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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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).

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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.

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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.).

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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.)

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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.)

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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.)

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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.)

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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.)

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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.