Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/380

 366 J. H. MUIRHEAD : epistemology has to say on the continuity between percept and concept, fact and hypothesis on the one hand, and between causal connexion and other forms of identity on the other. Is there, it may be asked, any "direct" experience of "identical recurring qualities or aspects within the general mass of otherwise undiffer- entiated organic consciousness" without admixture of concept or concept which is not in germ hypothesis and as such to be tested by the consistency it introduces into experience as a whole ? Mr. Taylor in the latter part of his book seems to admit no other test than this and frequently alludes to it in express terms. The question which the reader will press is whether the test of self-consistency is identical with that of a "pure experience" upon which the emphasis is laid in the chapter before us. The too hasty identi- fication of these divergent standards seems to me an obscurity from which the argument of the book never shakes itself wholly free. The statement of 'the possible relations in which a Science may stand to Metaphysics raises a similar doubt. No science seems to be wholly deductive in the above sense ; on the other hand none is wholly independent of Metaphysics. It is altogether a matter of degree depending on the relative concreteness of the subject matter. At the one extreme we have mathematics which may go its independent way, though this independence is at once challenged when the axioms of any particular system, e.y., Eu- clidean geometry, are questioned. At the other extreme we have Logic as now generally interpreted. Intermediate between them stand such sciences as Psychology whether in the "falsified" form with which the laboratory makes us familiar or in the more concrete form of ordinary text-books. Ethics one should have supposed as a science of the concrete forces on the student from the outset the question of the value of our ideals in relation to experience as a whole practical, theoretic and assthetic, and thus stands in a peculiarly close relation to metaphysics. To the failure to keep this clearly before him is due it appears to me a certain hesitancy in the writer's appreciation of the moral sentiment which in one passage is described as a subordinate section of the facts of experience, in another as the contrivance for bringing the actions of the individual into harmony with the permanent interests of the species and of himself as its representative. That Green, who is here referred to as a warning, occupied himself in the Prolegomena to Ethics with metaphysical discussions, as does Mr. Taylor himself, is due to the fact that in his view, as in Mr. Taylor's, certain meta- physical assumptions as to the character of our moral experience have stood in the way of the correct appreciation of the facts. Had Green been writing now when these assumptions have been largely abandoned he would have been among the first to welcome the author's admirable programme as at least an essential part of a future ethic ; although so long as views such as those of the pre- ceding pages were current he would have probably felt that there is still room for greater clearness as to the nature of self-determination