302 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as soon as I do that, I find that the inkstand appears there in spite of me. 

 If I turn away my eyes, other witnesses will tell me that it still remains. 

 If we all leave the room and dismiss the matter from our thoughts, still 

 a photographic camera would show the inkstand still there, with the 

 same roundness, polish and transparency, and with the same opaque 

 liquid within. Thus, or otherwise, I confirm myself in the opinion that 

 its characters are what they are, and persist at every opportunity in 

 revealing themselves, regardless of what you, or I, or any man, or gen- 

 eration of men, may think that they are. That conclusion to which 

 I find myself driven, struggle against it as I may, I briefly express by 

 saying that the inkstand is a real thing. Of course, in being real and 

 external, it does not in the least cease to be a purely psychical product, 

 a generalized percept, like everything of which I can take any sort of 

 cognizance. 



It might not be a very serious error to say that the facts of science 

 are sense-impressions, did it not lead to dire confusion upon other 

 points. We see this in Chapter III., in whose long meanderings through 

 irrelevant subjects, in the endeavor to make out that there is no rational 

 element in nature, and that the rational element of natural laws is 

 imported into them by the minds of their discoverers, it would be 

 impossible for the author to lose sight entirely of the bearing of the 

 question which he himself has distinctly formulated, if he were not 

 laboring with the confusing effects of his notion that the data of 

 science are the sense-impressions. It does not occur to him that he is 

 laboring to prove that the mind has a marvelous power of creating an 

 element absolutely supernatural — a power that would go far toward 

 establishing a dualism quite antagonistic to the spirit of his philosophy. 

 He evidently imagines that those who believe in the reality of law, or 

 the rational element in nature, fail to apprehend that the data of 

 science are of a psychical nature. He even devotes a section to proving 

 that natural law does not belong to things-in-themselves, as if it were 

 possible to find any philosopher who ever thought it did. Certainly, 

 Kant, who first decked out philosophy with these chaste ornaments of 

 things-in-themselves, was not of that opinion; nor could anybody well 

 hold it after what he wrote. In point of fact, it is not Professor Pear- 

 son's opponents but he himself who has not thoroughly assimilated the 

 truth that everything we can in any way take cognizance of is purely 

 mental. This is betrayed in many little ways, as, for instance, when he 

 makes his answer to the question, whether the law of gravitation ruled 

 the motion of the planets before Newton was born, to turn upon the cir- 

 cumstance that the law of gravitation is a formula expressive of the 

 motion of the planets 'in terms of a purely mental conception,' as if 

 there could be a conception of anything not purely mental. Eepeatedly, 

 when he has proved the content of an idea to be mental, he seems to 



