Page:Some New Philosophical Views.djvu/16

12 connecting with the passions,—"ideatory-cerebration" ceases in the same quantitative proportion as muscular exertion takes place; while he asserts that where the higher matters of Conduct are concerned—in every instance of which restraint of automatic impulse is seen—the above rule is precisely reversed, there being increase of ideation and abatement of habitual muscular activity. For this, he states, addition of cerebral structure is needed, but—and here is the significant point—the increment of energy required for it may be infinitesimal. But whence comes the addition of energy, and what determines its granting? Here our author brings in an alleged "duplicity of faculty" in the Ego, in proof of which he quotes the facts on which the modern doctrine of Relativity rests; and to this faculty, he says, if Conduct is not wholly illusory, must be ascribed a potentiality for which the best available name is "aspiration"—the opportunity for its exercise or non-exercise arising when previously-acquired cerebral structure is in full use, which it always is when Conscience is acting. As matter of fact, he points out that all the men in whom experience rises highest, affirm that if "aspiration" be exercised, a law or a Force comes into play by which a positive increase of energy is given from and by a Creative Source.

But, surprising to say, a writer of one of the critiques I have seen of this book, in a religious publication, thinks that the above reasoning is materialistic. On the other hand, Mr. James Sully, in his appreciative review of the volume in Mind, spoke of it, I remember, as the author's "new mysticism." If these views be "mysticism," it is stated in a severely scientific form; and it would seem that if "physicists," with the mental habitudes given by their studies, are ever to reach Faith, it must be along some such lines.

I had marked a number of other topics as to which the writer claims to have worked out original scientific conclusions. He explains that the fundamental process of the Intellect consists in our making our own "efferent-activities" represent, and practically measure, the larger operations of the physical world; he seems, in considering the difficult question of Attention, to establish as a fact that the "unit of impression" and "the unit of consciousness" are not the same; in his detailed inquiry into the Laws of the Succession of Ideas, he formulates no fewer than fifteen generalizations, as explaining what he terms the permutation of thought. I may just mention with respect to this last-named inquiry, that, in reading it, I was reminded that the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, in the last volume of his "Problems of Life and Mind," states that, as far back as 1868, Mr. Cyples communicated to him a newly-framed law upon the Association of Ideas. I note that the law as there quoted by Mr. Lewes is modified in the present book,—see p. 182. Chapter IV. is devoted to explaining a theory of the author as to the mechanism of Memory. In it, he asserts that for