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 NEW BOOKS. 115 that it still means for him the sensationalist travesty of human cognition, and that he has not yet heard of the more radical empiricism which is voluntarist and will scorn no psychical fact as irrelevant. And so he continues to classify his theory under the old rubric as apriorism, instead of insisting that it really transcends and supersedes both of the old intellectualist classifications. Now of course in a sense a postulate may be called a priori. It is- something we bring to experience to illumine it. And no passive re- ceptivity of impressions could ever have produced it. And perhaps the word a priori is already vague and ambiguous enough not to resent, or even to welcome, this further interpretation. Again, almost every philo- sopher can, if he chooses, affiliate himself to Kant, with much the same show of reason. But where is the gain ? The reference to Kant imports into a system all the confusions of that great master, and to call the method of postulation a priori is merely to plunge in unfathomable obscurity what was pretty plain before. Nay more. The mere use of this misleading nomenclature blinds Dr. Schultz to the extent and importance of the empirical factor in his own theory. If he had gone into the reasons for our postulating, he would have seen that the apriority of our postulates is relative and rests on an empirical basis. It is an em- pirical fact that our nature is (or has come to be) such as to make certain demands on its experience. And those demands are provoked by the empirical nature of that experience. Our postulates therefore are not ultimately arbitrary or irrational; they can only be understood with reference to the conditions of life which suggested them and which they are intended to control. And so the ultimate tendency of the whole theory seems predominantly empiricist. I cannot but think also that Dr. Schultz's zeal on behalf of the old conception of substance, and his consequent preference of atomism to energetics, is strategically a mistake. It brings him into needless op- position to the most fruitful and progressive tendencies of modern physics. I heartily agree of course that our immediate consciousness of self-existence has served as the anthropomorphic model for the con- struction of the conception of substance ; also that it subsequently turns out that, as developed, it is not applicable to the stream of psychic events and that a soul-atom is psychologically useless, nay, impossible. But in a consistent Humanist this result should arouse suspicions of something wrong in a conception which thus stultifies itself. And such suspicions are promptly justified when it turns out that the material ectype of the substance-soul, the atom, is no less superfluous than its prototype. The physicists therefore of the ' energetic ' school have performed a great service to science by showing that the substrate-atom may be dispensed with. But does not this destroy all substance and plunge us anew into chaos ? The fear is groundless, though it might terrify those who knew no better psychology than Hume's. If neither psychical nor physical processes really exhibit to us the operation of ' substances ' such as we had conceived, why not simply remodel the conception ? Why not apply the name to those features in our experience which have given occasion for constructing the impracticable ideal which is the real source of all our trouble. If a ' soul ' is not an unchangeable, unknowable sub- stratum but a self-conscious stream of psychic processes, why be surprised that a ' body ' is similarly a phenomenal group of physical processes, and why hesitate to call them both ' substances ' in the only sense in which the word has any valid application ? We shall thus restore ' substances * to psychology and to physics by the same device, and at bottom shall only be doing tardy justice to the Aristotelian conception of cWpycta.