Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/42

 has diverted attention from the defects of his position by directing his main attack against the very weakness which is fatal to his own theory. Thereby he surprises the reader into admissions which he could never have elicited by direct argument, and which are indeed inconsistent with the central tenets of his philosophy. The general criticism which I shall seek to justify is, therefore, that Avenarius’ true metaphysical position appears only in the physiology of the Kritik, and that, though his attempt in the Menschliche Weltbegriff to defend that crudely realistic position, and to restate it in a tenable form, has resulted in a most interesting and valuable criticism of subjective idealism, that realistic position itself involves the theory which he rejects. Owing to his refusal to recognise any metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality he cannot escape the position which he so successfully attacks. For, though he asserts character and content to be inseparable, in admitting, as he was bound to do, that content can vary independently of character, he relapses into the dualism which cuts off all possibility of escape from the subjectivist impasse.

At starting Avenarius formulates as self-evident, requiring no detailed analysis, the far-reaching distinction between character and content; and by a quite illegitimate use of it he establishes that view of the self which is all-important for his naturalistic philosophy. By identifying subjectivity with character he is enabled to treat subjectivity as an aspect that colours, quite indifferently, any and every objective content, and therefore as yielding nothing that can constitute the self as a self-centred reacting agent. This same consequence is reinforced by his classification of such different experiences as feeling, desire or volition, and knowledge, under the general heading of character. The whole problem of the nature of characters and of their relation to contents, the problem, that is to say, of the relation of subject and object to one another, is dismissed in the most casual manner in a few short paragraphs. And having thus assumed the right to treat subjectivity as a universal aspect of all possible experience, he has no great difficulty in establishing a purely naturalistic view of the self as merely one group of concrete contents within the field of objective experience. Throughout the Kritik, and indeed in all cases in which he is not directly engaged in defending his monistic view of experience,