Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/225

211 keep appointments, get together, not in this transcendent being, but in an identical phenomenal world; and that if this world is in consciousness, the various consciousnesses must somehow, in spite of their seeming exclusiveness, interpenetrate, or overlap, even if they do not unite in a higher and common consciousness? But I fear this would lead in the direction of the much-condemned idealism. I am not sure that, had Professor Read made more of the concept of "generic consciousness," an idea thrown out but not developed, a way might have been found out of some of the difficulties which the theory seems to present, although I think again that this would lead toward a more idealistic view. A word about freedom. Professor Read's view admits of freedom in the Spinozistic sense but in no other. He tells us that we have more power over our character than over circumstances and yet, since by his own theory a man's body expresses his character, he can clearly have no more power over his character than he has over his body. Now it is one of Professor Read's fundamental tenets that consciousness, not having mass and energy, cannot effect changes in empirical reality. So when he tells us that the decision in any deliberate action depends upon a man's character and shows what kind of a man he is, he might quite as well have said that it depends upon his body and shows what kind of a body he has. The only answer that Professor Read can give is, that our desires, volitions, etc., are expressed in the body, but this only links the desires and volitions the more securely in the same chain of necessity that controls the body. I am, of course, well aware of the difficulties that beset any attempt to make freedom intelligible; and indeterminism is clearly not what the common man means by freedom. But I do not think that Professor Read is justified in assuming that the alternative is either indeterminism or the view which he presents. Here again I think the root difficulty lies in an inadequate conception of consciousness and of the ego, and in the sharp antithesis between consciousness and empirical reality, which cannot be consistently maintained. But this is a large question which we cannot discuss here.

Professor Read's book is in my judgment the most consistent and thorough-going presentation which has yet been made of the pampsychist view, and I am well aware that the difficulties which I find in the doctrine may in a considerable measure be due to my misunderstanding of it. "Profound, O Vaccha, is the doctrine, recondite, and not to be easily comprehended by the simple-minded."