Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/552

 538 CEITICAL NOTICES : exhausted in them, it is true at the end, as at the beginning, that, it is not perceived by the senses, but only in spirit and in truth. And is it an absolutely impossible assumption that the same spirit should have created in itself a realm of higher entities, capable of a greater or less development, and sharing with itself the property of being only spiritually cognisable ? The spiritual monads would stand to the realm of thing-monads in relations of graded and changeable inwardness, appearing to sensuous perception as inter- action. Naturally, if we accept such a standpoint, the physical universe cannot be regarded as a system fully complete in itself and inaccessible to any external influence. The process of nature would only be a part of the process of the universe ; the whole of psycho-physical reality alone would show the unbroken self- sufficiency improperly demanded of nature, as a part of the whole^ The universal psycho-physical parallelism represented by Paulsen and Fechner, Prof. Busse considers the only application of the principle ultimately possible. Its employment as a mere working hypothesis always breaks down, owing to its negative assumptions. Wundt and Miinsterberg are examples of the inevitable advance from its employment as a regulative, to its enforcal as a constitutive principle dogmatically claiming acceptance as the true doctrine of the relation between body and soul. Prof. Busse discusses, every- where with acuteness, the three legitimate forms of parallelism dualism, realistic and idealistic monism. I shall confine myself here to some points in his investigation of whether, and how far, parallelism is reconcilable with an idealistic basis. Idealism, he allows, certainly admits of a parallelism between one series of psychical processes, such as the series of presentations the content, of which constitutes physical phenomena, and another series of psychical phenomena whether in the same or in different indi- viduals, so that certain members of the one should correspond to> certain members of the other, whilst a relation of cause and effect only took place between members of the same series. As psychical content, the affinity of these two series may be admitted, but there is no meaning in calling them identical, two sides of one and the same thing. They are two entirely separated series of psychical processes. The author will not admit that the identity of a presenta- tion and its content has anything to do with the identity of the two series, which are as much distinct as the thought which one person has and expresses from the thought which he occasions in another. On purely idealistic grounds there is identity without duality, but, if the presentation content is hypostasised to produce the physical series, there is duality without identity. Moreover, along with the identity of the two series, the idealist must give up their parallelism, since the perceptions whose content forms the physical process are the temporally later effects of the in- telligible process to which they ought to run parallel. The author considers this a point at once very difficult to follow and very important to understand. Take the case of a subject S who