Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/101

] knowledge embodies thought." No doubt the object, as content of consciousness, embodies the thought of the knower, but how prove that the real object embodies the thought of a second mind? The intelligibility of the world is simply the most general of the facts of adaptation upon which the teleological proof rests. To affirm that we can know only that in which another's thought is immanent is to beg the question.

The doctrine that volition yields immediate consciousness of the union of thought and energy is scarcely confirmed by psychology. The best recent analysis of conscious effort, that of Professor James, fully confirms these words of Hume: "The motion of our body follows upon the command of our will. Of this we are every moment conscious. But the means by which this is effected, the energy by which the will performs so extraordinary an operation,—of this we are so far from being immediately conscious, that it must forever escape our most diligent inquiry" (Inquiry, Sec. VII). As Professor James points out, volition is ultimately mere direction of attention; it expends itself upon thoughts only, and leaves the connection between our thoughts and the forces of nature (brain) utterly opaque. The forms of energy called brain molecules are as foreign to the subjective consciousness as are the fixed stars. We are thus thrown back upon the initial problem of how we know objective energy at all.

Further criticism need not be urged. Enough has been said to show the dependence of even the "genetic method" upon the answers one gives to the problems proposed by Plato and Kant.

God is Life, and biology is theology. These are the fundamental propositions on which the author of the work in hand constructs the outline of a system which aims to be at once scientific religion and religious science. The scheme is a frank dualism with the line of separation drawn between the living and the lifeless. All the systems of metaphysics and theology of the past have contained only half-truths. In one case, indeed, as much as this cannot be admitted: "Monism is muddleism. It is the sole system of religion or philosophy without any truth whatever as a basis" (p. 28). The inorganic