332 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



non-existent. The whole argument confuses end in the sense of an event that 

 ultimately happens with end in the sense of a purpose that is always present (or 

 past). 



This attempt to mingle the future with the past is part of a general mental 

 habit, evident throughout the book, of crushing together, or unduly identifying, 

 things that are separate, because they have connection as well as independency. 

 This mental habit is closely connected, as effect or cause, with the writer's concep- 

 tion of philosophy as something that " sees life steadily and sees it whole.'' " It is 

 the process as a whole that has to be considered," he writes, and, again, " the 

 process of the universe . . . must be taken as a whole, in which the spirit of the 

 whole is everywhere present." Regard wholes by all means, but do not forget that 

 the distant mass of foliage conceals a number of distinct trees ! " The spirit of 

 the whole is everywhere present" clearly expresses this mystical habit of blending 

 different things together in a sort of pseudo-identity. Surely there is one spirit 

 among men, another spirit among beavers, and yet another in the fires of the sun. 

 Theories of perception of the subjective or representationist type are condemned 

 because they mystify by "extruding man from the world he seeks to know." "The 

 fact of man's rootedness in nature," and " man as organic to the world," are so 

 emphasised that perception becomes virtually a mixing of man with the objects he 

 perceives. Perception and knowledge surely imply both a connection between 

 man and nature and an element of independent existence, which is the element 

 recognised in the misnamed "extrusion." So thorough is the mixing that beauty 

 and sublimity become " qualities of the object just as much as the vaunted primary 

 qualities.'' Feeling and emotion are so essential a part of beauty and sublimity 

 that pleasure (and pain by implication) are torn by this conception from their 

 natural habitat in consciousness and distributed throughout external things. The 

 same line of thought inspires the statement that "man does not make values any 

 more than he makes reality." This touches a central point of Prof. Pringle- 

 Pattison's philosophy. It is not easy to gather into a whole his own " Idea of 

 God" scattered through the present "construction through criticism" ; but he is 

 emphatic " that the idea of value is central and decisive throughout. It is, at 

 bottom, the question of the divineness or undivineness of the universe." 



Mr. Balfour's Theism and Humanism is a recent expression of the present 

 dominant tendency, discerned and approved by the Professor, to justify the Idea 

 of God through the Idea of Value. Now all ideas of value, be the values great or 

 small, represent human valuations. A minor value is most convenient to take to 

 illustrate the whole — as Euclid argues from the triangle A B C to all triangles. If 

 we take the greater values there is a danger, as often happens to Prof. Pringle- 

 Pattison and his confreres, of a mental excitement that surrounds the argument 

 with a cloud of rhetoric. A cabbage has an edible or nutritive value because there 

 are men to eat it. It would have no edible value if there were no men, or if men 

 did not eat. This edible value is not something that " eternally is," or " the spirit 

 of the whole " expressing itself in the cabbage. It is simply a value that appears 

 when cabbages grow and man requires to eat. It is quite unnecessary to look 

 beyond the physiological and appetitive nature of man, in combination with the 

 material of the cabbage, as far as this particular value is concerned. The ante- 

 cedents are quite competent to discover to us why we value cabbages as edible. 

 The edible value of cabbage arrived with us ; if we were to disappear it would 

 disappear too. Values, in short, from the value of the humble cabbage to the 

 loftiest aesthetic or moral significance, depend for their existence upon us. They 

 grow out of our life, or from the interaction between us and other existences. It 



