Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/206

190 both organic and conscious life: neither in the one nor in the other can the totality exist without parts, and neither in the one nor in the other can the totality be explained as the result of a mere combination of parts.

(VI) Intuitions, associations, and judgments appear at first with an existential quality which can become the object of consciousness only if a contrary quality (non-existence) is met with in experience, which will take place as soon as one recognizes the fact that experience affords negative as well as positive cases. One gradually comes to recognize the necessity of the reciprocal harmony of all that can exist, and thus to employ a formal criterion of reality. The world of experience is constantly growing, and is never completed. Moreover, the conception of reality or existence is an ideal conception, strange as it may seem; and this also develops with our increasing knowledge of the world order. Appreciative judgments are somewhat analagous to those of existence; by means of them one creates an ideal world, the dominant law of which is determined by the appreciative principle. Thus moral and religious problems are intimately connected with those of science.

The purpose of the author is to expose the inanity of every social dogma, which exposure he regards as the indispensable propædeutic for the liberation of the individual. Social dogmatisms are classified as dogmatisms a priori, and dogmatisms a posteriori. Of the first class, there are distinguished two types: the transcendent rationalism, and the rationalism of immanence. Plato and Kant are representatives of the transcendent rationalism, and Hegel of immanence. The dogmatisms a posteriori are expressed by the term, solidarity. There are several forms of solidarity, such as generic or organic solidarity, economic solidarity, intellectual solidarity, and moral and social solidarity. All of these forms have been invoked as the basis of social dogmatisms. After reviewing these different kinds of solidarity, the author concludes "that it is impossible to erect in dogma, the collective egoism." He also adds that "these collective egoisms remain armed against one another, and the law of the struggle for existence, in spite of optimistic affirmations, displays here, implacably, its effects.

Science is coming more and more to the view that the changes which take place in the world of matter form an unbroken series and are all explicable according to mechanical laws. As yet, however, there are many phenomena of which no mechanical explanation can be given. But to admit our present ignorance is not to maintain that it is, in the nature of