Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/251

 -GEORGE STUART FULLERTON, A System of Metaphysics. 237 world relates to the composition of space and time. His own view is substantially identical with Berkeley's that the " real " thing in the first sense of that word is never infinitely composite, and the "real" thing in the second sense, which may justly be re- garded as infinitely divisible, is only an order of experiences its divisibility only "a system of substitutions ". Of all antinomies, including Mr. Bradley's, his view coincides with that pointedly expressed by Prof. Strong; that they arise, "not from a vice of reason, but from an error in reasoning". The element of order, seen to be essential to objectivity, develops in the exposition into that of mechanism, and we are confronted with the relation between mind and body. Briefly, Prof. Fuller- iton is an automatist who regards the relation of mind and body as unique and hence neither capable of explanation nor requiring it. The relation is not causal, for cause has meaning only in the .physical system. Cause is a term of time, and it is evident on his principles, that, as a state of consciousness has a date only through being inseparable from bodily facts which have a place in the system of moving matter, so a state of consciousness can be a -cause only through bodily facts that are operative in that system. The author's thorough and trenchant criticism of theories of parallelism is conducted to show how many of them yield to the .temptation to think of psychic facts in material picture ; to show further that both the material and mental members of the relation -are matter of experience. Over the last part on " Other Minds and the Eealm of Minds " we cannot linger- Prof. Fullerton's deferred approach to the subject is amongst the signs of his total rejection of the doctrine of Clifford and later writers that the essence of objectivity lies in the fact that fellow-beings may share our sensations. In the argu- ment for fellow-minds his concern is to point out that the assump- tion of an independent material world is indispensable. He finds no evidence for panpsychism ; and it is of course clear that, to one who denies that a purely mental fact can be a cause at all, the conception of a realm of interacting sentiericy as the true scene of the causal continuities of nature must be unmeaning. Here again .appears the influence of a principle that, though not singled out for emphasis, might almost be called, when we grasp it, the key to the book ; the principle that " real time " is a construction bound up with the physical order, and that without such a con- struction mental facts would have no place in a temporal system at all. In the chapter on " The Unity of Consciousness " the author sweeps the ground of mare's nests in his most vigorous manner. " It is ... not surprising that acute minds should plague themselves with what they call ' the problem of the unity of consciousness'. Nevertheless, there is no such problem. . . . A problem, to which no solution can be given which does not con- sist in a mere restatement of the terms of the problem, is not a genuine problem." A wholly admirable chapter on Mechanism