Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/321

Rh It is thus with the pure Empiricists and the pure Transcendentalists. Down to the present time disciples of Locke have continued to hold that all mental phenomena are interpretable as results of accumulated individual experiences; and, by criticism, have been led simply to elaborate their interpretations: ignoring the proofs of inadequacy. On the other hand, disciples of Kant, asserting this inadequacy, and led by perception of it to adopt an antagonist theory, have persisted in defending that theory under a form presenting fatal inconsistencies. And then, when there is offered a mode of reconciliation, the spirit of no-compromise is displayed: each side continuing to claim the whole truth. After it has been pointed out that all the obstacles in the way of the experiential doctrine disappear if the effects of ancestral experiences are joined with the effects of individual experiences, the old form of the doctrine is still adhered to, while Kantists persist in asserting that the ego is born with intuitional forms which are wholly independent of any thing in the non-ego, after it has been shown that the innateness of these intuitional forms may be so understood as to escape the insurmountable difficulties of the hypothesis as originally expressed.

I am led to say this by reading the remarks concerning my own views, made with an urbanity I hope to imitate, by Prof. Max Müller, in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution last March. Before dealing with the criticisms contained in this lecture, I must enter a demurrer against that interpretation of my views by which Prof. Max Müller makes it appear that they are more allied to those of Kant than to those of Locke. He says:

On this passage let me remark, first, that the word "prehistoric," ordinarily employed only in respect to human history, is misleading when applied to the history of Life in general; and his use of it leaves me in some doubt whether Prof. Max Müller has rightly conceived the hypothesis he refers to.