Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/244



qualities of Prof. Fullerton's book spring from two roots; from a great talent and a great distrust. He has all a metaphysician's subtlety and all a practical man's suspicion of metaphysical flights. The result is a volume in which the natural impression of the world, the picture that experience paints on the practical mind, is not rejected but re-analysed, and in which the philosophies that threaten it are attacked with sharp weapons in the rear.

Descartes had hardly laid down his principle of universal doubt and undertaken his scrupulous reconstruction before he is found dropping the words, in a parenthesis: "I will here, with your permission, freely use the terms of the schools". His contemporary Hobbes, on the other hand, propounded no doubts as to the reality of the world, but on the third page of the Leviathan was already rebuking "the schools" for "insignificant speech". The spirit of the traditional English philosophy, in its contrast with the continental thinking, thus spoke at the very outset. In Prof. Fullerton it finds perhaps its most resolute exponent. He is sceptical of words, not of things. "What does it mean to say that the infinite divisibility of time is matter of intuition?" In the accent of that question is heard the ground-tone of the book. Hence its seaming diffuseness, the expression of an indefatigable care for clearness and genuineness in construction. "There has been so much mystification," to quote the author's casual words about a passing topic, "that one cannot be too explicit." Hence, too, the avoidance of summary formulas couched in the treacherously facile terms of technical philosophy, the pure and simple style, the abundance of destructive criticism. The author's deliberate exposition at least keeps us in the presence of the concrete, or persistently leads us back to it as the touchstone for every formula. There is an old infection in philosophy, according to Prof. Fullerton, which is carried by language, and which in unconsidered ways still vitiates nearly all phases of philosophy; the tendency to materialise psychic things. His book might almost be described as