
+qualities has led to setting up of separate things, so the
+growing recognition of similar qualities in these disparate objects
+begins to pull them together again. Some relation between the two
+objects is perceived; it is seen that neither object is just what it is
+in its isolation, but owes some of its meaning to the other objects.
+While in reality, (as I hope later to point out,) this “relationship”
+and mutual dependence means membership in a common whole,
+contribution to one and the same activity, a midway stage intervenes
+before this one fact, including as parts of itself the hitherto separate
+objects, comes to consciousness. The tradition of isolation is too
+strong to give way at the first suggestion of community. This
+passage-way from isolation to unity, denying the former but not admitting
+the latter, is necessity or determinism. The wall of partition
+between the two separate “objects” cannot be broken at one
+attack; they have to be worn away by the attrition arising from
+their slow movement into one another. It is the “necessary” influence
+which one exerts upon the other that finally rubs away the
+separateness and leaves them revealed as elements of one unified
+whole. This done, the determining influence has gone too.</p>
+
+<p>The process may be symbolised as follows: <i>M</i> is the object, the
+original synthesis of the elements seen to be of practical importance;
+<i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, etc., to <i>h</i> are predicates of constantly growing incompatibility.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">[369]</span>When the quality <i>i</i> is discovered, it is so manifestly incompatible
+with <i>a</i> that all attempt to refer it to the same subject <i>M</i> is
+resisted. Two alternatives are now logically open. The subject-matter
+<i>M</i>, as the synthesis of the qualities <i>a</i>-<i>h</i>, may be taken up;
+it may be asked whether the object is really <i>M</i> with these qualities;
+whether it is not rather Σ, having instead of the predicates <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>,
+etc., the qualities ρα, ρβ, with which the new quality <i>i</i> is quite
+compatible. But this process goes against the practical grain of
+our knowledge; it means not only that we do not know what we
+thought we knew; it means that we did not <i>do</i> what we thought we
+did. Such unsettling of action is hardly to be borne. It is easier
+to erect a new object <i>N</i>, to which the more incompatible predicates
+are referred. Finally, it is discovered that both <i>M</i> and <i>N</i> have the
+same predicates <i>r</i> and <i>s</i>; that in virtue of this community of qualities
+there is a certain like element even in the qualities previously
+considered disparate. This mutual attraction continues until it becomes
+so marked a feature of the case that there is no alternative but
+to suppose that the <i>r</i> and <i>s</i> of one produces these qualities in the
+other, and thereby influences all the qualities of the other. This
+drawing together continues until we have the one reconstructed object
+Σ, with the traits ρα, ρβρ, etc. It is found that there is one somewhat
+comprehensive synthesis which includes within itself the several
+separate objects so far produced; and it is found that this inclusion
+in the larger whole reacts into the meaning of the several
+constituting parts—as parts of one whole, they lose traits which
+they seemed to possess in their isolation, and gain new traits, because
+of their membership in the same whole.</p>
+
+<p>We have now to consider, more in detail, how the intermediate
+idea of necessity grows up and how it gives away upon the discovery
+of the one inclusive whole. Let us continue the illustration of
+the killing. The “general result,” the death of the hated enemy,
+is at first the fact; all else is mere accidental circumstance. Indeed,
+the other circumstances at first are hardly that; they do not
+attract attention, having no importance. Not only the savage, but
+also the common-sense man of to-day, I conceive, would say that
+any attempt to extend the definition of the “fact” beyond the mere
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">[370]</span>occurrence of the death is metaphysical refinement; that the <i>fact</i> is
+the killing, the death, and that that “fact” remains quite the same,
+however it is brought about. What has been done, in other words,
+is to abstract part of the real fact, part of <i>this</i> death, and set up the
+trait or universal thus abstracted as itself <i>fact</i>, and not only as fact,
+but as <i>the</i> fact, <i>par excellence</i>, with reference to which all the factors
+which constitute the reality, the concrete fact, of <i>this</i> death, are
+circumstantial and “accidental.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_66" href="#Footnote_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a></p>
+
+<p>A fragment of the whole reality, of the actual fact individualised
+and specified with all kind of minute detail, having been thus hypostatised
+into an object, the idea of necessity is in fair way to arise.
+These deaths in general do not occur. Although the mere death of
+the man, his removal from the face of the earth, is the <i>fact</i>, none
+the less all <i>actual</i> deaths have a certain amount of detail in them.
+The savage has to hit his enemy with a club or spear, or perform a
+magic incantation, before he can attain that all-important end of
+getting rid of him. Moreover, a man with a coat of armor on will
+not die just the same way as the man who is defenseless. These
+circumstances have to be taken into account. Now, if the “fact”
+had not been so rigidly identified with the bare practical outcome,
+the removal of the hated one, a coherent interpretation of the need
+for these further incidents would be open. It could be admitted that
+the original death was a highly complex affair, involving a synthesis
+of a very large number of different factors; furthermore, the new
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">[371]</span>cases of murder could be employed to reconstruct the original analysis-synthesis;
+to eliminate supposed factors which were not relevant,
+and to show the presence of factors at first not suspected. In
+other words, the real fact would be under constant process of definition,
+of “production.” But the stiff-necked identification of the fragment,
+which happened to have practical importance with the real object,
+effectually prevents any such reaction and reconstruction. What
+is to be done, however, with these conditions of spear, of stone, of
+armor, which so obviously have something <i>to do</i> with the real fact,
+although, as it would seem, they are not the fact? They are considered
+as circumstances, <i>accidental</i>, so far as death in general is concerned;
+<i>necessary</i>, so far as <i>this</i> death is concerned. That is, wanting
+simply to get the net result of the removal of my enemy, so that he
+will no longer blight the fair face of nature, it is accidental how I do
+it; but having, after all, to kill a man of certain characteristics and
+surroundings in life, having to choose time and place, etc., it becomes
+necessary, <i>if</i> I am to succeed, that I kill him in a certain way,
+say, with poison, or a dynamite bomb. Thus we get our concrete,
+individual fact again.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, then, that tortuous path from reality to reality, <i>via</i> a circuit
+of unreality, which calls the thought of necessity into existence.
+We first mutilate the actual fact by selecting some portion that appeals
+to our needs; we falsify, by erecting this fragment into the
+whole fact. Having the rest of the fact thus left on our hands for
+disposal, when we have no need of the concrete fact we consider it
+accidental, merely circumstantial; but we consider it necessary
+whenever we have occasion to descend from the outcome which we
+have abstracted back to the real fact, in all its individuality. Necessity
+is a device by which we both conceal from ourselves the unreal
+character of what we have called real, and also get rid of the practical
+evil consequences of hypostatising a fragment into an independent
+whole.</p>
+
+<p>If the purely teleological character of necessity is not yet evident,
+I think the following considerations will serve to bring it out.
+The practical value, the fruit from the tree, we pick out and set up
+for the entire fact so far as our past action is concerned. But so far
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_372">[372]</span>as our <i>future</i> action is concerned, this value is a result <i>to be</i> reached;
+it is an end to be attained. Other factors, in reality all the time
+bound up in the one concrete fact or individual whole, have now to
+be brought in as means to get this end. Although after our desire
+has been met they have been eliminated as accidental, as irrelevant,
+yet when the experience is again desired their integral membership
+in the real fact has to be recognised. This is done under the guise
+of considering them as means which are necessary to bring about the
+end. Thus the idea of the circumstances as external to the “fact”
+is retained, while we get all the practical benefit of their being not
+external but elements of one and the same whole. Contingent and
+necessary are thus the correlative aspects of one and the same fact;
+conditions are accidental so far as we have abstracted a fragment
+and set it up as the whole; they are necessary the moment it is required
+to pass from this abstraction back to the concrete fact. Both
+are teleological in character—contingency referring to the separation
+of means from end, due to the fact that the end having been already
+reached the means have lost their value for us; necessity being the
+reference of means to an end <i>which has still to be got</i>. Necessary
+means <i>needed</i>; contingency means no longer required—because already
+enjoyed.</p>
+
+<p>Note that the necessity of the means has reference to an end still
+to be attained, and in so far itself hypothetical or contingent, while the
+contingent circumstances are no longer needed precisely because
+they have resulted in a definite outcome (which, accordingly, is now
+a fact, and, in that sense, necessary) and we begin to see how completely
+necessity and chance are bound up with each other.</p>
+
+<p>Their correlation may thus be stated: <i>If</i> we are to reach an end
+we <i>must</i> take certain means; while so far as we want an undefined
+end, an end in general, conditions which accompany it are mere
+accidents. Whichever way the relationship be stated, the underlying
+truth is that we are dealing with only partial phases of fact,
+which, having been unduly separated from each other through their
+erection into distinct wholes, have now to be brought back into their
+real unity.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, then, <i>if</i> I am to reach an end, certain means
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_373">[373]</span><i>must</i> be used. Here the end is obviously postulated; save as it is
+begged (presupposed), the necessity of the means has no sense.
+If, when starving, I am to live I must steal a dinner, but, having
+stolen, the logical but unsympathetic judge may question the relevancy
+(that is, the necessity) of my end, and thus cut the ground
+out from under the necessity of my means. My end requires <i>its</i>
+justification, the establishing of its validity, before the necessity of
+the means is anything more than hypothetical. The proximate end
+must be referred to a more ultimate and inclusive end to get any
+solid ground. Here we have our choice: we may deny the existence
+of any organic whole in life and keep chasing in a never-ending series,
+the <i>progressus ad infinitum</i>, after an end valid in itself. In this
+case we never get beyond a hypothetical necessity—something is
+necessary <i>if</i> we are to have something else, the necessity being relative
+to the implied doubt. Or, being convinced that life is a whole
+and not a series merely, we may say there is one comprehensive end
+which gives its own validity to the lesser ends in so far as they constitute
+it. While, on the other alternative, we reach only a hypothetical
+necessity, on this we reach none at all. The comprehensive
+end is no end at all in the sense of something by itself to be reached
+by means external to it. Any such end would be simply one in the
+infinite series and would be itself hypothetical. Whenever minor
+ends cease to be in turn means to further ends it is because they
+have become parts, constituent elements, of the higher end and thus
+ceased to be steps towards an end and beyond and outside of themselves.
+Given a final (i. e., inclusive) end, eating and drinking, study
+and gossip, play and business, cease to be means <i>towards</i> an end
+and become its concrete definition, its analytic content. The minor
+activities state the supreme activity in its specific factors.</p>
+
+<p>Our dilemma is the choice between an end which itself has no
+existence save upon presupposition of another end, (is contingent,)
+and an end which as an end in itself simply <i>is</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The externality of means to end is merely a symptom of lack
+of specification or concreteness in the end itself. <i>If</i> I am going to
+invent some improvement in a type-writer, the necessity of going
+through certain preliminary steps is exactly proportionate to the indefiniteness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">[374]</span>of my conception of what the improvement is to be;
+when the end is realised, the operations which enter into the realisation
+cease to be means necessary to an end and become the specific
+<i>content</i> of that end. The improvement is a <i>fact</i>, having such
+and such elements defining it. If I simply want, in general, to get
+my mail I <i>must</i> take this path (there being but one road); but if my
+end is not thus general, if it is individualised with concrete filling,
+the walk to the office may become a part of the end, a part of the
+actual fact. In so far, of course, it loses all aspect of necessitation.
+It simply <i>is</i>. And in general, so far as my end is vague, or abstract,
+so far as it is not specified as to its details, so far the filling up of
+its empty schema to give it particularity (and thus make it fact) appears
+as a means necessary to reach an end outside itself. The
+growth in concreteness of the end itself is transformed into ways of
+effecting an end already presupposed. Or, to state it in yet one other
+way, determination in the sense of definition in consciousness is
+hypostatised into determination in the sense of a physical making.</p>
+
+<p>The point may come out more clearly if we consider it with the
+emphasis on chance instead of upon necessity. The usual statement
+that chance is relative to ignorance seems to me to convey the truth
+though not in the sense generally intended—viz., that if we knew
+more about the occurrence we should see it necessitated by its conditions.
+Chance is relative to ignorance in the sense rather that it
+refers to an indefiniteness in our conception of what we are doing.
+In our consciousness of our end (our acts) we are always making
+impossible abstractions; we break off certain phases of the act which
+are of chief interest to us, without any regard to whether the concrete
+conditions of action—that is, the deed in its whole definition—permits
+any such division. Then, when in our actual doing the
+circumstances to which we have not attended thrust themselves into
+consciousness—when, that is to say, the act appears in more of its
+own specific nature—we dispose of those events, foreign to our conscious
+purpose, as accidental; we did not want them or intend them—what
+more proof of their accidental character is needed? The
+falling of a stone upon a man’s head as he walks under a window is
+“chance,” for it has nothing to do with what the man proposed to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">[375]</span>do, it is no part of his conception of that walk. To an enemy who
+takes that means of killing him, it is anything but an accident, being
+involved in <i>his</i> conscious purpose. It is “chance” when we throw
+a two and a six; for the concreteness of the act falls outside of the
+content of our intention. We intended <i>a</i> throw, some throw, and
+in so far the result is not accidental, but this special result, being
+irrelevant to our conception of what we were to do, in so far is contingent.
+The vagueness or lack of determinateness in our end, the
+irrelevancy of actual end to conscious intent, chance, are all names
+for the same thing. And if I am asked whether a gambler who has
+a hundred dollars upon the outcome does not <i>intend</i> to throw double
+sixes, I reply that he has no such intention—unless the dice are
+loaded. He may <i>hope</i> to make that throw, but he cannot intend it
+save as he can define that act—tell how to do it, tell, that is, just
+<i>what</i> the act is. Or, once more, if I intend to get my mail and there
+are four paths open to me it is chance which I take, just in proportion
+to the abstractness of my end. If I have not defined it beyond
+the mere “general result” of getting mail, anything else is extraneous
+and in so far contingent. If the end is individualised to the
+extent, say, of getting the mail in the shortest possible time, or with
+the maximum of pleasant surroundings, or with the maximum of
+healthy exercise, the indifferency of the “means,” and with it their
+contingency, disappears. This or that path is no longer a mere
+means which <i>may</i> be taken to get a result foreign to its own value;
+the path is an intrinsic part of the end.</p>
+
+<p>In so far as a man presents to himself an end in general, he sets
+up an abstraction so far lacking in detail as (taken <i>per se</i>) to exclude
+the possibility of realisation. In order to exist as concrete or individual
+(and of course, nothing can exist except as individual or concrete)
+it must be defined or particularised. But so far as consciousness
+is concerned the original vague end is <i>the</i> reality; it is all that
+the man cares about and hence constitutes his act. The further particularisation
+of the end, therefore, instead of appearing as what it
+really is, viz., the discovery of the actual reality, presents itself as
+something outside that end. This externality to the end previously
+realised in consciousness is, taken as mere externality, contingency,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">[376]</span>or accident; taken as none the less so bound up with the desired end
+that it must be gone through before reaching that end, it is necessary.
+Chance, in other words, stands for the irrelevancy as the matter
+at first presents itself to consciousness; necessity is the required,
+but partial, negation of this irrelevancy. Let it be complete, instead
+of partial, and we have the one real activity defined throughout.
+With reference to this reality, conditions are neither accidental
+nor necessary, but simply constituting elements—they neither may
+be nor must be, but just are. What is irrelevant is now not simply
+indifferent; it is excluded, eliminated. What is relevant is no longer
+something required in order to get a result beyond itself; it is incorporated
+into the result, it is integral.</p>
+
+<p>It now remains to connect the two parts of our discussion, the
+logical and the practical consideration of necessity, and show that,
+as suggested, logical necessity rests upon teleological—that, indeed,
+it is the teleological read backwards. The logical process of discovering
+and stating the reality of some event simply reverses the
+process which the mind goes through in setting up and realising
+an end. Instead of the killing of an enemy as something to be
+accomplished, we have the fact of a murder to be accounted for.
+Just as on the practical side, the end, as it first arises in consciousness,
+is an end in general and thus contrasts with the concrete
+end which is individualised; so the fact, as at first realised in consciousness,
+is a <i>bare</i> fact, and thus contrasts with the actual event
+with its complete particularisation. The actual fact, the murder as
+it really took place, is one thing; the fact as it stands in consciousness,
+the phases of the actual event which are picked out and put
+together, is another thing. The fact of knowledge, it is safe to say,
+is no <i>fact</i> at all; that is, if there had been in reality no more particularisation,
+no more of detail, than there is consciousness, the
+murder would never have happened. But just as, practically, we
+take the end in general to be the real thing, (since it is the only thing
+of any direct interest,) so in knowledge we take the bare fact as abstracted
+from the actual whole, as <i>the</i> fact. Just as the end of the
+savage is merely to kill his enemy, so the “fact” is merely the dead
+body with the weapon sticking in it. The fact, as it stands in consciousness,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_377">[377]</span>is indeterminate and partial, but, since it is in consciousness
+by itself, it is taken as a whole and as the certain thing. But
+as the abstractness of the “end in general” is confessed in the fact
+that means are required in order to make it real—to give it existence—so
+the unreal character of the “fact” is revealed in the statement
+that the causes which produced it are unknown and have to be
+discovered. The bare fact thus becomes a result to be accounted
+for: in this conception the two sides are combined; the “fact” is
+at once given a certain reality of its own while at the same time the
+lack of concreteness is recognised in the reference to external causes.</p>
+
+<p>The gradual introduction of further factors, under the guise of
+causes accounting for the effect, defines the original vague “fact,”
+until, at last, when it is accounted for, we have before us the one
+and only concrete reality. This done, we no longer have an effect
+to be accounted for, and causes which produce it, but one fact
+whose statement or description is such and such. But intermediate
+between the isolation and the integration is the stage when
+necessity appears. We have advanced, we will suppose, from
+the bare fact of the murder to the discovery of a large amount of
+“circumstantial” evidence regarding that fact. We hear of a man
+who had a quarrel with the deceased; he cannot account for himself
+at the time when the murder <i>must</i> have been committed; he is
+found to have had a weapon like that with which the murder <i>must</i>
+have been committed. Finally we conclude he <i>must</i> have been the
+murderer. What do these “musts” (the “must” of the time, weapon,
+and murderer) mean? Are they not obviously the gradual filling-in
+of the previously empty judgment, through bringing things at
+first unconnected into relation with each other? The existence of
+the man M. N. is wholly isolated from the “fact” of the murder till
+it is learned that he had a grudge against the murdered man; this
+third fact, also distinct <i>per se</i>, brought into connection with the
+others (the “fact” of the murder and of the existence of M. N.)
+compels them to move together; the result is at first the possibility,
+later, as the points of connection get more and more marked and
+numerous, the “necessity,” that M. N. is the murderer. Further, it
+is clear that this “must” marks not a greater certainty or actuality
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_378">[378]</span>than a mere “is” would indicate, but rather a doubt, a surmise or
+guess gradually gaining in certainty. When the fact is really made
+out to our satisfaction, we drop the “must” and fall back on the
+simple <i>is</i>. Only so long as there is room for doubt, and thus for
+argument do we state that the time and weapon must have been
+such and such. So when we finally conclude that the murderer
+must have been M. N., it means that we have woven a large number
+of facts, previously discrete, into such a state of inter-relationship
+that we do not see how to avoid denying their discreteness and incorporating
+them all into one concrete whole, or individual fact.
+That we still say “must” shows, however, that we have not quite
+succeeded in overcoming the partial and indefinite character of the
+original “fact.” Had we succeeded in getting the whole fact before
+us the judgment would take this form: The murder <i>is</i> a fact of
+such and such definite nature, having as its content such and such
+precise elements. In this comprehensive whole all distinction of
+effect to be accounted for and causes which produce clean disappears.
+The idea of necessity, in a word, comes in only while we are
+still engaged in correcting our original error, but have not surrendered
+it root and branch; this error being that the fragment of reality
+which we grasp is concrete enough to warrant the appellation
+“fact.”</p>
+
+<p>A great deal of attention has been directed to the category of
+cause and effect. One striking feature of the ordinary consideration
+is, that it takes for granted the matter most needing investigation
+and aims the inquiry at the dependent member of the firm.
+The effect seems to be so clearly <i>there</i>, while the cause is so obviously
+something to be searched for that the category of effect is
+assumed, and it is supposed that only the idea of causation is in
+need of examination. And yet this abstraction of certain phases of
+fact, the erection of the parts thus abstracted into distinct entities,
+which, though distinct, are still dependent in their mode of existence,
+is precisely the point needing examination. It is but another
+instance of the supreme importance of our practical interests. The
+effect is the end, the practical outcome, which interests us; the
+search for causes is but the search for the means which would produce
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_379">[379]</span>the result. We call it “means and end” when we set up a
+result to be reached in the future and set ourselves upon finding the
+causes which put the desired end in our hands; we call it “cause
+and effect” when the “result” is given, and the search for means is
+a regressive one. In either case the separation of one side from the
+other, of cause from effect, of means from end, has the same origin:
+a partial and vague idea of the whole fact, together with the habit
+of taking this part (because of its superior practical importance) for
+a whole, for a fact.</p>
+
+<p>I hope now to have made good my original thesis: that the
+idea of necessity marks a certain stage in the development of judgment;
+that it refers to a residuum, in our judgments and thus in
+our objects, of indeterminateness or vagueness, which it replaces
+without wholly negating; that it is thus relative to “chance” or
+contingency; that its value consists wholly in the impulse given
+judgment towards the <i>is</i>, or the concrete reality defined throughout.
+The analysis has been long; the reader may have found it not only
+tedious, but seemingly superfluous, since, as he may be saying to
+himself, no one nowadays regards necessity as anything but a name
+for fixed uniformities in nature, and of this view of the case nothing
+has been said. I hope, however, that when we come to a consideration
+of necessity as equivalent to uniformity, it will be found that
+the course of this discussion has not been irrelevant, but the sure
+basis for going further.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">John Dewey.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_65" href="#FNanchor_65" class="label">[65]</a> This article, as the title may indicate, was suggested by Mr. Peirce’s article
+upon “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” As, however, my thought takes
+finally a different turn, I have deemed it better to let it run its own course from the
+start, and so have not referred, except indirectly, to Mr. Peirce’s argument. I
+hope this will not be taken as a desire to slur over my indebtedness to him.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_66" href="#FNanchor_66" class="label">[66]</a> The reason of this abstraction is in practical nature, as already indicated.
+For all the savage <i>cares</i> about it, the death in general, <i>is</i> the real fact. It is all that
+interests him. It is hardly worth while to attempt to persuade the savage; indeed,
+if he were not only a savage, but also a philosopher, he might boldly challenge the
+objector to present <i>any</i> definition of object which should not refer objectivity to
+man’s practical activity; although he might, as a shrewd savage, admit that some
+one activity (or self) to which the object is referred has more content than another.
+In this case, I, for one, should not care about entering the lists against the savage.
+But when the common-sense philosopher, who resists all attempts to reconstruct
+the original object on the ground that a fact is a fact and all beyond that is metaphysics,
+is also a case-hardened nominalist (as he generally is), it is time to protest.
+It might be true that the real object is always relative to the value of some action;
+but to erect this pure universal into the object, and then pride one’s self on enlightenment
+in rejecting the “scholastic figment” of the reality of universals is a little
+too much.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_380">[380]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_ISSUES_OF_SYNECHISM">THE ISSUES OF “SYNECHISM.”</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In a late number of <i>The Monist</i>, (Vol. II, No. 4,) there appears a
+singularly acute and profound article, from the pen of one of
+the ablest of American logicians and mathematicians, Mr. Charles
+S. Peirce. Its subject is “The Law of Mind”—the idea of continuity.
+The writer tells us, (p. 534,) “the tendency to regard continuity,
+in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime
+importance in philosophy, may conveniently be termed <i>Synechism</i>.”
+With this <i>synechistic</i> philosophy, as applied to mind, the
+paper is occupied, to the exclusion, for the nonce, of Mr. Peirce’s
+companion doctrine of <i>Tychism</i>,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_67" href="#Footnote_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> which was dealt with, by him, in
+the January, 1891, and April, 1892, issues of <i>The Monist</i>. These
+conceptions are, both of them, to be viewed as essential to philosophy
+as a whole, but the latter is; for the present, allowed to drop
+out of sight, in order to allow of the due elaboration of the former.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_68" href="#Footnote_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a></p>
+
+<h4>THE FORMULA OF SYNECHISM.</h4>
+
+<p>The formula of Synechism, with which the article begins, is as
+follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Logical analysis applied to mental phenomena shows that there is but one
+law of mind, namely, that ideas tend to spread continuously, and to affect certain
+others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading
+they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality,
+and become welded with other ideas.” (Vol. II, No. 4, p. 534.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The individuality and continuity of ideas are, then, shown respectively
+to involve no contradiction; an idea once past—in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_381">[381]</span>sense of an event in an individual consciousness—is not wholly past,
+it is only going—“infinitesimally past, less past than any assignable
+past date.” Thus the conclusion is reached that “the present is
+connected with the past by a series of real, infinitesimal steps.”
+Again, “We are forced to say that we are immediately conscious
+through an infinitesimal interval of time. This is all that is requisite.”
+(<i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 535-536.)</p>
+
+<p>All that it is necessary to say at the outset is, that this view is
+supported by an elaborate inquiry into the nature of infinity and
+continuity in general, into which, for the purpose of the present paper,
+it is not needful to enter. And this for two reasons: (1) The
+synechistic philosophy, by itself, does not profess to be monistic. Its
+expounder does not, even if his Tychism were not in reserve, profess
+to carry it beyond the realm of mind, with all that is implied in
+such a reservation. Now, it is the bearing of Mr. Peirce’s Synechism
+upon a monistic solution of the universe with which the present
+article is concerned. And (2) Mr. Peirce’s method of treatment,
+though precise and logical in the direction of its own path, is too
+purely technical to be summarised for the general reader’s benefit.
+But withal, Synechism is far too fertile, not so much in respect of
+what it makes clear, as suggestively, and, if the expression may be
+allowed, <i>obliquely</i>, to be passed over without comment. Its excogitator
+is eminently frank; he does not conceal the difficulties which,
+ever and anon, occur in his statement. Sometimes his theory seems
+a trifle too wide for the facts encountered, sometimes rather too
+scanty to contain them. Such phrases as the following: “No, I
+think we can only hold”—p. 552; “we are driven to perceive”—p.
+555; “this obliges me to say”—p. 557; “the principle with
+which I set out requires me to maintain”—p. 558; “the only answer
+that I can, at present, make is”—p. 559, etc., etc., do every
+credit to the writer’s candor, but they would scarcely occur in an
+exposition, which, in the mind of its author, made the rough places
+altogether plain. Synechism, even with Tychism in the background,
+probably does not, in Mr. Peirce’s own mind, completely solve the
+world-riddle, at least, as yet. Still these very pauses themselves,
+on the part of a thinker of such ability, are eminently suggestive.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_382">[382]</span>To use his own words: “the present paper is intended to show what
+Synechism is, and what it leads to.” Let us emphasise this latter
+clause, as likely to be more fruitful than the former.</p>
+
+<h4>MR. PEIRCE’S POSITIVISM.</h4>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce, in spite of his theory of chance, is, in his Synechism,
+almost severely a positivist;&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_69" href="#Footnote_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> but his positivism, like most of that
+current nowadays, does not go deep enough. He is positivist, <i>after</i> he
+has got externality—fertile in excitations—comfortably disposed
+around his subject; and vibrations, undulations, attractions, etc.,
+ready to play upon the thousand-stringed harp, <i>but not before</i>. For,
+“we must not tax introspection,” he tells us, p. 548, “to make a phenomenon
+manifest, which essentially involves externality,” when the
+real problem at issue is: Is there externality, in the vulgar sense, at
+all, or is it only that <i>rationalised externality</i> which <i>circumspection</i>, within
+the limits of egoity, reveals? Now, upon this a good deal hinges.
+At all events the difference in question, or, rather, that there <i>is</i> a
+difference, has been mooted, to say the least. And, this being the
+case, it is a little tedious, when the really vital point of the spatial
+extension of feelings is being debated, to have this illustration
+brought in, (p. 548,): “Moreover, our own feelings are focused in
+attention to such a degree, that we are not aware that ideas are not
+brought to an absolute unity. Just as nobody, not instructed by
+special experiment, has any idea how very, very little of the field of
+vision is distinct.” Why, that is reasoning in a circle, if some systems
+are true; and it is a begging of the question, if they are the
+reverse.</p>
+
+<p>If the system of so-called objective reality were, at sight, wholly
+veracious, if everything existed just as it seems, this positivism of
+Mr. Peirce’s might be workable. Then no one would seek to go
+beneath the process of the apparent, the actually visible, for a <i>rationale</i>.
+But modern science teaches, in its very primer, that many
+things are, and act, quite otherwise than as they seem to be, and
+do. Appearances <i>rationalised</i> are alone to be accepted. The sun
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_383">[383]</span>does not “rise” and “set,” as it seems to do. The earth is not, as
+it appears to be, an immovable plane, and so on. And, this once
+allowed, where is the principle to end? If the superficial judgment
+may be thus corrected, or reversed, it is liable to revision or
+reversal <i>ad infinitum</i>, unless reason be shown to the contrary. It
+may thus be disputed whether our author is quite in order in writing,
+as he does, and using the statement to support his theory—“Precisely
+how primary sensations, as colors and tones, are excited,
+we cannot tell, in the present state of psychology.... As far
+as sight and hearing are in question, we know that they are only
+excited by vibrations of inconceivable complexity; and the chemical
+senses are probably not more simple.” (P. 557.)</p>
+
+<p>To argue, we cannot tell precisely <i>how</i> they are excited, but we
+know that they <i>are</i> excited, is somewhat feminine; seeing that the
+said “excitement” is not patent on the surface of ordinary perception.
+And, this being the case, the excitement, or its mode rather, not
+being given immediately, but only mentally annexed, Mr. Peirce is
+not consistently positivist. It is equally open to an opponent to “annex”
+something else of his own to the “given” thing, or altogether
+to deny the necessity of anything whatever being thus annexed. In
+any case that (if anything) which is sought to be annexed must
+stand the test of positivism; we must know <i>if</i> such a thing is, and
+<i>what</i> it is precisely. And this is just what Mr. Peirce cannot do
+for us. He cannot tell us exactly what the “excitant” of feelings
+<i>is</i>; he can only guess what it is “<i>something like</i>,” viz.: the feelings
+themselves. Hence the following:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The principle with which I set out [that of continuity] requires me to maintain
+that these feelings are communicated to the nerves by continuity, <i>so that there
+must be something like them in the excitants themselves</i>. If this seems extravagant,
+it is to be remembered that it is the sole possible way of reaching any explanation
+of sensation, which otherwise must be pronounced a general fact absolutely inexplicable
+and ultimate. Now absolute inexplicability is a hypothesis which sound
+logic refuses, under any circumstances, to justify.” (P. 558.—The italics are not
+in the original.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>There must be something like the feelings in the excitants of
+the feelings. Now, this point is worthy of the closest attention.
+Note that “the excitant” <i>alone</i> is mentioned. <i>Vibrations</i> excite sight
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_384">[384]</span>and hearing. Yet, from what follows, it is plain that Synechism is
+not inconsistent with belief in a fixed objective. “Even the least
+psychical of peripheral sensations, that of pressure, has, in its excitation,
+conditions which, though apparently simple, are seen to
+be complicated enough when we consider <i>the molecules and their attractions</i>,”
+pp. 557-558. Can there, then, be any doubt that we have
+here three distinct things: (1) a subjective, (2) an “excitant,” and
+(3) an objective; the middle term being a vehicle of communication
+between the first and third? It does not affect this presentation of
+Mr. Peirce’s position that, at an earlier stage of his argument, he
+speaks of matter—synonymous, presumably, with the objective—as
+being “not completely dead, but merely mind, hide-bound with
+habits,” as “partially deadened” or “effete,” mind; or that the
+editor of <i>The Monist</i> says that, with Mr. Peirce, “mind is the beginning
+of all.” (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 95.) The question,
+at present, is not regarding origins, but regarding co-existences.
+So that there is a distinct <i>hiatus</i> here, arising from the confusion of
+the stimulant, or excitant, of sensation with the objective itself.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_70" href="#Footnote_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a>
+Now, the stimulant of sensation is never the object perceived.
+Hence, once an objective is admitted, a trinity of entities is unavoidable,
+since still less can the “stimulant” be the subject. This special
+difficulty, in the present writer’s opinion, is inseparable from
+dualism in every form. How it besets Mr. Peirce’s theory is evident
+from his hazarded suggestion: “There must be <i>something like</i>
+the feelings in the excitants.” He thus uses only two of his cosmical
+terms, and gives the third the go-by! All dualism halts, but surely
+there is here a palpable stumble.</p>
+
+<p>In a recent article in <i>The Open Court</i>&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_71" href="#Footnote_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> I have pointed out the
+vanity of introducing a vehicle of communication between object
+and subject, especially emphasising the fact that, once this intermediate
+term is brought in, the veritable objective disappears.
+“Once you bring in vibrations,” I remarked, “you practically provide
+a <i>second</i> object, which is really a part of the subject, and, in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_385">[385]</span>order to do this, you have taken from the original objective all that
+composed it.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_72" href="#Footnote_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> (<i>The Open Court</i>, p. 3361.)</p>
+
+<p>Is it any wonder, then, that Mr. Peirce should suppose the excitants
+to be “something like” the excited feelings? Since he, practically,
+surrenders the objective, what could more closely resemble
+the subjective than the subjective itself? If he had adopted the position
+of Hume, and made impressions and ideas all-in-all, his principle
+of continuity might hold. But this he does not do, since (1)
+he implicitly admits the objective element, and (2) even if he did
+not do this, there must be something other than the idea or feeling
+in his system, since, otherwise, there could be no ground for the
+charge of seeming “extravagance,” which, he admits, may be leveled
+against, at least one of, his conclusions.</p>
+
+<h4>FEELINGS SPATIALLY EXTENDED.</h4>
+
+<p>This leads us to Mr. Peirce’s conclusions regarding subjective
+spatial extension—the spatial extension of feelings—as the result of
+observation of irritated protoplasm. Our attention is directed to an
+excited mass of protoplasm,—an amœba, or a slime-mould,—which
+“does not differ in any radical way from the contents of a nerve-cell,
+though its functions may be less specialised.” (P. 547.) The
+irritation is induced when, say, the amœba is “quiescent and rigid,”
+and we note its behaviour under it. That feeling passes from one
+part of this amorphous continuum of protoplasm to another, we are
+led to believe. And this conclusion follows: “Whatever there is
+in the whole phenomenon to make us think there is feeling in such
+a mass of protoplasm,—<i>feeling</i>, but plainly no <i>personality</i>,—goes
+logically to show that that feeling has a subjective, or substantial,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_386">[386]</span>spatial extension, as the excited state has.” This is a chain of reasoning.
+Let us examine its links. We have:</p>
+
+<p>(1) The behaviour of the amœba under immediate, mechanical
+irritation—the spread, or spatial extension, of the state of irritation.</p>
+
+<p>(2) We are asked to identify this spread-out irritation, this field
+of excitation, with “feeling” on the part of the amœba, because
+there is “no doubt that it feels when it is excited.”</p>
+
+<p>(3) From the spatial extension of the irritation, thus identified
+with feeling, we are asked to conclude that the feeling, in the
+amœba, has a subjective, spatial extension as the excited state has,
+and, finally, passing from the feeling of the amœba to our own feelings,
+by inference, we are asked to admit:</p>
+
+<p>(4) Not that we have necessarily a feeling of bigness, but that
+“the feeling [inferentially arrived at from the spread-out irritation
+on the part of the amœba] as a subject of inhesion is big.” (P. 548.)</p>
+
+<p>After this, we are disposed to agree with Mr. Peirce when he
+says: “This is, no doubt, a difficult idea to seize”; not, as he goes
+on to say, “for the reason that it is a subjective, not an objective,
+extension,” but on the ground that the reasoning involves, plainly,
+not only the subjective and objective, but what Clifford calls the
+“ejective,” as well, and this assumption, <i>inter alia</i>, that the last-named
+lies on the same plane as the former. Never, surely, was
+the conclusion that feelings have spatial extension more easily
+reached. It is only when we find that in (1) we are dealing with
+the objective pure and simple, observed phenomena; that in (2) the
+connection between irritation or excitation, and feeling is assumed,
+in the object, because feeling, subjectively, is found to accompany
+irritation; that (3) as the irritation, in the amœba, is spread out, so
+is the feeling to be viewed; and (4) that, as the feeling of the
+amœba, so is our feeling to be considered, viz.: that the feeling, “as
+a subject of inhesion, is big,” we are led to say after all this, that,
+by such a process, anything, or everything, could be demonstrated,—the
+<i>field</i> of spatial extension, for example, having no more claim to
+be assumed than the <i>point</i> at which the irritation admittedly begins.
+Why should the <i>middle</i> stage of the irritation be selected in preference
+to the <i>initial</i> and <i>final</i> ones? The irritation originates in a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_387">[387]</span>point, spreads, and then dies out. Thus our feeling, (we purposely
+use Mr. Peirce’s nomenclature,) or idea, of an elephant, is unquestionably,
+as a subject of inhesion, “big.” <i>But only for a time, and
+not at first.</i> Really, our idea, or feeling—in Synechism—of an elephant,
+must logically commence as a minute speck, and return to
+this vanishing-point again. There is no other way out of it. For
+must not the analogy of the irritated amœba be followed throughout,
+and if not, why not?</p>
+
+<h4>DUALISM AND THE WAY OUT.</h4>
+
+<p>The <i>crux</i> of philosophy, from the time of Hume to the present
+day, has been, what may be summarised as, the consciousness of
+succession <i>as</i> succession. The hours pass over the mental dial, but,
+though one succeeds the other, something is needed besides the
+succession of the terms of the series to give consciousness of the series
+<i>as a series</i>, to give the synthesis of the day made up of hours.
+Hume virtually gave up the problem in eviscerating the subjective.
+Prof. T. H. Green only missed the point at issue when he placed
+his eternal consciousness, which was to “have and to hold” the
+terms of the cosmical series, as it were in solution, for the human
+organism, <i>out of time altogether</i>. Mr. Peirce puts the matter boldly
+when he says: “An idea once past is gone forever, [in the sense of an
+event in an individual consciousness,] and any supposed recurrence
+of it is another idea.” (P. 534.) In order, then, that an idea past
+may be present really, and not vicariously, the notion that consciousness
+necessarily occupies an interval of (finite) time must be
+given up; since, to put it briefly, a second past is as much past as
+a year. According to Mr. Peirce then, and his contention is supported
+by an elaborate inquiry into the nature of infinity and continuity
+generally, “we are immediately conscious through an infinitesimal
+interval of time.” For the complete <i>rationale</i>, reference
+must necessarily be made to the article itself.</p>
+
+<p>Even the above outline, however, is sufficient to show that, here
+as elsewhere, Mr. Peirce’s dualism is his snare. Nothing but this
+could lead to a disintegration so complete as the following:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“In this infinitesimal interval, not only is consciousness continuous in a subjective
+sense, that is, considered as a subject, or substance, having the attribute of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_388">[388]</span>duration; but also, because it is immediate consciousness, its object is <i>ipso facto</i>
+continuous.” (P. 536.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is to admit, practically, that there is something in consciousness
+other than the consciousness itself. And this is evident,
+because at one and the same time, (whether an interval of finite
+time, or an infinitesimal interval,—whether an “instant” or a “moment,”—does
+not matter,) these two entities are different. For:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“This mediate perception is objectively, or as to the object represented, spread
+over the four instants; but subjectively, or as itself the subject of duration, it is
+completely embraced in the second moment.” (<i>Ibid.</i>)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>But this “mediate” and “immediate” cannot simultaneously
+exist, unless there is something else <i>to which</i> they do so exist. It is
+only paltering with us in a double sense to speak of “instant” and
+“moment” in this connection. The one may pass into the other,
+but there is “a time when” (it matters not whether the interval be
+finite or infinitesimal) they do not coexist. Hence, they are not the
+same, but different.</p>
+
+<p>According to Mr. Peirce’s notation, for all ordinary purposes
+we may write, if <i>a</i> is a finite quantity, and <i>i</i> an infinitesimal, <i>a</i> + <i>i</i> = <i>a</i>.
+“That is to say, this is so for all purposes of measurement.” Be it
+so; the infinitesimal may be neglected for purposes of calculation.
+But such a formula can only be experimental. The theory which
+embodies it cannot avail for a world-scheme; to admit it would be
+to grant that a thing is, and is not, at one and the same time.
+Surely the most superficial reader will see that, to put it popularly,
+a world-scheme admits of no alternative subject to accept, or to
+reject, a neglectable quantity.</p>
+
+<p>And this is not the only instance of dualism in Mr. Peirce’s
+world-scheme as a totality. For have we not Synechism and Tychism
+as well? With the latter Mr. Peirce does not deal in the paper now
+under consideration. He must, however, be credited, or debited,
+with it, as held in reserve. For our present purpose it is not necessary
+to examine Tychism in detail. Its alleged existence is sufficient.
+For, and here let the significance of what follows be noted, in Mr.
+Peirce’s view, as opposed to determinism, Tychism exists as a principle.
+It <i>is</i>, otherwise it could not be expounded as operative. But
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_389">[389]</span>it also exists as an idea, first, it may be, in our author’s mind, and
+subsequently in the minds of his disciples. Thus it falls into the
+synechistic province: “As an idea it can only be affected by an
+idea, by anything but an idea it cannot be affected at all.” (“The
+Law of Mind,” p. 557.) Yet to affirm Tychism thus impotent, because
+unaffectible, outside the synechistic sphere, is to contradict
+Mr. Peirce’s conclusions, for if Tychism is nothing outside the ideal
+realm, it is altogether inside it. Hence Synechism is everything
+practically, and Tychism nothing. But that Mr. Peirce will not
+have. He has a two-fold Tychism, that is the fact; actual and
+operative on the one hand, ideal on the other. And this is dualism
+confessed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s method is quite fertile in duplication of the subjective
+entity. His latest paper, “Man’s Glassy Essence,” (<i>The
+Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1,) contains some typical instances.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction
+with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking
+at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness.” (P. 20.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is the strictly empirical view. And it may be possibly
+defended with the contention that all problems, to be duly examined,
+must, in the first place, be viewed from that standpoint. But
+it must be plainly manifest to any unprejudiced thinker that, even
+granted a total cosmical problem made up of separate problems of
+an individual nature, the same method of solving the sum cannot be
+employed which is used in solving its constituents. In the above instance,
+considering matter in its totality, and consciousness in its
+totality, what is left to view them indifferently from “outside,” or
+“inside”? Plainly nothing. Still more transparent an example is
+the following:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The consciousness of a habit involves a general idea. In each action of that
+habit certain atoms get thrown out of their orbit, and replaced by others. Upon
+all the different occasions it is different atoms that are thrown off, but they are
+analogous from a physical point of view, and there is an inward sense of their being
+analogous. Every time one of the associated feelings recurs, there is a more or less
+vague sense that there are others, that it has a general character, and of about what
+this general character is.” (P. 20.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_390">[390]</span></p>
+
+<p>This is part of the answer to the query: How do general ideas
+appear in the molecular theory of protoplasm? Now, without discussing
+the value of this <i>rationale</i>, as affecting Mr. Peirce’s own
+theories, it is not difficult to see what its acceptance would “lead
+to.” Certain atoms of a molecule get thrown out and are replaced
+by <i>others</i>. This happens repeatedly. On different occasions <i>different
+atoms</i> come and go. Yet they are “analogous,” and there is “an
+inward sense” of this. Upon whose shoulders is the burden of
+proving the analogy placed, or of experiencing it even? With whom
+or what is there “an inward sense”? Perhaps it is better not to answer
+otherwise than to say that if this faculty be not present in the
+ever changing molecule to begin with, it cannot be logically reached
+by any process of multiplying it.</p>
+
+<h4>THE MONISTIC SOLUTION.</h4>
+
+<p>Monism, as a unitary system of the universe, does not necessarily
+commend itself to acceptance simply <i>as</i> monism. To say,
+this is dualism, <i>therefore</i> it cannot be a correct <i>rationale</i> of the universe,
+since the only true one must be monistic, is to start with
+an unphilosophical prepossession. The true solution may be two-fold,
+or it may be manifold. But it is not too much to say, perhaps,
+on the other hand, that, even as causes may not be multiplied
+without necessity, even so phenomena must not logically be divided
+into independent groupings without sufficient reason given. Preference
+should be accorded to a monistic, rather than to a dualistic,
+system, not on the ground alone of the simplicity of the former, but
+on the ground that a theory which has one explanation for one set
+of phenomena and another explanation for a second set, must first
+demonstrate that a unitary conception of the universe is, at least,
+improbable, otherwise it will always be hinted that the dualism in
+question has not gone deep enough to find a synthetic bond wherewith
+to unite the apparently diverse. Mr. Peirce, throughout his
+article on Synechism, constantly touches, despite his latent dualism,
+the margin of a truth so great as to merit the title of transcendent.
+As often he misses it. And his concluding words are, in this connection,
+almost wistful: “The facts that stand before our face and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_391">[391]</span>eyes and stare us in the face, are far from being, in all cases, the
+ones most easily discerned. That has been remarked from time
+immemorial.” (P. 559.) But though thus “remarked,” the maxim
+has, as immemorially, been neglected in practice. To none can
+this remark be more fitly applied than to the excogitator of Synechism,
+himself seeing that, having arrived at the point of asserting that
+“there must be <i>something like</i> the feelings in the excitants themselves,”
+he does not see that the excitant and the feeling are one and
+the same; and that there is no second or third term in the cosmical
+equation.</p>
+
+<p>Does this seem “extravagant”? If so, the reply must be <i>not</i>
+that it is the only escape from an otherwise inexplicable difficulty,
+but that there is really no difficulty at all. What Mr. Peirce’s own
+Synechism “<i>leads to</i>” is that the past, the present, and the to-come,
+alike of matter and idea, are not reconciled by “time and its flow,”
+or even by the logic of infinitesimals, subtle though that may be,
+but that the contents of each and all, with all their apparently infinite
+variety, resolve into a consistent unity.</p>
+
+<h4>THE “MISSING LINK.”</h4>
+
+<p>Pushed to a logical conclusion, the excitants and the feelings
+owe their apparent variety to their assigned position in a series, the
+correspondence or relation between them being <i>only another link in
+the self-same chain</i>. Vulgar realism never fathoms this explanation.
+It always harps upon the one string that idealism, and more especially
+idealistic monism, fails to account for variety or difference;
+forgetting, or rather never seeing, that difference or variety which is
+its essence, is only one more added perception on the same plane
+with ordinary perceptions; so that given <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, <i>d</i>,—sundry perceptions,—their
+essential variety may be stated as <i>e</i>. Or this may be
+stated numerically; variety, as a whole, being nothing more than
+the sum of differences, which is always something other than the
+terms differentiated, but always on the same level with them—the
+difference between any continuous number, above unity, and another
+number being a third number, which is different from either. Variety
+in numbers cannot be expressed otherwise than numerically.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_392">[392]</span>So, in the last recess, the variety of colors is only colorable, of tones
+audible, and so on. The “vibrations of inconceivable complexity”
+which, according to Mr. Peirce, “excite sight and hearing,” can be
+approximately stated numerically, so that the difference between
+red and, say, yellow, is a number corresponding to another color,
+which may be orange or not; it being part of the present scientific
+theory of light that any specific number of ethereal undulations
+happening between the colors of the ocular spectrum, corresponds
+to a possible color, although the retinal expanse may be insensible
+to these particular rates of tremor. To Mr. Peirce it may appear
+“extravagant,” but the difference between any two colors and tones
+is another color, another tone; just as the difference between any two
+numbers is a third number. This is the logical outcome of his own
+Synechism; <i>this</i>, in part, is what it “leads to.”</p>
+
+<h4>TIME AND ITS “FLOW” RATIONALISED.</h4>
+
+<p>Excitants and feelings being unified, and the element of variety,
+hitherto supposed to be the exclusive copyright of vulgar realism,
+shown to be nothing but another term added to the series, or, numerically,
+a concurrent series—so that should <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, <i>d</i> ... be a series,
+the variety of the series may be expressed as <i>e</i>, or the individual
+differences as <i>f</i>, <i>g</i>, <i>h</i> ...—it only needs an examination of what Mr.
+Peirce terms “time and its flow,” to render his system a completely
+monistic one, and this although true monism is much more than the
+negation of determinism, synechistically expressed.</p>
+
+<p>In Mr. Peirce’s article under examination, “The Law of Mind,”
+the notation of infinitesimals, which forms the keystone of Synechism,
+is only introduced after a lament over the incapacity, or unworkableness
+rather, of finite time, when the duration of consciousness
+is involved. If <i>finite</i> time is to come in as a factor—“an idea once
+past [in the sense of an event in an individual consciousness] is
+gone forever, and any supposed recurrence of it is another idea”
+(p. 534). And the problem which Mr. Peirce sets himself to solve
+is how in effect to bring <i>back</i> this past idea—not vicariously—but in
+all its pristine freshness, into the now-time. This is sought to be
+accomplished by the explanation that the past idea is “not wholly
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_393">[393]</span>past, it is only going, less past than any assignable past date”—and
+so on through the intricacies of Mr. Peirce’s infinitesimal theory,
+into which we need not enter at present. But the statement of the,
+supposed, difficulty which finite time presents in this connection,—the
+past idea really past and gone, and the recurrence of it another
+idea,—if put in a slightly different form, hints a solution, in continuity
+with the foregoing pages, without the aid of the infinitesimal at
+all. <i>That an idea is once past and gone</i>, any occurrence, or recurrence,
+of this idea, <i>is another idea</i>.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_73" href="#Footnote_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a></p>
+
+<p>But, in the meantime, let us see what Mr. Peirce has to say regarding
+“time and its flow”:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“One of the most marked features about the law of mind is, that it makes time
+to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. The relation of past to future
+is, in reference to the law of mind, different from the relation of future to past.
+This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical
+force, where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in
+time than between moving northward, and moving southward” (p. 546).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This for once is not very clear. It is difficult to see how “the
+law of physical force” can be spoken of as “in time,” to the exclusion
+of mind; not easy, also, to understand the distinction further
+insisted upon. But the intention is evident, viz., to perpetuate, if
+not to originate, a cosmical duality. Time, it would seem, marches
+indifferently in at least two directions, though it is not very clear
+how this is accomplished. And then the old fiction follows, that
+“Time, as the universal form of change, cannot exist unless there
+is something to undergo change, etc.” (p. 547.)</p>
+
+<p>The same notation suits in this case as in the foregoing. Time
+is only another term in the series. If <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, <i>d</i> be a series, <i>e</i> is the
+variety, <i>f</i> the whole time involved, and <i>g</i> the individual intervals.
+Of course all this is not a simple series, it is an infinitely complicated
+one; the above arrangement is only intended to show that difference,
+variety, time, etc., are no mysterious entities pervading events,
+acting as their “form” or carrying them in their “flow,” but simply
+percepts, or concepts, on a level with others.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_394">[394]</span></p>
+
+<p>This is not patent on the surface, it may be. Time has the appearance
+of a current in which events float. But this is an illusion
+dispelled by examination. Events cannot be submerged in time.
+Time cannot be the vehicle of events. It is impossible to conceive
+time as existing simultaneously with an event. It always follows it.
+What to Mr. Peirce appears as a “flow,” arises from the foregoing.
+Take events, percepts, or concepts, as a hypothetical series, <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>,
+<i>d</i> ... and their times as <i>a´</i>, <i>b´</i>, <i>c´</i>, <i>d´</i> ... the first series contains
+the event <i>per se</i>, or as happening; the “time when” is contained in
+the second series, practically inseparable from the first, but the time
+when necessarily follows—consequently if the first be <i>a</i>, the second
+must be, at least <i>a</i>. But no concept or percept is abstract, except
+the concept time itself, which, being unconnected, <i>seems</i> anywhere,
+and, like its fellow-abstract space, is spread out, to us, tri-dimensionally,
+as past, present, and to come. And, as in space the position
+is simply spectral,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_74" href="#Footnote_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> a question of perspective or adjustment, so,
+in time, the timal series is adjusted to the substantive idea. But
+this two-fold spectral succession breeds by comparative intensity
+(which is another complex series) the sense of a flow, where there is
+none, but only the idea of a flowing, which is another matter. Thus,
+the so-called “veil of the future” is no more a veil than it is a brickbat.
+It is simply the indeterminateness of an unconnected adjective—as
+if one should say, white—and the query arises, <i>What</i> is it that
+is white? When the noun is supplied you have something definite.
+Just so, when the future lapses into the present.</p>
+
+<p>Thus there is never anything without, at least, these three additions:
+first, variety or difference; second, time; third, relation,
+spatial or otherwise. These are all terms in a series, or set of concurrent
+series. Nothing can be, practically, isolated, for everything
+runs in a series. But this is a much broader theory of continuity
+than that which Synechism affords.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_75" href="#Footnote_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> All apparent perplexities vanish.
+The difficulty no longer exists that to perceive a series we must
+hold it, as it were, in solution. Since other than series nothing is.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_395">[395]</span>Hence the cosmos is an illimitable series or complex of series. But
+inasmuch as the timal element (as also the spatial) occurs through
+the series having time-term and space-term resident within it, all
+difficulty in apprehending it as a series vanishes. The impracticability,
+if any, would be in viewing any term as isolated.</p>
+
+<h4>THE RESULT <i>RE</i> TYCHISM.</h4>
+
+<p>What a flood of light does such a system shed indirectly upon
+Tychism, since the controversy between the latter and determinism
+mainly hinges upon the “must be,” the imperative, as it were, of
+the series! It has been very ably pointed out by Dr. Carus in his
+article <i>re</i> Mr. Peirce’s “Onslaught on the Doctrine of Necessity”
+(<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 573-4.) that the formula adopted
+by Mr. Peirce in his Tychism, “chance is first, law is second, the
+tendency of habits is third,” involves its author in the admission of
+a law in a system professing to be, in its inception at all events,
+chanceful and <i>lawless</i>. Mr. Peirce’s “Synechism” professes to be
+the law of mind. Parenthetically, however, it may be remarked,
+that the distinction as to law, and lawlessness or “chance,” narrows
+itself to the plane of one term more or less in a series, or <i>even to less
+than that subordinate place</i>. For, although, for convenience sake,
+and for facility of contrast, we have followed Mr. Peirce’s figure of
+a series, to show more clearly also to what his theory leads, it is
+nevertheless plain, that time and its accompanying relations being
+placed on their proper level, that of integral percepts and concepts,
+the figure of a series is simply a matter of convenience of arrangement.
+Certainly as the “time when” is necessarily annexed to every
+percept and concept the timal element may be said to follow, not to
+precede, its fellow-term. Really, however, they may be said to be
+simultaneous, since the timal refinements of finite, infinite, past,
+present, and future are each of them contained in a percept of its
+own.</p>
+
+<h4>EXTERNALITY A SERIAL TERM.</h4>
+
+<p>But if the timal element be independent as a separate percept,
+the spatial as another, and so on, it follows that, although the terms
+of the series may, as it were, <i>run</i>, though we cannot conceive them
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_396">[396]</span>separated, or as, in practice, otherwise than as continuous in their
+flow, still, theoretically, a series or complex of series it <i>is</i>, and a
+series may be interrupted at any term. Thus externality itself being
+a spatial relation, is but <i>one term more</i>, non-essential in theory, to
+the term preceding. So that when the Neo-Kantians speak of the
+“constitution of the objective” it ought to be added that it is not
+only the content of the objective which is thus constituted by consciousness,
+but that externality, all that goes to make up what is
+termed “out-sidedness,” is constituted by consciousness also.</p>
+
+<h4>THE NOW-TIME.</h4>
+
+<p>“<i>The present is half past, and half to come</i>,” (p. 546) like the color
+of a curved boundary line on a particolored surface; i. e. “betwixt
+and between” the two. It is here that the theory of Synechism shows
+its chief defect. Up to this stage we have been dealing with ideas,
+feelings, <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i>, <i>d</i> ... successively passing through a point of consciousness
+<i>e</i>. And the infinitesimal notation suits the required process
+fairly well. It is complicated enough, but it is ingenious, and at least
+plausible. Nothing up to this stage would lead us to suppose that
+any additional element was to be imported into the <i>rationale</i> which
+Mr. Peirce presents. As we have seen, finite time would not serve
+his purpose. By however minute a <i>finite</i> interval have <i>a</i>, <i>b</i>, <i>c</i> or <i>d</i>
+passed the point <i>e</i>, all chance of their recovery is hopeless. Well,
+we have recourse to infinitesimals, and find (to put it popularly, and
+not in Mr. Peirce’s technical terms) that <i>a</i> past the point of consciousness
+by an infinitesimal interval heralds <i>b</i>. So that <i>e</i> is simultaneously
+confronted with the disappearing form of the first and the
+appearing form of the second, and the same with <i>b</i>, and <i>c</i>, in turn,
+and so on. Thus the present, in the sense of ideas successively
+passing through consciousness, is half <i>a</i> and half <i>b</i>, then half <i>b</i> and
+half <i>c</i>, this infinitesimal gradation ultimately ensuring the presence
+of the whole series in the last “moment.”</p>
+
+<p>But this will not avail with the concept time itself as distinguished
+from timed succession. That these two are separate with
+Mr. Peirce it is impossible to doubt. He says, e. g., “Time with
+its continuity logically involves some other kind of continuity than
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_397">[397]</span>its own,” (p. 547) and speaks of “time and its flow,” and of “time
+as the universal form of change.” And it is confusing, to say the
+least, when we are shifted without warning from what is practically
+the perceptual to the conceptual region. Granted the ideas, the
+feelings, or what not, “gliding almost imperceptibly” (as did the
+late Mr. Bardell to another sphere) past the central point of consciousness,
+yet not wholly past, only going, less past than any assignable
+past date, granted this, the assertion is not consequently
+warranted that time itself, the <i>present</i>, as time, not as involving the
+succession of ideas, is “half past and half to come.” The ideas, the
+feelings, of which Mr. Peirce writes, successively pass through the
+stage of being thus half past and half to come, but that is by no
+means the same thing as saying that the present is half past, half to
+come, as Synechism avers. With our theory, as presented in the foregoing
+pages there is indeed no such difficulty, but Mr. Peirce, on
+the other hand, has elected to stand by infinitesimally measuring
+time, as applied to ideas etc., as separate from conceptual time, and
+must take the consequences of his decision. He says <i>the present,
+not the present idea</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Now, in the concept time as a whole, in its entire range, a definite
+point may be selected—to the exclusion of other points—a point
+having position but not extension, as <i>the present</i>. Is it, then,—the
+present,—half past, half to come, as a timed idea is? Certainly not.
+There is nothing of the flow of a series in it. Further, this selection
+of the “now,” as a point, does not interfere with its permanence.
+“Nowness” may persist. And the moment it partook, even infinitesimally,
+of the character of the past or of the future, it would cease
+to be the present. In the case of a series of ideas in time the difficulty
+is to get them all in present solution, as it were, without detriment
+to their evident continuity, but the definition of the present as
+a point in time presents no such difficulty. The conditions are quite
+distinct. Yet regarding this time point—the present—Mr. Peirce
+assures us that it is “half past, half to come,” which is just that of
+which it is the precise negation, if words are to have any meaning.</p>
+
+<p>Again, Mr. Peirce’s <i>rationale</i> shows, upon the face of it, that
+there is (1) finitely divisible time and, (2) time divided infinitesimally,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_398">[398]</span>for what finite time could not do, in that it had limitations,
+the infinitesimal notation readily accomplishes. In its ulterior consequences,
+this is somewhat unfortunate for Synechism, inasmuch as
+the consciousness of ideas in continuity being confined to the infinitesimal
+theory, where, it may be asked, is the place, in consciousness,
+for the succession of finite intervals? Consciousness must be
+practically doubled, so to speak, if it is to hold both of these together.
+This is what comes of making one’s world-scheme hang
+upon a mathematical subtlety—the subtlety in question partaking
+as a rule, more or less of the nature of an escape from the difficulties
+of the vulgar notation, the vulgar notation remains to be reckoned
+with, and both have to be credited to consciousness. As an instance
+of this take the following from Mr. Peirce’s late article,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_76" href="#Footnote_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> “Man’s
+Glassy Essence”—p. 15:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“In order that a sub-molecule of food may be thoroughly and firmly assimilated
+into a broken molecule of protoplasm, it is necessary not only that it should have
+precisely the right chemical composition, but also that it should be at precisely the
+right spot <i>at the right time</i> and should be moving in precisely the right direction
+with precisely the right velocity. If all these conditions are not fulfilled, ... it
+will be in special danger of being thrown out again” (The italics are not in the
+original).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Now here is a “time when” which can be exactly specified in
+accordance with the conditions. Certain results follow unless it is
+kept to. This is what Mr. Peirce would doubtless consider as a
+timed physical event, part and parcel of the regularity of matter,
+and yet an event which, in its own time and way, goes to account
+for both feeling and habit-taking—capable, therefore, of being stated
+in terms of finite time, as happening at a given instant, and neither
+before nor after it. But when this same molecule is, by virtue of
+keeping its appointment punctually, safely installed in feeling protoplasm,
+the succession of ideas, or feelings, of which, as subject, it
+is capable, obeys another rule—a given <i>instant</i> obtains no longer; it
+is the <i>moment</i> which is everything&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_77" href="#Footnote_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a>—a moment half its predecessor,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_399">[399]</span>half its successor. Even granted the function of the infinitesimal,
+this looks very much like a reduction to absurdity. For, if the above
+mentioned timed coalescence of the sub-molecule with the broken
+molecule were <i>also</i> a matter of subjective feeling, passed as process
+through a consciousness, the conclusion follows that the juncture of
+the molecules happens at two different times! There is no escape
+from this. Given the <i>instant</i> in the one case, the <i>moment</i> in the other,
+these two cannot possibly be the same point in time. The moment
+partakes, however insensibly, of the preceding and succeeding stages,
+the instant does not. Hence they are not the same but different
+times.</p>
+
+<h4>OTHERNESS.</h4>
+
+<p>The foregoing has a distinct bearing upon the question of “other
+selves” of which Mr. Peirce writes as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The recognition by one person of another’s personality takes place by means
+to some extent identical with the means by which he is conscious of his own personality.
+The idea of the second personality, which is as much as to say that second
+personality itself, enters within the field of direct consciousness of the first person,
+and is as immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time,
+the opposition between the two persons is perceived, so that the externality of the
+second is recognised.” (“The Law of Mind,” p. 558.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is the scheme of “otherness” which, in the case of the
+Neo-Kantians, particularly the French section, represented by M.
+Pillon, M. Renouvier, and others, has proved such a snare. To
+these thinkers, (as indeed to the late Prof. T. H. Green, of Oxford,
+though in a less degree,) the so-called external world lies in “other”
+thinking subjects—in “foreign centres of representations.” The
+free-trade doctrine has verily penetrated to the philosophic region—the
+wholesale admission of foreign wares to the detriment of
+home products. Why should I place the content of that so-called
+external world, which, external or internal, is my very own inalienably,
+in a centre of representation other than my own, thus making
+my cognition of it rest entirely upon the “ejective” plane? It is
+only when I discover, as I must sooner or later, that there is nothing
+in the report of an “outsider” (or in any number of them) beyond
+what I credit him or her with in my own consciousness; and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_400">[400]</span>that the outsider is on the same plane as other objects, it is only
+then that the mystification is cleared up. I do <i>not</i> cognise, or recognise,
+the external at second-hand. The “note” of otherness is
+simply another term more or less in the cosmical series.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, not only with the familiar “other selves” of
+ordinary life that we are confronted in Synechism. In the creed of
+animism</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">and Mr. Peirce speaks of “spiritual influences” (p. 559) as having
+at least no hindrance presented to them by his doctrine. But he
+has some other shadowy personalities at command, which, it must
+be confessed, are well calculated to give us pause. “There should
+be something like&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_78" href="#Footnote_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> personal consciousness in bodies of men who
+are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion.... None of
+us can fully realise which the minds of corporations are.... But
+the law of mind clearly points to the existence of such personalities.”
+It is probably true that the “minds of corporations,” must ever
+present an insoluble riddle of perversity to the suburban dweller,
+vexed with the mockery of paving and lighting. But we need not
+linger over this speculation, for there are other shades behind.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“If such a fact is capable of being made out anywhere it should be in the
+Church.... Surely a personality ought to have developed in that Church, in that
+‘bride of Christ,’ as they call it.” (“Man’s Glassy Essence,” pp. 21-22.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>A PERSONAL CREATOR.</h4>
+
+<p>Bearing our ecclesiastical divisions in mind, it is difficult to
+conceive the unity of a “corporate personality” of this kind, but,
+to let that pass, it may be remarked that, when any one begins to
+imagine that there are others in the universe besides himself, he is
+not, as a rule, content with two or three companions of his solitude.
+They come in battalions. Thus, behind the other selves, corporate
+personalities and spiritual influences of Synechism, there looms a
+transcendent personality. “A genuine evolutionary philosophy,”
+we are told, “... is so far from being antagonistic to the idea of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_401">[401]</span>a personal Creator, that it is really inseparable from that idea.”
+And a philosophy of pseudo-evolutionism is “hostile to all hopes
+of personal relations to God.” (“The Law of Mind,” p. 557.)</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce thus assigns to his first cause a place in the <i>continuum</i>
+of ideas, and says that if there is a personal God we must
+have a direct perception of that person and “indeed be in personal
+communication with him.” The difficulty, he admits, is that if this
+be so, how is it possible that the existence of this being should ever
+have been doubted by anybody. And the only answer he can at
+present make is, that “facts that stand before our face and eyes,
+and stare us in the face, are far from being in all cases the ones
+most easily discerned. That,” he adds, “has been remarked from
+time immemorial.” (“The Law of Mind,” pp. 558-559.)</p>
+
+<p>One of the ablest of living philosophical writers, Professor
+Veitch, of Glasgow University, puts it somewhat similarly, though
+with his own realistic coloring, when he says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“God, if at all, must rise above the line of finite regress; He cannot be a cause
+in that; He cannot be a cause dependent on another cause; He must be somewhere,
+or at some point, in the line of an otherwise endless scientific regress, there, above
+it, yet related to it, and in it; otherwise He is nothing for us.” (“Knowing and
+Being,” p. 320.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The parallelism is worth noting. Those views embody what
+has been the contention of the present writer throughout this paper,
+<i>with this most notable difference</i>: that no term of a series may thus
+transcend the series, or be other than on a level with the other
+terms, being itself only a term, a link, in the series itself. And with
+this falls forever the idea of a cause uncaused.</p>
+
+<p>Yet am <i>I</i> not <i>in</i> the series? For all that is in the series is mine
+every percept, every concept; so that, “extravagant” as it may appear,
+it is <i>I who am the series</i>. In other words, the ego is the universe-synthesis,
+and the universe-synthesis the ego.</p>
+
+<p>Is Mr. Peirce prepared to take the consequences of that which
+his Synechism leads to?</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">G. M. McCrie.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_67" href="#FNanchor_67" class="label">[67]</a> From τύχη, chance.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_68" href="#FNanchor_68" class="label">[68]</a> <i>Tychism</i> again comes to the front in the succeeding number of <i>The Monist</i>,
+(Vol. III, No. 1,) in an article by Mr. Peirce, entitled “Man’s Glassy Essence.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_69" href="#FNanchor_69" class="label">[69]</a> Dr. Carus, in his review of Mr. Peirce’s doctrines, (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, No.
+4, p. 575,) notes this positivistic-constructionism.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_70" href="#FNanchor_70" class="label">[70]</a> Cf. T. H. Green, <i>Prolegomena to Ethics</i>, Ch. II, p. 63.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_71" href="#FNanchor_71" class="label">[71]</a> Nos. 258, 59, 61, August, 1892. <i>Miss Naden’s World-Scheme.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_72" href="#FNanchor_72" class="label">[72]</a> In a note to this passage was appended a quotation from a pamphlet by Dr.
+E. Cobham Brewer as a practical instance of the objective being, on the antiquated
+subject-object plane, actually superseded. Suppose a very remote star to become
+extinct, the “vibrations” would continue to “travel” towards a spectator situated
+on our planet for years, it may be for centuries. So that the spectator, ultimately,
+“sees” that which does not even exist. Dr. Brewer’s comment, which cannot be
+considered any contribution to a satisfactory <i>rationale</i>, is: “the objects, however,
+must have existed, or no messenger could have been sent from their courts.” Evidently,
+in this case, that which is sent is, at least, as good as the sender—is, in fact,
+the self-same thing. Only, in that case, what of the extinct object?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_73" href="#FNanchor_73" class="label">[73]</a> Or to put it in another form, any one idea, and the timing of this idea are
+really two ideas, although, as we shall see later, they may be inseparable in practice.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_74" href="#FNanchor_74" class="label">[74]</a> Cf., in this connection, the results of experiments by Cheselden, as far back as
+1727 on congenitally blind persons, couched for double cataract.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_75" href="#FNanchor_75" class="label">[75]</a> Much more inclusive, also, than the Relational Theory of the Neo-Kantians.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_76" href="#FNanchor_76" class="label">[76]</a> <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_77" href="#FNanchor_77" class="label">[77]</a> Mr. Peirce uses the word “instant” to mean a point of time, and “moment”
+to mean an infinitesimal duration.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_78" href="#FNanchor_78" class="label">[78]</a> The phrase, “something like,” is significant, when we remember, (see <i>ante</i>,)
+that with Mr. Peirce the excitants were “something like” the excited feelings.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_402">[402]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_FOURTH_DIMENSION">THE FOURTH DIMENSION.<br>
+<span class="smaller">MATHEMATICAL AND SPIRITUALISTIC.</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>INTRODUCTORY.</h4>
+
+<p>The tendency to generalise long ago led mathematicians to
+extend the notion of three-dimensional space, which is the
+space of sensible representation, and to define aggregates of points, or
+spaces, of more than three dimensions, with the view of employing
+these definitions as useful means of investigation. They had no
+idea of requiring people to imagine four-dimensional things and
+worlds, and they were even still less remote from requiring of them
+to believe in the real existence of a four-dimensioned space. In
+the hands of mathematicians this extension of the notion of space
+was a mere means devised for the discovery and expression, by
+shorter and more convenient ways, of truths applicable to common
+geometry and to algebra operating with more than three unknown
+quantities. At this stage, however, the spiritualists came in,
+and coolly took possession of this private property of the mathematicians.
+They were in great perplexity as to where they should put
+the spirits of the dead. To give them a place in the world accessible
+to our senses was not exactly practicable. They were compelled,
+therefore, to look around after some <i>terra incognita</i>, which
+should oppose to the spirit of research inborn in humanity an insuperable
+barrier. The residence of the spirits had to be a place inaccessible
+to our senses and full of mystery to the mind. This property
+the four-dimensioned space of the mathematicians possessed.
+With an intellectual perversity which science has no idea of, these
+spiritualists boldly asserted, first, that the whole world was so situated
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_403">[403]</span>in a four-dimensioned space as a plane might be situated in
+the space familiar to us, secondly, that the spirits of the dead lived
+in such a four-dimensioned space, thirdly, that these spirits could
+accordingly act upon the world and, consequently, upon the human
+beings resident in it, exactly as we three-dimensioned creatures can
+produce effects upon things that are two-dimensional; for example,
+such effects as that produced when we shatter a lamina of ice, and
+so influence some possibly existing two-dimensioned <i>ice</i>-world.</p>
+
+<p>Since spiritualism, under the leadership of the Leipsic Professor
+Zöllner, thus proclaimed the existence of a four-dimensioned space,
+this notion, which the mathematicians are thoroughly master of,—for
+in all their operations with it, though they have forsaken the
+path of actual representability, they have never left that of the truth,—this
+notion has also passed into the heads of lay persons who have
+used it as a catchword, ordinarily without having any clear idea of
+what they or any one else mean by it. To clear up such ideas and
+to correct the wrong impressions of cultured people who have not a
+technical mathematical training, is the purpose of the following
+pages. A similar elucidation was aimed at in the tracts which
+Schlegel (Riemann, Berlin, 1888) and Cranz (Virchow-Holtzendorff’s
+Sammlung, Nos. 112 and 113) have published on the so-called fourth
+dimension. Both treatises possess indubitable merits, but their
+methods of presentation are in many respects too concise to give a
+lay mind any profound comprehension of the subject. The author,
+accordingly, has been able to add to the reflections which these excellent
+treatises offer, a great deal that appears to him necessary for
+a thorough explanation in the minds of non-mathematicians of the
+notion of the fourth dimension.</p>
+
+<h4>I.<br>
+THE CONCEPT OF DIMENSION.</h4>
+
+<p>Many text-books of stereometry begin with the words: “Every
+body has three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness.” If we
+should ask the author of a book of this description to tell us the
+length, breadth, and thickness of an apple, of a sponge, or of a cloud
+of tobacco smoke, he would be somewhat perplexed and would probably
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_404">[404]</span>say, that the definition in question referred to something different.
+A cubical box, or some similar structure, whose angles are
+all right angles and whose bounding surfaces are consequently all
+rectangles is the only body of which it can at all be unmistakably
+asserted that there are three principal directions distinguishable in
+it, of which any one can be called the length, any other the breadth,
+and any third the thickness. We thus see that the notions of length,
+breadth, and thickness are not sufficiently clear and universal to
+enable us to derive from them any idea of what is meant when it is
+said that every body possesses three dimensions, or that the space
+of the world is three-dimensional.</p>
+
+<p>This distinction may be made sharper and more evident by the
+following considerations: We have, let us suppose, a straight line
+on which a point is situated, and the problem is proposed to determine
+the position of the point on the line in an unequivocal manner.
+The simplest way to solve this is, to state how far the point is removed
+in the one or the other direction from some given fixed point;
+just as in a thermometer the position of the surface of the mercury
+is given by a statement of its distance in the direction of cold or heat
+from a predetermined fixed point—the point of freezing water. To
+state, therefore, the position of a point on a straight line, the sole
+datum necessary is a single number, for beforehand we have fixed
+upon some standard line, like the centimetre, and some definite point
+to which we give the value zero, and have also previously decided
+in what direction from the zero-point, points must be situated whose
+position is expressed by positive numbers, and also in what direction
+those must lie whose position is expressed by negative numbers.
+This last mentioned fact, that a <i>single</i> number is sufficient to determine
+the place of a point in a straight line, is the real reason why
+we attribute to the straight line or to any part of it a single dimension.</p>
+
+<p>More generally, we call every totality or system, of infinitely
+numerous things, <i>one</i>-dimensional, in which <i>one</i> number is all that
+is requisite to determine and distinguish any particular one of these
+things amidst the entire totality. Thus, time is one-dimensional.
+We, as inhabitants of the earth, have naturally chosen as our unit
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_405">[405]</span>of time, the period of the rotation of the earth about its axis, namely,
+the day, or a definite portion of a day. The zero-point of time is regarded
+in Christian countries as the year of the birth of Christ, and
+the positive direction of time is the time <i>subsequent</i> to the birth of
+Christ. These data fixed, all that is necessary to establish and distinguish
+any definite point of time amid the infinite totality of all
+the points of time, <i>is a single number</i>. Of course this number need
+not be a whole number, but may be made up of the sum of a whole
+number and a fraction in whose numerator and denominator we may
+have numbers as great as we please. We may, therefore, also say
+that the totality of all conceivable numerical magnitudes, or of only
+such as are greater than one definite number and smaller than some
+other definite number, is one-dimensional.</p>
+
+<p>We shall add here a few additional examples of one-dimensioned
+magnitudes presented by geometry. First, the circumference of a
+circle is a one-dimensional magnitude, as is every curved line,
+whether it returns into itself or not. Further, the totality of all equilateral
+triangles which stand on the same base is one-dimensional,
+or the totality of all circles that can be described through two fixed
+points. Also, the totality of all conceivable cubes will be seen to
+be one-dimensional, provided they are distinguished, not with respect
+to position, but with respect to magnitude.</p>
+
+<p>In conformity with the fundamental ideas by which we define
+the notion of a one-dimensional manifoldness, it will be seen that the
+attribute <i>two</i>-dimensional must be applied to all totalities of things
+in which <i>two</i> numbers are necessary (and sufficient) to distinguish
+any determinate individual thing amid the totality. The simplest
+two-dimensioned complex which we know of is the plane. To determine
+accurately the position of a point in a plane, the simplest
+way is to take two axes at right angles to each other, that is, fixed
+straight lines, and then to specify the distances by which the point
+in question is removed from each of these axes.</p>
+
+<p>This method of determining the position of a point in a plane
+suggested to the celebrated philosopher and mathematician Descartes
+the fundamental idea of analytical geometry, a branch of mathematics
+in which by the simple artifice of ascribing to every point in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_406">[406]</span>a plane two numerical values, determined by its distances from the
+two axes above referred to, planimetrical considerations are transformed
+into algebraical. So, too, all kinds of curves that graphically
+represent the dependence of things on time, make use of the
+fact that the totality of the points in a plane is two-dimensional.
+For example, to represent in a graphical form the increase of the
+population of a city, we take a horizontal axis to represent the time,
+and a perpendicular one to represent the numbers which are the
+measures of the population. Any two lines, then, whose lengths
+practical considerations determine, are taken as the unit of time,
+which we may say is a year, and as the unit of population, which
+we will say is one thousand. Some definite year, say 1850, is fixed
+upon as the zero point. Then, from all the equally distant points
+on the horizontal axis, which points stand for the years, we proceed
+in directions parallel to the other axis, that is, in the perpendicular
+direction, just so much upwards as the numbers which stand for the
+population of that year require. The terminal points so reached, or
+the curve which runs through these terminal points, will then present
+a graphic picture of the rates of increase of the population of the
+town in the different years. The rectangular axes of Descartes are
+employed in a similar way for the construction of barometer curves,
+which specify for the different localities of a country the amount of
+variation of the atmospheric pressure during any period of time.
+Immediately next to the plane the surface of the earth will be recognised
+as a two-dimensional aggregate of points. In this case geographical
+latitude and longitude supply the two numbers that are
+requisite accurately to determine the position of a point. Also, the
+totality of all the possible straight lines that can be drawn through
+any point in space is two-dimensional, as we shall best understand if
+we picture to ourselves a plane which is cut in a point by each of
+these straight lines and then remember that by such a construction
+every point on the plane will belong to some one line and, <i>vice versa</i>,
+a line to every point, whence it follows that the totality of all the
+straight lines which pass through the point assigned are of the same
+dimensions as the totality of the points of the imagined plane.</p>
+
+<p>The question might be asked, In what way and to what extent
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_407">[407]</span>in this case is the specification of <i>two</i> numbers requisite and sufficient
+to determine amid all the rays which pass through the specified
+point a definite individual ray? To get a clear idea of the problem
+here involved, let us imagine the ray produced far into the heavens,
+where some quite definite point will correspond to it. Now, the position
+of a point in the heavens depends, as does the position of a
+point on all spherical surfaces, on two numbers. In the heavens
+these two numbers are ordinarily supplied by the two angles called
+altitude, or the distance above the plane of the horizon, and azimuth,
+or the angular distance between the circle on which the altitude is
+measured and the meridian of the observer. It will be seen thus
+that the totality of all the luminous rays that an eye, conceived as a
+point, can receive from the outer world is two-dimensional, and also
+that a luminous point emits a two-dimensional group of luminous
+rays. It will also be observed, in connection with this example, that
+the two-dimensional totality of all the rays that can be drawn through
+a point in space is something different from the totality of the rays
+that pass through a point but are required to lie in a given plane.
+Such a group of objects as the last-named one, is a one-dimensional
+totality.</p>
+
+<p>Now that we have sufficiently discussed the attributes that are
+characteristic of one and two-dimensional aggregates, we may, without
+any further investigation of the subject, propose the following
+definition, that, generally, <i>an n-dimensional totality of infinitely numerous
+things is such, with respect to which the specification of n numbers is
+necessary and sufficient to indicate a definite individual amid the totality
+of all the infinitely numerous individuals of the group</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, the point-aggregate made up of the world-space
+which we inhabit, is a three-dimensional totality. To get true bearings
+in this space and to define any determinate point in it, we have
+therefore to lay through any point which we take as our zero-point
+three axes at right angles to each other, one running from right to
+left, one backwards and forwards, and one upwards and downwards.
+We then join each two of these axes by a plane and are enabled thus
+to specify the position of every point in space by the three perpendicular
+distances by which the point in question is removed in a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_408">[408]</span>positive or negative sense from these three planes. It is customary
+to denote the numbers which are the measures of these three distances
+by <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, and <i>z</i>, the positive <i>x</i>, positive <i>y</i>, and positive <i>z</i> ordinarily
+being reckoned in the right hand, the forward, and the upward
+directions from the origin. If now, with direct reference to
+this fundamental axial system, any particular specification of <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>,
+and <i>z</i> be made, there will, by such an operation, be cut out and isolated
+from the three-dimensional manifoldness of all the points of
+space a totality of less dimensions. If, for example, <i>z</i> is equal to
+seven units or measures, this is equivalent to a statement that only
+the two-dimensional totality of the points is meant, which constitute
+the plane that can be laid at right angles to the upward-passing
+<i>z</i>-axis at a distance of seven measures from the zero-point. Consequently,
+every imaginable equation between <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, and <i>z</i> isolates and
+defines a two-dimensional aggregate of points. If two different equations
+obtain between <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, and <i>z</i>, two such two-dimensional totalities
+will be isolated from among all the points of space. But as these
+last must have some one-dimensional totality in common, we may
+say that the co-existence of two equations between <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, and <i>z</i> defines
+a one-dimensional totality of points, that is to say a straight line, a
+line curved in a plane, or even, perhaps, one curved in space. It
+is evident from this that the introduction of the three axes of reference
+forms a bridge between the theory of space and the theory of
+equations involving three variable quantities, <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, <i>z</i>. The reason that
+the theory of space cannot thus be brought into connection with
+algebra in general, that is, with the theory of indefinitely numerous
+equations, but only with the algebra of three quantities, <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, <i>z</i>, is
+simply to be sought in the fact that space, as we picture it, can only
+have three dimensions.</p>
+
+<p>We have now only to supply a few additional examples of <i>n</i>-dimensional
+totalities. All particles of air are four-dimensional in
+magnitude when in addition to their position in space we also consider
+the variable densities which they assume, as they are expressed
+by the different heights of the barometer in the different parts of the
+atmosphere. Similarly, all conceivable spheres in space are four-dimensional
+magnitudes, for their centres form a three-dimensional
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_409">[409]</span>point-aggregate, and around each centre there may be additionally
+conceived a one-dimensional totality of spheres, the radii of which
+can be expressed by every numerical magnitude from zero to infinity.
+Further, if we imagine a measuring stick of invariable length to assume
+every conceivable position in space, the positions so obtained
+will constitute a five-dimensional aggregate. For, in the first place,
+one of the extremities of the measuring stick may be conceived to
+assume a position at every point of space, and this determines for
+one extremity alone of the stick a three-dimensional totality of positions;
+and secondly, as we have seen above, there proceeds from
+every such position of this extremity a two-dimensional totality of
+directions, and by conceiving the measuring-stick to be placed lengthwise
+in every one of these directions we shall obtain all the conceivable
+positions which the second extremity can assume, and consequently,
+the dimensions must be 3 plus 2 or 5. Finally, to find out
+how many dimensions the totality of all the possible positions of a
+square, invariable in magnitude, possesses, we first give one of its
+corners all conceivable positions in space, and we thus obtain three
+dimensions. One definite point in space now being fixed for the position
+of one corner of the square, we imagine drawn through this
+point all possible lines, and on each we lay off the length of the side
+of the square and thus obtain two additional dimensions. Through
+the point obtained for the position of the second corner of the square
+we must now conceive all the possible directions drawn that are perpendicular
+to the line thus fixed, and we must lay off once more on
+each of these directions the side of the square. By this last determination
+the dimensions are only increased by one, for only one one-dimensional
+totality of perpendicular directions is possible to one
+straight line in one of its points. Three corners of the square are now
+fixed and therewith the position of the fourth also is uniquely determined.
+Accordingly, the totality of all equal squares which only
+differ from one another by their position in space, constitutes a manifoldness
+of six dimensions.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_410">[410]</span></p>
+
+<h4>II.<br>
+THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NOTION OF FOUR-DIMENSIONAL POINT-AGGREGATES,
+PERMISSIBLE.</h4>
+
+<p>In the preceding section it was shown that we can conceive not
+only of manifoldnesses of one, two, and three dimensions, but also
+of manifoldnesses of <i>any</i> number of dimensions. But it was at the
+same time indicated that our world-space, that is, the totality of all
+conceivable <i>points</i> that differ only in respect of position, cannot in
+agreement with our notions of things possess more than three dimensions.
+But the question now arises, whether, if the progress of
+science tends in such a direction, it is permissible to extend the notion
+of space by the introduction of point-aggregates of more than
+three dimensions, and to engage in the study of the properties of
+such creations, although we know that notwithstanding the fact that
+we may conceptually establish and explore such aggregates of points,
+yet we cannot picture to ourselves these creations as we do the spatial
+magnitudes which surround us, that is, the regular three-dimensional
+aggregates of points.</p>
+
+<p>To show the reader clearly that this question must be answered
+in the affirmative, that the extension of our notion of space is permissible,
+although it leads to things which we cannot perceive by
+our senses, I may call the reader’s attention to the fact that in arithmetic
+we are accustomed from our youth upwards to extensions of
+ideas, which, accurately viewed, as little admit of graphic conception
+as a four-dimensional space, that is, a point-aggregate of four
+dimensions. By his senses man first reaches only the idea of whole
+numbers—the results of counting. The observation of primitive
+peoples&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_79" href="#Footnote_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> and of children clearly proves that the essential decisive
+factors of counting are these three: First, we abstract, in the counting
+of things, completely from the individual and characteristic attributes
+of these things, that is, we consider them as homogeneous.
+Second, we associate individually with the things which we count
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_411">[411]</span>other homogeneous things. These other things are even now, among
+uncivilised peoples, the ten fingers of the two hands. They may,
+however, be simple strokes, or, as in the case of dice and dominoes,
+black points on a white background. Third, we substitute for the
+result of this association some concise symbol or word; for example,
+the Romans substituted for three things counted, three strokes placed
+side by side, namely: III; but for greater numbers of things they
+employed abbreviated signs. The Aztecs, the original inhabitants
+of Mexico, had time enough, it seems, to express all the numbers
+up to nineteen by equal circles placed side by side. They had abbreviated
+signs only for the numbers 20, 400, 8000, and so forth.
+In speaking, some one same sound might be associated with the
+things counted; but this method of counting is nowadays employed
+only by clocks: the languages of men since prehistoric times have
+fashioned concise words for the results of the association in question.
+From the notion of number, thus fixed as the result of counting, man
+reached the notion of the addition of two numbers, and thence the
+notion that is the inverse of the last process, the notion of subtraction.
+But at this point it clearly appears that not every problem
+which may be propounded is soluble; for there is no number which
+can express the result of the subtraction of a number from one which
+is equally large or from one which is smaller than itself. The primary
+school pupil who says that 8 from 5 “won’t go” is perfectly
+right from his point of view. For there really does not exist any result
+of counting which added to eight will give five.</p>
+
+<p>If humanity had abided by this point of view and had rested
+content with the opinion that the problem “5 minus 8” is not solvable,
+the science of arithmetic would never have received its full
+development, and humanity would not have advanced as far in civilisation
+as it has. Fortunately, men said to themselves at this
+crisis: “If 5 minus 8 won’t go, we’ll <i>make it go</i>; if 5 minus 8 does
+not possess an intelligible meaning, we will simply give it one.” As
+a fact, things which have not a meaning always afford men a pleasing
+opportunity of investing them with one. The question is, then,
+what significance is the problem “5 minus 8” to be invested with?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_412">[412]</span></p>
+
+<p>The most natural and, therefore, the most advantageous solution
+undoubtedly is to abide by the original notion of subtraction as
+the inverse of addition, and to make the significance of 5 minus 8
+such, that for 5 minus 8 plus 8 we shall get our original minuend 5.
+By such a method all the rules of computation which apply to real
+differences will also hold good for unreal differences, such as 5 minus
+8. But it then clearly appears that all forms expressive of differences
+in which the number that stands before the minus direction is
+less by an equal amount than that which follows it may be regarded
+as equal; so that the simplest course seems to be to introduce as
+the common characteristic of all equal differential forms of this description
+a common sign, which will indicate at the same time the
+difference of the two numbers thus associated. Thus it came about,
+that for 5 minus 8, as well as for every differential form which can
+be regarded as equal thereto the sign “-3” was introduced. But in
+calling differential forms of this description numbers, the notion of
+number was extended and a new domain was opened up, namely,
+the domain of negative numbers.</p>
+
+<p>In the further development of the science of arithmetic, through
+the operation of division viewed as the inverse of multiplication, a
+second extension of the idea of number was reached, namely, the
+notion of fractional numbers as the outcome of divisions that had
+led to numbers hitherto undefined. We find, thus, that the science
+of arithmetic throughout its whole development has strictly adhered
+to the principle of conformity and consistency and has invested every
+association of two numbers, which before had no significance, by the
+introduction of new numbers, with a real significance, such that similar
+operations in conformity with exactly the same rules could be
+performed with the new numbers, viewed as the results of this association,
+as with the numbers which were before known and perfectly
+defined. Thus the science proceeded further on its way and reached
+the notions of irrational, imaginary, and complex numbers.</p>
+
+<p>The point in all this, which the reader must carefully note, is,
+that all the numbers of arithmetic, with the exception of the positive
+whole numbers, are artificial products of human thought, invented
+to make the language of arithmetic more flexible, and to accelerate
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_413">[413]</span>the progress of science. All these numbers lack the attributes
+of representability.</p>
+
+<p>No man in the world can picture to himself “minus three
+trees.” It is possible, of course, to know that when three trees of a
+garden have been cut down and carried away, that three are missing,
+and by substituting for “missing” the inverse notion of “added,”
+we may say, perhaps, that “minus three trees” are added. But
+this is quite different from the feat of imagining a negative number
+of trees. We can only picture to ourselves a number of trees that
+results from actual counting, that is, a positive whole number. Yet,
+notwithstanding all this, people had not the slightest hesitation in
+extending the notion of number. Exactly so must it be permitted
+us in geometry to extend the notion of space, even though such an
+extension can only be mentally defined and can never be brought
+within the range of human powers of representation.</p>
+
+<p>In mathematics, in fact, the extension of any notion is admissible,
+provided such extension does not lead to contradictions with
+itself or with results which are well established. Whether such
+extensions are necessary, justifiable, or important for the advancement
+of science is a different question. It must be admitted, therefore,
+that the mathematician is justified in the extension of the notion
+of space as a point-aggregate of three dimensions, and in the
+introduction of space or point-aggregates of more than three dimensions,
+and in the employment of them as means of research. Other
+sciences also operate with things which they do not know exist, and
+which, though they are sufficiently defined, cannot be perceived by
+our senses. For example, the physicist employs the ether as a
+means of investigation, though he can have no sensory knowledge
+of it. The ether is nothing more than a means which enables us to
+comprehend mechanically the effects known as action at a distance
+and to bring them within the range of a common point of view.
+Without the assumption of a material which penetrates everything,
+and by means of whose undulations impulses are transmitted to the
+remotest parts of space, the phenomena of light, of heat, of gravitation,
+and of electricity would be a jumble of isolated and unconnected
+mysteries. The assumption of an ether, however, comprises
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_414">[414]</span>in a systematic scheme all these isolated events, facilitates our mental
+control of the phenomena of nature, and enables us to produce
+these phenomena at will. But it must not be forgotten in such reflections
+that the ether itself is even a greater problem for man, and
+that the ether-hypothesis does not solve the difficulties of phenomena,
+but only puts them in a unitary conceptual shape. Notwithstanding
+all this, physicists have never had the least hesitation in employing
+the ether as a means of investigation. And as little do reasons
+exist why the mathematicians should hesitate to investigate
+the properties of a four-dimensioned point-aggregate, with the view
+of acquiring thus a convenient means of research.</p>
+
+<h4>III.<br>
+THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IDEA OF FOUR-DIMENSIONED POINT-AGGREGATES
+OF SERVICE TO RESEARCH.</h4>
+
+<p>From the concession that the mathematician has the right to
+define and investigate the properties of point-aggregates of more
+than three dimensions, it does not necessarily follow that the introduction
+of an idea of this description is of value to science. Thus,
+for example, in arithmetic, the introduction of operations which
+spring from involution, as involution and its two inverse operations
+proceed from multiplication, is undoubtedly permitted. Just as for
+“<i>a</i> times <i>a</i> times <i>a</i>” we write the abbreviated symbol “<i>a</i>³,” (which
+we read, <i>a</i> to the third power,) and investigate in detail the operation
+of involution thus defined, so we might also introduce some
+shorthand symbol for “<i>a</i> to the <i>a</i>ᵗʰ power to the <i>a</i>ᵗʰ power” and thus
+reach an operation of the fourth degree, which would regard <i>a</i> as a
+passive number and the number 3, or any higher number, as the
+active number, that is, as the number which indicates how often <i>a</i>
+is taken as the base of a power whose exponent may be <i>a</i>, or “<i>a</i> to
+the <i>a</i>ᵗʰ,” or “<i>a</i> to the <i>a</i>ᵗʰ to the <i>a</i>ᵗʰ power.”</p>
+
+<p>But the introduction of such an operation of the fourth degree
+has proved itself to be of no especial value to mathematics. And
+the reason is that in the operation of involution the law of commutation
+does not hold good. In addition, the numbers to be added may
+be interchanged and the introduction of multiplication is therefore
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_415">[415]</span>of great value. So, also, in multiplication the numbers which are
+combined, that is, the factors, may be changed about in any way,
+and thus the introduction of involution is of value. But in involution
+the base and the exponent cannot be interchanged, and consequently
+the introduction of any higher operation is almost valueless.</p>
+
+<p>But with the introduction of the idea of point-aggregates of
+multiple dimensions the case is wholly different. The innovation in
+question has proved itself to be not only of great importance to research,
+but the progress of science has irresistibly forced investigators
+to the introduction of this idea, as we shall now set forth in
+detail.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, algebra, especially the algebraical theory of
+systems of equations, derives much advantage from the notion of
+multiple dimensioned spaces. If we have only three unknown quantities,
+<i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, <i>z</i>, the algebraical questions which arise from the possible
+problems of this class admit, as we have above seen, of geometrical
+representation to the eye. Owing to this possibility of geometrical
+representation, some certain simple geometrical ideas like “moving,”
+“lying in,” “intersecting,” and so forth, may be translated into
+algebraical events. Now, no reason exists why algebra should stop
+at three variable quantities; it must in fact take into consideration
+any number of variable quantities.</p>
+
+<p>For purposes of brevity and greater evidentness, therefore, it is
+quite natural to employ geometrical forms of speech in the consideration
+of more than three variables. But when we do this, we assume,
+perhaps without really intending to do so, the idea of a space
+of more than three dimensions. If we have four variable quantities,
+<i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, <i>z</i>, <i>u</i>, we arrive, by conceiving attributed to each of these four
+quantities every possible numerical magnitude, at a four-dimensioned
+manifoldness of numerical quantities, which we may just as well regard
+as a four-dimensioned aggregate of points. Two equations
+which exist on this supposition between <i>x</i>, <i>y</i>, <i>z</i>, and <i>u</i>, define two
+three-dimensioned aggregates of points, which intersect, as we may
+briefly say, in a two-dimensioned aggregate of points, that is, in a
+surface; and so on. In a somewhat different manner the determination
+of the contents of a square or a cube by the involution of a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_416">[416]</span>number which stands for the length of its sides, leads to the notion
+of four-dimensioned structures, and, consequently, to the notion of
+a four-dimensioned point-space. When we note that <i>a</i>² stands for
+the contents of a square, and <i>a</i>³ for the contents of a cube, we naturally
+inquire after the contents of a structure which is produced
+from the cube as the cube is produced from the square and which
+also will have the contents <i>a</i>⁴. We cannot, it is true, clearly picture
+to ourselves a structure of this description, but we can, nevertheless,
+establish its properties with mathematical exactness.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_80" href="#Footnote_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> It is bounded
+by 8 cubes just as the cube is bounded by 6 squares; it has 16 corners,
+24 squares, and 32 edges, so that from every corner 4 edges, 6
+squares, and 4 cubes proceed, and from every edge 3 squares and 3
+cubes.</p>
+
+<p>Yet despite the great service to algebra of this idea of multiple-dimensioned
+space, it must be conceded that the conception although
+convenient is yet not indispensable. It is true, algebra is in need
+of the idea of multiple dimensions, but it is not so absolutely in need
+of the idea of <i>point</i>-aggregates of multiple dimensions.</p>
+
+<p>This notion is, however, necessary and serviceable for a profound
+comprehension of geometry. The system of geometrical knowledge
+which Euclid of Alexandria created about three hundred years
+before Christ, supplied during a period of more than two thousand
+years a brilliant example of a body of conclusions and truths which
+were mutually consistent and logical. Up to the present century
+the idea of elementary geometry was indissolubly bound up with
+the name of Euclid, so that in England where people adhered longest
+to the rigid deductive system of the Grecian mathematician, the
+task of “learning geometry” and “reading Euclid” were until a
+few years ago identical. Every proposition of this Euclidian system
+rests on other propositions, as one building-stone in a house rests
+upon another. Only the very lowest stones, the foundations, were
+without supports. These are the axioms or fundamental propositions,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_417">[417]</span>truths on which all other truths are, directly or indirectly,
+founded, but which themselves are assumed without demonstration
+as self-evident.</p>
+
+<p>But the spirit of mathematical research grew in time more and
+more critical, and finally asked, whether these axioms might not possibly
+admit of demonstration. Especially was a rigid proof sought
+for the eleventh axiom of Euclid, which treats of parallels.</p>
+
+<p>After centuries of fruitless attempts to prove Euclid’s eleventh
+axiom, Gauss, and with him Bolyai and Lobatschewsky, Riemann
+and Helmholtz, finally stated the decisive reasons why any attempt
+to prove the axiom of the parallels must necessarily be futile. These
+reasons consist of the fact that though this axiom holds good enough
+in the world-space such as we do and can conceive it, yet three-dimensioned
+spaces are ideally conceivable though not capable of
+mental representation, where the axiom does not hold good. The
+axiom was thus shown to be a mere fact of <i>observation</i>, and from that
+time on there could no longer be any thought of a deductive demonstration
+of it. In view of the intimate connection, which both in an
+historical and epistemological point of view exists between the extension
+of the concept of space and the critical examination of the
+axioms of Euclid, we must enter at somewhat greater length into
+the discussion of the last mentioned propositions.</p>
+
+<p>Of the axioms which Euclid premises to his geometry, only the
+following three are really geometrical axioms:</p>
+
+<p><i>Eighth axiom</i>: Magnitudes which coincide with one another are
+equal to one another.</p>
+
+<p><i>Eleventh axiom</i>: If a straight line meet two straight lines so as
+to make the two interior angles on the same side of it taken together
+less than two right angles, these straight lines, being continually
+produced, shall at length meet on that side on which are the angles
+which are less than two right angles.</p>
+
+<p><i>Twelfth axiom</i>: Two straight lines cannot inclose a [finite]
+space.</p>
+
+<p>The numerous proofs which in the course of time were adduced
+in demonstration of these axioms, especially of the eleventh, all turn
+out on close examination to be pseudo-proofs. Legendre drew attention
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_418">[418]</span>to the fact that either of the following axioms might be
+substituted for the eleventh:</p>
+
+<p><i>a</i>) Through a point there can be drawn to a straight line, within
+the plane which joins the point with the line, one and one line only
+which shall not intersect the first (parallels) however far the two lines
+may be produced;</p>
+
+<p><i>b</i>) If two parallel lines are cut by a third straight line, the interior
+alternate angles will be equal.</p>
+
+<p><i>c</i>) The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right
+angles, that is, to the angle of a straight line or 180°.</p>
+
+<p>By the aid of any one of these three assertions, the eleventh
+axiom of Euclid may be proved, and, <i>vice versa</i>, by the aid of the
+latter each of the three assertions may be proved, of course with
+the help of the other two axioms, eight and twelve. The perception
+that the eleventh axiom does not admit of demonstration without
+the employment of one of the foregoing substitutes may best be
+gained from the consideration of congruent figures. Every reader
+will remember from his first instruction in geometry that the congruence
+of two triangles is demonstrated by the superposition of one
+triangle on the other and by then ascertaining whether the two completely
+coincide, no assumptions being made in the determination
+except those above mentioned.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="fourth-dimension-figure-1" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/fourth-dimension-figure-1.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 1.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In the case of triangles which are congruent as are I and II in
+the preceding cut, this coincidence may be effected by the simple <i>displacement</i>
+of one of the triangles; so that even a two-dimensional
+being, supposed to be endowed with powers of reasoning, but only
+capable of picturing to itself motions within a plane, also might
+convince itself that the two triangles I and II could be made to
+coincide. But a being of this description could not convince itself
+in like manner of the congruence of triangles I and III. It would
+discover the equality of the three sides and the three angles, but it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_419">[419]</span>could never succeed in so superposing the two triangles on each
+other as to make them coincide. A three-dimensioned being, however,
+can do this very easily. It has simply to turn triangle I about
+one of its sides and to shove the triangle, thus brought into the position
+of its reflection in a mirror, into the position of triangle III.
+Similarly, triangles II and III may be made to coincide by moving
+either out of the plane of the paper around one of its sides as axis
+and turning it until it again falls in the plane of the paper. The
+triangle thus turned over can then be brought into the position of
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>Later on we shall revert to these two kinds of congruence:
+“congruence by displacement” and “congruence by circumversion.”
+For the present we will start from the fact that it is always possible
+within the limits of a plane to take a triangle out of one position and
+bring it into another without altering its sides and angles. The
+question is, whether this is only possible in the plane, or whether it
+can also be done on other surfaces.</p>
+
+<p>We find that there are certain surfaces in which this is possible,
+and certain others in which it is not. For instance, it is impossible
+to move the triangle drawn on the surface of an egg into some other
+position on the egg’s surface without a distension or contraction of
+some of the triangle’s parts. On the other hand, it is quite possible
+to move the triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere into any other
+position on the sphere’s surface without a distension or contraction
+of its parts. The mathematical reason of this fact is, that the surface
+of a sphere, like the plane, has everywhere the same curvature,
+but that the surface of an egg at different places has different curvatures.
+Of a plane we say that it has everywhere the curvature zero;
+of the surface of a sphere we say it has everywhere a positive curvature,
+which is greater in proportion as the radius is smaller. There
+are surfaces also which have a constant negative curvature; these
+surfaces exhibit at every point in directions proceeding from the
+same side a partly concave and a partly convex structure, somewhat
+like the centre of a saddle. There is no necessity of our entering in
+any detail into the character and structure of the last-mentioned
+surfaces.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_420">[420]</span></p>
+
+<p>Intimately related with the plane, however, are all those surfaces,
+which, like the plane, have the curvature zero; in this category
+belong especially cylindrical surfaces and conical surfaces. A
+sheet of paper of the form of the sector of a circle may, for example,
+be readily bent into the shape of a conical surface. If two congruent
+triangles, now, be drawn on the sheet of paper, which may by displacement
+be translated the one into the other, these triangles will,
+it is plain, also remain congruent on the conical surface; that is, on
+the conical surface also we may displace the one into the other; for
+though a bending of the figures will take place, there will be no distension
+or contraction. Similarly, there are surfaces which, like the
+sphere, have everywhere a constant positive curvature. On such
+surfaces also every figure can be transferred into some other position
+without distension or contraction of its parts. Accordingly, on all
+surfaces thus related to the plane or sphere, the assumption which
+underlies the eighth axiom of Euclid, that it is possible to transfer
+into any new position any figure drawn on such surfaces without
+distortion, holds good.</p>
+
+<p>The eleventh axiom in its turn also holds good on all surfaces
+of constant curvature, whether the curvature be zero or positive;
+only in such instances instead of “straight” line we must say
+“shortest” line. On the surface of a sphere, namely, two shortest
+lines, that is, arcs of two great circles, always intersect, no matter
+whether they are produced in the direction of the side at which the
+third arc of a great circle makes with them angles less than two
+right angles, or, in the direction of the other side, where this arc
+makes with them angles of more than two right angles. On the
+plane, however, two straight lines intersect only on the side where a
+third straight line that meets them makes with them interior angles
+less than two right angles.</p>
+
+<p>The twelfth axiom of Euclid, finally, only holds good on the
+plane and on the surfaces related to it, but not on the sphere or other
+surfaces which, like the sphere, have a constant positive curvature.
+This also accounts for the fact that one of the three postulates
+which we regarded as substitutes for the eleventh axiom, though
+valid for the plane, is not true for the surface of a sphere; namely,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_421">[421]</span>the postulate that defines the sum of the angles of a triangle. This
+sum in a plane triangle is two right angles; in a spherical triangle
+it is more than two right angles, the spherical triangle being
+greater, the greater the excess the sum of its angles is above
+two right angles. It will be seen, from these considerations, that
+in geometries in which curved surfaces and not fixed planes are
+studied, the axioms of Euclid are either all or partially false.</p>
+
+<p>The axioms of geometry thus having been revealed as facts of
+experience, the question suggested itself whether in the same way
+in which it was shown that different two-dimensional geometries
+were possible, also different three-dimensional systems of geometry
+might not be developed; and consequently what the relations were
+in which these might stand to the geometry of the space given by
+our senses and representable to our mind. As a fact, a three-dimensional
+geometry can be developed, which like the geometry of the
+surface of an egg will exclude the axiom that a figure or body can
+be transferred from any one part of space to any other and yet remain
+congruent to itself. Of a three-dimensional space in which
+such a geometry can be developed we say, that it has no constant
+measure of curvature.</p>
+
+<p>The space which is representable to us, and which we shall
+henceforth call the <i>space of experience</i>, possesses, as our experiences
+without exception confirm, the especial property that every bodily
+thing can be transferred from any one part of it to any other without
+suffering in the transference any distension or any contraction.
+The space of experience, therefore, has a constant measure of curvature.
+The question, however, whether this measure of curvature
+is zero or positive, that is, whether the space of experience possesses
+the properties which in two-dimensioned structures a plane possesses,
+or whether it is the three-dimensioned analogon of the surface
+of a sphere is one which future experience alone can answer. If the
+space of experience has a constant positive measure of curvature
+which is different from zero, be the difference ever so slight, a point
+which should move forever onward in a straight line, or, more accurately
+expressed, in a shortest line, would sometime, though perhaps
+after having traversed a distance which to us is inconceivable,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_422">[422]</span>ultimately have to arrive from the opposite direction at the place
+from which it set out, just as a point which moves forever onward
+in the same direction on the surface of a sphere must ultimately arrive
+at its starting point, the distance it traverses being longer the
+greater the radius of the sphere or the smaller its curvature.</p>
+
+<p>It will seem, at first blush, almost incredible, that the space of
+experience even <i>can</i> have this property. But an example, which is
+the historical analogon of this modern transformation of our conceptions,
+will render the idea less marvellous. Let us transport ourselves
+back to the age of Homer. At that time people believed that
+the earth was a great disc surrounded on all sides by oceans which
+were conceived to be in all directions infinitely great. Indeed, for
+the primitive man, who has never journeyed far from the place of
+his birth, this is the most natural conception. But imagine now that
+some scholar had come, and had informed the Homeric hero Ulysses
+that if he would travel forever on the earth in the same direction he
+would ultimately come back to the point from which he started;
+surely Ulysses would have gazed with as much astonishment upon
+this scholar as we now look upon the mathematician who tells us
+that it is possible that a point which moves forever onward in space
+in the same direction may ultimately arrive at the place from which
+it started. But despite the fact that Ulysses would have regarded
+the assertion of the scholar as false because contradictory to his
+familiar conceptions, that scholar, nevertheless, would have been
+right; for the earth is not a plane but a spherical surface. So also
+the mathematician might be right who bases this more recent strange
+view on the possible fact that the space of experience may have a
+measure of curvature which is not exactly zero but slightly greater
+than zero. If this were really the case, the <i>volume</i> of the space of
+experience, though very large, would, nevertheless, be finite; just
+as the real spherical surface of the earth as contrasted with the
+Homeric plane surface is finite, having so and so many square miles.
+When the objection is here made that a finiteness of space is totally
+at variance with our modes of thought and conceptions, two ideas,
+“infinitely great” and “unlimited,” are confounded. All that is at
+variance with our practical conceptions is that space can anywhere
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_423">[423]</span>have a limit; not that it may possibly be of tremendous but finite
+magnitude.</p>
+
+<p>It will now be asked if we cannot determine by actual observation
+whether the measure of curvature of experiential space is exactly
+zero or slightly different therefrom. The theorem of the sum
+of the angles of a triangle and the conclusions which follow from this
+theorem do indeed supply us with a means of ascertaining this fact.
+And the results of observation have been, that <i>the measure of curvature
+of space is in all probability exactly equal to zero or if it is slightly
+different from zero it is so little so that the technical means of observation
+at our command and especially our telescopes are not competent to determine
+the amount of the deviation</i>. More, we cannot with any certainty
+say.</p>
+
+<p>All these reflections, to which the criticism of the hypotheses
+that underlie geometry long ago led investigators, compel us to institute
+a comparison between the space of experience and other
+three-dimensioned aggregates of points (spaces), which we cannot
+mentally represent but can in thought and word accurately define
+and investigate. As soon, however, as we are fully involved in the
+task of accurately investigating the properties of three-dimensional
+aggregates of points, we similarly find ourselves forced to regard
+such aggregates as the component elements of a manifoldness of
+more than three dimensions. In this way the exact criticism of
+even ordinary geometry leads us to the abstract assumption of a
+space of more than three dimensions. And as the extension of every
+idea gives a clearer and more translucent form to the idea as it originally
+stood, here too the idea of multiple-dimensioned aggregates
+of points and the investigation of their properties has thrown a new
+light on the truths of ordinary geometry and placed its properties in
+clearer relief. Amid the numerous examples which show how the
+notion of a space of multiple-dimensions has been of great service
+to science in the investigation of three-dimensioned space, we shall
+give one a place here which is within the comprehension of non-mathematicians.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine in a plane two triangles whose angles are denoted
+by pairs of numbers—namely, by 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, and 2-5, 3-5, 4-5.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_424">[424]</span>(See Fig. 2.) Let the two triangles so lie that the three lines which
+join the angles 1-2 and 2-5, 1-3 and 3-5, and 1-4 and 4-5 intersect at
+a point, which we will call 1-5. If now we cause the sides of the
+triangles which are opposite to these angles to intersect, it will be
+found that the points of intersection so obtained possess the peculiar
+property of lying all in one and the same straight line. The point
+of intersection of the connection 1-3 and 1-4 with the connection 4-5
+and 3-5 may appropriately be called 3-4. Similarly, the point of intersection
+2-4 is produced
+by the meeting of 4-5, 2-5
+and 1-2, 1-4; and the point
+of intersection 2-3, by the
+meeting of 1-3, 1-2 and
+3-5, 2-5. The statement,
+that the three points of
+intersection 3-4, 2-4, 2-3,
+thus obtained, lie in one
+straight line, can be
+proved by the principles
+of plane geometry only
+with difficulty and great
+circumstantiality. But by
+resorting to the three-dimensional
+space of experience,
+in which the plane of the drawing lies, the proposition may
+be rendered almost self-evident.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp71" id="fourth-dimension-figure-2" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/fourth-dimension-figure-2.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 2.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>To begin with, imagine any five points in space which may be
+denoted by the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; then imagine all the possible
+ten straight lines of junction drawn between each two of these points,
+namely, 1-2, 1-3 ... 4-5; and finally, also, all the ten planes of
+junction of every three points described, namely, the plane 1-2-3,
+1-2-4, ... 3-4-5. A spatial figure will thus be obtained, whose ten
+straight lines will meet some interposed plane in ten points whose
+relative positions are exactly those of the ten points above described.
+Thus, for example, on this plane the points 1-2, 1-3, and 2-3 will lie in
+a straight line, for through the three spatial points 1, 2, 3, a plane can
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_425">[425]</span>be drawn which will cut the plane of a drawing in a straight line.
+The reason, therefore, that the three points 3-4, 2-4, 2-3, also must
+ultimately lie in a straight line, consists in the simple fact that the
+plane of the three points 2, 3, 4, must cut the plane of the drawing
+in a straight line. The figure here considered consists of ten points
+of which sets of three so lie ten times in a straight line that conversely
+from every point also three straight lines proceed.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="fourth-dimension-figure-3" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/fourth-dimension-figure-3.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 3.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Now, just as this figure is a section of a complete three-dimensional
+pentagon, so another remarkable figure, of similar properties,
+may be obtained by the section of a figure of four-dimensioned
+space. Imagine, namely, six points, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, situated in
+this four-dimensioned space, and every three of them connected by
+a plane, and every four of them by a three-dimensioned space. We
+shall obtain thus twenty planes and fifteen three-dimensioned spaces
+which will cut the plane in which the figure is to be produced in
+twenty points and fifteen rays which so lie that each point sends out
+three rays and every ray contains four points. (See Fig. 3.) Figures
+of this description, which are so composed of points and rays
+that an equal number of rays proceed from every point and an equal
+number of points lie in every ray, are called <i>configurations</i>. Other
+configurations may, of course, be produced, by taking a different
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_426">[426]</span>number of points and by assuming that the points taken lie in a
+space of different or even higher dimensions. The author of this
+article was the first to draw attention to configurations derived from
+spaces of higher dimensions. As we see, then, the notion of a space
+of more than three dimensions has performed important work in the
+investigations of common plane geometry.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, I should like to add a remark which Cranz makes
+regarding the application of the idea of multiple-dimensioned space
+to theoretical chemistry. (See the treatise before cited.) In chemistry,
+the molecules of a compound body are said to consist of the
+atoms of the elements which are contained in the body, and these are
+supposed to be situated at certain distances from one another, and
+to be held in their relative positions by certain forces. At first, the
+centres of the atoms were conceived to lie in one and the same
+plane. But Wislicenus was led by researches in paralactic acid
+to explain the differences of isomeric molecules of the same structural
+formulæ by the different positions of the atoms in <i>space</i>. (Compare
+“La chimie dans l’espace” by van’t Hoff, 1875, preface by J.
+Wislicenus). In fact four points can always be so arranged in space
+that every two of them may have any distance from each other; and
+the change of one of the six distances does not necessarily involve
+the alteration of any other.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose our molecule consists of five atoms? Four of these
+may be so placed that the distance between any two of them can be
+made what we please. But it is no longer possible to give the fifth
+atom a position such that each of the four distances by which it is
+separated from the other atoms may be what we please. Quite the
+contrary, the fourth distance is dependent on the three remaining
+distances; for the space of experience has only three dimensions.
+If, therefore, I have a molecule which consists of five atoms I cannot
+alter the distance between two of them without at least altering
+some second distance. But if we imagine the centres of the atoms
+placed in a four-dimensioned space, this can be done; all the ten
+distances which may be conceived to exist between the five points
+will then be independent of one another. To reach the same result
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_427">[427]</span>in the case of six atoms we must assume a five-dimensional space;
+and so on.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if the independence of all the possible distances between
+the atoms of a molecule is absolutely required by theoretical chemical
+research, the science is really compelled, if it deals with molecules
+of more than four atoms, to make use of the idea of a space of
+more than three dimensions. This idea is, in this case, simply an
+instrument of research, just as are, also, the ideas of molecules and
+atoms—means designed to embrace in an obvious and systematic
+form the phenomena of chemistry and to discover the conditions
+under which new phenomena can be evoked. Whether a four-dimensioned
+space really exists is a question whose insolubility cannot
+prevent research from making use of the idea, exactly as chemistry
+has not been prevented from making use of the notion of atom,
+although no one really knows whether the things we call atoms exist
+or not.</p>
+
+<h4>IV.<br>
+REFUTATION OF THE ARGUMENTS ADDUCED TO PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF A
+FOUR-DIMENSIONED SPACE INCLUSIVE OF THE VISIBLE WORLD.</h4>
+
+<p>The considerations of the preceding section will have convinced
+the cultured non-mathematician of the service which the theory of
+multiple-dimensioned spaces has done, and bids fair to do, for geometrical
+research. In addition thereto is the consideration that every
+extension of one branch of mathematical science is a constant source
+of beneficial and helpful influence to the other branches. The knowledge,
+however, that mathematicians can employ the notion of four-dimensioned
+space with good results in their researches, would never
+have been sufficient to procure it its present popularity; for every
+man of intelligence has now heard of it, and, in jest or in earnest,
+often speaks of it. The knowledge of a four-dimensioned space did
+not reach the ears of cultured non-mathematicians until the consequences
+which the spiritualists fancied it was permissible to draw
+from this mathematical notion were publicly known. But it is a tremendous
+step from the four-dimensioned space of the mathematicians
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_428">[428]</span>to the space from which the spirit-friends of the spiritualistic
+mediums entertain us with rappings, knockings, and bad English.
+Before taking this step we will first discuss the question of the real
+existence of a four-dimensional space, not judging the question
+whether this space, if it really does exist, is inhabited by reasonable
+beings who consciously act upon the world in which we exist.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="fourth-dimension-figure-4" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/fourth-dimension-figure-4.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 4.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Among the reasons which are put forward to prove the existence
+of a four-dimensional space containing the world, the least reprehensible
+are those which are based on the existence of symmetry.
+We spoke above of two triangles in the same plane which have all
+their sides and angles congruent, but which cannot be made to coincide
+by simple displacement within the plane; but we saw that this
+coincidence could be effected by holding fast one side of one triangle
+and moving it out of its plane until it had been so far turned round
+that it fell back into its plane. Now something similar to this exists
+in space. Cut two figures, exactly like that of Fig. 4., out of
+a piece of paper, and turn the triangle <i>ABF</i> about the side <i>AB</i>,
+<i>ACE</i> about the side <i>AC</i>, <i>BCD</i> about the side <i>BC</i>, and in one figure
+above and in the other below; then in both cases the points <i>D</i>,
+<i>E</i>, <i>F</i> will meet at a point, because <i>AE</i> is equal to <i>AF</i>, <i>BF</i> is equal
+to <i>BD</i>, <i>CD</i> is equal to <i>CE</i>. In this manner we obtain two pyramids
+which in all lengths and all angles are congruent, yet which
+cannot, no matter how we try, be made to coincide, that is, be so
+fitted the one into the other that they shall both stand as one pyramid.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_429">[429]</span>But the <i>reflected</i> image of the one could be brought into coincidence
+with the other. Two spatial structures whose sides and angles
+are thus equal to each other, and of which each may be viewed
+as the reflected image of the other, are called <i>symmetrical</i>. For instance,
+the right and the left hand are symmetrical; or, a right and
+a left glove. Now just as in two dimensions it is impossible by
+simple displacement to bring into congruence triangles which like
+those above mentioned can only be made to coincide by circumversion,
+so also in three dimensions it is impossible to bring into congruence
+two symmetrical pyramids. Careful mathematical reflection,
+however, declares, that this could be effected if it were possible,
+while holding one of the surfaces, to move the pyramid out of the
+space of experience, and to turn it round through a four-dimensioned
+space until it reached a point at which it would return again
+into our experiential space. This process would simply be the four-dimensional
+analogon of the three-dimensional circumversion in the
+above-mentioned case of the two triangles. Further, the interior
+surfaces in this process would be converted into exterior surfaces,
+and <i>vice versa</i>, exactly as in the circumversion of a triangle the anterior
+and posterior sides are interchanged. If the structure which
+is to be converted into its symmetrical counterpart is made of a
+flexible material, the interchange mentioned of the interior and
+exterior surfaces may be effected by simply turning the structure inside
+out; for example, a right glove may thus be converted into a
+left glove.</p>
+
+<p>Now from this truth, that every structure can be converted by
+means of a four-dimensional space inclusive of the world, into a
+structure symmetrical with it, it has been sought to establish the
+probability of the real existence of a four-dimensioned space. Yet
+it will be evident, from the discussions of the preceding section, that
+the only inference which we can here make is, that the idea of a
+four-dimensioned space is competent, from a mathematical point of
+view, to throw some light upon the phenomena of symmetry. To
+conclude from these facts that a space of this kind really exists,
+would be as daring as to conclude from the fact that the uniform
+angular velocity of the apparent motions of the fixed stars is explicable
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_430">[430]</span>from the assumption of an axial motion of the firmament, that
+the fixed stars are really rigidly placed in a celestial sphere rotating
+about its axis. It must not be forgotten that our comprehension of
+the phenomena of the real world consists of two elements: first, of
+that which the things really are; and, second, of that by which we
+rationally apprehend the things. This latter element is partly dependent
+on the sum of the experiences which we have before acquired,
+and partly on the necessity, due to the imperfection of reason,
+of our embracing the multitudinous isolated phenomena of the
+world into categories which we ourselves have formed, and which,
+therefore, are not wholly derived from the phenomena themselves,
+but to a great extent are dependent on us.</p>
+
+<p>Besides geometrical reasons, Zöllner has also adduced cosmological
+reasons to prove the existence of a four-dimensional space.
+To these reasons belong especially the questions whether the number
+of the fixed stars is infinitely great, whether the world is finite
+or infinite in extension, whether the world had a beginning or will
+have an end, whether the world is not hastening towards a condition
+of equilibrium or dead level by the universal distribution of its matter
+and energy; the problems, also, of gravitation and action at a distance;
+and finally, the questions concerning the relations between
+the phenomena in the world of sense-perception to the unknown
+things-in-themselves. All these questions which can be decided in
+no definite sense, led Zöllner and his followers to the assumption
+that a four-dimensioned space inclusive of the space of experience
+must really exist. But more careful reflection will show that this
+assumption does not dispose of the difficulties but simply displaces
+them into another realm. Furthermore, even if four-dimensioned
+space did unravel and make clear all the cosmological problems
+which have bothered the human mind, still, its existence would not
+be proved thereby; it would yet remain a mere hypothesis, designed
+to render more intelligible to a being who can only make experiences
+in a three-dimensional space, the phenomena therein which are full
+of mystery to it. A four-dimensioned space would in such case possess
+for the metaphysician a value similar to that which the ether
+possesses for the physicist. Still more convincing than these cosmological
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_431">[431]</span>reasons to the majority of men is the physio-psychological
+reason drawn from the phenomena of vision which Zöllner adduces.
+Into this main argument we will enter in more detail.</p>
+
+<p>When we “see” an object, as we all know, the light which proceeds
+or is reflected therefrom produces an image on the retina of
+our eye; this image is conducted to our consciousness by means of
+the optical nerve, and our reason draws therefrom an inference respecting
+the object. When, now, we look at a square whose sides
+are a decimetre in length, and whose centre is situated at the distance
+of a metre from the pupil of our eye, an image is produced on the
+retina. But exactly the same image will be produced there if we
+look at a square whose sides are parallel to the sides of the first
+square but two decimetres in length, and whose centre is situated
+at a distance of two metres from the pupil of the eye. Proceeding
+thus further, we readily discover that an eye can perceive in any
+length or line only the ratio of its magnitude to the distance at which
+it is situated from it, and that generally a three-dimensional world
+must appear to the eye two-dimensional, because all points which
+lie behind each other in the direction outwards from the eye produce
+on the retina only one image. This is due to the fact that the
+retinal images are themselves two-dimensional; for which reason,
+Zöllner says, the world must appear to a child as two-dimensional,
+if it be supposed to live in a primitive condition of unconscious mental
+activity. To such a child two objects which are moving the one
+behind the other, must appear as suffering displacement on a surface,
+which we conceive behind the objects, and on which the latter
+are projected. In all these apparent displacements, coincidences
+and changes of form also are effected. All these things must appear
+puzzling to a human being in the first stages of its development,
+and the mind thus finds itself, as Zöllner further argues, in the first
+years of childhood forced to adopt a hypothesis concerning the constitution
+of space and to assume that the world is three-dimensional,
+although the eye can really perceive it as only two-dimensional.
+Zöllner then further says, that in the explanation of the effects of
+the external world, man constantly finds this hypothesis of his childish
+years confirmed, and that in this way it has become in his mind
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_432">[432]</span>so profound a conviction that it is no longer possible for him to
+think it away. Consonant with this argumentation, also, is Zöllner’s
+remark, that the same phenomenon has presented itself in
+astronomical methods of knowledge. To explain the movements of
+the planets, which appear to describe regular paths on the surface
+of a celestial sphere, we were compelled in the solution of the riddles
+which these motions presented, to assume in the structure of the
+heavens a dimension of “depth,” and the complicated motions in
+the two-dimensioned firmament were converted into very simple
+motions in three-dimensioned space. Zöllner also contends that our
+conception of the entire visible world as possessed of three dimensions
+is a product of our reason, which the mind was driven to form
+by the contradictions which would be presented to it on the assumption
+of only two dimensions by the perspective distortions, coincidences,
+and changes of magnitude of objects. When a child moves
+its hand before its eyes, turns it, brings it nearer, or pushes it farther
+away, this child successively receives the most various impressions
+on the surface of its retina of one and the same object of whose
+identity and constancy its feelings offer it a perfect assurance. If
+the child regarded the changeable projection of the hand on the surface
+of the retina as the real object, and not the hand which lies beyond
+it, the child would constantly be met with contradictions in its
+experience, and to avoid this it makes the hypothesis that the space
+of experience is three-dimensional. Zöllner’s contention is, therefore,
+that man originally had only a two-dimensional intuition of
+space, but was forced by experience to represent to himself the objects
+which on the retinal surface appeared two-dimensional, as
+three-dimensional, and thus to transform his two-dimensional space-intuition
+into a three-dimensional one. Now, in exactly the same
+way, according to Zöllner’s notion, will man, by the advancement
+and increasing exactness of his knowledge of the phenomena of the
+outer world, also be compelled to conceive of the material world as
+a “shadow cast by a more real four-dimensional world,” so that
+these conceptions will be just as trivial for the people of the twentieth
+century as since Copernicus’s time the explanation of the motions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_433">[433]</span>of the heavenly bodies by means of a three-dimensional motion
+has been.</p>
+
+<p>Zöllner’s arguments from the phenomena of vision may be refuted
+as follows: In the first place it is incorrect to say that we see
+the things of the external world by means of two-dimensional retinal
+images. The light which penetrates the eye causes an irritation of
+the optical nerves, and any such effect which, though it be not
+powerful, is, nevertheless, a mechanical one, can only take place on
+things which are material. But material things are always three-dimensional.
+The effect of light on the sensitive plates of photography
+can with just as little justice be regarded as two-dimensional.
+Our senses can have perception of nothing but three-dimensional
+things, and this perception is effected by forces which in their turn
+act on three-dimensional things, namely, our sensory nerves. It is
+wrong to call an image two-dimensional, for it is only by abstraction
+that we can conceive of a thickness so growing constantly smaller
+and smaller as to admit of our regarding a three-dimensional picture
+as two-dimensional, by giving it in mind a vanishingly small thickness.
+It is also wrong to say, as Zöllner says, that when we see the
+shadow of a hand which is cast upon a wall we see something two-dimensional.
+What we really perceive is that no light falls upon
+our eye from the region included by the shadow, while from the entire
+surrounding region light does fall on our eye. But this light is
+reflected from the material particles which form the surface of the
+wall, that is, from three-dimensional particles of matter. We must
+always remember that our eye communicates to us only three-dimensional
+knowledge, and that for the comprehension of anything which
+has two, one, or no dimensions, <i>a purely intellectual act of abstraction
+must be added to the act of perception</i>. When we imagine we have
+made a lead-pencil mark on paper, we have, exactly viewed, simply
+heaped along side of each other little particles of graphite in such a
+manner that there are by far fewer graphite particles in the lateral
+and upward directions than there are in the longitudinal direction,
+and thus our reason arrives by abstraction at the notion of a straight
+line. When we look at an object, say a cube of wood, we recognise
+the object as three-dimensional, and it is only by abstraction that we
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_434">[434]</span>can conceive of its two-dimensional surfaces, of its twelve one-dimensional
+edges, and of its eight no-dimensional corners. For
+we reach the perception of its surface, for example, solely by reason
+of the fact that the material particles which form the cube prevent
+the transmission of light, and reflect it, whereby a part of the light
+reflected from every material particle strikes our eye. Now, by
+thinking exclusively of those material particles which are reflected,
+in contrariety to the empty space without and the hidden and therefore
+non-reflected particles within, we form the notion of a surface.</p>
+
+<p>It is evident from this, that all that we perceive is three-dimensional,
+that we cannot come at anything two-dimensional without an
+intellectual abstraction, and that, therefore, we cannot conceive of
+anything two-dimensional exerting effects upon material things. But
+this fact is a refutation of the retinal argument of Zöllner. If vision
+consisted wholly and exclusively in the creation of a two-dimensioned
+image, the things which take place in the world could never
+come into our consciousness. The child, therefore, does not originally
+apprehend the world, as Zöllner says, as two-dimensional;
+on the contrary, it apprehends it either not at all, or it apprehends
+it as three-dimensional. Of course the child must first “learn how”
+to see. It is found from the observation of children during the first
+months of their lives, and of the congenitally blind, who have suddenly
+acquired the power of vision by some successful operation,
+that seeing does not consist alone in the irritations which arise in
+the optic nerves, but also in the correct interpretation of these irritations
+by reason. This correct interpretation, however, can be accomplished
+only by the accumulation of a considerable stock of experience.
+Especially must the recognition of the distance of the
+object seen, be gradually learned. In this, two things are especially
+helpful; first, the fact that we have two eyes and, consequently, that
+we must feel two irritations of the optic nerves which are not wholly
+alike; and secondly, the fact that we are enabled by our power of
+motion and our sense of touch to convince ourselves of the distance
+and form of the bodies seen. The question now arises, what sort of
+an intuition of space would a creature have that had only one eye,
+that could neither move itself nor its eye, and also possessed no
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_435">[435]</span>peripheral nerves. According to Zöllner’s view, this creature could,
+owing to its two-dimensional retinal images, only have a two-dimensional
+intuition of space. The author’s opinion, however, is, that
+such a creature could not see at all, as it has no possibility of collecting
+experiences which are adapted in any way to interpreting the
+effects of things on its retina. The light which proceeded from the
+objects roundabout and fell on the retina could produce no other
+effect on the being than that of a wholly intelligible irritation, or,
+perhaps, even pain.</p>
+
+<p>The reflections presented sufficiently show that neither the phenomena
+of symmetry nor the retinal images of the objects of vision
+necessarily force upon us the assumption of a four-dimensioned space.
+If the material world should ever present problems which could not
+in the progress of knowledge be solved in a natural way, the assumption
+that a four-dimensional space containing the world exists would
+also be incompetent to resolve the difficulties presented; it would
+simply convert these difficulties into others, and not dispose of the
+problems but simply displace them to another world. Yet the question
+might be asked, Is the existence of a four-dimensional space
+really <i>impossible</i>? To answer this question, we must first clearly
+know what we mean by “exist.” If existence means that the intellectual
+<i>idea</i> of a thing can be formed and that this idea shall not lead
+to contradictions with other well-established ideas and with experience,
+we have only to say that four-dimensioned space does exist,
+as the arguments adduced in sections II and III have rendered
+plain. If, namely, the space of four dimensions did not exist as a
+clear idea in the minds of mathematicians, mathematicians could
+certainly not have been led by this idea to results which are recognised
+by the senses as true, and which really take place in our own
+representable space. But if existence means “material actuality”
+we must say that we neither now nor in the future can know anything
+about it. For we know material actuality only as three-dimensional,
+our senses can only make three-dimensional experiences,
+and the inferences of our reason, although they can well abstract
+from material things, can never ascend to the point of explaining a
+four-dimensional materiality. Just as little, therefore, as we can
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_436">[436]</span>locally fix the idea of a two-dimensional material world, as little
+can we substantiate the notion of a four-dimensioned material
+existence.</p>
+
+<h4>V.<br>
+EXAMINATION OF THE HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE EXISTENCE OF
+FOUR-DIMENSIONAL SPIRITS.</h4>
+
+<p>In connection with the belief that the visible world is contained
+in a four-dimensioned space, Zöllner and his adherents further hold
+that this higher space is inhabited by intelligent beings who can
+act consciously and at will on the human beings who live in experiential
+space. To invest this opinion with greater strength Zöllner
+appealed to the fact that the greatest thinkers of antiquity and of
+modern times were either wholly of this opinion or at least held
+views from which his contentions might be immediately derived.
+Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Glaukon in the seventh book
+of the Republic, is evidence, says Zöllner, that this greatest philosopher
+of antiquity possessed some presentiment of this extension of
+the notion of space. Yet any one who has connectedly studied and
+understood Plato’s system of philosophy must concede that the so-called
+“ideas” of the Platonic system denote something wholly different
+from what Zöllner sees in them or pretends to see. Zöllner
+says that these Platonic ideas are spatial objects of more than three
+dimensions and represent “real existence” in the same sense that
+the material world, as contrasted with the images on the retina, represents
+it. Zöllner similarly deals with the Kantian “thing-in-itself,”
+which is also regarded as an object of higher dimensions.</p>
+
+<p>To show Kant in the light of a predecessor, Zöllner quotes the
+following passage from the former’s “Träume eines Geistersehers,
+erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik” (1766, Collected Works,
+Vol. VII, page 32 et seqq.): “I confess that I am very much inclined
+to assert the existence of immaterial beings in the world,
+and to rank my own soul as one of such a class. It appears, there
+is a spiritual essence existent which is intimately bound up with
+matter but which does not act on those forces of the elements by
+which the latter are connected, but upon some internal principle
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_437">[437]</span>of its own condition. It will, in the time to come—I know not
+when or where—be proved, that the human soul, even in this life,
+exists in a state of uninterrupted connection with all the immaterial
+natures of the spiritual world; that it alternately acts on
+them and receives impressions from them, of which, as a human
+soul, it is not, in the normal state of things, conscious. It would
+be a great thing, if some such systematic constitution of the spiritual
+world, as we conceive it, could be deduced, not exclusively
+from our general notion of spiritual nature, which is altogether too
+hypothetical, but from some real and universally admitted observations,—or,
+for that matter, if it could even be shown to be probable.”</p>
+
+<p>What Kant really asserts here is, first, the partly independent
+and partly dependent existence of the soul, and of spiritual beings
+generally, on matter, and, second, that spiritual beings have some
+common connection with and mutually influence one another. This
+contention, which is that of very many thinkers, does not, however,
+entail the consequence that the “transcendental subject of
+Kant” must be four-dimensional, as Zöllner asserts it does. Kant
+never even hinted at the theory that the psychical features of the
+world owe their connection with the material features to the fact
+that they are four-dimensional and, therefore, include the three-dimensional.
+Is it a necessary conclusion that if a thing exists and
+is not three-dimensional, as is the case with the soul, that it is therefore
+four-dimensional? Can it not in fact be so constituted that it is
+wholly meaningless to speak of dimensions at all in connection
+with it?</p>
+
+<p>Yet still more strongly than the words of Plato and Kant do
+certain utterances of the mathematicians Gauss and Riemann speak
+in favor of Zöllner’s hypothesis. S. v. Waltershausen relates of
+Gauss in his “Gruss zum Gedächtnis,” (Leipsic, 1856,) that Gauss
+had often remarked that the three dimensions of space were only
+a specific peculiarity of the human mind. We can think ourselves,
+he said, into beings who are only conscious of two dimensions;
+similarly, perhaps, beings who are above and outside our world may
+look down upon us; and there were, he continued, in a jesting tone,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_438">[438]</span>a number of problems which he had here indefinitely laid aside, but
+hoped to treat in a superior state by superior geometrical methods.
+Leaving aside this jest, which quite naturally suggested itself, the
+remarks of Gauss are quite correct. We possess the power to abstract
+and can think, therefore, what kind of geometry a being that
+is only acquainted with a two-dimensional world would have; for
+instance, we can imagine that such a being could not conceive of
+the possibility of making two triangles coincide which were congruent
+in the sense above explained, and so on. So, also, we can
+understand that a being who has control of four dimensions can only
+conceive of a geometry of four-dimensional space, yet may have the
+capacity of thinking itself into spaces of other dimensions. But it
+does not follow from this that a four-dimensional space exists, let
+alone that it is inhabited by reasonable beings.</p>
+
+<p>Riemann, on the other hand, speaks directly of a world of spirits.
+In his “Neue mathematische Principien der Naturphilosophie”
+he puts forth the hypothesis that the space of the world is filled with
+a material that is constantly pouring into the ponderable atoms,
+there to disappear from the phenomenal world. In every ponderable
+atom, he says, at every moment of time, there enters and appears a
+determinate amount of matter, proportional to the force of gravitation.
+The ponderable bodies, according to this theory, are the
+place at which the spiritual world enters and acts on the material
+world. Riemann’s world of spirits, the sole office of which is to explain
+the phenomenon of gravitation as a force governing matter, is,
+though, essentially different from the spiritual world of Zöllner, the
+function of which is to explain supposed supersensuous phenomena
+which stand in the most glaring contradiction with the established
+known laws of the material world.</p>
+
+<p>Besides this appeal to the testimony of eminent men like Plato,
+Kant, Gauss, and Riemann, the scientific prophet of modern spiritualism
+also bases his theory on the belief, which has obtained at all
+times and appeared in various forms among all peoples, that there
+exist in the world forces which at times are competent to evoke
+phenomena that are exempt from the ordinary laws of nature. We
+have but to think of the phenomena of table-turning which once excited
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_439">[439]</span>the Chinese as much as it has aroused, during the last few
+decades, the European and American worlds; or of the divining-rod,
+by whose help our forefathers sought for water, in fact, as we
+do now in parts of Europe and America.</p>
+
+<p>Cranz, in his essay on the subject, divides spiritualistic phenomena
+into physical and intellectual. Of the first class he enumerates
+the following: the moving of chairs and tables; the animation
+of walking-sticks, slippers, and broomsticks; the miraculous throwing
+of objects; spirit-rappings (Luther heard a sound in the Wartburg,
+“as if three score casks were hurled down the stairs”); the
+ecstatic suspension of persons above the floor; the diminution of
+the forces of gravity; the ordeals of witches; the fetching of wished-for
+objects; the declination of the magnetic needle by persons at a
+distance; the untying of knots in a closed string; insensibility to
+injury and exemption therefrom when tortured, as in handling red-hot
+coals, carrying hot irons, etc.; the music of invisible spirits;
+the materialisations of spirits or of individual parts of spirits (the
+footprints in the experiments of Slade, photographed by Zöllner);
+the double appearance of the same person; the penetration of matter
+(of closed doors, windows, and so forth). As numerous also is
+the selection presented by Cranz of intellectual phenomena, namely:
+spirit-writing (Have’s instrument for the facilitation of intercourse
+with spirits), the clairvoyance and divination of somnambulists, of
+visionary, ecstatic, and hypnotised persons, prompted or controlled
+by narcotic medicines, by sleeping in temples, by music and dancing,
+by ascetic modes of life and residence in barren localities, by the exudations
+of the soil and of water, by the contemplation of jewels,
+mirrors, and crystal-pure water, and by anointing the finger-nails
+with consecrated oil. Also the following additional intellectual phenomena
+are cited: increased eloquence or suddenly acquired power
+of speaking in foreign languages; spirit-effects at a distance; inability
+to move, transferences of the will, and so forth.</p>
+
+<p>All these phenomena, presented with the aspect of truth, and
+associated more or less with trickery, self-deception, and humbug,
+are adduced by the spiritualists to substantiate the belief in a world
+of spirits which consciously and purposely take part in the events
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_440">[440]</span>of the material world, and that these phenomena may be sufficiently
+and consistently explained by the effects of the activity of such a
+world. It is impossible for us to discuss and put to the test here
+the explanations of all these supersensuous phenomena. Anything
+and everything can be explained by spirits who act at will upon the
+world. There are only a few of these phenomena, namely, clairvoyance
+and Slade’s experiments, whose explanations are so intimately
+connected with our main theme, the so-called fourth dimension,
+that they cannot be passed over.</p>
+
+<p>First, with respect to clairvoyance, the American visionary Davis
+describes the experiences which he claims to have made in this
+condition, induced by “magnetic sleep,” as follows:&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_81" href="#Footnote_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> “The sphere
+of my vision now began to expand. At first, I could only clearly
+discern the walls of the house. At the start they seemed to me dark
+and gloomy; but they soon became brighter and finally transparent.
+I could now see the objects, the utensils, and the persons in the adjoining
+house as easily as those in the room in which I sat. But my
+perceptions extended further still; before my wandering glance,
+which seemed to control a great semi-circle, the broad surface of
+the earth, for hundreds of miles about me, grew as transparent as
+water, and I saw the brains, the entrails, and the entire anatomy of
+the beasts that wandered about in the forests of the eastern hemisphere,
+hundreds and thousands of miles from the room in which I
+sat.” The belief in the possibility of such states of clairvoyance is
+by no means new. Alexander Dumas made use of it, for example,
+in his “Mémoires d’un médicin,” in which Count Balsamo, afterwards
+called Cagliostro, is said to possess the power of transforming
+suitable persons into this wonderful condition and thus to find out
+what other persons at distant places are doing. Zöllner explains
+clairvoyance by means of the fourth dimension thus:</p>
+
+<p>A man who is accustomed to viewing things on a plain is supposed
+to ascend to a considerable height in a balloon. He will
+there enjoy a much more extended prospect than if he had remained
+on the plain below, and will also be able to signal to greater distances.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_441">[441]</span>The plain, that is, the two-dimensioned space, is accordingly
+viewed by him from points outside of the plain as “open” in
+all directions. Exactly so, in Zöllner’s theory, must three-dimensioned
+spaces appear, when viewed from points in four-dimensioned
+space, namely, as “open”; and the more so in proportion as the
+point in question is situated at a greater distance from the place of
+our body, or in proportion as the soul ascends to a greater height in
+this fourth dimension. Zöllner thus explains clairvoyance as a condition
+in which the soul has displaced itself out of its three-dimensioned
+space and reached a point which with respect to this space is
+four-dimensionally situated and whence it is able to contemplate the
+three-dimensional world without the interference of intervening obstacles.</p>
+
+<p>The following remark is to be made to this explanation. The
+reason why we have a better and more extended view from a balloon
+than from places on the earth is simply this, that between the
+suspended balloon and the objects seen at a distance nothing intervenes
+but the air, and air allows the transmission of light, whereas,
+at the places below on the earth there are all kinds of material
+things about the observer which prevent the transmission of light
+and either render difficult or absolutely impossible the sight of
+things which lie far away. In the same way, also, from a point in
+four-dimensioned space, a three-dimensional object will be visible
+only provided there are no obstacles intervening. If, therefore, this
+awareness of a distant object is a real, actual vision by means of a
+luminous ray which strikes the eye, there is contained in the explanation
+of Zöllner the tacit assumption that the medium with
+which the four-dimensional world is filled is also pervious to light
+exactly as the atmosphere is.</p>
+
+<p>The theory that there are four-dimensional spirits who produce
+the phenomena cited by the spiritualists received special support
+from the experiments which the prestidigitateur Slade, who claimed
+he was a spiritualistic medium, performed before Zöllner. Of these
+experiments we will speak of the two most important, the experiment
+with the glass sphere and the experiment with the knots. To
+explain the connection of the glass sphere experiment with the fourth
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_442">[442]</span>dimension, we must first conceive of two-dimensional reasoning beings,
+or, let us say, two-dimensional worms, living and moving in a
+plane. For a creature of this kind it will be self-evident that there
+are no other paths between two points of its plane than such as lie
+within the plane. It must, accordingly, be beyond the range of
+conception of this worm, how any two-dimensional object which lies
+within a circle in its space can be brought to any other position in
+its space outside the circle without the object passing through the
+barriers formed by the circle’s circumference. But if this worm
+could procure the services of a three-dimensional being, the transportation
+of the object from a position within the circle to any position
+outside it could be effected by the three-dimensional being simply
+taking the object <i>out of</i> the plane and placing it at the desired
+point. This object, therefore, would, in an inexplicable manner,
+suddenly disappear before the eyes of the worms who were assembled
+as spectators, and after the lapse of an interval of time would
+again appear outside the circle without having passed at any point
+through the circle’s circumference. If now we add another dimension,
+we shall derive from this trick, which is wholly removed from
+the sense-perception of the flattened worms, the following experiment,
+which is wholly beyond the perception of us human beings.
+Inside a glass sphere, which is closed all around, a grain of corn is
+placed; the problem is to transport the corn to some place outside
+the sphere without passing through the glass surface. Now we
+should be able to perform this trick if some four-dimensional being
+would render us the same aid that we before rendered the two-dimensional
+worm. For the four-dimensional being could take the
+grain of corn into his four-dimensional space and then replace it in
+our space in the desired spot outside of the glass sphere. Slade
+performed this trick before Zöllner. Its mere performance sufficed
+to convince this latter investigator that Slade had here made use of
+a four-dimensional agent, who, in respect of power of motion, controlled
+his four-dimensional space as we do our three-dimensional
+space. It never occurred to Zöllner that this experiment was the
+cleverly executed trick of a prestidigitateur, or, as it would at once
+occur to us, that the whole thing was a sensory illusion. The fact
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_443">[443]</span>that we cannot explain a trick easily and naturally does not irrevocably
+prove that it is accomplished by other means than those which
+the world of matter presents.</p>
+
+<p>Still better known than this last performance is Slade’s experiments
+with knots. To explain this in connection with the fourth
+dimension, we must resort again to the plane and the flat worm inhabiting
+it. To two parallel lines in a plane let the two ends of a
+third line, which has a double point, that is, intersects itself once,
+be attached. Our flat worm would not be able to untie the loop
+formed by the doubled third line, which we will call a string, because
+it cannot execute motions in three dimensions. If, therefore,
+a two-dimensional prestidigitateur should appear and accomplish
+the trick of untying this loop without removing the two ends of the
+string from the parallel lines, he will have accomplished for our flat
+worm a supersensuous experiment. A human being engaged in the
+service of the prestidigitateur could execute for him the experiment
+by simply lifting the string a little out of the plane, pulling it taut,
+and placing it back again. This suggests the following analogous
+experiment for three-dimensional beings. The two ends of a string
+in which a common knot has been made are sealed to the opposite
+walls of a room. The problem is to untie this knot without breaking
+the seals at the two ends of the string. Everybody knows that
+this problem is not soluble, but it may be calculated mathematically
+that the knot in the string can be untied as easily by motions in a
+fourth dimension of space as in the experiment above described the
+knot in the two-dimensional string was untied by a three-dimensional
+motion. Now as Slade untied the knot before Zöllner’s eyes without
+apparently making any use of the ends fastened in the walls, Zöllner
+was still more strongly confirmed in the view that Slade had power
+over spirits who performed the experiments for him.</p>
+
+<p>Still more far-reaching is the theory of Carl du Prel concerning
+the relations of the material and the four-dimensional world. (Compare
+his numerous essays in the spiritualistic magazine <i>Sphinx</i>.)
+Just as the shadows of three-dimensional objects cast on a wall are
+controlled in their movements by the things whose projections they
+are, in the same way it is claimed does there exist back of everything
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_444">[444]</span>of this sense-perceptible world a real transcendental and four-dimensional
+“thing-in itself” whose projection in the space of experience
+is what we falsely regard as the independent thing. Thus
+every man besides existing in his terrestrial self also exists in a spiritual
+or astral self which constantly accompanies him in his walks
+through life and whose existence is especially proclaimed in states
+of profound sleep, of somnambulism, and in the conditions of mediums.
+In this way Du Prel explains the wonderful feats of somnambulists,
+and the aerial journeys of sorcerers and witches. Whereas,
+ordinarily the separation of the material body from the astral body
+is only effected at the moment of death; in the case of somnambulists
+this separation may take place at any time, or, as Du Prel says:
+“the threshold of feeling may be permanently displaced.”</p>
+
+<p>In view of the natural relations of such theories to the dogmas
+of Christianity it is explainable that theologians also have raised
+their voices for or against spiritualism. While the <i>Protestant Church
+Times</i> beheld in the “repulsive thaumaturgic performances which
+these coryphæi of modern science offer, a lack of comprehension of
+real philosophy,” the magazine <i>The Proof of Faith</i>, expresses its delight
+at the discovery of spiritualism in the following manner:
+“Every Christian will surely rejoice at the deep and perhaps mortal
+wound which these new discoveries have in all probability administered
+to modern materialism.”</p>
+
+<p>We shall pass by the childish opinion that the Bible also speaks
+of four dimensions, as both in Job (xi, 8-9) and in the Epistle to the
+Ephesians (iii, 18) only breadth, length, depth, and height, that
+is, four directions of extension, are mentioned. Yet we will still add,
+as Cranz has done, the reflections which Zöllner, as the most prominent
+representative of modern spiritualism, has put forward respecting
+its relation to the doctrines of Christianity (<i>Wissensch. Abhandl.</i>,
+Vol. III). By the foundation of transcendental physics on the
+basis of spiritualistic phenomena, the “new light” has arisen which
+is spoken of in the New Testament. The rending of the veil of the
+Temple on the crucifixion of Christ, the resurrection, the ascension,
+the transfiguration, the speaking with many tongues on the giving
+out of the Holy Ghost, all these are in Zöllner’s view spiritualistic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_445">[445]</span>phenomena. Similarly, he sees a reference to the four-dimensional
+world of spirits in all those sayings of Christ in which the latter
+speaks to his Apostles of the impossibility of their having any image
+or notion of the place to which when he disappeared he would go
+and whence he would return. (Gospel of St. John, xiii, 33, 36; xiv,
+2, 3, 28; xvi, 5, 13).</p>
+
+<p>Ulrici, however, goes furthest in the mingling of spiritualistic
+and Christian beliefs; for he sees in the doctrine of spiritualism a
+means of strengthening belief in a supreme moral world-order and
+in the immortality of the soul. In answer to Ulrici’s tract “Spiritualism
+So-called, a Question of Science” (1889) Wundt wrote an
+annihilating reply bearing the title “Spiritualism, a Question of
+Science So-called.” Wundt criticises the future condition of our
+souls according to spiritualistic hypotheses in the following sarcastic
+yet pertinent words, which Cranz also quotes: “(1) Physically, the
+souls of the dead come into the thraldom of certain living beings
+who are called mediums. These mediums are, for the present, at
+least, a not widely diffused class and they appear to be almost exclusively
+Americans. At the command of these mediums, departed
+souls perform mechanical feats which possess throughout the character
+of absolute aimlessness. They rap, they lift tables and chairs,
+they move beds, they play on the harmonica, and do other similar
+things. (2) Intellectually, the souls of the dead enter a condition
+which, if we are to judge from the productions which they deposit
+on the slates of the mediums, must be termed a very lamentable
+one. These slate-writings belong throughout in the category of
+imbecility; they are totally bereft of any contents. (3) The most
+favored, apparently, is the moral condition of the soul. According
+to the testimony which we have, its character cannot be said to be
+anything else than that of utter harmlessness. From brutal performances,
+such, for instance, as the destruction of bed-canopies,
+the spirits most politely refrain.” Wundt then laments the demoralising
+effect which spiritualism exercises on people who have
+hitherto devoted their powers to some serious pursuit or even to the
+service of science. In fact it is a presumptuous and flagrant procedure
+to forsake the path of exact research, which slow as it is,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_446">[446]</span>yet always leads to a sure extension of knowledge, in the hope that
+some aimless, foolhardy venture into the realm of uncertainty will
+carry us further than the path of slow toil, and that we can ever thus
+easily lift the veil which hides from man the problems of the world
+that are yet unsolved.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Now that we have presented the opinions of others respecting
+the existence of a four-dimensional world of spirits, the author would
+like to develop one or two ideas of his own on the subject. In the
+preceding section it was stated that everything that we perceive by
+our senses is three-dimensional and that everything that possesses
+four or more dimensions can only be regarded as abstractions or fictions
+which our reason forms in its constant efforts after an extension
+and generalisation of knowledge. To speak of a two-dimensional
+matter is as self-contradictory as the notion of four-dimensional
+matter. But a two or a four-dimensional world might exist in some
+other manner than a material manner, and for all we know in one
+which to us does not admit of representation. But in such a case,
+if it were without the power of affecting the material world, we should
+never be able to acquire any knowledge concerning its existence,
+and it would be totally indifferent to the people of the three-dimensional
+world, whether such a world existed or not. Just as an artist
+during his lifetime produces a number of different works of art, so
+also the Creator might have created a number of different-dimensioned
+worlds which in no wise interfere with one another. In such
+a case, any one world would not be able to know anything of any
+other, and we must consequently regard the question whether a
+four-dimensional world exists which is incapable of affecting ours,
+as insoluble. We have only to examine, therefore, the question
+whether the phenomenal world perhaps is a single individual in a
+great layer of worlds of which every successive one has one more
+dimension than the preceding and which are so connected with one
+another that each successive world contains and includes the preceding
+world, and, therefore, can produce effects in it. For our
+reason, which draws its inferences from the phenomena of this world,
+tells us, that if outside the three-dimensional world there exists a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_447">[447]</span>second four-dimensional world, containing ours, there is no reason
+why worlds of more or less dimensions should not, with the same
+right, also exist. But if now, as Zöllner and his adherents maintain,
+four-dimensional spirits exist which can act by the mere efforts
+of their own wills on our world, there is surely no reason why we
+three-dimensional beings should not also be able to produce effects
+on some two-dimensional animated world. Whether we have, generally,
+any such influence we do not know, but we certainly do know
+that we do not act purposely and consciously on a two-dimensional
+world. If, therefore, Zöllner were right, the plan of creation
+would possess the wonderful feature that four-dimensional beings
+are capable of arbitrarily affecting the three-dimensional world, but
+that three-dimensional beings have no right in their turn consciously
+to affect a two dimensional world.</p>
+
+<p>The supporters of Zöllner’s hypothesis will perhaps reply to
+the objection just made, that the plan of creation might, after all,
+possibly possess this wonderful peculiarity, that we human beings
+perhaps, in some higher condition of culture, will be able to act consciously
+on two-dimensional worlds, and that at any rate it is simply
+an inference by analogy to conclude from the non-existence of a relation
+between three and two dimensions that the same relation is also
+wanting in the case of four and three dimensions. As a matter of fact,
+the objection above made is not intended to refute Zöllner’s hypothesis,
+but only to stamp it as very improbable. But despite this improbability
+Zöllner would still be right if the phenomena of the material
+world actually made his hypothesis necessary. That, however,
+is by no means the case. Although most of the phenomena to which
+the spiritualists appeal are probably founded on sense-illusions,
+humbug, and self-deception, it cannot be denied that there possibly
+do exist phenomena which cannot be brought into harmony with
+the natural laws now known. There always have been mysterious
+phenomena, and there always will be. Yet, as we have often seen
+that the progress of science has again and again revealed as natural
+what former generations held to be supernatural, it is certainly
+wholly wrong to bring in for the explanation of phenomena which
+now seem mysterious an hypothesis like that of Zöllner’s, by which
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_448">[448]</span>everything in the world can be explained. If we adopt a point of
+view which regards it as natural for spirits arbitrarily to interfere in
+the workings of the world, all scientific investigation will cease, for
+we could never more trust or rely upon any chemical or physical experiment,
+or any botanical or zoölogical culture. If the spirits are
+the authors of the phenomena that are mysterious to us, why should
+they also not have control of the phenomena which are not mysterious?
+The existence of mysterious phenomena justifies in no manner
+or form the assumption that spirits exist which produce them.
+Would it not be much simpler, if we <i>must</i> have supernatural influences,
+to adopt the naïve religious point of view, according to
+which everything that happens is traceable to the direct, actual, and
+personal interference of a single being which we call God? Things
+which formerly stood beyond the sphere of our knowledge and were
+regarded as marvellous events, as a storm, for example, now stand
+in the most intimate connection with known natural laws. Things
+that formerly were mysterious are so no longer. If one hundred and
+fifty years ago some scientists were in the possession of our present
+knowledge of inductional electricity and had connected Paris and
+Berlin with a wire by whose aid one could clearly interpret in
+Berlin what another person had at that very moment said in Paris,
+people would have regarded this phenomenon as supernatural and
+assumed that the originator of this long-distance speaking was in
+league with spirits.</p>
+
+<p>We recognise, thus, that the things which are termed supernatural
+depend to a great extent on the stage of culture which humanity
+has reached. Things which now appear to us mysterious,
+may, in a very few decades, be recognised as quite natural. This
+knowledge, however, is not to be obtained by the lazy assumption
+of bands of spirits as the authors of mysterious phenomena, but by
+performing what in physics and chemistry is called experiment.
+But the first and essential condition of all scientific experimenting
+is that the experimenter shall be absolutely master of the conditions
+under which the experiment is or is not to succeed. Now, this criterion
+of scientific experimenting is totally lacking in all spiritualistic
+experiments. We can never assign in their case the conditions under
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_449">[449]</span>which they will or will not succeed. When all the preparations
+in a spiritualistic séance have been properly made, but nothing takes
+place, the beautiful excuse is always forthcoming that the “spirits
+were not willing,” that there were “too many incredulous persons
+present,” and so forth. Fortunately, in physical experiments these
+pretexts are not necessary. By the path of experiment, and not by
+that of transcendental speculation, physics has thus made incredible
+progress and has piled new knowledge strata on strata upon the
+old. Accordingly, the prospect is left that the mysteries which the
+conditions and properties of the human soul still present can be
+solved more and more by the methods of scientific experiment. To
+this end, however, it is especially necessary that the physio-psychological
+experiments in question should only be performed by men
+who possess the critical eye of inquiry, who are free from the dangers
+of self-illusion, and who are competent to keep apart from their
+experiments all superstition and deception. The history of natural
+science clearly teaches that it is only by this road that man can arrive
+at certain and well-established knowledge. If, therefore, there
+really is behind such phenomena as mind-reading, telepathy, and
+similar psychical phenomena something besides humbug and self-illusion,
+what we have to do is to study privately and carefully by
+serious experiments the success or non-success of such phenomena,
+and not allow ourselves to be influenced by the public and dramatic
+performances of psychical artists, like Cumberland and his ilk.</p>
+
+<p>The high eminence on which the knowledge and civilisation of
+humanity now stands was not reached by the thoughtless employment
+of fanciful ideas, nor by recourse to four-dimensional worlds, but by
+hard, serious labor and slow, unceasing research. Let all men of
+science, therefore, band themselves together and oppose a solid
+front to methods that explain everything that is now mysterious to
+us by the interference of independent spirits. For these methods,
+owing to the fact that they can explain everything, explain nothing,
+and thus oppose dangerous obstacles to the progress of real research,
+to which we owe the beautiful temple of modern knowledge.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Hermann Schubert.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_79" href="#FNanchor_79" class="label">[79]</a> This is discussed at greater length in my tract <i>Zahl und Zählen</i> in Virchow-Holtzendorff’s
+collection of popular essays, J. F. Richter, 1887.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_80" href="#FNanchor_80" class="label">[80]</a> Victor Schlegel, indeed, has made models of the three-dimensional nets of all
+the six structures which correspond in four-dimensioned space to the five regular
+bodies of our space, in an analogous manner to that by which we draw in a plane
+the nets of five regular bodies. Schlegel’s models are made by Brill of Darmstadt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_81" href="#FNanchor_81" class="label">[81]</a> Quoted by Cranz.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_450">[450]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="CORRESPONDENCE">CORRESPONDENCE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="FRANCE_III_I">I.<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK IN FRANCE.</span></h4>
+
+<p>The return of Mme. Hyacinthe Loyson to France after her
+American tour, undertaken, I understand, in order to obtain
+new support for the Gallican church, suggests the writing of this
+article, which will be a brief survey, from the point of view of an
+American layman, of the present religious situation in France.</p>
+
+<p>As Père Hyacinthe’s reform has been made the peg on which
+to hang this article, perhaps I cannot do better than begin by an
+examination of the noble but fruitless labors of the eloquent ex-Carmelite.
+While one cannot help being carried away by the oratory
+of Hyacinthe Loyson and charmed with his personality, so full
+of wit, kindliness, and gentility; while one must admire the devotedness
+and earnestness of Mme. Loyson and feel much sympathy for
+their studious and promising son Paul, one is convinced in spite of
+one’s self that this latter-day Gallicanism is doomed to failure if indeed
+it has not already failed. You have simply to visit the poor
+little church in the Rue d’Arras, in this city, to see what a mere
+handful of followers Père Hyacinthe has been able to collect in this
+great centre of two million people, after years of work and after
+preaching hundreds of magnificent sermons that would fill to overflowing
+the largest edifice in America, Sunday after Sunday, if delivered
+with similar eloquence by a divine of no matter what denomination
+or of no denomination at all. To the practical layman of
+this practical age no further demonstration is necessary in order to
+prove that Père Hyacinthe’s mission is, as the French say, <i>un coup
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_451">[451]</span>dans l’eau</i>, that is, an effort which produces no result. Whenever
+I leave this humble church and am well out in the narrow, shabby
+street in which it is situated and am away from the influence of the
+preacher’s fascination, I cannot help exclaiming, What a waste of
+power, What a casting of pearls before swine! And all of Mme.
+Loyson’s enthusiastic conversation in private, her accounts of the
+encouraging letters received by the Père, furtively of course, from
+discontented priests, and her statements concerning the warm words
+of sympathy and support from the churchmen of foreign lands, cannot
+remove that abiding feeling that this rejuvenated Gallican church
+movement is other than a dismal failure; more than ever one exclaims:
+<i>C’est un coup dans l’eau</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Père Hyacinthe has always received, in France as abroad, his
+greatest support from the Protestants. But Protestantism here in
+France is a sickly growth when compared, for instance, with its
+rich and sturdy brother in the United States. It has, at most, only
+a small band of followers, nearly lost to view in the vast army of
+Catholicism and Freethought. Furthermore, the Liberal wing is
+losing ground and the Orthodox wing gaining slightly, not an encouraging
+sign in these days to those who hope for the final triumph
+of faith over the growing tendency towards infidelity. The real truth
+is that about the only strength left in French Protestantism to-day
+lies in the fact that there is a certain <i>éclat</i> associated, in the eyes of
+the upper classes, with the being a Protestant, much as is the case
+in America and England, in the same rank, about being a Roman
+Catholic. It distinguishes you from the multitude, and in these
+democratic times human nature, especially when it is that of the
+“upper ten,” is very keen for elimination from “the vulgar throng.”
+It is difficult for an American to comprehend this peculiar little streak
+of innocent vanity running through certain French circles which
+shows itself in this wish to be known as Protestants. It is not too
+much to say that to the impartial outside observer this phase of the
+French Protestantism of to-day is the one that first strikes the eye;
+which goes to prove in a peculiar but significant manner the weak
+hold, on the one hand, which the doctrine of Luther and Calvin
+now has on the French nation, and, on the other hand, how universal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_452">[452]</span>must be scepticism, freethought, and utter indifference to
+church and religion of every kind.</p>
+
+<p>If native French Protestantism exerts so little influence on the
+nation, it is easy to imagine the excessive futility of the work of the
+foreign missionary. There is a great deal said in American and religious
+circles about the labors in France of the Salvation Army, the
+McAll Mission, the Young Men’s Christian Association, etc. I have
+received more than one letter from would-be subscribers in the
+United States asking me if these and other similar organisations
+were really accomplishing all that they pretend. My reply is invariably
+that if you regard their labors as charity work some good is
+being done, but if money is asked for because of the religious results
+which have been accomplished, the demand should be considered
+to be arrant humbug. If Père Hyacinthe, a Frenchman and
+a Catholic, after forty years of labor, has accomplished next to nothing,
+it is easy to imagine how this nation, so reserved in its relations
+with the foreigner when he attempts to penetrate into its inner life,
+would treat Scotch and Yankee missionaries. From a religious
+standpoint, therefore, American money and sympathy is absolutely
+thrown away when it is sent to France. If it be answered that much
+misery and physical suffering is relieved by these foreign missions,
+the French might well ask if charity does not begin at home. The
+French are a peculiarly thrifty people. Few are poor, beggars are
+scarce and charitable institutions are rich and numerous. Hence
+devoting American dollars to the relief of French distress is much
+like sending coals to Newcastle, if it is not a piece of sheer impertinence,
+like our protesting to the Czar against his Siberian convict
+system when we have one quite as cruel in full swing in some of our
+Southern states.</p>
+
+<p>And now, finally, a few paragraphs about the great Roman
+Catholic church of France, the only religious institution of any real
+first-rate importance in this country.</p>
+
+<p>While it is true that the Catholic Church, at least as a church,
+still has a strong hold on the French nation, it is also quite true
+that indifference, infidelity, free thought, and atheism are on the increase.
+Matthew Arnold says, in his essay on Tolstoi, written in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_453">[453]</span>1887: “Between the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he [Tolstoi]
+had lost, he tells us, the Christian belief in which he had been
+brought up, a loss of which examples nowadays abound certainly
+everywhere, but which in Russia, as in France, is among all young
+men of the upper and cultivated classes more a matter of course,
+perhaps, more universal, more avowed, than it is with us.” Arnold
+might have enlarged, at least in the case of France, his limits and
+stated that in the cities the middle and lower classes, too, particularly
+the male portion, have abandoned Rome. One has only to
+visit a Paris church to be convinced of the contempt which men feel
+for the priesthood and religion: you can count ten female devotees
+for one of the masculine gender. In the village church, far away
+from the great centres, the priest may still have the large majority
+of the population, men and women alike, as faithful attendants upon
+service. But even here, for one man who confesses, a dozen or
+score of women will kneel at the chair. Then again, this more
+general participation in religious ceremonies by the rural population
+is due in a large measure to the fact that these Sunday masses
+and vespers are almost the only break and variety in a very dead
+and monotonous existence. The church is a sort of meeting place,
+where whole families, babies, children, and adults, congregate. The
+hum of idle conversation, the crying of infants, and the ardent exhortations
+of the priest are often mingled in a manner that would
+astonish and shock a pious Protestant, accustomed to the highly
+proper atmosphere of an Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church in
+the United States.</p>
+
+<p>Another sign of the disfavor in which French Catholicism finds
+itself to-day is seen in the quality of its future priests. You have
+simply to look into the faces of the seminarists as they pass by you
+in procession in the streets of Paris to be convinced of the well-known
+fact that these young men are, for the most part, the faint-hearted
+and dull-headed sons of the peasantry, eager to escape the
+drudgery of farm life and not intelligent enough for business or the
+petty employments offered by the State.</p>
+
+<p>“Anybody can make a priest,” is often heard in France. The
+result is that just as the English army is the receptacle for the riff-raff—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_454">[454]</span>Tommy Atkinses of Rudyard Kipling’s “Barrack-room
+Ballads”—of the cities, so the French priesthood draws most of its
+recruits from the scum of the farming districts. This fact contrasts
+strongly, by the way, with the manner in which the Protestants fill
+their pulpits. The young man who becomes a pastor is not looked
+upon by his friends and companions as a failure and a numskull.
+Quite the contrary; he is immediately classed among those taking a
+high moral stand. Some of the best families of France are descended
+from, or have relatives who are, clergymen, and they are
+quite proud of the fact; another example of that sentiment of halo
+surrounding French Protestantism to which reference has already
+been made.</p>
+
+<p>Another cause of this boycotting of the cloth as a profession by
+the youth of the élite is due to the Church having got on the wrong
+side during the struggle for the foundation of the present Republic.
+The Catholics supported the Monarchists and Bonapartists and took
+an active part in the attempt to prevent the advent of republican
+institutions and to overthrow these institutions when they had been
+accepted by a majority of the nation. This unpatriotic course brought
+the Church into bad odor among republicans, so that the having a
+son in orders, for example, would be apt to be an impediment to a
+father aspiring to political preferment, especially if the latter belonged
+to the Radical or Socialist wing of the Republican army.
+The result is that a whole great political party is, in its general tendency,
+opposed to the Catholic Church.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is the harm occasioned thereby limited to lowering the
+quality of the seminarists. It makes a vast number of intelligent
+and influential citizens sworn enemies of religion. Thus, when
+Gambetta attended funerals, he would not enter the church, but
+wait outside in the porch. When Louis Blanc was buried neither
+church nor priest participated in the pageant. On the death of
+Henri Martin, a free-thinking Protestant clergyman officiated at the
+burial service. Hundreds of other prominent Republicans, who
+have died or been buried since 1870, never entered a church, perhaps,
+except when their bodies were borne there by their families,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_455">[455]</span>acting under the influence of its female members, or out of respect
+for public sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>One of the shrewdest acts of Leo XIII. is his recent declaration
+in favor of the French Republic. He not only accepts the situation,
+but has ordered the faithful, both ecclesiastical and lay, in
+France to do likewise. But this demand has not been complied
+with without a murmur. More than one priest and noble has shown
+himself more ultramontane than the Pope. The important fact remains
+true, however, that officially the Vatican recognises the political
+change in France, and, though the Republicans, particularly
+those of the Radical camp, are wary of these new converts and still
+believe with Gambetta, that “<i>le clericalisme, voilà l’ennemi</i>,” yet the
+mere fact that the Vatican lays down its arms means a great deal,
+even if the hatchet may not be definitively buried. Moderate Republicans,
+those who go to church even if they do not believe what
+is said there, think they see in this action of the Holy Father a new
+source of strength for the Republic. And it seems to me that they
+are right, and that this view is the soundest. If the priesthood
+ceases its attacks on the political powers that be, and if these latter
+keep a sharp watch, which will be done while the Radical and Socialist
+elements are so strong in Chamber and Senate, the clerical
+party can be held in check, and the Republic will have so many less
+enemies, even if these quondam enemies are but lukewarm friends.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Theodore Stanton.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_456">[456]</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="FRANCE_III_II">II.<br>
+<span class="smaller">NEW FRENCH BOOKS.</span></h4>
+
+<p>I am happy to have the opportunity in my present letter to
+speak of a book of real importance, <i>La pathologie des emotions, Études
+physiologiques et cliniques</i>, by <span class="smcap">M. Ch. Féré</span>. The name of this learned
+physician of the Bicêtre is sufficiently well known to dispense me
+from the necessity of speaking of his personality, so that I can devote
+all that I have to say to his work. Its great merit is not so
+much the novelty of the psychological theory which is laid at its
+foundation, as the wealth of facts presented and the sureness of the
+methods pursued. M. Féré’s mind is of a distinctly positive cast,
+and he possesses in a high degree the ability to draw from the thesis
+which he illustrates and confirms, the various consequences which
+from a medical and social point of view this thesis involves.</p>
+
+<p>States of intellectual consciousness, he writes, citing Spencer,
+cannot be dissociated from emotional states. The emotions are the
+products of our mental representations of agreeable states or painful
+states, and are the stronger according as they contain a greater number
+of present or nascent sensations competent to recall these states.
+The emotions, accordingly, being simply representations of states
+of consciousness provoked by external excitations, it is to be presumed
+that the physiological conditions of emotions (of central or
+cerebral origin) present a striking analogy, if not an absolute resemblance,
+to the physiological conditions of sensations (of peripheral
+origin, either internal or external); and this relation should be as
+prominently marked in pathological as in normal states. The upshot
+of all this is, continues M. Féré, that physical agents capable of
+modifying a state of consciousness of peripheral origin (sensations),
+are also capable of modifying states of consciousness of central origin
+(emotions). “The external signs of these different states of
+consciousness can be studied by the same methods. Psychology is
+only specialised physiology; mental medicine only a specialisation
+of general medicine, from which it must borrow its methods of research
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_457">[457]</span>and action—all purely physical. The demonstration of these
+relations is the object of the present work.”</p>
+
+<p>The work, which contains almost six hundred pages, presents
+no divisions but that of chapters. But it would not be difficult to
+group its contents under the four general titles: (1) physiological
+and pathological effects of physical agents on man; (2) physiological
+conditions and pathological and curative effects of emotions;
+(3) psychopathy and morbid emotivity; (4) the consequences to individuals
+and society of morbid emotivity, its medical treatment,
+prophylaxis and legislation. The entire demonstration of M. Féré,
+I might add, is essentially aimed at the two following propositions:
+the first, that all the symptoms of emotions possess a certain resemblance
+to those of fatigue or physical pain; the other, that the original
+source of morbid emotivities and their resultant disorders is a
+state of depression congenital or acquired.</p>
+
+<p>M. Féré reverts constantly to these fundamental ideas. After
+having exhibited, for example, the reciprocal influences of the emotions,
+or disorders of the imagination, and of disorders which are
+of physical origin, he concludes that “physical disease and moral
+disease have the same basis.” It is thus only in appearance, he
+writes, that the mind has any influence on the functions of the body;
+the phenomena of mind are, quite the reverse, the necessary effect
+of certain modifications of the body, and it is by the intermediary
+action of the manifestations of the body that the representations of
+the mind act. It is found convenient to regard the gray matter of
+the brain as the central organ of the emotions, and the great sympathetic
+as the peripheral organ that presides over their “exteriorisation”;
+but we have no right to think of the emotions without
+their external signs, and we are thus led to the conclusion that
+“emotion is essentially a generalised reflex phenomenon the centrifugal
+path of which is principally the great sympathetic system.”</p>
+
+<p>A psychological question much debated since M. Ribot took it
+up, the question of <i>attention</i>, is also treated here, in an incidental
+yet very interesting manner (Chapter III). M. Féré connects attention
+with the study of the physiological conditions of physical
+action, and thus takes sides, it will be seen, with the motory theory
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_458">[458]</span>of attention. James Sully, and others, have denied the existence
+of muscular phenomena accompanying attention. But physiology
+is in a position to disclose the existence of these movements; it can
+study their qualities, their energy, their form, their precision, and
+their rapidity. We will find in M. Féré’s book a number of new
+experimental facts establishing the thesis that “muscular tension
+constitutes the physiological condition of attention.” “The mistake
+of many psychologists (M. Hirth, for example) has been, that
+they have confounded rest with willed immobility, which from a
+mechanical point of view is very far removed from the former; for
+immobility of will is precisely the result of very intense muscular
+activities, and can only be produced by a general tension of the
+muscular system, which throws the subject in a state such that it
+can react the most quickly and most energetically on any excitation,
+whencesoever it may proceed.” Willed, or voluntary, immobility
+is attention itself; to produce this state, well-enervated and well-nourished
+muscles are necessary. “We may say,” declares M. Féré,
+“that the practice of immobility is the most favorable exercise for
+the development of the mind: a system of education which should
+neglect this exercise would suppress attention, it would be a regressive
+education.”</p>
+
+<p>“It is lack of attention,” he tells us further on, “that is the
+cause of the insensibility of hysterical patients, and it is instability
+of attention that is the cause of the variability of their sensory and
+motory disorders.” It is all due to the want of sufficient energy to
+bring simultaneously into a state of tension the muscular settings of
+all of the sensory organs. Hysterical anæsthesia according to him—and
+how perfectly right he is!—is nothing but a mental and psychical
+disease, which may be cured by <i>suggestion</i>; it is an organic
+malady, which cannot be cured without the restoration of the proper
+organic state.</p>
+
+<p>Worthy of notice are a few pages on the existence of electrical
+phenomena, “which are exaggerated in certain subjects, but which
+appear to exist in a more feeble degree in the normal states.” The
+facts here involved might furnish us with a key to the phenomena
+of transmission, polarisation, elective sensibility, and certain actions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_459">[459]</span>at a distance, whose solution still presents great difficulties. Also to
+be noted are a number of corrections of inductions made by Darwin,
+whom ignorance of physiology often involved in mistakes concerning
+the true nature of phenomena: thus Darwin was often led to attribute
+an intentional character to actions which are throughout reflex.</p>
+
+<p>Basing his views on the inevitable correlation of these two orders
+of phenomena, the physical and the psychical, M. Féré stands
+in a position of direct hostility to the metaphysics (of course, unconscious)
+of the great body of alienists. He selects the characteristic
+disorder of insanity, namely hallucination, and sets about to
+show the existence of physical phenomena concomitant with hallucination.
+Chapter XIII is one of the most instructive of his work
+and well worth thoughtful perusal. Let us add on this point that
+M. Féré stoutly combats the doctrine, held by Magnan in particular,
+that all forms of phobia, that is to say, of morbid emotive states,
+are the brands of degeneration. He admits, however, that a great
+number are connected with permanent constitutional states, congenital
+or acquired.</p>
+
+<p>M. Féré accepts the pathological and degenerative theory of
+crime. But he rejects in a measure Lombroso’s thesis of the assimilation
+of genius to insanity. Genius and talent, he says, are by no
+means devoid of intellectual and emotional anomalies, but it is not
+true that neuropathic states are the indispensable concomitants of
+genius, although susceptibility to impressions is, when not developed
+to excess, one of the physiological conditions of genius.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to the social consequences involved, I will simply
+quote his concise statement that “physiology is quite in accord with
+political economy in condemning the intemperate generosity which
+favors the development and multiplication of emotive personalities.”
+With regard, finally, to the question of responsibility, M. Féré’s
+position differs, so far as I can see, in no respect from my own, which
+I have expounded at sufficient length in a former number of <i>The
+Monist</i>, to dispense me from the necessity of reverting to it here.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Our next book is also a remarkable one—<i>Les transformations du
+droit</i>, by <span class="smcap">M. G. Tarde</span>, a small volume of some two hundred and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_460">[460]</span>twelve pages. M. Tarde has again and again declared himself the
+avowed adversary of Spencerianism, and of evolution generally, at
+least in so far as the idea of evolution is indiscriminately and unreflectingly
+employed, as is the case, he maintains, in a great class of
+social questions which make up the criminal and civil law. Everywhere
+in these domains, despite apparent uniformity, which is the
+simple effect of a perspective that effaces the differences of remote
+times, is found diversity. The serial stages of development professedly
+disclosed, he rejects as absolutely incompetent in the explanation
+of criminal law, procedure, the status of persons and things,
+and obligations.</p>
+
+<p>In criminal law, for example, we ordinarily regard the system
+of pecuniary composition as the origin of penal justice, and the idea
+of vengeance as necessarily antecedent to the idea of culpability. A
+mistake, says M. Tarde. And he offers on this subject a distinction
+which is quite curious. He sees the defensive reaction made against
+criminal acts originally splitting up into two distinct forms of quite
+unequal scope: the one moral, the joint product of indignation and
+compassion; the other vindictive, malevolent, and ruthless. The
+first, according to him, is exercised within the family and between
+members of the same social group; the second is displayed towards
+the foreigner and the enemy. Of these two sources of penality, the
+domestic moral punishment is the most important; the blow-for-blow
+policy, or vengeance, although more apparent, is a secondary
+source. I fully admit that the instinct of sympathy, the primitive
+condition of all social aggregation, has never been wholly absent
+from human relations, and it might be that the distinction perceived
+by M. Tarde is well founded, although the two sources appear to
+have become so confounded in the justice of the tribunals that it is
+difficult to trace them to that point. But M. Tarde seems to me to
+be too much disposed to flatter the portrait of the primitive man
+and to make as “mild as lambs” these prehistoric creatures whom
+we have pictured as “cruel as tigers,” and to be too much preoccupied
+with the ideas of penality and moral responsibility, which he
+thinks the new theories have compromised.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to the status of persons, he denies the existence of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_461">[461]</span>the well-known order of development by which promiscuity, matriarchy,
+and patriarchy are said to succeed each other. The tribe
+could only have arisen, he tells us, from the federation of families,
+and the strong family, the one capable of development, could only
+have been patriarchal. It is wrong, he adds, to regard uterine filiation,
+that is, the custom of considering a child the son of its mother
+and not the son of its father, as a vestige of a pre-existent matriarchy.
+“In a patriarchal society, polygamy—which is the very reverse of
+matriarchy—ought in the very necessity of things to give predominance
+to the custom referred to, so that children born of the same
+mother could be distinguished from one another.” This, indeed,
+was the idea of the Greek tragedians. The maxim, which occurs so
+often in Euripides, that it is not good that a man should have several
+wives, is always disclosed as the anxiety of assuring the legitimacy
+of children; Æschylus charges Minerva to defend the “cause
+of her father”; it is one of the aspects of the reaction against the
+customs of Asia. The primitive family, says M. Tarde, in summing
+up, was quite different in its original forms; it was here monogamic,
+there polygamic, and in other places polyandrous, at one time exogamic
+and at another endogamic, and so forth. “Marriage, therefore,
+did not spring from a single typical form, nor does it, in its various
+forms, make towards such.”</p>
+
+<p>His criticisms are of equal strength with regard to the status of
+things and the presumed priority of collective property. Contrary
+to the views of M. de Laveleye, he is of opinion that the community
+of the village could only have arisen on an enlarged model of the community
+of the family, “just as the vestal fire of the city could only
+have been lighted in imitation of the fire of the domestic hearth”:
+The certain effect of the first must in its origin have been to encroach
+upon, not to produce, the second. Excessively preoccupied in finding
+in the present the vestiges of a state of things that is past, the
+evolutionists involve themselves, regardless of consequences, in many
+naïve and wonderful theories, which M. Tarde, in his keen and
+pointed style, has not hesitated to expose. There is much point
+and a profusion of the <i>granum salis</i> in these instructive pages.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to obligations, he makes a distinction, as in criminal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_462">[462]</span>law, between internal and external relations. Also, after having
+asserted with Sir Henry Sumner Maine, the non-fusion of the law of
+nature and the law of nations, he remarks that here also there exists
+two sources whose waters have not subsequently flowed together:
+the <i>jus naturæ</i> is conceived to be the generalisation of a type of relations
+abstracted from the internal relations of the members of the
+primitive social group; the <i>jus gentium</i> to be the outcome of relations
+between men that belong to different groups.</p>
+
+<p>Is, then, this disordered succession of the social data mere
+chance? The reader will bethink himself of a number of facts which
+go to disprove this conclusion, and it is a difficulty moreover which
+M. Tarde has also felt. He replies by making a distinction of “two
+kinds of laws, the laws of causation and the supposed laws of evolution.”
+The first, which in his theory are analogous to the laws of
+celestial mechanics, whose formulæ remain constant no matter what
+the history of the solar systems distributed throughout the heavens
+may be, are the psychological laws; the second are merely arbitrary
+formulæ, which, when we come to define them accurately, do not
+admit of adaptation even to the majority of cases. The psychological
+laws of which M. Tarde here speaks are reducible to <i>imitation</i>&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_82" href="#Footnote_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a>—consequently
+to <i>invention</i>—and to <i>logic</i>. I certainly do not propose
+to question the importance of these factors. In a short tract
+published several years ago I pointed out myself that the influences
+of contact are more efficient than the influences of race or even of
+climate, and this implicitly involves the idea of imitation. Yet the
+character of the psychological factor does not, it seems to me, exclude
+a tendency towards a certain arrangement of the data of society,
+despite their possible and actual diversity. “With respect
+to the facts of society,” I wrote, “we point out their changes but
+do not succeed in disclosing the laws of their evolution; the most
+we have done is to note amid the totality certain features which appear
+to predominate.” To extricate these features is a task not
+unworthy of the historian. M. Tarde himself admits that results of
+this character have already been reached, and he especially points
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_463">[463]</span>to “the splendid and commendable movement in advance, which
+though not generally noticed&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_83" href="#Footnote_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> has, nevertheless, accompanied all
+juridical evolutions”—namely, the constant enlargement of the relations
+of law as the result of a growing sympathy and sociability.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, the point of view which M. Tarde has taken does
+not exclude a class of researches different from his. Nothing can
+be better than to formulate the laws of the psychological agent, and
+M. Tarde, original mind that he is, has done this with a superiority
+and penetration to which I yield my unqualified admiration. At
+bottom, does not the view of Auguste Comte, despite his contempt
+for psychology, involve the preliminary study of the biological individual
+and the social agent? Psychological laws and physical laws
+undoubtedly meet in the same group of “laws of causation”; still,
+it should not be forgotten that in the social order of things man is
+the creator of the facts and that his creations react upon him in the
+proportion in which they are realised. At any rate, a tangible relation
+exists between the creations of the agent and the variations
+of the results, and it is not forbidden to inquire if there does not
+also exist a certain order in these creations, the effect of which would
+be to produce a recognisable serial succession in the results, a medial
+line about which the events of our life oscillate. A difficult investigation—and
+one in which M. Tarde has shown himself to be
+too speedily satisfied, and in which we should strenuously guard
+against hasty generalisations. It is unpleasant, we admit, to turn
+topsy-turvy a house in which we have long lived in comfort; but
+our contentment returns in an increased measure when we have replaced
+our things in their proper places, and swept out the dusty
+corners.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. M. Aguiléra</span> has just published a work entitled, <i>L’idée du
+Droit en Allemagne</i>. His book is a history of the different schools
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_464">[464]</span>of law which have arisen in Germany and lays especial emphasis on
+the fact that no nation has advanced as far as this in seeking in philosophical
+ideas the motives and the justification of its acts, and he
+sets about showing how the existence of Germany’s special conception
+of law may be explained. Germany, he writes in his conclusion,
+everywhere starts from the idea of force. Its peculiar characteristic
+is to bow before victorious force. And to this must be added, if we
+wish to comprehend its aggressive character, the sentiment of vanity,
+which has led it to proclaim “that incredible formula: the ideal of
+Germany is the ideal of humanity.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">M. George Lyon</span> gives us a learned historical study, <i>La philosophie
+de Hobbes</i>. He points out how everything is interrelated in
+the work of this philosopher—his conception of the state to his theories
+of ethics, his ethical doctrines to his psychological theories,
+and the latter to general principles concerning nature, thought, and
+their laws. But he also presents with much force the objections to
+Hobbism. He condemns its final consequence, which is submission
+to force. He points out finally the inevitable ambiguity which permeates
+this system in consequence of the struggle “between individual
+inspiration, which is purely ontological, and the action of an
+intellectual environment which is eminently empirical. Hobbes was
+the metaphysician of empiricism as Bacon was its poet.” I dismiss
+for the present all discussion of these subjects; an occasion
+will present itself later of dealing with them.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Les races et les langues</i> <span class="smcap">M. André Lefèvre</span> sums up the state
+of the science of language. The distinguishing characteristic of his
+work is the non-separation of language from the organism which has
+produced it, and the simultaneous presentation of languages with
+the ethnical groups which speak them. M. Lefèvre accepts, let us
+note at once, the well-known stages of the linguistic school—monosyllabism,
+agglutination, inflection, and analysis, which M. Tarde,
+if he should unexpectedly become a philologist would stigmatise as
+gratuitous. Of the races, of the places of origin, and of the migrations
+of the ancient peoples he tells a great many stories which are
+somewhat of the fairy-tale order, but this reservation does not affect
+in the least the value of his special linguistic researches.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_465">[465]</span></p>
+
+<p>In conclusion I shall mention <i>Le problème de la mort, ses solutions
+imaginaires et la science positive</i>, by <span class="smcap">M. L. Bourdeau</span>, and <i>Platon,
+sa philosophie, précédé d’un aperçu de sa vie et de ses écrits</i>, by
+<span class="smcap">M. Ch. Bénard</span>, a new volume in the series of historical studies
+by this venerable professor.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_84" href="#Footnote_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a></p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Lucien Arréat.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h5>FOOTNOTES:</h5>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_82" href="#FNanchor_82" class="label">[82]</a> See his work <i>Les lois de l’imitation</i> (Alcan, Paris).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_83" href="#FNanchor_83" class="label">[83]</a> I have called attention to this in a less definite manner in several passages of my
+book <i>La morale dans le drame, l’épopée et le roman</i>, in which I shall have to incorporate
+the corrections which the splendid studies of M. Tarde have suggested. For
+the citation given a few lines above I ask permission to refer the reader to my
+<i>Journal d’un philosophe</i> (Alcan, Paris).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_84" href="#FNanchor_84" class="label">[84]</a> All the works mentioned are published by F. Alcan.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_466">[466]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_REVIEWS_III">BOOK REVIEWS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Einleitung in die Philosophie.</span> By <i>Prof. Friedrich Paulsen</i>. Berlin: Wilhelm
+Hertz. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>Friedrich Paulsen, professor at the University of Berlin, writes this “Introduction”
+not so much for connoisseurs as for students, whom it may serve as a
+guide. He discusses in general outlines the various fundamental problems of philosophy,
+at the same time indicating his own position, which, in more than one respect,
+is very similar to the philosophy presented in the columns of <i>The Monist</i>.</p>
+
+<p>His own view, which, as he trusts, is the general tendency of modern philosophical
+thought, he calls “idealistic monism.” It is opposed, on the one hand, to
+supernatural dualism, and on the other hand to atomistic materialism; the former
+being the traditional doctrine of the schoolmen and of ecclesiasticism, separating
+body and soul, nature and God, etc., each into two distinct realities, which are accidentally
+combined, the latter being an attempt, having its beginning in the eighteenth
+century, to explain all natural phenomena in a purely mechanical way.
+Paulsen adds: “The whole history of modern philosophy can be said to be a continuous
+attempt to overcome this opposition.... The principle of natural science
+is the <i>Natur-Gesetzmässigkeit</i> of all events.... Modern materialism derives from
+this a kind of metaphysics, represents all reality as a system of blindly operating
+physical forces.... Philosophy undertakes to dispel the opposition of these two
+doctrines; its proposition is—and we may say that this is the main-spring of the
+entire evolution of modern philosophy—<i>to reconcile the religious world-conception
+with that of natural science</i>. There are many who regard this aspiration as a sort
+of squaring of the circle, and we grant that some similitude between the two may
+exist, for here as well as there we can attain only to approximations, here as well
+as there we can never solve the problem finally and forever. At any rate, we
+must recognise the fact that the whole philosophical thought of the last three
+centuries has been directed towards this goal.”</p>
+
+<p>Professor Paulsen classes the various philosophies of the present time as follows:
+(1) The phenomenalistic-positivistic philosophy which denies any absolute
+cognition of reality, least of all in physics; the world of objects is a world of phenomena.
+(2) The idealistic monistic philosophy. To define the nature of reality
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_467">[467]</span>as it is in itself, we must rely upon the data of our inner experience. The intellectual-historical
+world is to us the most comprehensible dénouement of reality—in
+fact, the only comprehensible one. The ultimate idea to which we are led in tracing
+out facts, is this: Reality, which presents itself to our senses in the objective
+world as a unitary system of motions, is the appearance of a spiritual all-being,
+which must be conceived as the evolution of some unitary idea. In this respect
+idealistic monism agrees upon the whole with speculative philosophy, or rather with
+all idealism since Plato.</p>
+
+<p>The philosophy of the present time is, further on, characterised (3) as passing
+from intellectualism to voluntaryism; namely, it allows the will to have its legitimate
+influence in the construction of a world-view. It is (4) evolutionistic-theological,
+which latter tendency meets half way the above-mentioned idealistic monism.
+Both are beginning to permeate ethics, sociology, jurisprudence, and politics. The
+old formalistic methods are dropped and teleological considerations prevail. Purpose
+is recognised to rule in life. Lastly (5) the philosophy of to-day is historical.
+The older philosophy is mathematical-naturalistic or abstract-rationalistic. Speculative
+philosophy precedes the construction of an intellectual-historical world; it
+then attempts also to construct nature historically, at least in a logico-genetic schematism.
+Natural science has already pursued this course in its cosmical and biological
+theories of evolution. It is apparent how these tendencies follow the old tradition
+of harmonising the physical and the intellectual-historical worlds into one unitary
+conception of the whole.</p>
+
+<p>The book is divided into two parts, with an introduction and conclusion. The
+introduction defines the relation of philosophy to mythology and to the sciences.
+Philosophy cannot be separated from the sciences. Says Paulsen: “Figuratively
+speaking, reality is a great riddle proposed to man; all the various sciences determine
+some parts of it, and the attempt to solve the <i>whole</i>, to find the key to
+the <i>mysterium magnum</i> of being, is called philosophy.”</p>
+
+<p>The first book treats, in two chapters, of the problems of metaphysics, viz.:
+the ontological problem and the cosmo-theological problem. In the former chapter
+materialism, panpsychism, and the nature of the soul are discussed, while the second
+chapter is devoted to atomism and teleological theism, implying such subjects
+as the theory of evolution, causality, pantheism. The second part reviews, in
+the first chapter, the problems of the theory of cognition, viz.: the idealistic arguments,
+the realistic views, and our knowledge of the outer world. The second
+chapter presents an exposé of the problems regarding the origin of cognition as
+viewed by rationalism and empiricism, paying special attention to Kant’s formalistic
+realism. The conclusion is a brief treatment of some ethical problems.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to discuss all the details of the 444 pages of Paulsen’s book, but
+a few specimen quotations from the chapter “Pantheism and World-soul” may be
+welcome to our readers. Our author asks: Considering all the tendencies of yearning
+and willing that appear in the innumerable forms of reality, is there a unity of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_468">[468]</span>inner life corresponding to the unity of the physical world in its universal interaction?
+The affirmation of this question constitutes the idealistic pantheism.</p>
+
+<p>Idealistic pantheism is to Professor Paulsen the simplest and most obvious
+construction of the world possible. To other world-views, the existence of the soul
+is a problem; it has even been called an “absolute problem.” “I believe,” he
+adds, with great truth, “that there can be no stronger argument against any world-view
+than that it regards the existence of soul as something absolutely mysterious.”
+There is a power of conviction in idealistic pantheism verified by the
+astonishing agreement of the testimonies of many various thinkers in the Orient as
+well as in the Occident, in antiquity no less than in modern times. (P. 243.)</p>
+
+<p>Says Professor Paulsen: “The dayfly may imagine when the sun sinks that
+all is at an end; light vanishes forever and the whole world is swallowed up in
+darkness and death. But man who sees so many suns sink and rise should have
+learned that in the infinite there are many possibilities which he cannot see at
+present [p. 241]. The conception of a world-soul, of a spiritual all-being, of a
+<i>mundus intelligibilis</i> appears to our physicists and physiologists in the same light
+as the conception of anthropomorphic deities—as a childish dream. They have no
+need of this hypothesis [pp. 243-244]. Du Bois-Reymond declares that a naturalist
+before admitting the assumption of a world-soul should demand, ‘that we
+ought to find somewhere in the world neuroglia embedded in warm arterial blood
+under the proper pressure and provided with appropriate sense-organs, ganglions,
+and fibres, corresponding to the intellectual capacities of such a soul.’ An animal,”
+says Paulsen, “needs as a matter of course legs to stand upon and to move
+with, a stomach, teeth, eyes, and a central nervous system, but the All is not in
+need of this; it needs no legs to stand upon and to move with, no stomach for alimentary
+purposes, no eyes, no ears, for there is nothing to be seen or heard outside
+of it, and so it can also dispense with a nervous system and a brain.”</p>
+
+<p>Quoting two passages, one from Fechner, the other from Nägeli, to the effect
+that the system of fixed stars might be regarded as a group of molecules in an infinitely
+larger whole which we should have to conceive of as a unitary organism,
+Paulsen says: “Indeed, there is no objection to regarding a planet as a ganglion of
+the world-brain. Is it too large? No. Why should not the world-brain have
+bigger cells than an animal brain. Or is its composition inappropriate? Why?
+We find in it the same materials, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, phosphorus, and
+so forth, and also innumerable interactions similar for all we know to those that
+take place in a ganglion. Who knows how striking would be the resemblance of
+their structures, if we could but see a ganglion under a sufficiently powerful magnifying
+glass.”</p>
+
+<p>These ideas are mere possibilities and are presented as such, but we cannot attribute
+to them any philosophical, scientific, or religious importance. Our idea of
+“a world-soul” or, better, of God, is different and we avoid purposely anything
+that can be constructed upon the basis of a vague hypothesis.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_469">[469]</span></p>
+
+<p>We ourselves reject pantheism, the view which identifies God and the All for
+reasons which we need not repeat here. We call our view of God entheism, and in
+forming our idea of God we purposely avoid such fantastical assumptions as considering
+the possibility of solar systems being molecules in the organism of a huge
+world-animal. Granted the truth of this view, the mere possibility of which we cannot
+deny, this extraordinary creature or world-animal would not be God, its will
+would not be our moral authority; it would not be the eternal, the immutable, the
+ground of all being, the ultimate rule of action, and the omnipotent universal law of
+existence: it would merely be a creature like ourselves, only immeasurably bigger,
+evolving like other animals and subject to the same or analogous or perhaps similar
+wants, disappointments, sufferings, and joys as ourselves. What a miserable God
+such a world-being would be; we know nothing of him and he knows nothing of
+us. His will and aspirations would have even less influence upon our aspirations,
+than, for instance, the hopes of a man upon the molecular groupings in his tissues,
+we being only the parasites upon the crust of an atom of his tissues. We have presented
+our view of the subject in Vol. III, No. 2, pp. 249-257, of <i>The Monist</i>, in the
+third part of the article “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” with reference to a similar
+hypothesis incidentally touched upon as a possibility of monistic theism by Professor
+Romanes.</p>
+
+<p>We simply state the difference between our position and that of Professor Paulsen
+concerning the nature of a world-soul without intending to make more of it
+than he does himself; for, if we are not mistaken, it is with him a mere suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>We conclude our review with a passage which shows Professor Paulsen’s attitude
+toward Christianity, which more than anything else proves the general agreement
+of his work with ours. He says:</p>
+
+<p>“The Christian faith is not a philosophical system, not a theological dogma
+and still less the residue of an old superstition, but the immediate and living certainty
+of the heart concerning the nature of the good and its importance in real
+life. This faith can be to-day the same as it was in Luther’s, or St. Augustine’s,
+or the apostles’ time who saw Jesus with their own eyes bodily. If Christianity,
+did indeed consist of a number of doctrines and opinions, it would certainly be
+true, as some claim, that it has been dead a long time, for doctrines and opinions
+are not long-lived. If Christianity really did consist of the belief in the creation
+of the world five thousand years ago out of nothing, the rib story of Eve, the story
+of Eden and the fall, etc., etc., ... then indeed it would be impossible for a
+thinking man of to-day to be a Christian. But all that is not the faith of Christianity,
+it is not the religion of Jesus. And if all the leaders of all the confessions
+declare that this is the Christian faith and that he who does not believe all these
+things can have no part in Christ, their proposition must be rejected as untrue.
+No one can be saved by believing these things; while the request of the church
+to believe in certain opinions set forth by men has expelled many an honest man....
+In the life and death of Jesus I have learned to understand the meaning of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_470">[470]</span>life and I call God and the revelation of God that which makes my life possible
+and explains to me the significance of my life.... Is such a faith compatible
+with the above-mentioned monistic world-conception? My answer is, By all
+means.”</p>
+
+<p>This is Professor Paulsen’s solution of the problem of a reconciliation of
+science and religion—and we add that it is ours too.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. C.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">First Steps in Philosophy.</span> By <i>William Mackintire Salter</i>. Chicago: C. H.
+Kerr &amp; Co. 1892. Price, $1.00. Pages, 155.</h4>
+
+<p>This little book is divided into two parts: (1) Physical, (2) Ethical. In the
+first, Mr. Salter discusses the conception of matter; in the second, that of duty.
+Mr. Salter’s philosophical position is epitomised in a sentence which he quotes from
+Herbert Spencer. This sentence states, that, “what we are conscious of as properties
+of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections
+produced by objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable.” Mr. Salter’s
+philosophical position, accordingly, is, first, Idealism, and, second, Agnosticism.</p>
+
+<p>In ethics, Mr. Salter’s view embraces Utilitarianism, or Hedonism, and Intuitionism,
+both of which, he says, are incomplete in themselves, and must be supplemented
+by other elements. Utilitarianism makes happiness the ultimate end; Intuitionism,
+virtue; and Mr. Salter adds, such an end must embrace the “realisation
+of <i>all</i> our capacities.” Mr. Salter’s ethical position has been before discussed
+in our journals.</p>
+
+<p>If we study Mr. Salter’s philosophical views, we shall find that his theory is
+a reproduction of Berkeley’s analysis of the data of knowledge, embellished by
+the results of modern physiological psychology. Yet Mr. Salter’s theory, although
+it everywhere shows the traces of a close study of Berkeley’s views, presents the
+strange historical anomaly of undoing Berkeley’s work. Berkeley’s undoubted
+aim was to place knowledge on a basis of fact and refute, in a philosophical
+manner, the agnosticism, metaphysicism, and transcendentalism prevalent in his
+day. But Mr. Salter adds to Berkeley’s results the very things that Berkeley
+sought to overthrow, and thus renders the latter’s analysis (and consequently his
+own) in need of an equivalent analysis.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for instance, the above-quoted sentence from Herbert Spencer, to which
+Mr. Salter assents. “Objective agencies,” “unknown and unknowable”! Is this consistent?
+All knowledge is a knowledge of sensations, a knowledge <i>of</i> and <i>in</i> the mind,
+says the idealist, and we cannot, by any process of ratiocination, arrive at things
+“outside” the mind. Yet he himself, it seems, arrives at a knowledge of “objective
+agencies” outside the mind (pp. 65, 69), and, what is more wonderful, at
+agencies that are “unknown” and “unknowable.” Surely, this is not abiding by
+an analysis of the facts of sensation (Berkeley). It is as unrational a procedure to
+infer metaphysical objective agencies, as it is to infer a metaphysical substratum
+“matter,” which last is the error of the realist.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_471">[471]</span></p>
+
+<p>Again, take the notion of cause. Here, also, the same unwarrantable abandonment
+of the facts of sensation, i. e. of <i>all that is</i>, is evident.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of an analysis, in which he shows that “all the choir of Heaven
+and the furniture of the earth,” and “all which it inhabit,” retreat and vanish in
+mind, Mr. Salter asks: “But is there absolutely nothing real and objective left?
+So far as sensible phenomena are concerned, we must answer, No, absolutely
+nothing is left; the whole sensible (material) world is but an effect upon ourselves.
+But,” he adds, “it would be a hasty inference,” on these grounds, “to say that
+nothing whatever is left.” And when asked “what is left,” he answers, “all
+that causes sensation.” We can never know scientifically what these causes are,
+but “we have an inextinguishable faith” <i>that</i> they are, “there being no particular
+thing we are more sure of than that for every event (and every sensible phenomenon
+is an event, viz., in ourselves) there is some kind of explanation or cause.”
+To sum up: The theory of “sensible or physical idealism”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_85" href="#Footnote_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> implies a “supersensible
+or metaphysical realism.” In the theory of sensible idealism things only
+exist as sensations; “only exist, that is, <i>save in their supersensible or transcendental
+causes</i>”—which, says the author, we must always add.</p>
+
+<p>What is a cause? Cause is an abstraction. An abstraction from what? from
+a real, physical world, or from a metaphysical, transcendental world? Plainly,
+from our real world, from Mr. Salter’s world of “sensible reality.” By what philosophical
+warrant, then, is this concept applied to a world from which it has not
+been derived and to which it surely cannot apply! It is wrong to speak of a cause
+of the All. The All has no cause, just as it has no weight.</p>
+
+<p>All these difficulties arise from the notion that there are two kinds of knowledge
+and two kinds of existences. Idealism, to be consistent, must be absolute; Mr.
+Salter’s idealism is not absolute. This is exactly the criticism that the reading of
+his book at once forces on one. All knowledge is knowledge of sensations, i. e.
+of reality; things not accessible to sensation are not real, they do not exist; consequently,
+all entities transcendental, metaphysical, and supersensible do not exist.
+This is the conclusion to which any philosophy, idealism, realism, or what not
+<i>must</i> lead.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays, few people dispute the fundamental thesis of idealism (of course,
+expressed in different terms from those of Mr. Spencer’s sentence). In a sense, it
+is established. Its only drawback is, that its “establishment” accomplishes nothing.
+It leaves the problem of philosophy where it found it.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_86" href="#Footnote_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> Reality is still reality.
+The same difficulties and perplexities exist. The universe still mocks us. And
+foremost among the riddles that the world opposes to man, stands that eternal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_472">[472]</span>query: “What is mind?” Mr. Salter’s views of this question will show us what
+contributions his theory is likely to make to philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Salter defines mind as “that which experiences sensations and thoughts,
+or, more simply, that which feels and thinks.” It is not feeling, not thinking, but
+<i>that which</i> feels and thinks. It is thus an agent, a subject. It is difficult to understand
+how this notion of mind is come at, without self-contradiction. In their
+origin, all notions of mind-subjects, mind-essences, mind-agencies, and so forth, are
+materialistic. They must be volatilised and stripped of their substantial attributes,
+if they are to take a place in an idealistic philosophy, and then, as they “cannot be
+ranged along with the sensible phenomena of which the mind takes cognisance,”
+there is but one realm left to exist in, which is the transcendentalistic.</p>
+
+<p>All this comes from carrying the abstraction by which “mind” is reached, to
+mathematically infinite limits. In this abstraction the world retreats and fades
+away into nothingness. And what is left? Not a single idea or fact by which we
+can fix our abstraction. Mind is all, and mind is nothing. It is not matter, not
+time, not space—not even a mathematical point, which we expect it to become in
+its infinitely contracting perspective. It has no attributes, no qualities; it is
+nothing and nowhere. This conception of mind, Mr. Salter says, is only mysterious
+as we <i>make</i> it so, by careless and inaccurate thinking. And Mr. Salter is
+right. It would require much careless thinking to make such a conception mysterious.
+A thing or notion that cannot be defined, placed, or brought into connection
+with any other thing or notion in the world, is not <i>mysterious</i>, but simply does
+not exist. In that respect, it is as plain as day.</p>
+
+<p>The same confusion exists in the discussion which disposes of the query,
+“<i>Where</i> is mind?” The idealist, in Mr. Salter’s sense, does not admit that the
+mind is in, or in anywise spatially connected with, the brain. The question, <i>where</i>
+is mind? he says, has no meaning, any more than the question, what is the color of
+a pleasure? This is true. Mind is an abstraction. In this sense it has no spatial
+existence. But the phenomena from which this abstraction has produced itself,
+<i>are</i> linked with phenomena which have spatial existence, and in this sense the mental
+processes are not mysterious nothings and nowheres. When I lose that group
+of sensations called my leg, I know that, generally, I have lost the feeling of my leg.
+So, also, when a certain part of that group of sensations called my brain is destroyed,
+I know that I shall then have lost my power of memory or of speech or of motion.
+I may also experiment with other groups of sensations called dogs and cats, which
+I know have mental powers. In the light of these facts it is not correct, either in
+philosophy or common sense, to say that mental processes are absolutely independent
+of locality. I know that my thoughts are not connected with the group of sensations
+I call the moon, and I know they are not connected with that group of sensations
+that I call Mr. Smith. I am always aware of them as connected with that
+group of sensations which I call “myself.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Salter, in fact, half recognises this. He says, “The mind <i>is</i> dependent on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_473">[473]</span>the body in the sense that our general power of sensation and thought is connected
+with those sensations we call our body.” Yet, “why this should be so is mysterious.”
+Indeed! One is inclined to ask Mr. Salter here, what species of explanation
+or knowledge he wishes of this phenomenon. Is explanation, or knowledge,
+something more than the recognition and seeing of a plain connection between the
+groups of sensations that constitute reality? In Mr. Salter’s analysis, all the facts of
+the world are mysterious. Why a thing is as it is and is not other than it is, is mysterious.
+He utterly fails to understand why the power of perceiving colors is linked
+with the particular group of sensations he calls his eye, and why it should not just
+as well be linked with some other group or no group at all.</p>
+
+<p>Why do I see with my eye? Why do I not see with my hand or with the
+hairs of my head, or why do I not eat with my elbow, instead of my mouth? Why
+do not stones fall upwards? Why do not magnets point towards the East? Why do
+not the planets move about Jupiter or Saturn? Mr. Salter’s question makes a jumble
+of the whole universe.</p>
+
+<p>It is not the object of science or philosophy to find out why things are not what
+they are, but to find out what they are. In this inquiry the why and wherefore,
+properly understood, will evolve themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Science simply concerns itself with the connection of the groups of sensations
+which the idealist, and for that matter every one else, calls reality. It cannot concern
+itself with anything else. All other things are artificial and self-made existences.
+Nothing exists but reality and the connections of reality. To seek for any
+other connections than those that exist is absurd and futile. And to seek for any
+other causes or cause of relations than such as really are is also futile. Before we
+speak of the knowledge of a thing we must analyse and define our notion of knowledge,
+and before we speak of the cause of a thing we must analyse and define our
+notion of cause. In our view, the relation which Mr. Salter doubts, is so intimately
+and inextricably one, that the causal relation disappears. Neither is the cause of
+the other. We may, for the purposes of inquiry, start from either as our general
+concept, but we should never go so far as utterly to expel from reality the other.
+True science and philosophy are neither idealistic nor materialistic, but <i>real</i>. The
+two positions are extreme positions, and each is useful only as a safeguard against
+the errors of the others. Reality is reality; that is the main thing. Whether it is
+idealistic or materialistic is of minor consequence. Besides reality there is nothing;
+its negation is non-existence.</p>
+
+<p>We do not wish in these criticisms to repudiate all that is in Mr. Salter’s book.
+A great many of its reflections are helpful and suggestive. We may refer, for example,
+to the passages in which the body is regarded as a gradually decreasing wall
+of separation between that part of reality which is known subjectively and that part
+which is known objectively. This is really a unitary view. We believe, however,
+that if Mr. Salter would carefully analyse the notions of knowledge, explanation,
+cause, effect, and, therefore, the notion of reality, he would not push his philosophy
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_474">[474]</span>to the mysterious extreme at which it finally arrives, and he would absolutely reject
+such unscientific conceptions as supersensible realism, metaphysical realism, and
+supersensible or transcendental causes. These render the reading of his book as a
+philosophical help unsatisfactory, and leave the mind even more confused and perplexed
+than it was before. However, all discussions of this sort have their value,
+and Mr. Salter’s book possesses a virtue which few other philosophical productions
+can boast of: it is very short. The author’s pleasant style will also add to the
+pleasure of its perusal, and if read critically the book will evoke much helpful
+thought.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">T. J. McCormack.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">A Review of The Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution.</span>
+By <i>C. M. Williams</i>. New York and London: Macmillan &amp; Co. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>This is a book, the perusal of which will leave the earnest student of moral
+science full of disappointment. Not at all that it manifests any lack of ability or
+information. On the contrary, it is at once clearly and entertainingly written, and
+at the same time packed with notes and comments that are full of interest and instruction.</p>
+
+<p>The course of the book may be briefly stated. The first part, comprising nearly
+half of its six hundred pages, is devoted to the statement of the ethical doctrines
+maintained by thirteen prominent writers, whose views have been formed more or
+less under the influence of the theory of evolution, viz.: Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel,
+Spencer, Fiske, Rolph, Baratt, Stephen, Carneri, Höffding, Gizycki, Alexander,
+and Paul Ree. The rest of the book is the review of our author. This review is
+conducted under the topical heads: The Concepts of Evolution; Intelligence and
+End; The Will; Thought, Feeling, and Will in Evolution; Egoism and Altruism
+in Evolution; Conscience; Moral Progress in History; The Results of Ethical Inquiry
+on an Evolutional Basis; and The Ideal and the Way of Its Attainment.</p>
+
+<p>These are all topics of great interest and importance, and the author has brought
+to the consideration of them a mind fully stored and entirely competent. But we
+look in vain for that discourse and criticism which above all other matters relating
+to moral science those who are interested in human welfare crave from those who
+tender their reflections upon ethical topics.</p>
+
+<p>The great need of moral science is the discovery and certification of its basis.
+It is a need that far transcends the scope of mere moral science, for upon its right
+determination depends the right determination of a multitude of questions that
+deeply involve the welfare of humanity. It is a need that is not merely crying to
+be supplied. It is absolutely wailing. Could it only be rightly determined, mankind
+would fast enough orient itself in the course of evolution and with undissipated
+energy work out its best possible development. But undiscovered or uncertified it
+balks all process, save only that mechanical, halting, stumbling process that has
+hitherto obtained; a process that is, as all may observe, one that has little if any
+inward coördination, but is full of inability and cross-purposes. Since it was the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_475">[475]</span>professed purpose of our author to review a number of the more prominent systems
+of ethics, which he esteems to be founded on the theory of evolution, his failure to
+notice and to comment upon so conspicuous a feature of moral science would naturally
+lead a reader, unversed in the works noticed, to suppose that those works had
+altogether slighted this topic. Such is, however, not the case. With the exception
+of perhaps Darwin and Wallace, all the writers reviewed by our author have given
+more or less attention to this matter, and they have left us in no doubt as to the
+positions which they severally hold. Most of them are Hedonists of one sort or
+another. Haeckel, Carneri, Rolph, and Alexander are, we believe, the only exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>But a more serious criticism upon the work under notice is suggested by its
+very title. That title as much as says that the various works which are reviewed
+by our author are “founded” upon the theory of evolution, at least in so far as their
+ethical doctrines are concerned.</p>
+
+<p>Now, what is the theory of evolution? What is its essential nature? Does not
+its very form consist in the affirmation of an eternal secular mutation, in which
+there is no discontinuity whatever? It says that existence in sum and in every detail
+is eternal and continuous process. It uncompromisingly forbids all suppositions
+of any absolute beginning, or of any absolute end, or of any absolutely final adjustment.
+Hence, no system of ethics can with truth be said to be “founded” upon
+the theory of evolution that ignores or forgets this essential character of it. Now,
+when we turn to the consideration of the various “systems” which our author supposes
+to be “founded” upon the theory of evolution, we find them, one and all,
+occupied more or less with suppositions of ends. All are forecasting some “ideal”
+condition, which, being attained, all chances of retrogression will be foreclosed and
+all possibilities of betterment will be exhausted. In other words, they suppose an
+attainment of death, or rather an attainment of a death-in-life more utterly horrible
+than any actual death can possibly be. The very first condition for an ethics that
+will be truly evolutional must be the fit and full recognition of a boundless horizon
+to evolution in morals as well as in all else. Emerson perceived the truth when
+he said in “The Sphynx”:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Profounder, profounder</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Man’s spirit must dive;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">To his aye rolling orb</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">No goal will arrive.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The heavens that now draw him</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">With sweetness untold,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Once found; for <i>new</i> heavens</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">He spurneth the old.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And at present, the most serious efforts to establish a truly clear-sighted ethics
+of evolution, with an unequivocal disavowal of any and all Hedonism, is made by
+the editors of <i>The Monist</i>. It, indeed, is the key-note of the missionary work that
+characterises all the publications of The Open Court Publishing Co.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_476">[476]</span></p>
+
+<p>Any truly evolutional ethics must show itself a doctrine that applies just as
+well to regress as to progress. Evolution is too often confounded with progress,
+but degeneration is just as truly evolutional as is the contrary movement, and, looking
+the facts of existence in the face, mankind has no assurance of any unchangeable
+course of betterment. The principles of morals are, however, not dependent
+upon the benign action of nature. When the earth’s stock of fuel shall become exhausted,
+or when the ice age returns, or when the sun grows cold, there will be no
+alteration thereby in the moral law. Good and evil must and will be the same under
+all circumstances, and no system of ethics is nor can be anything but a temporary
+makeshift, that does not as well fit the <i>diastoles</i> as it does the <i>systoles</i> of existence.
+We must look for a doctrine that shall inform the conduct of men not only
+for the fore part of the day, when all is jubilant and bounding and man asks only
+for some good task to do, but also for the evening and night, when man grows weary
+and craves for rest; for not only youth and maturity, but for waning strength, old
+age, and death; for not only the progressive era of cosmic history, but for the periods
+when natural conditions may disfavor mankind, when, say, man may gradually
+be so reduced in resources that the same will barely suffice for simple life-preservation;
+when under the stress of natural conditions the human intellect, in the course
+of generations, becomes step by step eliminated; when indeed humanity itself tends
+perhaps slowly, but with certainty, towards permanent extinction.</p>
+
+<p>They who complacently protest that the theory of evolution leaves the domain
+of moral science substantially unaffected are surely in great default either in their
+comprehension of the nature and implications of that theory, or in their powers of
+circumspection, while those who suppose that moral science becomes evolutional
+simply because of a little application of that theory to some of the subordinate questions
+that are involved, show themselves in a plight as bad as the others if not
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>Our author notices without dissent, and even with seeming concurrence, the
+various remarks made by many of the writers reviewed by him in discredit of teleology.</p>
+
+<p>Since as we have before protested the theory of evolution forbids all suppositions
+of any ends that are absolutely final, it of course follows that teleology is in
+the strictness of its meaning inadmissible, even in ethics. But in dismissing teleology,
+let us not pour out the child with the bath. However it ought to be with the
+interpretation of the order of nature as a speculative exercise, something that is
+analogous to teleology is an absolute necessity if ethics is to be anything more than
+a curious study of human practise. The universe may manifest no purpose, design
+or secular tendency, but man is and can be nothing but a miserable estray on the
+ocean of existence unless he sails on a course, instead of merely drifting. To do
+this he must take something by which to steer, and any plausible stability is better
+than no bearings whatever. At any rate man is insuperably drawn to thus mark out
+his course. If the theory of evolution forbids him to suppose any ends that are absolutely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_477">[477]</span>final, it does not prevent him from ascertaining directions. Indeed evolution
+affords him data of the very first importance for that behoof. Instead of ends
+we have aims and if ethics is to become that counsel and guide to humanity, which
+we yearn for so anxiously, it must ascertain and certify that single paramount aim
+to which all other tendencies are naturally subsidiary. Teleology, or rather the
+determination of the aim of evolution, must prepare the foundation before any evolutional
+ethics that is worthy the name can be established.</p>
+
+<p>Again our author with considerable debate notices the remarks of the writers
+reviewed by him on the old question of free will and necessity,—but like the positing
+of some end or aim to be subserved, free will is one of the presuppositions of ethics.
+When man begins to debate the possibility of rightly ascertaining the true end or
+aim for his pursuit, or when he begins to moot the question of free will, he is debating
+not any question of ethics proper, but only whether such a science is possible.
+Unless conditions and events are functions, as well of man’s personality as of his
+environment; unless persons count for something in the variations of the course of
+nature, it is altogether vain and idle to be troubled with questions of morality.</p>
+
+<p>Free will and somewhat to be achieved are principles which whether well or
+ill founded, ethics proper must take for granted before it has or can have any <i>raison
+d’être</i>. As for free will, however the metaphysicians may have stumbled over their
+own feet, the common sense of mankind has never wavered. As a practical question
+(and ethics is pre-eminently a matter of practice) this question is not an open
+one.</p>
+
+<p>But on the question of what is the true paramount aim for man to pursue, the
+decision that shall finally satisfy man is yet to be made. The best proof that no
+satisfactory answer has yet been made is the fact that we are still seeking an answer.
+As with regard to the needful prime condition for a truly evolutional ethics we
+found wisdom in the poetical insight, so again in this exigency we personally find the
+most profound ethical philosophy in that same insight.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“’Tis Life of which our nerves are scant.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">’Tis Life, not death for which we pant,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">More Life, and fuller that we want.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Francis C. Russell.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Der Pessimismus im Lichte einer höheren Weltauffassung.</span> By <i>Dr. J. Friedländer</i>
+and <i>Dr. M. Berendt</i>. Berlin W.: S. Gerstmann. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>The authors’ aim is the refutation of pessimism and the foundation of a higher
+world-conception. This latter is a pantheism spiritualised by moral ideals and contrasted
+to Darwinism and materialism. Natural science is said to be the surrounding
+walls of the new view, furnishing (1) negative truths of criticism and (2) a
+knowledge of the positive features of nature. The negative truths are: the impossibility
+of the existence of a personal God, of the efficiency of prayer, of miracles,
+of the immortality of the soul, of the separate existence of souls without bodies.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_478">[478]</span>The positive results of natural science are the unity of nature, the indestructibility
+of nature, the harmony of the All, the indivisibility of nature, the irrefragable necessity
+of natural processes according to immutable laws, and the freedom or independence
+of nature, as having its cause in itself, uncreated and uninfluenced by
+any extramundane being.</p>
+
+<p>Natural science alone, according to the authors, is not sufficient to constitute
+the new world-conception. A one-sided view of natural science together with the
+obsolete conceptions of theism are exactly what has brought forth the philosophical
+pessimism of our time. Natural science, accordingly, is not to be regarded as
+the sole source of truth; it is to be corrected by pantheism. The former teaches
+us “to regard matter and its motion, so to say, as a dead inert substance to which
+motion is attached; it treats matter as an immediate reality. Pantheism, however,
+teaches that matter is to be conceived as the interrelation of the innumerable live
+acts of will appearing successively in time and side by side in space,” etc. The
+authors point out that the necessity of law which regulates the mechanical processes
+of nature does not exclude freedom; for “freedom is not arbitrariness but is
+controlled by an immanent <i>Gesetzmässigkeit</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>This summary is sufficient to characterise the ideas of the Drs. Friedländer and
+Berendt. We cannot say that they admit of no criticism, (e. g. their conception of
+natural science must be pronounced as too narrow if not actually erroneous, nor
+should the law of the survival of the fittest be interpreted in the sense that strength
+means brutal force,) but we can, nevertheless, express our sympathy with the aim
+of the authors as well as with the spirit in which they pursue it.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Die Philosophie und die sociale Frage.</span> By <i>Gustav Engel</i>. Leipsic: C. E. M.
+Pfeffer. 1892.</h4>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Acht Abhandlungen, Herrn Professor Dr. Karl Ludwig Michelet zum 90.
+Geburtstag als Festgruss dargereicht von Mitgliedern der philosophischen
+Gesellschaft.</span> Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer. 1892.</h4>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Wie steht es jetzt mit der Philosophie, und was haben wir von ihr zu hoffen?</span>
+By <i>Dr. Wilhelm Paszkowski</i>. Halle a. S.: F. Beyer, 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This lecture by the well-known writer on the science of statistics and its related
+subjects was read before the Philosophical Society of Berlin on the 31st of
+May, 1890. It discusses the problem of socialism, or rather the aspirations of the
+German social democracy from the philosophical point of view of the lecturer,
+which is a modernised Hegelianism. This lecture drew forth on the evening of its
+delivery considerable discussion, which was participated in by Herr Kahle, a socialist,
+and Herr Runze. The discussions of these gentlemen, together with Mr. Engel’s
+reply, are embodied in the pamphlet.</p>
+
+<p>The second of these two pamphlets is also a publication of the Philosophical
+Society of Berlin. It consists of eight treatises, essays, or lectures, which were presented
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_479">[479]</span>by the members of the society to Prof. Karl Ludwig Michelet as a festival
+gift on his ninetieth natal day. The authors of these eight essays are: Adolf Lasson,
+August Cieszkowski, Gustav Engel, Friedrich Kirchner, Wilhelm Paszkowski,
+Max Runze, Georg Ulrich, and F. Zelle. They deal with philosophical subjects,
+chiefly such as pertain to the Hegelian philosophy. Appended to the pamphlet is
+a bibliography of the writings of this Nestor of the Philosophical Society by F.
+Ascherson.</p>
+
+<p>The author of the third pamphlet complains about the decay of philosophy:
+“Metaphysics, the inner fane in the temple of science, stands desolate,” and the
+last disciples of Hegel can no longer prevent the deluge which sweeps away the
+idealism of their grand old master.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Der Materialismus, eine Verirrung des menschlichen Geistes, widerlegt
+durch eine zeitgemässe Weltanschauung.</span> By <i>Dr. Eugen Dreher</i>. Berlin:
+S. Gerstmann. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>The author of this pamphlet, at present a docent at the University of Halle,
+feels somewhat oppressed by the materialistic tendencies of our times. His desire
+is to establish in the world a province of the ideal, and this domain of idealistic
+aspirations and hopes, he says, must and can be based upon a scientific foundation.
+To reach this goal, the author propounds a philosophy which is confessedly dualistic,
+and which must be made a kind of religion. Descartes’s <i>Cogito, ergo sum</i>,
+is to him the beginning of all philosophy. The existence of the All is devoid of
+sense, unless there is an ego to think it. This dualism, if made a religion, will
+throw light upon the problems of the labyrinth of life.</p>
+
+<p>The aspirations of the author are serious and noble. We cannot, however,
+agree with the results of his reasonings. He does not seem to have considered
+Kant’s objections to the fallacy of the <i>cogito, ergo “ego” sum</i>. Nor is he familiar
+with Lichtenberg’s famous remark, that “we should say by rights ‘it thinks,’ exactly
+as we say ‘it rains.’” The same moral conclusions at which the author arrives
+may be reached, the same province for ideal aspirations in the world may be
+gained, the same religious comfort may be found, without any surrender of the
+monistic view of the world. Materialism is an error of human thought. But the
+error cannot be cured by dualism.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Ueber die Grundformen der Vorstellungsverbindung.</span> Psychologische Studie.
+By <i>Max Offner</i>. Marburg: R. Friedrich. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>This little brochure is a carefully worked out study of the phenomena of association.
+The author’s view is summed up in the following statement: “The attempt
+to reduce the phenomena of association, in conformity with their real nature,
+to one single ultimate process cannot be regarded as successful, and we shall
+have to control our aspirations after a unitary conception and rest satisfied with
+reducing the various phenomena of association to two processes which are closely
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_480">[480]</span>related, namely: (1) to an association of simultaneity; and (2) to an association of
+immediate succession.” There is much that is suggestive in the sixty-seven pages
+of this pamphlet.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Finite Homogeneous Strain, Flow, and Rupture of Rocks.</span> Bulletin of the
+Geological Society of America. By <i>George F. Becker</i>. Rochester: Published
+by the Society. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>This is a purely technical research, concerning the causes and form of the discontinuity
+of rock masses. The studies presented are the outgrowth of field-work
+in the Sierra Nevada of California. This range is so intersected by false joints,
+schistose and slaty cleavages, that on a scale of one mile to the inch their average
+separation would be for the most part microscopic. The dynamic manifestations in
+these regions are very systematic. Some of the strains which have produced this
+phenomenon have been infinitesimal, and others have been finite. Only the latter
+are here treated. Finite strain, the relations of stress to strain, the nature of finite
+shear, viscosity, flow, plasticity, ductility, and rupture, the relation of plastic solids
+to fluids, the spacing of fissures formed by inclined pressures, jointing, and slaty
+cleavage, are the chief subjects discussed. The most important result of the investigation
+is that jointing, schistosity, and slaty cleavage all imply relative movement
+and are thus as truly orogenic as falls of notable throw. “In the light of this conclusion,”
+says the author, “it appears that if one could reproduce the orogeny of
+the Sierra in a moderate interval of time on a model made to a scale of one mile
+to the inch, it would seem to yield to external and bodily forces much like a mass
+of lard of the same dimensions.”</p>
+
+<p>This pamphlet is neatly got up, and reflects credit upon the author and publisher.</p>
+
+<p class="right">μκρκ.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Der echte und der Xenophontische Sokrates.</span> By <i>Karl Joël</i>. Volume I. Berlin:
+R. Gaertner. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>There are two sources from which we have derived the main bulk of our knowledge
+concerning Socrates; namely, the writings of Plato and Xenophon. The former
+is generally regarded as an idealiser, and the latter as an historical biographer;
+for Plato simply uses the impressive figure of Socrates to expound his own philosophy,
+while Xenophon, the general, the politician, the historian, is supposed to give
+in the “Memorabilia” a simple and faithful account of what appeared to him worthy
+of being preserved. As Xenophon was not a philosopher himself, it is tacitly assumed
+that he had no reason to alter, to suppress, or to add his own personal views
+to the historical account of the great master whom he bore in grateful remembrance
+as a faithful disciple. There are some other sources; but they are less rich than
+those of Plato and Xenophon. Among them must be mentioned several passages in
+Aristotle, especially in “Magna Moralia” I, p. 1182, a 15. Our author urges with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_481">[481]</span>good reason that the Xenophontic Socrates is radically different from and even
+opposed to the real Socrates, and that we ought to rely more on Aristotle than on
+Xenophon. Xenophon’s “Memorabilia,” Karl Joël declares, is not an historical
+writing but a <i>Tendenzschrift</i>, and we have to be on our guard wherever Xenophon’s
+special tendency comes in.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates is the representative of the philosophical spirit of Attica, and the character
+of his teachings may in a word be described as a noble and sublimated subjectivism.
+Socrates is a rationalist and as such he opposes the mysticism of the
+soothsayer and mantic. He goes so far in his rationalism as to identify knowledge
+and virtue. He cannot understand, from his point of view, (which regards the soul
+as a rational being only and leaves out of sight the existence of impulses,) that a man
+can knowingly neglect to choose the better thing and choose the worse. Plato, in
+order to avoid the error of Socrates, invented the distinction between the rational
+and irrational part of the soul and Aristotle criticises Socrates saying τὰς γὰρ ἀρετὰς
+ἐπιστήμας ἐποίει.</p>
+
+<p>The subjectivism of Socrates appears in his trust in the δαιμόνιον, the divine
+voice within his soul, his rationalism in his constant request to gather information
+before beginning to act. He exhibits in his talks great irony; for instance, when
+telling a politician that as a shoemaker must know his trade before making shoes, so
+he, the politician, ought to know <i>his</i> business before undertaking to manage affairs
+of state. Again and again he satirises the bungling levity of men who imagine that
+in the greatest and gravest things of life they can act without any information. Both
+the subjectivism and rationalism of Socrates appear in his constant inculcation of
+the Delphian motto “know thyself.”</p>
+
+<p>What a different character is Xenophon! He was a convinced believer in manticism.
+There are more than a hundred passages in his writings in which not rational
+forethought but the art of the soothsayer is left to decide the most important
+questions of practical life. When the courageous ten thousand offered him the
+leadership in their dangerous retreat, his ambition urged him to accept, but he first
+asks the God, and the omens being unfavorable, he refuses. He did not accept the offer
+until he had received another more auspicious omen. In the same way Xenophon
+acts throughout. All important decisions which prudence would urge, are made
+dependent upon sacrifices, dreams, or the flight of birds, and more than once the
+safety of the army is greatly endangered by a fatal passivity caused through unfavorable
+omens which prevent Xenophon’s acting with decision at the right moment.
+It is no exaggeration to say that these ten thousand Greek soldiers escaped only by
+good luck the fate of the Athenian army in Sicily under Nikias. And this man, a
+zealous believer in manticism, should be an impartial and reliable historian of the
+doctrines of Socrates? The δαιμόνιον of Socrates is changed into a mystic power, a
+kind of <i>spiritus familiaris</i>. It has ceased to be the divinity of man’s inner self as
+which it appears in Plato’s account, and is represented by Xenophon as some peculiarity
+of Socrates which was given him as a special favor by the gods. Socrates
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_482">[482]</span>dethroned the old fate that was supposed to rule the affairs of men and pointed out
+the importance of knowledge, for through knowledge we can learn to regulate our
+fate ourselves. The philosopher who thought little of well-being, of εὐτυχία, and
+demanded above all a well-doing, an εὐ πράττειν (“Memorabilia,” III, 9, 14, 15,)
+did not recommend asking soothsayers questions where we should better ask ourselves,
+although it is probable that he recommended the Athenians to apply to the
+Delphic oracle instead of relying upon omens not so much because he believed in
+prophesies, but because he thought that they would be influenced by the authority
+of this venerable institution whose wisdom and conservative spirit were beyond question,
+so that good advice could be expected from it. Karl Joël, accordingly, advises
+us to read the “Memorabilia” with an inversion of the points, viz., to convert the
+sentences qualified by “although” and “to be sure” into the main sentences and
+<i>vice versa</i>. In this way we shall be able to distinguish between the pagan orthodoxy
+of Xenophon and the rationalism of Socrates. Why does Xenophon not state directly
+and simply (1) Socrates advised his friend to ask the oracles in all cases of
+uncertainty, (2) manticism is indispensable in the economy of a household as well as
+of a state, and (3) the gods have not granted us any real knowledge as to a final
+success and reveal it through special revelations. Why must he add long sentences
+introduced by “although”? He adds to (1) that everybody ought to act solely according
+to his own conviction, to (2) that all the trades up to the highest professions had
+to be learned before practiced, and to (3) that those who inquired at the oracles for
+things which could be learned and studied in the usual way are crazy and even blasphemers.</p>
+
+<p>This sketch may suffice to characterise the book which is much better than
+could be anticipated after a perusal of the preface, which almost induced us to lay
+it aside unread. It is not the modesty of the author which produces a prejudice but
+the random talk concerning things which neither a reader nor a reviewer will care
+to know. The author has apparently no talent for writing prefaces, and he would
+be wise to omit them in the future entirely. The book might be very much condensed,
+repetitions avoided, and an alphabetical index certainly should have been
+added.</p>
+
+<p>It contains <i>five hundred and fifty-four</i> pages; and the author says he is preparing
+a <i>second</i> volume. We think it would have been better for his views if he had
+expressed them in a pamphlet.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">A Perplexed Philosopher.</span> Being an examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s various
+utterances on the land question, with some incidental reference to his synthetic
+philosophy. By <i>Henry George</i>. New York: Charles L. Webster &amp;
+Company. 320 pp.</h4>
+
+<p>The “Perplexed Philosopher” herein described is Mr. Herbert Spencer, and
+persons who like ginger in their ale will enjoy this book; for its eloquent invective,
+hot from the heart, cheers us like that stimulating drink. Because of this fiery and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_483">[483]</span>revengeful attack on Herbert Spencer much dignified reproof has been aimed at
+Mr. George by those excellent people who religiously forgive the injuries done to
+others, and allow only to themselves the luxury of retaliation; but when we consider
+the provocation given by Mr. Spencer, this counter-blow of Mr. George is
+mild. Mr. Spencer had a critic’s right severely or tenderly to condemn the doctrines
+of Mr. George; and had he kept himself within his privilege Mr. George in
+reply would not have had any right to assail the personal character and motives of
+Mr. Spencer; but the older philosopher chose to treat the younger with supercilious
+disdain, and this was a personal affront that fully justified a retort personal. Scorn
+is an ignoble argument, lawful only in return for scorn.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the truth or error they contain, the writings of Mr. George have
+achieved a phenomenal popularity; their influence on social opinion has been in
+some directions almost revolutionary; they are to-day the political creed of many
+men in different parts of the world, and especially of many thousands in America,
+Great Britain, and Australia. They are bold in theories, attractive in illustration,
+and admirable in their literary form. Their approval of “Social Statics” was an
+advertisement that multiplied by hundreds the readers of that book, and there is no
+philosopher great enough to affect ignorance of Mr. George’s writings, or to dismiss
+them with a sneer. More copies of “Progress and Poverty” have been sold than
+of any other book on social economics that ever has been written, and when Mr.
+Spencer spoke of that book as “a work which I closed after a few minutes on finding
+how visionary were its ideas,” he put on airs of aggravating superiority which
+naturally provoked the resentment of Mr. George.</p>
+
+<p>After not reading the book Mr. Spencer condemned its heresies and said:</p>
+
+<p>“There is the movement for land nationalisation pressed by Mr. George and
+his friends with avowed disregard for the just claims of existing owners....</p>
+
+<p>“And now this doctrine (that society as a whole has an absolute right over the
+possessions of each member) is being openly proclaimed. Mr. George and his
+friends, Mr. Hyndman and his friends, are putting their theory to its logical issue.”</p>
+
+<p>To that Mr. George replies as follows:</p>
+
+<p>“In nothing I have ever written or spoken is there any justification for such a
+characterisation. I am not even a land nationalisationist as the English and
+German and American nationalisationists well know.... I have been a staunch
+denier of the assumption of the right of society to the possessions of each member,
+and a clearer and more resolute upholder of the rights of property than Mr. Spencer
+has been.”</p>
+
+<p>Without waiting to inquire whether Mr. George includes within the “rights
+of property” the right to property in land, it is enough to say that here at least Mr.
+Spencer is at a disadvantage. He disarmed himself before going into battle by refusing
+to read Mr. George’s writings, and scorning to examine them he accused
+them of communism, confiscation, and land-nationalisation. Mr. Spencer cannot
+now strike back for he has thrown his weapons away. He is a prisoner in the hands
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_484">[484]</span>of Mr. George, who couples him with Parson Wilbur denouncing a print called the
+<i>Liberator</i>, “whose heresies,” he said, “I take every opportunity of combating, and
+of which, I thank God, I have never read a single line.” The parallel is well drawn;
+and the lesson of it is this, never challenge a man and then treat him with contempt;
+if you think he is not a foeman worthy of your steel, let him alone.</p>
+
+<p>Had Mr. Spencer studied the works of Mr. Henry George, he would have found
+in them some doctrines having a manifest family likeness to communism, confiscation,
+and land-nationalisation; but they avail Mr. Spencer nothing, because he
+would not condescend to read the chapters where those revolutionary principles are.
+If he would bend his brow a moment and examine them he might find that in this
+controversy there are two perplexed philosophers instead of one. In the book before
+us Mr. George remarks:</p>
+
+<p>“It is this confusion of Mr. Spencer as to rent and value that has led him into
+confusion as to the right of property; and that, at first, at least prevented him
+from seeing that to secure the equal rights of men to land, <i>it is not necessary that
+society should take formal possession of land, and let it out</i>, and consequently, that
+the difficulties he anticipated in taking possession of improved land were imaginary.”</p>
+
+<p>But, in “Progress and Poverty,” Chapter II, he said:</p>
+
+<p>“We should satisfy the law of justice, we should meet all economic requirements,
+by at one stroke abolishing all private titles, declaring all land public
+property, and <i>letting it out to the highest bidders in lots to suit</i>, under such conditions
+as would safely guard the right to improvements.”</p>
+
+<p>The italics are ours, directing the attention to apparent contradictions which it
+is for Mr. George to reconcile. And, if English words have any meaning, “abolishing
+all private titles” means confiscation; and “declaring all land public property
+and letting it out to the highest bidders,” is land-nationalisation; at least, the
+ordinary reader may innocently think so, yet Mr. George declares that he is not a
+land-nationalisationist.</p>
+
+<p>As a personal defense and explanation Mr. George has a right to say that he is
+not a land-nationalisationist, or a communist, or an “ist” of any other kind, and
+we are bound to take his word for it, but in this dispute that matter is wholly immaterial.
+The question before the meeting is this, Is Mr. George’s book a land-nationalisationist
+or is it not? Is it a confiscationist or not? In “Progress and
+Poverty” Mr. George explains his meaning thus:</p>
+
+<p>“I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate property in land. The
+first would be unjust, the second needless. Let the individuals who now hold it
+still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call <i>their</i> land.
+Let them continue to call it <i>their</i> land. Let them buy and sell and bequeath and
+devise it. We may safely leave them the shell if we take the kernel. <i>It is not
+necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.</i>”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_485">[485]</span></p>
+
+<p>The italics are by Mr. George; and a little farther on, he says;</p>
+
+<p>“That is the first step upon which the practical struggle must be made. When
+the hare is once caught and killed, cooking him will follow as a matter of course.”</p>
+
+<p>And several years afterwards, in “Protection or Free Trade,” page 302, Mr.
+George describes the artful mechanism of the snare by which the hare is to be
+caught and killed:</p>
+
+<p>“Now it is evident that, in order to take for the use of the government the
+whole income arising from land just as effectively as it could be taken by formally
+appropriating and letting out the land, it is only necessary to abolish, one after
+another, all taxes now levied, and to increase the tax on land values till it reaches
+as near as may be the full annual value of the land.”</p>
+
+<p>In that paragraph “government” is merely another word for “nation,” and the
+taking away from private owners all the lands of the country “for the use of the
+government” is land-nationalisation, whether the taking be done boldly by imperial
+decree, or furtively by taxing it up to its “full value” and out of the hands of its
+owners.</p>
+
+<p>The discrimination above made must apply to Herbert Spencer as well as to
+Henry George. Mr. Spencer has a right to qualify and explain as much as he
+pleases; he may properly say what he thinks now about the right of land-ownership,
+but the question at issue is this, What are the opinions of “Social Statics” upon the
+land question? Are they not in principle, and very nearly in expression the opinions
+of “Progress and Poverty”?</p>
+
+<p>It is not to be denied that “Progress and Poverty” found moral support in
+“Social Statics.” In fact, the disciples of Henry George, whenever their doctrines
+were assailed, brought Herbert Spencer into the field as a reinforcement. This,
+at last, gave Mr. Spencer great annoyance, and in a moment of irritation he determined
+even by a qualified recantation to withdraw the reserve brigade on which
+“Progress and Poverty” had so long depended for assistance. Hence, his letters
+to the <i>Times</i> and the <i>St. James’s Gazette</i>, and the modification of his views which
+appears in “Justice.” He tried to do this by dropping Mr. George to the ground,
+while endeavoring to stand on consistent feet himself; and this it is that inspires the
+vehement criticism of Mr. George.</p>
+
+<p>With a scalpel most logically keen Mr. George has dissected Mr. Spencer’s
+philosophy of land, and with almost Indian exultation he exposes its eccentricities
+and contradictions. As was inevitable, for we cannot get along without it, the old
+familiar Galileo moral is brought in by Mr. George to prove that “still it moves.”
+He is right; for if it is ethically and politically true, as declared by Mr. Spencer in
+1850, “that equity does not permit property in land,” it will be true forever, and
+no extremity of recantation can make it false. The attempt of Mr. Spencer to show
+by duplicate metaphysics that his later opinions concerning land are not inconsistent
+with the occult meaning of “Social Statics,” is a failure. It cannot stand a moment
+before the searching analysis and legible comparisons of Mr. George.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_486">[486]</span></p>
+
+<p>The attempt to resolve a concrete subject, such as government ownership of
+land, into abstract terms of justice limited or expanded by the right of some private
+person to the house on the land, and the barn, and the well, and the fences, and
+the apple-trees, and other appurtenances, corporeal and incorporeal, has involved
+Mr. George himself, as well as Mr. Spencer, in some confusion of thought, and has
+entangled both of them in varieties of statement not easy to reconcile. This might
+be due to obscure definitions and multiplied explanations, or to changes of opinion,
+but Mr. George asserts that Mr. Spencer’s inconsistencies are the result of moral
+and intellectual dishonesty, prompting him to explain away his principles to propitiate
+the landlords and other aristocratic persons who admitted him into their
+high society after he became eminent, and before they knew that his philosophy denied
+the right of private property in land.</p>
+
+<p>In his letter to the <i>Times</i>, apologising for “Social Statics,” Mr. Spencer said:</p>
+
+<p>“The work referred to—“Social Statics”—was intended to be a system of
+Political Ethics—absolute political ethics, or that which ought to be, as distinguished
+from relative political ethics, or that which is at present the nearest practical
+approach to it.”</p>
+
+<p>And then the philosopher becomes a politician and frames for the landed and
+the landless a moral code, ambidextrous and elastic as a party platform. Duty,
+justice, right, and truth, lose all their absolute qualities, and become relative to expediency
+and our own convenience. He teaches us to oppose wrongs until they
+become vested rights and then defend them. He makes ethics changeable as our
+coats, and the man who can afford two suits of clothes may have two suits of ethics,
+an “absolute” suit for Sundays and a “relative” suit for every day; an “abstract”
+suit for wearing about the house, and a “practical” suit for business purposes. He
+may wear a suit of “pure” ethics when buying, and a suit of “applied” ethics
+when selling; and so, at last, by those harlequin morals, it happens that what we
+ought to do has no relation at all to “that which ought to be.” Those pure subtleties
+and applied subterfuges make Mr. Spencer an easy mark for the indignant sarcasm
+of Mr. George, who shows what Mr. Spencer thought of absolute and relative
+ethics when he said in “Social Statics”:</p>
+
+<p>“When a man admits that an act is ‘theoretically just,’ he admits it to be
+that which, in strict duty, should be done. By ‘true to principle’ he means in
+harmony with the conduct decreed for us. The course which he calls ‘abstractedly
+right,’ he believes to be the appointed way to human happiness. There is no
+escape. The expressions mean this or they mean nothing.”</p>
+
+<p>The book is written in an angry vein, and the nicknames “traitor,” “juggler,”
+“apostate,” and the like, add nothing to the value of its argument; they only give
+bitterness to the censure. They are not to be commended, although they ought to
+be excused, for they sprang out of “a tempest of provocation.” Mr. George has
+been fighting under the banner of Herbert Spencer, and he feels like a soldier
+whose general deserts him in the battle and then disowns him altogether.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_487">[487]</span></p>
+
+<p>The only rational explanation of Mr. Spencer’s letters to the <i>Times</i> and the <i>St.
+James’s Gazette</i> is that he has radically changed his opinions about the private
+ownership of land: and his timid, uncertain, and equivocal way of saying so makes
+him look very much like the “perplexed philosopher” that Mr. George describes.
+At the same time it must be noticed that Mr. George himself is not so radical in
+this last book as he was in “Progress and Poverty.” His principles appear to be the
+same, but in the application of remedies he is milder than he was about fourteen
+years ago. When he reaches Mr. Spencer’s age he may be just as conservative and
+“perplexed” as that philosopher is now.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">M. M. Trumbull.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_85" href="#FNanchor_85" class="label">[85]</a> Mr. Salter’s name for his theory.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_86" href="#FNanchor_86" class="label">[86]</a> Says Mr. Salter: “Idealism (as here stated) is not, however, itself a solution, being only a
+clear statement of what the problem is; and for all that such idealism can say, the problem may
+be insoluble.”</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_488">[488]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="PERIODICALS_III">PERIODICALS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. IV. Nos. 4 and 5.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die Grundempfindungen in normalen und anomalen Farbensystemen und
+ihre Itensitätsverteilung im Spektrum.</span> By <i>Arthur König and Conrad
+Dieterici</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ist eine cerebrale Entstehung von Schwebungen Möglich?</span> By <i>Karl L.
+Schaefer</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber einige neuere Fortschritte in der Anatomie und Physiologie der
+Arthropodenaugen.</span> By <i>Sigmund Fuchs</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. IV. No. 6.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Das Tapetum lucidum bei Durchleuchtung des Auges.</span> By <i>Ziem</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Berichtigung zu Professor Münsterbergs Beiträgen zur experimentellen
+Psychologie, Heft 4.</span> By <i>G. E. Müller</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span> (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>PHILOSOPHISCHE MONATSHEFTE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XXIX. No. 3 and 4.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die älteste Fassung von Melanchthons Ethik.</span> By <i>H. Heineck</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die moderne Energetik in ihrer Bedeutung für die Erkenntnisskritik,
+II.</span> By <i>K. Lasswitz</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die sittliche Frage eine sociale Frage, II.</span> By <i>F. Staudinger</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Johann Eduard Erdmann.</span> By <i>B. Erdmann</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span> (Berlin: Dr. R. Salinger.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVI. No. 4.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die statischen Functionen des Ohrlabyrinthes und ihre Beziehungen
+zu den Raumempfindungen.</span> (Part I.) By <i>R. Wlassak</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber Verschmelzung und Analyse.</span> Eine psychologische Studie. (Part I.)
+By <i>H. Cornelius</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die Wichtigkeit der Reproductionsgefühle für die Entwicklung und
+Bildung des Menschen.</span> By <i>J. Zahlfleisch</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_489">[489]</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 1.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaft bei Galilei.</span> By <i>A. Riehl</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die statischen Functionen des Ohrlabyrinthes und ihre Beziehungen
+zu den Raumempfindungen.</span> (Concluded.) By <i>R. Wlassak</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber Verschmelzung und Analyse.</span> Eine psychologische Studie. (Concluded.)
+By <i>H. Cornelius</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Werththeorie und Ethik.</span> (Part I.) By <i>Chr. Ehrenfels</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A. Voigt’s “elementare Logik” und meine Darlegungen zur Logik des
+logischen Calculs.</span> By <i>E. G. Husserl</i>. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PHILOSOPHIE UND PHILOSOPHISCHE KRITIK.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. CI. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Doxographisches zur Lehre vom τέλος.</span> By <i>A. Döring</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ernst Platner’s und Kant’s Erkenntnisstheorie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung
+von Tetens und Aenesidemus.</span> By <i>Dr. Arthur Wreschner</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jahresbericht über Erscheinungen der philosophischen Litteratur in
+französischer Sprache aus den Jahren 1889 und 1890.</span> By <i>Adolph Lasson</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Recensionen.</span> (Leipsic: C. E. M. Pfeffer.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. V. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On the Development of Voluntary Motor Ability.</span> By <i>Wm. L. Bryan</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Training of Animals.</span> By <i>James E. LeRossignol</i>, Ph. D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On the Judgment of Angles and Positions of Lines.</span> By <i>Joseph Jastrow</i>,
+Ph. D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Statistics of “Unconscious Cerebration.”</span> By <i>Charles M. Child</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Experimental Psychology at Wellesley College.</span> By <i>Mary Whiton
+Calkins</i>. (Worcester: J. H. Orpha.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Ethics of Social Progress.</span> <i>Prof. Franklin H. Giddings.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Did the Romans Degenerate?</span> By <i>Mary Emily Case</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Political Economy and Practical Life.</span> By <i>Prof. William Cunningham</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">German Character as Reflected in the National Life and Literature.</span>
+By <i>Richard M. Meyer</i>, Ph. D.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Book Reviews.</span> (Philadelphia: <i>International Journal of Ethics</i>, 118 South
+Twelfth Street.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 1.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Philosophy of Religion.</span> By <i>Prof. Otto Pfleiderer</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">An Ancient Pessimist.</span> By <i>Prof. J. Clark Murray</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Concept of Law in Ethics.</span> By <i>Prof. F. C. French</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">J. H. Lambert.</span> By <i>Harold Griffing</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_490">[490]</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Kant’s Critical Problem.</span> By <i>J. G. Schurman</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Epistemology in Locke and Kant.</span> By <i>Prof. Andrew Seth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Anthropometry and Experimental Psychology.</span> By <i>Prof. E. B. Titchener</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Discussions</span>: Reality and Idealism. By <i>David G. Ritchie</i> and <i>F. C. S. Schiller</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Book Reviews.</span> (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn &amp; Company.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE NEW WORLD.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 5.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Place of the Fourth Gospel in the New Testament Literature.</span>
+By <i>Orello Cone</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Folk-Song of Israel in the Mouth of the Prophets.</span> By <i>Karl Budde</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cosmopolitan Religion.</span> By <i>C. A. Bartol</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Alleged Socialism of the Prophets.</span> By <i>A. W. Benn</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Whittier’s Spiritual Career.</span> By <i>John W. Chadwick</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Personal Factor in Biblical Inspiration.</span> By <i>Marvin R. Vincent</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Israel in Egypt.</span> By <i>C. H. Toy</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Briggs Heresy Trial.</span> By <i>C. R. Gillett</i>. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
+&amp; Co.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 12.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le mouvement philosophique en Russie: II. La philosophie de Hegel et
+les cercles philosophiques.</span> By <i>E. Lannes</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La composition musicale et les lois générales de la psychologie.</span> By <i>M.
+Paulhan</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La psychologie de W. James</span> (2nd article). By <i>L. Marillier</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Analyses et comptes rendus.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 1.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La psychologie de W. James</span> (3d article). By <i>L. Marillier</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La Croyance métaphysique.</span> By <i>J. Gourd</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La Beauté plastique.</span> By <i>L. Couturat</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Analyses et comptes rendus.</span></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">L’Unité de la philosophie.</span> By <i>P. Janet</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">L’Expression objective en musique d’après le langage instinctif.</span> By <i>J.
+Combarieu</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La Psychologie de W. James.</span> (Concluded.) By <i>L. Marillier</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Revue des périodiques étrangers.</span> (Paris: Félix Alcan.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 3.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Recherches sur la succession des phénomènes psychologiques.</span> By <i>B.
+Bourdon</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">L’amour est-il un état pathologique?</span> By <i>G. Danville</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sur un effet particulier de l’attention appliquée aux images.</span> By <i>André
+Lalande</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Beauté organique et beauté plastique.</span> By <i>A. Naville</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_491">[491]</span></p>
+
+<h4>REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 1.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Métaphysique et morale.</span> By <i>Félix Ravaisson</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le continu mathématique.</span> By <i>H. Poincaré</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Essai sur quelques problèmes de philosophie première.</span> By <i>F. Rauh</i>.
+(Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>VOPROSUI FILOSOFII I PSICHOLOGII.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_87" href="#Footnote_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a></h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. III. No. 15.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Aim of Human Life.</span> By <i>W. Rosanoff</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Problem of Judgment.</span> By <i>F. Charitonoff</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Positivism of Kant.</span> By <i>A. Kozloff</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Basis of the Moral Duty.</span> By <i>N. Grote</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A Criticism of Moral Altruism.</span> By <i>W. Preobrajensky</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Sense of Love.</span> By <i>W. Solowoff</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Founder of Transcendental Monism.</span> By <i>A. Wedensky</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Second International Congress of Experimental Psychology in
+London.</span> By <i>W. Chige</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Question of Zoöpsychology.</span> By <i>W. Wagner</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Law of Perception.</span> By <i>N. Lange</i>. (Moscow, 1892.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. VI. No. 1.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber die actuale Bestimmtheit des unendlich Kleinen.</span> By <i>Pohle</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Gassendi’s Skepticismus und seine Stellung zum Materialismus.</span> By <i>Kiefl</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Begriff des “Wahren.”</span> By <i>Franz Schmid</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Begriff des Unbewussten in psychologischer und erkenntnisstheoretischer
+Hinsicht bei Ed. v. Hartmann.</span> By <i>Achelis</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Substanzbegriff bei Cartesius im Zusammenhang mit der scholastischen
+und neueren Philosophie.</span> (Continued.) By <i>Carl Ludewig</i>, S. J.
+(Fulda, 1893.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>SPHINX.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XV. No. 84.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Nirwana.</span> By <i>Menetos</i>.—<span class="smcap">Die Wiederverkörperungslehre im Drama.</span> By <i>Ludwig
+Deinhard</i>.—<span class="smcap">Die Gnade.</span> By <i>Maria Janitschek</i>.—<span class="smcap">Das Fernsehen als Funktion
+des transscendentalen Subjekts.</span> By <i>Carl du Prel</i>, Ph. D. (Concluded.)—<span class="smcap">An
+Carl du Prel.</span> By <i>Martin Greif</i>.—<span class="smcap">Sehen und Wahrträumen.</span>
+By <i>Hermann Haug</i>.—<span class="smcap">Ueber die spiritistischen Phänomene vom physikalischen
+Standpunkt.</span> By <i>Dr. Anton Lampa</i>.—<span class="smcap">Schuld und Sühne.</span> Ein Beitrag
+zur Frage der Telepathie. By <i>M. Const. Hoch</i>. (Concluded.)—<span class="smcap">Die Göttin
+des Genusses.</span> Eine Traumphantasie. By <i>Karl Friedr. Jordan</i>.—<span class="smcap">Fegfeuer.</span>
+Nach François Coppée. By <i>Rudolf Geering</i>.—<span class="smcap">Gerettet!</span> By <i>Raphael
+von Koeber</i>, Ph. D.—<span class="smcap">Melancholie.</span> By <i>Carl Vanselow</i>.—<span class="smcap">Die sechs Schwäne.</span>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_492">[492]</span>Ein Beitrag zum Nachweis des Esoterismus im Volksbewusstsein. By <i>Gottschalk
+Thorsten</i>.—<span class="smcap">Geheimniss.</span> By <i>Adolf K. W. Hochenegg</i>.—<span class="smcap">Eine Geisterstimme.</span>
+By <i>Hugo Gozdawa</i>.—<span class="smcap">Der Begriff des Absoluten.</span> By <i>O. Plümacher</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVI, No. 85.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lebe deinem höchsten Ideal getreu!—A-u-m.</span> By <i>Menetos</i>.—<span class="smcap">Psalmen.</span> By
+<i>Franz Evers</i>.—<span class="smcap">Meister der Mystik.</span> By <i>Wilhelm von Saintgeorge</i>.—<span class="smcap">Aegyptens
+grosse Pyramide.</span> Ein Tempel der Einweihung in die Mysterien. By
+<i>Eduard Maitland</i>.—<span class="smcap">Die deutsche Gesellschaft für ethische Kultur und
+Herr von Egidy.</span> By <i>Hugo von Gizycki</i>.—<span class="smcap">Die Mystik des Islam.</span> By <i>Adolf
+Engelbach</i>.—<span class="smcap">Ein echter Diener Gottes.</span> By <i>Dr. Raphael von Koeber</i>.—<span class="smcap">Ein
+Gegner des Spiritismus.</span> By <i>Carl du Prel</i>.—<span class="smcap">Die Wissenschaft der Magier.</span>
+By <i>Ludwig Deinhard</i>.—<span class="smcap">Hebe dich weg von mir, Satan!</span> By <i>H. v. M.</i>—<span class="smcap">Anna
+Henle.</span> Ein Erlebnis. By <i>Hübbe-Schleiden</i>.—<span class="smcap">Der Stern der Sintflut.</span> By
+<i>Arthur Stentzel</i>.—<span class="smcap">Selige Gegenwart.</span> By <i>Maria Janitschek</i>.—<span class="smcap">Sehnsucht.</span>
+By <i>Carl Vanselow</i>.—<span class="smcap">Das Elflein, das ausging, den König zu suchen.</span> By
+<i>Bernhard Fabler</i>.—<span class="smcap">Der blinde Passagier.</span> By <i>Ludwig Ganghofer</i>.—<span class="smcap">Frühlings
+Erwachen.</span> Für Väter und Erzieher. By <i>O. Plümacher</i>.—<span class="smcap">Drei Knospen.</span>
+By <i>Hans von Mosch</i>. (Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke &amp; Son.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>We cannot be accused of having any penchant for Theosophy or Spiritualism
+and find little occasion to praise their productions, which are usually crude and
+illiterate. But we must confess that Hübbe-Schleiden’s review, the <i>Sphinx</i>, is
+greatly superior to anything in this field we have ever seen. There is artistic taste
+about it; there is, so far as its position admits of, a certain contact with positive
+science; there is an attractive popularity without shallowness. All these means
+are skilfully employed by the editor to impress his ideas, erroneous though they may
+be, upon his public. If the magazine appeared in English, instead of German, it
+would at once become the recognised leader in its field.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_87" href="#FNanchor_87" class="label">[87]</a> <i>Questions of Philosophy and Psychology.</i></p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_493">[493]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="masthead">
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Vol. III.</span>
+<span class="smcap spacer">July, 1893.</span>
+<span class="smcap">No. 4.</span></p>
+
+<h2>THE MONIST.</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="NATIONALISATION_OF_EDUCATION">NATIONALISATION OF EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITIES.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_88" href="#Footnote_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>A little more than a century ago it was universally believed
+that, in the nature of things, the vitality of a republic and its
+size stand in an inverse ratio. The inadaptability of a republican
+system of government to a state of vast territorial expanse and with
+a very numerous population was considered an almost axiomatic,
+i. e. self-evident, truth. When the thirteen English colonies in North
+America had taken the bold resolution to transform themselves into
+the United States of America, many an ardent patriot often asked
+himself, not free from anxious foreboding, whether the Union was
+within the limits laid down by irreversible political laws, as the
+utmost extent of republics fit to endure. If it had not been for the
+size of the country, the doubts as to whether the republican experiment
+was likely to prove a success, would never have assumed a
+character, which gave sufficient color to the charge of monarchical
+tendencies, to make them appear well-founded in the eyes of so
+many people. When afterwards a new empire was to be added to
+the Union by the Louisiana purchase, the doubt, as to whether the
+republican system of government would be equal to the strain put
+upon it by such an immense enlargement of the area of the United
+States, played a not unimportant part among the objections of the
+opposition. That experience has definitively disposed of these ideas,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_494">[494]</span>by proving the apprehensions to be unfounded, is no reason to think
+meanly of the political discernment of those who entertained them.
+It will not be universally admitted, that experience has thus far
+proved them to be wholly unfounded also as to consolidated republics.
+And how can it be wondered at, that at that time the essential
+difference was not fully realised and understood, which exists between
+a federal and a consolidated republic with regard to the peculiar
+dangers and evils apt to arise from this specific cause. Though
+republican federations had been known to the world for two thousand
+years, no instruction was to be derived from their history on this
+head. As to the extent of territory, the consolidated Roman republic,
+which had consumed its vitality with its growth, could alone be
+compared with the United States; and as to many of the essential
+features of their political structure, neither modern nor ancient history
+furnished an analogy. In the soil of the New World, the germs
+of European institutions had—adapting themselves to the new conditions—developed
+into a new type of commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>It is conceded on all sides that, next to the capacity of the
+American people for self-government, the United States owe it primarily
+to the happy blending of the principles of National Union
+and State Independence that, taking all in all, hitherto their history
+has been the most striking and convincing vindication of republican
+institutions; and it is hardly questioned that, but for the happy
+blending of these two principles, a republic comprising half the
+North American continent and possessed of all the requisites of vitality
+never would nor could have existed. Upon their being “an
+indestructible Union of indestructible States,” the vitality of the
+United States absolutely depends. That, with this principle as the
+foundation, the domain of a republic <i>can</i> be almost indefinitely
+extended, without thereby destroying its vital energies, has been irrefutably
+demonstrated. But does that mean, that the United States
+have definitively solved the problem of keeping the vital forces of a
+republic covering a vast area unimpaired? By no means. Only
+the preliminary question has been settled by them for all time to
+come, what the indispensable prerequisite of its solution is, and
+they have thus far succeeded in preserving their vitality. But even
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_495">[495]</span>as to themselves, the solution of the problem itself has to be repeated
+over and over again, not only by generation after generation, but
+every year and every day. The hour never will, never can come,
+when the American people can, with impunity, say: the task is accomplished;
+let us rest and enjoy the fruits. It never can come,
+because the problem itself is in a continuous state of transformation.
+Though the changes be so slow, that they are imperceptible to the
+keenest eye trying to follow them up from year to year, they are
+none the less real, and if they are not duly heeded, the penalty will
+have to be paid some time in one way or another. While the fundamental
+principle, the blending of National Union and State Independence,
+is irreversible, the attempt to make its application immutable,
+would be fatal. I say the attempt, for actually to do it, is,
+in the nature of things, impossible. The American people are not
+only constitutionally a nation. The civil war did not result in the
+permanent disruption of the Union, but in welding it more indissolubly
+together, because, with the single exception of slavery, the
+facts coincided with the law. In spite of the tremendous sectionalising
+influence exercised by slavery, the nationalisation in feeling,
+thinking, and interests had made such progress under the operation
+and protection of the law of the land, that it could stand as severe
+a test, as any consolidated State can boast of having stood. The
+causes, to which it was due, that the facts were in conformity with
+the law, have been ever since unremittingly at work,—the counter-tendencies
+have disappeared with the abolishment of slavery,—and,
+independent of that, those causes are every year acquiring a greater
+force. The actual nationalisation, therefore, goes steadily on,
+whether we like it or not, and though the constitutional nationalisation
+be allowed to remain unchanged. While the legal status under
+the Constitution may not be altered for ever so long, we are confronted
+by constantly changing conditions. If we do not conform
+in what we do and leave undone to the irrepressible changes of this
+evolutionary process, the maintenance of the principle of blending
+National Union and State Independence will avail us but little. The
+vital energies will dry up and ebb away, for while we have kept the
+form, we have become strangers to the spirit which renders it a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_496">[496]</span>magic force. Nor ought the dividing line between political parties to
+run, as in days of yore, on the question of State rights and consolidation.
+All discriminating patriots must be as well State rights men
+as consolidationists, respectively conscious supporters and promoters
+of further nationalisation. Where and how ought State independence
+to be strengthened, so as to prevent an over-consolidation by the
+silent working of those nationalising causes, which it is impossible
+to stem? and: Where and how ought consolidation, respectively
+nationalisation, to be promoted, in order to make the working of
+those nationalising causes conducive to the true interests of the
+people and to the invigorating of republican institutions? These
+are the two questions which the American people have constantly
+to ask themselves. On the discretion and discernment displayed in
+trying to find the correct answers must it depend, whether the federative
+principle will work as well in the future, as it has done in the
+past.</p>
+
+<p>If these propositions must be admitted, it can be proved that
+in no respect is conscious and systematic nationalisation more imperatively
+needed than in regard to education. At first sight this
+assertion may seem worse than extravagant. I am, however, not
+afraid to submit my case to the jury of the American people, if I am
+but conceded the legal right of every criminal, to be heard ere I am
+judged.</p>
+
+<p>Education is the bed-rock on which this republic rests. However
+excellent its political institutions be, its decay and ultimate
+downfall is inevitable, if the people fail to do their full duty by themselves
+in this respect. For, in a democratic republic, political institutions
+are live forces only so far as the people have the mental
+and moral requirements for working them well, and these mental
+and moral requirements can be attained only by education. It is,
+therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, a <i>vital</i> question for the
+republic that every one of its sons and daughters receive not only
+some schooling, but that the education of all be proper and adequate.
+That is a tremendous task. It constantly grows in scope
+and intricacy, and at the same time, it becomes of more and more
+import that it be well accomplished. With the people rests the ultimate
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_497">[497]</span>decision in everything, and the problems confronting the commonwealth
+are assuming more and more a character, taxing the
+highest statesmanship to the utmost. Thus the claims upon the intelligence
+and the moral soundness of the people are fast being
+strained far beyond anything ever known by any former generation
+in this or any other country. And lack of the required intelligence
+and moral soundness in any one State necessarily affects the whole
+Union. A State that is derelict to its duty in the education of its
+people, wrongs not only itself, but also the nation. By its share in
+the federal government, every State is directly instrumental in laying
+down the law for the whole country. All the States are thereby made
+to participate in the payment of the penalty for its intellectual and
+moral deficiencies. This is, however, by no means the only way in
+which they are made to suffer by them. What the law does with regard
+to everything rendered federal by the Constitution; commerce, travel,
+and interchange of population do in other respects. They are unremittingly
+and with ever increasing intensity at work, multiplying
+and rendering more close the organic relations between all the parts
+of the vast domain, every water-way, railroad-track, and telegraph
+line performing the functions of the veins in the animal organism.
+If the blood be poisoned in one limb, the virus cannot be prevented
+from working its way into the whole system.</p>
+
+<p>To admit that education is in the highest degree a national <i>interest</i>,
+and to deny its being a national <i>concern</i>, is, however, a self-contradiction.
+To contest either the right or the duty of a nation
+to acknowledge every national interest a national concern, and to
+deal with it accordingly, is a palpable absurdity. Not as to the
+Whether, but only as to the How, can the people be restricted by
+the Constitution. A constitution imposing upon the people an injunction
+to minister to the needs of the commonwealth, would be as
+great a political monstrosity as a constitution providing for the dissolution
+of the state.</p>
+
+<p>This doctrine will not be allowed to pass unchallenged. I shall
+be asked whether I set myself against the universally accepted fundamental
+principle of American constitutional law, that the federal
+government has no powers but those granted to it by the Constitution.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_498">[498]</span>I do not. “Where, then,” my interlocutor will go on, “do
+you find the express grant or the implied power?” Nowhere. “Then
+you advocate a constitutional amendment to the effect indicated by
+you?” I do not. I know that such an amendment could not get the
+vote of a single state, and if there were a possibility of its being
+adopted by the constitutional number of states, I should be found,
+to the last, among those fighting it tooth and nail. I can hardly
+conceive of a more suicidal measure than the adoption of such an
+amendment. Just because education is the bed-rock on which the
+republic rests, is it of vital importance that it does not become a
+federal affair. Self-reliance and responsibility are the main pillars
+supporting a democratic commonwealth. Kill, in the people of a
+state and the population of its subdivisions, the habit of self-reliance
+and the sense of responsibility in regard to the substratum of the
+whole political and social structure, and they will wither and shrivel
+up in regard to everything else. The compulsion to tax themselves
+directly for the establishment and maintenance of schools and the
+being in close touch with those entrusted with the direction of the
+educational work are an inestimable boon to the people.</p>
+
+<p>Even if it were economically possible to do without direct taxes,
+political reasons would peremptorily forbid their abolishment. On
+account of their moral effect, no state could dispense with them, and
+least of all a democracy. All indirect taxes are paid more or less
+unconsciously; the people, however, must be kept conscious that
+the public purse means their own pockets. The more they lose
+sight of this, the wider the door is opened to paternalism, and paternalism
+is a more deadly enemy of liberty than despotism and
+tyranny. These, if any vitality be left in the people, ultimately
+kindle the desire for liberty, while paternalism acts upon it as an
+opiate and ends by killing it through the systematic enervation of
+self-government. If this is to be kept alive not only in form, but
+also in essence and in spirit, the people must constantly be held to
+teach themselves in illustrating by their own acts the irrefutable
+truth, that not the rights, but the self-imposed duties are the vital
+principle of true democracy. Nothing, however, is more apt to
+drive this all-important fact irresistibly home, implanting it ineradicably
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_499">[499]</span>in their whole feeling and in their conscious thinking, than the
+necessity to vote, as directly as possible, out of their own pockets
+the money required for preserving intact and in vigor the prerequisite
+of <i>all</i> that is needed for the preservation of the nation’s vitality.
+If it be not deemed irreverent, I should say that every dollar a man
+voluntarily votes out of his pocket to provide for the educational
+needs of the community, preaches to him a political “Sermon on
+the Mount.” “Liberty and self-government,” it says, “must be
+paid for;—state and society are in their very essence ethical conceptions;—they
+must totter, fall, and crumble to pieces, unless they
+rest on an ethical foundation;—to preserve, broaden, and deepen
+this foundation, by providing for the required intellectual and moral
+equipment of the generations in whose hands the future destinies of
+the commonwealth will lie, is the paramount duty of the people;—no
+one has the right to exempt himself from doing his share in the
+fulfilment of this duty, for the heirloom of the past, enjoyed by the
+present, is but a trust to be left, with accrued interest, to the future;—the
+fulfilment of this duty ought to be considered rather a privilege
+than a sacrifice, for every farthing paid for the maintenance of
+the humblest village school is an integral part of the nation’s life-insurance
+premium;—glory in this responsibility to the whole country,
+for it constitutes you, with the wealthiest and mightiest, a joint
+builder of its greatness;—glory in thus bearing witness by the fruit
+of the sweat of your brow, that you, too, are sworn in on the creed
+that man does not live by bread alone;—glory in and render thanks
+for being thus held to keep ablaze in your own bosom and help
+kindle in the bosom of the lowliest child of the community, the
+sacred fire of idealism.”</p>
+
+<p>That by many, perhaps by most people, this appeal is not heard
+in distinct words, I do not contest. But that is no reason to make
+light of it. Utterly lost it never is. Something of it sinks into the
+mind even of the dullest and most hard-hearted, though it be but in
+the form of a faint and vague feeling. To make them lose this, is
+to deprive them of the best they have. Democracy is not a mill-pond,
+on which a fragile boat can outride the wildest tempest. It
+is the open sea, on which the proudest and stoutest craft is sure to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_500">[500]</span>be swamped, sooner or later, if it be not properly ballasted. True
+idealism, however, never was a more essential part of the ballast,
+than in these times and in this country. It stands more in need of
+it than any other state, because its unparalleled opportunities are
+appallingly powerful incentives to plunge headlong into the materialistic
+tendencies of the age. Therefore, it is ruthless to lay hands
+on anything tending to keep alive and foster true idealism in the
+people. For this reason it would be, in my opinion,—not in intention,
+but in effect,—a dastardly crime, under any plea whatever, to
+release the people from the obligation to provide in their local organisations
+for the education of their youths.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, I even deem it upon the whole more beneficial than
+detrimental that many of the higher and most of the highest educational
+institutions of the country are the free gift of high-minded
+men and women to the people. I have never agreed with those who
+have contended in this country that the duty of the commonwealth
+does not extend beyond providing for primary and, at the most, to
+some extent for secondary education, and that it would not be fair
+and proper to tax all for the establishment and maintenance of colleges
+and universities, which, in the nature of the case, only a small
+minority can frequent. It would be hard to name a more promising
+sign of the times, than that this doctrine has of late lost so much of
+its former hold upon public opinion, that one would have to search
+long for an advocate of it in its original rigor. It is eminently
+in the interest of all, that there be an ample number of men and
+women who have received the highest education. Therefore, it
+is evidently not only justified, but imperative, that the commonwealth
+furnish the means for supplying its want. But if the views
+held in this respect on the continent of Europe had prevailed in the
+United States, the American people would have been the poorer of
+one of the vastest and most grateful fields for manifesting idealistic
+public-spiritedness. An inestimable loss, for idealistic public-spiritedness
+is not the least of the causes to which it is due that American
+democracy has stood the test; and idealistic public-spiritedness,
+like every virtue, grows stronger and more fruitful by being practised.
+Every donation for educational purposes prompts others to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_501">[501]</span>follow suit, and is, apart from its direct beneficent effects, a most
+valuable object-lesson to the whole nation. With equal impressiveness,
+the rich and the poor are reminded of the treasures which
+“neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.” On every educational institution
+brought into existence in such a way are indelibly inscribed
+the two magic words to which this country owes it greatness: Help
+yourself, and Public Spirit; every one of them is a living protest,
+as well against paternalism—whether it present itself in the socialistic
+or in any other garb—as against the setting up of the golden calf
+as the idol of the republic. Therefore, everything tending to seriously
+check these manifestations of idealism and public spirit in regard
+to higher education would be deplorable, even if it were in
+itself commendable, for paternalism and materialism are too rampant
+to leave anything undone that is calculated to keep them down.</p>
+
+<p>To contend that the existing decentralisation in regard to education
+must be done away with, would, for these reasons, be a truly
+Quixotic charge upon windmills: the venture must result in broken
+bones. It cannot, and, if it could, ought not to be done, for this
+decentralisation is the natural outgrowth of the whole historical development
+of the commonwealth and in perfect accordance with the
+underlying principle of its political and social structure. But it
+would be strange logic to conclude from this that it can have worked
+no harm, or that the evil consequences it may have had cannot be
+remedied. Can it be denied that, apart from the primary schools,
+it sounds almost like mockery to speak of an American system of
+education? If we look at the schools of a higher grade, we are confronted
+by a bewildering chaos, and the nearer the top, the worse
+the confusion becomes. That the effects of this are not altogether
+good, will be universally admitted, though opinions will differ as to
+the weight that ought to be attached to the bad consequences in the
+aggregate and severally. To me, some of them seem to be of a very
+serious character, and I hold that they must from year to year become
+of more consequence. To say that somebody has been through
+a “high school,” does not convey sufficiently definite information as
+to either the kind or the amount of instruction he has received. To
+know that somebody is a graduate of an “academy,” a “college,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_502">[502]</span>a “university,” means to know next to nothing as to his mental
+equipment. To gauge our man, we must inquire, What academy,
+what college, what university? Having learned that, we are in hundreds
+of cases not a whit wiser than before. We have to ask for
+the calendar of the institution, and, after having read that, we shall
+often be still pretty much at sea, for, as the Germans say, “paper is
+patient,” and the printing of a first-class programme implies by no
+means of necessity first-class instruction. This may be considered
+by some of little or no moment, because the degrees confer no rights
+whatever. But they are, nevertheless, not senseless gewgaws. If
+they be deemed such, their abolishment must be insisted upon, for
+then they are as much out of place in this country as orders or other
+meaningless titles. They are intended to be certificates of knowledge
+and mental training. If they lose this character, they are
+nothing, or worse than nothing. It is, however, self-evident that
+they must be deprived of this character, exactly to the extent that
+the educational institutions bearing the same name and conferring
+the same degrees differ from each other. Do you not think it more
+than likely that, if a law were passed making it obligatory to add to
+the letters indicating a degree the name of the institution by which
+it was conferred, an astounding number of ornamental tails to names
+would be cut off forever?</p>
+
+<p>This would not be done, if the degrees merely failed to be definite
+and reliable certificates of knowledge and mental training.
+They do positive harm, because the institutions conferring them
+have little more in common than the name, their educational standard
+differing in the extremes, as much as the crippled shrub and
+the sturdy oak. While the public do not know what value to attach
+to the degree, a large percentage of the recipients are betrayed
+into offensive and pernicious self-deception. Upon the official averment
+of their <i>alma mater</i>, they lay the flattering unction to their soul
+that they have received a much better intellectual outfit than they
+really possess. These institutions practically reverse the precept of
+the Greek sage: not “know thyself,” but “deceive thyself” is the
+maxim imprinted on their diplomas. And this self-deception is a
+subtle, contagious virus. It is at least doubtful, whether more will
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_503">[503]</span>take warning by looking through the false pretense, or be lured by
+it into the same mistaken notions as to the requirements of genuine
+higher education. To have practically no fixed standards for the
+different grades of higher education must as inevitably have mischievous
+effects upon the intellectual life of a people, as its economic
+life must be demoralised by allowing everybody to coin money of
+the same outward appearance, but of any alloy he pleases. Not
+that harm has been done by the almost unlimited freedom enjoyed
+by the educational institutions owing their existence to private
+munificence, is to be wondered at; it is astonishing that the deleterious
+effects have not been much worse. A premium is offered for
+sailing under a false flag. If a college may be called a university,
+and an academy a college, it would be more than surprising if the
+grander name were not frequently preferred, for it flatters alike the
+vanity of the donors, the instructors, and the pupils, and will—with
+more or less reason—be expected to work as a bait. With the name
+goes the right to confer degrees, and the exercising of this privilege
+is to serve the same purposes. But the name renders it necessary
+to keep up appearances, and that is an expensive pleasure. The
+masquerading in a pretentious guise cuts down the allowance of
+wholesome food. Worthless universities instead of good colleges,
+inferior colleges instead of satisfactory academies and fitting schools,
+are but too often the result. No name will deprive the rose of its
+sweet scent; but the buttercup cannot, with impunity, call itself
+a rose.</p>
+
+<p>The worst, however, is, that even the best institutions of the
+higher order are made to pay a heavy penalty for the shortcomings
+of those of the lower rank. Not getting the proper material, they
+do not turn out as good work as they in themselves might do. Much
+valuable time, which ought to be devoted to going on with the
+building, must be spent in mending and strengthening the deficient
+foundation, which, after all, does not acquire the requisite solidity,
+because mending is necessarily patchwork. Nor is the damage confined
+to the pupils that have been sent up from inefficient schools.
+These act as a drag upon those who have come adequately prepared.
+To render matters worse, the deficiencies are neither the same with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_504">[504]</span>all, nor is it known beforehand where they will be found and how
+far they will extend. Neither are the curricula the same, nor is
+there any guaranty that the same curriculum means the same work
+done. Here so many things have been taught, that everything has
+suffered in regard to thoroughness. There, specialisation has commenced
+so early, that the basis is too narrow and too shallow.
+Training for a special purpose has encroached upon education. All
+these difficulties greatly hamper the institution. But they do more.
+They exercise a strong pressure upon it to stray from the right path,
+for they are powerful incentives to yield to the evil tendency, more
+to measure, than to weigh the work done. This is, in my opinion,
+the most deplorable of all the bad consequences which the lack of a
+uniform system, resulting from the decentralisation of education, has
+thus far had; and it is all the more dangerous, because the measuring
+principle is so well fitted to be clad in the seductive garb of a lucid
+and clear-cut system.</p>
+
+<p>I do not expect that every one of my propositions will be universally
+assented to. But can any unprejudiced observer dispute
+that there is enough truth in what I have said to prompt the people
+seriously to ponder the question, where this is going to end? If no
+conscious, energetic, and concerted effort be made to counteract the
+evil effects of decentralisation, the very fact of higher education
+having assumed such a kaleidoscopic character renders inevitable
+its becoming more and more kaleidoscopic. The founders, boards
+of trustees, presidents, and faculties of new institutions are almost
+compelled to give their individual notions on higher education, to a
+dangerous extent, free scope. Having a hundred different patterns
+presented to their consideration, the temptation is well-nigh irresistible
+not to adopt any one of them, but to devise a new one. A
+new experimenting laboratory is set up. That its experiments will
+be, positively or negatively, of some value, is to be supposed. In
+most cases, however, the public interest would have been better
+served by a good factory, renouncing the risky ambition of dabbling
+with new inventions.</p>
+
+<p>A European is struck with wonderment that, considering the
+extent to which decentralisation in higher education has been carried,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_505">[505]</span>not infinitely more harm has been done, and that the harm it
+does, seems to impress the Americans comparatively so little. Neither
+can be understood, unless one fully realises to what a degree the
+American commonwealth is still in its formative period, and what an
+astounding educational power there is in American life. To the
+former it is principally due, that the deleterious effects mentioned
+are here in fact of much less consequence, than they would be, where
+the advantages of an historical development, counting by more than
+centuries, are paid for by the rigidity of age; and the latter supplements
+and corrects the work of the schools so effectively, that it is
+not surprising to find even many a keen-sighted and highly accomplished
+American more or less blindfolded as to this. Because the
+ultimate results are satisfactory, it is taken for granted, that the
+educational conditions of the country must be all right, while a
+searching critical examination irresistibly forces upon one the question,
+whether a good deal is not achieved in spite of them. If this
+be so, failure to promptly attend to what is defective in them will
+surely be punished, for thanks to the rapidity with which the United
+States are being filled up, their formative period is fast drawing to
+a close, and with its close, the educational power of American life
+will be, in some important respects, very sensibly diminished. The
+peculiar advantages, they have thus far enjoyed, are steadily growing
+weaker, while intellectually and morally, the difficulties confronting
+the whole civilised world, and difficulties peculiar to them, are as
+steadily making greater demands upon the people. Growth of population
+and development of economical life, with all its attending circumstances,
+constantly working at the further nationalisation of the
+American people, and the problems to be solved growing more and
+more intricate, disaster must become inevitable, if education does not
+keep abreast of this double movement; and this it cannot do, if we
+do not energetically and systematically go to work to nationalise
+education without consolidating it. Nor have we any time to lose,
+for the task is by no means easy. Every inch of ground gained will
+be the price of an arduous and protracted struggle.</p>
+
+<p>From the Federal Government no direct assistance is to be derived,
+for the question is not within the province of its constitutional
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_506">[506]</span>powers, and if it were, we ought not to ask its interference, because,
+as I said, to nationalise education without consolidating it, is to be
+the aim. Public opinion, unaided by law, must effect the reform.
+Public opinion, however, is in this country even more powerful than
+the law. It is sure finally to overcome not only all active, but even
+all passive resistance, which is always much harder to overcome.
+But is there any possibility of ever inducing public opinion to take
+the question up in full earnest? I am confident there is, and at all
+events it must be tried. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for
+not undertaking it. It only admonishes us, not to waste time,
+strength, and enthusiasm in vain attempts to carry the fortress by
+assault. The works are so extended and so strong that only a methodical
+siege requiring a great deal of skill, patience, and determination,
+offers any chance of success. Two preliminary questions
+must, therefore, be answered, ere operations can be commenced:
+who is to conduct the campaign, and by what tactics can the approaches
+be pushed on the fastest?</p>
+
+<p>The answer to be given to the first question is plain. The instructors
+are to be considered the experts, if anybody can claim the
+title. Upon them, therefore, devolves the duty to take the lead.
+This they have already commenced to do. The very existence of a
+National Educational (Teacher’s) Association is in itself irrefutable
+proof that the opinions advanced by me, have, in some way and to
+some extent, asserted themselves for some time. How this has been
+done and what has been effected, I do not feel called upon to discuss.
+I merely state that while I appreciate what it has done and
+expect from it still more in the future, I am firmly convinced that
+the goal can never be reached if we are to content ourselves with
+what this organisation is capable of achieving. This will be deemed
+the less disparaging, if I furthermore state that, in my opinion, the
+end could no more be attained by any other organisation acting
+singlehanded. Hunting for any one device which will as certainly
+effect a cure as patent medicines claim to cure bodily ailments, is
+but to waste time. The evil has to be attacked from many points
+and in many ways, if sanitation is to set in.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_507">[507]</span></p>
+
+<p>While I am fully persuaded of this, I am, however, on the other
+hand as firmly convinced that nothing will be of avail if the Universities
+do not step forward, heading the column of attack and adding
+compulsion to suasion. The reform has to be worked from the top
+downward. At present the law is, to a great extent, dictated by the
+schools of the lower grade to those of the higher. This must be reversed.
+The Universities must insist upon getting the proper material
+for doing what in their judgment is the proper work. They
+must cease fitting themselves to what the schools are pleased to send
+them. By closing their doors against all applicants whom they do
+not really deem adequately prepared, they must compel the schools,
+either to take down from their portals the inscription “fitting school,”
+or to mend their ways and furnish their pupils the kind and the
+amount of instruction they ought. A University that meekly submits
+to travel on whatever roads some hundreds of schools, which
+all more or less follow their own notions, happen to think good
+enough, never can be a University except in name. No institution
+has a moral right to the proud name of University that does not,
+consciously and determinately, do all that is in its power to direct its
+educational policy solely by what the civilisation of the age and the
+true interests of the nation require.</p>
+
+<p>I wish the old maxim <i>ultra posse nemo obligatur</i> did not compel
+me to say “to do all that is in its power,” for I am but too well
+aware how deplorably little that is in many cases. State Universities
+are subject to another will, and this other will is apt to have
+very much its own notions as to how much a University may be
+allowed to cost, and to determine the standard of the University
+entirely by the local standard of schools. Other Universities, though
+legally their own masters, are practically restrained as much or even
+more by implacable facts. No University can entirely dispense with
+students, and the endowment of more than one University forbids
+its making light of the number of students it can secure. Being to
+some extent dependent upon the students for their maintenance,
+they cannot afford to be very fastidious in regard to the standard of
+schools they try to enlist into their constituency. But there is also
+a goodly number of Universities whose position is in absolutely every
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_508">[508]</span>respect so strong that they can enter the lists without any risk whatever
+to themselves. Whether they stop growing for a while or even
+decline in numbers for some years does not affect their future in the
+least. They are so much in quest by students that the fitting schools
+are sure to make haste to meet their requirements, if these rise above
+their curriculum. To move on in wild leaps would, of course, be
+foolish. But so long as these Universities do not do that they never
+need to look backward in their onward march; their whole constituency
+of schools must follow close upon their heels, because they
+cannot afford to bolt and drop out. The more the leading Universities
+proceed upon a concerted plan, the larger the circle would
+grow, within which their joint pressure would be irresistible: the
+strength of each would be doubled by pressing on, shoulder to shoulder
+with the others, on the same lines. At the same time it will
+make it correspondingly easier for the weaker ones to follow in their
+wake. How could it fail to make an impression upon those on whom
+they depend, if they can back their pleas by urging the practical
+unanimity of all the foremost institutions of the country as to the
+right course to take? The more the leading Universities are united,
+not only as to the scope and method of their own work, but also as
+to what is to be considered the proper preparation for University
+work, the more will deviations from the rules laid down by them
+come to imply to public opinion inferiority of standard; and if there
+is a whip under which American communities smart, it is this. As
+to this would be added the missionary influences of the alumni sent
+from the leading Universities into all parts of the republic, it would
+be strange indeed, if the idea were not constantly to spread and to
+cast deeper root, that to adequately provide for the educational needs
+of the country, it is necessary consciously to create and systematically
+to foster a tendency, by the free action of public opinion, more and
+more to harmonise education, in developing it everywhere and in all
+its ramifications into a thoroughly organic structure.</p>
+
+<p>I am prepared to hear the opinions I have ventured to advance
+strenuously contested and, perhaps, even mercilessly ridiculed by
+many. The open antagonists, however, cause me but little uneasiness.
+I fear only one thing, i. e. that those who more or less endorse
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_509">[509]</span>my criticisms and agree with me as to what is desirable, will be induced
+by the arduousness of the work to persuade themselves that
+it is impossible to bring about such a reform. To them I should
+say: Where there is a will, there is a way, and the American people
+<i>must</i> be brought to will this reform, because every year a portentous
+word is becoming more true and of greater import: “the age of
+perils is past, but the age of difficulties has set it.”</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">H. von Holst.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_88" href="#FNanchor_88" class="label">[88]</a> Commencement address at the Nebraska State University, June 7, 1893.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_510">[510]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="MEANING_AND_METAPHOR">MEANING AND METAPHOR.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Professor Huxley supposes&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_89" href="#Footnote_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> “that so long as the human
+mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify
+its intellectual conceptions.” He finds that “the science of
+the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual
+shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages.” The difference
+he sees is “that the philosopher who is worthy of the name
+knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and
+ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant
+and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality.” He
+then goes on to warn us against dealing with symbols as though
+they were “real existences.”</p>
+
+<p>Few indeed are free from reproach in this matter, so far as reproach
+is deserved at all in the general unconsciousness of what
+constitutes the danger. Few see the question to be vital or the
+danger to be urgent; and even those who do are apt to deny that the
+search for a remedy can be a crusade worth attempting; the very
+idea seems Utopian or pedantic. On the one hand, teachers as a
+rule do not take their own analogies and metaphors seriously. Both
+the literary and scientific, as well as the philosophic and historical
+instinct tell against their doing so. In their eyes figures have either
+faded into indifferent abstractions, or they are obviously pictorial
+and merely rhetorical. But the average reader is apt to take them
+at the foot of the letter. He is usually unaware both of the extent
+to which he literalises and of the curious inconsistencies which his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_511">[511]</span>literalising involves. So he makes his inferences with alight heart,
+and wonders, perhaps, at the resulting confusion without suspecting
+its true cause.</p>
+
+<p>Would that the real state of the case and its practical consequences
+could be pressed home to all with such force, that whatever
+be our line of work or thought or expression we should strive
+in earnest to mend matters. At least, we might begin by learning
+better what part symbolism plays in the rituals of expression, and
+ask ourselves what else is language itself but symbolism, and what
+it symbolises. We should then examine anew the relations of the
+“symbolic” to the “real”; of image, figure, metaphor, to what we
+call literal or actual. For this concerns us all. Imagery runs in
+and out, so to speak, from the symbolic to the real world and back
+again. As matters stand, we never know where we are because we
+know so little where our phrases or our words are; indeed, perhaps
+they and we are “neither here nor there.” Or, if we do know
+where we are, we cannot be sure that our hearer or reader knows
+where he is. He, too, is probably “neither here nor there.” He
+often praises or agrees with us in the wrong place or the wrong
+manner. That is worse than being complained of or differed from;
+it is difficult to repudiate approval. Nor can we take refuge in
+lucidity and fancy that the clear must be the true. In the long run
+and in the cases which <i>signify</i> most, there is no escape through
+merely lucid style or method. The “luminous” speaker or writer,
+the “forcible” orator or essayist, the moment he tries to convey to
+the public mind a thought which is really new, will find himself
+hampered by his very clearness itself. His ideas are controverted
+on assumptions not really his; or he himself is misled in subtle ways
+by what he assumes in others.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, by an instructive paradox, the clearest writer is often the
+most controversial; and he wonders at our perverseness as, while
+we admire his power and his “style,” we wonder at the perverseness
+in him. We possibly agree with him in ways we do not suspect;
+he possibly agrees with us in senses he ignores. Such a writer
+may pride himself on a chary use of metaphor, or on a carefully
+sharp distinction between “image” and “thing” or “object.” But
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_512">[512]</span>he is liable to forget the danger dogging him even here. One is
+tempted to say that there is only one term more figurative as well
+as more ambiguous than “metaphorical,” and that is “literal.”
+Most certainly much that is called “literal” is tinged with the figurative
+in varying degrees, not always easy to distinguish, even with
+the help of context. The word “literal” itself is indeed a case in
+point. It has rarely, if ever, any reference to writing.</p>
+
+<p>The question is, whether this state of things is quite so inevitable
+as most of us seem to think. Certainly, so long as we are content
+to live in the fool’s paradise of supposing that only the perverse,
+the prejudiced, the stupid, or the ignorant can possibly mistake our
+meaning, and that our misreadings of others are simply due to their
+“obscurity,” or “quibbling,” or literary incapacity, we shall ourselves
+contribute to the hopelessness of the situation. But this is a
+subject which cannot be dealt with in an incidental way; it is rather
+a hope for the future, that one of the most practically serviceable of
+subjects—that of Meaning, its conditions and its changes—shall be
+seriously taken up. Then, indeed, we may get back to the first of
+all questions, and that which is most pregnant of helpful answers;
+that which needs asking more than any other if good work is to be
+done in this day of universal “unsettlement”:—What do we really
+mean? On all sides dead calms are stirred and ruffled, dead levels
+upheaved or depressed; nothing (happily) can hope to escape the
+wave of quickening force. So before long we may well be asking
+this question in good earnest; and when we do we can but be the
+better, even if we must needs submit in some cases where we may
+have been prematurely positive, to be content (for the moment)
+with the answer: We do not really know.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is, that we have been postulating an absolute Plain
+Meaning to be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have
+been virtually assuming that our hearers and readers all share the
+same mental background and atmosphere. We have practically
+supposed that they all look through the same inferential eyes, that
+their attention waxes and wanes at the same points, that their associations,
+their halos of memory and circumstance, their congenital
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_513">[513]</span>tendencies to symbolise or picture, are all on one pattern. Verily,
+we need a “Critique of Plain Meaning”!</p>
+
+<p>Again we <i>quote</i> on the same assumption. Unless the language
+of our author is obviously archaic; unless his allusions unmistakably
+betray a different life-context, a different social “milieu,” in short,
+a different mental world, we claim him or we repudiate him on the
+same principle. We take his words, we take his phrases, we fill
+them out with the same content as our own, we make him mean
+precisely what we ourselves mean. And be it noted that it is always
+what we mean <i>now</i>. That this in any way varies from what we
+meant at some time when, e. g., our attention was differently focussed,
+rarely enters our heads.</p>
+
+<p>We shall, I suppose, admit that until lately there was one very
+good reason for this state of things. Only the exceptional mind (if
+any); only the mind which could not make itself fully understood
+by its contemporaries, and would risk being reckoned crazy or criminal
+if it spoke “plainly,” had any suspicion that this way of looking
+at things was being gradually invalidated by the general extension
+of the critical domain. The history of language, its relation to
+thought; the scope of expression and representation, the function
+of the figurative and symbolic; the growth of all means of mental
+communion from the simplest rudiments of gesture or cry to the
+highest point of intellectual complexity,—all this was either ignored
+or taken for granted on radically insecure bases.</p>
+
+<p>Again, while the underlying conditions of language must be
+looked for in the domain of psycho-physics, that science had not yet
+come into existence. Even now it is but feeling its way and putting
+forth tentative hypotheses, warning us, as it does, so that they are
+liable to be constantly modified and occasionally revolutionised.
+And what does it realise, first and foremost? That our difficulties
+on the very threshold of the inquiry are, as usual, largely those of
+language. On all sides we have to use, as best we may, modes of
+expression that inevitably convey ambiguous meanings even to the
+thoughtful, even to the trained mind, which cannot but carry with
+them a background of outgrown or disproved premises, vitiating
+more or less every conclusion that we draw from them. The very
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_514">[514]</span>phrases which are our only shorthand for the vast oratory of nature
+and experience betray us in the using. We have taken them as
+though they were like numerals invariable in meaning, thus supposing
+them subject to a permanent uniformity. We have taken them as
+though they were without a history, merely fortuitous labels or symbols
+of unanimous consent; the accepted sense, we think, being
+easily ascertainable, always persistent, and wholly sufficient for
+practical purposes. In any case we strangely assume that we may
+safely play upon all the chords of imagery, reserving without difficulty
+for serious use a body of terms which are direct expressions of
+“fact.”</p>
+
+<p>But the suggestion now made is that this is precisely one of the
+most dangerous of presuppositions. It is not the man who has mystified
+himself, or who wishes to mystify others; it is not the man
+who confounds the reality of the logical with that of the actual; it
+is not the man who takes emotion for proof and notion for fact; it is
+none of these, but the man who is clear on such points and sees
+that they must be drawn out into clues and followed up to the uttermost,
+if we would know where we are—who is beginning to see that
+the paramount need of the moment is the “torpedo-shock” of the
+question, What do we really mean? He knows that the off-hand
+vagueness and ready-made confusion, which too often from sheer
+ignorance usurp the name of common-sense, are in the long run its
+most deadly enemies.</p>
+
+<p>We may look forward then with a new hope to the rise of a
+systematic inquiry on the subject of meaning and its changes. This
+would entail the much-needed work of classifying metaphor, and
+might even be found to point to the existence of a third value,
+neither wholly literal, nor wholly figurative, as that of a large proportion
+of ordinary expression. From this and like causes, in this
+age of rapid changes due mainly to scientific conquest, we can all
+readily put to each other questions to which either a “yes” or a
+“no” must be equally misleading. And men of science have specially
+realised this, since many a time they have been unjustly credited
+with evasion, or with untenable or immoral views, because they
+either answered to a “plain question”: “In one sense, yes; in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_515">[515]</span>another, no,” or else gave an answer which could not fail to be misunderstood
+by a mind which was governed by unconscious survivals.
+So far as we are in touch with modern culture, we no longer mean
+what we must have meant in the days before Copernicus, when we
+say, for instance, “the sun rises.” When we speak of infection,
+we no longer mean what we used to mean before microbes had been
+heard of. When we talk of “heat,” we no longer mean what we
+used to mean even fifty years ago. And when a man says that he
+believes in the sun, the planets, the cosmos, in the heavens and the
+earth, in mind and matter, in soul and body, in spirit and flesh, he
+cannot, if he would, mean just what his forefathers meant, or indeed
+anything at all absolutely and finally. Whether we will or no, the
+meaning of such terms is changing on our very tongues, and ever
+swaying between the extremes which we call literal and metaphorical;
+“heaven,” e. g., ranging in value from sky to human destiny;
+“earth,” from soil to the visible Home of Man. We may appeal,
+and are right to appeal to “hard, dry” facts; but we perforce put
+something out of ourselves even into these. They become “facts”
+under the quickening touch of “mind,” while that emerges from a
+dim world of prepossession, bequeathing us many a primitive legacy
+from pre-intelligent sentience, and perhaps from little-suspected
+sources lying yet further back. For instance, primitive terror in its
+“superstitious” forms tended to represent man as inferior to and
+dependent on powers of some sort;—and this was true to natural
+order in the fact that his very world was not self-centred and was
+dependent for its best boons upon a greater than itself. As language
+advanced, he began quite naturally to express his meaning in “appropriate
+metaphors”; to use, e. g., the figures of light and then of
+sight to describe what he had, as we now say, “in his mind,” or
+what sense-messages, as we now say, had “put into his head.” For
+“something told him” that light, as it had been the first pleasure,
+was also the great means of life.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_90" href="#Footnote_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> And he “saw,” in however grotesque
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_516">[516]</span>a guise, the unbroken continuity of the organic and the inorganic,
+and perhaps even more clearly than most of us yet do, that
+of so-called “matter” and so-called “mind.” Perhaps in some
+cases, therefore, he chose his imagery better than (after long ages
+of dualism carried to the splitting-point) we generally do now.</p>
+
+<p>He knew again that the senses after all, stern masters though
+they were while life was so hard to live, had very narrow limits; and
+that the world was in some sense fuller and richer of life than it had
+seemed to be as known directly through them.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_91" href="#Footnote_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> And then he wondered,—and
+began to ask. He was the first Questioner. As Prof.
+Max Müller says,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_92" href="#Footnote_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> “the greater the savagery, the dullness, the stupidity
+with which <i>Homo sapiens</i> began, the greater the marvel at what
+must have been from the first, though undeveloped, in him, and
+made him in the end what we find him to be in the men of light and
+leading of our own age.” The mere fact of the question is the riddle
+to be solved. For certainly the beasts had not taught him either to
+wonder or to ask. And not merely insatiable questioning but something
+more here rises to challenge our attention and to demand reflection.
+Man is the first critic because he is the first idealist; the
+first to be discontented, to protest, to see life as a “ravelled end,”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_517">[517]</span>as something which is incomplete and speaks of something more.
+Surely in any case the step of all steps, the deepest yet the narrowest
+line to cross is the step from something noticed or found, from something
+which happens or appears, from something which somehow
+affects us, excites us, to its significance.</p>
+
+<p>Of course in one sense it is impossible to fix any definite moment
+as that of the advent of this “significance.” Animals interpret
+each other’s aspect and gestures, often indeed with a subtle precision
+which to some extent we have lost. But interpretation in the
+intellectual sense becomes, from our present point of view, that
+which makes us really human. Our progress, our ascent, is mainly
+marked in this. The root-question to ask in gauging levels of humanity
+is, how much can a given man interpret or translate, of a
+world that teems with meaning? How much can he truly classify
+and relate, how much can he rightly infer and conclude, how much
+can he account for, explain, and fruitfully apply? For after all, results
+must be our tests. Claims and credentials are nothing, unless
+they can show this warrant; whereas truth which can use all facts
+alike is the very means of survival. Man begins by doing, by acting
+out impulse; then he learns to “think” little by little, observing,
+questioning, pondering, testing his way onward and upward. And
+throughout his patient, often painful journey, he is himself perpetually
+challenged. Nature’s stimulating appeals rain upon him ceaselessly
+from every side; she orders him to master all her meanings.
+He responds:—at first again, “blindly,” but ever rising to higher
+grades of answer. Both deficiency and error are no doubt more or
+less present in all mental response to actual fact—that is, in all experience.
+But the essence of sanity from the first lies in corrective
+power. Everywhere there is either absence of notice, absence
+of response, or there is experimental activity (broadly speaking)
+corrected at once; automatically or by the combined effect of the
+related organic activities. For instance, in health, if in using the
+hand, one finger accidentally goes astray, the coördinating muscles
+promptly recall it to a “sense of duty.” We know how the same
+rule works in speech and writing. Therefore, unless “voluntary”
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_518">[518]</span>and “capricious” (or “willing” and “wilful”) are synonyms, the
+advent of volition ought not to mean the abrogation of this rule.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, obvious that “natural selection” can only operate
+in cases where death or sterility is the consequence of failure in
+adaptation and appropriate reaction, or segregation the consequence
+of excessive variation. But the point here is, why does not a tendency
+to correction, thus established, survive automatically in incipient
+imagination and therefore in language? It seems almost
+a burlesque of popular notions of “free will” to suppose that the
+moment the death-penalty is taken off, the new-born intelligence,
+unique in adapting power, should go astray persistently without let
+or hindrance. Many now merely formal or even jocular customs
+still prevailing&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_93" href="#Footnote_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a> testify, as legacies from a remote time of danger
+needing to be averted, to the strength of tendencies organised during
+myriads of generations under the pressure of the struggle for life.
+Why does not this apply to language?</p>
+
+<p>But sight gives us here perhaps the most suggestive lesson; for
+therein the ascending series seems especially gradual and unbroken.
+The eye, unlike the other organs of sense is an outgrowth of the
+very brain itself; “the retina ... is in reality a part of the brain.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_94" href="#Footnote_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a>
+We may well therefore connect its functions specially with the
+thought of significance; it is the main out-post of our central means
+of interpretation.</p>
+
+<p>Taking the stages in the evolution of the eye, and using a short
+summary of these as a convenient means of testing the value of a
+conspicuous group of metaphors, we find (1) a mere dint; (2) this
+dint deepening into a pit which (3) gradually narrows. Hitherto
+we have had only light and darkness; now we have an image, though
+but a dim one. (4) The pit is closed by a transparent membrane;
+this is protection, not obstacle. (5) The lens is formed by deposit
+of cuticle. Gain; increased distinctness and increased brightness.
+The lens can focus a larger pencil of rays from each part of the object
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_519">[519]</span>to each part of the retina (corresponding point). Finally, iris
+and eyelid protect the perfected eye more completely, and enable it
+both to bear more light and to discern more detail.</p>
+
+<p>If mental development were in any way comparable to this
+physiological development, we should expect to find (1) something
+which would naturally be described as a vague or dim “impression”;
+gradually deepening, becoming more distinctly localised as
+the stimulus became more definitely “impressive.” (2) We should
+begin to find “reality” and the “unreal”; “fact” and “fancy”;
+“truth” and “falsehood”; knowledge and ignorance,—contrasted as
+“light” and “darkness.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_95" href="#Footnote_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a>
+    And this is what actually happens.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_96" href="#Footnote_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a></p>
+
+<p>(3) Still our mental “impression” would not as yet afford us an
+image; “imagination” only now comes upon the scene and begins to
+work (though as yet “dimly”) upon the objects which more and more
+“incisively” “impress” us. (4) Our deep “impression” is closed
+in one sense from direct contact with the outward; mental vision
+becomes more delicately differentiated from the emotional “touch,”
+however this may be specialised and intensified. But what secludes
+this is transparent; it is protection, not obstacle. We rightly speak
+of mental penetration; of “seeing through” a superficial limit. The
+mental “lens” is formed from that “continuum” on which the original
+“impression” was made. The gain now is increased distinctness
+and brightness. More rays of “light,” of reality, of fact, of
+truth, of knowledge, can now be focussed from each part of a given
+object (or group of objects) of mental attention and interest; to each
+part of the responsive “sensitive plate” of the mind. Finally we
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_520">[520]</span>have, so to speak, increased protective growth. The function of
+what are called academic culture and scientific method, with their
+fastidious standards of fitness and accuracy, may perhaps represent
+something not unlike that of iris and eyelid, enabling the developing
+mind safely to bear intenser illumination and also to discern more
+subtle detail.</p>
+
+<p>It must be admitted that so far as it goes this is a significant
+psychological parable. However slender its right to the position
+even of a working clue to early stages of mind, it has at least better
+credentials than many accepted analogies can claim. And throughout
+its course what most “impresses” itself upon one’s mind is the steady
+maintenance of invariable reaction to excitation, and of protection
+from unfavorable stimulus.</p>
+
+<p>“Mind,” as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson tells us,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_97" href="#Footnote_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> “is a fiction of
+the fancy.” Of course this is open to the retort that so is fancy a
+fiction of the mind, or fiction a fancy of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>Psychology is full of these see-saws of paradox, depending on
+vicissitudes of linguistic usage or context. But mind is indeed a fiction
+of the fancy when we endow it with a fanciful freedom from all
+ties with what we call physical reality. For this, however plainly
+we may recognise its genesis in our own sequences of sense-impression,
+does practically through them rule us with an undeviating severity
+which neither fiction nor fancy can tamper with. Therefore,
+if we think it absurd to suppose that there may possibly be an undiscovered
+vein of authentic and really indicative symbol or metaphor
+running through the arbitrary meshes of fanciful custom or mythical
+term, we are in fact implying that all clues from the original interactions
+of physical energy were entirely lost when what we call
+“mind” issued first in language. But at all events we may be sure
+that links between the “physical” and the “psychical” are everywhere
+drawing closer and emerging clearer, however buried as yet
+in a mass of the fantastic or the arbitrary.</p>
+
+<p>It will probably be objected that we can never hope to find
+these. No doubt such an attempt must mean the patient work of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_521">[521]</span>many lifetimes, and at best we could not hope to lay bare the ultimate
+point of “origin.” But yet it seems worth trying. For after
+all, even the results which may appear so scanty in the tracing back
+of language, are already rich far beyond what could have been hoped
+for a few generations back. And if it were once realised that such
+a line of work might have practical and far-reaching issues; if we
+really saw that thus some barren disputes and speculations might
+cease to bar the way or to waste some precious energies, we should
+be more than rewarded. In his “Dialogues of Plato”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_98" href="#Footnote_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> Professor
+Jowett warned us twenty years ago of our linguistic dangers, repeating
+his warning with greater emphasis and in fresh forms in the admirable
+essays added in the edition just published. He urges that
+the “greatest lesson which the philosophical analysis of language
+teaches us is, that we should be above language, making words our
+servants and not allowing them to be our masters.” “Words,” he
+tells us, “appear to be isolated but they are really the parts of an
+organism which is always being reproduced. They are refined by
+civilisation, harmonised by poetry, emphasised by literature, technically
+applied in philosophy and art; they are used as symbols on
+the border-ground of human knowledge; they receive a fresh impress
+from individual genius, and come with a new force and association
+to every lively-minded person. They are fixed by the simultaneous
+utterance of millions and yet are always imperceptibly
+changing:—not the inventors of language, but writing and speaking,
+and particularly great writers, or works which pass into the hearts
+of nations, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, the German or English
+Bible, Kant and Hegel, are the makers of them in later ages. They
+carry with them the faded recollection of their own past history; the
+use of a word in a striking and familiar passage, gives a complexion
+to its use everywhere else, and the new use of an old and familiar
+phrase has also a peculiar power over us.” Then he reminds us of
+what we too often forget; that “language is an aspect of man, of
+nature, and of nations, the transfiguration of the world in thought,
+the meeting-point of the physical and mental sciences, and also the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_522">[522]</span>mirror in which they are reflected, an effect and partly a cause of
+our common humanity, present at every moment to the individual
+and yet having a sort of eternal or universal nature.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_99" href="#Footnote_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a></p>
+
+<p>Nowadays, when we feel most scathingly superior, we often announce
+that we fail to see and have yet to learn something which,
+bringing us, it may be, a really fresh idea, unpleasantly stirs misgiving.
+Let us go on with our greeting, meaning it in good earnest.
+For when we honestly and without reservation consent to learn and
+succeed in seeing some things now waiting for our study we may
+find more than we look for, within reach. After all it may be that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_523">[523]</span>we have really failed to see and have really yet to learn the part that
+meaning—whether of language or of conduct—and its change or
+variations (successive or simultaneous) have had throughout the
+mental history of man. It may be that while the ordinary modern
+metaphor like the ordinary modern analogy is a mere rhetorical device,
+some few images may be found to hail from an altogether
+deeper and more authentic source. Many, however ancient, are not
+of course any the more valid for their antiquity. On the contrary it
+is obvious that such a figure for instance as “foundation” or “basis”
+to express an ultimate necessity, is a survival from days in which
+the earth was supposed to require and to possess such fixed and immutable
+base, while the analogies, e. g. between the human and the
+inorganic orders are now reversed. We import the idea of mechanism
+and invariable sequence into the former instead of exporting
+conscious intention into the latter; we level down where our forefathers
+levelled up. And we have to beware of the subtle atmosphere
+of fallacy thus introduced.</p>
+
+<p>But on the other hand it is conceivable that some may be found
+to belong to that as yet mysterious energy on which natural selection
+plays and of which variation is the outcome or the sign.
+What we find in language may thus be, as it were, not merely the
+“scarred and weather-worn” remnant of geogenic strata but sometimes
+the meteorite, the calcined fragment of earlier worlds of correspondence,
+ultra-earthly, cosmical. We have no right to do more
+than ask and seek and knock at the gates of fact in such a matter as
+this. But until that has been done; until at least we have tried the
+experiment; have looked for grades of validity in metaphor and
+analogy in the light of modern science, and still more, have recognised
+clearly the powerful though hidden effects upon us of organised
+mental picture brought in surreptitiously with verbal imagery, or by
+comparison; we cannot know whether such an effort is worth while
+or no, or what harvest it may yield. For after all, whether we like
+it or no, we <i>are</i> heliocentric; the world and all that is in it is cosmically
+generated. As far as science—and experience—are concerned,
+anything which says “I don’t admit that origin; I claim to
+have produced myself or to have been originated by and on the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_524">[524]</span>earth in a final sense,” must make good its geocentric or self-creating
+pretensions with overwhelming cogency and rigorous proof. We
+appeal to the “light” of science, of reason, of experience, against
+the “darkness” of superstition, myth, and mysticism. And we are
+thus appealing not to the supersensuous or supernatural but to the
+ultra-satellitic. Not only beyond the earth and touch but beyond
+the atmosphere and hearing is the home of the light that lightens
+our small world, calling forth in us the answer of sight. And the
+manifold revelations through this sense—in its mental as well as
+bodily character—press upon us, with greater and greater insistence,
+the wealth of our relations with the universe.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, <i>meaning</i>—in the widest sense of the word—is
+the only value of whatever “fact” presents itself to us. Without
+this, to observe and record appearances or occurrences would become
+a worse than wasteful task. Significance is the one value of
+all that consciousness brings, or that intelligence deals with; the
+one value of life itself. But perhaps for this very reason we have
+taken it too much for granted. It may need a more definite place
+in psychological inquiries. It may have unsuspected bearings.</p>
+
+<p>When we have realised better what manner of gift this is, we
+may find answers of which we have prematurely despaired; answers
+coming not from the “mystical” point of the horizon of experience,
+but rather from the neural. And let us beware here of repeating
+the pre-scientific error of postulating, for figurative purposes, a flat
+earth on which whatever lies beyond “horizons” never meets! But,
+it may be said, why not? Why should it signify? Why, but because
+Man is the one not merely who thinks, or speaks, or writes, or looks
+upwards, but the one who <i>means</i>, the one who <i>is</i> the meaning of
+much, and makes the meaning of all; the one who will not tolerate
+the unmeaning anywhere in experience. Nothing remains but that
+he should interpret rightly; that he should apprehend nature and
+experience in their true sense. It is the glory of science that she
+puts this aim in the forefront of her labors. She tells us that nothing
+can be done without assumption and hypothesis as to the meaning
+of things. But that significance belongs to the very spring to
+which we owe her dauntless energy and her accumulating triumphs.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_525">[525]</span></p>
+
+<p>Why should it signify? The very term answers us. To “signify”
+is the one test of the important. The significant is alone worth
+notice. We inherit a mode of thinking which we are at last becoming
+able to criticise in the light of knowledge gained by observation
+and experiment. But if we persist in using, without warning to
+hearer or reader, imagery which has no longer either sense or relevance,
+or which tends to call up a false mental picture or to perpetuate
+an else decaying error, we shall to that extent forfeit the
+very gifts which science brings us, and must not complain of the
+obstinate persistence of ideas which needlessly divide us. At least,
+let us try to realise more clearly what we are losing in this way.
+The danger even thus must needs be lessened; detected bogies become
+powerless for mischief; but we need not leave their ancient
+home empty, swept, and garnished; stores of verified analogy are
+waiting to replace them. The figurative must not indeed be pressed,
+still less literalised. But we may see that it conveys a true, rather
+than a false impression; and harmonises with, instead of contradicting
+that which we most surely know.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_100" href="#Footnote_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a></p>
+
+<p>It may be said in a true sense that the function of the hero, the
+saint, the poet, is to bring the world to <i>life</i>. But the function of
+the devoted servant of science, the critical scholar, the true philosopher,
+is to bring the world to <i>truth</i>, in a sense only now becoming
+possible. Through the last discipline alone, in its most thorough
+applications, can we hope fully to master the scope of all significance
+and the laws of all its workings. Then, indeed, we may further
+hope to read with a fresh eye the Significance of Life.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Victoria Welby.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_89" href="#FNanchor_89" class="label">[89]</a> <i>The Nineteenth Century</i>, April, 1886. (Reprinted in <i>Essays on Controverted
+Questions</i>.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_90" href="#FNanchor_90" class="label">[90]</a> “Light affects the new-born infant at an early stage, although in this as in
+other respects individual differences immediately assert themselves. The child
+seems to take pleasure in an excitation of light and tries (even on the second day
+after birth) to turn towards it in order to retain it.” (<i>Outlines of Psychology</i>, H.
+Höffding, p. 4.)</p>
+
+<p>“Under the influence of light the conversion of inorganic matter into more
+complex organic matter takes place, more particularly in the green cells of plants.”
+(<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 315.)</p>
+
+<p>“It is certainly necessary to look further back than the visual sensations to
+understand the great influence of light on all creatures that have sensuous perception....
+Light is thus one of the most elementary conditions of life.” (<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 229.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_91" href="#FNanchor_91" class="label">[91]</a> It must be borne in mind that I am using psychological terms in a merely
+general sense. Among many examples of such use I may quote Sachs (<i>Physiology
+of Plants</i>, p. 200) and F. Darwin (<i>Address to Biological Section</i>, Brit. Assoc, August
+1891), who speaks of the plant as “perceiving” external change, as “recognising”
+the vertical line, “knowing” where the centre of the earth is, “translating” stimulus,
+etc. See also Darwin’s <i>Forms of Flowers</i>, p. 90.</p>
+
+<p>Again Prof. M. Foster uses the word “will” in the same general (rather than
+metaphorical) sense. (<i>Text Book of Phys.</i>, Part 3, pp. 1059, 1062, 1063.) Modes
+of reaction are thus verbally linked with consciousness, and we must remember that
+all our terms for the “mental” belong first to the “physical,” and that many are
+reciprocally used in the two spheres.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_92" href="#FNanchor_92" class="label">[92]</a> <i>Natural Religion</i>, p. 243.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_93" href="#FNanchor_93" class="label">[93]</a> See Dr. Tylor’s <i>Primitive Culture</i>, Vol. I, pp. 74-121; <i>Ibid.</i>, Vol. II, pp.
+297-298, 404-428.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_94" href="#FNanchor_94" class="label">[94]</a> Dr. M. Foster’s <i>Text-Book of Physiology</i>, Part 4, p. 1142.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_95" href="#FNanchor_95" class="label">[95]</a> I am of course merely directing attention to the relative aptness of metaphors
+of mental process familiarly in use in our own language. It is obvious that before
+any inference could be made from them as to the value of unconscious analogies of
+imagery, we should have to make appeal to comparative philology and embark on a
+wide inquiry, for which the English-speaking races must wait for Dr. Murray’s
+epoch-making Dictionary.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_96" href="#FNanchor_96" class="label">[96]</a> It must be borne in mind that the whole process presupposes the other senses
+or at least the temperature-sense, the “muscular sense” and that of touch; that is,
+we should have “felt” simple stimuli “emotionally” before we “saw” things intellectually.
+And hearing is not now in question, though in that, too, we should find the
+same character of development, i. e. the same prominence of the protective and discriminative
+factors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_97" href="#FNanchor_97" class="label">[97]</a> <i>Brain</i>, June, 1891. P. 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_98" href="#FNanchor_98" class="label">[98]</a> Vol. I, pp. 285-286, 293.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_99" href="#FNanchor_99" class="label">[99]</a> The following, among many pregnant passages between which it is difficult to
+choose, may be further quoted:</p>
+
+<p>“The famous dispute between Nominalists and Realists would never have
+been heard of, if, instead of transferring the Platonic ideas into a crude Latin
+phraseology, the spirit of Plato had been truly understood and appreciated. Upon
+the term substance at least two celebrated theological controversies appear to
+hinge, which would not have existed, or at least not in their present form, if we had
+‘interrogated’ the word substance, as Plato has the notions of Unity and Being.
+Those weeds of philosophy have struck their roots deep into the soil, and are always
+tending to reappear, sometimes in new-fangled forms; while similar words, such as
+development, evolution, law, and the like, are constantly put in the place of facts,
+even by writers who profess to base truth entirely upon fact. In an unmetaphysical
+age there is probably more metaphysics in the common sense (i. e. more <i>a priori</i>
+assumption) than in any other, because there is more complete unconsciousness that
+we are resting on our own ideas, while we please ourselves with the conviction that
+we are resting on facts. We do not consider how much metaphysics are required
+to place us above metaphysics, or how difficult it is to prevent the forms of expression
+which are ready made for our use from outrunning actual observation and experiment.”
+(Vol. IV, p. 39-40.)</p>
+
+<p>“To have the true use of words we must compare them with things; in using
+them we acknowledge that they seldom give a perfect representation of our meaning.
+In like manner when we interrogate our ideas we find that we are not using them
+always in the sense which we supposed. (<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 41.)</p>
+
+<p>“Many erroneous conceptions of the mind derived from former philosophies
+have found their way into language, and we with difficulty disengage ourselves from
+them. Mere figures of speech have unconsciously influenced the minds of great
+thinkers. Also there are some distinctions, as, for example, that of the will and of
+reason, and of the moral and intellectual faculties, which are carried further than
+is justified by experience. Any separation of things which we cannot see or exactly
+define, though it may be necessary, is a fertile source of error. The division of the
+mind into faculties or powers or virtues is too deeply rooted in language to be got
+rid of, but it gives a false impression. For if we reflect on ourselves we see that all
+our faculties easily pass into one another, and are bound together in a single mind
+or consciousness; but this mental unity is apt to be concealed from us by the distinctions
+of language.” (<i>Ibid.</i>, p. 155.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_100" href="#FNanchor_100" class="label">[100]</a> I would gladly forward to any reader interested in a question of such practical
+bearings, a small collection of <i>Witnesses to Ambiguity</i> gathered from representative
+sources, and a pamphlet which was circulated at the International Congress of
+Experimental Psychology, held in London, August, 1892, giving examples of the
+mischievous confusions suggested by the use, even among writers of the first rank,
+of the metaphor, <i>Inner and Outer</i>. Prof. H. Sidgwick, the president, in his opening
+address, expressed the opinion that very important work of this kind remained
+to be done, and added, “I have much sympathy with the view urged in a pamphlet
+that I have received for distribution among members of the Congress, which illustrates
+forcibly the confusion caused by one established antithesis of terms.” Professor
+Sully and others have expressed themselves strongly in the same sense.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_526">[526]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="REPLY_TO_THE_NECESSITARIANS">REPLY TO THE NECESSITARIANS.<br>
+<span class="smaller">REJOINDER TO DR. CARUS.</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>§ 1. In <i>The Monist</i> for January, 1891, and in the number for
+April, 1892, I attacked the doctrine that every event is precisely determined
+by law. Like everybody else, I admit that there is regularity:
+I go further; I maintain the existence of law as something
+<i>real and general</i>. But I hold there is no reason to think that there
+are general formulæ to which the phenomena of nature <i>always</i> conform,
+or to which they <i>precisely</i> conform. At the end of my second
+paper, the partisans of the doctrine of necessity were courteously
+challenged and besought to attempt to answer my arguments. This,
+so far as I can learn, Dr. Carus alone, in <i>The Monist</i> of July and
+October, 1892, has publicly vouchsafed to do. For this I owe him
+my particular thanks and a careful rejoinder.</p>
+
+<p>§ 2. I number the paragraphs of his papers consecutively. The
+following index shows the pages on which those paragraphs commence,
+and the numbered sections of this rejoinder in which they
+are noticed.</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <th colspan="3">DR. CARUS</th>
+    <th colspan="3">REJOINDER</th>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Vol. II,</td>
+    <td class="tdr">p.</td>
+    <td class="tdr">560</td>
+    <td class="tdr">¶</td>
+    <td class="tdr">1</td>
+    <td class="tdr"></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">2</td>
+    <td>§28</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">3</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">561</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">4</td>
+    <td>23.27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">5</td>
+    <td>21</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">6</td>
+    <td>18</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">7</td>
+    <td>18</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">562</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">8</td>
+    <td>18 <i>bis.</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">9</td>
+    <td>21</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">10</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">563</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">11</td>
+    <td>12.21.22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">12</td>
+    <td>19</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">13</td>
+    <td>19</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">564</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">14</td>
+    <td>3.12 <i>bis.</i> 22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">15</td>
+    <td>8 <i>ter</i>, 16</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">565</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">16</td>
+    <td>21</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">17</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">18</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">19</td>
+    <td>13 note</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">566</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">20</td>
+    <td>14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">21</td>
+    <td>13, 14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">22</td>
+    <td>3.12.22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">23</td>
+    <td>12</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">24</td>
+    <td>3.13.14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">567</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">25</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">26</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">27</td>
+    <td>8.22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">28</td>
+    <td>20.22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">29</td>
+    <td>12</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">568</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">30</td>
+    <td>22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">31</td>
+    <td>22 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">32</td>
+    <td>22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">569</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">33</td>
+    <td>22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">34</td>
+    <td>22</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">35</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">36</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">37</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">570</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">38</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">39</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">40</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">571</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">41</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">42</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">43</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">572</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">44</td>
+    <td>23</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">45</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">46</td>
+    <td>5.23</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">573</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">47</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">48</td>
+    <td>7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">49</td>
+    <td>7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">50</td>
+    <td>7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">574</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">51</td>
+    <td>7.25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">52</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">53</td>
+    <td>25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">54</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">55</td>
+    <td>25 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">575</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">56</td>
+    <td>17</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">57</td>
+    <td>17 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">58</td>
+    <td>17.25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">59</td>
+    <td>17</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">60</td>
+    <td>17<span class="pagenum" id="Page_527">[527]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">576</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">61</td>
+    <td>7.17.25 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">62</td>
+    <td>17.21</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">63</td>
+    <td>17</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">577</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">64</td>
+    <td>17 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">65</td>
+    <td>26</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">66</td>
+    <td>25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">67</td>
+    <td>25 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">578</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">68</td>
+    <td>6.7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">69</td>
+    <td>17</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">579</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">70</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">71</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">580</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">72</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">73</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">74</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">75</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">581</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">76</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">77</td>
+    <td>3.11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">78</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">79</td>
+    <td>21</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">582</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">80</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">81</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">82</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">83</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Vol. III,</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">68</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">84</td>
+    <td>5</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">85</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">86</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">69</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">87</td>
+    <td>12</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">88</td>
+    <td>5.15 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">89</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">90</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">91</td>
+    <td>5</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">92</td>
+    <td>5</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">70</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">93</td>
+    <td>5</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">94</td>
+    <td>5</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">95</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">96</td>
+    <td>4.11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">71</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">97</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">98</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">99</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">100</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">72</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">101</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">102</td>
+    <td>11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">103</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">104</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">105</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">73</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">106</td>
+    <td>11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">107</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">108</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">109</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">110</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">111</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">74</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">112</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">113</td>
+    <td>6.11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">114</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">115</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">75</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">116</td>
+    <td>6.7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">117</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">76</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">118</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">119</td>
+    <td>9</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">120</td>
+    <td>6.16</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">121</td>
+    <td>14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">122</td>
+    <td>11</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">77</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">123</td>
+    <td>3</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">124</td>
+    <td>10</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">125</td>
+    <td>7</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">78</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">126</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">127</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">128</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">79</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">129</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">130</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">131</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">132</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">133</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">134</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">80</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">135</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">136</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">137</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">138</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">139</td>
+    <td>5.15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">81</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">140</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">141</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">142</td>
+    <td>15.25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">143</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">144</td>
+    <td>15 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">145</td>
+    <td>15 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">146</td>
+    <td>15 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">147</td>
+    <td>15 <i>ter</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">82</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">148</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">149</td>
+    <td>12.15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">150</td>
+    <td>15 <i>bis.</i> 25</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">83</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">151</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">152</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">153</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">154</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">155</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">84</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">156</td>
+    <td>15 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">157</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">158</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">85</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">159</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">160</td>
+    <td>15.24</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">86</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">161</td>
+    <td>15 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">162</td>
+    <td>15</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">163</td>
+    <td>5.14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">164</td>
+    <td>14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">87</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">165</td>
+    <td>4.14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">166</td>
+    <td>14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">167</td>
+    <td>14</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">168</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">169</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">88</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">170</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">171</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">172</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">173</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">174</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">89</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">175</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">176</td>
+    <td>27 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">177</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">178</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">179</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">180</td>
+    <td>30</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">181</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">182</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">90</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">183</td>
+    <td>30</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">184</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">185</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">186</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">91</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">187</td>
+    <td>27</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">188</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">189</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">190</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">92</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">191</td>
+    <td>4</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">192</td>
+    <td>27 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">193</td>
+    <td>20.27 <i>bis</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">93</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">194</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">195</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">196</td>
+    <td>8</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">94</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">197</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">198</td>
+    <td>6</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">199</td>
+    <td>30</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">200</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">201</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">95</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">202</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">203</td>
+    <td>20.29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">204</td>
+    <td>29</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">96</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">205</td>
+    <td>20</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">206</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="c">”</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdr">207</td>
+    <td></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>§ 3. Dr. Carus’s philosophy is hard to understand. Some
+phrases which he frequently uses lead the reader to imagine that he
+is listening to an old-fashioned Königsberg Kantian. What, then,
+is our surprise when we find (¶ 14) that he sneers at the Kantian,
+Sir William Hamilton (whom he calls Mr. Hamilton) as having
+“no adequate conception of the <i>a priori</i>.” In his “Ursache, Grund
+und Zweck” (1883), an admirably clear and systematic exposition
+of much of his thought, he takes a Schleiermacherian view of the
+<i>a priori</i>. He admits it to be founded in the universal conditions of
+cognition; but he thinks it is among the objective rather than the
+subjective conditions. This is an opinion to which Hamilton is also
+at times inclined. It is a weak conception, unless the whole distinction
+between the inward and the outward world be reformed in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_528">[528]</span>the light of agapastic and synechistic ontology. For to deny that
+the <i>a priori</i> is subjective is to remove its essential character; and to
+make it both subjective and objective (otherwise than in the sense
+in which Kant himself makes it objective) is uncalled for, and is cut
+off by Ockham’s razor. But when synechism has united the two
+worlds, this view gains new life.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing which has astonished me is Dr. Carus’s extravagant
+laudation (¶ 17) of Venn’s highly enlightened and remarkably
+bright-thinking, yet blundering little book, “The Logic of Chance.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_101" href="#Footnote_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a>
+This is the way he speaks of it: “This admirable work, we will
+make bold to say, marks a new epoch in the study of logic.” He
+adds that it “paves the way which Mr. Peirce has actually followed.”
+But the question of the nature of probability had long before that
+publication engaged the attention of some of the most powerful intellects
+in England; and my opinion concerning it was fully made
+up before I saw the book. I do not think I learned anything from
+that except a classification of the philosophies of probability. However,
+after all his eulogy, Dr. Carus only uses the book to quote from
+it Mill’s rewording of Kant’s definition of causation, which he would
+better have quoted direct.</p>
+
+<p>Let me say, not to Dr. Carus, but to the younger generation of
+readers, that if they imagine that Hamilton, because he is antiquated,
+is not worth reading, they are much mistaken. The Scotistic elements
+of his philosophy, and his method in the notes on Reid are
+especially worthy of attention. As for Mill, though his philosophy
+was not profound, it is, at least in his “Examination of Hamilton,”
+admirably set forth. Whoever wishes to appeal to the American
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_529">[529]</span>philosophical mind needs to be quite familiar with the writings of
+these two men.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus himself accepts all that I hold for erroneous in Kant’s
+definition of causation as universal and necessary sequence. Mill
+merely substitutes the exacter words <i>invariable</i> for “universal,” and
+<i>unconditional</i> for “necessary.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_102" href="#Footnote_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> In giving his form of the definition,
+Mill shows why it is not applicable to the sequence of day and
+night, namely, that that is not necessary. Yet Dr. Carus writes
+(¶ 18) of this very same sequence as if it came under Mill’s definition!&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_103" href="#Footnote_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a></p>
+
+<p>Again, why should he make it “the immortal merit of the great
+Scotchman” (¶ 22), that is, of Hume, that he admitted the truth of
+Leibniz’s principle?</p>
+
+<p>The famed puzzle of causation is peculiarly understood by Dr.
+Carus. The difficulties which the perusal of Hume suggested to
+the mind of Kant,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_104" href="#Footnote_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> were such as belonged to all categories, or general
+conceptions of the understanding. The precritical Kant inherited
+a very decided nominalism from Leibniz and Wolf; and the
+puzzle for him was simply the usual difficulty that plagues nominalism
+when it finds itself confronted with a reality which has an element
+of generality. Necessity is, I need hardly say, but a particular
+variety of universality. But Dr. Carus (¶ 24) passes over this,
+to dwell upon an entirely different objection to causation, namely,
+that it seems to be a creation out of nothing, and a miracle.</p>
+
+<p>I find myself equally at cross-purposes with him, when in
+¶¶ 71-77, he speaks of the prevalent views of logicians concerning
+<i>comprehension</i>. This word, in logic, measures the amount of predicates
+or marks attached to a conception; but Dr. Carus’s criticisms
+seem to be based upon the idea that by comprehension is meant
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_530">[530]</span>logical breadth, or the amount of subjects to which the conception
+is applicable.</p>
+
+<p>I am simply gravelled by his remarks (¶ 95) concerning sundry
+English words.</p>
+
+<p>No more do I know what to make of his praise (¶ 123) of the
+German translation of a French phrase used in the theory of functions,
+meaning <i>univocally determined</i>.</p>
+
+<p>§ 4. One habit which goes far to obscure Dr. Carus’s meaning
+is that whenever he finds his opinion at variance with a familiar
+saying, instead of rejecting that formula, he retains it and changes
+the meaning. This is calculated to throw the whole discussion into
+confusion. Thus, nothing is more certain than that the so-called
+“law of identity,” or <i>A</i> is <i>A</i>, was intended to express the fact that
+every term is predicable of itself. But Dr. Carus, simply because
+he finds that “meaningless and useless” (¶ 96), thinks himself
+authorised to confuse the terminology of logic by making this formula,
+<i>A</i> = <i>A</i>, under the same old name, mean that things to which
+the same name is applicable are for some purpose equivalent.</p>
+
+<p>In like manner, he changes the meaning of the word <i>freedom</i>
+(¶ 165), so that the distinction between those who maintain and
+those who oppose the freedom of the will may, in words, disappear.
+It seems scarcely defensible for a thoroughgoing necessitarian, such
+as he is, to fly the flag of Free Will.</p>
+
+<p>He, also, changes the meaning of <i>spontaneity</i> so far that, according
+to him, “masses gravitate spontaneously” (¶ 191), and so pretends
+that his doctrine does not suppress the spontaneity of nature!</p>
+
+<p>§ 5. There are other questions of terminology in which I am
+unable to agree with Dr. Carus. Thus, when I define necessitarianism
+as “the theory that the will is subject to the general mechanical
+law of cause and effect,” Dr. Carus (¶ 139) wishes to delete
+“mechanical.” But the result would be to define a doctrine to
+which the advocates of free will would generally subscribe, as readily
+as their opponents. In order properly to limit the definition, it is
+quite requisite to exclude “free causation.” By “mechanical”
+causation, I mean a causation entirely determinative, like that of
+dynamics, but not necessarily operating upon matter.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_531">[531]</span></p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus mentions (¶ 84) that there are several different ideas
+to which the term necessity is applied. It seems to me that what
+lies at the bottom of all of them is the experience of reaction against
+one’s will. In the simplest form, this gives the sense of reality.
+Dr. Carus himself admits (¶ 46) that reality involves the idea of inevitable
+fate. Yet philosophical necessity is a special case of universality.
+But the universality, or better, the generality, of a pure
+form involves no necessity. It is only when the form is materialised
+that the distinction between necessity and freedom makes itself
+plain. These ideas are, therefore, as it seems to me, of a mixed
+nature. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 91-94) insists that by the necessary, he
+wishes to be understood to mean in all cases the <i>inevitable</i>. This is
+the idea of <i>fate</i>, and is not the conception which determinists
+usually attach to the term necessity. Yet he does not appear to be
+quite consistent. At one time (¶ 88), he carefully distinguishes
+necessity from fate. At another time (¶ 163), every element of compulsion
+is to be excluded from the conception of necessity.</p>
+
+<p>§ 6. One important key to Dr. Carus’s opinions is the recognition
+of the fact that, like many other philosophers, he is a nominalist
+tinctured with realistic opinions.</p>
+
+<p>He says (¶ 103), that “there is no need of discussing the truism
+that, properly speaking, there is no absolute sameness.” Now, upon
+the nominalistic theory, there is not only no absolute or numerical
+identity, but there are not even any real agreements or likenesses
+between individuals; for likeness consists merely in the calling of
+several individuals by one name, or (in some systems) in their exciting
+one idea. On the other hand, upon the realistic theory, the fact
+that identity is a relation of reason does not in the least prevent it
+from being real. On that theory, it is real unless it is <i>false</i> that anything
+is itself. Thus, upon either theory, identity is just as real as
+similarity. But Dr. Carus, being a nominalist leaning toward realism,
+is inclined to make dynamical relations real, and second-intentional
+ones unreal. This opinion, I think, is a transitional one.</p>
+
+<p>The declaration (¶ 198) that “natural laws are simply a description
+of nature as nature is,” and that “the facts of nature express
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_532">[532]</span>the character of nature,” are nominalistic. But in another
+place (¶¶ 107-116), he says distinctly that uniformities are real.</p>
+
+<p>He says (¶ 70), “Mr. Peirce attempts to explain natural laws as
+if they were concrete and <i>single facts</i>.” This is eminently nominalistic.
+The nominalist alone makes this sharp distinction between
+the abstract and the concrete,&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_105" href="#Footnote_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> which must not be confounded with
+Hegel’s distinction for which the same words are used. The nominalist
+alone falls into the absurdity of talking of “single facts,” or
+<i>individual generals</i>. Yet Dr. Carus says (¶ 68) that natural laws describe
+the facts of nature <i>sub specie aeternitatis</i>. Now I understand
+Spinoza to be a realist. In ¶117 he considers it “settled” “that
+there are samenesses.” This is realistic. But in ¶ 120, he holds
+“the whole business of science to be to systematise the samenesses
+of experience,” which is nominalistic.</p>
+
+<p>§ 7. Dr. Carus seems to be in some doubt as to how far evolutionism
+ought to be carried. In ¶¶ 48-51, he seems to side with
+my contention that it should be thoroughgoing. In ¶116, he makes
+intellect an evolution from feeling. Yet he is sometimes (¶ 125)
+“inclined” to say the world never was a chaos; he sometimes
+(¶ 61) thinks it weak to suppose that real chance begets order; and
+he sometimes (¶ 68) goes so far as to pronounce eternity to be the
+<i>conditio sine qua non</i> of natural law.</p>
+
+<p>§ 8. Every reader of <i>The Monist</i> knows that our good editor’s
+great word is “formal law.” The clearest statement he has ever
+made of this doctrine I find in the following two sentences (¶ 127):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The <i>a priori</i> systems of thought are ... constructions raised out of the
+recognition of the formal, i. e. relational samenesses that appear in experience.
+All possibilities of a certain class of relations can be exhausted and formulated in
+theorems.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_106" href="#Footnote_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a></p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is perspicuous. For example, of pairs, we can easily show
+that there are but two forms <i>A</i>:<i>A</i> and <i>A</i>:<i>B</i>. This proposition,—theorem
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_533">[533]</span>if you will,—exhausts the possibilities. If we make believe
+there is no danger of falling into error in mathematical reasoning,—and
+one danger, though not, perhaps, a very serious one, <i>is</i>
+eliminated,—then this proposition is absolutely certain. But I will
+say, at once, that such a proposition is not, in a proper sense, synthetic.
+It is a mere corollary from the definition of a pair. Moreover,
+its application to experience, or to possible experience, opens
+the door to probability, and shuts out absolute necessity and certainty,
+<i>in toto</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning points like this, Dr. Carus, in company with the
+general body of thinkers, is laboring under a great disadvantage
+from not understanding the logic of relatives. It is a subject I have
+been studying for a great many years, and I feel and know that I
+have an important report that I ought to make upon it. This branch
+of logic is, however, so abstruse, that I have never been able to find
+the leisure to translate my conclusions into a form in which their
+significance would be manifest even to a powerful thinker whose
+thoughts had not long been turned in that direction. I shall succeed
+in doing so, whenever I can find myself in a situation where I
+need think of nothing else for months, and not before. That may
+not be for thirty years; but I believe it is the intention of providence
+that it should be. Meantime, I will testify, and the reader
+can take my testimony for what he thinks it is worth, that all deductive
+reasoning, except that kind which is so childishly simple
+that acute minds have doubted whether there was any reasoning
+there,—I mean non-relative syllogism,—requires an act of choice;
+because from a given premise, several conclusions,—in some cases
+an infinite number,—can be drawn. Hence, Dr. Carus is altogether
+too hasty in his confidence (¶¶ 195, 196) that general thinking machines
+“are not impossibilities.” An act of original and arbitrary
+determination would be required; and it seems almost evident that
+no machine could perform such an act except within narrow limits,
+thought out beforehand and embodied in its construction. Moreover,
+positive observation is called for in all inference, even the
+simplest,—though in deduction it is only observation of an object of
+imagination. Moreover, a peculiar act which may properly be called
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_534">[534]</span><i>abstraction</i>&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_107" href="#Footnote_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a>
+    is usually required, consisting in seizing evanescent elements
+of thought and holding them before the mind as “substantive”
+objects, to borrow a phrase from William James. At the same time,
+the process I am describing, that is, relative deduction, is perfectly
+general and demonstrative, and depends upon the truth of the assumed
+premises, and not, like inductive reasoning, upon the manner
+in which those premises present themselves.</p>
+
+<p>But the application of the logic of relatives shows that the
+propositions of arithmetic, which Dr. Carus usually adduces as examples
+of formal law (¶ 15), are, in fact, only corollaries from definitions.
+They are certain only as applied to ideal constructions,
+and in such application, they are merely analytical.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is our ideas about the distinction between analytical
+and synthetical judgments is much modified by the logic of relatives,
+and by the logic of probable inference. An analytical proposition
+is a definition or a proposition <i>deducible</i> from definitions; a synthetical
+proposition is a proposition not analytical. Deduction, or analytical
+reasoning, is, as I have shown in my “Theory of Probable
+Reasoning,” a reasoning in which the conclusion follows (necessarily,
+or probably) from the state of things expressed in the premises,
+in contradistinction to scientific, or synthetical, reasoning, which
+is a reasoning in which the conclusion follows probably and approximately
+from the premises, owing to the conditions under which the
+latter have been observed, or otherwise ascertained. The two classes
+of reasoning present, besides, some other contrasts that need not be
+insisted upon in this place. They also present some significant resemblances.
+Deduction is really a matter of perception and of experimentation,
+just as induction and hypothetic inference are; only,
+the perception and experimentation are concerned with imaginary
+objects instead of with real ones. The operations of perception and
+of experimentation are subject to error, and therefore it is only in a
+Pickwickian sense that mathematical reasoning can be said to be
+perfectly certain. It is so, only under the condition that no error
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_535">[535]</span>creeps into it: yet, after all, it is susceptible of attaining a practical
+certainty. So, for that matter, is scientific reasoning; but not so
+readily. Again, mathematics brings to light results as truly occult&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_108" href="#Footnote_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a>
+and unexpected as those of chemistry; only they are results dependent
+upon the action of reason in the depths of our own consciousness,
+instead of being dependent, like those of chemistry, upon the action
+of Cosmical Reason, or Law. Or, stating the matter under another
+aspect, analytical reasoning depends upon associations of similarity,
+synthetical reasoning upon associations of contiguity. The logic of
+relatives, which justifies these assertions, shows accordingly that
+deductive reasoning is really quite different from what it was supposed
+by Kant to be; and this explains how it is that he and others
+have taken various mathematical propositions to be synthetical which
+in their ideal sense, as propositions of pure mathematics, are in truth
+only analytical.</p>
+
+<p>Descending from things I can demonstrate to things of which
+various facts, in the light of those demonstrations, fully persuade
+me, I will say that in my opinion there are many synthetical propositions
+which, if not <i>a priori</i> in Dr. Carus’s sense, are, at least, innate
+(notwithstanding his frequent denials of this, as in ¶ 15) though
+he is quite right in saying that their abstract and distinct formulation
+comes very late (¶ 126). But turn the facts as I will, I cannot
+see that they afford the slightest reason for thinking that such propositions
+are ever absolutely universal, exact, or necessary in their
+truth. On the contrary, the principles of probable inference show
+this to be impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus adduces the instance of a geometrical proposition,
+namely, “that two congruent regular tetrahedrons, when put together,
+will form a hexahedron.” (¶ 25.) This, he says, seems to
+be “a very wonderful thing”; for why should not a larger tetrahedron
+be formed, just as two heaps of flour make a large heap of
+flour? Yet, he continues, the probability that the two tetrahedrons
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_536">[536]</span>do always make a hexahedron is 1, “which means certainty” (¶ 27).
+But as it happens, the proposition, in the form stated is quite
+erroneous. What is true is this. If two tetrahedra are so placed
+that one face of each is coincident with one face of the other, while
+all the other faces are inclined to one another, and if of the 8 faces,
+the 2 that are coincident are not counted, there remain to be counted
+8-2=6 faces. But there is nothing more wonderful about this
+than that 8-2=6, which is an easy corollary from definitions.
+Very few propositions in mathematics that appear “marvellous”
+will hold water; and those few excite our astonishment only because
+the real complexity of the conditions are masked in an intuitional
+presentation of them.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus holds (¶ 15) that formal knowledge is absolutely universal,
+exact, and necessary. In some cases, as where he says that,
+given the number of dimensions of space, the entire geometry could
+be deduced (¶ 35), the boasted infallibility will prove on examination
+to be downright error. In all other cases, the propositions only
+relate to ideal constructions, and their applicability to the real world
+is at the best doubtful, and, as I think, false; while in their ideal
+purity, they are not synthetical.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, my good friend and antagonist holds that the combination
+of oxygen and hydrogen to produce water is not “different in
+principle” from that of the tetrahedra to produce a hexahedron
+(¶ 26). There is all the difference between the ideal and the real;
+which to my Scotistic mind is very important. But this is not the
+only passage in which he speaks as if form were the principle of individuation.</p>
+
+<p>§ 9. Dr. Carus’s position is even weaker than that of Kant, who
+makes space, for example, a necessary form of thought (in a broad
+sense of that term). But Dr. Carus appears to consider space as an
+absolute reality. For he says (¶ 119) that “every single point of
+space has its special and individual qualities.” Here again form is
+made the principle of individuation; whence the queer phrase, “individual
+qualities.”</p>
+
+<p>§ 10. Dr. Carus argues that whatever is unequivocally determinate
+is necessary. (¶ 124.) Were the determination spoken of real
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_537">[537]</span>dynamic determination, this would be a mere truism. But the expression
+used, <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>, merely expresses a mathematical
+determination, and therefore no real necessity ensues. The equation</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>x</i>² - 23<i>x</i> + 132¼ = 0</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula09" style="max-width: 15.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula09.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">determines <i>x</i> to be either 11·477 or 11·523. In this sense, <i>x</i> has
+necessarily one value or the other. The equation</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>x</i>² - 12<i>x</i> + 6 = 0</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula10" style="max-width: 10.9375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula10.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">determines <i>x</i> to be either 11·477 or 0·523. Together, the two equations
+uniquely determine <i>x</i> to be 11·477. This shows how much
+that argument amounts to.</p>
+
+<p>§ 11. By “sameness,” Dr. Carus means equivalence for a given
+purpose. (¶¶ 102, 106.) By the “idea of sameness,” he means
+(¶¶ 77, 96) the principle that things having a common character are
+for some purpose equivalent. This, he says, “has a solid basis in
+the facts of experience.” By a “world of sameness” (¶ 113), he
+seems to mean one in which any two given concrete things are in
+some respect equivalent. He argues (¶ 122) that a “world of sameness
+is a world in which necessity rules.” I do not see this. It
+seems to me so bald a <i>non sequitur</i>, that I cannot but suppose the
+thought escapes my apprehension. If there were anything in the
+argument, it would seem to be a marvellously expeditious way of
+settling the whole dispute; and therefore it would have been worth
+the trouble of stating, so as to bring it within the purview of minds
+like mine.</p>
+
+<p>§ 12. My candid opponent sometimes endorses emphatically
+the Leibnizian principle. “Necessitarianism must be founded on
+something other than observation. Observation is <i>a posteriori</i>; it
+has reference to single facts, to particulars; yet the doctrine of necessity
+... is of universal application. The doctrine of necessity ...
+is of an <i>a priori</i> nature.” (¶ 11.) “Millions of single experiences ...
+cannot establish a solid belief in necessity.” (¶ 14.) “No amount
+of experience is sufficient to constitute causation by a mere synthesis
+of sequences.” (¶ 22.) “Millions of millions of cases” constitute
+“no proof” that a proposition “is always so.” (¶ 29.)</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he holds that the law of “the conservation of
+matter and energy” so conclusively proves necessary causation, that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_538">[538]</span>the obstinacy of Hume, himself, could not have withstood the argument.
+(¶ 23.) One wonders, then, what is supposed to prove this
+“law of the conservation of matter and energy,” if no amount of
+experience can prove it.</p>
+
+<p>But the <i>a priori</i> itself can “be based on the firm ground of experience.”
+(¶ 14.) In that case, it is not prior to experience, after
+all! “The idea of necessity is based upon the conception of sameness,
+and ... the existence of sameness is a fact of experience.”
+(¶ 87.) If absolute necessity can be irrefragably demonstrated from
+the fact that two things are alike, it is a pity Dr. Carus should not
+state this demonstration in a form, that I, and men like me, can understand.
+That would be more to the purpose than merely saying
+it can be proved. Absolute chance is rejected as “involving a violation
+of laws well established by <i>positive evidence</i>.” (¶ 149.)</p>
+
+<p>All these <i>denials</i> that absolute necessity can be established and
+absolute chance refuted by experiential evidence, mixed with as
+clear <i>assertions</i> of the same things, when taken together, have the
+appearance of an attempt, as the politicians say, to “straddle” the
+question.</p>
+
+<p>§13. But the ingenious Doctor seeks to bolster up necessity by
+introducing the confused notion of “causation.”</p>
+
+<p>I do not know where the idea originated that a cause is an instantaneous
+state of things, perfectly determinative of every subsequent
+state. It seems to be at the bottom of Kant’s discourse on
+the subject; yet it accords neither with the original conception of a
+cause, nor with the principles of mechanics. The original idea of
+an efficient cause is that of an agent, more or less like a man. It is
+prior to the effect, in the sense of having come into being before the
+latter; but it is not transformed into the effect. In this sense, it
+may happen that an event is a cause of a subsequent event; seldom,
+however, is it the principal cause. Far less are events the only causes.
+The modern mechanical conception, on the other hand, is that the relative
+positions of particles determine their accelerations at the instants
+when they occupy those positions. In other words, if the positions
+of all the particles are given at <i>two</i> instants (together with the law
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_539">[539]</span>of force), then the positions at all other instants may be deduced.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_109" href="#Footnote_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a>
+This doctrine conflicts with Kant’s second analogy of experience,
+as interpreted by him, in no less than four essential particulars. In
+the first place, far from involving any principle that could properly
+be termed generation, or <i>Erzeugung</i>, which is Kant’s word for the
+sequence of effect from cause, the modern mechanical doctrine is a
+doctrine of persistence, and, as I have repeatedly explained, positively
+prohibits any real growth. In the second place, one state of
+things (i. e. one configuration of the system) is not sufficient to determine
+a second, it is two that determine a third. To whomsoever
+may think that this is an inconsiderable divergence of opinions,
+let me say, study the logic of relatives, and you will think so no
+longer. In the third place, the two determining configurations, according
+to mechanics, may be taken at almost any two instants, and
+the determined configuration be taken at any third instant we like.
+<i>There is no mechanical truth in saying that the past determines the future,
+rather than the future the past.</i> We habitually follow tradition
+in continuing to use that form of expression, but every mathematician
+knows that it is nothing but a form of expression. We continue,
+for convenience, to talk of mechanical phenomena as if they were
+regulated, in the same manner in which our intentions regulate our
+actions (which is essentially a determination of the future by the
+past), although we are quite aware that it is not really so. Remark
+how Kant reasons:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“If it is a necessary law of our sensibility, and consequently a <i>formal condition</i>
+of all perceptions, that the preceding time determines the following, (since I can
+only come to the following through the preceding,) then is it also an indispensable
+<i>law of the empirical representation</i> of the time-series that the appearances of the
+preceding time determine every occurrence in the following.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>What this leads to is a causality like that of mental phenomena,
+where it <i>is</i> the past which determines the future, and <i>not</i> (in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_540">[540]</span>the same sense) the reverse; but the doctrine of the conservation of
+energy consists precisely in the denial that anything like this occurs
+in the domain of physics. Had Kant studied the psychological phenomena
+more attentively and generalised them more broadly, he
+would have seen that in the mind causation is not absolute, but follows
+such a curve as is traced in my essay towards “The Law of
+Mind” (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, 550). Does our judicious editor deem it
+ungracious to find fault with Kant for not doing so much more than
+he did, considering what that hero-like achievement was? We must
+seem to carp, as long as thinkers can hold that achievement for sufficient.
+In the fourth place, Kant’s “Analogy” ignores that continuity
+which is the life-blood of mathematical thought. He deals with
+those awkward chunks of phenomenon, called “events.” He represents
+one such “event” as determined by certain others, definitely,
+while the rest have nothing to do with it. It is impossible to cement
+such thought as this into hermetic continuity with the refined conceptions
+of modern dynamics. The statement that every instantaneous
+state of things determines precisely all subsequent states, and
+not at all any previous states, could, I rather think, be shown to involve
+a contradiction.</p>
+
+<p>The notion which Dr. Carus holds of a cause seems to be that
+it is a state, embracing all the positions and velocities of all the
+masses at one instant, the effect being a similar state for any subsequent
+instant. (¶¶ 21, 24.) This breaks at once with common parlance,
+with dynamics, and with philosophical logic. In common
+parlance, we do not say that the position and upward velocity of a
+missile is the cause of its being at a subsequent instant lower down
+and moving with a greater downward velocity.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_110" href="#Footnote_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> In dynamics, it is
+the fixed force, gravitation, or whatever else, together with those relative
+positions of the bodies that determine the intensity and direction
+of the forces, that is regarded as the cause. But these causes
+are not previous to, but simultaneous with, their effects, which are
+the instantaneous accelerations. Finally, logic opposes our calling
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_541">[541]</span>one of two states which equally determine one another (as any two
+states of a system do, if the velocities are taken to be included in
+these states) <i>the</i> determinator, or cause, simply because of the circumstance
+that it precedes the other in time,—a circumstance that
+is upon the principles of dynamics plainly insignificant and irrelevant.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody will make slips in the use of words that have been
+on his lips from before the time when he learned to think; but the
+practice which I endeavor to follow in regard to the word <i>cause</i>, is
+to use it in the Aristotelian sense of an <i>efficient cause</i>, in all its crudeness.
+In short, I refuse to use it at all as a philosophical word. When
+my conception is of a dynamical character, I endeavor to employ
+the accepted terminology of dynamics;&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_111" href="#Footnote_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> and when my idea is a
+more general and logical one, I prefer to speak of the <i>explanation</i>.</p>
+
+<p>§ 14. Dr. Carus thinks the element of necessity in causation
+can be demonstrated by considering the process as a transformation.
+“It is a sequence of two states which belong together as an initial
+and final aspect of one and the same event.” (¶ 21. Compare ¶¶ 20,
+24.) He neglects to explain how he brings under this formula the
+inward causation of the will and character, as set forth by him in
+¶¶ 163-167.</p>
+
+<p>It is unnecessary for me to reply, at length, to an argument so
+manifestly inconclusive. On the one hand, it conflicts with the
+principle that absolute necessity cannot be proved from experience;
+and on the other hand, it leaves room for an imperfect necessity.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Tait has done an ill office to thought in countenancing
+the idea that the conservation of energy is of the same nature as the
+“conservation,” or rather perduration, of matter. Dr. Carus says
+(¶ 121) that</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The law of the conservation of matter and energy rests upon the experience
+(corroborated by experiments) that causation is transformation. It states that the
+total amount of matter and the total amount of energy remain constant. There
+is no creation out of nothing and no conversion of something into nothing.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_542">[542]</span></p>
+
+<p>The historical part of this statement contains only a small grain
+of truth; but that I will not stop to criticise. The point I wish to
+make is that the law of the conservation of energy is here represented
+under a false aspect. The true substance of the law is that
+the accelerations, or rates of change, of the motions of the particles
+at any instant depend solely on their relative positions at those instants.
+The equation which expresses the law under this form is a
+differential equation of the second order; that is, it involves the
+rates of change of the rates of change of positions, together with the
+positions themselves. Now, because of the purely analytic proposition
+of the differential calculus that</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Dₜ</i>²<i>s</i> = ½<i>Dₛ</i>(<i>Dₜs</i>)²,</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula11" style="max-width: 15.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula11.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">the first integral of the differential equation of the second order, that
+is, the differential equation of the first order which expresses the
+same state of things, equates half the sum of the masses, each multiplied
+by the square of its velocity, to a function of the relative positions
+of the particles <i>plus</i> an arbitrary constant.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_112" href="#Footnote_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> In order to fix
+our ideas, let us take a very simple example, that of a single particle
+accelerated towards an infinite plane, at a rate proportional to
+the <i>n</i>ᵗʰ power of its distance from the plane. In this case, if <i>s</i> be
+the distance, the second differential equation will be</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Dₜ</i>²<i>s</i> = -<i>asⁿ</i>,</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula12" style="max-width: 12.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula12.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">and the first integral of it will be</p>
+
+<p class="center">(<i>Dₜs</i>)² = -(²<i>ᵃ</i>⁄<i>ₙ</i>₊₁)<i>sⁿ</i>⁺¹ + <i>C</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="formula13" style="max-width: 21.875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/formula13.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="noindent">By the first law of motion, and the Pythagorean proposition, the
+part of the velocity-square depending on the horizontal component
+is also constant.</p>
+
+<p>The arbitrary constant, <i>C</i>, plainly has its genesis in the fact
+that forces do not determine velocities, but only accelerations. Its
+value will be fixed as soon as the velocity at any instant is known.
+This quantity would exist, just the same, and be independent of the
+time, and would therefore be “conserved” whether the forces were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_543">[543]</span>“conservative,” that is, simply positional, or not. Now, this constant
+is the energy; or rather, the energy is composed of this constant
+increased by another which is absolutely indeterminable, being
+merely supposed large enough to make the sum positive.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, the law of energy does not prescribe that the total amount
+of energy shall remain constant; for this would be so in any case
+by virtue of the second law of motion; but what it prescribes is that
+the total energy diminished by the living force shall give a remainder
+which depends upon the relative positions of the particles and
+not upon the time or the velocities. It is also to be noticed that
+the energy has no particular magnitude, or quantity. Furthermore,
+in transformations of kinetical energy into positional energy, and
+the reverse, the different portions of energy do not retain their identity,
+any more than, in book-keeping, the identity of the amounts of
+different items is preserved. In short, the conservation of energy,
+(I do not mean the <i>law</i> of conservation,) is a mere result of algebra.
+Very different is it with the “conservation” of matter. For, in the
+first place, the total mass is a perfectly definite quantity; and, in
+the second place, in all its transformations, not only is the <i>total</i>
+amount constant, but all the different parts preserve their identity.
+To speak, therefore, of “the conservation of matter and energy,” is
+to assimilate facts of essentially contrary natures; and to say that
+the law of the conservation of energy makes the total amount of
+energy constant is to attribute to this law a phenomenon really due
+to another law, and to overlook what this law really does determine,
+namely, <i>that the total energy less the kinetic energy gives a remainder
+which is exclusively positional</i>.</p>
+
+<p>§ 15. Dr. Carus does not make it clear what he means by
+<i>chance</i>. He does, indeed, say (¶¶ 145, 146):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“What is chance?</p>
+
+<p>“Chance is any event not especially intended, either not calculated, or, with a
+given and limited stock of knowledge, incalculable.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This defines what he means by a chance event, in the concrete;
+what he understands by probability, we are left to conjecture. But
+from what he says in ¶ 147, I infer that he regards it as dependent
+upon the state of our ignorance, and therefore nothing real.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_544">[544]</span></p>
+
+<p>I am, therefore, much puzzled when I find him expressing a
+conviction (¶¶ 88, 156) that chance plays an important part in the
+real world. He explains very distinctly that “when we call a throw
+of the dice pure chance, we mean that the incidents which condition
+the turning up of these or those special faces of the dice have not
+been, or cannot be, calculated.” (¶ 147.) This is the commonest,
+because the shallowest, philosophy of chance. Even Venn might
+teach him better than that. However, according to that view, when
+he writes of “the important part that chance plays in the world,—not
+absolute chance ... but that same chance of which the throw
+of the die is a typical instance” (¶ 88), he can be understood to
+mean no more than that many things happen which we are not in
+condition to calculate or predict. This is not playing a part <i>in the
+world</i>, one would say—at least, not in the natural world; it is only
+playing a part in our ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus frequently uses phrases which make us suspect he
+penetrates deeper. Thus, he says, “we do not believe in absolute
+chance, but we believe in chance” (¶ 144); and again, “Every man
+is the architect of his own fortune—but not entirely. There are
+sometimes coincidences determining the fates of men.” (¶ 161.)
+But when we remark the consecution of ¶¶ 137-162, we feel pretty
+sure he really sees no further. To do so would have been to perceive
+that indefinitely varied specificalness <i>is</i> chance.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time, I myself strove to make chance that diversity
+in the universe which laws leave room for, instead of a violation of
+law, or lawlessness. That was truly believing in chance that was
+not absolute chance. It was recognising that chance does play a
+part in the real world, apart from what we may know or be ignorant
+of. But it was a transitional belief which I have passed through,
+while Dr. Carus seems not to have reached it.</p>
+
+<p>As for absolute chance, Dr. Carus makes the momentous admission
+that it is “not unimaginable” (¶ 150). If so, its negation,
+or absolute necessity, cannot be a formal principle.</p>
+
+<p>§ 16. But it is time for me to leave the consideration of Dr.
+Carus’s system and to take up his strictures upon mine. His philosophy
+is one eminently enlightened by modern ideas, which it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_545">[545]</span>synthetises to an unusual extent. It is distinguished for its freedom
+from the vice of one-sidedness, and displays every facet of the gem
+of philosophical inquiry, except the one on which it rests, the question
+of absolute law. Its prominent faults, which I feel sure must
+have struck every competent reader, are that it shows little trace of
+meditation upon the thoughts of the great idealists, and that there
+is a certain want of congruity between different elements of it. How
+strangely it sounds, for instance, to find an apriorian, and one who
+is dinging “formal laws” so perpetually into our ears, one who holds
+that “in order to weave the woof of the <i>a posteriori</i> elements into
+coherent cloth, we want the warp of the <i>a priori</i>” (¶ 15), to find
+this man declaring for a positivism “which accepts no doctrine,
+theory, or law, unless it be a formulation of facts,” and proclaiming
+that “the whole business of science is to systematise the samenesses
+of experience, and to present them in convenient formulas” (¶ 120).
+Now there is just one way of bringing such warring elements into
+harmony, and curing the greatest defect of the system,—and it is a
+way which would also bring the whole into far better concordance
+with natural science. It is to lop off the heads of all absolute propositions
+Whose subject is not the Absolute, and reduce them to the
+level of probable and approximate statements. Were that defalcation
+performed, Dr. Carus’s philosophy would, in its general features,
+offer no violent opposition to my opinions. Moreover, the Doctor
+has at heart the conciliation of religion and science. I confess such
+serious concern makes me smile; for I think the atonement he desires
+is a thing which will come to pass of itself when time is ripe,
+and that our efforts to hasten it have just that slight effect that our
+efforts to hasten the ripening of apples on a tree may have. Besides,
+natural ripening is the best. Let science and religion each
+have stout faith in itself, and refuse to compromise with alien and
+secondary purposes, but push the development of its own thought
+on its own line; and then, when reconcilement comes,—as come it
+surely will,—it will have a positive value, and be an unmixed good.
+But since our accomplished editor thinks himself called upon to assist
+in this birth of time, let me ask him whether of all the conditions
+of such peace, the first is not that religious thought should abandon
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_546">[546]</span>that extravagant absoluteness of assertion which is proper to the state
+of intellectual infancy, but which it has so long been too timid to
+let go? This pragmatical and unneeded absoluteness it is which is
+most deeply contrary to the method, the results, and the whole
+spirit of science; and no error can be greater than to fancy that
+science, or scientific men, rest upon it or readily tolerate it.</p>
+
+<p>§ 17. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 56-64) condemns my method of investigation
+as contrary to that by which science has been advanced; and
+holds that a radically different, and thoroughly positivistic method
+is requisite,—a method so intensely positivistic as to exclude all
+originality. I suppose he will not object to my forming an opinion
+concerning the methods of science. I was brought up in an atmosphere
+of scientific inquiry, and have all my life chiefly lived among
+scientific men. For the last thirty years, the study which has constantly
+been before my mind has been upon the nature, strength,
+and history of methods of scientific thought. I have no space here
+to argue the question. In its logical aspect, I have partly considered
+it in various publications; and in its historical aspect, I have long
+been engaged upon a treatise about it. My critic says (¶ 57) that
+1 am “very positivistic in my logic of science.” This is a singular
+misapprehension. Few of the great scientific minds with whom I
+have come into personal contact, and from whom I endeavored to
+learn were disposed to contemn originality or the ideal part of the
+mind’s work in investigation; and those few, it was easy to see,
+really breathed an atmosphere of ideas which were so incessantly
+present that they were unconscious of them. Were I to name those
+of my teachers who were most positivistic in theory, a smile would
+be excited. My own historical studies, which have been somewhat
+minutely critical, have, on the whole confirmed the views of Whewell,
+the only man of philosophical power conjoined with scientific
+training who had made a comprehensive survey of the whole course
+of science, that progress in science depends upon the observation of
+the right facts by minds <i>furnished with appropriate ideas</i>. Finally,
+my long investigation of the logical process, of scientific reasoning
+led me many years ago to the conclusion that science is nothing but
+a development of our natural instincts. So much for my <i>theory</i> of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_547">[547]</span>scientific logic. It is as totally opposed as anything can be to Dr.
+Carus’s theory (¶ 69, note; and “Ursache, Grund und Zweck,” p.
+2) that originality is out of place in science.</p>
+
+<p>But in my <i>practice</i> of scientific reasoning, Dr. Carus accuses me
+of being what he calls a “constructionist”; that is, a theoriser unguided
+by indications from observation or accepted facts. To a
+mind upon whom that celebrated and splendid chapter of Kant upon
+the architectonical method failed to make a deep impression, I may
+appear so; but <i>travesty</i> is in truth hardly too strong a word to describe
+the account of my method by Dr. Carus.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps exaggeration is not without its value. If so, let me
+sum up the method Dr. Carus recommends. Eschew originality, is
+its pious formula; do not think for yourself, nor countenance results
+obtained by original minds. Distrust them; they are not safe
+men. Leave originality to mathematicians and their breed, to poets,
+and to all those who seek the sad notoriety of having unsettled belief.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_113" href="#Footnote_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a>
+Flee all philosophies which smack of this aberrant nineteenth
+century.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_114" href="#Footnote_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> This theory of Dr. Carus condemns itself; for it is highly
+original, and soars into the free ether untrammelled by historic facts.</p>
+
+<p>Keppler comes very close to realising my ideal of the scientific
+method; and he is one of the few thinkers who have taken their
+readers fully into their confidence as to what their method really
+has been.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_115" href="#Footnote_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> I should not feel justified in inflicting upon mine an
+autobiographical account of my own course of thought; but some
+things Dr. Carus’s accusation forces me to mention. My method of
+attacking all problems has ever been to begin with an historical and
+rational inquiry into the special method adapted to the special problem.
+This is the essence of my architectonical proceeding upon
+which Dr. Carus has commented very severely. To look an inch
+before one’s nose involves originality: therefore, it is wrong to have
+a conscious method. But further, in regard to philosophy, not only
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_548">[548]</span>the methods, but the elementary ideas which are to enter into those
+methods, should be subjected to careful preliminary examination.
+This, especially, Dr. Carus finds very unscientific. (¶ 64, and elsewhere.)
+It is, undoubtedly, the most characteristic feature of my
+procedure. Certainly it was not a notion hastily or irreflectively
+caught up; but is the maturest fruit of a lifetime of reflection upon
+the methods of science, including those of philosophy; and if it
+shall be found that one contribution to thought on my part has
+proved of permanent service, that, I expect, will be the one. This
+method in no wise teaches that the method and materials for thought
+are not to be modified in the course of the study of the subject-matter.
+But instead of taking ideas at haphazard, or being satisfied
+with those that have been handed down from the good old times, as
+a mind keenly alive to the dangers of originality would have done,
+I have undertaken to make a systematic survey of human knowledge
+(a very slight sketch of which composed the substance of my paper
+on the “Architecture of Theories,”) in order to find what ideas have,
+as a fact, proved most fruitful, and to observe the special utilities
+they have severally fulfilled. A subsidiary object of this survey was
+to note what the great obstacles are to-day in the way of the further
+advance of the different branches of science. In my “Architecture
+of Theories,” I never professed to do more than make a slight sketch
+of a small portion of my preliminary studies, devoting thirteen lines
+to some hints as to the nature of the results. In the four following
+papers I have given a selection of a few of these results. Among
+those which remain to be reported are some of much more immediate
+importance than any of those hitherto set forth. If anybody
+has been surprised to find my subsequent papers developing thoughts
+which they were unable to foresee from my first, it is only what I
+warned people from the outset that they would find to happen. Nor
+have the greatest of these surprises yet been reached.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_116" href="#Footnote_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a></p>
+
+<p>The next series of facts reviewed was that of the history of philosophy.
+I waded right into this fearful slough of “originality,” in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_549">[549]</span>order to gather what seemed to throw a light upon the subject.
+Finally, I reviewed the general facts of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>I now found myself forced by a great many different indications
+to the conclusion that an evolutionary philosophy of some kind must
+be accepted,—including among such philosophies systems like those
+of Aristotle and of Hegel. From this point the reasoning was more
+rapid. Evolution had been a prominent study for half a generation;
+and much light had been thrown upon the conditions for a fruitful
+evolutionary philosophy. The first question was, how far shall this
+evolution go back? What shall we suppose <i>not</i> to be a product of
+growth? I fancy it is this cautious reflectiveness of my procedure
+which especially displeases Dr. Carus. It is not positivistic: it is
+architectonic. But the answer to the question was not far to seek.
+If an evolutionary explanation is to be adopted, philosophy, logic,
+and the economy of research all dictate that in the first essay, at
+least, that style of explanation be carried as far back as explanation
+is called for. What elements of the universe require no explanation?
+This was a simple question, capable of being decided by logic
+with as much facility and certainty as a suitable problem is solved
+by differential calculus. Being, and the uniformity in which being
+consists, require to be explained. The only thing that does not require
+it is non-existent spontaneity. This was soon seen to mean
+absolute chance. The conclusion so reached was clinched by a
+careful reëxamination of the office of chance in science generally,
+and especially in the doctrines of evolution. Arrived at this point,
+the next question was, what is the principle by which the development
+is to proceed? It was a difficult inquiry, and involved researches
+from different points of view.</p>
+
+<p>But I will not trouble the reader with further autobiographical
+details. I have given enough to show that my method has neither
+been in theory purely empirical, nor in practice mere brain-spinning;
+and that, in short, my friend Dr. Carus’s account of it has
+been as incorrect as can be.</p>
+
+<p>§ 18. The learned doctor (¶¶ 6, 7, 8) pronounces me to be an
+imitator of David Hume, or, at least, classes my opinions as closely
+allied to his. Yet be it known that never, during the thirty years in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_550">[550]</span>which I have been writing on philosophical questions, have I failed
+in my allegiance to realistic opinions and to certain Scotistic ideas;
+while all that Hume has to say is said at the instance and in the interest
+of the extremest nominalism. Moreover, instead of being a
+purely negative critic, like Hume, seeking to annul a fundamental
+conception generally admitted, I am a positive critic, pleading for
+the admission to a place in our scheme of the universe for an idea
+generally rejected. In the first paper of this series, in which I gave
+a preliminary sketch of such of my ideas as could be so presented,
+I carefully recorded my opposition to all philosophies which deny
+the reality of the Absolute, and asserted that “the one intelligible
+theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is
+effete mind.” This is as much as to say that I am a Schellingian, of
+some stripe; so that, on the whole, I do not think Dr. Carus has
+made a very happy hit in likening me to Hume, to whose whole
+method and style of philosophising I have always been perhaps too
+intensely averse. Yet, notwithstanding my present disclaimer, I
+have little doubt apriorians will continue to describe me as belonging
+to the sceptical school. They have their wonderful ways of arriving
+at truth, without stooping to confront their conclusions with
+facts; and it is amusing to see how sincerely they are convinced
+that nobody can have science at heart, without denying all they uphold.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_117" href="#Footnote_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a></p>
+
+<p>My opponent has a habit of throwing out surprising opinions
+without the least attempt to illuminate them with the effulgence of
+reason. Thus he says (¶ 8): “If Kant’s answer to Hume had been
+satisfactory, Mr. Peirce would probably not have renewed the attack.”
+What attack? All that Hume attacked I defend, namely, law
+as a reality. How could a defence of that which I defend as essential
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_551">[551]</span>to my position, cause me to surrender that position, namely,
+that real regularity is imperfect? In any sense in which Hume could
+have admitted the possibility of law, it must be precisely followed;
+since its existence could consist only in the conformity of facts unto
+it. But perhaps Dr. Carus means that if one question had been
+completely settled, I should probably have confined myself to talking
+about that, instead of broaching a new one.</p>
+
+<p>§ 19. Another misunderstanding of my position on the part of
+Dr. Carus (¶¶ 12, 13) is simply due to “boldly” having been twice
+printed where the reading should have been “baldly,” in my paper
+on “The Doctrine of Necessity.” (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, p. 336, lines
+20 and 25.) I wish printers would learn that I never use the word
+<i>bold</i>. I have so little of the quality, that I don’t know what it
+means. As I read the “revise,” as usual, it was presumably my
+fault that the <i>erratum</i> occurred. At any rate, had my meaning
+been clearly expressed, the proof-reader would not have been misled
+by my defective chirography. What I was trying to say was, in
+substance, this: Absolute chance is a hypothesis; and, like every
+hypothesis, can only be defended as explaining certain phenomena.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_118" href="#Footnote_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a>
+Yet to suppose that an event is brought about by absolute chance is
+utterly illogical, since as a hypothesis it could only be admitted on
+the ground of its explaining observed facts; now from mere non-law
+nothing necessarily follows, and therefore nothing can be explained;
+for to explain a fact is to show that it is a necessary, or, at
+least, a probable, result from another fact, known or supposed.
+Why is not this a complete refutation of the theory of absolute
+chance? <i>Answer</i>: because the <i>existence</i> of absolute chance, as well
+as many of its characters, are not themselves absolute chances, or
+sporadic events, unsubject to general law. On the contrary, these
+things <i>are</i> general laws. Everybody is familiar with the fact that
+chance has laws, and that statistical results follow therefrom. Very
+well: I do not propose to explain anything as due to the action of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_552">[552]</span>chance, that is, as being lawless. I do not countenance the idea
+that Bible stories, for instance, show that nature’s laws were violated;—though
+they may help to show that nature’s laws are not so
+mechanical as we are accustomed to think. But I only propose to
+explain the regularities of nature as consequences of the only uniformity,
+or general fact, there was in the chaos, namely, the general
+absence of any, determinate law.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_119" href="#Footnote_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> In fact, after the first step is taken,
+I only use <i>chance</i> to give room for the development of law by means
+of the law of habits.</p>
+
+<p>§ 20. In ¶ 28, I read: “Mr. Peirce does not object to necessity
+in certain cases; he objects to necessity being a universal feature of
+the world.” This is correctly stated, and so it is in ¶ 203. I object
+to necessity being universal, as well as to its ever being exact. In
+short, I object to absolute universality, absolute exactitude, absolute
+necessity, being attributed to any proposition that does not deal
+with the Α and the Ω, in the which I do not include any object of
+ordinary knowledge. But it is careless to write (¶ 193) that I “describe
+the domain of mind as the absence of law.” Is not one of
+my papers entitled “The Law of Mind”? It is true that I make the
+law of mind essentially different in its mode of action from the law
+of mechanics, inasmuch as it requires its own violation; but it is
+law, not chance uncontrolled. That it is not “an undetermined
+and indeterminable sporting” should have been obvious from my
+expressly stating that its ultimate result must be the entire elimination
+of chance from the universe. That directly negatives the adjective
+“indeterminable,” and hence also the adjective “undetermined.”
+Still more unwarranted is the statement (¶ 205) that I deny
+“that there are samenesses in this world.” If the slightest excuse
+for such an accusation can be found in all my writings I shall be
+mightily surprised.</p>
+
+<p>§ 21. Dr. Carus fully admits (¶ 9) the justice of my first reply
+to the argument that necessity is postulated in all scientific reasoning,
+which reply is that to postulate necessity does not make it true.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_553">[553]</span>As this reply, if correct is complete, Dr. Carus was bound after that
+admission to drop the postulate-argument in favor of necessity.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_120" href="#Footnote_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a>
+But he takes no notice, at all, of my four-page argument to show
+that scientific reasoning does <i>not</i> postulate absolute universality,
+exactitude, or necessity (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, pp. 324-327); but
+calmly asserts, four or five times over (¶¶ 5, 11, 16, 62, 79), without
+one scintilla of argumentation, that that postulate <i>is</i> made, and
+uses this as an argument in favor of necessity.</p>
+
+<p>§ 22. He also fully admits (¶¶ 11, 14, 22) the justice of my
+argument that the absoluteness of universality, exactitude, and necessity,
+cannot be proved, nor rendered probable, by arguments
+from observation. That argument consisted in assuming that all
+arguments from observation are probable arguments, and in showing
+that probable inferences are always affected with probable errors.</p>
+
+<p>Had I deemed it requisite, I might easily have fortified that
+argument by a more profound analysis of scientific reasoning. Such
+an analysis I had formerly given in my “Theory of Probable Inference”
+(in “Studies in Logic,” Boston: Little and Brown).</p>
+
+<p>But, notwithstanding his admissions, Dr. Carus sets up his
+<i>ipse dixit</i> against my argumentation. “We deny most positively,”
+says the editorial Elohim, “that the calculus of probabilities is applicable
+to the order of the world, as to whether it may or may not
+be universal.” (¶¶ 27, 31.)</p>
+
+<p>To support this, he cites (¶¶ 31-34) four passages from articles
+written by me sixteen years ago. I hope my mind has not been
+stationary during all these years; yet there is little in those old articles
+which I now think positively erroneous, and nothing in the
+passages cited. My present views had, at that time, already begun
+to urge themselves on my mind; but they were not ripe for public
+avowal. In the first of the passages cited, I express the opinion,
+which I first uttered in my earlier lectures before the Lowell Institute,
+in 1866, afterwards in the <i>Popular Science Monthly</i> in 1877, in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_554">[554]</span>still fuller elaboration in my “Theory of Probable Inference” in
+1882, and maintain now as strongly as ever, that no definite probability
+can be assigned to any general arrangement of nature. To
+speak of an <i>antecedent</i> probability would imply that there was a statistical
+science of different universes; and a <i>deduced</i> probability requires
+an antecedent probability for one of its data.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_121" href="#Footnote_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a> This consideration
+only goes to fortify my present position, that we cannot conclude
+from observed facts with any degree of probability, and therefore
+<i>a fortiori</i> not with certainty, that any proposition is absolutely
+universal, exact, or necessary. In the absence of any weight of
+probability in favor of any particular exact statement, the formal
+presumption is altogether against any one out of innumerable possible
+statements of that kind.</p>
+
+<p>The second passage cited is one in which I argue that the universe
+is not a chaos, or chance-medley. Now Dr. Carus admits
+(¶ 28) that I do not to-day maintain that it is a chance-medley.</p>
+
+<p>The third passage cited is this: “A contradiction is involved
+in the very idea of a chance-world.” This is in entire harmony with
+my present position that “a chaos ... being without connection
+or regularity would properly be without existence.” (“Architecture
+of Theories,” <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. I, p. 176.)</p>
+
+<p>The fourth passage is to the effect that “the interest which the
+uniformities of nature have for an animal measures his place in the
+scale of intelligence.” This I still believe.</p>
+
+<p>So much for my supposed contradictions. If I am not mistaken,
+our amiable editor, whose admirable editorship springs so
+largely out of his amiability, in copying out these passages was really
+not half so much intent on showing me to be wrong at present, as
+on showing me to have been right formerly. However hard he hits,
+he contrives to honey his sockdologers, and sincerely cares more to
+make the reader admire his antagonist when he is right than to condemn
+him when he is wrong. There is a touch of art in this that
+proclaims the born editor, and which I can hardly hope to imitate.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_555">[555]</span></p>
+
+<p>Though Dr. Carus admits over and over again that necessity
+cannot be based on observation, he often slips back to the idea that
+it can be so based. He says, (¶ 30) that “form is a quality of this
+world, not of some samples of it, but throughout, so far as we know
+of existence in even the most superficial way.” But does he not see
+that all we <i>do</i> know, and all we <i>shall</i> to-morrow, or at any date know,
+is nothing but a sample of our possible experience,—nay, is but a
+sample of what we are in the future to have already experienced?
+I have characterised inductive inference as reasoning from samples;
+but the most usual way of sampling a class is by examining <i>all</i> the
+instances of it that have come under our observation, or which we
+can at once collect.</p>
+
+<p>§ 23. Dr. Carus (¶¶ 44, 46) holds that from my social theory
+of reality, namely, that the real is the idea in which the community
+ultimately settles down, the existence of something inevitable is to
+be inferred. I confess I never anticipated that anybody would urge
+that. I thought just the reverse might be objected, namely, that all
+absoluteness was removed from reality by that theory, and it was
+many years ago that, in my “Theory of Probable Inference,” I admitted
+the obvious justice, as it seemed to me, of that objection.
+We cannot be quite sure that the community ever will settle down
+to an unalterable conclusion upon any given question. Even if they
+do so for the most part, we have no reason to think the unanimity
+will be quite complete, nor can we rationally presume any overwhelming
+<i>consensus</i> of opinion will be reached upon every question.
+All that we are entitled to assume is in the form of a <i>hope</i> that such
+conclusion may be substantially reached concerning the particular
+questions with which our inquiries are busied.</p>
+
+<p>Such, at least, are the results to which the consideration of the
+doctrine of probability brings my mind irresistibly. So that, the
+social theory of reality, far from being incompatible with tychism,
+inevitably leads up to that form of philosophy. Socialistic, or as I
+prefer to term it, agapastic ontology seems to me likely to find favor
+with many minds at an early day, because it is a natural path by
+which the nominalist may be led into the realistic ways of thought,
+ways toward which many facts and inward forces impel him. It is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_556">[556]</span>well, therefore, to call attention to the circumstances that the realism
+to which it leads is a doctrine which declares general truths to
+be real,—independent of the opinions of any particular collection of
+minds,—but not to be destined, in a strictly universal, exact, and
+sure acceptation, to be so settled, and established. Now to assert
+that general truths are objectively real, but to deny that they are
+strictly universal, exact, and certain, is to embrace the doctrine of
+absolute chance. Thus it is that the agapastic ontologist who endeavors
+to escape tychism will find himself “led into” that “inextricable
+confusion” which Dr. Carus (¶ 4) has taken a contract to
+show that I am led into.</p>
+
+<p>§ 24. Conservatism is wholesome and necessary; the most convinced
+radical must admit the wisdom of it, in the abstract; and a
+conservative will be in no haste to espouse the doctrine of absolute
+chance. I, myself, pondered over it for long years before doing so.
+But I am persuaded, at length, that mankind will before very long
+take up with it; and I do not believe philosophers will be found
+tagging on to the tail of the general procession.</p>
+
+<p>My little dialogue between the tychist and the necessitarian
+(<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, pp. 331-333) seems to have represented pretty
+fairly the views of the latter; for Dr. Carus, in ¶¶ 151-155, does
+little more than reiterate them, without much, if at all, reinforcing
+them. His ¶¶ 158-160 merely work out, in a form perhaps not quite
+clear, what is manifest from the elementary principles of dynamics,
+and was considered in my dialogue.</p>
+
+<p>His arguments in this connection, apart from those already noticed,
+are that absolute chance is something which if it existed would
+require explanation, that the manifold specificalness of nature is explained
+by law without any aid from chance, and that absolute chance
+if it existed, in the sense in which it is supposed to exist in my
+chaos, could not possibly breed law as supposed by me. To the
+consideration of these arguments I proceed to apply myself.</p>
+
+<p>§ 25. One of the architectonic—and, therefore, I suppose, by
+Dr. Carus considered as highly reprehensible—features of my theory,
+is that, instead of saying off-hand what elements strike me as requiring
+explanation and what as not doing so, which seems to be his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_557">[557]</span>way, I have devoted a long time to the study of the whole logical
+doctrine of explanation, and of the history of explanations, and have
+based upon the general principles so ascertained my conclusions as
+to what things do and what do not require to be explained.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus (¶ 67) defines <i>explanation</i> as a description of a special
+process of nature in such a way that the process is recognised
+as a transformation. This I cannot quite grant. First, I cannot
+admit that “special processes of nature” are the only things to be
+explained. For instance, if I were to meet a gentleman who seemed
+to conform scrupulously to all the usages of good society, except
+that he wore to an evening party an emerald satin vest, that would
+be a fact calling for explanation, although it would not be a “special
+process of nature.” Second, I cannot admit that an explanation
+is a description of the fact explained. It is true that in the setting
+forth of some explanations, it is convenient to restate the fact explained,
+so as to set it under another aspect; but even in these
+cases, the statement of <i>other</i> facts is essential. In all cases, it is
+<i>other facts</i>, usually hypothetical, which constitute the explanation;
+and the process of explaining is a process by which from those other
+facts the fact to be explained is shown to follow as a consequence,
+by virtue of a general principle, or otherwise. Thus, a “special
+process of nature” calling for explanation is the circumstance that
+the planet Mars, while moving in a general way from west to east
+among the fixed stars, yet retrogrades a part of the time, so as to
+describe loops in the heavens. The explanation is that Mars revolves
+in one approximate circle and we in another. Again, it has
+been stated that a warm spring in Europe is usually followed by a
+cool autumn, and the explanation has been offered that so many
+more icebergs than usual are liberated during a warm spring, that
+they subsequently lower sensibly the temperature of Europe. I care
+little whether the fact and the explanation are correct or no. The
+case illustrates, at any rate, my point that an explanation is a special
+fact, supposed or known, from which the fact to be explained
+follows as a consequence. Third, I cannot admit that every description
+which recognises the fact described as a transformation is an
+explanation; far less that “it is complete and exhaustive” (¶ 67).
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_558">[558]</span>A magician transforms a watch into a dove. Recognise it as a
+transformation and the trick is explained, is it? This is delightfully
+facile. Describe the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly as a
+transformation, and does that explain it? Fourth, I cannot admit
+that every explanation recognises the fact explained as a transformation.
+The explanation of the loops in the motion of Mars is not
+of that nature. But I willingly recognise in Dr. Carus’s definition
+an attempt,—more or less successful,—to formulate one of the great
+offices of scientific inquiry, that of bridging over the gap between
+the familiar and the unfamiliar.</p>
+
+<p><i>Explanation</i>, however, properly speaking, is the replacement of
+a complex predicate, or one which seems improbable or extraordinary,
+by a simple predicate from which the complex predicate
+follows on known principles. In like manner, a <i>reason</i>, in one sense,
+is the replacement of a multiple subject of an observational proposition
+by a general subject, which by the very conditions of the special
+experience is predicable of the multiple subject.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_122" href="#Footnote_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> Such a reason
+may be called an explanation in a loose sense.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, that which alone requires an explanation is a coincidence.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, I say that a uniformity, or law, is <i>par excellence</i>, the
+thing that requires explanation. And Dr. Carus (¶ 51) admits that
+this “is perfectly true.”</p>
+
+<p>But I cannot imagine anything further from the truth than his
+statement (¶ 66) that “the only thing in the world of which we cannot
+and need not give account is the existence of facts itself.” I
+should say, on the contrary, that the existence of facts is the only
+thing of which we need give account. Forms may indulge in whatever
+eccentricities they please in the world of dreams, without responsibility;
+but when they attempt that kind of thing in the world
+of real existence, they must expect to have their conduct inquired
+into. But should Dr. Carus reply that I mistake his meaning, that
+it is only “being in general” (¶ 66) that he holds unaccountable, I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_559">[559]</span>reply that this is simply expressing scepticism as to the possibility
+and need of philosophy. In a certain sense, my theory of reality,
+namely that reality is the dynamical reaction of certain forms upon
+the mind of the community, is a proposed explanation of being in
+general; and be it remarked that the mind of the community, itself,
+is the thing the nature of whose being this explanation first of all
+puts upon an idealistic footing.</p>
+
+<p>Chance, according to me, or irregularity,—that is, the absence
+of any coincidence,—calls for no explanation. If <i>law</i> calls for a particular
+explanation, as Dr. Carus admits it does, surely the mere
+absence of law calls for no further explanation than is afforded by
+the mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating the
+result. An explanation is the conception of a fact as a necessary
+result, thereby accounting for the coincidence it presents. It would
+be highly absurd to say that the absence of any definite character,
+must be accounted for, as if it were a peculiar phenomenon, simply
+because the imperfection of language leads us so to talk of it. Quite
+unfounded, therefore, is Dr. Carus’s opinion that “chance needs
+exactly as much explanation as anything else” (¶ 53);—an opinion
+which, so far as I can see, rests on no defensible principle.</p>
+
+<p>Equally hasty is his oft repeated objection (¶ 55, 58, 61) that
+my absolute chance is something ultimate and inexplicable. I go
+back to a chaos so irregular that in strictness the word existence is
+not applicable to its merely germinal state of being; and here I
+reach a region in which the objection to ultimate causes loses its
+force. But I do not stop there. Even this nothingness, though it
+antecedes the infinitely distant absolute beginning of time, is traced
+back to a nothingness more rudimentary still, in which there is no
+variety, but only an indefinite specificability, which is nothing but a
+tendency to the diversification of the nothing, while leaving it as
+nothing as it was before. What objectionable ultimacy is here? The
+objection to an ultimate consists in its raising a barrier across the
+path of inquiry, in its specifying a phenomenon at which questions
+must stop, contrary to the postulate, or hope, of logic. But what
+question to which any meaning can be attached am I forbidding by
+my absolute chance? If what is demanded is a theological backing,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_560">[560]</span>or rational antecedent, to the chaos, that my theory fully supplies.
+The chaos is a state of intensest feeling, although, memory and habit
+being totally absent, it is sheer nothing still. Feeling has existence
+only so far as it is welded into feeling. Now the welding of this
+feeling to the great whole of feeling is accomplished only by the reflection
+of a later date. In itself, therefore, it is nothing; but in its
+relation to the end, it is everything.</p>
+
+<p>More unreasonable yet is Dr. Carus’s pretension, that the manifold
+specificalness, which is what I mean by chance, is capable of
+explanation (¶¶ 142, 143) by his own philosophic method. He may
+explain one particularity by another, of course; but to explain specificalness
+itself, would be to show that a specific predicate is a necessary
+consequence of a generic one, or that a whole is without
+ambiguity a part of its part. Remark, reader, at this point, that
+chance, whether it be absolute or not, is not the mere creature of
+our ignorance. It is that diversity and variety of things and events
+which law does not prevent. Such is that real chance upon which
+the kinetical theory of gases, and the doctrines of political economy,
+depend. To say that it is not absolute is to say that it,—this diversity,
+this specificalness,—can be explained as a consequence of
+law. But this, as we have seen, is logically absurd.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Carus admits that absolute chance is “not unimaginable”
+(¶ 150). Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of
+all, things the most obtrusive. That it is absolute, is the most manifest
+of all intellectual perceptions. That it is a being, living and
+conscious, is what all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self
+can scarce muster hardihood to deny.</p>
+
+<p>Almost as unthinking is the objection (¶ 61) that absolute chance
+could never beget order. I have noticed elsewhere the historic
+oblivescence of this objection. Must I once again repeat that the
+tendency to take habits, being itself a habit, has <i>eo ipso</i> a tendency
+to grow; so that only a slightest germ is needed? A realist, such
+as I am, can find no difficulty in the production of that first infinitesimal
+germ of habit-taking by chance, provided he thinks chance
+could act at all. This seems, at first blush, to be explaining something
+as a chance-result. But exact analysis will show it is not so.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_561">[561]</span></p>
+
+<p>In like manner, when the eminent thinker who does me the
+honor to notice my speculation, objects that I do not, after all, escape
+making law absolute, since the tendency to take habits which I propose
+to make universal is itself a law, I confess I can find only words
+without ideas in the objection. Law is a word found convenient, I
+grant, in describing that tendency; but is there no difference between
+a law the essence of which is to be inviolable (which is the nominalistic
+conception of mechanical law, whose being, they say, lies in
+its action) and that mental law the violation of which is so included
+in its essence that unless it were violated it would cease to exist?
+In my essay, “The Law of Mind,” I have so described that law.
+In so describing it, I make it a law, but not an absolute law; and
+thus I clearly escape the contradiction attributed to me.</p>
+
+<p>§ 26. In my attack on “The Doctrine of Necessity,” I offered
+four positive arguments for believing in real chance. They were as
+follows:</p>
+
+<p>1. The general prevalence of growth, which seems to be opposed
+to the conservation of energy.</p>
+
+<p>2. The variety of the universe, which is chance, and is manifestly
+inexplicable.</p>
+
+<p>3. Law, which requires to be explained, and like everything
+which is to be explained must be explained by something else, that
+is, by non-law or real chance.</p>
+
+<p>4. Feeling, for which room cannot be found if the conservation
+of energy is maintained.</p>
+
+<p>In a brief conversation I had with him, my friend remarked
+(and it was an inconsiderate concession, I certainly do not wish
+to hold him to it) that while the theory of tychism had some attractive
+features, its weakness consisted in the absence of any positive
+reasons in its favor. I infer from this that I did not properly state
+the above four arguments. I therefore desire once more to call attention
+to them, especially in their relations to one another.</p>
+
+<p>Mathematicians are familiar with the theorem that if a system
+of particles is subject only to positional forces, it is such that if at
+any instant the velocities were all suddenly reversed, without being
+altered in quantity, the whole previous history of the system would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_562">[562]</span>be repeated in inverse succession. Hence, when physicists find
+themselves confronted with a phenomenon which takes place only
+in one order of succession and never in the reverse order,—of which
+no better illustration could be found than the phenomena of growth,
+for nobody ever heard of an animal growing back into an egg,—they
+always take refuge in the laws of probability as preventive of
+the velocities ever getting so reversed. To understand my argument
+number 1, it is necessary to make this method of escape from apparent
+violations of the law of energy quite familiar to oneself. For
+example, according to the law of energy, it seems to follow (and by
+the aid of the accepted theory of light it does follow) that if a prism,
+or a grating, disperses white light into a spectrum, then the colors
+of the spectrum falling upon the prism or grating at the same angles,
+and in the same proportions, will be recombined into white light;
+and, everybody knows that this does in fact happen. Nevertheless,
+the usual and prevalent effect of prisms and gratings is to produce
+colored spectra. Why? Evidently, because, by the principles of
+probability, it will rarely happen that colored lights converging from
+different directions will fall at just the right angles and in just the
+right proportions to be recombined into white light. So, when
+physicists meet with the phenomena of frictional and viscous resistance
+to a body in motion, although, according to their doctrine, if the
+molecules were to move with the same velocities in opposite directions
+the moving body would be accelerated, yet they say that the
+laws of probability, applied to the trillions of molecules concerned,
+render this practically certain not to occur. I do no more, then,
+than follow the usual method of the physicists, in calling in chance
+to explain the apparent violation of the law of energy which is presented
+by the phenomena of growth: only instead of chance as they
+understand it, I call in absolute chance. For many months, I endeavored
+to satisfy the data of the case with ordinary <i>quasi</i> chance;
+but it would not do. I believe that in a broad view of the universe,
+a simulation of a given elementary mode of action can hardly be explained
+except by supposing the genuine mode of action somewhere
+has place. If it is improbable that colored lights should fall together
+in just such a way as to give a white ray, is it not an equally
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_563">[563]</span>extraordinary thing that they should all be generated in such a way
+as to produce a white ray? If it is incredible that trillions of molecules
+in a fluid should strike a solid body moving through it so as
+to accelerate it, is it not marvellous that trillions of trillions of molecules
+all alike should ever have got so segregated as to create a
+state of things in which they should be practically certain to retard
+the body? It is far from easy to understand how mere positional
+forces could ever have brought about those vast congregations of
+similar atoms which we suppose to exist in every mass of gas, and
+by which we account for the apparent violations of the law of energy
+in the phenomena of the viscosity of the gas. There is no difficulty
+in seeing how sulphuric acid acting on marble may produce an aggregation
+of molecules of carbonic anhydride, because there are similar
+aggregations in the acid and in the marble, but how were such
+aggregations brought about in the first place? I will not go so far
+as to say that such a result is manifestly impossible with positional
+forces alone; but I do say that we cannot help suspecting that the
+simulated violation of the law of energy has a real violation of the
+same law as its ultimate explanation. Now, growth <i>appears</i> to violate
+the law of energy. To explain it, we must, at least, suppose a
+simulated, or <i>quasi</i>, chance, such as Darwin calls in to produce his
+fortuitous variations from strict heredity. It may be there is no real
+violation of the law, and no real chance; but even if there be nothing
+of the sort in the immediate phenomenon, can the conditions
+upon which the phenomenon depends have been brought about except
+by real chance? It is conceivable, again, that the law of the
+conservation of forces is not strictly accurate, and that, nevertheless,
+there is no absolute chance. But I think so much has been
+done to put the law of the conservation of forces upon the level of
+the other mechanical laws, that when one is led to entertain a serious
+doubt of the exactitude of that, one will be inclined to question the
+others.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, few psychologists will deny the very intimate connection
+which seems to subsist between the law, or <i>quasi</i>-law, of
+growth and the law of habit, which is the principal, if not (as I hold
+it to be) the sole, law of mental action. Now, this law of habit
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_564">[564]</span>seems to be quite radically different in its general form from mechanical
+law, inasmuch as it would at once cease to operate if it were
+rigidly obeyed; since in that case all habits would at once become
+so fixed as to give room for no further formation of habits. In this
+point of view, then, growth seems to indicate a positive violation of
+law.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now consider argument number 3: and remark how it
+fortifies number 1. Physical laws that appear to be radically different
+yet present some striking analogies. Electrical force appears to
+be polar. Its polarity is explained away by Franklin’s one-fluid
+theory, but in that view the force is a repulsion. Now, gravitation
+is an attraction, and is, therefore, essentially different from electricity.
+Yet both vary inversely as the square of this distance. Radiation,
+likewise follows the same formula. In this last case, the formula,
+in one aspect of it, follows from the conservation of energy. In
+another aspect of it, it results from the principle of probability, and
+does not hold good, in a certain sense, when the light is concentrated
+by a lens free from spherical aberration. But neither the
+conservation of energy nor the principle of probability seems to
+afford any possible explanation of the application of this theory to
+gravitation nor to electricity. How, then, are such analogies to be
+explained? The law of the conservation of energy and that of the
+perduration of matter present so striking an analogy that it has
+blinded some powerful intellects to their radically different nature.
+The law of action and reaction, again, has often been stated as the
+law of the conservation of momentum. Yet it is not only an independent
+law, but is even of a contrary nature, inasmuch as it is only
+the algebraical sum of opposite momenta that is “conserved.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_123" href="#Footnote_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a>
+How is this striking analogy between three fundamental laws to be
+explained? Consider the still more obvious analogy between space
+and time. Newton argues that the laws of mechanics prove space
+and time to be absolute entities. Leibniz, on the other hand, takes
+them as laws of nature. Either view calls for an explanation of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_565">[565]</span>analogy between them, which no such reflection as the impossibility
+of motion without that analogy can supply. Kant’s theory seems to
+hint at the possibility of an explanation from both being derived
+from the nature of the same mind. Any three orthogonal directions&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_124" href="#Footnote_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a>
+in space are exactly alike, yet are dynamically independent.</p>
+
+<p>These things call for explanation; yet no explanation of them
+can be given, if the laws are fundamentally original and absolute.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, law itself calls for explanation. But how is it to be
+explained if it is as fundamentally original and absolute as it is commonly
+supposed to be? Yet if it is not so absolute, there is such a
+phenomenon as absolute chance.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, the chance which growth calls for is now seen to be absolute,
+not <i>quasi</i> chance.</p>
+
+<p>Now consider argument number 2. The variety of the universe
+so far as it consists of unlikenesses between things calls for no explanation.
+But so far as it is a general character, it ought to be
+explained. The manifold diversity or specificalness, in general,
+which we see whenever and wherever we open our eyes, constitutes
+its liveliness, or vivacity. The perception of it is a direct, though
+darkling, perception of God. Further explanation in that direction
+is uncalled for. But the question is, whether this manifold specificalness
+was put into the universe at the outset, whether God created
+the universe in the infinitely distant past and has left it to its own
+machinery ever since, or whether there is an incessant influx of specificalness.
+Some of us are evolutionists; that is, we are so impressed
+with the pervasiveness of growth, whose course seems only
+here and there to be interrupted, that it seems to us that the universe
+as a whole, so far as anything can possibly be conceived or
+logically opined of the whole, should be conceived as growing. But
+others say, though parts of the universe simulate growth at intervals,
+yet there really is no growth on the whole,—no passage from a simpler
+to a more complex state of things, no increasing diversity.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my argument is that, according to the principles of logic,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_566">[566]</span>we never have a right to conclude that anything is absolutely inexplicable
+or unaccountable. For such a conclusion goes beyond what
+can be directly observed, and we have no right to conclude what
+goes beyond what we observe, except so far as it explains or accounts
+for what we observe. But it is no explanation or account of a fact
+to pronounce it inexplicable or unaccountable, or to pronounce any
+other fact so. Now, to say no process of diversification takes place
+in nature leaves the infinite diversity of nature unaccounted for;
+while to say the diversity is the result of a general tendency to diversification
+is a perfectly logical probable inference. Suppose there
+be a general tendency to diversification; what would be the consequence?
+Evidently, a high degree of diversity. But this is just
+what we find in nature. It does not answer the purpose to say there
+is diversity because God made it so, for we cannot tell what God
+would do, nor penetrate his counsels. We see what He <i>does</i> do,
+and nothing more. For the same reason one cannot logically infer
+the existence of God; one can only know Him by direct perception.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be noted that a general tendency to diversification
+does not explain diversity in its specific characters; nor is this called
+for. Neither can such a tendency explain any specific fact. Any
+attempt to make use of the principle in that manner would be utterly
+illogical. But it can be used to explain universal facts, just as quasi-chance
+is used to explain statistical facts. Now, the diversity of
+nature is a universal fact.</p>
+
+<p>To explain diversity is to go behind the chaos, to the original
+undiversified nothing. Diversificacity was the first germ.</p>
+
+<p>Argument No. 4 was, upon its negative side, sufficiently well
+presented in my “Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” Mechanical
+causation, if absolute, leaves nothing for consciousness to do in the
+world of matter; and if the world of mind is merely a transcript of
+that of matter, there is nothing for consciousness to do even in the
+mental realm. The account of matters would be better, if it could
+be left out of account. But the positive part of the argument, showing
+what can be done to reinstate consciousness as a factor of the
+universe when once tychism is admitted, is reinforced in the later
+papers. This ought to commend itself to Dr. Carus, who shows
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_567">[567]</span>himself fully alive to the importance of that part of the task of science
+which consists in bridging gaps. But consciousness, for the
+reason just stated, is not to be so reinstated without tychism; nor can
+the work be accomplished by assigning to the mind an occult power,
+as in two theories to be considered in the section following this. As
+might be anticipated, (and a presumption of this kind is rarely falsified
+in metaphysics,) to bridge the gap synechism is required. Supposing
+matter to be but mind under the slavery of inveterate habit,
+the law of mind still applies to it. According to that law, consciousness
+subsides as habit becomes established, and is excited again at
+the breaking up of habit. But the highest quality of mind involves
+a great readiness to take habits, and a great readiness to lose them;
+and this implies a degree of feeling neither very intense nor very
+feeble.</p>
+
+<p>I have noticed above (§ 7) Dr. Carus’s dubious attitude toward
+the first argument. I considered in the last section his attempted
+reply to the second. To the third argument, he replies (¶ 65) that
+law ought to be accounted for by the principle of sufficient reason.
+But, of course, that principle cannot recommend itself to me, a
+realist; for it is nothing but the lame attempt of a nominalist to
+wriggle out of his difficulties. Reasons explain nothing, except upon
+some theistic hypothesis which may be pardoned to the yearning
+heart of man, but which must appear doubtful in the eyes of philosophy,
+since it comes to this, that Tom, Dick, and Harry are competent
+to pry into the counsels of the Most High, and can invite in
+their cousins and sweethearts and sweethearts’ cousins to look over
+the original designs of the Ancient of Days.</p>
+
+<p>§ 27. My fourth argument it is which seems to have made most
+impression upon Dr. Carus’s mind (¶ 85), and his reply is rather
+elaborate.</p>
+
+<p>While embracing unequivocally the necessitarian dogma, equally
+for mind and for matter (¶ 193), Dr. Carus wishes utterly to repudiate
+materialism and the mechanical philosophy (¶ 133). To facilitate
+his, thus, walking the slack-rope, he makes (¶ 168) a division
+of events into “(1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4) physiological,
+and (5) psychical events.” The first three (¶¶ 169-171)
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_568">[568]</span>are merely distinguished by the magnitude of the moving masses,
+so that, for philosophical purposes, they do not differ at all. As for
+physiological events, though he devotes a paragraph (¶ 172) to their
+definition, he utterly fails to distinguish them from the mechanical
+(including the physical and chemical) on the one hand, or from the
+psychical on the other. Dr. Carus seems to think (¶ 176) that by this
+division he has separated himself entirely from the materialists; but
+this is an illusion, for nobody denies the existence of feelings.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is, he distinctly enrolls himself in the mechanical
+army when he asserts that mental laws are of the same necessitarian
+character as mechanical laws (¶ 193). The only question that remains
+as to his position is whether he is a materialist or not. He
+instances (¶ 185) the case of a general receiving a written dispatch
+and being stimulated into great activity by its perusal, and causing
+great motions to be made and missiles to be sped in consequence.
+Now, the dilemma is this. Will Dr. Carus, on the one hand, say
+that the motion of those missiles was determined by mechanical laws
+alone, in which case, it would only be necessary to state all the positions
+and velocities of particles concerned, a hundred years before,
+to determine just how those bullets would move and, consequently,
+whether the guns were to be fired or not, and this would constitute
+him a materialist, or will he say that the laws of motion do not suffice
+to determine motions of matter, in which case, since they formally
+certainly do so suffice, they must be <i>violated</i>, and he will be
+giving to mind a direct dynamical power which is open to every objection
+that can be urged against tychism?</p>
+
+<p>Now admire the decision with which he cuts the Gordian knot!</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">There are no purely mechanical phenomena.</span>” (¶ 175.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>That is,</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<i>The laws of motion <span class="smcap">are</span> applicable to and will explain all motions</i>.” (¶ 177.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>But hold!</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The mechanical philosopher ... feels warranted in the hope that ... the
+actions of man ... can be explained by the laws of motion .... We may anticipate
+that this conclusion will prove <span class="smcap">erroneous</span>. <i>And so it is.</i>” (¶ 176.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>At the same time,</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">No objection can be made</span> <i>to the possibility of explaining the delicate motions
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_569">[569]</span>in the nervous substance of the brain by the laws of molar or molecular mechanics</i>.”
+(¶ 178.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Yet,</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<i>The simplest</i> psychical reflexes, including those <i>physiological reflexes</i> which
+we must suppose to have originated by conscious adaptation ... <span class="smcap">cannot</span> <i>be explained
+from mechanical</i> or physical <i>laws</i> alone.” (¶ 186.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>However,</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<i>We do <span class="smcap">not</span> say that there are motions</i> ... in the brain ... <i>which form exceptions
+to the laws of mechanics</i>.” (¶ 187.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Nevertheless,</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as the atoms of a
+gravitating stone. Yet there is present an additional feature; there are present
+states of awareness.... Neither states of awareness nor their meanings can be
+weighed on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they determinable in foot-pounds.”
+(¶ 192.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Clearness is the first merit of a philosopher; and what ¶ 192
+comes to is crystal-clear. Dr. Carus wants to have the three laws
+of motion always obeyed; but he wishes the forces between the molecules
+to be varied according to the momentary states of awareness.
+All right: he is entitled to suppose whatever he likes, so long as the
+supposition is self-consistent, as this supposition is. It conflicts
+with the law of energy, it is true; for that law is that the forces depend
+on the situations of the particles alone, and not on the time.
+It is liable to give rise to perpetual motion. It was intended, no
+doubt, to be an improvement on my molecular theory of protoplasm,
+earlier in the same number. It escapes materialism. It supposes a
+direct dynamical action between mind and matter, such as has not
+been supposed by any eminent philosopher that I know of for centuries.
+I am sorry to say that it shows a dangerous leaning toward
+originality. The argument for thus rejecting the law of the conservation
+of energy, I leave to others to be weighed. It seems to suppose
+a much larger falsification of that law than my doctrine; but it is a
+pretty clever attempt to escape my conclusions. It rejects what has
+to be rejected, the law of the conservation of energy; and is far
+more intelligent than the theory of those (like Oliver and Lodge)
+who wish to give to mind a power of deflecting atoms, which would
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_570">[570]</span>satisfy the conservation of energy while violating the law of action
+and reaction. If it can have due consideration, I doubt not it will
+accelerate the acceptance of my views. Meantime, I do not see
+where that “inextricable confusion” into which I was to be led is
+to come in. (¶ 4.)</p>
+
+<p>§ 28. Little more requires to be noticed in Dr. Carus’s articles.
+He admits (¶ 2) that indeterminism is the more natural belief, which
+is no slight argument in its favor.</p>
+
+<p>§ 29. The remarks upon the theological bearings of the theories,
+if they are found somewhat wide of the mark, are explained by the
+haste of the editor to show just what all the affiliations of my views
+were, before I had had time to explain what those views are. The
+remarks to which I refer will be found in ¶¶ 3, 36, 81, 82, 83, 128,
+203, 204. They are worth putting together.</p>
+
+<p>§ 30. The doctrine of symbolism, to which Dr. Carus has recourse,
+seems to be similar to that of my essay “Some Consequences
+of Four Incapacities” (<i>Journal of Speculative Philosophy</i>, II.) (¶¶ 180,
+183, 199.) On this head, I can only approve of his ideas.</p>
+
+<p>§ 31. It is true that I wrote many definitions for one of the “encyclopedic
+lexicons.” But they were necessarily rather vaguely expressed,
+in order to include the popular use of terms, and in some
+cases were modified by proof-readers or editors; and for reasons not
+needful here to explain, they are hardly such as I should give in a
+Philosophical Dictionary proper.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">C. S. Peirce.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_101" href="#FNanchor_101" class="label">[101]</a> J. S. Mill had in the first edition of his <i>Logic</i> decisively taken an objective
+conception of chance and probability; but in his second edition he had become
+puzzled and had retracted, leaving that chapter, and with it his whole logic, a melancholy
+wreck, over which the qualified reader sighs, “And this once seemed intelligible!”
+Venn in the first edition of his book set forth the same objective conception
+with great clearness, and for that he was entitled to high praise, notwithstanding
+his manifest inadequacy to the problems treated. But in his second edition, he too
+has fallen away from his first and correct view, and has adopted a theory which I
+shall some day show to be untenable. Venn’s whole method in logic, as well as his
+system, is in my opinion of the weakest.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_102" href="#FNanchor_102" class="label">[102]</a> Mill often did good service in substituting precise terms for ambiguous ones;
+as when in speaking of mathematical conclusions he prefers to say they are legitimate
+deductions rather than that they are necessary.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_103" href="#FNanchor_103" class="label">[103]</a> In his <i>Ursache, Grund and Zweck</i>, Dr. Carus alludes to this passage. But
+he prefers the treatment of the question by Reid, whom he calls Mill’s opponent
+(<i>Gegner</i>).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_104" href="#FNanchor_104" class="label">[104]</a> It is of comparatively little consequence what Hume really meant. The main
+interest is in what Kant thought he meant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_105" href="#FNanchor_105" class="label">[105]</a> Along with the distinction, I would of course do away with this use of the
+words <i>abstract</i> and <i>concrete</i> to which no clear idea can be attached, as far as I can
+see.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_106" href="#FNanchor_106" class="label">[106]</a> I cannot but disapprove of this use of the word “construction” to mean a
+studied theory, because the word is imperatively required in the theory of cognition
+to denote a mathematical diagram framed according to a general precept.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_107" href="#FNanchor_107" class="label">[107]</a> I apply this term because it is essentially like the passage from the concrete
+“virtuous” to the abstract “virtue,” or from the concrete “white” (adjective) to
+the abstract “whiteness,” or “white” (substantive).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_108" href="#FNanchor_108" class="label">[108]</a> I can never use this word without thinking of the explanation of it given by
+Petrus Peregrinus in his <i>Epistole de Magnete</i>. He says that physical properties are
+occult in the sense that they are only brought out by experimentation, and are not
+to be deduced from admixtures of <i>hot</i> and <i>cold</i>, <i>moist</i> and <i>dry</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_109" href="#FNanchor_109" class="label">[109]</a> It follows as a corollary from this that if the positions of the particles at any
+one instant, together with the velocities at that instant, and the law of force, are
+given, the positions at all instants can be calculated. Of course, to give the positions
+and velocities at one instant, is a special case of the giving of the positions at
+two instants. The two instants may be such that there will be more than one solution
+of the problem; but this is an insignificant detail.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_110" href="#FNanchor_110" class="label">[110]</a> It would seem to follow from his notion that in uniform motion each minute’s
+motion is the cause of that of the next. Yet he says (¶ 19) “there is no cause that
+is equal to its effect.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_111" href="#FNanchor_111" class="label">[111]</a> But, as I have elsewhere said, I should like to persuade mathematicians to
+speak of “positional energy” as <i>Kinetic potency</i>, the <i>vis viva</i> as <i>Kinetic energy</i>, and
+the total “energy” as the <i>Kinetic entelechy</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_112" href="#FNanchor_112" class="label">[112]</a> The differential equation being an ordinary, not a partial one, this is an absolute
+constant, determined by initial (or final, or any instantaneous) conditions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_113" href="#FNanchor_113" class="label">[113]</a> Dr. Carus calls attention to the connection between my doctrine of the fixation
+of opinion and his anti-originalism.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_114" href="#FNanchor_114" class="label">[114]</a> Dr. Carus passes a sweeping judgment on Post-Kantian philosophy, as being
+original.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_115" href="#FNanchor_115" class="label">[115]</a> This was a remark of my father’s.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_116" href="#FNanchor_116" class="label">[116]</a> A person in the last <i>Monist</i>, breaks in upon my series of articles to foretell
+what the “issues of synechism” will be. Were he able to do so, it would certainly
+be the height of ill-manners thus to take the words out of my mouth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_117" href="#FNanchor_117" class="label">[117]</a> As I am writing, I am shown a letter, in which the writer says: “Peirce
+with all his materialistic ideas, yet,” etc I never promulgated a materialistic idea
+in my life. The writer simply assumes that science is materialistic. As I am correcting
+the proofs, I notice that Mr. B. C. Burt, in his new <i>History of Modern Philosophy</i>,
+sets me down as sceptical, though doubtfully. There are a good many inaccuracies
+in the work. This was inevitable in a first edition. But the ingenious
+plan of the book admirably adapts it to the wants of just that class of students who
+cannot understand that no repertory of facts ever can be trusted implicitly.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_118" href="#FNanchor_118" class="label">[118]</a> Its being hypothetical will not prevent its being established with a very high
+degree of certainty. Thus, all history is of the nature of hypothesis; since its facts
+cannot be directly observed, but are only supposed to be true to account for the
+characters of the monuments and other documents.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_119" href="#FNanchor_119" class="label">[119]</a> Somebody may notice that I here admit a proposition as absolutely true.
+Undoubtedly; because it relates to the Absolute.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_120" href="#FNanchor_120" class="label">[120]</a> Indeed, to admit that reply is all but to admit the non-absolute grade of necessity.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_121" href="#FNanchor_121" class="label">[121]</a> I rightly go somewhat further in my <i>Theory of Probable Inference</i>; but that
+has no bearing on the present discussion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_122" href="#FNanchor_122" class="label">[122]</a> Dr. Carus, in his <i>Ursache, Grund und Zweck</i>, well says that <i>reasons</i> are discovered
+by induction, in the strict sense. It is often admitted that <i>causes</i> can only
+be inferred by hypothetic reasoning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_123" href="#FNanchor_123" class="label">[123]</a> The conservation of a vortex, which consists of the preservation of a certain
+character of motion by the same particles, though derived from the coöperation of
+other laws, is, in form, quite different.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_124" href="#FNanchor_124" class="label">[124]</a> In speaking of directions, we assume the Euclidean hypothesis that the angles
+of a triangle are equal to two right angles.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_571">[571]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_FOUNDER_OF_TYCHISM">THE FOUNDER OF TYCHISM, HIS METHODS, PHILOSOPHY, AND CRITICISMS.<br>
+<span class="smaller">IN REPLY TO MR. CHARLES S. PEIRCE.</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>INTRODUCTORY AND PERSONAL.</h4>
+
+<p>Soon after I had received Mr. Peirce’s manuscript he wrote me
+in a private letter as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“You have not found, I trust, that in my rejoinder I have anywhere overstepped
+the limit of amiable disputation. If anything of that kind did, unconsciously to me,
+in the heat of composition, slip from my pen, I am most anxious to have it pointed
+out to me, so that there may be no feeling in the matter of a disagreeable kind. For
+if you should not mention it, I should at some future time discover it, and it would
+be a source of real unhappiness to me.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is a very amiable disposition of mind. Mr. Peirce presses
+me very hard in the struggle for truth: he does not hesitate to take
+advantage of even the smallest weak point which he espies or rather
+which he believes he espies. He does not shrink from using plain
+terms, such as “absurd,” “unthinking,” “weak,” “hasty,” “irrational.”
+Yet he preserves in the heat of the controversy a friendly
+spirit towards his antagonist, which I cannot but appreciate and wish
+publicly to acknowledge. But I would not have him change a word
+or soften the language of his article in the least, <i>for my sake</i>. If Mr.
+Peirce is wrong, I will take care of myself; if he is right, let the
+truth come out.</p>
+
+<p>We are both, as it were, by profession champions of truth; so
+we need not mind an occasional fling if in the end the cause of truth
+be promoted. Especially, in the present case, I need not mind the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_572">[572]</span>hard blows which Mr. Peirce deals with such assurance, for all the
+points at which he strikes are well protected. The fiercer the onslaught,
+the better the test. I feel satisfied that his severe scrutiny
+only serves to prove the strength of the position which I defend.</p>
+
+<p>I shall speak my mind as freely and unreservedly as does Mr.
+Peirce, and hope he in his turn will resent plain words as little as I
+do. As offense is not intended, so offense should not be taken.</p>
+
+<p>Let me add here in these introductory remarks that I am always
+open to conviction. The views which I uphold have been well considered
+and thought out in their most important consequences.
+They are consistent and well guarded in spite of Mr. Peirce’s thinking
+the contrary, so that I feel no need of changing them. But
+should some unforeseen difficulty arise which would oblige me to revise
+the whole system of my ideas, I shall not hesitate publicly to
+confess it and allow myself to be lead by truth whithersoever it be.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The issue of our controversy is the problem of chance—not of
+chance as it occurs, for instance, in the throw of dice, but of “absolute
+chance,” or perfect lawlessness. Mr. Peirce makes absolute
+chance the corner-stone of his philosophy; he propounds a radical
+and sweeping indeterminism, while I reject the idea, not of chance,
+but of absolute chance as incompatible with the philosophy of science.</p>
+
+<h4>I. DIFFERENCES OF METHOD.</h4>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce calls himself a Scotist and professes to represent mediæval
+Realism, speaking at the same time of me as a Nominalist.
+We find, however, that the inverse statement would be nearer the
+truth.</p>
+
+<p>Before discussing Mr. Peirce’s philosophy itself, we must examine
+his methods. Difference of method will produce important
+divergencies of opinion.</p>
+
+<h5>1. ATTENTION TO DETAIL.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce takes up in his rejoinder many incidental points,
+which have little or no bearing upon the main issues between us.
+On the one hand, things of no consequence, such as my granting
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_573">[573]</span>that “absolute chance” like the impossibilities of fairy tales, is not
+unimaginable, and my saying that tychism is attractive but weak for
+lack of arguments, are adduced as “momentous admissions,” and
+“inconsiderate concessions.” On the other hand, Mr. Peirce catches
+at straws to prove a lack of information on my part. He cannot forbear
+calling attention to the little breach of etiquette committed in
+not giving an English baronet his proper title.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce shows on all these and other occasions a love of the
+incidental, and if I were to allow myself to follow his example the
+battle would soon be broken up into innumerable skirmishes.</p>
+
+<p>It is noteworthy that Mr. Peirce’s procedure appears to be a nominalistic
+tradition. Nominalists, regarding universals as mere names
+of many particular things, have always showed a great preference
+for the single, the incidental, the scattered; while realists viewing
+universals as real things were in the habit of laying perhaps too
+much stress upon universalities and generalities to the neglect of the
+particular and individual.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, Mr. Peirce’s favorite idea, which is a belief in absolute
+chance, is in my opinion the most nominalistic and anti-realistic
+proposition I have ever met with. Regularity, or natural law, is to
+him the product of evolution. Thus he demolishes the eternity of
+the universal, and eternity is only universality in time. Now suppose
+that eternity (i. e. universality in time) could be proved an error;
+then, the universality of the universal in space also will become illusory.
+If those abiding features of nature which we call natural laws
+have indeed originated from a general sporting, from chance, from a
+chaotic lawlessness, by a gradual habit taking, who can assure us
+that nature has not taken different habits in other parts of the universe?</p>
+
+<p>I look upon Mr. Peirce as an extreme nominalist, or, if he prefers
+it, as a nominal realist soaked with nominalistic opinions. He
+professes to be a realist, but he rescinds the foundation of realism.</p>
+
+<p>Like the bear of the hermit Mr. Peirce throws the stone at the
+fly of necessary connection, and in doing so kills the philosophy of
+realism itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_574">[574]</span></p>
+
+<h5>2. ORIGINALITY.</h5>
+
+<p>Originality, wherever we find it, is pleasing; but a hankering
+after originality is dangerous. Experience teaches us to regard a
+thinker’s love of originality as one of the main causes of his going
+astray. Let the poet be original, but not the scientist, not the philosopher,
+not the searcher for truth. The conceit of being original
+flatters our vanity, and original ideas in philosophy are tantamount
+to original errors.</p>
+
+<p>I do not deny the value of originality, but I do deny that it is
+a criterion of truth.</p>
+
+<p>Originality consists in the free exercise of our imagination, and
+a vivid imagination is very valuable to the thinker. But it so happens
+that every dreamer cherishes with a mother’s love the children
+of his fancy. And it is, therefore, necessary to be especially critical
+with the offspring of one’s own brain.</p>
+
+<p>Kepler (“who,” Mr. Peirce says, “comes very close to realising
+my ideal of the scientific method”) was endowed with an extraordinarily
+vivid imagination. He invented an extremely original
+scheme of explanation for the solar system, and expounded it with
+great poetical fervor in his “Mysterium Cosmographicum.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_125" href="#Footnote_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a></p>
+
+<p>Kepler at once became famous by his “Mysterium Cosmographicum”
+and was generally admired for his originality. But his
+bent for hatching original ideas did not alone make Kepler what he
+is to us now in the history of science. A greater quality than his
+poetical fervor and original imagination was his rigorous self-criticism.
+He took notice of every little fact that did not agree with his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_575">[575]</span>theories, and for the sake of truth, of objectively provable truth, that
+is, the agreement of his views with positive facts, he sternly slew
+all those creatures of his fancy which he foresaw could not survive.</p>
+
+<p>Having myself a good deal of imagination, and having tried
+myself many original ideas, I can appreciate the self-denial and discipline
+of Kepler. I have come to the conclusion that originality is
+only an important means of attaining truth. Our ways of reaching
+the truth, our methods of finding it, may deserve the praise of originality,
+but truth itself is never original; for truth is the faithfulness
+of a copy which in our representations we make of reality, and to
+praise ideas as original is certainly no argument that they are true.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need of showing that Mr. Peirce is not just in his
+statement of my view of originality, by maintaining that I have advised
+people “think not for yourself.” Confessedly he exaggerates,
+but in truth he misrepresents.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce does not relish what I have to say on the subject,
+and, to pacify his mind, he does not tire of praising originality as
+the high-water mark of genius.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s love of originality is a nominalistic feature of his
+mind. A nominalist who denies the existence of universals cannot
+understand that everything in science must be sacrificed to truthfulness.
+The question, Does this idea correctly represent its respective
+reality? has no sense to a nominalist. The nominalist is only interested
+in what a thinker makes of things. The subjective conception,
+in his opinion, exhausts the subject. I can understand that a
+nominalist should be greatly pleased with originality, but a realist
+should not allow himself to be seduced by its charms.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s penchant for, and my distrust of, originality, have
+a direct influence upon our respective methods of thought. It naturally
+makes him bolder and me more cautious.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_126" href="#Footnote_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_576">[576]</span></p>
+
+<h5>3. A MODERN PROCRUSTES.</h5>
+
+<p>There was a man in ancient Greece named Procrustes, who had
+two beds; one long, the other short. He used to lay his tall guests
+upon the short bed, and his short guests upon the long bed, cutting
+off the limbs of the former and stretching out the bodies of the latter,
+until they fitted the size of their unpleasant resting places. In the
+same way Mr. Peirce treats philosophical views.</p>
+
+<p>There is the bed of the materialist and, as all processes to the
+materialist are purely mechanical, necessitarianism is stretched in the
+materialist’s bed to mechanicalism. I plead, since ideas and feelings
+are not motions, that mental processes cannot be explained by the
+laws of motion, but can, for that reason, be none the less determined;
+but I plead in vain. That view of necessitarianism does not suit the
+bed upon which my Procrustes places me. Other views, however,
+are cut down without further ado because they are said to be nominalistic.
+Anything that does not appeal to Mr. Peirce’s realistic
+mind is dismissed with a shrug.</p>
+
+<p>I am neither a realist nor a nominalist, or rather, I am both
+realist and nominalist. I am convinced that to some extent both
+sides were right and both sides were wrong, and regard it as our duty
+to sift their propositions and accept the truth whether it be nominalistic
+or realistic.</p>
+
+<p>We must follow the principle of hearing both sides, and not
+consider at all whether a statement agrees or disagrees with certain
+party principles.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_127" href="#Footnote_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_577">[577]</span></p>
+
+<h5>4. OCCAM’S RAZOR.</h5>
+
+<p>The most brilliant disciple of Duns Scotus was William of Occam,
+whose fame almost rivalled that of his master. Occam became
+an adversary of realism; he became a nominalist, and after him
+was named a method known as Occam’s razor, especially useful to
+nominalists in their warfare against realists.</p>
+
+<p>Occam’s razor is expressed in the sentence: “<i>Entia non sunt
+multiplicanda præter necessitatem</i>,” which means: Only in cases of
+extremest necessity are we allowed to assume the existence of hypothetical
+facts. If assumed facts are not absolutely indispensable,
+cut them off!</p>
+
+<p>Occam’s razor was invented for a special purpose, that of cutting
+off the realistic hypostatisation of abstract ideas.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know which is more startling, that a realist in name,
+such as Mr. Peirce, should use a weapon forged by nominalists
+against realism, or that he whom in other respects we found in such
+a close contact with nominalistic methods, should not understand
+how to handle a nominalistic weapon.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce censures me for making the statement that the formal
+is subjective as well as objective. This, he says, is cut off by Occam’s
+razor.</p>
+
+<p>The formal is subjective, for our sensation is possessed of form
+and our mind is in possession of formal thought. It is objective, for
+reality is not void of form and the things are such as they are by
+virtue of their peculiar shape.</p>
+
+<p>The proposition that the formal is objective and subjective at
+the same time is as little cut off by Occam’s razor as, for instance,
+the proposition that there is air inside and outside of us, viz. in our
+lungs and in the surrounding atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s usage of the beds of Procrustes is cruel, but his
+usage of Occam’s razor is inconsiderate. He should be careful in
+handling such a sharp knife, lest he do himself harm.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce uses Occam’s razor to cut off statements and facts
+which make his pet theories dispensable; but he forgets that Occam’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_578">[578]</span>razor cuts off ideas only, and when it comes in contact with
+facts its edge is turned.</p>
+
+<p>Occam’s razor is an excellent instrument to dispose of such
+hypotheses as absolute chance, for it declares that if their assumption
+is not quite indispensable, we must cut them off.</p>
+
+<p>Now it either is or is not a fact that the formal is objective and
+subjective at once. It cannot be untrue in my philosophy while it
+is true in Mr. Peirce’s system. My proposition of the formal being
+at once objective and subjective is, according to Mr. Peirce, “cut off
+by Occam’s razor.” “But,” adds he, “when synechism has united
+the two worlds this view gains new life.” So long as I say so, it is
+wrong; but should I adopt Mr. Peirce’s system, it will pass as right.</p>
+
+<h5>5. THE APPLICATION OF LEARNING.</h5>
+
+<p>Philosophers should make it a rule not to encumber their
+thoughts unnecessarily with learning. The great problems of philosophy
+are, in my opinion, much simpler than they are generally
+supposed to be. The art mainly consists in stating them in the simplest
+possible manner.</p>
+
+<p>It is indispensable for a philosopher to be familiar, at least in a
+general way, with all the most important sciences, especially with
+psychology, physiology, logic, physics, mathematics, and mechanics.
+But he should not for that reason introduce any more than he can
+help their complicated details into his expositions.</p>
+
+<p>Every specialist is inclined to look at things through the spectacles
+of his own speciality. But the philosopher who takes a higher
+standpoint should be on his guard. He should always endeavor to
+simplify matters and avoid introducing into philosophy issues which
+belong to a special field, and derive their peculiarities from special
+conditions. To confound the methods of the various sciences, or to
+generalise without sufficient discrimination, will throw everything
+into confusion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce, as we well know, has greatly distinguished himself
+in logic by valuable discoveries and independent investigations.
+We have repeatedly taken occasion to pronounce unreservedly our
+admiration of his achievements in this field. But we cannot approve
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_579">[579]</span>of his application of certain methods of his speciality to philosophy
+in general. Mr. Peirce is inclined to look at the world
+through the spectacles of that new and extremely specialised branch
+of logic which he is at present about to invent.</p>
+
+<p>One hindrance to properly appreciating his doctrines, says Mr.
+Peirce, lies in my “laboring under the great disadvantage of not
+understanding the logic of relatives,” which, he adds (p. 533):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Is a subject I have been studying for a great many years, and I feel and
+know that I have an important report that I ought to make upon it. This branch
+of logic is, however, so abstruse that I have never been able to find the leisure to
+translate my conclusions into a form in which their significance would be manifest
+even to powerful thinkers, whose thoughts had not long been turned in that direction.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I shall be glad to sit at Mr. Peirce’s feet as an attentive student,
+as soon as he has worked out his logic of relatives, or any other subject.
+But I cannot now accept any of his theories on the credit of
+some half-developed science, be it ever so profound or intricate,
+until I see plainly its connection with the present issues.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce trusts that his favorite ideas will find support in his
+peculiar conception of the logic of relatives. Judging from the
+quiddities which he now so confidently propounds as weighty arguments,
+we cannot share his sanguine hopes. His arguments, to be
+derived from the logic of relatives, are like promises to pay out of
+the returns of a gold-mine, just discovered and boomed by the owners.
+There may be gold in the mine, but I do not as yet take any
+stock in it.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce promises to prove by the logic of relatives what, if
+it were true, he should be able to demonstrate in plain language.</p>
+
+<p>I have an idea that the logic of relatives can be worked out into
+as clear a science as is mathematics or algebra. But what shall we
+say when told that the logic of relatives is really abstruse, and that
+he who labors under the disadvantage of not understanding this abstruse
+science is not prepared to grasp Mr. Peirce’s philosophy?
+The abstrusity, in my mind, counts against Mr. Peirce’s philosophy,
+as much as against his logic of relatives.</p>
+
+<p>In my childhood I was much plagued with Latin, but as soon
+as I had acquired a smattering of it, I began to talk Latin to the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_580">[580]</span>servants, and when they did not understand me I thought that they
+were “laboring under the great disadvantage” of not speaking Latin.
+Since then I have learned to translate my Latin into the language of
+the people with whom I have to deal.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce seems to rely on his learning in proportion to its abstrusity;
+he likes to walk on stilts.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce is scholarly to excess. He has a special talent of
+rendering issues involved. Not even his references to my articles
+in <i>The Monist</i> are made directly by quoting the pages on which they
+appear. That method would be too common. He invents a ponderous
+system, necessitating the reader to look twice when he wishes to
+find a passage,—a scheme which is original and very dignified in
+appearance, but makes quotation unnecessarily complicated.</p>
+
+<p>Learning is a virtue, but even virtues should be used with discretion.</p>
+
+<h5>6. THE PRINCIPLE OF POSITIVISM.</h5>
+
+<p>Says Mr. Peirce in confirmation of Whewell (p. 546):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Progress in science depends upon the observation of the right facts by minds
+<i>furnished with appropriate ideas</i>.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>To rely on the observation of facts is, in my opinion, a principle
+of positivism. That facts must be observed “by minds furnished
+with appropriate ideas” is undeniable, but ideas, in order to
+be appropriate, must be true; they must be representations of facts.</p>
+
+<p>Because he relies on facts I have characterised Mr. Peirce’s
+method as positivistic. But he indignantly repudiates “the charge”
+as “totally unfounded.”</p>
+
+<p>Positivism (which I have always carefully distinguished from
+Comtism, the latter being a special kind of positivism&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_128" href="#Footnote_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a>) is not a peculiar
+philosophy, but a most important principle of science.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce seems to use the term positivism in a different sense
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_581">[581]</span>from that in which I use it. Be it so. I shall not nominalistically
+quarrel about words so long as there are more urgent subjects under
+discussion. Noticing that Mr. Peirce does not state that all ideas
+should be ultimately reducible to facts, he is to be acquitted.</p>
+
+<h5>7. LOPPING OFF THE ABSOLUTE.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce thinks that an agreement between us could be arrived
+at. He says (p. 545):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Dr. Carus’s philosophy would, in its general features, offer no violent opposition
+to my opinions” (§ 16).</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>But the condition is (p. 545):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“To lop off the heads of all absolute propositions whose subject is not the Absolute.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact I have lopped off all absolutes. If Mr. Peirce
+were more familiar with my views he would have known that. Thus,
+on my part, I had done all I could to come to an agreement with
+him long before he asked me to do it. But I fear that having also
+lopped off the Absolute itself, I did too much of a good thing, for
+Mr. Peirce carefully records his opposition to all philosophies which
+deny the reality of the Absolute. (See § 18.)</p>
+
+<p>I wish to improve this occasion for conciliation, by turning the
+tables. Mr. Peirce’s views would, upon the whole, offer no violent
+opposition to my opinions if he would only consent to lop off the absolute-property
+of his absolute chance. I would even swallow his
+Absolute if he would promise to designate by that name some real
+quality of the world, or the world itself as a whole, or something that
+is thinkable without making one’s head swim.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_129" href="#Footnote_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_582">[582]</span></p>
+
+<p>Every predication of absolute, changes a real and useful idea
+into its caricature. To, say that a complicated calculation is “absolutely
+true,” that is, true without stipulating the condition that the
+methods are right, and that the execution is made without any mistake,
+is ridiculous; and thus the phrase “in a Pickwickian sense”
+(which we gratefully borrow from Mr. Peirce) would always form a
+drastic but adequate substitute for the term absolute. “Absolutely
+true” is “true in a Pickwickian sense” only. There are no absolute
+truths which are in this sense unconditionally true. In the
+same way, “absolute chance” is different from that real chance
+known to us in experience and instanced by the throw of the dice.
+Absolute chance is “chance in a Pickwickian sense.”</p>
+
+<p>Strange Mr. Peirce speaks of real chance when he means an
+imaginary absolute chance. He apparently uses the word “real”
+in this connection not to denote something that is a fact of experience
+but to express the idea of its being perfect or complete. Thus we
+may speak of a “real” perpetual motion, stating at the same time
+that it is neither real nor realisable.</p>
+
+<h5>8. THE THEORY OF PROBABLE INFERENCE.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce applies his theory of probable inference to everything;
+also to those cases which are unequivocally determined. He
+granted in a private conversation that 2 × 2 = 4 admits of no exception.
+But of other purely formal statements which are in the same
+predicament, for instance, that the sum of the angles of a triangle
+in a plane measures 180°, he states as probable that they are either
+somewhat less or somewhat more than 180°, adding, “that they are
+exactly that amount is what nobody can ever be justified in concluding.”
+To determine the sum of the angles of a plane triangle by
+measuring the parallaxes of stars rests upon a fundamental misconception
+of the principles of formal sciences. It would be consistent
+for Mr. Peirce to say, that 2 × 2 = 4 is true only according to the
+definitions or axioms of arithmetic. But in order to know whether
+2 × 2 = 4 in reality, we ought to apply the theory of probable inference.
+Until we had verified the statement 2 × 2 = 4 by applying
+this formula to the farthest solar systems, we should not be justified
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_583">[583]</span>in concluding that it is exactly true. The theory of probable inferences
+is supposed to help us out of this perplexity, “and within another
+century our grandchildren will surely know whether the three
+angles of a triangle are greater or less than 180°.”&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_130" href="#Footnote_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a></p>
+
+<p>There is always danger in the application of abstract ratiocination;
+and the theory of probable inference forms no exception to the
+rule. On the contrary, it is especially liable to lead one astray.
+There is the case of the doctor who said to his patient: “I am sure
+you will be cured, for I had ninety-nine patients who died during the
+operation, and statistics prove beyond doubt that one among a hundred
+will survive it. You are the hundredth.”</p>
+
+<p>The theory of probable inferences is often misapplied, but
+can it be worse misapplied than by introducing it into the province
+of that which is certain? There is no sense in applying the
+theory of probabilities to what is certain. We may doubt whether
+the rays of light travel in exactly straight lines, but we cannot doubt
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_584">[584]</span>the straightness of lines in plane geometry. We cannot doubt that
+all the radii in a circle are equal, or that the sum of the angles of a
+Euclidean triangle are 180°.</p>
+
+<h5>9. ZWEIDEUTIG BESTIMMT.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce very kindly informs me that the term <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>
+is a translation of a French phrase. Very well, I do not
+deny it. I know very well that the phrase has a long history, but I
+do not consider myself bound to present the whole pedigree of every
+term I use.</p>
+
+<p>Does Mr. Peirce perhaps suppose that the French phrase is the
+original? If we have to go back to the original beginning at all, why
+does he not tell us that the French <i>univoque</i> is a translation from the
+mediæval Latin <i>univoce</i>, which was coined and used by the schoolmen
+in opposition to <i>æquivoce</i>. Neither the term <i>eindeutig</i>, as Mr.
+Peirce asserts, nor its scholastic original <i>univoce</i>, is an exclusively
+mathematical expression.</p>
+
+<p>Although the term <i>eindeutig</i> is a translation of the French <i>univoque</i>,
+there is after all a great difference between the French term
+and the German term, and I have a good reason to prefer the German
+expression. The French term is nominalistic or even vocalistic,
+the German one is realistic. <i>Univoque</i> and <i>univocal</i> mean that
+there is only one name or one <i>vox</i>, while <i>eindeutig</i> lays no stress on
+the name but on the meaning of the name, denoting that which admits
+of but one interpretation. This is a sufficient reason for me to
+prefer it, and it ought to appeal to Mr. Peirce’s realistic mind.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_131" href="#Footnote_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce, maintaining that <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i> is only a mathematical
+term, adduces two equations, each one of which, taken singly,
+admits, he says, of two possible determinations.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_132" href="#Footnote_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> Mr. Peirce uses
+these equations as an argument against my application of the term,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_585">[585]</span>adding, sarcastically: “This shows how much that argument amounts
+to.” But his example proves at best only that there are incomplete
+determinations; some problems allow of several solutions. In a German
+township in which blue hussars are garrisoned, children used to
+propose to another this profound problem: “It lies under a plum-tree
+and is blue; what is it?” If the child questioned argues, “It is
+a plum,” he is corrected “No, it is a hussar.” But if he argues,
+“It is a hussar,” he is corrected, “No, it is a plum.” So he has no
+chance of guessing right. The result of Mr. Peirce’s first equation,
+which may be either 11·477 or 11·523, is like the conundrum of the
+plum-tree: it amounts to the same, viz. to nothing, and proves only
+that there are determinations which are <i>zweideutig bestimmt</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>10. EXPLANATION.</h5>
+
+<p>The differences of method become very serious when we disagree
+on the very meaning of “explanation” itself. How can two debaters
+accept or reject one another’s arguments, if their ideas of explanation
+are radically different?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s definition of the term “explanation” appears to
+me very unsatisfactory. He says (p. 57):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“I cannot admit that explanation is description of the fact explained. It is
+true that in the setting forth of some explanations it is convenient to restate the fact
+explained so as to set it under another aspect, but even in these cases the statement
+of other facts is essential. (!) In all cases it is <i>other facts</i>, (!) usually hypothetical,
+which constitute the explanation; (!) and the process of explaining is a process by
+which from those other facts the fact to be explained is shown to follow as a consequence
+by virtue of a general principle or otherwise.”</p>
+
+<p>“To explain a fact is to show that it is a necessary or at least a probable result
+from another fact (!) known or supposed.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>My definition of “explanation,” as a description in which the
+process described is recognised as a transformation is sneered at.
+Says Mr. Peirce (p. 558):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“A magician transforms a watch into a dove. Recognise it as a transformation
+and the trick is explained, is it? This is delightfully facile.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Indeed, the magician’s trick is explained as soon as we know
+all the changes that have taken place. Take the whole number of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_586">[586]</span>objects handled by the magician, those which he shows and those
+which he conceals. Let us observe how he hides the watch and
+how he produces the dove, and the trick is explained. Is it not?</p>
+
+<p>Explanation is, as the word suggests, a making plain, so that
+we can look over the whole field before us, and leave nothing hidden
+from sight. This whole field, the survey of which is needed for the
+recognition of the transformation, is called the system of the explanation.
+After we have seen how the changes take place, and after we
+have described in exact formulas their modes of action, our desire for
+explanation is completely satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>The instances adduced by Mr. Peirce prove plainly that his
+objections cannot be maintained. Every one of them is an instance
+of transformation (with the exception of the emerald vest, which,
+however, is not stated with sufficient completeness). Take, for instance,
+the following example adduced by Mr. Peirce (p. 557):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“A ‘special process of nature,’ calling for explanation, is the circumstance
+that the planet Mars, while moving in a general way from west to east among the
+fixed stars, yet retrogrades a part of the time, so as to describe loops in the heavens.
+The explanation is, that Mars revolves in one approximate circle and we in
+another.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Can any one deny that this explanation is a description? We
+draw the two orbits as correctly as possible for the required demonstration
+and combine the points representing the earth with those
+representing Mars at their successive positions. Considering the fact
+that we do not perceive the motion of the earth, we have to construct
+a diagram in which the directions of these lines are described as
+viewed from a stationary point. This is a description of changes
+that take place. It is a portrayal of the transpositions of two bodies,
+and the appearance which the change of this relation presents to
+one of them.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce has neither the grace nor good-will to, understand my
+proposition, that <i>explanation is always a tracing of form</i>. He says
+(p. 558):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Forms may indulge in whatever eccentricities they please, in the world of
+dreams, without responsibility.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>In the world of dreams, yes! But not in the world of reality.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_587">[587]</span>And even the irresponsible eccentricities of dreams take place according
+to law.</p>
+
+<p>Feeling that he mistakes my position, Mr. Peirce adds:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Should Dr. Carus reply that I mistake his meaning, that it is only ‘being in
+general’ (§ 66), that he holds unaccountable, I reply that this is simply expressing
+scepticism as to the possibility and need of philosophy.” (P. 558.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Of course, I mean “being in general.” As to the scepticism
+imputed to me, I answer, that any attempt at explaining how matter
+and energy, which I take to be eternal, came into being, is a wrongly
+formulated problem. Mr. Peirce might as well call me a sceptic,
+because I recognise that we cannot square the circle. (Compare
+“Fundamental Problems,” 2d ed., pp. 283-285 and 291.)</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s gravest mistake is his belief that</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“In all cases it is <i>other facts</i> which constitute the explanation.” (P. 557.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The practical application of this mistake becomes fatal to his
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>It is by no means necessary to pass beyond that system of facts
+which contains the phenomenon to be explained. We must, as a
+matter of course, keep completing the facts of a phenomenon until
+we have acquired a survey of what we call the whole system of the
+facts, but we have never to resort to other facts.</p>
+
+<p>We are confronted every day with hundreds of facts of which
+we never see the whole system to which they belong, but we readily
+supply these deficiencies from the stock of our experience. We
+refer the unknown to the known. The single case under observation
+is referred to something with which we are familiar. Those
+systems of explanation which are known to us serve as patterns for
+others that are only partially known, and we fill out, with their assistance,
+the gaps of our observation.</p>
+
+<p>The readiness and reliability of our explanation thus depends
+upon the stock of knowledge we have. The more we know, the
+easier shall we conquer the unknown; the more incomplete our
+knowledge is, the greater the number of hypothetical facts that will
+have to be introduced; and this always weakens the reliability of
+our explanations. Hypothetical facts should be introduced only in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_588">[588]</span>cases of urgent necessity. However, if they are admitted at all, they
+have to be thought of as parts of the system under investigation, for
+they have been invented only because we are compelled to assume
+that without them it would be incomplete.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce adduces the following example to prove that “other
+facts” are required in an explanation:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“It has been stated that a warm spring in Europe is usually followed by a cool
+autumn, and the explanation has been offered that so many more icebergs than usual
+are liberated during a warm spring, that they subsequently lower sensibly the temperature
+of Europe. I care little whether the fact and the explanation are correct
+or no. The case illustrates, at any rate, my point that an explanation is a special
+fact, supposed or known, from which the fact to be explained follows as a consequence.”
+(P. 557.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>When, as in this instance, we recognise that one fact is the
+necessary result of another fact, we view them both as parts of one
+set or system of facts in which a transformation is taking place, and,
+unless we see the connection of the two facts as constituting one
+process of transformation, we cannot say that the problem is explained.
+When we observe changes which are the results of transformations
+taking place beyond the horizon of our knowledge, we
+are, as a matter of course, unable to give an explanation.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce had perhaps in mind a special and more complex
+kind of explanation, which we define as “comprehension.” He
+says (p. 557):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The fact to be explained is shown to follow as a consequence, by virtue of a
+general principle or otherwise.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Take as an instance the law of gravitation. There are the facts
+of falling stones and the motions of celestial bodies. Both sets of
+facts are explained, according to Mr. Peirce, “by virtue of a general
+principle,” i. e. gravitation, while we say, both sets of facts
+are comprehended under a common formula. Mr. Peirce’s conception
+of “explanation” rests on the antiquated view that gravitation
+is a principle behind the gravitating masses which compels the stone
+to fall. Gravitation, however, is not “another fact” foreign to the
+facts under consideration. It is not a principle called in from the
+outside. On the contrary, it is the essence and extract of the very
+facts that are to be explained.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_589">[589]</span></p>
+
+<p>Principles which have not been derived either from the facts to
+be explained, or from the additional facts which belong to their system,
+do not and cannot explain the phenomena.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Comprehension is, as it were, an explanation of a higher degree.
+The term means a grasping together, and it actually consists in
+viewing two or several facts in such a way as to recognise their common
+features. Comprehension is a reduction of our patterns of explanation;
+it unites two or several of them in one formula.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, it has been observed that certain objects float in
+water while others sink to the bottom. The observations do not
+seem to agree, they present two incoherent facts. When we find
+out that the weight of a floating body is equal to the weight of water
+which it displaces, we understand at once why bodies whose specific
+gravity is greater than water sink while those of a lighter specific
+gravity float. Comprehension, in this as in every other case, is the
+description of a process which comprises all the facts that belong to
+a special class in a common formula. The description must be
+applicable to all single cases however different they may be.</p>
+
+<p>This conception of comprehension has a great advantage over
+Mr. Peirce’s view. While he has to bring in some “other fact” from
+the outside, we need not introduce any foreign element. Comprehension,
+as we understand it, can rise from the statement of particular
+facts to more and more general formulations, until finally we
+arrive at universal laws. All the laws thus formulated to satisfy our
+cravings for comprehension, are found to belong to one great system
+of laws, and our scientists are constantly engaged not only in widening
+the range of our experience by new discoveries, but also in revising
+our statements of the uniformities of nature and, where they
+appear to be in collision, in bringing them into harmony.</p>
+
+<p>This conception of comprehension is monistic, Mr. Peirce’s is
+dualistic. We need not, in order to explain the facts of existence,
+go beyond them into a supernatural realm. Mr. Peirce must go outside
+of the world into non-existence when he attempts to understand
+the world by the principles of his philosophy. It is very doubtful
+whether explanations, the “essential” nature of which is to consist
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_590">[590]</span>of “other facts usually hypothetical,” will be satisfactory to anybody
+except himself.</p>
+
+<p>Otherness makes any fact unfit to serve as a factor of an explanation
+and indeed I cannot think of any instance, real or imaginary,
+in which the explanatory facts, be they real or hypothetical,
+do not form parts of the system under consideration.</p>
+
+<p>There is only one instance to which Mr. Peirce’s method of explanation
+has been applied, and I am under the impression that it
+has been invented solely for this purpose. Mr. Peirce’s philosophy
+is too original to be explained by the usual methods; it must have
+an original method of its own. In order to explain “law” Mr.
+Peirce calls in “chance.” His explanation must be an “other fact”
+and the only fact different from law is not-law, lawlessness, or absolute
+chance. According to my idea of explanation, law can never be
+explained by chance. According to Mr. Peirce, it is the only possible
+thing that can be called in as that “<i>other</i> fact” which is supposed
+to be the essential constituent of an explanation.</p>
+
+<p>If Mr. Peirce’s method of explanation were sound, we should
+have to explain order from chaos, possibility from impossibility, and
+sense from nonsense.</p>
+
+<h4>II. MR. PEIRCE’S PHILOSOPHY.</h4>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s constant references to scholastic philosophy remind
+me of happy years long past when I was extremely interested
+in the theories of such men as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Occam,
+Abelard, Tauler, and others. Together with my chum, now a sober
+Professor of physics at a German University, I freely indulged in
+the construction of various world-theories, which, alas! were quickly
+overthrown one after another by the slightest puff of wind. I have not
+lost my interest in the schoolmen, but it is considerably weakened.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s repeated praise of scholastic realism and his condemnation
+of any theory that he brands as nominalistic, seems to me
+like the method of some of our politicians who, eager to revive toryism,
+should censure all evils of the politics of to-day as whiggish. This
+comparison is not exaggerated, for there are a few Hamiltonians who
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_591">[591]</span>miss the refining influence of an aristocratic class and regret that the
+historical tradition of toryism has been so completely broken. I
+would not deny that there is some truth in it, and there is some
+truth, too, in mediæval realism, which has been neglected by the,
+first violently suppressed and then triumphant, nominalism. But
+in reviving realism the Scotists should be very careful to avoid a
+resurrection of its errors.</p>
+
+<h5>1. DUNS SCOTUS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PATRON SAINT.</h5>
+
+<p>Johannes Duns Scotus, a Franciscan, honored since his successful
+defense of the Blessed Virgin’s Immaculate Conception by the
+title Doctor Subtilis, and the very same man after whom, on account
+of the narrowness of his later disciples during the time of the Reformation,
+a blockhead is to-day called a dunce, was one of the most
+characteristic figures of scholastic philosophy. He lived at the end
+of the thirteenth Century when the authority of the philosophy of
+Thomas Aquinas who had died March 7th, 1274, was all but universally
+recognised. Scotus appeared as the most powerful opponent
+of Thomas. Ingenious, original, bold, and buoyant in his attacks
+he had a short but brilliant career and died comparatively young at
+Cologne, in November, 1308.</p>
+
+<p>While Thomas, surnamed Dr. Universalis, or Dr. Angelicus, is
+regarded by his order, the Dominicans, as the greatest authority in
+philosophical matters, Scotus succeeded in impressing his mode of
+thought upon the Franciscans; yet Thomas is universally regarded
+in the Roman church and also among Protestant theologians as the
+more orthodox Christian.</p>
+
+<p>Almost all the ideas of Scotus were set forth in opposition to
+the views of others and mainly of Thomas. Thomas was a determinist,
+Scotus an outspoken indeterminist. Thomas says that man’s
+action is necessarily determined by what he thinks is best. Scotus
+avers that man thinks in a certain way because he wills in a certain
+way. Man’s ideas are fashioned to suit his character. His motto is,
+“<i>voluntas superior est intellectu</i>” and his idea of will is identified
+with the indetermined arbitrariness of a perfect <i>liberum arbitrium</i>.
+According to Thomas, God commands us to do the good because it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_592">[592]</span>is good. Scotus calls good that which God commands simply because
+God commands it. The will of God, like the will of man is,
+in Scotus’s opinion, undetermined, it is arbitrary. Thus God created
+the world not because his will was determined by some motive, but
+because it so pleased him; and Christ’s passion and death were not
+really an atonement; they simply were accepted as such by God.</p>
+
+<p>Without entering into this controversy of <i>anno olim</i> we might
+say that we side neither with Thomas nor with Scotus, but would
+modify the statement of the former by the criticism of the latter.
+Thomas goes too far when he says that whatever is recognised as
+the best will of necessity be done. He overlooks the power of
+passions. Thomas’s statement would be right, if every passion were
+regarded as a will which has its own and independent but mistaken
+ideas about good. A soul whose passions are more powerful than
+rational considerations will necessarily be inclined to obey its irrational
+impulses. There is something in Scotus’s criticism, but his
+view is no improvement. In speaking of will as superior to the intellect,
+did he ever ask himself the question, What his own will
+would be independent of his intellect? Further, when God is said
+to command the good because it is good, Thomas separates in a logical
+consideration two ideas which are identical. Scotus is right in
+defining good as the will of God. From our standpoint we should
+say, the will of God, viz., the moral order of the universe, is of a
+definite kind which can be ascertained by experience. To speak of
+the will of God as good is an anthropomorphic expression. Good is
+that which agrees with the will of God; bad, that which opposes it.
+Suppose the moral order of the universe were different, goodness
+and badness would change with it.</p>
+
+<p>We have sketched the views of Scotus only to show the points
+of contact between him and Mr. Peirce. Mr. Peirce is also an outspoken
+indeterminist. He identifies feeling with chance, and his
+free will is a <i>liberum arbitrium</i>. Mr. Peirce, like Scotus, also separates
+theology, and, with it, religion, from philosophy.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_133" href="#Footnote_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a> Scotus
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_593">[593]</span>ridicules those who confound both, clearly indicating that he is aiming
+at Thomas, to whose fervent faith their conciliation was a matter of
+momentous and all important consequence. Scotus goes so far as
+to aver that something might be true in philosophy which is wrong
+in theology (see Ed. “Wadding” Fol. 4, p. 848)—a statement that
+to an honest searcher for truth must almost appear as frivolous.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_134" href="#Footnote_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a></p>
+
+<p>How much more imbued with true religiosity was his great
+namesake John Scotus Erigena the venerable founder of scholasticism
+when saying: “<i>Non est alia philosophia, i. e. sapientiae stadium,
+et alia religio</i>.”</p>
+
+<h5>2. MR. PEIRCE’S ORIGINAL THEORIES.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce as a controversalist and critic is like Scotus, brilliant,
+versatile, and powerful. But he is more; he is also constructive.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s style of architecture reminds us of neo-Platonism,
+and this is quite in harmony with Scotism, for Scotus, through
+Avicebron, derived many of his ideas from the Neo-Platonists. Mr.
+Peirce proposes a modern view of emanation, which starts the world
+from that βῦθος of nothingness which at the same time is the womb
+of all existence. The primeval state of being, says Mr. Peirce, “Was
+mere nothing from a physical aspect,” but, if it was not really nothing,
+what, then, was it?</p>
+
+<p>It was chance.</p>
+
+<p>Here lies the essential difference between Mr. Peirce and the
+neo-Platonists. The neo-Platonists (whose speculations, if they are
+treated not as philosophy, but as poetical effusions, are very profound
+and thoughtful) look to the Logos, or world-reason, as the beginning
+of the world emanation, while Mr. Peirce shows a certain contempt
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_594">[594]</span>for reason. To the neo-Platonist, reasons <i>are</i> explanations, while to
+our modern Scotist, reasons explain nothing. He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Reasons explain nothing, except upon some theistic hypothesis which may be
+pardoned to the yearning heart of man, but must be doubtful in the eyes of philosophy....”
+(P. 567.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce goes so far as to speak of “the dullness of ratiocination’s
+self.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s gospel would deviate in the very first verse from
+that of St. John, for it would read</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ἡ τυχή.—In the Beginning was Chance!</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And this chance which was in the beginning actually is, to Mr. Peirce,
+God, a personal God, an anthropomorphic deity endowed with consciousness.
+He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“That primeval chaos in which there was no regularity was mere nothing from
+a physical aspect. Yet it was not a blank zero; for there was an intensity of consciousness
+there, in comparison with which all that we ever feel is but as the struggling
+of a molecule or two to throw off a little of the force of law to an endless and innumerable
+diversity of chance utterly unlimited.” (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 19.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And in another passage he says of chance:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“That it is a being living and conscious is what all the dullness that belongs to
+ratiocination’s self can scarce muster hardihood to deny.” (P. 560.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s argument that all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s
+self can scarcely muster hardihood to deny his proposition,
+sounds strange in the mouth of a scientist. But it is not strange;
+for I have found that enthusiastic defenders of improbable theories
+always fill the holes of their argumentation with abuse of those who
+dare to discover these holes. Call a person who doubts the truth
+of your statements dull, and you will frighten many a weak mind
+into a patient acceptance of your view.</p>
+
+<p>We may rest assured that whenever a philosopher scolds he is
+at his wit’s end. For why should he lose patience if he can prove
+his proposition? Thus diatribes are always symptoms that there is
+some flaw in one’s logic and the louder one chides the sorer is the
+spot.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_595">[595]</span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce is serious in the statement that chance is a conscious
+being. He actually identifies chance and feeling. He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The primordial chance, the existence of which, according to
+Mr. Peirce, “calls for no explanation,” has “a primordial habit-taking
+tendency.” Whence this tendency gets into the universe of
+absolute chance, Mr. Peirce is unable to disclose. The deviations
+from the mechanical order in the present course of things, which,
+by the by, are by no means proved, suggest to him and justify, in
+his opinion, this assumption. Thus, assumes he, primordial chance
+ceased to be chance; it changed by a gradual habit-taking into regularities.
+Consciousness ceased to be consciousness and became crystallised
+into natural laws. Mind ceased to be an arbitrary sporting,
+and by becoming effete it begot, through a summation of minute
+effects, this material universe of ours. Accordingly, real existence
+or thing-ness consists merely in the regularities thus produced, and
+“physical events are but the degraded ... forms of psychical events.”</p>
+
+<p>This is in brief Mr. Peirce’s cosmogony, which, as the prophet
+of Tychism, he reveals to us in axiomatic aphorisms.</p>
+
+<p>By gradual habit-taking, Mr. Peirce declares (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol.
+I, No. 2, p. 176), mind will at last be “crystallised in the infinitely
+distant future.” This rather sad outlook is, in another passage,
+modified by a counter-oracle, which announces that “an element of
+pure chance survives.” Why, he does not say. Irregularities, not
+being entirely suppressed, can increase again, and as such they are
+“undeveloped forms of psychical events.” Says Mr. Peirce (<i>The
+Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 18):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“There are almost insensible fortuitous departures from regularity; these will
+produce, in general, equally minute effects.... Protoplasm is in an excessively unstable
+condition.... In the protoplasm these habits are to some slight extent broken
+up, so that, according to the law of mind, ... feeling becomes intensified.</p>
+
+<p>“This breaking up of habit and renewed fortuitous spontaneity will, according
+to the law of mind, be accompanied by an intensification of feeling.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This is the gist of Mr. Peirce’s mental philosophy, which proclaims
+that “consciousness is not to be reinstated without tychism.”
+The reappearance of chance is said to explain the origin of mind!</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_596">[596]</span></p>
+
+<p>Our conception of mind is different. We see mind develop out
+of sentiency by the recognition of the regularities of the surrounding
+world. Reason is almost a synonym of man’s ability to form
+generalisations, of his having and operating with concepts, of his
+thinking ideas. Not the arbitrariness of a wilful mind is the properly
+mental of man’s soul, but his reason; and man’s reason originates
+under the influence of the uniformities of the surrounding
+world, which impress themselves, in what we call experience, upon
+his existence. The more a creature recognises the regularities of
+existence, and the more its soul becomes an image of this world-order,
+which is the prototype of his reason, of the divine Logos, the
+higher it rises in the scale of evolution.</p>
+
+<p>If chance, as Mr. Peirce declares, is but the outward aspect of
+that which within is feeling, we should henceforth have to look upon
+the roulette and dice as sentient beings.</p>
+
+<h5>3. THE FOUR POSITIVE ARGUMENTS OF TYCHISM INSUFFICIENT.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce adduces four positive arguments for believing in absolute
+chance. They are: (1) the prevalence of growth; (2) the variety
+of the universe; (3) the necessity of explaining law; and (4)
+the existence of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>By growth, Mr. Peirce does not understand the growth of crystals,
+or trees, or organisms. That kind of growth is a mere transformation.
+Mr. Peirce’s idea of “real” growth is “opposed to
+the conservation of energy.” It is not an increase of the thing
+growing through the assimilation of substances taken from the surrounding
+world; it is an actual increase of energy, not a mere
+change; it is a growth of the universe itself. Granted the possibility
+of this so-called “real” growth, and we can easily explain the
+evolution of the world out of the tiniest beginning. But, of course,
+one thing has to go: either the conservation of energy or “real
+growth.” Mr. Peirce lets go the former, I the latter.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_135" href="#Footnote_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_597">[597]</span></p>
+
+<p>The variety of the universe is, in my world-conception, sufficiently
+explained by the variety of forms, for form is indeed the
+<i>principium individuationis</i>; a doctrine, which, but for Mr. Peirce’s
+philosophy, I should regard as almost universally accepted. Among
+its advocates we find also Mr. Peirce’s great master, Duns Scotus,
+and Scotus’s teacher, Avicebron. In so far as various formations
+are possible, (exactly as the die can show six different surfaces,)
+chance plays an important part in the diversification of nature, but
+this chance is not to be thought of as a violation of the law, but
+appears to be a special case only, and a true manifestation of the
+law under complicated conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Chance and probability are not mere subjective ideas, creatures
+of our ignorance, playing a rôle simply in our limited knowledge of
+the world. The words signify a certain condition of objective existence.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, the probability of throwing 1 with one die is 1/6.
+This means, the die is so constructed that it can show six different
+positions, one among them being 1; and these six possibilities are
+as real a quality of the die, as its weight or its color.</p>
+
+<p>The die has six possible positions. Now I take a die and throw
+3. Are we not entitled to believe that the throw was sufficiently determined
+by all the innumerable conditions which accompany the
+act? We confidently think so, and feel no need of assuming any
+absolute chance. Now I throw again. What is now the probability
+of throwing 1? We answer again, 1/6. And, lo! there it is! It
+came at the second throw, and we ask, was our statement of the
+probabilities wrong? We say, no! it was not wrong, for it remains
+true even now. The statement does not mean that we shall throw a
+1 at each sixth throw, but that (supposing the die to be perfect) 1/6
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_598">[598]</span>among all the possible throws will be 1, so that supposing all the
+possible throws realised in an infinite series of throws, the average
+number of 1’s among them will be the one-sixth part of the whole.</p>
+
+<p>The enormous importance of chance (viz., of that real chance
+which is no violation of the law) has been recognised since Democritus
+and has received a fresh illustration from the investigations of Darwin,
+which I need not here recapitulate.</p>
+
+<p>The theory of probabilities teaches, that whatever can happen
+in the long course of an infinite number of events, actually will happen,
+and that whatever, according to the nature of things, has a
+greater probability, will in an infinite number of cases occur with
+proportionately greater frequency.</p>
+
+<p>The lesson which we have to draw from this statement is, that
+that which we wish not to happen, should be made impossible. And
+this can be done, perhaps not perfectly, but approximately. According
+to Mr. Peirce, the evolution of mind is due to the reappearance
+of chance; we say that the evolution of mind is marked by man’s
+increasing power in the restriction of chance.</p>
+
+<p>The identification of chance with feeling, or even with mind, is
+to me an idea so grotesque, that I am inclined to regard it as a relic
+of gnostic speculations.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce, instead of attempting to comprehend laws, as we
+do, seeks to trace their origin. He tries to explain their existence
+by growth, as if they were beings that evolve like the forms of planetary
+systems or the organisms of living creatures. Considering the
+fact that Mr. Peirce is a realist only in name, and that his philosophy
+is soaked with nominalistic traditions, we should say (and Mr.
+Peirce will pardon me that I quote the expression from him) that:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The puzzle for him is simply the usual difficulty that plagues nominalism
+when it finds itself confronted with a reality which has an element of generality.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The assumption of absolute chance might be used to account
+for any otherwise inexplicable event, but Mr. Peirce does not countenance
+this idea. He warns us to be cautious in its use, like the
+druggist who labels his poisons “handle with care”; “I only use
+chance,” he says, “to give room for the development of law.” Having
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_599">[599]</span>used absolute chance to start the world with, he dismisses it. So
+Fiesco discharges his negro after he has done his work: “<i>Der Mohr
+hat seine Schuldigkeit gethan, der Mohr kann gehen</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>In my criticism of Mr. Peirce’s theory I said (<i>The Monist</i>, II,
+p. 574):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“How little, after all, we can escape the determinism of law as being a feature
+of the world, will be seen from the fact that the explanation for the evolution of
+law is presented by Mr. Peirce as being itself a law, i. e., a formula describing a
+regularity supposed to obtain in facts.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce replies:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Is there no difference between a law, the essence of which is to be inviolable
+... and <i>that mental law, the violation of which is so included in the essence
+that unless it were violated, it would cease to exist</i>?... Thus I clearly escape the
+contradiction attributed to me.” (P. 561.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s escape is like the disappearance of a medium from
+a room without doors. He must have got out through the fourth
+dimension. The argument is so subtle that I cannot see it, and I
+feel tempted to retort in a sentence quoted from my profound adversary:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“I confess, I can find only words without ideas in the objection.” (P. 561.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce speaks of law as having developed out of chance,
+but he himself, in fact, after a fashion, explains the origin of those
+laws of nature which represent its present uniformities by a law of
+habit-taking.</p>
+
+<p>That the conservation of energy should leave no room for feeling
+is to me an obscure proposition. The law of the conservation
+of energy declares only that the sum of all energy in the world, potential
+as well as kinetic, remains constant. If a living and feeling
+being renews its waste and stores up new energy in its tissues,
+it must take it out of the general storehouse of nature; it must
+transform it, and cannot produce it out of nothing. Why should
+feeling become impossible, if the conservation of energy is true?</p>
+
+<p>The identification of chance with feeling is, to my mind, a vagary.
+It is true that feeling develops mind; mind makes deliberation
+possible, and deliberation implies choice. But choice is not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_600">[600]</span>chance. The choice which a man makes is determined by his character.
+There is more resemblance between logical identity and a
+pun, than between feeling and chance.</p>
+
+<h5>4. THE NEGATIVE ARGUMENT A LOGICAL FALLACY.</h5>
+
+<p>The four positive arguments for believing in absolute chance
+are untenable. But Mr. Peirce, knowing that he had to weather
+a storm of criticisms, has taken along a sheet-anchor, consisting of
+a negative argument, which, if it were true, would make the four
+positive arguments redundant.</p>
+
+<p>What shall we say to the statement, that chance need not be
+explained? Mr. Peirce says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“Chance, according to me, or irregularity—that is, the absence of any coincidence,—calls
+for no explanation. If <i>law</i> calls for explanation, as Dr. Carus admits
+it does, surely the mere absence of law calls for no further explanation than is
+afforded by the mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating the result.”
+(P. 559.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce is a great logician, but the logical arguments of his
+philosophy are not sound. If the absence of law, of coincidences, of
+regularities, did not require explanation, the scientist would (as is
+but right) still have to explain the uniformities of nature, but the
+miracle monger would have a good time; for he could tell us boldly
+that, according to the rules of modern logic he is not bound to give
+any explanation.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that while everything must be explained, the absence
+of everything (i. e. nothing) need not be explained; but we cannot
+use this pattern as a schedule which can be filled out at our pleasure.
+The ideas “absence of,” “no,” “no one,” and “nothing”
+play a part in logic analogous to that of zero in mathematics. I
+need hardly remind the reader of the puzzling demonstration, that
+since one cat has one tail more than <i>no</i> cat, and since no cat has eight
+tails, one cat must have nine tails. Operations with zero act like
+death in the realm of human conventionalities. Death makes the
+beggar equal to the king. Multiply any equation that is wrong with
+zero, and it will be correct. Operations with zero render the impossible
+possible.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_601">[601]</span></p>
+
+<p>But let us look closer at Mr. Peirce’s proposition. He avers
+that “the mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating
+the result calls for no explanation.”</p>
+
+<p>Should it ever happen that the absence of any particular circumstance
+necessitates the result, I do not see why this absence
+should remain unexplained. Say for instance, a certain stronghold
+is taken because the enemy discovers the absence of guards in a
+certain part of the walls. If this absence of guards be counted as
+an important circumstance helpful in the conquest of the citadel
+(and there is no reason why we should not count it as such) can we
+say that while the presence of guards on all other spots of the wall
+has to be and can be explained as an endeavor to secure the place
+against a <i>coup de main</i>, the mere absence of guards calls for no explanation?
+The absence of guards in a particular spot of the Capitol
+during the siege by the Gauls, was accounted for by the steepness
+of the place. This particular spot was regarded as safe on
+account of its inaccessibility. Similarly, the absence of guards in
+the citadel of the Messenians is explained by the idea that the Spartans
+would make no attack because in that particularly stormy night
+a cloudburst seemed to prevent all approach.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously the necessity of explaining a rule, does not confer the
+privilege of neglecting to explain its exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>It goes without saying that Mr. Peirce’s argument (even if it
+were formally faultless) can have no force with a necessitarian. Such
+a one, after having explained and proved to his satisfaction that <i>Gesetzmässigkeit</i>
+(or regularity such as can be formulated in laws) is a characteristic
+feature of the universe, is not only asked to believe that
+there are after all exceptions to law, but is even told that according
+to some paragraph in Mr. Peirce’s unwritten logic of relatives no
+further argument is needed to prove the non-existence of law. Only
+Mr. Peirce’s extreme love of his pet theories can make him blind to
+such palpable fallacies. But such are the foundations of his philosophical
+architecture.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_602">[602]</span></p>
+
+<h4>III. MR. PEIRCE AS A CRITIC.</h4>
+
+<p>A good general, who has to mask the weak points of his position,
+uses the strategem of making demonstrative sallies upon his enemy.
+Mr. Peirce, although apparently quite unconscious of the fact that his
+basic doctrines are untenable, instinctively imitates this maxim of
+warfare. His defence is mostly aggressive. Instead of replying to
+my arguments he endeavors to represent my views as incohesive and
+contradictory.</p>
+
+<p>The present issue is not whether my views are tenable, but
+whether Mr. Peirce’s are. However, I am glad to have the benefit of
+the searching criticism of so subtle a thinker as Mr. Peirce. Therefore,
+I willingly appear before his tribunal to expurgate myself of
+his charges.</p>
+
+<h5>1. THE A PRIORI AND POSITIVISM.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce is greatly puzzled with my position. He quotes
+several statements of mine which appear to him contradictory. I
+said: (1) that millions of <i>single</i> experiences cannot establish a belief
+in necessity, (2) that necessitarianism must be founded upon the
+<i>a priori</i>, and (3) that the <i>a priori</i> must be founded upon experience.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_136" href="#Footnote_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a>
+To him who overlooks the here italicised word “single” this may,
+indeed, seem to be a vicious circle.</p>
+
+<p>All knowledge begins with experience. We define experience
+as the effects of events upon sentient beings, and these effects are
+sense-impressions of certain forms and interrelations. At an advanced
+stage of evolution, the formal and relational are first unconsciously,
+as, for instance, in counting, and then consciously, with
+scientific deliberation, abstracted from the sensory. Systems of pure
+forms are constructed out of the purely formal elements, thus gained
+from experience by abstraction, such as our system of numbers and
+the logical categories. Now the laws of these forms of thought are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_603">[603]</span>applicable to all formal and relational conditions of reality. The
+formal and relational of reality are known to us even in those regions
+of the universe and in those provinces of scientific investigation
+which have not as yet been explored. The scientist knows them
+<i>a priori</i>, even before he investigates objects which he never saw before.
+He is acquainted with certain of their qualities, viz., with the
+laws of their formal and relational conditions.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the <i>a priori</i>, or, as I prefer to call it, formal thought, is a
+product of experience, and is again applicable to experience.</p>
+
+<p>Single experiences, isolated observations, innumerable particular
+cases cannot directly yield or reveal the laws of formal thought.
+So long as they remain single and isolated they will never develop
+into mental factors; but such is the nature of reality that the single
+experiences will be built up and arranged in feeling substance as
+systematically as, for instance, the formation of crystals or the harmonious
+growth of cells in organisms? When sentient creatures
+become conscious not only of the sensory element of their experience,
+but also of this system of their soul, of the formal of their
+psychical existence, they become rational beings; and the formal
+which grows with their sentiency is not an exclusive and peculiar
+quality of theirs; it is not purely subjective, but it has been imparted
+to them, piecemeal, together with the single data of their experience.
+It constitutes a part of their <i>Anschauung</i>; it is found in the objective
+world and is a general feature of reality.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the formal elements of our <i>Anschauungen</i>, of the facts of
+experience, that organ of cognition is developed which Kant calls
+“pure reason.”</p>
+
+<p>Experience is often used to denote sense-experience only; thus
+Kant contrasts experience or sense-perception, which he calls <i>a posteriori</i>,
+with pure reason and formal thought, which he calls <i>a priori</i>.
+We use experience in the sense defined above, <i>so as to include the
+formal element</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I am unable to form a clear conception of Mr. Peirce’s view of
+the <i>a priori</i>. Those systems of formal thought which I regard as
+constructions he regards as products of analysis. He says, “They
+are results dependent upon the action of reason in the depths of our
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_604">[604]</span>own consciousness.” He only grants that “their abstract and distinct
+formulation comes very late.” He still holds that the <i>a priori</i>
+is innate.</p>
+
+<p>In my conception, mathematical ideas, like that of the contrivance
+of logarithms, are inventions; and they are constructions as
+much as the invention of the steam-engine by James Watt.</p>
+
+<p>There is one peculiarity about the purely formal which is not
+found in the sensory elements of experience. Our knowledge of the
+various spheres of the purely formal is of a general nature; it applies
+to any form of the same kind. This gives system to our formal conceptions,
+and enables us to make statements which are rigidly and
+unequivocally determined. It is this quality which makes them
+available as an organ of cognition when dealing with facts of experience.
+They furnish us with methods, schedules of reference, and
+plans which like blanks have to be filled out.</p>
+
+<p>Science begins with the application of formal thought, viz.,
+with counting, measuring, and classifying. Only with the assistance
+of the formal sciences can we master the material of the sensory data
+of experience; and thus it happens that the formal is the condition,
+not of any kind of experience, but of every systematic experience.</p>
+
+<p>The formal sciences are the tools of cognition. That to which
+they cannot be applied remains unexplained, and this is the ultimate
+reason why processes of nature can be regarded as explained only
+when recognised as processes of transformation. Cognition is the
+tracing of form. We can understand a change only if it is a change
+of form. We cannot understand how anything real can disappear
+into, or originate out of, nothing. We have no explanation for any
+actual increase or decrease either of matter or energy. Whenever
+we see something entirely new we regard it as a new combination, the
+elements of which existed before.</p>
+
+<p>If there were processes in the universe which could positively
+be proved not to be transformations we should be confronted with an
+unfathomable mystery; and it is a matter of course that we must not
+be duped so easily by the appearance of problems which cannot be
+solved at first sight. The advance of science which has resolved so
+many mysterious phenomena into plain instances of transformation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_605">[605]</span>gives us confidence that this method is the only reliable maxim of
+inquiry. It has helped us so far, and it will help us in the future.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>I call my views positivism, because like the French positivists
+and also like Locke and his school I maintain that all knowledge is
+to be derived from the positive facts of experience. But my positivism
+is not of the old kind; it is neither sensationalism nor materialism
+nor Comtism. It is a new positivism broadened by a
+study of Kantian philosophy and Kant’s problem of the <i>a priori</i>;
+and this new positivism, I hope, deserves the attention of the thinkers
+of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce calls it a “straddling of the question,” by which he
+means that a man is “on both sides of the fence,” and has learned
+so to formulate the issues, “that both parties can readily subscribe
+to his propositions.”</p>
+
+<h5>2. DETERMINISM AND FATALISM.</h5>
+
+<p>Fatalism and determinism must not be confounded. We define
+determinism as that view, according to which every event is determined
+by its conditions. The decision of a man whose liberty is
+not curtailed by any compulsion, so that he can act as he pleases
+exactly in agreement with his character, is determined objectively
+by the motive and subjectively by his character. A man of a certain
+character in a given situation will act in a way that is perfectly
+determinable.</p>
+
+<p>Determinism, as I take it, does not exclude free-will. Nor does
+it exclude such chance as is, for instance, the incidental turning up
+of the various faces of a die.</p>
+
+<p>Determinism is the basis of science, and also of ethics as a
+science. If the decision of a free will were merely the result of chance,
+why should our teachers and preachers take so much trouble to form
+character?</p>
+
+<p>While determinism is a sound doctrine, fatalism is a superstition.
+Fatalism excludes the idea of free will. We define fatalism
+as that view which regards the fate of a man, whatsoever he may
+do, as fixed. For instance, we call the orthodox Mohammedan a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_606">[606]</span>fatalist; he looks at the flame without quenching it, because he
+argues, “if it is Allah’s will that my house burn down, it will burn
+down, whatever I may do.”</p>
+
+<p>In my reply to Mr. Peirce (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, p. 572) I approvingly
+quoted from him a passage containing the word “fate,” adding
+that here “the word ‘fate’ must be understood as Mr. Peirce understands
+it.” In spite of this warning, Mr. Peirce employs this
+quotation made from <i>his</i> writings as if it were mine, and calls attention
+to the inconsistency involved in the different application of the
+word. This charge of inconsistency is neither judicious nor fair!</p>
+
+<p>We define “necessary” as “that which is determined.”</p>
+
+<p>Determined means describable. Necessity is that feature of
+things which makes it possible that we can, in proportion to our
+knowledge, describe beforehand or predict the course of events.</p>
+
+<p>Kant’s definition of “necessary,” as given in his “Critique of
+Pure Reason,” is narrower. He says:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“That the coherence of which with the real is determined according to universal
+conditions of experience is necessary, or exists necessarily.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This means in our phraseology, “that feature of the real which
+is determined by the laws of form.”</p>
+
+<p>The word “determinism” has been inappropriately used in the
+sense of fatalism, in which sense it has to be condemned as a superstition.
+The term is needed, however, to denote a basic principle
+of great value. “Determinism,” if used in the sense which the word
+literally indicates, means “that view which regards all events as
+determined by its conditions.” Determinism does not mean that
+everything is decreed by some fate, that some Deity or other power
+has determined the course of events. It means that definite conditions
+produce definite results, and that the results can be ascertained
+and described, if <i>all</i> the conditions are known.</p>
+
+<p>Fatalism is a peculiar kind of determinism, and, indeed, an obviously
+erroneous one. Fatalism rests upon a dualistic conception,
+regarding necessity as a foreign force residing outside and above
+things and compelling them to act in a special way. It is the Moira
+of the ancients and the Kismet of the Mohammedans. The monistic
+view knows nothing of a foreign force or supermundane <i>fatum</i> enacting
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_607">[607]</span>a special course of affairs. Necessity, in the monistic conception,
+simply denotes the determinedness of results by its conditions;
+it signifies that <i>Gesetzmässigkeit</i>, or regularity according to
+law, is a feature of reality. We need not repeat again that the monistic
+view of determinism excludes neither chance nor free-will. It
+only excludes “absolute” chance and that indeterminable arbitrariness
+which is sometimes said to be free-will.</p>
+
+<p>If events were not determined, if under the very same conditions
+the same causes could bring about different results, so that no
+regularities formulable in laws existed, the world would be a chaos
+and no cosmos, absolute chance would prevail, and science would
+be impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce not only confounds fate and necessity, but he also
+identifies them with resistance, and with reality. My idea of necessity
+has as little to do with the experience of, reaction as, for instance,
+with the idea of density, or with pleasure and pain. To confound
+such heterogeneous concepts must be productive of confusion. No
+wonder that Mr. Peirce makes the confession that these ideas seem
+to him “of a mixed nature.”</p>
+
+<p>That my presentation of the case of Determinism <i>versus</i> Free-will
+results in “a doctrine to which the advocates of free-will will
+generally subscribe as readily as their opponents,” is used as a reproach;
+but I do not take it as such, for my intention is not to side
+with one party, but to bring out the truth of both views.</p>
+
+<h5>3. NATURAL LAWS, DESCRIPTIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce makes the following allegation of inconsistency.
+He says of me:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The declaration (§ 198) that ‘natural laws are simply a description of nature
+as nature is,’ and that ‘the facts of nature express the character of nature,’ are
+nominalistic. But in another place (107-116) he says distinctly that uniformities
+are real.” (P. 531.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I am unable to detect any inconsistency in these expressions.
+The gist of these three statements is this: the formulas usually
+called natural laws describe certain uniformities of reality.</p>
+
+<p>The expression “description of nature” is by no means nominalistic.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_608">[608]</span>If law is said to be a description, it is not a mere name,
+but presupposes the existence of some objective reality for the description
+of which it has been formulated.</p>
+
+<h5>4. CAUSATION.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s usage of the word “cause” is very unsettled. He
+says (p. 538):</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The original idea of an efficient cause is that of an agent, more or less like
+man.”</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The original idea of “cause” is the struggle of reaching an
+end or bringing about a certain state of things. The Latin <i>causa</i>
+means “a lawsuit.”</p>
+
+<p>In a similar way, the German <i>Ursache</i> does not mean the original
+thing, but a “seeking.” <i>Sache</i> is the English <i>sake</i> and Gothic
+<i>sakjô</i>, meaning “struggle,” or “quarrel.” It is derived from the
+same root as the verb “to seek.”</p>
+
+<p>Like <i>causa</i>, the word <i>Ursache</i> was used as a legal term.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce further states:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“The modern mechanical conception, on the other hand, is that the relative
+positions of particles determine their accelerations at the instants when they occupy
+those positions.” (P. 538.)</p>
+
+<p>“In dynamics, it is the fixed force, gravitation, or whatever else, together with
+those relative positions of the bodies that determine the intensity and direction of
+the forces, that is regarded as the cause.” (P. 540.)</p>
+
+<p>“The practice which I endeavor to follow in regard to the word <i>cause</i> is, to
+use it in the Aristotelian sense of an <i>efficient cause</i> in all its crudeness.” (P. 541.)</p>
+
+<p>“When my idea is a more general and logical one, I prefer to speak of the
+explanation.” (P. 541.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>No wonder that some causes are prior to their effects, others
+simultaneous, and that effects may even be prior to their causes!
+Using the word in various senses, Mr. Peirce becomes so entangled
+about causation, that in mustering the ideas force, position, reason,
+law, cause, and explanation, he no longer knows which is which.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce being unable to bring any consistency into the usage
+of the term “cause,” drops it entirely as a philosophical word. This
+is Dr. Ironbeard’s method, who kills his patient to save him pain.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_609">[609]</span></p>
+
+<p>There was a time when I felt inclined to follow that plan of dealing
+with words in this predicament. But I found out very soon that
+there is not one difficult word in philosophical language which is not
+or was not at some time or other almost universally maltreated by
+the professional thinkers of mankind. What, then, is to be done?
+Shall we eradicate all old terms that are erroneously used and create
+a philosophical Volapük, which will have the advantage of being
+unincumbered with the errors of a long historical inheritance, but
+the disadvantage of being nowhere spoken and nowhere understood,
+except by its inventors?</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Ironbeard’s method of dealing with terms is radical. It
+imitates the method of the social reformers who, on finding something
+wrong in society generally, propose to tear down the entire
+social structure, and begin the world over again from its beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the terms which have been in use for centuries and
+even millenniums, I have found to correspond to a special want
+of expressing some definite reality or constant group of realities or
+important relation among realities. The misuse of different words
+almost invariably has its origin in a consideration of the name
+alone, to the neglect of the reality denoted by the name. And misuses
+can be mended only by carefully investigating the realities
+themselves for the denotation of which the words have been invented.
+If we were to make a clean sweep of the “superstitions,”
+soul, God, cause, natural law, etc., because in many minds there
+are superstitious notions connected with these ideas, we should soon
+have to invent new terms for the realities which necessitated the
+formation of the old ones. The great bulk of religious and philosophical
+words originated because in each case there was an actual
+want of a phrase to denote some specific reality. The errors of the
+various terms arise because our ideas concerning the nature of these
+realities have not as yet been matured, and it is the office of the
+philosopher to contribute his mite toward their clarification.</p>
+
+<p>Causation, in my conception, is transformation. Take any
+system of conditions and let it somehow be changed. The event
+which starts the change is called the cause, the new configuration
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_610">[610]</span>produced, the effect. The various factors of the system are the
+conditions or circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>Taking this view, I <i>do not say</i> that the effect is the cause transformed.
+The total effect is the cause plus all the circumstances
+transformed. The effect is something radically different from the
+cause. The cause is always an event, that is a motion of some kind;
+the effect, a new arrangement, a new formation, a new state of
+things, or perhaps the dissolution of an old state of things.</p>
+
+<p>While cause and effect are different, the whole process of causation,
+including cause, circumstances, and effect, is to be viewed as
+one fact, or, rather, as one system of facts; and a process of causation
+is explained, (as we have seen above) as soon as it is so described
+that we recognise it as a transformation.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_137" href="#Footnote_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a></p>
+
+<p>There is a popular usage which calls the cause of the falling
+stone gravitation. This kind of cause is not an event, not a motion,
+but a law of nature, and I prefer to call it “the reason” for
+the stone’s fall.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce defines a reason as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“A reason, in one sense, is the replacement of a multiple-subject of an observational
+proposition by a general subject, which by the very conditions of the special
+experience is predicable of the multiple subject.” (P. 558.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_611">[611]</span></p>
+
+<p>This somewhat stilted definition seems upon the whole to
+agree with what I also call “a reason.” All the reasons by which
+we comprehend nature are formulated in statements which describe
+those general features of reality which we call “laws of nature.”</p>
+
+<p>Who does not see that causes (i. e., events which produce effects)
+and reasons (i. e., the formulas by which we comprehend the
+uniformities of nature) are two radically different ideas, and who
+can deny that the denotation of these two radically different ideas,
+by one and the same term, must and actually does bring about
+lamentable confusion in the minds of philosophers! Accordingly,
+let us call them by different names; never mind what we call them,
+but let us distinguish them. I regard the usage stated here as the
+most appropriate. We call “the cause” of the stone’s fall that event
+which removed its support; but when we inquire after the reason
+why the stone falls, we want to know the law of nature which describes
+in a general formula that quality of stones which makes
+them fall.</p>
+
+<h5>5. THE FUTURE IN MENTAL CAUSATION.</h5>
+
+<p>It seems as if some evil genius had caused Mr. Peirce to cross
+my position everywhere, even where I should expect to find him in
+perfect agreement.</p>
+
+<p>Concerning mental and mechanical causation he first startles
+me with an italicised proposition which declares:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“<i>There is no mechanical truth in saying that the past determines the future rather
+than the future the past.</i>” (P. 539.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce apparently intends to discredit the belief that the
+past determines the future. He adds:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“We continue, for convenience, to talk of mechanical phenomena as if they
+were regulated, in the same manner in which our intentions regulate our actions,
+(which is essentially a determination of the future by the past,) although we are
+quite aware that it is not really so.” (P. 539.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>In other words, Mr. Peirce contends that our view of mechanical
+causation is based upon an analogy with mental causation; the
+latter being a determination of the future by the past, we conclude
+that the former is regulated in the same manner.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_612">[612]</span></p>
+
+<p>This is an old error which rests on the supposition that cognition
+begins with introspection or self-knowledge. The truth is that
+all cognition begins with objective observation.</p>
+
+<p>We have to say, (1) that man’s view of mechanical causation has
+not been fashioned after the model of mental causation, and (2) that
+the future actually enters as a factor in mental causation. We do
+not believe that the future determines the past, but it does determine
+the present.</p>
+
+<p>Should we judge of the causation of mechanical motions from
+our own mental experience, we should certainly reach other conclusions
+than we do, for the most characteristic feature of mental
+causation, that which essentially distinguishes it from mechanical
+causation, is the fact that the future actually enters into it as the
+main factor.</p>
+
+<p>We as rational beings, and the lower animals also on a smaller
+scale, do know to some extent the future. We know by experience
+the effects of certain actions. This fact of the future’s being partly
+known, makes it possible for the future to enter as a factor in mental
+causation. I go so far as to maintain that there is no mental causation
+except some consideration of the future be contained in the motive
+cause. The presence of a plan, of an end kept in view, of an
+aim to be reached in the future, is exactly what distinguishes the
+purposive action of thinking beings from mechanical events.</p>
+
+<h5>6. MENTAL CAUSATION.</h5>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce has discovered in my expositions of mechanical and
+mental action what he believes to be a flagrant contradiction, and,
+as if it were the exhibition of my scalp, displays it triumphantly
+(§ 27) in capitals and italics. “No objection can be made,” I said,
+“to the possibility of explaining the motions ... of the brain by
+the laws of molar and molecular mechanics.” And “yet the simplest
+psychical reflexes cannot be explained from mechanical or
+physical laws alone.”</p>
+
+<p>Is this really a contradiction, or is it Mr. Peirce’s inability to
+discover the agreement between the two statements? Let us see.</p>
+
+<p>Take a little toy fish of tin with a small iron rod in its snout,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_613">[613]</span>floating in the water, and push the fish so that it shoots forward
+with a certain velocity in a straight line. Now take a magnet and
+hold it at a short distance from the prolonged path of the fish. The
+fish at once changes its course; it now describes a curve which according
+to the laws of mechanics is determined (omitting any other
+possible modifying circumstances) by the momentum of the push,
+the velocity of which is gradually diminished by the friction of the
+water, and the attraction of the magnet. These are the data, and
+from these data the motion of the fish is unequivocally determined
+by the laws of mechanics.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when we speak of the motion of the fish, we mean the
+motion, and not the iron rod, or the qualities of the iron rod, in its
+snout. While speaking of motion or the laws of motion, and while
+calculating the curve of a motion, our ideas move in a perfectly defined
+sphere of abstraction from which all other things and considerations
+are excluded. This method of abstraction which is the essence
+of human thought and also of that special kind of human
+thought called science, is the way by which alone we are enabled
+to arrive at clear distinctions and lucid explanations. We have to
+keep our various abstractions stored in an orderly manner in our
+mind, each one in a special box. If we do not distinguish the different
+spheres of abstraction and their limits, we shall soon confound
+all issues in a hopeless chaos.</p>
+
+<p>But we find, on further examination, that in this limitation of the
+description to the abstract sphere of pure motion only a part of the
+process before us is described. The description explains fully, exhaustively,
+and satisfactorily the mechanical aspect of the case, but
+it does not explain why the magnet attracts iron. The attraction
+of the magnet consists in the definite qualities of (1) the magnet,
+(2) the iron, and (3) the medium between them. When we inquire
+after an explanation of the physical qualities of things, we enter into
+another sphere of abstraction, viz., that of physics. That physics
+will have to be explained as a domain of molecular mechanics may
+be mentioned incidentally.</p>
+
+<p>Take another and simpler instance: the fall of a stone. The
+motion of the stone, its increasing velocity during the fall can be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_614">[614]</span>explained according to the laws of mechanics; but that quality of
+the stone called gravity, which is the reason of its fall, cannot be deduced
+from the laws of mechanics. The gravity of a mass is treated
+in mechanics as the given fact or datum, an investigation into the
+nature of which is excluded from the sphere of mechanics. He
+who demands of mechanics an explanation of gravity searches in the
+wrong box.</p>
+
+<p>When we come to the investigation of psychical phenomena,
+we strike a feature which is entirely absent in mechanics, physics,
+and chemistry. It is the appearance of feeling. Feelings vary according
+to the various impressions made by surrounding objects.
+The same objects making the same impressions, special kinds of
+feelings come to stand for or to represent their respective kinds of
+objects, and thus feelings acquire meaning, feelings become ideas.
+This peculiarity of sentiency, that it has acquired meaning, is the
+characteristic feature of “mind.”</p>
+
+<p>When speaking of mind I refer to all those phenomena of
+meaning-freighted feelings which ensoul thinking beings; and the
+domain of psychology is thus again quite a distinct domain of abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us return to the contradiction of which Mr. Peirce accuses
+me.</p>
+
+<p>An idea which physiologically considered is a special brain-structure
+or combination of brain-structures, reacts upon a given
+stimulus, which, let us say, is the sound of a certain word. The
+word is a sound-symbol and the word possesses a certain meaning.
+The word spoken having the same meaning as a special idea that
+is thought, while its brain-structure is agitated, possesses a quality
+comparable to chemical affinities. This peculiar word will serve as
+a stimulus for this peculiar idea. It will not (at least not directly)
+stimulate other ideas—as little as a chemical that has no affinity for
+the ingredients of another chemical will cause a reaction. Why the
+motion takes place calls for a psychical explanation, but the motion
+itself takes place in strict accord with the laws of mechanics.</p>
+
+<p>But are not the laws of mechanics annulled by the laws of
+physics, and those of physiology by the laws of psychology?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_615">[615]</span></p>
+
+<p>No, they are not annulled, but modified.</p>
+
+<p>A piece of iron that falls to the ground with the same velocity
+as a stone of equal weight will be held up by a magnet strong
+enough to hold it. This is not an annulment of the gravity of the
+iron; it is not a reversion of the law of gravitation; gravitation
+holds in this case as good as in any other. It is only a modification
+and a complication. We must remember that the law of gravity does
+not say, the non-supported piece of iron or stone will drop, it says
+that all bodies are attracted by the earth with a definite force depending
+upon their mass and position. And this attraction takes
+place in our example; the iron supported by the magnet retains all
+its inherent gravity, which is constantly asserting itself, although
+counteracted by the force of the attraction of the magnet.</p>
+
+<p>Since the mechanical, chemical, psychical, etc. qualities represent
+reality in various abstract aspects, we should know that there
+are no purely mechanical, no purely chemical, no purely psychical
+phenomena. Every real phenomenon, i. e. the original whole from
+which the abstractions have been made, presents a complex state
+of things of which many various aspects can and must be taken.</p>
+
+<p>I repeat now without fear of contradiction or miscomprehension,
+that brain-motions are perfectly explainable by the laws of
+molar and molecular mechanics, while psychical reflexes, not being
+purely mechanical processes, cannot be explained by mechanical
+laws. The properly psychical and the properly mental are other
+elements of an entirely different nature from the mechanical and the
+physical. They belong to a radically different sphere of abstraction.
+He who tries to explain the psychical by the mechanical,
+looks for his explanation in the wrong box. And he who regards
+the proposition that the mechanical laws hold good for all motions
+without any exception, but that they cannot be called upon to explain
+that which is not motion, as a contradiction, has not as yet
+learned practically to apply the method of abstraction.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange that we have to give this little lesson in the elements
+of abstraction lore to so prominent a logician as Mr. Peirce.
+We feel inclined to exclaim: “Art thou a master of Israel and
+knowest not these things?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_616">[616]</span></p>
+
+<h4>STRAY SHOTS.</h4>
+
+<p>There are a number of incidental comments aimed at scattered
+points of my position. I call them “stray shots”; they have exploded
+without harm. While going over the battle-field I shall pick
+them up and will throw some of them back into Mr. Peirce’s camp,
+whence they came.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce is in the habit of calling every approach to his views
+“deep,” while divergencies are branded as “shallow.”—</p>
+
+<p>Hume’s scepticism is called Leibnitz’s principle, by which latter
+Mr. Peirce apparently means that innumerable single cases of experience
+alone do not constitute certainty. Why Mr. Peirce demands
+that Hume’s conclusion which Leibnitz never would have countenanced,
+should be identified with Leibnitz’s principle from which
+it is derived is not apparent.—</p>
+
+<p>How easily Mr. Peirce changes his opinion! Venn’s “Logic
+of Chance,” which Mr. Peirce so much admired formerly, has become
+“a blundering little book.”—</p>
+
+<p>Synechism and agapasticism, viz., the principle of continuity
+and the idea of love as main factors of evolution are nothing
+new. I have always defended them, although not in the peculiar
+way that Mr. Peirce does.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_138" href="#Footnote_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a> In his article “Evolutionary Love” he
+appears to me unjust toward Darwin. I do not think that I should
+improve my propositions, which are in their way synechistic as well
+as agapastic, by adopting either Mr. Peirce’s terms or his presentation
+of these principles.—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce says, he does not doubt that my idea of mental causation
+was intended to be an improvement on his molecular theory of
+protoplasm. I can assure Mr. Peirce that I had no such intentions.
+I held my view long before I ever had a chance of knowing Mr.
+Peirce’s molecular theory of protoplasm. Moreover, I am unable
+to discover any similarity between his views and mine.—</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_617">[617]</span></p>
+
+<p>I took pains to explain that, if we disregard the notion of form,
+every transformation, that is, every case of causation, will appear as
+a most miraculous and inexplicable event. To illustrate my view
+I said that “<i>supposing we had no idea of the laws of form or only an incoherent
+and fragmentary knowledge of them</i>,” it would be “a very
+wonderful thing” that two congruent regular tetrahedrons when
+put together will form a hexahedron—a body which is something
+new. And I added to this statement, “<i>but the laws of form do perfectly
+and satisfactorily explain it</i>.” How great was my astonishment
+to see Mr. Peirce with great complacency take up the problem and
+explain it! Indeed, it is true. That the combination of two congruent
+regular tetrahedrons will make a hexahedron, is wonderful <i>only</i> to
+him who does not understand the laws of form. Otherwise, it is not
+wonderful. I was amused at Mr. Peirce’s ingenuity to prove to me
+that it is a case of 8-2=6.—</p>
+
+<p>There is a difference between the combination of two tetrahedrons
+and of the atoms <i>H₂O</i>. Mr. Peirce tells me, that the one is
+ideal, the other real—“a difference which to his Scotistic mind is
+very important.” Did Mr. Peirce think, indeed, that I was not
+aware of this difference, or does he mean to establish a rule never
+to compare the relations as developed in the sciences of pure forms
+to the relations that obtain in reality?—</p>
+
+<p>Says Mr. Peirce in one passage, there is a difference between
+the ideal and the real, which to his Scotistic mind is very important.
+In another passage he declares that “the nominalist alone makes a
+sharp distinction between the abstract and the concrete.”—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce smiles at the endeavor of reconciling religion with
+science. For he thinks:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>“It is a thing which will come to pass of itself when time is ripe, and that our
+efforts to hasten it have just that slight effect that our efforts to hasten the ripening
+of apples on a tree may have.” (P. 545.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce forgets that the religious fruits of the conciliation
+between religion and science are our own sentiments. He who says
+that man should be indifferent about working out the truth, on the
+plea that truth will take care of itself, is comparable to the apple-tree,
+that refuses to work out the ripening of the apples. The proposition
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_618">[618]</span>to let religion and science work out their destinies, one of which
+is their mutual agreement, of themselves, is irreligious and also unscientific.
+Truth will not take care of itself if we do not strain all
+our efforts to find truth; and the kingdom of heaven will never come
+unless (as Christ taught, Matt. 11, 12) “it suffereth violence, and
+the violent take it by force.”—</p>
+
+<p>The same Mr. Peirce who says that our efforts to hasten the
+conciliation of religion with science are useless, believes in miracles
+and proposes a theory that prayer can work miracles.—</p>
+
+<p>Several philosophers, such as Locke and Hegel, have complained
+of the uselessness of the logical law of identity <i>A</i> = <i>A</i>, and
+also of its barrenness for any practical purpose. The law of identity
+has been invented nevertheless, because there is a want for it; and
+this want, in my opinion, was felt because the statement of sameness
+(as set forth in <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. III, p. 70, et seqq.) is one of
+the most elementary and important forms of reasoning, being indispensable,
+for instance, in mathematics where it appears as equations.
+We may simply laugh at the old logicians</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">“Who whirl in narrow circling trails,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Like kittens playing with their tails.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">We may impatiently discard the whole proceeding as empty talk,
+yet I submit that we had better try to understand the meaning of
+their unprofitable exertions and the drift of their apparently meaningless
+argumentations. If we regard the principle of absolute
+identity as the formula of sameness (in the sense explained in the
+quoted passage, <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 70, et seqq.) emptied
+of its contents we shall understand why logicians wasted so
+much energy on an entirely barren subject. We shall readily condone
+their mistakes in consideration of the importance of the subject. It
+is difficult to say how much we have profited by their blunders.—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce uses the terms analytical and synthetical in a new
+sense for reasons which he explains at greater length in his “Theory
+of Probable Inferences.” He says, “analytical reasoning depends
+upon associations of similarity; synthetical reasoning upon associations
+of contiguity.” I willingly grant to the scientist and the philosopher the
+liberty to change the historical meaning of terms if the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_619">[619]</span>traditional usage is not helpful in our dealings with the facts which
+they were invented to describe. However, we must not change a term
+without good and sufficient reasons. In the present case, I still prefer
+the traditional usage of the terms “analytical” and “synthetic.”—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce takes the liberty of changing terms for himself, but
+he resents it in others.—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce disapproves of the usage of the word “construction”
+in the sense of systems of formal thought, such as the decimal system,
+etc., etc. “Because,” he says, “the word is imperatively required
+in the theory of cognition to denote a mathematical diagram
+framed according to a general precept.” On the strength of this
+argument we might as well disapprove of calling churches, mosques,
+houses, cottages, or any kind of edifice, “building,” because the
+word “building” is imperatively required to denote business-buildings.—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce says that according to my statement (in ¶ 163)
+“every element of compulsion is to be excluded from the conception
+of necessity.” Having never made such a statement, I looked
+up the passage, which is the last but one paragraph in <i>The Monist</i>,
+Vol. III, No. 1, page 86, and find that Mr. Peirce must have misread
+the sentence, “compulsion excludes free will, and necessity
+does not,” which, of course, has an entirely different meaning.—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce identifies evolution with real growth, regarding it
+as opposed to the law of the conservation of energy. He regards
+everything as a product of such growth, or <i>Erzeugung</i>, and adds, “I
+fancy it is this cautious reflectiveness of my procedure which especially
+displeases Dr. Carus.” Mr. Peirce does not use the word
+“bold.” He says, “cautious reflectiveness.”—</p>
+
+<p>I did not say that causation is to be explained from the law of
+the conservation of matter and energy. I said (<i>The Monist</i>, Vol.
+II, No. 4, p. 566) that the law of the conservation of matter and
+energy throws light upon the problem of causation. The law of
+the conservation of matter and energy and the law of causation describe
+the same thing under two different aspects. If we understand
+the one, it will help us to understand the other.—</p>
+
+<p>Kant’s chapter on the Architectonic of Pure Reason is well
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_620">[620]</span>known to me, but I think that Kant was possessed of a peculiar
+love of architectonic which has contributed not a little to rendering
+the system of his philosophy unnecessarily labyrinthine.—</p>
+
+<p>It is surprising to find a man whom I always regarded as a
+Kant scholar of first degree saying that “Kant makes space a necessary
+form of thought.” Now, as a matter of fact, Kant does not
+make space a form of <i>thought</i>, but of <i>Anschauung</i> or intuition. We
+cannot understand Kant unless we understand this distinction.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_139" href="#Footnote_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a>—</p>
+
+<p>Kant conceives of causation as a necessary sequence. Mill,
+who objects to the idea of necessity, replaces Kant’s words “universal”
+and “necessary” by “invariable” and “unconditioned,” a
+substitution which was made with the outspoken intention of radically
+changing the meaning of the phrase. Mill’s terms are <i>not</i>
+“more exact,” as Mr. Peirce says, but different. They are worse
+than less exact to a Kantian, and can appear more exact only to
+those who take Mill’s view, which is nominalistic. And this substitution
+of Mill’s is regarded by realistic Mr. Peirce as a mere “rewording
+of Kant’s definition”!—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce makes too much of the idea of “<i>Erzeugung</i>, which,”
+as he correctly says, “is Kant’s word for the sequence of effect
+from cause.” Yet Kant’s idea of <i>Erzeugung</i> does not conflict with
+“the modern mechanical doctrine.” Kant says in that very same
+chapter, “<i>Aller Wechsel (Succession) der Erscheinungen ist nur Veränderung</i>,”
+i. e., “All change (succession) of phenomena is only transformation.”
+(!) Does not Mr. Peirce know that Kant calls every
+world-conception that stands in contradiction to the mechanical
+principle “a philosophy of indolence,” or “<i>faule Weltweisheit</i>”?—</p>
+
+<p>The same Kant who proposed a mechanical explanation of the
+evolution of the starry heavens, objected very strongly to that kind
+of explanations “which derive all order from chance”; and speaking
+of Epicurus’s “absolute chance”(!) he adds: “Epicurus was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_621">[621]</span>even so reckless (<i>so unverschämt</i>) as to demand that the atoms should
+deviate from their straight course without any cause.” Mr. Peirce
+has either overlooked in Kant these passages, or, if he has read
+them, he has never taken them to heart.—</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce objects to my statement that according to his philosophy
+the domain of mind is characterised by absence of law. He
+argues: “Is not one of my papers entitled ‘The Law of Mind?’”
+Yet this law of mind, he states two lines further on, “requires its
+own violation.” (P. 552.)—</p>
+
+<p>The “sporting” of the primeval chance, Mr. Peirce says on
+page 552 of this number, is “not undetermined and indeterminable,”
+because “its ultimate result must be an entire elimination of
+chance from the universe.” Shall we understand that the “arbitrary
+sporting” of the primeval chaos, with which Mr. Peirce (according
+to <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. I, No. 2, p. 175) begins his cosmogony,
+was determined? If absolute chance is determined, why not call
+such a philosophy “determined Indeterminism”? We try hard to
+understand Mr. Peirce, but sometimes we really have to give it up.—</p>
+
+<p>Physiology teaches that memory alone changes feeling into consciousness,
+but the consciousness of Mr. Peirce’s original Chance is
+without memory and habit.—</p>
+
+<p>Chance, a being living and conscious, has, according to Mr.
+Peirce, created the world, but the ultimate result of evolution must
+be an entire elimination of Chance from the universe. Thus it appears
+that the creation of the world is an act of divine suicide. The
+world-process is a slow degeneration of God, finally ending in his
+complete annihilation.</p>
+
+<h4>RETROSPECT.</h4>
+
+<p>In summing up the result of the whole battle, we find that
+there is not a single question on which we have to yield or even
+modify our position. Our position remains the same, while Mr.
+Peirce’s position has become glaringly untenable. There is one
+point, however, in which justice demands that we should recognise
+that he is right. I should not have called Hamilton “Mr.,” but
+“Sir William.” I can, however, assure Mr. Peirce that this mistake
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_622">[622]</span>of mine (which in all my allusions to Hamilton occurs only once)
+was a mere slip of the pen; it was not ignorance on my part and
+still less was it any disregard of the rules of politeness.</p>
+
+<p>We are obliged to reject the favorite ideas of Mr. Peirce, and
+have only to add that our esteem for him has not been lessened, in
+spite of all disagreements, and notwithstanding the flaws we have
+detected in his reasoning. On the contrary, our admiration for him
+as a dialectitian has been greatly increased, for, in truth, we have
+never before seen propositions so untenable in their nature, so odd
+and almost bizarre, as those of “absolute chance,” of “matter as
+effete mind,” of “feeling as being the inner aspect of chance,” and
+of “real growth as opposed to the conservation of energy,” defended
+with greater adroitness.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce is unusually familiar with certain branches of learning,
+of which he has made a specialty, and also with general philosophy;
+but he has original ideas, and he prizes them too highly.
+Where he makes no use of his originality, he does extraordinarily
+good Work. Thus, most of his papers on logic, published in sundry
+magazines, are, in their critical as well as constructive parts, strictly
+scientific and almost free from apocryphal speculations. Only slight
+hints in them have been a puzzle to me and other readers of his essays.
+Of late, however, Mr. Peirce has come out more explicitly with his
+peculiar philosophy, and we regret to say that the more he allows
+his original ideas to enter into his thoughts, the more warped are
+his theories.</p>
+
+<p>While we regard Mr. Peirce’s original ideas as erroneous, we
+must say that they are nevertheless highly interesting and stimulating.
+His propositions are presented so vigorously, so attractively,
+so brilliantly, that while perusing his articles, we find them remarkably
+suggestive; we enjoy them as we do poetry. They read like
+a romance of the origin of the world or a fairy-tale of metaphysics.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce’s views should receive the consideration of all
+earnest students of philosophy; for he goes to the root of its main
+problems, and his very errors are instructive.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Editor.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_125" href="#FNanchor_125" class="label">[125]</a> Kepler’s scheme is, that all the regular solids, icosahedron, dodecahedron,
+octohedron, tetrahedron, and cube should be placed one within the other at such
+distances that spheres could be described between them so as to touch the corners of
+each respective interior and the planes of each respective exterior solid. He found,
+by placing the sun in the centre and allowing the planets to move in great circles
+on the spheres, (making the circle between the icosahedron and dodecahedron equal
+to the orbit of the earth,) that then the distances between the planets would, upon
+the whole, agree with astronomical observations.</p>
+
+<p>This theory is as ingenious, as fascinating, and as original as Mr. Peirce’s
+propositions. It has only one little fault; it does not agree with facts. And Kepler
+afterwards abandoned his original theory.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_126" href="#FNanchor_126" class="label">[126]</a> Like Mr. Peirce, Kepler had, in his days, too, thought of the possibility of
+making the world evolve from chance. When, in 1604, a new and brilliant fixed
+star suddenly appeared in Ophiuchos, he took up the problem of star-evolution.
+We will let Kepler tell the story in his own words as it appears in his treatise on the
+new star:</p>
+
+<p>“Yesterday, while pondering over the problem, I was called to dinner, and my
+young wife served the salad. ‘Do you think,’ I asked her, ‘if since the origin of
+creation, pewter platters, salad leaves, oil and vinegar, and also hard-boiled eggs had
+been flying in a chaotic mixture through space that <i>Chance</i> would have been able to
+collect them to-day in a salad?’ ‘Certainly not in such a good mixture as this is,’
+was the reply of my beautiful wife.”</p>
+
+<p>Kepler rejected the idea that the world could have evolved by chance.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_127" href="#FNanchor_127" class="label">[127]</a> The philosophical articles of the <i>Century Dictionary</i> do not seem to be free of
+party spirit. An extraordinary amount of praise is given to the mediæval realists
+which, considering the vagaries of their propositions, they do not deserve. On the
+other hand, the blame for the discredit into which scholasticism has fallen is heaped
+upon the nominalists.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_128" href="#FNanchor_128" class="label">[128]</a> I said in <i>Fundamental Problems</i>, page 142, “The introduction of the word
+positivism into philosophy is the merit of M. Auguste Comte. Although we cannot
+accept much of M. Comte’s conception of positivism we gratefully adopt the name.”
+There are plenty of other passages in which my usage of the term positivism, as distinguished
+from the French positivism, is set forth, so that there could be little danger
+of being misunderstood.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_129" href="#FNanchor_129" class="label">[129]</a> My main objection to the term Absolute is to forestall any hypostatising of a
+vague abstract notion which can only serve the purpose of mystification. I suffer
+the term Absolute in a loose sense when it is understood that it is used loosely. I
+do not say, as Mr. Peirce seems to believe, “absolutely universal” or “absolutely
+necessary.” The words universal and necessary are sufficiently significant to me
+without any additional emphasis.</p>
+
+<p>Reality is relative throughout. Absolute existences are, if the term is taken
+seriously, nonentities; and the expression “The Absolute” for the whole of existence
+or for those features of existence which are universal and necessary is, to say the
+least, misleading. These are my reasons for rejecting the Absolute as a philosophical
+term. There is, of course, no objection to the term in chemistry, physics,
+mathematics, and other sciences, where it has acquired technical meanings.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_130" href="#FNanchor_130" class="label">[130]</a> Mr. Peirce correctly says that the axioms of geometry are now exploded.
+This, however, does not overthrow the reliability of formal mathematics; on the
+contrary, it places it on a safer basis than that of unprovable assumptions, which
+must be taken for granted.</p>
+
+<p>We look upon the whole system of geometry as a <i>product of mental operations</i>.
+We perform some operations and note what their products are. We do something
+and mind the consequences of what we do. The problem of modern geometry is
+to invent a method by which we can construct in the simplest manner possible a
+straight line and a plane. Euclid still presupposes the existence of the plane and
+assumes it to be such that parallel lines do not meet. When we are able to construct
+the plane of Euclidean geometry, we can dispense with the axiom of parallels, for,
+in that case, the plane will possess the qualities it has by construction. We can
+very well execute other constructions in which parallel lines possess other qualities,
+and we shall on the basis of such an altered plan of operation be able to produce
+entirely different systems of geometry.</p>
+
+<p>We must distinguish between the space of our mathematicians and real space.
+Experience teaches us that real space has three dimensions which means that from
+a given point every other point is determinable by three magnitudes. We might
+doubt (although I think there is little occasion to do so) whether the real space of our
+experience is truly three-dimensional, but we cannot doubt that the truths developed
+in the one-dimensional system of numbers, in the two-dimensional system of plane
+geometry, in the three-dimensional system of solid geometry, and also in <i>n</i>-dimensional
+systems each in their respective domain are perfectly reliable, for they are
+unequivocally determined, they are <i>eindeutig bestimmt</i>. There is no application of
+the theory of probabilities in a field where the products are not due to chance but
+result with certainty.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_131" href="#FNanchor_131" class="label">[131]</a> I wonder why the <i>Century Dictionary</i> does not mention the scholastic usage
+of the word <i>univocus</i> as the root of univocal. Similarly we are not told that the
+word <i>incompossibilitas</i> is an invention of the schoolmen. Duns Scotus, Mr. Peirce’s
+favorite philosopher, uses the terms <i>univoce</i> and <i>incompossibilitas</i> freely.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_132" href="#FNanchor_132" class="label">[132]</a> We accept in this argument Mr. Peirce’s solutions, which, however, are his
+own. A simpler example would have been more appropriate.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_133" href="#FNanchor_133" class="label">[133]</a> The belief in a duality of truth appears quite rational from the dualistic standpoint
+of the middle ages, and the arguments of Scotus are cleverly devised, being
+based upon the supposition that the fall of man had changed the entire order of the
+world, so that the laws of nature prior to the Fall were different to those which obtain
+now.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_134" href="#FNanchor_134" class="label">[134]</a> Duns Scotus was a very zealous advocate of ecclesiastical supremacy, even
+advising, for instance, the prosecution of the Jews in order to convert them. It is a
+strange irony of fate that the author of the <i>Fons vitæ</i>, upon whose authority Scotus
+so largely depends and from whom he derived some of his most important ideas was
+an Israelite. Scotus did not know that Avicebron was a pseudonym of the Spanish
+Jew Salomon ben Gebirol.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_135" href="#FNanchor_135" class="label">[135]</a> I omit here a discussion as to whether or not the conservation of energy is
+true or not. I need not mention that the views of our physicists, such men as
+Helmholtz, Mach, Maxwell, Tait, and others differ widely from Mr. Peirce’s presentation
+of the subject. Mr. Peirce rejects the law of the conservation of energy,
+but retains the conservation, or (as he prefers to say) perduration of matter. I waive
+the question, whether this is consistent, and call attention only to another, most
+flagrant contradiction. Mr. Peirce states that, “not only the total amount [of matter]
+remains constant, but all the different parts preserve their identity”; and yet he
+says that “matter is effete mind.” Thus when mind becomes effete, the amount of
+matter increases; however, when the habits of matter are broken up, mind originates,
+and the amount of matter decreases. This, it seems, would make any perduration
+of matter and of the identity of its different parts impossible.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_136" href="#FNanchor_136" class="label">[136]</a> That my view of the <i>a priori</i>, as Mr. Peirce claims, is “Schleiermacherian”
+is new to me.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_137" href="#FNanchor_137" class="label">[137]</a> It is a matter of course that frequently several events coöperate to bring
+about an effect. In that case we have our choice, either to speak of several causes,
+or to treat the coöperation of all of them as <i>the</i> cause, or to select one of them to
+be called the cause, while the others may be counted among the conditions.</p>
+
+<p>The limitation of a system of causation depends entirely upon the purpose of
+our inquiry, and we must here, as in many other things, use discretion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Peirce concludes, that according to my view of causation we can, in a
+relatively uniform motion, such as the flight of a cannon ball, regard the motion of
+every moment as the cause for the motion of the next moment. I say “relatively,”
+for absolutely uniform motion does not exist. I grant this, but I do not grant what
+Mr. Peirce regards as a contradiction of mine, that in that case the cause would be
+equal to the effect. A man who knows the artifices of the hair-splitting Eleates and
+the other conundrums of logic, should know that every second of time is different
+from every other second; 12 o’clock is different from 1 second past 12. He who denies
+this, has only to miss a train in order to be converted. And how much more
+different than the moments of time are the various moments of real motion, for in
+every moment the moving body is in another place, with changed relations; and if
+that does not constitute a difference, we should have to deny the existence of motion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_138" href="#FNanchor_138" class="label">[138]</a> See my article on “The Continuity of Evolution” in <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II,
+No 1; and also “Monism and Meliorism,” p. 73, where “the struggle for the
+ideal” is contrasted with “the struggle for life.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_139" href="#FNanchor_139" class="label">[139]</a> For details see, in <i>The Monist</i>, Vol. II, No. 4, page 518, et seqq., and 527, et
+seqq., my articles, “Mr. Spencer on the Ethics of Kant,” heading iv, and “What
+Does Anschauung Mean?”</p>
+
+<p>I now forgive Mr. Spencer; for if a Kant scholar like Mr. Peirce can fall into
+this unpardonable mistake, why should not Mr. Spencer, whose knowledge of Kant’s
+writings is, as he confesses himself, extremely limited, have the same privilege?</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_623">[623]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="THE_FOUNDATIONS_OF_THEISM">THE FOUNDATIONS OF THEISM.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>I. THE REALISM OF THEISM.</h4>
+
+<p>It is commonly alleged that there is deeply seated in the human
+mind a belief in the existence of a supreme being, and that the
+prevalence of such belief is evidence that it has a basis in supernatural
+revelation. It is urged in reply to this assertion, that this belief is
+not universal, and that in any case its presence cannot be regarded as
+satisfactory evidence that is well founded. It is known that the disposition
+to worship is aroused by grand and beautiful objects; and
+as Darwin well remarks in one of his letters, the natural sentiments
+of the sublime and the beautiful easily assume a personal direction.
+Scientific explanations, moreover, push a personal source of things
+ever further from us, and it is becoming apparently more easy to
+doubt or deny any such source whatever.</p>
+
+<p>Prevalent human instincts and intuitions are, however, the result
+of experience imperfectly or perfectly digested, as the case may be.
+In most instances they yield to analysis something of value. A more
+plausible explanation of the theistic instinct is the anthropomorphic
+one. Man knows that he originates many movements, both of his
+own body and of other material things, and he knows of no other
+real source of such movements. He therefore, in his primitive state,
+before scientific explanations are attained, naturally refers motions
+in nature to an original personal source. This, it may be supposed,
+is the natural habit of the unsophisticated mind, and is at the bottom
+of theistic belief, whether as unexplained in consciousness, and
+therefore an instinct, or as a distinctly formulated belief. The phenomena
+of nature must have originated somehow, and there is no
+other conceivable source of motion than a personal one.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_624">[624]</span></p>
+
+<p>Facts developed by scientific research tend to weaken this anthropomorphism.
+The indestructibility of matter means that it
+has never been created. The conservation of energy states that
+matter has always been in motion. The law of organic evolution is
+supposed to do away with the necessity for creative intervention in
+the origination of plants and animals. Finally, the observed facts
+of the evolution of mind show that this, the light of the world, grew
+like the organic beings which it inhabits. Nothing higher than man
+has been found, and there seems to be no ground for suspecting the
+existence of any higher mind. And man himself dies and undergoes
+dissolution, like other organic bodies. The result of this use of the
+facts of science is agnosticism, at least. We know of nothing beyond
+what they teach, and some agnostics go so far as to say, “ignorabimus,”
+we shall never know. Agnostics, however, have their
+faces set in different directions. Some rest in it as a relief from
+mental toil, as persons more theologically inclined join a church.
+Others, believers in the progressive evolution of knowledge as of
+other phenomena, set themselves to explore the unknown country,
+believing that our opportunities in this direction are practically unlimited.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look again at this anthropomorphism which is so deeply
+seated and so widely spread. Its essence is the fact that we control
+our own bodies in a great degree and that our material organs obey
+the behests of our mind. We do things for, to us, satisfactory reasons,
+and for satisfactory reasons we leave many things undone,
+which we could readily do. What has science done towards explaining
+this most ordinary phenomenon? We may truthfully say,
+absolutely nothing. It remains a fact that a majority, if not all animals,
+move their bodies in their entirety or in part, because they
+have sensations. In the lower animals these sensations are merely
+either sense-impressions from without, or they are from within, being
+produced by their physical condition. We rise but little in the
+scale, when effects of memory are evident, for we find that many
+actions are due to experience of the result of former actions. With
+still higher development, mental organisation becomes more apparent,
+and the reasoning and emotional states have more and more
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_625">[625]</span>distinct outcome in intelligent acts. But the mechanism by which
+the act is called forth by the mental state, has never been explained.</p>
+
+<p>The difficulty lies here. A sensation, or a state of mind, weighs
+nothing. A material body, let it be a cell or a mass of cells, as a
+muscle, weighs something. How then can the former move the
+latter? From a mechanical point of view, it cannot be done. For
+that which has no weight to set in motion anything which has
+weight, is to violate the law of the conservation and correlation of
+energy. And this law is not only an <i>a priori</i> necessity, but it has
+been demonstrated <i>a posteriori</i> in so many cases that exceptions cannot
+be thought of. So a school of physiologists say that <i>it is not
+done</i>. No animal eats because it is hungry, or drinks because it is
+thirsty. The man does not direct the muscle of his arm when he
+writes, nor those of his tongue when he speaks. But it is easy to see
+why such a school of physiologists includes but an infinitesimal
+part of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>There is a school of evolutionists who account for the whole
+matter in harmony with the views of the physiologists above mentioned.
+I refer to the Post-Darwinians, who account for evolution
+by natural selection exclusively. That is, animals originally moved
+aimlessly in all directions. Those whose movements were beneficial
+to them, survived, while those whose movements were not beneficial,
+or which were injurious, perished. As frequent motions in a
+given direction lead to habits, so were inaugurated movements
+which were habitually beneficial to the actors, which have therefore
+persisted and multiplied. Thus were established the multifarious
+habits of animals and men. Consciousness had nothing to do with
+the process. It merely acted the part of the onlooker, being simply
+aware of what went on. “Like the locomotive whistle,” says Huxley,
+“it made considerable noise, but did none of the work.”</p>
+
+<p>To a person familiar with the facts of the evolution of the structures
+of animals, this seems like a most inadequate theory. It is a
+commonplace that no kind of selection, either artificial or natural,
+ever originated anything. Selection simply selects between existing
+alternatives. The fundamental question of evolution is, What is
+the origin of things? What is the fate of things originated? is a secondary
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_626">[626]</span>question. To this first question the Post-Darwinian reply
+must be, that everything possible has originated no one knows yet
+how, so that what has survived was necessarily to be found in this
+<i>embarras de richesse</i>. This is an enormous assumption, and one to
+which the history of the life of past and present ages lends no support.
+No such multifarious and promiscuous variation is known to
+have occurred in living or in extinct organic beings. But if the
+variations have not been infinite, then the chance of the existing one
+having been hit upon becomes greatly reduced, and the chance of
+its having occurred at the same time in individuals of opposite sex
+is still smaller. Finally, the chance of its not being immediately
+bred out by the overwhelming numbers of individuals not possessing
+it, is indeed infinitesimal. In fact, it is evident that variations of
+structure must have appeared in numbers of individuals of a species
+at the same time, in order to secure survival. This indicates a common
+cause of general application. That such causes have existed
+and been effective at all periods of past and present time is amply
+proved by the facts of geology and paleontology. The most influential
+in effecting change of form and structure has been the motion
+of the body and of its parts necessary to secure its food, to defend
+or protect itself from dangers, and to reproduce its kind. The direct
+mechanical effects of these motions on all the materials of the
+body may be traced in the successive stages of the forms of past
+ages to those of the present time.</p>
+
+<p>The objections above made to the theory of multifarious variation
+of organic forms, apply with equal force to the theory of multifarious
+movements of organic beings as furnishing the source of intelligent
+habits. An additional and especial objection to the latter
+hypothesis is the fact that it does not recognise the well-known
+adaptability of animals to new situations and circumstances. If the
+events of life were a routine moving with mathematical precision,
+the theory of origin from multifarious variations would have a better
+foundation; but this is not the case. Food, friends, and enemies
+do not appear in stated periods, quantities, or qualities. Emergencies
+are common, and variation of circumstance is the rule.
+Without sensation, uniform habits would but lead to destruction.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_627">[627]</span>Everything which should not be presented in the habitual form and
+at the habitual time would be neglected. Food and drink would be
+refused, or not obtained; defense and reproduction would not be
+attempted under the proper conditions. In fact, the conduct of
+living beings would be no more intelligent than that of inorganic
+matter in motion, were sensation to have no share in the process.
+But as soon as we believe that the habits of animals are due to hunger,
+thirst, and the perception of temperature, resistance, etc., their
+acts become intelligible, and the formation of habits becomes a
+necessary consequence of memory or the faculty of subsequent recognition
+of sensations experienced at a previous time.</p>
+
+<p>It is, in this connection, of great interest to recall the diverse
+effects on our mental history of sense-impressions, as compared
+with the effect of thought. Sense-impressions are not remembered
+in the proper sense of the term. The repetition in memory is always
+vastly more indistinct than the original state of consciousness;
+so much so as to be a very different thing. Thought, on the contrary,
+when remembered at all, is an exact repetition in quality of
+its first presence. The presentative consciousness has one quality;
+the representative and re-representative have another quality. This
+shows us that the structural arrangement of brain substance concerned
+in the latter forms of consciousness have a far more permanent
+quality than that due to the former. They thus constitute
+more permanent acquisitions, and this being the case, must have a
+most important bearing on evolution.&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_140" href="#Footnote_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> This is because it is a representative
+state which determines action. The process of determination
+may become so rapid as to be almost instantaneous; but it had
+to be learned and the representation was what gave the act its
+character and which organised the machinery of the automatic or
+reflex act.</p>
+
+<p>I here refer to the low degrees of consciousness sometimes
+called subconsciousness, and the expression, “the subliminal consciousness,”
+introduced by F. Meyer. All shades of consciousness
+intervene between the most distinct forms and the unconsciousness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_628">[628]</span>of the reflex state. Intelligent subconsciousness is a low stage in
+this evanescent series. Stages on the passage to and from sleep,
+and other forms of unconsciousness due to physical causes, are properly
+termed subconscious. There are reflexes which are due to
+mechanisms which we inherit from our animal and human ancestors,
+which are sometimes accompanied by consciousness. The amount
+of intelligence displayed will depend on the function involved. Experiments
+on vertebrate animals show that intelligent adaptation of
+the movements of the body have been transferred forwards in the
+brain during the course of evolution. Thus, a fish which retains the
+medulla only, will guide itself through the water so as to avoid danger.
+If the cerebellum and thalami are left to a reptile, it will avoid
+destructive acts. But if a mammal is deprived of its hemispheres,
+its actions are without design, and it is incapable of self-preservation.</p>
+
+<p>It may be that in the temporary absence of the higher consciousness,
+the lower forms which once existed in our ancestors may
+be revived, as in some of the elements of our dreams, and in some
+forms of cerebral disease, when much of the blood is withdrawn
+from the cortex or parts of it. The amount of consciousness
+necessary to the performance of intelligent acts depends on the
+novelty of the situation. Many of the theories on this subject, however,
+take it for granted that intelligent acts arise in primarily unconscious
+states. This is only credible on the supposition that such
+acts have arisen by natural selection only, a view which I have combated
+on a previous page. Some authors use expressions which can
+only imply unconscious consciousness. This is of course absurd and
+self-contradictory. No source but sensation can be found for intelligent
+acts.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that there are some movements of organic bodies
+which have an intelligent appearance, to which we cannot ascribe
+consciousness. Such are those of the spermatozoöids and of the
+leucocytes. Some of the lowest animals and plants cannot be yet
+proved to be conscious. We cannot now explain the nature of the
+movements which these forms exhibit, but they will probably yield
+to research. Enough it is for our present purpose to know that the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_629">[629]</span>majority of animals are conscious for a large part of their lives. And
+we have abundant evidence to show that movements inaugurated in
+conscious states may be performed, so soon as learned, in unconsciousness,
+and become part of the mental furniture of the animal.</p>
+
+<p>It seems, then, that the control of ponderable matter by mental
+states is not the exclusive prerogative of man, but is a phenomenon
+of common observation in the animal kingdom. The facts
+indicate that it is characteristic of mind to move resistant and tri-dimensional
+matter under suitable conditions. These conditions are
+rigid, but within the limits which they define, the sequence is definite.
+It is difficult to believe in anything which is in direct violation
+of mechanical necessity, and a mere hypothesis to that effect
+would not deserve a moment’s consideration. But the belief that
+the body, or parts of it, are moved in direct obedience to mental
+states is founded on more numerous observations than are most of
+those beliefs which we hold to be true. In fact there is no scientific
+doctrine better supported by observation and experience than this
+one. On this ground alone, then, we are compelled to believe in
+something in the universe which is supermechanical, or extramechanical.
+We may call this supernaturalism, or occultism, or
+what we like, but the fact remains. We have in it the germ of
+theism, anthropomorphic, if you will, but one which grows in importance
+as we come to examine further into the characteristics of
+mental action.</p>
+
+<p>Before going into this part of the subject, I will refer to the part
+played by mind in evolution. From what has gone before, it is evident
+that this part has been an important one. If structures are
+produced by motions, it is clear that habits produce structures, and
+<i>vice versa</i>; and that under the law of natural selection only the useful
+and harmless ones have survived. It follows, then, that progressive
+evolution of form is secured by the presence of consciousness,
+and must, sooner or later, fail without it. With development of intelligence
+the progress must become more continuous and rapid.
+The facts of paleontology confirm such a hypothesis; since the more
+intelligent animals (Mammalia) have generally supplanted the less
+intelligent, (Reptilia and Batrachia), whenever brought into conflict
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_630">[630]</span>with them. The supremacy of the intelligent over the unintelligent
+Mammalia is also clearly shown by research into their past history.
+The modification of type, or evolution, has also become more and
+more rapid as time has advanced and intelligence developed.</p>
+
+<p>There is another reason why the intervention of supermechanics
+into the process has been necessary to secure such results as we observe
+in the evolution of life. The law of inorganic evolution is, as
+Spencer epitomises it, “the integration of matter and the dissipation
+of energy.” Natural chemical reactions when not interfered with by
+human intelligence, produce solids and give out heat. In other
+words, they result in death and not in life. To produce life something
+different from chemical energy has been necessary. And as
+the case is a parallel one to the evolution of the types of life, we
+may suspect that the agency at work has been a related one. It is
+some form of energy of the vital class which is able to overcome the
+bonds which hold dead matter in their adamantine grasp; and it is
+evident that such an energy could have been organised only in some
+region where mechanics of a superchemical order prevail. If we
+take a large view of the universe the alternatives of life and death
+present themselves clearly before us. The law of the latter is the
+integration of matter and dissipation of energy. The law of the
+former is the converse; the loosing of the bonds of matter, and the
+production of mechanism for the raising of the type of energy. The
+first is catagenesis, the latter is anagenesis. The end of catagenesis
+is the extinction of all mind and all life. Anagenesis sustains both.
+The best foundation for our belief in anagenesis is that it exists.
+Catagenesis has not destroyed it, and this fact must lead us to suspect
+that it is the product of an agency which is superchemical; and
+the only such that we know is consciousness.</p>
+
+<p>In the presence of such a far-reaching hypothesis we are called
+upon to consider more particularly the relations of mind to its physical
+basis. The essential condition of the existence of mind as we
+know it, is metabolism. The substance&#x2060;<a id="FNanchor_141" href="#Footnote_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> of the nervous cells must be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_631">[631]</span>in a state of decomposition and recomposition; old material loosing
+its chemical bonds and giving forth energy, and new material arriving
+to undergo the same process. The energy thus produced
+displays the phenomena of mind, and as such differs widely from the
+inorganic energies of heat, light, etc. The extent to which it displays
+habits depends on the part of the nervous structure where it
+is produced. In the spinal cord it is strictly automatic, and as we
+approach the hemispheres the so-called voluntary element becomes
+more apparent, until a region is reached where conception, deliberation,
+and judgment have their seat. In this region energy is purely
+mental in its attributes, and it unlocks the executive mechanism of
+the body, and puts it in action in accordance with the needs of consciousness.
+So far, mechanical laws explain the order of events. The
+supermechanical resides in the mental content and its effects on the
+outgoing energy. No quantitative relation can be shown to exist
+between the results of the mental processes of classification, conception,
+judgment, etc, and the amount of incoming or outgoing
+energy. Indeed it is plain that none can exist, if the statement
+already made be true, viz., that thoughts are without weight. This
+part of the subject requires critical treatment, but the general result
+is included in the above statement, which is sufficient for our present
+purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Since consciousness possesses such extraordinary relations to
+matter we may well suspect that it has a wider distribution than
+comes within the purview of our present limited ken. Why should
+it not protect and nourish itself under conditions different from those
+which prevail in our planet? The one condition necessary to it is
+metabolism—which means free energy. The kind of physical basis
+cannot be important, provided it be capable of exhibiting this kind
+of non-automatic energy. Automatism and all its reflex consequences
+are the death of consciousness, as every one knows. From such a
+type of energy all the fixed types of energy must have been derived,
+and with them the types of both mental and physical structures. In
+its freest form it should have as a physical basis a form of matter
+which should be without habits, but always ready to undergo a catagenetic
+change into routine energy and ultimate unconsciousness.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_632">[632]</span>Such a medium should be unspecialised matter, and the consciousness
+inhabiting it would be a creator. Such consciousness would be
+readily transmitted wherever the physical basis should be suitable,
+and one such substance is our protoplasm. The probable inferiority
+of protoplasm as a physical basis is indicated by the long and tedious
+education which has been necessary to enable beings made of it
+to attain a high order of intelligence. In such a basis anagenesis is
+slow, and catagenesis is easy. Other bases might be imagined where
+the reverse would be the case. No assumption can be made as to a
+constant and limited amount of consciousness in the universe. That
+such is the case is supposable; but it is also supposable that the
+amount of suitable physical basis may be increased by a process of
+assimilation of non-conscious matter, as is done by animals in digestion
+and reproduction. This process might continue until all
+matter should be brought into that generalised condition which is
+necessary to the continuance of consciousness. The entire universe
+would then be conscious, and a maximum limit would be reached.
+In the primitive consciousness, whatever its extent in space in the
+Universe, we have the Supreme Being or Person.</p>
+
+<h4>II. THE IDEALISM OF THEISM.</h4>
+
+<p>What I mean by the above expression is the theism which is
+supposed to be demonstrated by idealistic metaphysics. There are
+two forms of this alleged demonstration, both of which have for their
+starting-point the basis of the idealistic philosophy. This basis is
+the fact that we know nothing of matter excepting as sense-impressions.
+From this it is inferred that were conscious beings to become
+extinct, matter would no longer exist. It is also a consequence of
+this belief that what we observe of the conduct of matter, which we
+call by the name of natural law, is of purely mental origin.</p>
+
+<p>If now the universe consist wholly of mind, the totality of it,
+either as reduced to a body of general laws, or to a single comprehensive
+generalisation, or concept, is one form of idealistic God.
+The other demonstration is as follows. Since matter exists as mental
+states, and since these mental states are common to mankind,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_633">[633]</span>who are mortal; since these mental states reproduce themselves
+from generation to generation, it is inferred that a permanent mental
+state exists, which possesses the permanent sensations we call matter.
+And this common mind of humanity is God.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between these deities is this. In the first case
+he is an abstraction of the human mind and therefore not a person
+apart from such men as are capable of the generalisations of which
+he consists. In the second case he is a person apart from humanity.
+The validity of either demonstration to the thinker depends on
+his point of view. To every one but the idealist, the first proposition
+is atheism. The evidence for the second is metaphysical anthropomorphism,
+and would be a demonstration, were the theory of
+idealism well founded.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that we only know matter as sense-impressions does
+not, in the opinion of realists, prove that it does not exist as the resistant
+and extended. Resistance of each part to the movements of
+other parts (energy), and extension in space, are conditions about
+which we have a great deal of information. Our lives are spent in
+overcoming the one, and in getting round the other. Our methods
+of dealing with it represent the antithesis of those employed in
+thought-processes. The latter are best performed in the absence
+of the muscular exertion which is so necessary in dealing with the
+former. I have referred to the well-known difference in consciousness
+between sense-impressions and the representation and re-representation
+of them. The difference certainly implies a difference
+in the immediate sources of the respective kinds of consciousness.
+The one is produced by something different from that which produces
+the other. In short, the one is produced by the contact of
+matter external to our physical basis, and the other is produced by
+a modification of brain-structure; and in the first place by that
+simplest form of it which is the cause of memory. The effect of
+such observation is the conviction that matter exists as something
+outside of consciousness or mind, in spite of the fact that we only
+know it in consciousness. In a word, consciousness and knowledge
+imply the existence rather than the non-existence of something which
+is known.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_634">[634]</span></p>
+
+<p>The fundamental actualities are, then, subject and object; or,
+in popular language, mind and matter. Philosophy includes the
+sciences which embrace the knowledge of both subject and object;
+but the practical philosophy is the science of the mutual relations
+of the two. It may be said that subject and object are opposite
+sides of the same reality, but this form of expression appears to me
+to be no more accurate than the statement that energy and matter
+are opposite sides of the same thing. As energy is the motion of
+matter, mind is the intelligence of matter; and both may be called
+properties of matter with equal propriety, since both are impossible
+without a physical basis. Mind, however, differs from energy in
+possessing some intrinsic qualities which are in essence independent
+of the qualities of the physical basis; and these intrinsic qualities
+are the forms of logic. These are, however, but a part of the totality
+of mind, although they underlie or penetrate all its representative
+activities.</p>
+
+<p>While mind then cannot exist without a physical basis, it remains
+to be considered whether any other objective world is necessary
+to its existence. It is sometimes alleged that consciousness
+could not exist without an objective, exterior to its physical basis.
+If, however, consciousness is a necessary attribute of free energy,
+the latter purely metaphysical speculation has no foundation. The
+“intuition of Being” (Rosmini) would exist, albeit not much specialised,
+in the absence of multifarious objects; but the forms of logic
+would characterise it nevertheless.</p>
+
+<p>It is alleged that we can never know matter as it is, because our
+observation is restricted to the mutual relations of its component
+parts. In this assertion our intelligence necessarily concurs, but this
+need not cause us to relax our exertions in the pursuit of knowledge.
+The practical philosophy is, as already remarked, the knowledge of
+the relations subsisting between mind and matter, so that our most
+valuable acquisition will be in the end the laws of a relation. We
+may well postpone our endeavors after the absolute, even if we can
+ever attain a knowledge of it. The realist is content to believe that
+if we do not know “things as they are in themselves,” it is because,
+of the imperfection of our senses. But we are constantly discovering
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_635">[635]</span>new aids to research, and we can put no limit to our power in
+this direction.</p>
+
+<p>The research into the relations of subject and object, means to
+theology, an investigation as to the existence and nature of Deity,
+and as to an existence for conscious beings in other than terrestrial
+life. The pure idealist reaches an affirmative answer to these problems
+by a short and easy route, based on a study of the intrinsic nature
+of mind alone. The pure realist reaches a negative conclusion
+by an equally short cut, by considering the properties of matter
+alone. Not a few thinkers entertain both doctrines at one and the
+same time, although they are mutually exclusive and contradictory.
+No wonder that they reach what Montgomery well terms “the
+puzzle of puzzles.” But the rational conclusion from this deadlock
+must be, that there is something wrong with the methods of both sides.
+To the practical mind it seems that the vice in both methods is the
+failure to harmonise properly with their own, the facts adduced by
+the opposite side in the discussion. And it is indeed evident that that
+cannot be the final philosophy which restricts itself to a consideration
+of mind alone; or that which restricts itself to a consideration of
+matter alone. That men should pursue different lines of research is
+natural. Those whose minds are capable in the fields of conception
+naturally prefer idealistic studies; while those whose especial genius
+lies in the direction of mechanics, easily pursue-materialistic research.
+What is needed is a combination of the two fields of ability
+in the same mind.</p>
+
+<p>A considerable class of serious people, observing the diversities
+between the schools of philosophy, regard such studies as useless.
+Since they have not the disposition or ability to solve the question
+for themselves, they find it best to rest in uncertainty, which has
+optimistic or pessimistic tendencies according to temperament and
+education. The optimist has faith that all is, and all will be, well;
+while the pessimist takes the opposite view. Both are sustained in
+their position by those teachers who teach the impotence of our
+faculties and the uselessness of knowledge. Such appeal in support
+of their position to the facts already cited; the imperfection of our
+senses; the relativity of knowledge; the inscrutable nature of mind
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_636">[636]</span>and matter, etc. This position is, however, a plea of avoidance,
+and it will be time enough to listen to it when the avenues of the increase
+of human knowledge are permanently closed. This they are
+not at present.</p>
+
+<p>The key to the position is the doctrine of evolution. Here we
+behold the interaction of subject and object, both in our own persons
+and in the inferior beings which are with us, and which have
+preceded us on earth. That mind has not sprung full-fledged upon
+this planet, is clear; and that it has made wonderful progress in
+power, is equally clear. Why did it not appear with all its powers
+“in the beginning”? The answer obviously is, “the intractability
+of matter.” Why has it progressed in face of this obstacle? The
+answer is, the tractability of matter. Mind, through its intrinsic
+quality, has coërced matter, in ever increasing degree, and the limit
+of its capacity in this direction plainly has not yet been reached. Its
+most important conquest has been that of its own physical basis,
+and next to it is the conquest of the world of objects by which it is
+surrounded. Its last conquest will be the knowledge of its destiny,
+as a projection of its known past. To this end the knowledge of its
+own constitution is essential, but this is not all, as the pure idealist
+would have us believe. The knowledge of external relations is
+also essential, for we can in no state of being escape them. Psychic
+life is an “internal adjustment to external relations,” quite as much
+as is the physical life, as it is defined by Spencer in the phrase just
+quoted.</p>
+
+<p>The Deity of evolution indicated in the first section of this paper,
+will not satisfy the pure idealist. He is not an absolute, since
+He is compelled to respect relations. But we find Him to be just,
+which he evidently is not if absolute. He is anthropomorphic, and
+not an abstraction of the human mind. And yet as the seat of rationality,
+and as the director of free energy, He possesses the function
+of creator of whatever is possible. The evolution of independent
+human minds has been only possible through education, and here
+as elsewhere, teachable students have met with greater success than
+the stolid.</p>
+
+<p>It has been already pointed out that the process of evolution
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_637">[637]</span>may be either progressive (Anagenesis) or retrogressive (Catagenesis).
+This is well known to be the case with organic types, where
+degenerate phyla are common. It seems, indeed, that in the order
+of things degeneracy has occurred wherever it has been possible;
+that is, under circumstances which permitted vegetative life through
+lack of stimuli to energetic motion. There has always been “room
+at the top”; but only when all the lower fields of existence have been
+for the time being filled, has there been room at the top only. The
+history of mental evolution has accompanied that of general structural
+evolution, and for similar reasons. It is well illustrated in
+human society to-day. These facts suggest that this has been the
+history of all evolution, since they harmonise with the order of evolution
+observed in our solar system, in which the inorganic has preceded
+the organic, or Catagenesis has preceded Anagenesis. If the
+forms of non-vital energy represent a result of Catagenesis, we are
+not bound to look on minerals as in any sense living, as has been
+suggested by Haeckel and others. Most, if not all, forms of chemical
+energy have sunk below the vital level, and certainly far below
+the possibility of displaying consciousness. We are here looking
+over unexplored territory, and one whose elucidation is entirely in
+the future, but we may put our ideas in order, if we do nothing
+more.</p>
+
+<p>Besides his relations to the impersonal materials that surround
+him, man has essential relations to his fellow-man. The laws of
+these relations are ethics. Much is written and spoken against the
+utilitarian or evolutionary theory of ethics. I cannot, however,
+escape the conviction that this theory offers the true explanation of
+the rise of the ethical sentiment in mankind. But to understand it
+aright, we must include the growth of the social sentiment, as well
+as that of the rational element, in the evolution of justice or right.
+The opponents of this view sometimes commit the error common to
+all those who do not understand the nature of mental evolution.
+Some of them imagine that it is necessary to suppose that, in harmony
+with this theory, every man decides his every act solely in
+accordance with what appears to him at the time to subserve the
+lowest form of selfishness of which he is capable. The doctrine, on
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_638">[638]</span>the contrary, maintains that habits of honesty and justice are the
+result of the education of the ages, and that men obey such motives
+according to their developmental status; that is, in accordance with
+the evolution of the habit of preferring the higher to the lower forms
+of utility. The further question of what it is that has raised the
+standard of utility, is answered by what we see going on around us.
+The fear of the law; the love of the approbation of our fellows; the
+sympathy with our fellow-men; the fear of their indignation; all
+these are educators of great potency, which have always been active.
+These motives, organised as character, are compulsory, and it would
+be strange if they have not been effective in producing results.</p>
+
+<p>Practical ethics has to do with material beings and their material
+possessions, i. e. with person and property. Without the objective,
+the content of ethics is purely ideal, consisting of love and
+hate, and the justice and injustice of opinion which might be the outcome
+of those sentiments. These sentiments are realities of the
+subjective, representing the affections, as the form of thought constitutes
+the rational faculties. But if we endeavor in thought to deprive
+love and hate, justice and injustice, of all material consequences
+and implications, we deprive those sentiments of much of
+their value if we do not abolish their occasions altogether. It appears
+to me at least doubtful whether hate and injustice could exist
+in a society consisting of disembodied minds, if such beings could be
+imagined; a supposition which I cannot entertain.</p>
+
+<p>If ethics cannot exist without material expression, it is clear
+that, on the other hand, they cannot exist without a subjective foundation.
+Thus ethics is the highest expression of the relation between
+mind and matter. Ethics is the practical application of the mental
+powers to human relations, and the more complete the evolution of
+mind, the more perfect is the ethical practice. Thus the evolution
+of the mind is the guarantee of ethical progress, and the more intelligent
+the mind, the more easy will the evolution be. As in all
+education, the laggards experience the severities of compulsion,
+while pains and penalties are avoided by those who perceive their
+approach and do not await their arrival. Here we have the utilitarian
+ground of our numerous ethical and religious organisations.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_639">[639]</span>They invite men to <i>a priori</i> subjective theory, and objective practice,
+so as to preserve society from the evils of inferior and painful
+methods of compulsion, which lie at the basis of ethical evolution.
+It is the dread of this method which rouses a natural repugnance in
+the minds of many men to the doctrine which teaches of it. But it
+must be remembered that the instruments of evolution change with
+the thing that is evolving, and the conditions of progressive ethics
+are the stages of progress of the mind. What is necessary for the
+education of the lower mind is no longer necessary for the higher.
+This is not only a truth of philosophy, but the fact may be discerned
+in the religions which men have made for themselves. They describe
+the ethical state of their authors, and prescribe the treatment appropriate
+to it.</p>
+
+<p>Our knowledge of some parts of evolutionary history is meagre,
+and on some of its chapters we are absolutely in the dark. This is
+especially true of the causes of the appearance of life and consciousness
+on the earth. Spontaneous generation has not been proven,
+and the immediate source of sensation is unknown. The conclusions
+enumerated in the preceding pages are derived from evidence presented
+in more or less complete fragments. But the thesis remains
+true that mind possesses a limited control over its physical basis,
+but one which is sufficient to account for the main direction of the
+evolution of those organic forms which possess it. And it is also
+true that the essential forms of the rational mind are not due to corresponding
+qualities of the physical basis. These forms are: the
+principles of identity, of abstraction, and of generalisation or conception.
+These characteristics constitute the idealistic essence of
+Theism. But we look to the realistic element of Theism for the
+demonstration of the distinct personality of God.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">E. D. Cope.</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<h4>FOOTNOTES:</h4>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_140" href="#FNanchor_140" class="label">[140]</a> <i>Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society</i>, 1889, p. 495</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a id="Footnote_141" href="#FNanchor_141" class="label">[141]</a> Recent experiments conducted in the laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University
+show that the cytoplasm of cells, which are exhausted by labor, is vacuolated.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_640">[640]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="LITERARY_CORRESPONDENCE_IV">LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="nobreak" id="GERMANY_IV">GERMANY.</h4>
+
+<p>The name of Cesare Lombroso is now more and more mentioned
+in Germany, not only in psychiatrical, juridical, and
+sociological works, written for the learned public, but also in the
+newspapers and magazines. By the side of occasional recognition
+of his doctrine of the born criminal and genius, we meet—and these
+are the majority of the cases—with violent attacks on it, which not
+seldom exhibit real ignorance of the views of the celebrated Italian
+investigator. Lombroso himself is partly to blame for this unfortunate
+circumstance, for his writings, with their mountains of undigested
+material, are so lacking in unity and perspicuity that misconceptions
+are very apt to arise.</p>
+
+<p>The German translator of Lombroso, <span class="smcap">Dr. H. Kurella</span>, psychiatrist
+in Kreuzburg, in Silesia, has recently given to the world a
+synoptical exposition of Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal,
+under the title <i>Cesare Lombroso und die Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers</i>,
+Hamburg, 1892, Richter. The author not only expounds
+the doctrines of Lombroso, but also deals critically with them, and,
+although upon the whole his sympathies are with the views of the
+Italian scientist, he nevertheless believes that the existence of a
+fixed type of the <i>delinquente nato</i>, embracing all special forms of
+criminality, is yet a question of doubt. On the other hand, <span class="smcap">Max
+Nordau</span>, a widely-read author of ours, gives unqualified recognition
+to the theories of Lombroso, fully accepting the idea of “degeneration,”
+first introduced by Morel into science and further developed
+by Lombroso, and, in completion of the work of his master, extending
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_641">[641]</span>this idea to art and literature. In his work, <i>Entartung</i>, the first
+volume of which was recently published by Carl Duncker, of Berlin,
+and is dedicated to Lombroso, “his dear, admired master,” he says:
+“Degenerate types are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists,
+and idiots. They are often writers and artists, and these exhibit
+the same mental, and frequently also the same physical, traits as
+those members of the same anthropological family that satisfy their
+diseased instincts by means of the murderer’s knife or the cartridge
+of the dynamitard, instead of with pen and pencil.”</p>
+
+<p>People who are acquainted with Nordau’s previous works will
+perhaps imagine that this latest book of his is simply a mass of
+journalistic ebullitions which can lay no claim to <i>scientific</i> value.
+This, however, is wrong. Nordau is not only well acquainted with
+the patho-psychological literature of this province—especially with
+the French—but he also turns his knowledge to scientific account,
+which psychiatrists like Pelman and others have publicly admitted.
+Taking it as a whole, Nordau has presented in this first volume of
+his work a good psychology of mysticism—good, that is, for all who
+accept the association psychology. Nordau’s expositions embrace
+all the psychological theories which belong in this province, with
+their applications to individuals and to the tendencies of modern
+literature and art. With respect to the first point, the author is right
+in saying that he does not offer here anything new to the professional
+psychologist, but he is wrong in his theory that psychologists will
+read this chapter with impatience, for his exposition is unquestioniably
+elegantly written. Of much greater interest is the second part,
+in which a diagnosis of imbecility is rendered upon the English pre-Raphaelites,
+the French symbolists, the Tolstois, and Richard
+Wagners. The chapter on Richard Wagner will especially attract
+attention for its severity. Nordau closes it with the words, “of all
+the aberrations of the present time, Wagnerism is the most widely
+diffused and the most important. The playhouse at Bayreuth, the
+<i>Bayreuther Blätter</i>, the Parisian <i>Revue Wagnerienne</i>, are lasting
+monuments by which the future will measure in wonderment the
+dimensions of this degeneration and hysteria of our day.”</p>
+
+<p>Nordau throws light upon numerous mooted phenomena of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_642">[642]</span>modern art and literature, pointing out their diseased features. One
+is really surprised at the extent of his work. All in all, it may be
+foreseen that Koch’s doctrine of the “psychopathical minor factors”—or
+those psychical factors which constitute the border-line
+between mental health and disease—will clear up much more extensive
+fields than they have, when applied in the direction indicated
+by Nordau. <span class="smcap">Koch</span> has now published the third part of his work,
+(which I have repeatedly mentioned in <i>The Monist</i>) and thus completed
+it. He concludes his last volume with these words: “The
+domain of the ‘psychopathical minor factors’ is a wide and very interesting
+one. Whosoever enters profoundly into it will learn to
+look at much in life with different eyes from those with which he
+began, will understand many men and many human acts, which before
+he did not understand. There are yet many scientific treasures
+to be unearthed in this field, and I hope that I shall win many
+a coadjutor. I hope, also, that qualified men will make this theory
+of the psychopathical minor factors fruitful in wider fields and for
+greater problems.”</p>
+
+<p>It is a common belief that it is pre-eminently in our time that
+psychical disorders and psychical minor factors play so great a rôle.
+But that in the sense of Nordau they are not of so recent origin a
+careful reader will learn from a new work of <span class="smcap">Ludwig Geiger</span>, the
+well-known historian of literature and civilisation (Paetel, Berlin).
+Its title is: <i>Berlin, 1688-1840: Geschichte des geistigen Lebens der
+preussischen Hauptstadt</i>. As yet, only the first volume has appeared,
+which extends to the death of Frederick the Great. The reader,
+however, would obtain an entirely wrong impression of the work if
+he were to believe that psychiatrical points of view are expressly
+dwelt upon in this book. To find them he must read between the
+lines. The book is an extraordinarily painstaking history of the
+civilisation of Berlin, taken from the sources, and giving especial
+prominence to intellectual factors. We shall reserve the detailed
+discussion of this important work for another occasion, perhaps until
+it is fully completed.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Christian Ufer.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_643">[643]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="BOOK_REVIEWS_IV">BOOK REVIEWS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Hand-Commentar zum neuen Testament. iv. Evangelium, Briefl und Offenbarung
+des Johannes.</span> Bearbeitet von <i>H. J. Holtzmann</i>. Zweite verbesserte
+und vermehrte Auflage. (Freiburg I. B. and Leipsic: 1893. J. C. B.
+Mohr.)</h4>
+
+<p>The fourth gospel, of all the sacred writings of the New Testament, has always
+been the reviewer’s favorite book. Its profundity, its wealth of philosophical ideas,
+the fervor of its author’s religious sentiment, and the spiritual grace that pervades the
+whole book, exercised an unspeakable charm on my mind. This gospel was the first
+to rouse my doubts in the belief of literal inspiration, and it was again the one,
+which, after the severest storms of infidelity had blown over, reconciled me to
+the spirit of Christianity. Thus the perusal of Professor Holtzmann’s commentary
+again arouses the recollections of former struggles, and I find that even to-day the
+first chapter of the fourth gospel has lost none of its fascination. It is a wonderful
+book, and its author is a man whom I always longed to meet and shake hands with,
+over a span of almost two millenniums and a world-wide abyss of difference of
+opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Only those who are familiar with the difficulties of the St. John literature of
+the New Testament can really appreciate this latest work of Prof. H. J. Holtzmann.
+He presents in a most clear and concise manner the problems involved, together
+with their various solutions, critically arranged. He carefully avoids obtruding on
+the reader his own views. He stands before us as a faithful compiler only. I say
+“only,” but this “only” means a great deal. It does not mean that he suppresses
+or conceals his own views, it means that he states the facts with scrupulous impartiality.
+If there is any partiality apparent in his treatment of the sacred writings,
+it is the reverent attitude he preserves whenever love of truth obliges him to accept
+the negative result of critical investigations. And where is there a theological
+scholar to-day, who is orthodox enough to dare to accept the theory that the gospel
+of St. John was written by the apostle? Holtzmann carries his impartiality to the
+extent of not rejecting this old traditional idea, concerning the authorship of the
+fourth gospel, but the evidence against it is overwhelmingly sufficient to satisfy the
+most narrowminded believer. Holtzmann teaches us at the same time to understand
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_644">[644]</span>the spirit of the first and second century of our era, and thus excludes from
+the beginning the old prejudice, that if the author were not the man whom he impersonated
+his work must be regarded as a fraud. The historical value of the book
+lies in the revelations it gives us concerning the religious demands of the times in
+which it was written. The fourth gospel originated when the Jewish religiosity of
+growing Christianity began to expand into cosmic universality. The author was
+undoubtedly a Jew-Christian, whose home most likely was Ephesus. Ephesus was the
+place where we find the first beginnings of Christian Alexandrianism. Here the Logos-idea
+was introduced into Christian thought. Philo, the Alexandrian Jew, had already
+represented Moses as the incarnation of the divine Logos. Should not now
+a Christian familiar with Philo’s philosophy apply the same method to Jesus of
+Nazareth? Some work adapted to satisfy the wants of the time and especially the
+religious yearnings for knowledge as a means of edification was needed. The Christ-idea
+had taken a definite shape in the imagination of the Christian congregations of
+Asia Minor, consisting of diaspora Jews and Gentiles, and their Christ-idea found a
+worthy expression in the picture of Jesus of Nazareth as we have it in the fourth
+gospel.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the author of the fourth gospel was a Jew-Christian, appears from
+his readiness to explain Jewish customs. He knows Judaism, and is familiar with
+Jerusalem as it appeared after the destruction of the temple. The probability is
+that he wrote his gospel between 120 and 140. He is comparable to Matthew in so
+far as both are greatly interested in the controversy between Gentiles <i>versus</i> Jews,
+yet Matthew’s Israel has grown into the world-wide cosmos. The frequent occurrence
+of the very word “cosmos” in the fourth gospel is remarkable. In the same
+way the Greek term γιγνώσκειν (to know) appears besides the older term πιστεύειν (to
+believe), which latter is a translation of a Jewish conception, still employed so vigorously
+by St. Paul. The author of the fourth gospel is not familiar with Galilee
+and does not seem to care for consistency in the details of his accounts, for he frequently
+contradicts his own statements. The most important differences between
+his and the three synoptic gospels are the accounts as to the main field of Jesus’s
+activity, which according to St. John was Judea, according to the synoptic gospels
+Galilee, and the day of Jesus’s death, which according to St. John is the 14th of
+Nisan, according to the synoptic gospels the 15th of Nisan, so that if we follow the
+latter, Jesus would have been tried and condemned, against all Jewish customs, on
+one of the greatest festival days. Holtzmann rightly warns the reader, that whatever
+may speak in favor of the synoptic gospels as being, in general, historically more
+correct, the author of the fourth gospel might have had some special source for this
+particular fact.—</p>
+
+<p>The Revelation of St. John has given more trouble to the Christian exegesis
+than any other book, and light was not shed upon its plan and construction, until it
+was found to be one instance only of a whole class of literary productions. When
+we consider the Revelation of St. John in the same line with other apocalyptic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_645">[645]</span>works, and when we understand the mental disposition of the pious Jews shortly
+before and after Christ, we have a clew to the enigmatic visions which are unrolled
+before our eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The expectations of the Jews in the times of the Maccabees were disappointed
+again and again. The great events of the world did not justify the national hopes,
+and God did not seem to care about fulfilling his promises. The last prophet, who
+called himself Malachi, or “the messenger of God,” proclaimed the message of the
+Lord, “Yet I loved Jacob,” and he comforts the faithful who still endure in all
+their tribulations, that “a book of remembrance is written before him for them
+that feared the Lord and that thought upon His name.” After Malachi, a number
+of revelations appeared, which, to the satisfaction of the Messianic expectations,
+explained the events of the world, and prophesied that those only who should persevere
+until the end would be called upon to rule, together with the “Son of Man,”
+who is to come to smite the heathens and to rule them with an iron rod. The first
+apocalyptic author, who wrote in 164 B. C., impersonated Daniel, the prophet, who
+had lived about 400 B. C. The powerful nations of the world are represented as
+beasts, the fourth and last beast being the Macedonian empire. It has ten horns,
+that is, rulers, the last one being Antiochus Epiphanes. As soon as his power is
+broken, the power over the earth will be given to Israel, which is called the Son of
+Man. The power of the tenth horn was broken, indeed, yet the Messianic hopes
+remained unfulfilled, and thus new prophecies were wanted, which should again
+explain the plans of the Almighty, so that the faithful would still endure and hope.
+Thus, Henoch was written, and after Henoch the Assumption of Moses, the book
+of Baruch, and other revelations.</p>
+
+<p>The apocalyptic literature is characterised by Messianic expectations and
+eschatological reflections. The end of the present course of affairs is said to be near
+at hand and a new order will be established in which the faithful shall rule for a
+whole millennium and the wicked be tormented.</p>
+
+<p>The Revelation of St. John represents this spirit of apocalyptic hopes among the
+early Christians of Asia Minor. It throws much light upon the conditions and the
+conceptions of a period concerning which we have very little information. We here
+see Christianity in its beginnings. The coloring of the Revelation is still Jewish. Its
+author stands in a conscious contrast to the Greek spirit which is about to change
+the properly Jewish character of the new doctrine. The author of the St. John revelation
+is a Jew to the backbone still; he denounces the antinomistic Christianity of
+the Gentiles as represented by Nocolaitanes whom, we are told, God hateth. He
+does not directly mention the apostle St. Paul, but there is little doubt that he is
+alluded to in Chap. II, 2, as one of them “which say they are apostles and are not.”</p>
+
+<p>The more powerful the Greek spirit grew in the church, the weaker became
+these original features inherited from the diaspora Jews until they were dropped forever
+through the efforts of Origenes who made a decided and successful opposition
+to the belief in the millennium. Yet it took some time for the traditional view of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_646">[646]</span>the Messiah to change into the purer and more spiritual Christ-ideal There were
+two parties in the early church who spoke two radically different idioms; the one
+still cherished the old chiliasm, dreaming of the establishment of a millennium on
+earth. Their terminology moved always in the same allegories: they spoke of green
+and fat fields and of sulphurous abysses, of white horses and terrible beasts, of trees
+of life, of golden cities and of war and bloodshed, while the other party spoke of
+Logos, of the eternal Son through whom the world had been made, of “the dispensation
+of the fulness of the times in which God might gather together in one all
+things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth,” of the pleroma
+and of aeons.</p>
+
+<p>The Revelation of St. John is an expression of the former party and it was natural
+that after a complete victory of the latter party, Christian teachers knew not
+what to make of this book which shows Christian views by the side of an irreconcilable
+Judaism, and a worldly empire in Jerusalem, the beloved city with twenty-four
+Jewish elders representing the twelve tribes of Israel. The rest of Jerusalem is to
+be finally converted while there is no hope for paganism. The difference between
+Israelites and Gentiles remains a radical one even in the Holy City when the new
+heaven and the new earth has been created. The Gentile-Christians appear as citizens
+of a lower order. The Israelites alone live in the city while the Gentiles only
+walk in the light thereof, and they shall bring the glory and honor of the nations
+into it.</p>
+
+<p>We have given a few glimpses of the problems of the St. John literature only.
+It is impossible to go over the whole field. Nor is it necessary to do so. Professor
+Holtzmann has given us so complete a presentation that we need but refer to his
+work which is indispensable to all interested in the literature of the New Testament.
+It will be the more valuable and welcome as it is furnished with an index, a feature
+rarely found in German books.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. C.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Die Willensfreiheit und ihre Gegner.</span> By <i>Dr. Constantin Gutberlet</i>. Fulda:
+Fuldaer Actiendruckerei. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>Dr. Constantin Gutberlet regards the doctrine of free-will as a cardinal doctrine
+of Christianity. In the present booklet he endeavors to show that all attacks
+made upon it by unchristian savants have failed. He criticises Höffding, Lombroso,
+Wundt, Münsterberg, Lotze, P. Ree, and Schopenhauer, and establishes as his own
+view a theory of free-will which he calls “freedom of choice.” He says: “There
+is no decision without <i>sufficient</i> reason, but there may be without <i>rational</i> reason.
+The sufficient reason is that a greater good may be recognised as possessing ‘blind’
+sides, that we can do without it and even reject it for the sake of these ‘blind’
+sides. On the other hand, a lesser good may be given as an object of willing, and
+our willing by its own energy conditions the free decision of the will” (p. 25). Freedom
+of will is not a reversal of causation, which latter, according to Gutberlet, is
+“an absolutely necessary law” (p. 8 and <i>passim</i>).</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_647">[647]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to understand how Gutberlet, taking this view, can class himself
+among the indeterminists. From his premises, we should expect him to take the
+view which we have defended, that freedom of will is not contradictory to determinism.
+If freedom of will means freedom of choice, in which “we ourselves, as the
+contents of our ideas, feelings, and dispositions, are the cause not only of our activities,
+but also of our free decision” (p. 19), then our decisions are most certainly determined
+by our character. Gutberlet’s criticism of Wundt (pp. 167-171), who defends
+freedom of will and determinism, is wide of the mark, and it seems that Gutberlet
+is either not clear on this point himself or he does not draw the consequences
+of his own standpoint. Says Gutberlet: “Only on the supposition that there is
+no other than ‘mechanical’ causation of natural forces, can the determinist maintain
+that freedom abolishes the principle of causation. In the application of the
+principle of Causation ‘what happens has a cause’ to natural forces, the principle
+can be inverted thus: ‘when all sufficient causes are given, the effect follows with
+necessity.’ Yet if there are spiritual agents which stand above the mechanical
+causation of nature and natural forces, we cannot <i>a priori</i> declare that their effects
+follow with the same necessity from their character as is the case with nature.
+Accordingly, unless we assume the questionable theory that free causation is impossible,
+we cannot invert here the principle of causation and use it against free
+decision” (p. 168).</p>
+
+<p>How does this sentence agree with Mr. Gutberlet’s statements that causation is
+an absolutely necessary law and that “we ourselves ... are the cause of our free
+decision.” Our decisions are determined by “our ideas, feelings, and dispositions,”
+and yet a sufficient cause determines its effect only if the causation is mechanical,
+not if it is spiritual. Gutberlet explains the difficulty as follows: “Certainly, if we
+did not reduce the free decision <i>once made</i> (die <i>eingetretene</i> freie Entscheidung), to
+an adequate cause, we should sin against logic and psychology. But we understand by
+‘adequate cause of a decision’ not only the influence of motives, but
+also the energy of a free will.” Very well then, Mr. Gutberlet would be a determinist
+as much as Wundt. Decisions are determined by two factors: (1) by the
+motives (i. e. the objects which act as stimuli upon the will) and (2) by the character
+of the agent. Not everybody is affected by the same stimulus in the same way. One
+chooses this and another that motive, and his character determines the choice; and
+a man of a certain character, under definitely given conditions, will freely and yet
+necessarily choose a certain motive. Dr. Gutberlet, it appears to us, says yes and
+no in one breath.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Gutberlet is the editor of the <i>Philosophisches Jahrbuch</i>, a Roman Catholic
+periodical. He belongs to that class of men who by partisans of free thought are regarded
+as especially dangerous. He is not as narrow as the common type of <i>defensores
+fidei</i>. He studies the works of modern savants “whose intellectual superiority,” as he
+confesses, he “admires in many respects.” He is broader than most of his <i>confreres</i>,
+and thus he makes the creed of his church appear broader than it practically is.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_648">[648]</span>We can see no danger in the appearance of such men. It is true, he will make converts
+among the educated, or at least, he will keep some wavering elements within
+the pale of the church; for the Roman church is, upon the whole, still very hostile
+to progress. But, on the other hand, such a man is in his circles a missionary of
+science; he will help to broaden the views of his brethren. He is learning, and
+they will learn from him.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">P. C.</span></p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie.</span> By <i>Wilhelm Wundt</i>. Leipsic:
+Wilhelm Engelmann. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>Wundt’s “Physiological Psychology” is perhaps justly regarded as his best and
+most valuable work. We have just received the first part of the fourth edition and may
+expect that the second part will soon appear. We intend to review the whole work
+as soon as completed, and will state here only that this new edition contains, among
+many emendations and additions, an explicit account of the modern methods of
+psychological investigations, with descriptions and illustrations of the most important
+instruments invented for that purpose.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Vergleichend-entwickelungsgeschichtliche und anatomische Studien im Bereiche
+der Hirnanatomie.</span> 3. <span class="smcap">Riechapparat und Ammonshorn.</span> Abdruck
+aus <i>Anatomischer Anzeiger</i>. By <i>Dr. L. Edinger</i>. (Jena: 1893. Gustav
+Fischer.)</h4>
+
+<p>Dr. Edinger proves in this essay that in the cerebral evolution of animals the
+cortex makes its first appearance in the formation of the cornu ammonis. This
+convolution being the centre of smell, it is more than merely probable that smell
+sensations, or something analogous to smell sensations, were phylogenetically the first
+psychical functions.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">État mental des hystériques les stigmates mentaux.</span> By <i>Pierre Janet</i>. Paris:
+Rueff &amp; Co. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>M. Pierre Janet, one of the most prominent disciples of Professor Charcot,
+presents in this little volume of two hundred and thirty-three pages a summary of
+the results of modern psychical research as it is understood at the Salpétrière.
+Charcot himself recommends the book to the medical profession. Janet investigates
+anæsthesia (Chap. I), amnesia, abulia, the diseases of motion, and the modifications
+of character. The author proposes to “describe the phenomena and endeavors
+to establish a rigorous determinism of their relations. The moral view of a
+diseased person,” he says, “ought to constitute a part of the clinical diagnosis
+while the psychical state must be closely investigated in its connection with physiological
+facts. This is the only way in which the physician can gain a knowledge
+of the entire man and understand the diseases which affect his organism.”</p>
+
+<p>Professor Charcot states that Professor Janet’s researches on the mental state of
+hysterical persons were begun long ago and completed under his supervision; that
+they were expounded by M. Janet in the Spring of 1892 in a few lectures at the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_649">[649]</span>Salpétrière; that they tend to confirm the idea, often expressed in his own teachings,
+that hysteria is upon the whole a mental disease.</p>
+
+<p>Hypnotism has long enough been regarded not only as harmless but even as a
+panacea for almost all the ailments of mankind. It would be well to heed Charcot’s
+warning, as hysterical diseases may be treated with better success, if the mystery that
+still surrounds them disappears before calm and scientific investigation.</p>
+
+<p class="right">ς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">L’école d’anthropologie criminelle.</span> By <i>l’Abbé Maurice de Baets</i>. Gand:
+P. van Fleteren. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>Dr. de Baets, Professor of Philosophy of the Gregorian University of Rome,
+Italy, and Secretary to the Bishop of Ghent, criticises in this elegantly printed little
+volume the modern school of criminal anthropology. He believes with Herbert
+Spencer that, if a great number of people accept certain errors, these errors must
+contain a kernel of truth. Professor de Baets says that he does not deny crime to
+be an outgrowth of the organism, to be inherited, to be closely connected with insanity,
+etc., but he cannot approve of criminal unaccountableness. The denial of
+responsibility, he says, is the denial of the wrong, and the denial of the wrong is
+the denial of morality. He sums up his view in italics on page 48: “Man is responsible
+for his acts in the measure that his acts depend on a free will.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Against Dogma and Free-Will.</span> By <i>H. Croft Hiller</i>. London: Williams and
+<span class="smcap">Norgate</span>. 1892.</h4>
+
+<p>The author has much to say against ecclesiasticism and sacerdotalism, and while
+he repudiates such men as Wundt and Ribot, he “begs to thank Drs. Weismann,
+Luys, and Ferrier from whose labors the views expressed in this treatise derive that
+scientific authentication without which they would be worthless.” The book is apparently
+a first venture into the stormy ocean of literary pursuits.</p>
+
+<p class="right">ς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">The Philosophy of Individuality, or the One and the Many.</span> By <i>Antoinette
+Brown Blackwell</i>. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>The author trusts that she has “<i>demonstrated</i> a conscious immortality.” In a
+former book of hers entitled “The Physical Basis of Immortality,” 1876, she propounded
+“the theory of persistent mind-matter individuals” which are to be conceived
+as ultimate atoms. The present volume of five hundred and nineteen pages
+is written to show that “this conception of the ultimate atoms could consistently
+explain and harmonise mental and material phenomena and by coördinated interpretations
+of the most diverse processes simplify and unify nature and her manifestations.”
+The theory of the correlation of matter and mind is accepted; “Nature,”
+the author says, “is nothing if not mathematical,” and there are many passages to
+which no monistic thinker would take exception. Along with them we find statements,
+e. g. on the rhythmic motion of atoms, etc., which it will be difficult to
+prove. Her peculiar view is characterised in the following sentence: “All ultimate
+individualities <i>may</i> be identical in kind, but no obvious necessity decides that they
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_650">[650]</span><i>must</i> be, and in an order of things where other varieties are prevalent, the weight
+of evidence for the present is on the side of varieties, even in the ultimate units.”
+The author’s theory (if we rightly understand her) has been tried before. Some
+suggestions of Goethe’s seem to indicate that he believed in soul-monads, and the
+German psychologist Herbart erected on the assumption of material soul-atoms his
+system of a mathematical psychology in which sound science was curiously mingled
+with improbable vagaries. The author of “The Philosophy of Individuality,” although
+apparently quite well informed otherwise, has, strange enough, not taken
+notice either of Goethe or of Herbart. Perhaps she would have abandoned her
+theory if she had been fully familiar with Herbartism and the critique which it has
+received; for Herbart’s soul-atoms are to-day regarded as a thing of the past.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart.</span> By <i>Prof. Rudolf Eucken</i>. Leipsic: Veit
+&amp; Co. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>Prof. Rudolf Eucken discusses in this volume such topics as “Subjective—Objective”;
+“A priori—A posteriori”; “Monism—Dualism”; “Idealism, Realism,
+and Naturalism”; “Theoretical—Practical,” and so forth. It seems to us that
+Eucken has not yet fully succeeded in reconciling his philosophy with natural science.
+We are glad to notice that he has a critical eye for the shortcomings of naturalists
+under whose methods of classification and mechanical conceptions the
+properly spiritual of man would be eliminated. He is judicious in his exposition of
+the various problems, but we miss a final solution, such as would clearly state and
+recognise the truth in both. Nevertheless the book is sound, full of valuable information,
+and its perusal is to be recommended to every student of philosophy.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<h4 class="book"><span class="smcap">The Æsthetic Element in Morality.</span> By <i>Frank Chapman Sharp, Ph.D.</i> New
+York: Macmillan &amp; Co. 1893.</h4>
+
+<p>The book contains chapters on: (1) the theory of altruism; (2) the intrinsic
+worth of character; (3) an analysis of moral beauty; (4) an examination of the æsthetic
+method of ethics; and (5) the idea of obligation in æsthetics and ethics. The
+author’s knowledge of ethical theories appears to be limited. Duns Scotus, the
+Realist, is called a thoroughgoing Nominalist. In spite of such defects, we find
+much that is good in the book. In the end of his discussion the author says with
+truth: “When the element of the <i>good</i>, or that which is capable of clothing itself
+in the form of an ideal, is taken out of the conception of obligation, this latter
+degenerates into what is nothing more than mere submission to an arbitrary imperative....Prometheus,
+chained to the rocks for bringing the gift of fire to the
+wretched barbarous inhabitants of the earth, in defiance of the will of the ‘Father
+of gods and men,’ is one of the grandest productions of the human imagination,
+and were the Supreme Being such a one as Augustine and Calvin imagined him,
+we should despise the wretched slaves that licked the dust at his feet.”</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_651">[651]</span></p>
+
+<h3 class="nobreak" id="PERIODICALS_IV">PERIODICALS.</h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<h4>ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. V. Nos. 1 and 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die Stabilität der Raumwerte auf der Netzhaut.</span> By <i>Franz Hillebrand</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber ein optisches Paradoxon.</span> (Second Article.) By <i>Franz Brentano</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span> (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>This second article, “On an Optical Paradox,” is a rejoinder of Franz Brentano
+of Vienna to Th. Lipps. We gave an account of this interesting discussion in <i>The
+Monist</i>, Vol. III, No. 1, p. 153 et seqq. Professor Brentano insists on explaining
+the optical illusion concerning distances between two points, as seen in <a href="#brentano-figure-01">Fig. 1-3</a>, by
+an overestimation of small and an underestimation of large angles. He complains
+of being misunderstood by Professor Lipps who substitutes “acute” for “small”
+and “obtuse” for “large”; for, says he, in comparisons both angles may be obtuse
+or both may be acute. Professor Brentano adds some more puzzling figures to
+prove his case; and, as in his first article, his propositions are ingenious and thought-stimulating;
+but his arguments do not suffice to convince us of the validity of his
+theory. We do not exactly intend to deny the general rule as to the overestimation
+of large and underestimation of small angles, but are inclined to believe that it will
+not serve as a sufficient explanation. We reproduce the most important figures
+devised by Brentano, and take the liberty of adding a few remarks and additional
+figures of our own.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-01" style="max-width: 15.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-01.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 1.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-02" style="max-width: 15.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-02.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 2.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_652">[652]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="brentano-figure-03" style="max-width: 50.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-03.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 3.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><a href="#brentano-figure-04">Fig. 4</a> represents two right angles, one of which is divided into nine angles of
+10° each. Brentano claims that we so overestimate the nine small angles as to take
+the undivided right angle as an acute one. I can only say that however much I have
+tried, I am not subject to the illusion.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="brentano-figure-04" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-04.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 4.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In <a href="#brentano-figure-05">Fig. 5</a> we have on the straight line <i>AB</i> a series of stations which are connected
+with a common centre. The line <i>AB</i> is not a curve, but this figure reminds
+us of a perspective view of the sector of a circle. The drawing appears as the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_653">[653]</span>diagrammatic picture of a shield, the buckle of which is in <i>C</i>. Thus <i>AB</i> is conceived
+as representing a curve. It does not seem that a comparison of the angles
+has anything to do with the illusion.</p>
+
+<p>How much perspective interferes with the optical illusions under discussion,
+impresses itself upon my mind, when I think of <a href="#brentano-figure-05">figure 5</a> as the diagram of a mountain,
+rising above the plane <i>AB</i>. If I imagine I stand below the plane, which may
+be a high table-land, the line <i>AB</i> appears to my eye straight. But when I imagine
+I am looking down upon the plane, the curvature of <i>AB</i> becomes very strongly
+marked.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp34" id="brentano-figure-05" style="max-width: 17.1875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-05.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 5.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In <a href="#brentano-figure-06">Fig. 6</a> we can detect no optical illusion. The line <i>AB</i> appears straight to us.
+The drawing reminds us of a sunrise on the ocean.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp81" id="brentano-figure-06" style="max-width: 37.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-06.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 6.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_654">[654]</span></p>
+
+<p>The same must be said about <a href="#brentano-figure-07">Figure 7</a>. Brentano, in agreement with Lipps,
+claims that we are inclined to regard the distance between the ends of the two lines
+as larger than between the points. If there is any illusion at all, it seems to me,
+that on the contrary, the distance between the ends of the lines appears shorter.
+And why? We measure the distance
+by allowing our eyes to run from one
+point to the other and then comparing
+the measurements. This comparison is
+geometrically effected by combining
+the respective starting points, and
+thus judging as to the parallelism of
+these two lines mentally constructed.
+Whether or not the dots appear equidistant,
+depends upon the execution of
+all these operations. While directly
+measuring the distances between the
+points, we have an easier measurement
+where the lines are attached. The lines
+give to the points a certain vim; they
+almost appear to move with a velocity
+indicated by the length of the little lines, while the isolated dots present a very
+phlegmatic appearance.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp54" id="brentano-figure-07" style="max-width: 12.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-07.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 7.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In order to see what effects
+other positions of the
+lines produce, let us compare
+in <a href="#brentano-figure-09">Fig. 9</a> the several relations
+by covering the rest. If there
+is any illusion as to <i>a</i> and <i>b</i>,
+we should say that the points
+of <i>a</i> appear at a greater distance;
+as to <i>b</i> and <i>c</i>, we see
+the greater distance in <i>c</i>, as
+to <i>c</i> and <i>d</i>, we feel doubtful,
+while any comparison with <i>e</i>,
+tends strongly to convince us
+of their equal distance. The
+reason is obvious. The lines in <i>e</i> assist us in drawing the parallels, which we consciously
+or unconsciously construct in order to compare the distances.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp75" id="brentano-figure-08" style="max-width: 18.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-08.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 8.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="brentano-figure-09" style="max-width: 37.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-09.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 9.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_655">[655]</span></p>
+
+<p>A comparison like that of α and β in <a href="#brentano-figure-08">Fig. 8</a>, where the equal length of the combining
+lines is very apparent, induced Brentano to regard the illusion which is observed
+in <a href="#brentano-figure-01">Figures 1-3</a> as due to the angles. In our opinion he is mistaken. For the
+illusion actually takes place in α and β; only it is quickly corrected with the help of
+the parallels, which, as in ε, assist the imagination in making an exact comparison.
+When we place α and β either at a sufficient distance, or are somehow prevented
+from making use of the parallel lines, we shall have the same illusion as appears in
+<a href="#brentano-figure-01">Figures 1, 2, 3</a>. To prove this, we have but to bring the figure α in a slanting
+position, as is shown in λ, and the illusion is so strong that many will find it difficult
+to believe that λ is an electrotyped duplicate of α.</p>
+
+<p>The mooted illusions are not sense-illusions, but illusions of judgment; and we
+believe that the explanation of these curious phenomena must be sought in the elements
+which unconsciously enter into the make-up of our judgments.</p>
+
+<p>Lipps says that lines are felt to be movements. If a line is continued, albeit
+with a slight declination, the motion appears “free and victorious,” aspiring beyond
+itself; while, if confined in the corner of an acute angle, it seems cut off and
+impeded. The victoriously progressive motion is overestimated; the checked motion
+is underestimated.</p>
+
+<p>Brentano, in order to meet Lipps’s objections, proposes a few additional figures,
+of which we reproduce the most important ones in <a href="#brentano-figure-10">Fig. 10-14</a>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp80" id="brentano-figure-10" style="max-width: 25.0em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-10.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 10.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="brentano-figure-11" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-11.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 11.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-12" style="max-width: 6.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-12.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 12.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-13" style="max-width: 6.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-13.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 13.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-14" style="max-width: 6.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-14.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 14.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It seems to us that the main part which the angles play in these or any other
+similar figures, consists in leading our imagination astray. The parallel lines which
+we attempt to construct for our comparison, switch slightly off with an inclination
+toward the angles.</p>
+
+<p>But that is not all; there are other elements that affect our judgment at the
+very outset. In measuring a distance we do something, and in looking at a diagram
+we think something. The diagram is suggestive of some reality to which we compare
+it. All these ideas, be they conscious, subconscious, or even unconscious,
+affect our judgment and are sometimes apt to lead it astray.</p>
+
+<p>In addition we have to mention two things, the influence of which upon our
+verdict cannot be doubted; the one is the size of the entire figure, the other the
+vacuity of the distance to be measured: both tend to make the distance appear
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_656">[656]</span>longer than it really is. To illustrate this, we add the three <a href="#brentano-figure-15">Figures 15, 16, 17</a>
+which contain no angles and yet show the same illusions.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-15" style="max-width: 9.375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-15.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 15.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-16" style="max-width: 12.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-16.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 16.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<figure class="figmulti" id="brentano-figure-17" style="max-width: 15.625em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/brentano-figure-17.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption>
+      <p>Fig. 17.</p>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The distance between the points in <a href="#brentano-figure-17">Figure 17</a> appears longer than in <a href="#brentano-figure-16">Figure 16</a>,
+and in <a href="#brentano-figure-16">Figure 16</a> again longer than in <a href="#brentano-figure-15">Figure 15</a>. The fact is, that before starting
+on our measurement-journey, we have in <a href="#brentano-figure-17">Figure 17</a> already traversed a good distance
+after having noted the extraordinarily lengthened boundary marks. The town
+<i>A</i> may be exactly as far as the town <i>B</i>, yet the journey to <i>A</i> will appear longer, if
+I have to ride an hour before I reach the station, while I may live opposite the
+terminus of the railroad to <i>B</i>.</p>
+
+<p>When our eyes glide down from one point to the other, we pass in one case
+through an empty desert the dreariness of which is not interrupted. We almost lose
+our way and become lonesome in its monotony. If our way, however, is full of
+variations, we are pleasantly entertained and regard our journey as so much shorter.
+The contrast is most obvious in <a href="#brentano-figure-10">figure 10</a>. The time-illusions as to the swiftness of
+hours of work or amusement and the slowness of moments of <i>ennui</i> have become
+proverbial among all nations. The more dreariness, the more marked is the lengthening
+of the distance, while even a partial accompaniment shortens the traversed
+road.</p>
+
+<p class="right">κρς.</p>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. V. Nos. 3 and 4.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Theorie des Farbensehens.</span> By <i>H. Ebbinghaus</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Ueber den Muskelsinn bei Blinden.</span> By <i>Paul Hocheisen</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Litteraturbericht.</span> (Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVII. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Einiges zur Grundlegung der Sittenlehre.</span> (First Article.) By <i>J. Petzoldt</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Kritik der Grundanschauungen der Sociologie H. Spencer’s.</span> By <i>P. Barth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Werththeorie und Ethik.</span> (Second Article.) By <i>Chr. Ehrenfels</i>. (Leipsic:
+O. R. Reisland.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_657">[657]</span></p>
+
+<h4>THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. V. No. 3.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On Errors of Observation.</span> By <i>Prof. James McKeen Cattell</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Minor Studies from the Psychological Laboratory of Clark University.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On the Discrimination of Groups of Rapid Clicks.</span> By <i>Thaddeus L. Bolton</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Statistics of Dreams.</span> By <i>Mary Whiton Calkins</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On the Pressure Sense of the Drum of the Ear and “Facial Vision.”</span>
+By <i>F. B. Dresslar</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On Reaction-Times When the Stimulus Is Applied to the Reacting Hand.</span>
+By <i>J. F. Reigart and Edmund C. Sanford</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Experiments upon Physiological Memory by Means of the Interference
+of Associations.</span> By <i>John A. Bergström</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A New Instrument for Weber’s Law; With Indications of a Law of Sense
+Memory.</span> By <i>James H. Leuba</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A New Pendulum Chronograph.</span> By <i>Edmund C. Sanford, Ph. D.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Laboratory Course in Physiological Psychology.</span> (Fourth Paper.) By
+<i>Edmund C. Sanford, Ph. D.</i> (Worcester, Mass.: J. H. Orpha.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. II. No. 3.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">German Kantian Bibliography.</span> By <i>Dr. Erich Adickes</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Epistemology of Neo-Kantism.</span> By <i>Prof. Andrew Seth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mental Measurement.</span> By <i>Prof. J. McK. Cattell</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Book Reviews.</span> (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn &amp; CO.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 5.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Psychologie du musicien.</span> 1. <span class="smcap">L’evolution des aptitudes musicales.</span> By
+<i>L. Dauriac</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La sociabilité et la morale chez les animaux.</span> By <i>Houssay</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sur les idées générales.</span> By <i>Marchesini</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Questionnaire sur l’audition colorée, figurée et illuminée.</span> By <i>Gruber</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">L’attention et les images.</span> By <i>F. Paulhan</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Une illusion d’optique.</span> By <i>B. Bourdon</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Science et socialisme.</span> <i>G. Sorel</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Analyses et comptes rendus.</span> (Paris: Félix Alcan.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. XVIII. No. 6.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">La nouvelle théorie de l’hérédité de Weismann.</span> By <i>Y. Delage</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Un calculateur du type visuel.</span> By <i>J.-M. Charcot and A. Binet</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Psychologie du musicien.</span>—II. <span class="smcap">L’oreille musicale.</span> By <i>L. Dauriac</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>REVUE DE MÉTAPHYSIQUE ET DE MORALE.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le mouvement et les arguments de Zénon d’Élée.</span> By <i>G. Noël</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza.</span> By <i>V. Delbos</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_658">[658]</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le concept du nombre chez les Pythagoriciens.</span> By <i>G. Milhaud</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le dialogue dans l’enseignement de la philosophie.</span> By <i>C. Mélinand</i>.
+(Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. I. No. 3.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Les prétendus sophismes de zénon d’élée.</span> By <i>V. Brochard</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Spir et sa doctrine.</span> By <i>A. Penjon</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Essai sur le caractère général de la connaissance.</span> By <i>G. Remacle</i>.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<h4>PHILOSOPHISCHES JAHRBUCH.</h4>
+
+<p class="center">CONTENTS: Vol. VI. No. 2.</p>
+
+<blockquote class="contents">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Begriff der Philosophie.</span> By <i>Uebinger</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Die Objectivität und die Sicherheit des Erkennens.</span> By <i>Isenkrahe</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Begriff des “Warren.”</span> (Concluded.) By <i>Franz Schmid</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Der Grundplan der menschlichen Wissenschaft.</span> By <i>Bahlmann, S. J.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Handschriftliches zu den Werken des Alanus.</span> By <i>Bäumker</i>. (Fulda, 1893.)</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76881 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-01.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-01.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0fea81
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-01.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-02.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-02.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d9752cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-02.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-03.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-03.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..739feff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-03.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-04.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-04.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d79330e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-04.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-05.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-05.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2dfac50
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-05.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-06.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-06.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..911ee6e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-06.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-07.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-07.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..788674e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-07.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-08.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-08.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cf5df3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-08.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-09.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-09.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9cc6d99
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-09.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-10.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-10.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b3f3bb4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-10.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-11.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-11.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4ecc245
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-11.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-12.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-12.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..da8a2ab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-12.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-13.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-13.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..38a3ed1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-13.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-14.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-14.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6866b8a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-14.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-15.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-15.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..21e2339
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-15.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-16.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-16.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f24f272
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-16.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-17.jpg b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-17.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bbeb8a0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/brentano-figure-17.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/cover.jpg b/76881-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71985b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/cut1.jpg b/76881-h/images/cut1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3cde86b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/cut1.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/cut2.jpg b/76881-h/images/cut2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d9752cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/cut2.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/cut3.jpg b/76881-h/images/cut3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e54fb5e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/cut3.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/cut4.jpg b/76881-h/images/cut4.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eef85a4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/cut4.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/cut5.jpg b/76881-h/images/cut5.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..739feff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/cut5.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/diagram.jpg b/76881-h/images/diagram.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..260a23c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/diagram.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula01.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula01.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..241a1be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula01.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula02.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula02.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..231464c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula02.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula03.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula03.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e709291
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula03.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula04.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula04.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..29d8882
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula04.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula05.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula05.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1865afa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula05.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula06.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula06.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fccedda
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula06.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula07.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula07.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66d0648
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula07.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula08.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula08.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f00c9eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula08.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula09.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula09.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..94f655d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula09.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula10.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula10.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3de29a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula10.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula11.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula11.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..902ede0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula11.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula12.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula12.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b923132
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula12.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/formula13.jpg b/76881-h/images/formula13.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e7bc1f2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/formula13.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-1.jpg b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5fac0b4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-1.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-2.jpg b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a56fc1c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-2.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-3.jpg b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ea9d365
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-3.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-4.jpg b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-4.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..47abee7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/fourth-dimension-figure-4.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/plate1.jpg b/76881-h/images/plate1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0a06b2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/plate1.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/plate2.jpg b/76881-h/images/plate2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d73ba3a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/plate2.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/plate3.jpg b/76881-h/images/plate3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d636891
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/plate3.jpg
diff --git a/76881-h/images/plate4.jpg b/76881-h/images/plate4.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c196be4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/76881-h/images/plate4.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5c1a002
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #76881
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76881)