Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/390

 376 F. c. s. SCHILLEB: fore nothing antecedently preposterous in supposing Prof. Taylor to have made this attempt. Besides both before and since he has given marked proof of a susceptible and syncretist temperament. 1 To take therefore Prof. Taylor's language (of which I gave a representative, though not an exhaustive selection) as aiming at such syncretism was exceedingly natural. It was in fact so taken in several quarters, and the mistake, such as it was, was not mine alone nor in the first instance. My own attention indeed was first called to the matter by an approving friend, and it was because of the marked similarity between Prof. Taylor's language and ours that I was moved to scrutinise his book so closely. As a result I was puzzled. Many of Prof. Taylor's utterances were distinctly what one may call ' pragmaticoid,' but it seemed on the whole more probable than their pragmatism was not genuine. Still it required very close reading to perceive that he could not mean what he seemed to say. And even when subsequently he came forward as the champion of intellectualism in the McGill Uni- versity Magazine and the Philosophical Review a doubt remained. In view of this difficulty and of the fact that Prof. Taylor was still happily alive to be questioned, I thought it best to challenge him by inquiring point-blank what he had meant. The success of this challenge is attested by the explicitness of his reply. It entirely removes all doubt as to what, psychologically, Prof. Taylor means. He does not mean to be a pragmatist, and if he has talked pragmatism it has been as M. Jourdain talked prose. But it does not follow that he did not talk it, and that his explana- tions are as good for others as for himself, and have succeeded in rendering his system logically coherent. The syncretism has not been eliminated but confessed, and it seems to be more deeply rooted in its structure than even now he realises. I am willing indeed to admit that this syncretism is somewhat different in kind from what I supposed. But I am now quite convinced that my criticism was justified both by the admitted laxity of Prof. Taylor's language and the grave tactical error of using ' pragmaticoid ' phrases without warning the reader that they did not mean what they might very reasonably be taken to mean. I. I proceed to consider Prof. Taylor's explanations of the incrim- inated doctrines in detail. They were, he assures us, derived from 1 Most recently e.g. in adopting the language, and on many important questions the views, of Mr. Russell's symbolic logic. And in one desirous of remaining au intellectualist this is 'doubtless wise. For though this latest of philosophic developments departs from absolutist ' orthodoxy ' quite as far as Humanism, albeit in a diametrically opposite direction, and will, when fully constructed, probably be found to be just as incom- patible with it, it appears to be intellectualist to the core, and at least avoids the confusion of logical with psychological considerations which vitiates the traditional ' logic '.