Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/406

 392 H. w. CARE : solved by it. If I understand Mr. Hodgson rightly, the task of philosophy as regards it is at an end when it pre- sents it in this simplest form as an ultimate fact to science, whose business thenceforward it is to follow out the history of its development. This would be well enough if the gift were of any value. Science would be, or at least ought to be, truly grateful for an ultimate conception of matter really simple and non-contradictory. But this is not the case with Matter as now denned, it is composite and to compose it we have to produce from our imagination a something or other, we know not what, for its content. But what purpose does it serve in this philosophy ? I have already said that I conceive the leading idea and central conception of Mr. Hodgson's philosophy to be his idea of agency. It is, I think, this idea of agency that has produced this doctrine of Matter. Matter is the present resting-place of agency, its here and now condition. By saying that it is the only positively known non-conscious reality is meant that it is the resting-place of agency in the world of present experience as distinguished from the Unseen World. Mr. Hodgson is opposed to every theory that would locate agency in consciousness. The assumption of it, in his view, vitiates the most part of modern philosophy. If not in consciousness then where ? is the immediate question and the answer is this doctrine of material agency. It is not the need to establish a non-conscious reality that has given rise to it, for that can be done without matter. Time and Space are real, they condition the Unseen World as well as conscious- ness, and they are absolutely identical in both their subjective and objective aspects, the same for Knowing and Being (v. iv., 277). Also the order of conditioning is real in every sense. Matter is not wanted to establish a real order of Being independent of Consciousness, it is solely required as a present home for agency. This of course is not the way it is brought forward by Mr. Hodgson. It is to him a necessary inference from percept matter and percept matter is a fact of experience, verifiable by subjective analysis. This brings me to the most important question of all in the consideration of Mr. Hodgson's philosophy, the question of the value of the analysis of experience. Every conception used by Mr. Hodgson is justified and solely justified by subjective analysis of experience. This analysis occupies the first volume of the Metaphysic of Ex- perience, and is written with extreme care and clearness and with an acuteness in detecting and exposing assumptions that commands most unqualified admiration, it has more-