Page:Philosophical Review Volume 5.djvu/340

324 of arguments in favor of idealism tends to prove. And that our whole physical life may be set in a dimension of Being that we have at present no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life, but not of it. They witness hourly an outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their intelligence, although in these events they may themselves play the cardinal part. So the world which is revealed to human beings may be encompassed by a still wider world which lies beyond our ken. This, it might be said, is only a case of 'maybe.' But science itself has much to do with 'maybe's,' and human life at large has everything to do with them.

The writer's aim is purely historical. He endeavors to show (1) what Locke's theory regarding the relation between mathematics and ethics actually was; (2) the relation in which his theory stands to the previous development of ethical thought in England. L.'s theory of knowledge was as essentially a mathematical one as that of Descartes. The rôle played by intuition in L.'s system is much larger, and this partly because he was familiar only with the Euclidean Geometry, with its frequent appeal to an ideal superposition of one figure upon another. The possibility of representing our ideas by visible and lasting marks is that which brings him nearest to an explicit recognition of the intuitive character of the science. Diagrams are more unmistakable than words; and the figure, really individual, is thought as universal; in it intuition and thought are united. For L., this is the general type of knowledge. And 'mathematical certainty' is possible outside of mathematics, e.g., as regards the principle of causality. The preeminence of mathematics over physical science rests upon its purely ideal character. And L. assumes that, where ideas are perfectly consistent, there can be no question as to their applicability to fact. Without this rationalistic assumption, his whole argument would fall to pieces. Now ethics, like mathematics, is capable of demonstration. The former, like the latter, is