Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/318

 The remaining reply which Dr. Hodgson makes runs thus:

Had Dr. Hodgson quoted the whole of the passage from which he takes the above sentence; or had he considered it in conjunction with the Kantian doctrine to which it refers (namely, that Space survives in consciousness when all contents are expelled, which implies that then Space is the thing with which consciousness is occupied, or the object of consciousness), he would have seen that his reply has none of the cogency he supposes. If, taking his first illustration, he will ask himself whether it is possible to "syllogize about syllogism," when syllogism has no content whatever, symbolic or other—has non-entity to serve for major, non-entity for minor, and non-entity for conclusion—he will, I think, see that syllogism, considered as surviving terms of every kind, cannot be syllogized about; the "pure form," of reason (supposing it to be syllogism, which it is not), if absolutely discharged of all it contains, cannot be represented in thought, and therefore cannot be reasoned about. Following Dr. Hodgson to his second illustration, I must express my surprise that a metaphysician of his acuteness should have used it. For an illustration to have any value, the relation between the terms of the analogous case must have some parallelism to the relation between the terms of the case with which it is compared. Does Dr. Hodgson really think that the relation between a dog and the part of himself which he bites is like the relation between matter and form? Suppose the dog bites his tail. Now, the dog, as biting, stands, according to Dr. Hodgson, for the form as the containing mental faculty; and the tail as bitten