Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/414

 400 CRITICAL NOTICES : trustful conception of constructive metaphysics, that the religious mind so frequently hesitates to surrender its beliefs at the challenge of the philosopher. I have never read what seemed to me a really satisfying explanation of the validity of inference ; yet inference is paradoxical enough, for on the one hand, there must be an identity between ground and consequent, or the conclusion will contain more than the premisses ; on the other hand, in the transition from ground to consequent something new must be gained, or proof there is none. Here is an antinomy, in all conscience, right at the heart of logical thinking; yet very few philosophers have been deterred by it from carrying on protracted and confident argumentation. Similarly, the religious mind is apt to argue, a few antinomies can- not be fatal to it either ; they cannot nullify its efforts to reach and hold truth. Again, if it be true, as we read (page 214), that for the philosopher the Supreme Eeality is to be found within the world- process rather than without it, while religion is bent rather on per- sonal fellowship with God, as One who has reality over and beyond the experiential process in which He is manifest ; then we may not be face to face with an ultimate dualism of mental attitude, but at all events it is natural that the devout mind should occasional!}' question whether a certain type of metaphysician, usually designated pantheist, always discerns, not to- say conserves, the religious in- terests of life. This quite apart from the fact that no unanimity obtains on the philosophic side as to the speculative truths which ought to be put in place of the rejected conceptions of piety. In passing, I may remark that I find it difficult to decide what for Mr. Galloway is the supreme court of appeal. He tends at one or two points to half-apologise to philosophy for the existence of the theologian ; as though theology were a discipline, which, from the intellectually unfortunate circumstances of the case, could hardly expect to attain any high standard of accuracy and rigour in think- ing. I cannot see that it is any weakness in theology that it should select its data from history (the Eitschlians, by the way, would not consent to say that their theology was purely historical) : nor is it, for that matter, correct to distinguish by saying (p. 321) that theology sets out from particular, philosophy from universal, experience. At least the expression is highly ambiguous, for obviously philosophy exercises a selection upon its data no less than the other. Pursuing, then, the line of inference back from experience to its permanent ground, Mr. Galloway seeks in this admirable essay to formulate a common ground of inner and outer experience. This distinction between "inner" and "outer" has been justified in the preceding paper, which is reprinted from MIND. As to the argument there, suffice it to say that the writer comes to the conclusion that outer experience is the interpretation by self-con- scious subjects of the action of reals which thought itself does not create. These trans-subjective reals, again, we ought to conceive after the analogy of the self, their qualities being representations in consciousness of the interaction of spiritual substances. Or as it is