Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/164

152 is to be determined, and what is the fundamental product of thought yielded by this process. This fundamental product I have shown to be the coexistence of subject and object; and then, describing this as a postulate to be justified by "its subsequently-proved congruity with every result of experience, direct and indirect," I have gone on to say that "the two divisions of self and not-self are redivisible into certain most general forms, the reality of which Science, as well as Common-Sense, from moment to moment assumes." Nor is this all. Having thus assumed, only provisionally, this deepest of all intuitions, far transcending an axiom in self-evidence, I have, after drawing deductions occupying four volumes, deliberately gone back to the assumption ("Principles of Psychology," § 386). After quoting the passage in which the principle was laid down, and after reminding the reader that the deductions drawn had been found congruous with one another, I have pointed out that it still remained to ascertain whether this primordial assumption was congruous with all the deductions; and have thereupon proceeded, throughout eighteen chapters, to show the congruity. And yet, having the volumes before him in which this principle is set forth with a distinctness and acted upon with a deliberation which I believe are nowhere exceeded, the reviewer enunciates for my benefit this principle of which he "thought that every tolerably educated man was aware! "He enunciates it as applying to limited groups of beliefs to which it does not apply; and shuts his eyes to the fact that I have avowedly and systematically acted upon it in respect to the entire aggregate of our beliefs (axioms included) for which it furnishes the ultimate justification!

Here I must add another elucidatory statement, which would have been needless had the reviewer read that which he criticises. His argument proceeds throughout on the assumption that I understand a priori truths after the ancient manner, as truths independent of experience; and he shows this more than tacitly, where he "trusts" that he is "attacking one of the last attempts to deduce the laws of Nature from our inner consciousness." Manifestly, a leading thesis of one of the works he professes to review is entirely unknown to him—the thesis that forms of thought, and consequently the intuitions which those forms of thought involve, result entirely from the effects of experiences, organized and inherited. With the "Principles of Psychology" before him, not only does he seem unaware that it contains this doctrine, but, though this doctrine, set forth in its first edition published nearly twenty years ago, has gained considerable currency, he seems never to have heard of it. The implication of this doctrine is, not that the "laws of Nature" are deducible from "our inner consciousness," but that our consciousness has a preëstablished correspondence with such of those laws (simple, perpetually presented, and never negatived) as have, in the course of practically-infinite ancestral experiences, registered themselves in our nervous structure. Had he