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 CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

convinced materialists and parallelists, to whom I have read the above criticisms on their systems, have found no answer to them; my criticisms have appeared to them just, but nevertheless they have continued to abide by their own systems, probably because they were bound to have one. We do not destroy an erroneous idea when we do not replace it by another.

This has decided me to set forth some personal views which, provisionally, and for want of better, might be substituted for the old doctrines. Before doing this, I hasten to explain their character, and to state openly that they are only hypotheses.

I know that metaphysicians rarely make avowals of this kind. They present their systems as a well-connected whole, and they set forth its different parts, even the boldest of them, in the same dogmatic tone, and without warning that we ought to attach very unequal degrees of confidence to these various parts. This is a deplorable method, and to it is perhaps due the kind of disdain that observers and experimentalists feel for