Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/379

 DR. WARD'S REFUTATION OF DUALISM. 865 necessity one or other term must be dropped " (ii., 29). And accordingly we find that the adherents of Conscious Automatism do either lapse into some form of crude monism, or subordinate one series to the other, and the upholders of Psychical Epiphenominalism maintain the contradictory positions that on the one hand there is no causal connexion between the two series, and yet on the other the psychical is a collateral product of the physical (i., yi.). If Mind is thus resolved into the absolutely ineffective shadow and accompaniment of mechanical phenomena, and volitions do not enter into the chain of Causation, their activity vanishes altogether from the world. But we can only accept this result if we ignore or deny individual experience, of which activity and the realisation of ends are elements. What Dr. Ward is concerned to insist on in Part iii. (in addition to pointing out the defects of theories of Psycho- physical Parallelism), is, that an appeal to experience forces us to admit the reality of psychical phenomena of an active kind, and to recognise that human volitions do affect the objects of our experience that they do invade the mechanical sphere at least as a vis directrix. This seems as much matter of direct experience as anything can be ; and its acceptability from a theoretic or systematic point of view becomes more obvious after a perusal of Parts iv. and v. So far we have seen that the attempt to explain the world purely from the mechanical side breaks down at every stage but it is only when we come to Part iv. that Dr. Ward is able to put his case, whether for criticism or construction, in the strongest form. Hitherto he has on the whole only attempted to discredit the current assumption of the dualism of Mind and Matter in as far as it has given way under everj' existing philosophical scheme based upon it or has come into obvious conflict with fact. He goes on in Part iv. to examine this dualism itself to show how it has arisen, and how if set up as more than a convenient methodological device it is in direct opposition to actual experience, and fatal to the construction of any coherent philosophy, and confronts both the naturalist and the psychologist with insoluble problems. The treatment of Dualism and Duality in this Part iv. seems to me to be the most impressive part of the book, and to be of extraordinary value and originality. And the author's method here is still an argument ad kominem he says in effect to the Naturalist, You have appealed to facts of experience, and to facts of experience we will go. We have, it seems, for the most part been struggling on in Science, Philosophy and Eeligion, hampered by a false