Page:Some New Philosophical Views.djvu/15

Rh other chapters, and which, I venture to think, ought to have been noted keenly by the critics:—

It scarcely needs to be indicated to the reflective reader that all this reasoning points straight to the substantiality of the Ego, and its more or less independence (after it is actualized by and in sensation) of physical conditions;—these being the very cardinal points which the anti-materialists have to prove. Mr. Cyples's hypothesis of Pain, in a word, affects all the controversial reasoning of these subjects.

He has a related theory of Pleasure which, in the case of "sensory-experience," he works out into what he proposes as a strict Law of the Beautiful. In the case of all the specific kinds of sensations, whether in colours, odours, taste, touch, &c., he affirms that the secret of their pleasurableness consists in their offering "accumulation of consciousness by multiplying identical impression."

Not attempting to observe any strict order in cataloguing points which seem to me to be new, I may go at once to a novel view which occurs in the chapter on "The Will." After conceding all the facts that the most rigid Determinists posit, the author leaves their final conclusion quite in the air by a series of subtle hypothetical suggestions, based on what seems to be a minuter observing of the physiological process of Conduct than has hitherto been made. I can only hint at his method. He thus sums up the objections which the scientists urge against Will:—

But, in pursuing his exhaustive statement of the case, the writer points out that the mathematical calculus is not as yet perfect enough to deal particularly with all actual quantities. He says that if the increments of energy needed to make valid the persuasion we have of physical sequence being altered in our activity in Conduct, be below a certain limit of size and frequency, the present calculus cannot pronounce that the increments are not "masked" in the ordinary mundane dynamics. Next he makes a curious inquiry into the size and the frequency of the increments of energy which might subserve the needs of a Conduct that should be definable as moral in the old meaning of the word. In the course of the inquiry he affirms that in the case of the lower order of