Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/487

 486 S. H. HODGSON : latter pre-supposition to be positively enjoined, instead of being, as it is, positively forbidden, by the fundamental truth, which he rightly and firmly holds, that consciousness simply is all-embracing. Both presuppositions are illogical as pre- suppositions ; but then the former, on grounds of experience alone, is demonstrably true of man, while it is in the highest degree problematical whether the latter is true, or even thinkable, in any application whatever, seeing that an uni- versal self can only be represented in thought as an individual .self indefinitely, or perhaps infinitely, magnified. Mr. Dewey stands by no means alone in holding the views he does. He belongs to a large and probably increasing number, who seem to think that philosophy has only two alternatives to choose from, Empiricism and Transcen- dentalism. The possibility of a strictly experiential philo- sophy, which is neither the one nor the other, does not seem to have occurred to them. Perhaps, for the present, a prudens qucestio is the best way of enlightening them on this possibility. When a Germanising enthusiast tells you, as a primary and self-evident truth, that the whole being of the phenomenal world depends on consciousness, instead of arguing the point, ask simply on whose ? This will compel him to take one of three courses, maintaining either (1) that consciousness can exist independently of a conscious being, so that no "whose" is requisite, a proposition for which there is no evidence, or (2) that the being who has the con- sciousness in question is other than himself, the speaker, the evidence for which can never be immediate, or (3) that he himself is the author of the world, an opinion which con- sistently held would quickly lodge him in an asylum. These alternatives will probably bring to light a confusion in his mind between the fact, which is true, that the meaning of the world depends on consciousness, and the opinion, which may be false, that the real existence of the world depends on it. Both statements are covered by using the large and un- analysed term ~beiny ; and the truth of the former by 110 means carries with it the truth of the latter, as an immediate consequence or necessary implication. He has in fact been making an unwarranted assumption, which by a strictly experiential method he would have avoided. n. I pass now to the second of Mr. Dewey 's two articles, " Psy- chology as Philosophic Method," in MIND 42. Here will be the place to justify my previous refusal to call the science which Mr. Dewey has in view, in both his articles, Psychology,