Page:Some New Philosophical Views.djvu/7



HE book named above has now been before the public for more than a year. Having been myself interested by a first perusal of it, I have watched with some curiosity the reception it has met with from the critics. The precise degree of praise or blame given to his performance, the author may be left to measure for himself, with what philosophy the writing of a big treatise on that topic may have bestowed. But in what quarters appreciation has been shown, and in what others non-appreciation, of what purports to be, and I believe is, an original book in the higher field of thinking, is a matter of more public significance. A consideration of it will tell us something of the present intellectual activity of literary and philosophical criticism among us. I think I may, with interest to the reader, combine that aim, more or less, with the main purpose of the present paper, namely, to give some account of Mr. Cyples's volume itself.

Let me at once say that it is very curious, and must be significant of the condition of criticism, that the writers in several religious organs have quite failed to see that the book is a quarry from which may be got a variety of reasonings, each one of which is as a weapon in the hands of those who hold anti-materialistic views. These arguments, it is true, are not used by Mr. Cyples to point any doctrinal conclusions; but none the less there they are in his pages; and the very fact that he has come upon them, as it seems, in a mere way of exhaustively inquiring into psycho-physiological matters, irrespective of dogmatic bias, might have been urged by the champions of spiritual beliefs as a recommendation, rather than otherwise. The critics on that side appear, so far as I can judge, to have been confused, and, in some cases, perhaps, one should say alarmed, by the large extent to which Mr. Cyples uses the language of the physicists. But they ought