Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/384

 370 E. E. C. JONES : " Synthetic Activity" is fundamental, and we are emphati- cally told that it is always conative and never merely cognitive and that " the unity and constancy of the subject of experi- ence are due to the nature of its activity " (ii., 192). The difficulties raised about the source of the conceptions of Cause and Substance are met by showing that causality "is found, and found first of all, whatever be its validity, in our own doing and suffering. . . . Thinking is doing, and like all doing has a motive and an end " (p. 189). The notion of Substance (not substances) is shown to be just the bare idea of an undetermined something, reached by successive abstractions. In part iv. the assumptions on which any Naturalistic scheme must be based are exposed and discredited, and the conclusion to which we are led is that the Dualism that has been accepted as a doctrine of Reality, is no more than a convenience of Scientific Method. Nature as known to us is " conformable to human intelligence " and " amenable to human ends" (ii., '254). " Apart from intelligence there is no intelligible world," and only for conscious subjects could uniformity of Nature have meaning or importance ; and again the fact that conscious subjects have been able to mould their experience on these lines testifies to the spiritual nature of the object-element in that Experience, and in all the advance and development of knowledge there is " a constant reci- procity . . . between subject and object " (ii., 255). Reflexion has shown " that the unity of experience cannot be replaced by an unknowable that is no better than a gulf between two disparate series of phenomena and epiphenomena. Once materialism is abandoned and dualism found untenable, a spiritualistic monism remains the one stable position." The whole argument appears to me to be thoroughly coherent, and the refutation of Dualism and the constructive suggestion put forward in the end to be of the very greatest interest and importance. Here at last there does seem to be a hint, and more than a hint, of a real and actual unity in difference. We have, in the reality of concrete experience, a genuine duality the finite spiritual subject in the strictest unity with its object, the otherness of which is as indisputable as its inseparability. There is also a certain unity in difference between the many finite minds which are objects to each other, and each of which interprets the rest as being of similar nature to itself. And if the so-called ' matter ' which is object to them all, and by means of which alone each of them knows the existence and character of other minds if this is indeed itself not