152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



gruity is to be determined, and what is the fundamental product of 

 thought yielded by this process. This fundamental product I have 

 shown to be the coexistence of subject and object; and then, describ- 

 ing this as a postulate to be justified by " its subsequently-proved con- 

 gruity with every result of experience, direct and indirect," I have 

 gone on to say that " the two divisions of self and not-self are redi- 

 visible into certain most general forms, the reality of which Science, 

 as well as Common-Sense, from moment to moment assumes." Nor 

 is this all. Having thus assumed, only provisionally^ this deepest 

 of all intuitions, far transcending an axiom in self-evidence, I have, 

 after drawing deductions occupying four volumes, deliberately gone 

 back to the assumption ("Principles of Psychology," § 386). After 

 quoting the passage in which the principle was laid down, and after 

 reminding the reader that the deductions drawn had been found con- 

 gruous with one another, I have pointed out that it still remained to 

 ascertain whether this primordial assumption was congruous with all 

 the deductions ; and have thereupon proceeded, throughout eighteen 

 chapters, to show the congruity. And yet, having the volumes before 

 him in which this principle is set forth with a distinctness and acted 

 upon with a deliberation which I believe are nowhere exceeded, the 

 reviewer enunciates for my benefit this principle of which he " thought 

 that every tolerably educated man was aware ! " He enunciates it as 

 applying to limited groups of beliefs to which it does not apply; and 

 shuts his eyes to the fact that I have avowedly and systematically 

 acted uj^on it in respect to the entire aggregate of our beliefs (axioms 

 included) for which it furnishes the ultimate justification ! 



Here I must add another elucidatory statement, which would have 

 been needless had the reviewer read that which he criticises. His ar- 

 gument proceeds throughout on the assumption that I understand a 

 priori truths after the ancient manner, as truths independent of expe- 

 rience ; and he shows this more than tacitly, where he " trusts " that 

 he is " attacking one of the last attempts to deduce the law^s of Nature 

 from our inner consciousness." Manifestly, a leading thesis of one of 

 the works he professes to review is entirely unknown to him — the 

 thesis that forms of thought, and consequently the intuitions which 

 those forms of thought involve, result entirely from the effects of ex- 

 periences, organized and inherited. With the " Principles of Psy- 

 chology " before him, not only does he seem unaware that it contains 

 this doctrine, but, though this doctrine, set forth in its first edition 

 published nearly twenty years ago, has gained considerable currency, 

 he seems never to have heard of it. The implication of this doctrine 

 is, not that the " laws of Nature " are deducible from " our inner con- 

 sciousness," but that our consciousness has a preestablished correspond- 

 ence wdth such of those laws (simple, perpetually presented, and never 

 .negatived) as have, in the course of practically-infinite ancestral ex- 

 periences, registered themselves in our nervous structure. Had he 



