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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



other has been so fully elaborated by the most re- 

 cent school of English philosophy, that English 

 readers will hardly find anything new in this por- 

 tion of Noire's philosophy. We must only re- 

 mark, as against all philosophers from Descartes 

 to Kant and his school, that even the most primi- 

 tive perceptions or empirical cognitions are never 

 entirely passive. Malebranche said : " In the same 

 manner as the faculty of receiving different figures 

 and configurations in the body is entirely pas- 

 sive, and involves no action whatever, the faculty 

 also of receiving different ideas and different mod- 

 ifications in the mind is entirely passive, and in- 

 volves no action whatever. I call this faculty, or 

 this capacity which the mind possesses of receiv- 

 ing all those things, the understanding (l'entende- 

 ment)." We hold, on the contrary, that every 

 impression becomes perceived by our resistance 

 only, and every resistance is active and self-con- 

 scious. We suffer, no doubt, in seeing and hear- 

 ing, but we suffer because we resist. 



Kant says, " If I take away all thought from 

 an empirical cognition, there remains no cognition 

 whatever of an object, for nothing is thought by 

 mere intuition, and the fact of my sense being 

 affected gives me nothing that relates to any ob- 

 ject." But whatever we may do in abstract rea- 

 soning, we cannot in rerurn natura take away all 

 thought from an empirical cognition, without de- 

 stroying it. This is what Schopenhauer urges, 

 with great success, against Kant. He shows that 

 even the simplest intuition involves activity, sen- 

 sation, and thought. In giving to our sensuous 

 disturbances an object, in saying of these objects 

 that they are, we are not only passive ; we are 

 active, we think, we are using Kant's own cate- 

 gory of causality, in addition to the intuitions of 

 space and time. In placing the cause of our sen- 

 suous disturbance outside ourselves, we apply 

 what Kant calls one form of our sensuous intui- 

 tion, viz., space. In placing one disturbance by 

 the side of another, we begin to count, and apply 

 Kant's second form of sensuous intuition, viz., 

 time. There is, in fact, according to Schopen- 

 hauer, no real sensation without the first germs 

 of intellect in it. Kant takes the intellect as some- 

 thing given, as ready at hand, whenever we want 

 to apply it to the brute material supplied by the 

 senses. Noire looks upon the intellect as grad- 

 ually developing from the lowest indications of 

 conscious sensation to the highest achievements 

 of discursive reasoning. On this point he was, 

 for a time, as it would seem, chiefly under the in- 

 fluence of Geiger. Geiger, speaking historically 

 rather than psychologically, says: 



" One thing is certain, that as far as our obser- 

 vation reaches, man is rational. And yet he has not 

 always been rational. Keason does not date from 

 all eternity. Reason, like everything else on earth, 

 had an origin and beginning in time. And, like 

 the species of living beings, reason did not spring 

 into existence suddenly, finished, and in all its per- 

 fection, as it were by a kind of catastrophe ; but it 

 has had its own development. We have in lan- 

 guage an inestimable and indispensable instrument 

 for seeing this. Nay, I believe that whatever 

 plausible theories on the descent of man may have 

 been started elsewhere, certainty and assurance 

 can be obtained from language only." 



Geiger seems to me to mix up two ideas in the 

 word rational. When he say3 that man was not 

 always rational, he means rationalis, not rationa- 

 bilis ; and between these two words the difference 

 is immense. We agree with Noire when he says : 



" How is it possible that from unconscious and 

 non-sentient matter consciousness and sensation 

 should suddenly shine forth, unless the inner qual- 

 ity, though in a dark and to us hardly perceptible 

 manner, belonged before to those substances from 

 which the first animal life, in its most elementary 

 form, was developed?" (p. 193). 



It may probably be objected that the inner 

 quality here spoken of is only a different name for 

 the qualitates occulta, which form the terror of 

 modern philosophy. But honest philosophers 

 must not allow themselves to be swayed by the 

 clamor of the day. No doubt the abuse that was 

 made of occult qualities, innate ideas, and of 

 faculties and instincts, was very great; but be- 

 cause modern philosophy had shown that these 

 terms were musty with the crust of long-accu- 

 mulated misconceptions, there was no ground for 

 throwing away these old terms, like broken toys. 

 Every one of them, if only carefully defined, has 

 its legitimate meaning ; and with all the prejudice 

 attaching to their name, the theory of occult qual- 

 ities and their gradual manifestation rules really 

 supreme at the present day, though thinly veiled 

 under the new name of evolution and potential 

 energy. 



Noire's philosophy rests on a most compre- 

 hensive theory of evolution ; it is the first attempt 

 at tracing the growth of the whole world, not only 

 of matter, but of thought also, from the beginning 

 of time to the present day. As the philosophy 

 of Nature strives to account for all that exists by 

 a slow progress of evolution, beginning from the 

 simplest elements, and ascending through endless 

 combinations to the highest effort of Nature, re- 

 alized in man, the philosophy of thought starts 



