Page:Some New Philosophical Views.djvu/13

Rh composition. If the reader finds any of the latter in the preceding quotations,he "will do what I have not done.

But I wish to give some account of the book as a whole. Adequately to notice in a single article a volume dealing connectedly with all the fundamental questions of philosophy, and which in doing so itself occupies over eight hundred pages, is not easy. It is made the harder by the unusually large claims the author puts forward for originality, alike in matters of observed facts and of explanatory hypotheses. I will, first of all, attempt a rough catalogue of the leading instances.

Mr. Cyples, then, asserts that, by the observing of minute facts, which he specifies, connected with reverie, the management of Attention, &c., he has made out what he styles an initiatory law of human experience to this purport,—that no one of the senses can operate so as to give the consciousness belonging to it without a certain aggregation of its activity, which is only got by the associated working of muscular machinery connected with it. Obviously, this is a subtle point, but it is also a very important one, as any one will discover who notes the use the alleged generalization is made of in the author's detailed explanations of the puzzling phenomena of Attention; of the facts which have recently been made the basis of what is called the doctrine of Relativity; and of the circumstance that the conceptions of Space and Time enter into all our experience. I cannot myself say that I am satisfied the evidence the author puts forward is ample enough to demonstrate his case; I think that it should have been worked out with more particularity; but there is no denying that the alleged law seems, at the least, to throw a good deal of light on the process of Attention. It is only fair to quote a few words from the author's statement. He says:—

The writer argues that we manage our Attention, alike in the way of observing any object more closely and in purposed ceasing to attend, by