Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/98

82 life, consciousness, feeling, thought, will, art, morality, religion, and science. The introduction declares that the individual, esoteric, speculative traits of philosophy have brought it into merited disrepute from which it can be rescued only by adopting the scientific method (here called "genetic"). Philosophy need not begin with a theory of knowledge or with an inquiry into human faculty; its function is simply to extend and unify the results of the special sciences (pp. 7, 8, and 25). Now, since the sciences deal with phenomena only, the sole content of knowledge, philosophical as well as scientific, is the phenomenal process. Ontology is thus ruled out, and the work of science and philosophy completed as soon as every fact is referred to its serial relation in the actual order of phenomena (p. 16).

This avowal of phenomenalism is not, as might be supposed, a Kantian 'removal of knowledge to make room for faith,' for in spite of the author's premises the thing-in-itself remains for him an object of knowledge. The geneses of which he treats are not merely chronological first things but also, in part, metaphysical. He even affirms the paradox that "scientific monism opens an invisible world of reality transcending the world of phenomena" (p. 371). The contradiction here between avowed method and declared result is so palpable that we may be pardoned for asking how it has been able to creep between the covers of a single volume. The introduction answers the question. The ancient fallacy of confounding object-of-consciousness with object-beyond-consciousness is committed by tacitly identifying the real order of phenomena (i.e.., the order actually observed) with states of reality or aspects of being (cf. pp. 10 and 12). That the fallacy should reappear in this undisguised form so soon after Karl Pearson published his spirited protest against it in the Grammar of Science is somewhat surprising.

The subject-matter has only such unity as results from the ever- present purpose of seeking the first and simplest fact in each field. Accordingly the contents of the volume can best be described by indicating the leading thought of each chapter. Chapter I argues from the correlation of subject and object in sensation and from the necessity for a cause of sensations to the reality of matter. Physical science is also made to witness that matter is essentially dynamic and essentially one. Chapter II concludes that life is "merely a special mode of molecular activity." Chapter III maintains that consciousness is constituted of "the psychic aspects of a great many cerebral cells unified through the organic unity of an organized