Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/153

 PHILOSOPHICAL PERIODICALS. 139 ence to the Imperative is not only consistent with moral common sense but necessarily right. Again he fails to see that, even if his formula expresses a correct analysis of the psychical event, which we call ' a moral choice,' we mean, by so calling it, not only that it is of this nature, but also that it is ' right ' in another and more ultimate sense, in which its Tightness does depend on its results.] B. Reininger. ' Das Causal- problem bei Hume und Kant.' [Quite worthless : the writer has utterly failed to distinguish the various questions which he pretends to answer. He sees both clearly and truly only (a) that both Hume and Kant thought all causal judgments synthetic ; (6) that Hume tried to explain why we believe that one thing will follow another, and (c) denied the possibility of proving the existence of necessary connexion (in some sense) between any two events ; finally (d) that Kant does not deny Hume's explana- tion (6), but tries to prove, what Hume declares indemonstrable (c), by the ' metaphysical hypothesis ' that ' our understanding gives laws to nature '. On these data H. Reininger seems not unnaturally to conclude, that Hume's theory is true in all essentials, and that Kant, instead of refuting him, has only made a brilliant suggestion in answer of an insolu- able problem which Hume did not attack. Everything else is either vague or untrue or both. E.g., he tells us Hume and Kant are agreed that ' the basis of special causal judgments is experience,' without a hint that, whereas Kant means by it ' experience is necessary to teach us what is necessarily connected with what ; but it does teach us truly,' Hume means the following tangle of contradictions ' experience causes us to believe that two things are necessarily connected; but there is no reason to believe that any two things are so ; and even if the two things in ques- tion were so, experience does not cause us to believe that they are so, since it only causes the expectation of the one to be necessarily connected with the perception of the other.'] Eecensionen, etc.