Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/398

 384 H. W. CAEB : common sense in its widest application, including science and religion. The analysis begins with the moment of experi- ence, makes explicit the reflective character of consciousness,, passes in order the sensations and combinations of sensations and the inferences from them that give rise to the panorama of objective thought, examines the ultimate conceptions of science, the laws of conscious action and the conceptions of the unseen world and religion. The reconstructed world of philosophy is not different in its essential features from the- unanalysed world of common-sense experience, of scientific and religious conceptions. The result of the analysis is not to transform these, still less to negate them, but to make explicit and orderly what in pre-philosophic thinking is- assumed and confused. The most characteristic part of Mr. Hodgson's work and that in which he has rendered the most eminent service to- philosophy is in his destructive criticism of the concepts of cause, causality, causal agency, etc., and the substitution of the conception of Real Condition, a purely empirical notion in the place of Cause with its old scholastic associations. " The term Cause implicitly contains two unrealisable ideas, (1) that of a total production or creation of its effect, and (2) that of an originating agency which itself requires no accounting for, but may be taken as self-existent." These two unrealisable ideas give rise to that conception of the universe as a self-existent and creative First Cause and a- dependent and created world, which still looms largely in popular philosophy. Mr. Hodgson has admirably exposed the contradiction contained in this conception. Real Condi- tion on the other hand expresses the simple empirical fact of the causal relation between particular existents within the universe and it is free from all assumption as to the nature of that relation. With the concept of cause are swept away all theories of the Absolute which would regard it like the First Cause as standing, however conceived, out- side and apart from the universe, conditioning it but itself unconditioned. The chief distinction that Mr. Hodgson claims for his philosophy is that it is entirely free from assumptions. The main charge that he brings against systems of philosophy opposed to his or occupying a different standpoint is that they are based on assumptions. Now apart from the question whether Mr. Hodgson is successful in avoiding assumptions, this ideal of philosophy without assumptions gives a dis- tinctive character to his work. Why must there be no assumption in philosophy ? Because an assumption neces-