Page:The Monist Volume 2.djvu/464

 to have. M is Man, T is fellow-man. T1 is the bodily appearance of T, it is R; while T2 is the E of T, i.e. his soul or spirit. C is the nervous central organ, etc. Thus Avenarius says (p. 18):

“I can in a relative consideration assume R to be the condition of changes in the E values, supposed to exist in M, only if M and in M the system C are parts of my supposition,” and in a note (p. 117) he adds:

“The skeleton in Goethe’s poem, ‘The Dead’s Dance,’ scents without an organ of smell, sees without eyes, thinks without a brain; it also moves without muscles. To consider such acts as true is now universally declared to be superstition. The time will come when the assumption of psychical phenomena without the coördination of the system C will universally be considered in the same way.”

The first three chapters remind us very much of W. K. Clifford’s article “On the Nature of Things in Themselves.” But the article is nowhere mentioned and it is most probable that it is unknown to the author. If Avenarius had known Clifford’s view, he might have presented his ideas with more economy of space. But if he did not know Clifford’s article, the coincidences of procedure and to a great extent also of the result attained are the more remarkable. What Avenarius calls the E values are termed by Clifford “ejects,” and the formation of ejects is called by Avenarius “introjection.”

On page 52 we read the following sentence on the three phases of the cognition of the data of experience:

“The first phase alone, that of ingenuous empiricism, cognises, i.e. explains the totality of these facts without the assistance of a non-sensible. . . . the second that of ingenuous realism conceives the non-sensible as supersensible, and the third, that of ingenuous criticism, as the pre-sensible. The epithet ingenuous has reference to the foundation, not to the doctrinary system built upon it. That which makes the said realism and criticism ingenuous is a survival of the ingenuous empiricism.”

The theory which conceives the external cause of an experience as an object, effecting in the subject sensations, passes successively through the following views. The object is said to be (1) not within the range of experience, (2) not within the range of cognition, (3) not-existing. Thus it reaches via agnosticism its climax in idealism and “pure experience becomes a something that is never truly experienced, it becomes the totality of mere or pure sensations” (p. 62).

The third part of the pamphlet is devoted to “the restitution of the natural world-idea.” Here the author comes, at least in some expressions, very close to the solution editorially upheld in The Monist. Avenarius says: “The task is. . . . to describe the what of my experience so as to make a practical application of it in my dealings with my fellow-men” (p. 79).

Professor Avenarius sums up his conclusions in the term “empirio-critical principal-coördination” which he defines as the inseparability of the ego-experience from the surrounding experience. “The ego and the surrounding belong in