FOOTNOTES
1 See, for example, the concessions and the fresh statements of the problem of philosophy, and the “clearing of the ground,” etc., referred to on p. 76 and p. 74. Also p. 27 in reference to the stir and the activity that have been excited by the pragmatist controversy. See also p. 230, in the eighth chapter, in reference to some things in such a typical intellectualist as Professor Bosanquet that may be construed as a concession to Pragmatism and Humanism.
2 Dr. Edward Caird affirmed in his memoir of his brother (Principal John Caird) that idealists admit some pragmatist charges.
3 Professor Stein, a contemporary European authority, to whom we shall again refer below, says, for example, in his well-known articles in the Archiv für Philosophie (1908), in reference to Pragmatism, that we have had nothing like it [as a ‘movement’] “since Nietzsche” (“Der Pragmatismus,” p. 9).
4 See Chapter VIII., where I discuss the natural theology that bases itself upon these supposed principles of a “whole of truth” and the “Absolute.”
5 This statement I think would be warranted by the fact of the tendency of the newer physical science of the day to substitute an electrical, for the old material, or corpuscular, conception of matter, or by the admission, for example, of a contemporary biologist of importance (Verworn, General Physiology, p. 39) that “all attempts to explain the psychical by the physical must fail. The actual problem is ... not in explaining psychical by physical phenomena but rather in reducing to its psychical elements physical, like all other psychical phenomena.”
7 See Chapter V. pp. 136, 138, where we examine, or reflect upon, the ethics of Pragmatism.
8 The importance of these volumes in the matter of the development, in the minds of thinking people everywhere, of a dynamic and an organic (instead of the older rationalistic and intellectualistic) conception of religion and of the religious life cannot possibly be overestimated. Of course it is only right to add here that such a dynamic and organic view of religion is the property not only of Professor James and his associates, but also of the army of workers of to-day in the realms of comparative religion and anthropology.
9 Pragmatism, p. 300.
10 Or an admission like the following in the Meaning of Truth (p. 243): “It may be that the truest of all beliefs shall be that in transsubjective realities.”
11 Meaning of Truth, p. 124, 5.
13 Pragmatism, pp. 244–245.
14 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 34.
15 In respect of James’ later doctrine of “radical empiricism” we may quote, for the sake of intelligibility, from Professor Perry (his friend and literary executor) the following: “James’ empiricism means, then, first, that ideas are to be tested by direct knowledge, and, second, that knowledge is limited to what can be presented. There is, however, a third consideration which is an application of these, and the means of avoiding a difficulty which is supposed to be fatal to them. This is what James calls ‘radical empiricism,’ the discovery that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the things themselves.’ ‘Adjacent minima of experience’ are united by the ‘persistent identity of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members ... of the experience-continuum.’ Owing to the fact that the connexions of things are thus found along with them, it is unnecessary to introduce any substance below them, or any subject above them, to hold things together” (Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 365). In regard to this radical empiricism, I am obliged, as a Kantian, to say that, to my mind, it represents the reduction of all Pragmatism and Empiricism to an impossibility—to the fatuous attempt (exploded for ever by Hume) to attempt to explain knowledge and experience without first principles of some kind or another. It is a “new Humism,” a thing which no one who has penetrated into the meaning of Hume’s Treatise can possibly advocate. A philosophy without first principles, or a philosophy that reduces the relations between experiences to mere “bits” of experience, is indeed no philosophy at all.
17 The Preface, pp. xv., xix.
19 As for Dr. Schiller’s charge that Absolutism is essentially “irreligious” in spite of the fact of its having been (in England) religious at the outset, the best way of meeting this is to insist that it is mainly in its form, rather than its content, that Absolutism is (or was) irreligious in both Germany and England.
20 British students of philosophy are quite well aware that it was the religious and the spiritual motive that seemed to weigh most with Hutchison Stirling and John Caird and Green in their attempts (thirty years ago) to introduce German transcendental philosophy to their fellow-countrymen. Stirling was impressed with the idea of a working correspondence between Hegelianism and Calvinism. John Caird’s animus was against the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and of Mansel, and he found inspiration in this connexion in Hegel’s treatment of Kant’s theory of the limitations of the understanding. And to Green the attractive thing about Kant was his vindication of a “spiritual principle” in “nature,” and in “knowledge,” and in “conduct,” a principle which rendered absurd the naturalism of the evolutionary philosophy. Friends of this spiritualistic interpretation of German Critical Rationalism find its richest and fullest expression in the books of Edward Caird upon the Evolution of Religion and the Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers.
21 The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary” qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,” a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s instructive account of his book in Man’s Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value, which we examine below as the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy.
22 See p. 244. I find a confirmation of this idea in what a biologist like Professor Needham treats of as the “autogenetic nature of responses” (General Biology, p. 474) in animals.
23 See the Studies in Humanism for all the positions referred to, or quoted, or paraphrased, in these two paragraphs.
24 This is an important essay. It reminds the modern reader, for one thing, of the importance of the natural theology of Aristotle. It is an anticipation, too, in its way, of the tendency of modern physics to substitute a dynamic for a static conception of matter, or atoms, or substance. In it Dr. Schiller points out how Aristotle’s doctrine of a perfect and self-perfecting Activity [an ἐνέργεια that is not mere change or motion, but a perfect “life” involving the disappearance of “time” and imperfection] is in a sense the solution of the old [Greek] and the modern demand for the substance or essence of things. We shall take occasion (in speaking of the importance to Philosophy of the concept of activity, and in speaking of the Philosophy of Bergson) to use the same idea, to which Dr. Schiller has given an expression in this essay, of God as the eternal or the perfect life of the world.
25 For a favourable estimate of the services of Dr. Schiller in regard to Pragmatism and Humanism the reader may consult the articles of Captain Knox in the Quarterly Review, 1909.
26 Studies in Humanism, p. 19. The remarks made in this paragraph will have to be modified, to some extent, in view of the recent (1911) appearance of the third edition of Dr. Schiller’s Riddles of the Sphinx. This noteworthy book contains, to say the very least, a great deal in the way of a positive ontology, or theory of being, and also many quite different rulings in respect of the nature of metaphysic and of the matter of its relation to science and to common sense. It rests, in the main, upon the idea of a perfect society of perfected individuals as at once the true reality and the end of the world-process—an idea which exists also, at least in germ, in the pluralistic philosophy of Professor James; and we shall indeed return to this practical, or sociological, philosophy as the outcome, not only of Pragmatism, but also of Idealism, as conceived by representative living thinkers. Despite, however, these many positive and constructive merits of this work of Dr. Schiller’s, it is for many reasons not altogether unfair to its spirit to contend that his philosophy is still, in the main, that of a humanistic pragmatism in which both “theory” and “practice” are conceived as experimentally and as hypothetically as they are by Professor Dewey.
28 See Professor Bawden’s book upon Pragmatism.
29 Pragmatism, p. 58.
30 Ibid. 76.
31 Studies in Logical Theory, p. 2.
32 I endeavour to indicate what this Humanism and Personalism may be in my sixth chapter.
33 Journ. of Phil. Psychol., 1906, p. 338.
34 From vol. ii. (p. 322) of Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy. Dr. C. S. Peirce, formerly a teacher of mathematics and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, was made by James into the father or patron saint of Pragmatism. James confesses to have been stimulated into Pragmatism by the teachings of Peirce.
35 Journ. of Phil. Psy., 1906, p. 340.
37 See Bourdeau, Pragmatisme et Modernisme, and W. Riley in the Journ. of Phil. Psy., April and May 1911; the James article, Journ. of Phil., 1906; Journ. of Phil., 1907, pp. 26–37, on Papini’s “Introduction to Pragmatism”; The Nation (N.Y.), November 1907, on “Papini’s view of the ‘daily tragedy’ of life.”
38 Reported to have been inaugurated by a Franco-Italian poet, Martinetti. Of the question of any possible connexion between this “Futurism” with the present Art movement bearing the same name I know nothing definite.
39 I refer to the recent volume dedicated by some of his old pupils to Professor Garman—a celebrated teacher of philosophy in one of the older colleges of the United States.
40 The two large volumes on the Psychology of Adolescence.
41 The Psychology of Religion.
42 Even such a book—and it is no doubt in its way a genuine and a noteworthy book—as Harold H. Begbie’s Twice-born Men is pointed to by this wing as another instance of the truth of pragmatist principles in the sphere of experimental religion. Schopenhauer, by the way, was inclined to estimate the efficacy of a religion by its power of affecting the will, of converting men so that they were able to overcome the selfish will to live. See my Schopenhauer’s System in its Philosophical Significance.
43 See, for example, the declaration of James and Schiller (in the prefaces to their books and elsewhere) in respect of their attitudes to the work of men like Renouvier, Poincaré, Milhaud, Wilbois, Le Roy, Blondel, Pradines, the valuable reports of M. Lalande to the Philosophical Review (1906–7–8), the articles of Woodbridge Riley in the Journal of Philosophy (1911) upon the continental critics of Pragmatism, the books of Bourdeau, Hebert, Rey, Tonquedoc, Armand Sabatier, Schinz, Picard, Berthelot, those of Poincaré, Renouvier, Pradines, and the rest, the older books upon nineteenth-century French philosophy by men like Fouillée, Levy-Bruhl, etc. There are also valuable references upon the French pragmatists in Father Walker’s Theories of Knowledge (in the Stoneyhurst Series), and in Professor Inge’s valuable little book upon Faith and its Psychology.
44 The outstanding representative in France during the entire second half of the nineteenth century of “Neo-Criticism” or “Neo-Kantianism,” a remarkable and comprehensive thinker, to whose influence, for example, James attributed a part of his mental development. His review, the Critique Philosophique, was a worthy (idealist) rival of the more positivistically inclined, and merely psychological, review of Ribot, the Revue Philosophique. French Neo-Kantianism, holding, as Renouvier does, that Kant’s ethics is the keystone of his system, is not in general inclined to the “positivism” or the “scientific” philosophy of some of the German Neo-Kantians. The critical work of Renouvier proposes some very ingenious and systematic rearrangements of Kant’s philosophy of the categories, and his freedom-philosophy must certainly have done a good deal (along with the work of others) to create the atmosphere in which Bergson lives and moves to-day. With Renouvier, Neo-Kantianism merges itself too in the newer philosophy of “Personalism,” and he wrote, indeed, an important book upon this very subject (Le Personnalisme, 1902). In this work, we find a criticism of rationalism that anticipates Pragmatism, the author explicitly contending for a substitution of the principle of “rational belief” instead of the “false principle” of demonstrable or a priori “evidence.” Consciousness, he teaches, is the foundation of existence, and “personality” the first “causal principle” of the world (although admitting “creation” to be beyond our comprehension). He examines critically, too, the notions of the “Absolute” and of the “Unconditioned,” holding that they should not be substantiated into entities. “Belief” is involved in “every act,” he teaches—also another pragmatist doctrine. And like his great predecessor Malebranche, and like our English Berkeley, he teaches that God is our “natural object,” the true “other” of our life. The philosophy of Personalism, the foundations of which are laid in this work, is further developed by Renouvier in a comprehensive work which he published in 1899, in conjunction with M. Prat, on The New Monadology (La Nouvelle Monadologie). This is one of the most complete presentations of a philosophy of “Pluralism” that is at the same time a “Theism”—to be associated, in my opinion, say, with the recent work of Dr. James Ward upon the Realm of Ends, referred to on p. 162.
45 Philos. Rev. (1906), article by Lalande.
46 H. Poincaré (talked of in recent scientific circles as one of the greatest mathematicians of history) is (he died about a year ago), so far as our present purpose is concerned, one of the important scientific writers of the day upon the subject of the “logic of hypotheses,” and of the “hypothetical method” in science—the method which the pragmatists are so anxious to apply to philosophy. He seems (see his La Science et l’Hypothèse, as well as the later book, La Valeur de la Science, referred to by Lalande in his professional reports to the Philosophical Review) to accept to some extent the idea of the “hypothetical” character of the constructions of both the mathematical and the physical sciences, believing, however, at the same time that we must not be “unduly sceptical” about their conclusions, revealing as they do something of the “nature of reality.” He discusses among other topics the theory of “energetics” of which we speak below in the case of Ostwald. He insists, too, upon the idea that the real is known only by “experience,” and that this “experience” includes the comparison of the thoughts of many minds. And yet he believes to some extent in the Kantian theory of the a priori element in knowledge (see La Science, etc., p. 64). It is, however, quite unnecessary for me to presume to enter into the large subject of the precise nature of “hypotheses” in the mathematical and the physical sciences.
47 A professor of mathematics in Paris and an ardent Bergsonian, and along with Laberthonnière one of the prominent Catholic defenders of Pragmatism and Modernism, author of a book on Dogmatism and Criticism (Dogme et Critique). Not having had the time to examine this book, as somewhat removed from my immediate subject, I append for the benefit of the reader the following statements and quotations from the useful book Faith and its Psychology, by Professor Inge of Cambridge. It is easy to see that the positions represented therein would give rise to controversy as to the historicity or fact of Christianity. “Le Roy gives us some examples of this Catholic Pragmatism. When we say ‘God is personal,’ we mean ‘behave in our relations with God as you do in your relations with a human person.’ When we say, ‘Jesus is risen from the dead,’ we mean ‘treat him as if he were your contemporary.’... His main theses may be summed up in his own words. ‘The current intellectualist conception renders insoluble most of the objections which are now raised against the idea of dogma. A doctrine of the primacy of action, on the contrary, permits us to solve the problem without abandoning anything of the rights of thought or of the exigencies of dogma.’” Le Roy, by the way, has published a book upon the philosophy of Bergson, which is said to be the best book upon the subject. It has been translated into English.
48 M. Abel Rey, author of a work on the Theory of Physical Science in the hands of Contemporary Scientists (La Théorie de la physique chez les physiciens contemporains). In this book (I have not had the time to examine it carefully) M. Rey examines the theories and methods of Newton, and also of modern thinkers like Mach and Ostwald, reaching the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is most compatible is a “modified form of Positivism,” which bears a striking resemblance to “Pragmatism” and the “philosophy of experience.” The English reader will find many useful references to Rey in the pages of Father Leslie J. Walker’s Theories of Knowledge, in the “Stoneyhurst Philosophical Series.”
49 Ibidem.
50 It was impossible to procure a copy of this work of M. Blondel. I have tried to do so twice in Paris.
51 M. Lalande in the Philosophical Review (1906), p. 246.
52 Ibid. pp. 245–246.
53 I am inclined to attach a great importance to this idea (Kant obviously had it) of “consulting moral experience directly,” provided only that the “moral” in our experience is not too rigidly separated from the intellectual. And it would so far, therefore, be only to the credit of Pragmatism if we could associate it with a rational effort to do justice to our moral experience, as indeed possibly presupposing a “reality” that transcends the limits of our mere individuality, a reality that transcends, too, the subjective idealism that figures but too prominently in modern philosophy. See my eighth chapter, p. 223, where I criticize Dr. Bosanquet for not consulting moral experience directly.
54 Phil. Rev., 1906, p. 243.
58 For a later statement upon the philosophy of religion in France see a report for the Phil. Rev. (vol. xvi. p. 304), by Le Roy. This whole matter is, of course, a subject in itself of the greatest theoretical and practical importance. It is enough for our purpose to have indicated the different ways in which Pragmatism and the “Will-to-Believe” philosophy have been received in France, and the different issues raised by this reception. The reader who would care to look at a constructive, philosophical view (by the doyen of French philosophy professors) of the whole issue between the pragmatist or “voluntarist” point of view in religion and the older “intellectual” view, cannot do better than consult Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy, by E. Boutroux, a book that is apparently studied everywhere at present in France. Its spirit and substance may be indicated by the following quotations, which follow after some pages in which M. Boutroux exposes the error of “the radical distinction between theory and practice.” “The starting point of science is an abstraction, i.e. an element extracted from the given fact and considered separately. We cannot expect man to be satisfied with the abstract when the concrete is at his disposal. That would be ‘something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a solid meal.’ Man uses science but he lives religion. The part cannot replace the whole; the symbol cannot suppress reality.”... “Not only is science unable to replace religion, but she cannot dispense with the subjective reality upon which the latter is grounded. It is pure Scholastic realism to imagine that the objective and the impersonal suffice apart from the subjective in our experience. Between the subjective and the objective no demarcation is given which justifies from the philosophical standpoint the divisions which science imagines for her own convenience.” (p. 329).
59 Since writing these words, I have made (thanks firstly to Dr. Schiller’s review in Mind, July 1911) the acquaintance of the important work of M. Pradines upon the Conditions of Action. In the central conception of this work, that action is “all-including” and that all knowledge is a form of action, I find an important development of much that the pragmatists have long been endeavouring to express, and also in particular a development of the celebrated action philosophy of M. Blondel. I am inclined, with Dr. Schiller, to regard the volumes of M. Pradines as apparently the high-water mark of French pragmatist philosophy in the general sense of the term, although I cannot but at the same time hail with approval their occasional sharp criticism of Pragmatism as to some extent “scepticism and irrationalism.” I am inclined to think, too, that the ethical philosophy of M. Pradines has some of the same defects that I shall venture to discuss later in dealing with the application (mainly by Dewey) of Pragmatism to moral theory. Of course his Conditions of Action is by no means as original a production as Blondel’s book upon Action.
60 Fouillée speaks in his book upon the Idealist Movement and the Reaction against Positive Science of the year 1851, as the time of the triumph of “force,” of “Naturalism” (Zola, Goncourt, etc.), and of the revival of Idealism by Lachelier, Renouvier, and Boutroux.
61 See the celebrated work of A. Fouillée, La Psychologie des idées-forces (Paris, 1890). I confess to having been greatly impressed by this book when I first made its acquaintance. In particular, I can think of an idea in Fouillée’s book that anticipates even Bergson, namely the fact that every idea or sensation is an effort that is furthered or impeded. But Fouillée’s works out in this book the active of the volitional side of nearly every mental power and of the mental life itself, refusing to separate “mind” and “bodily activity.” It really anticipates a great deal of the whole French philosophy and psychology of action, including the work of Blondel and Bergson.
62 M. Paul Desjardins (at present a professor of “letters” at Sévres) was influential in Paris about 1892–93 as the founder of a Union pour l’Action morale, which published a monthly bulletin. This society still exists, but under the name (and the change is indeed highly significant of what Pragmatism in general really needs) L’Union pour la vérité morale et sociale. I append a few words from one of the bulletins I received from M. Desjardins. They are indicative of the spiritualizations of thought and action for which the old society stood. “Il ne s’agit de rien moins que de renverser entièrement l’échelle de nos jugements, de nos attaches, de mettre en haut ce qui était en bas, et en bas ce qui était en haut. Il s’agit d’une conversion totale, en somme....” “La règle commune c’est la médiocrité d’âme, ou même ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’athéisme pratique. En effet, Dieu étant, par rapport à notre conscience, la Volonté que le bien se réalise, ou la Règle vivante, on devient pratiquement, athée, fût-on d’ailleurs très persuadé par les preuves philosophiques de l’existence de Dieu, lorsqu’on perd la notion de cette Volonté immuable avec laquelle la nôtre se confond activement dès qu’elle mérite le nom de volonté libre, etc.” In this last sentence there is a distinctly pragmatist note in the sense of the action philosophy of Blondel and Bergson and the rest.
63 See also the recent book by Flournoy on the Philosophy of James (Paris, 1911), in which this interesting special subject is discussed as well as the important difference between James and Bergson.
64 Rey in his Philosophie Moderne, 1908, speaks of the “gleaning of the practical factors of rationalistic systems” as the “new line” in French philosophy (Journ. of Phil., 1911, p. 226).
65 From the Lalande article already mentioned.
66 This can be seen, for example, in the Preface to Die Philosophie des Als Ob, the quasi-Pragmatist book recently edited by Vaihinger, the famous commentator on Kant. “We must distinguish in Pragmatism,” it is there stated, “what is valuable from the uncritical exaggerations. Uncritical Pragmatism is an epistemological Utilitarianism of the worst sort; what helps us to make life tolerable is true, etc.... Thus Philosophy becomes again an ancilla theologiae; nay, the state of matters is even worse than this; it becomes a meretrix theologorum.” This, by the way, is a strange and a striking book, and is perhaps the last conspicuous instance from Germany of the vitality, and of the depths of the roots of some of the principles of the pragmatists. The very appearance of the name of Vaihinger in connexion with it (as the editor) must be a considerable shock to rationalists and to Kantians, who have long looked upon Vaihinger as one of the authoritative names in German Transcendentalism. Here, however, he seems to agree with those who treat Kant’s ethical philosophy of postulates as the real Kant, making him out, further, as the author of a far-reaching philosophy of the “hypotheses” and the “fictions” that we must use in the interpretation of the universe. With Dr. Schiller, who reviews this work in Mind (1912), I am inclined to think that it travels too far in the direction of an entirely hypothetical conception of knowledge, out-pragmatising the pragmatists apparently. The student who reads German will find it a veritable magazine of information about nearly all the thinkers of the time who have pragmatist or quasi-pragmatist leanings. All the names, for example, of the German and French writers to whom I refer in this second chapter are mentioned there [I had, of course, written my book before I saw Vaihinger], along with many others. It is as serious an arraignment of abstract rationalism as is to be found in contemporary literature, and edited, as I say, by the Nestor of the Kant students of our time.
67 Especially in the open-minded and learned articles in the Archiv für Philosophie, 1907, Band xiv., Professor Stein (of Bern) is known as one of the most enthusiastic and voluminous writers upon Social Philosophy in Germany. His best-known work is an encyclopedic book upon the social question in the light of philosophy (Die soziale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie, 1903). His tendency here is realistic and naturalistic and evolutionistic, and he thinks (for a philosopher) far too much of men like Herbert Spencer and Mach and Ostwald. What one misses in Stein is a discussion of the social question in relation to some of the deeper problems of philosophy, such as we find in men of our own country like Mackenzie and Bosanquet, and Ritchie, and Jones, and others. His work, however (it has been translated into Russian and French), is a complete literary presentation of the subject, and a valuable source of information. See my review notices of it in the Phil. Rev. vol. xiv.
68 Mach and Ostwald both represent (for the purposes of our study) the association that undoubtedly exists between Pragmatism and the tendency of all the physical and natural sciences to form “hypotheses” or conceptions, that are to them the best means of “describing” or “explaining” (for any purpose) either facts, or the connexions between facts. Mach (professor of the history and theory of the sciences in Vienna) is a “phenomenalist” and “methodologist” who attacks all a priorism, treating the matter of the arrangement of the “material” of a science under the idea of the “most economic expenditure” of our “mental energy.” One of the best known of his books is his Analysis of the Sensations (translated, along with his Popular Science Lectures, in the “Open Court Library” of Chicago). In this work he carries out the idea of his theory of knowledge as a question of the proper relation of “facts” to “symbols.” “Thing, body, matter,” he says (p. 6), “are all nothing apart from their so-called attributes.” “Man possesses in its highest form the power of consciously and arbitrarily determining his point of view.” In his Introduction, he attempts to show how “the ego and the relation of bodies to the ego give rise” to “problems” in the relations simply of “certain complexes” of “sensation to each other.” While it is undoubtedly to the credit of Mach that he sees the “subjective,” or the “mental,” factor in facts and things and objects, it must be said that he ignores altogether the philosophical problems of the ego, or the “self,” as something more than a mere object among objects.
Ostwald is one of the founders of the theory of “Energetics,” the theory of the school that believes in substituting a dynamical philosophy, for the older, atomic, or mechanical philosophy of matter and motion. He put this philosophy forward in 1895 as the last gift of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. He suggests how this idea of energetics may be applied also to psychical processes, in so far as these may be understood by conceptions that have proved to be useful in our interpretation of the physical world. Our “consciousness would thus come to be looked upon as a property of a peculiar kind of energy of the nerves.” The whole idea is a piece of phenomenalistic positivism, and although Ostwald makes an attempt (somewhat in the manner of Herbert Spencer) to explain the “forms,” or the categories, of experience as simply “norms” or “rules” that have been handed on from one generation to another, he does not occupy himself with ultimate philosophical questions about the nature either of matter or of energy. His Natural Philosophy has recently been translated into English (Holt & Co., 1910). Its Pragmatism lies in the fact of his looking upon concepts and classification as “not questions” of the so-called “essence” of the thing, “but rather as pertaining to purely practical arrangements for an easier and more successful mastery of scientific problems” (p. 67). He also takes a pragmatist, or “functional,” conception of the mental life towards the close of this book. Professor Ostwald lectured some years ago in the United States, and his lectures were attended by students of philosophy and students of science. Professor (now President) Hibben has written an interesting account of his theory in its philosophical bearings in the Philosophical Review, vol. xii.
69 The philosophy of Avenarius (born in Paris, but died as Professor of Inductive Philosophy in Zurich) is called “Empirical Criticism,” which differs from Idealism by taking a more realistic attitude to ordinary human experience. There is an excellent elementary account of Avenarius in Mind for 1897 by Carstanjen of Zurich. Avenarius goes back in some respects to the teaching of Comte as to the need of interpreting all philosophical theories in the terms of the social environment out of which they come.