Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/340

324 the "return to reality" in our century has not been a return to the outer world of the seventeenth century, but "a return to a world pervaded with the spirit of idealism." Our age has given up the attempt to deduce reality, and has devoted itself to science, yet we must carry with us what we have learned from idealism. The business of science, like that of philosophy, is to discover the laws, the ideas, or rationality of things.

With the tenth lecture begins the constructive part of the work. The author adopts the realistic position of natural science, and seeks to show that its explanations, when pressed to the limit, become involved in paradoxes and contradictions. The theory which he examines is that of the nebular hypothesis, which represents the world as undergoing a continuous process of aggregation, and, as a consequence, constantly suffering loss of energy. To explain how we may conceive this process as without a beginning, Clifford has suggested that going backward from the present condition of the world, at an indefinite past time the molecules which now compose matter were at an infinite distance from each other. This would imply that the world could only exist in its present condition if the molecules of which it is composed were once actually an infinite distance apart. But this lands us in an absurdity. It is therefore impossible the author concludes, to conceive of a continuous process in the same direction going on through infinite time. Therefore the physical world, the world in space and time where such paradoxes are inevitable, is not the truth of things. Although I agree with the conclusion, it does not seem to follow in this case. The author has shown that Clifford's postulate is untenable, but it is yet quite possible that the process of the world maybe "cyclical"; that what appears to us as a straight line, because we see so small a portion of it, may in reality be a segment of a circle.

The eleventh lecture is a reaffirmation of a position which Professor Royce reached some years ago in his Religious Aspects of Philosophy. The conclusion of the first half of the chapter is, "the real world must be a mind or else a group of minds" (p. 368). That there is only one world of ideas, that of the Universal Self, which is inclusive of all finite beings, Professor Royce finds implied in the relation of" meaning "anything beyond our present consciousness. " When what is meant is outside of the moment which means, only a Self inclusive of the moment and its object could complete and so confirm or refute the opinion that the moment contains" (p. 377). If we suppose that there exists some reality beyond our consciousness, say, "a world of spirits," then the truth of any thought of mine will consist in its agreement with this reality. That there must be some relation between the knowing mind and the thing known, that both must somehow form parts of one cosmos, is