Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/100

84 a 'phenomenon,' we might well ask whether there could be a "universal fact" to any except a universal consciousness. Any other consciousness could get at the universal in nature only by observation plus some "principle." Again, on page 11 the ideal extension in time and space of the order of observed phenomena is defended on the ground that this order "excludes every contradictory order, under like conditions." This looks very much like assuming the "principle" of the uniformity of nature. More clearly inconsistent, if possible, are two statements on page 12. The law of causation is here declared to be the "last word of science, not its first word," yet it is called "the one universal that binds together all phenomena and gives unity and coherence to all knowledge." Now, that which "gives unity and coherence to all knowledge" cannot itself be a product of knowledge, a "last word of science," but must be a presupposition or principle involved in knowledge from the start. And yet the author claims that his method assumes no principle and needs no theory of knowledge! The same unsteadiness appears in statements regarding the relation of ultimate unity in reality to the possibility of inference. In one passage (p. 14) science is said to have proved that nature is not disconnected, yet the immediately preceding sentences show that the ground of inference itself is this basal unity or rationality of reality.

This is the result of trying to climb up into metaphysics without preliminary epistemological criticism. The sciences, of course, get on best when they are not too introspective. But the extra-scientific principles involved even in scientific cognition await investigation at the very threshold of philosophy.

A few oversights in the author's theistic argument should be mentioned. Chapter III does not even mention the well-known difficulty of correlating the unity of consciousness with the multiplicity of brain elements. To imagine that the "organic unity" of the brain supplies the needed parallel for the unity of the mental life is to deceive ourselves with words. For "organic unity" means simply that the resultant (or correlate) of brain dynamics, i. e., consciousness, is unitary; the multiplicity of the real components remains.

The argument from the intelligibility of the world to the immanence of reason in it is, when properly managed, an effective weapon for theism, but when the author says (p. 199) that, because rocks can be known, therefore they are thoughts as well as things, he asks us to admit the suspicious major, "Whatever can be an object of