Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/108

 '94 CRITICAL NOTICES : prove it so. ' Empirical idealism ' is still regarded as something of a paradox; I should like to see it regarded as a truism." A re-anthropomorphised Universe is the general outcome of this philosophy, which on the whole continues Lotze, Sigwart, and Benouvier's line of thinking, although it is so much more radically experiential in tone. Being so experiential, it has to be unacademic, informal and fragmentary; and this, from the point of view of making converts, is a bad practical defect. What we need now in English, it seems to me, is a more commanding and all-round statement in classic style and generalised terms of the personal idealism which these authors represent. Mr. Schiller might compass it, if he would tone down a little the exuberance of his polemic wit meanwhile we have these trial bricks, set in at separate points. Mr. Stout's contribution is a subtle paper on " Error," in which the personal idealism is less prominent than in the other essays. " It is essential to the possibility of error that both the real being and its unreal qualification must be present to consciousness," says Mr. Stout ; and he conveniently calls the real being, so far as it is present, the 'intent,' while he calls the qualification (whether true or untrue) the ' content ' of the consciousness in question. The most interesting results of this distinction are certain developments of Mr. Stout's well-known conceptualism. By inadvertence or confusion, he says, we may think of a different object from that which we are really interested in knowing and consequently really ' intend ' ; and we may as a result qualify our intent wrongly. In empirical matter error is in this way always possible, but not so when we intend abstract objects as such. ' Whiteness as such,' for example, is a direct creature of our intent. We can tell by inspection whether its nature is or is not inde- pendent of such an attribute as triangularity. In so experimenting on our mental object we are active ; but only in order that we may passively record the final result. This latter is true certainly and necessarily, for no other reality can have been intended than that on which the mental experiment was made. Thus there are limits set to the possibility of error wherever the whole object of our intent is unequivocally present to the mind. Mr. Stout makes application of this to Mathematical truth, and uses it to refute Bradley's dictum that all knowledge of ' Appearance ' is infected with error. Mr. Schiller's paper on ' Axioms as Postulates ' is a radical one indeed. Starting from the fact that the world as we know it is a gradual construction reached by successive trial, the Author denies that even ' in itself ' it is a datum ready-made. It takes its whole form from our successive experiments in shaping it. There is indeed a resisting factor, but the Aristotelian vrj is the 'best way in which to conceive of this. ' It is ; but it is only what is made of it ; ' and we must conceive it as the funded accumula- tion of successful plastic operations performed by striving beings