Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/556

 542 CRITICAL NOTICES I of experience, behind which we cannot go], what account can we render of the significance of the various elements in its growth ? We are to study the process of experience, not as a process, not from the point of view of its origin and course, but rather from the point of view of what it becomes, from the point of view of what it has in it to be. We are trying to discover, in the signifi- cant Aristotelian phrase, its TO ri yv eu/ai, what it essentially was " (pp. 45, 46). This amounts to what has been called an immanent criticism a criticism of the different aspects of subjective-objective experience by each other. A careful genetic survey of Sensational, Perceptual, and Con- ceptual experience (book ii., chaps, i. to iv.) brings out the meta- physical problems involved in each: viz., Kind, Quality, and Degree (in Sensation) ; relations of Time and Space ; the " more purely conceptual " relations of Number, Cause and Effect, Substance and Accident, etc. ; relations of Value and End. The problem of Metaphysics is to understand these various modes of determination, and to see within what limits each is valid. They are forms of a Constructive Activity, and give rise to certain main types of con- struction Perceptual, Scientific, Ethical, Esthetic, Eeligious, Speculative. Book iii. is occupied with discussion of the character and limits of each of these main types. Each is justified within its limits. Keligion is explained as an effort to view the universe as a complete system which is one, beautiful, and good ; Speculative Construction, as a systematic attempt to think out the justification for such a view of the Universe. So stated, there is little to object to in the distinction. But the chapter on Eeligion (pp. 138-145) seems to the present writer to be the one really unsatisfactory chapter in the book. To discuss it fully would carry us far afield. Prof. Mackenzie speaks of Religion when he means religions. Religions there are and have been ; there is (or let us hope there may be) Religion. What may be said of the former is not neces- sarily true of the latter. The author speaks of an attitude of mind which is above them all religions, poetry, metaphysics as they exist apart. To our mind that is Religion. But he also speaks as if Metaphysics in some way completed Religion at a higher level ; this suggests what Green called the one essential aberration of the Hegelian system. Yet he points out that the difficulties which make the limitations of "Religion" appear over again in the same forms in Metaphysics (pp. 143, 155). Also, on page 143, it is said that " it is difficult to convince men that good cannot exist at all except as a negation of evil," and, on page 154, that good "is only intelligible by contrast" with evil. If religion were merely a set of inadequate theories, doubtless it would differ from Metaphysics only as the uncritical differs from the critical method of dealing with the same problems ; but this does not appear to be Prof. Mackenzie's view. For him, Religion has an element of Feeling and of intuitive Insight. But he does not say what happens to these when we pass from religious to speculative construction,