Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/569

 CAEVETH READ, The, Metaphysics of Nature. 555 presentation ; or Truth is the correspondence of cognition with Reality, and if truth implies the possibility of error it cannot be an attribute of the Divine mind. There are more recent and more searching discussions of the criterion of Truth than Prof. Bead's ; nor can the discussion of Belief be regarded as contributing so much of logical or psychological moment, or even as quite free from objection. The statement that Hume says that Belief always attends the memory and the senses (p. 9), surely requires some qualification. Hume said that the belief or assent which always attends the memory and senses is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present, and that we are frequently in doubt concerning the ideas of the memory as they be- come weak and feeble. Again there seems too facile an acceptance of "feeling " as an adequate characterisation of Belief. This is a very insufficient analysis of the psychical process referred to, which, although apprehended with the immediacy of sensation or feeling, is really a complex process analogous to that accompanying the employment of words, the sense of which we understand without reduction to presentations. Every belief is referable to a system of beliefs, and any belief stands for a process ultimately embracing whole series of ideas. When Prof. Bead says, "Will it not be always true that in giving reasons for a belief mankind must point at last to some of its causes?" we may ask if cause and reason need be mutually exclusive ? And again when he says, ' ' An intui- tive axiom is a general judgment concerning ultimate unconditional truth," I press for the meaning of "unconditional". What Prof. Bead has to say regarding Nature, or previous -efforts to interpret it, may be briefly stated thus. We encounter it as a pre-formation, the perception of which, corresponding to stable nervous growths, precedes the personal life (p. 126). A Uni- versal Unity of Apperception does not explain the reciprocity and causation of things in the World, but must rather be explained as the result of them. To speak of Nature as the Universal Beason or Thought is an abuse of language, which does not give us the differential characters of inorganic Nature, or explain the fact of Empirical Beality, where thought and sensation meet in the perceptions and experience of normal men (p. 165). Nature is no mere system of relations that at the last relate nothing; there must be terms for relations to relate. The concept of relation is free from internal contradiction, and farther than the rela- tion of terms analysis cannot reach. Consciousness does not express or comprise the whole of Beality : there remains a surd of analysis, a perdurable somewhat, independent certainly of our private minds (p. 160), and Prof. Bead neither denies the " thing- by-itself " nor glories in its incognoscibility. There are funda- mental relations in which the thing known may agree with the cognition of it through phenomena. Knowledge is consciousness, and if there is anything other than consciousness, the knowledge of it can only be a representation in consciousness. Now the