Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/127

 VIII NEW BOOKS. Philosophy and Life ; and other Essays. By J. H. MUIKHEAD, M.A., Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy in the University of Birmingham. London : Sonnenschein & Co. Pp. 274. A PREFATORY " Author's Note " states that " of the first series of Essays in this volume, about one-half have already appeared in the Fortnightly Review and other journals ; . . . they were all written in the first instance as lectures for various more or less popular societies ". Their titles are : " Philosophy and Life," " Professor William Wallace " (as man and as thinker), " R. L. Stevenson's Philosophy of Life " (a very striking and suggestive appreciation), " Abstract and Practical Ethics," " What Im- perialism Means," " The Science of Poor-law Relief," " Modern Methods of Temperance Reform," " A Liberal Education," " Psychology and Education ". The remaining papers four in number are philosophical in the technical sense of this word : they are reprinted partly from MIND and partly from the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society : " The Place of the Concept in Logical Doctrine," " The Goal of Knowledge," " Hypo- thesis," " Is Knowledge of Space a priori ? " They are all interesting and suggestive, full of material for thought and discussion ; but we can allow ourselves only a brief comment on the first two of them. The author maintains that there is a sense in which the concept is really prior to judgment ; that " the beginnings of knowledge must be looked for in a concept or form of apprehension which, like the undifferentiated con- tinuum of the psychologist, may be said to contain in itself the possibility of all differences, but to hold them as yet in solution, awaiting the dis- tinguishing, crystallising action of the logical judgment to give them at once a separate place and coherent connexion in the whole " (p. 204). Pursuing this line of thought, he describes the goal of knowledge as " a concept or mode of apprehending the world in which the processes of differentiation and intagration have been brought to completion in a fully articulated system of coherent judgments ". This use of the term concept certainly avoids one difficulty in the doctrine that judgment is the refer- ence of an idea " to Reality " ; but, passing from this point, it seems to the present writer that Prof. Muirhead's discussion of the fundamental question to which these lead up suffers from the presence of an unproved and undiscussed assumption. What is the relation of the ideal of know- ledge to ultimate reality ? In answering this question it is assumed that we are shut up to a choice between two alternatives : the view of Mr. Bradley and Mr. M'Taggart, that there is an alien element in Reality which even an Absolute or complete knowledge could never embrace ; and the contrary view of T. H. Green and the Master of Balliol, that " a com- plete knowledge of the conditions of the possibility of an object would be equivalent to the reality of the object". Is the choice only between 8