26 



NATURE 



[May io, 1900 



of Huxley and Mr. Spencer, made in the first flush of 

 the reconnaissance in force of militant science, but left 

 Naturalism the while untouched ? 



Dr. Ward's polemic against Mechanism is, we take it, 

 justified with some qualifications, as against those who 

 hold that the synthesis of naturalism is complete, and 

 that the law of its continuity implies the resolution of all 

 phenomenal realities into terms of the modern substitutes 

 for matter in motion, conceived of as having no qualitative 

 but only quantitative determinations. Again, the un- 

 necessarily contemptuous criticism of Evolution as the 

 working of mechanism is vaHd against Mr. Spencer's 

 " First Principles." Mr. Spencer's mastership happily 

 does not rest upon the soundness of the too early stereo- 

 typed foundation, nor on the claim that the edifice is 

 complete to its coping-stone. Further, if " science " is at 

 the standpoint of the materialism of Laplace, or even if 

 it has taken the Huxley of the early sixties, with his un- 

 doubted materialist bias, as guide in all things, it will have 

 to retrace the steps it has taken in its advance towards a 

 creed. If it abstracts the known from the knower, and 

 maintains that the act of abstraction makes no difference, 

 it can be convicted of positing a phenomenal -woxXd. per se. 

 If, in the faith of continuity, it says that the inorganic, as 

 it is conceived by mathematical physics, not only con- 

 ditions but also constitutes the organic, in the sense that 

 we must not, in order to explain the organic, look for 

 anything in the inorganic other than those mathematical 

 determinations of which alone abstract physics take 

 account, then it is against that long patience which is the 

 chief of discoverers, and is attempting an "anticipation" 

 of experience. If it treats regulative as constitutive prin- 

 ciples, and attributes agency to formulae, it is guilty of 

 what we had thought was specifically the idealist's fallacy. 

 But must Naturalism do these things ? 



We might instance Dr. Hodgson's experientialism and 

 Prof. Miinsterberg's transformism among types of natur- 

 alism able to " let the galled jade wince." Surely, too, 

 the specialist, finding in his own department, recognised 

 as partial and abstract, the immanence of law, and learn- 

 ing that his colleagues in other departments find law 

 there too, and so throughout, is justified in believing that 

 out of nature — human nature, and specifically the nature 

 of human thought included — the solution must come. 

 Unable to find a mediating term between his "non- 

 matter in motion " or what not, and psychic process, he 

 accepts the "parallelism," with hypothetical connection 

 as co-aspects or, since Prof Ward, despite of Kant and 

 Mr. Bradley, prefers the causal relation, co-effects of a 

 unitary system. And if to the knowledge of this he sees 

 no road from the human standpoint, wherein lies the illicit- 

 ness of the union, always stigmatised by Dr. Ward as an 

 evil liaison^ between his positive treatment of his facts of 

 science and his agnostic neutral attitude, without bias 

 either materialist or spiritualist, towards the ultimate 

 real? 



Dr. Ward thinks, in terms of the quotation on his title- 

 page, that law implies teleology, and that teleology 

 implies spiritualistic monism. We do not see the steps 

 by which he establishes this latter point. And he thinks 

 neutral agnosticism unstable in the direction of one bias 

 or other. We do not see why. 



Surely in taking Naturalism " to designate the doctrine 

 NO. 1593, VOL. 62] 



that separates Nature from God, subordinates Spirit to 

 Matter, and sets up unchangeable law as supreme," Dr. 

 Ward has imposed upon it three characters— the first an 

 ambiguity, the second a mechanical bias which is not 

 essential to it, the third its pride, or what it would re- 

 pudiate, according to the meanings attached to the words 

 "law" and "supreme." It is he who has conjured up 

 what, by a curious slip, he calls " a novel Frankenstein." 



We cannot accept Dr. Ward's criticism of psycho- 

 physical parallelism. Mr. Stout, who also " carried Cam- 

 bridge to Aberdeen," is to the point here. He treats it 

 as the best mode of formulating the facts, but needing 

 for explanation something beyond itself That he finds 

 this something in an idealist metaphysic makes his witness 

 the more impartial. Prof. Ward hankers after " inter- 

 action," or at least "activity of mind." The first, in the 

 form in which he demands it, involves him, to our think- 

 ing, in a dualism, which is not a duality of subject and 

 object, and for which his own " refutation of dualism " 

 is enough. The second is spiritualism, which, if monistic, 

 precisely inverts material monism and makes man a 

 conscious automaton from the other point of view. 



We may note in this connection a sceptical argument 

 of Dr. Ward's. In what seems to be a misapplication of 

 the formula of " introjection," which he applies elsewhere 

 with signal success, he insists that my psychoses are 

 experience only for me, my neuroses experience only 

 for the physiologist. The inference surely must be to 

 solipsism or to nothing. Does Dr. Ward mean to deny 

 the accompaniment of my psychical phantasmagoria with 

 brain change ? 



The quality of Dr. Ward's idealism is perhaps to be 

 doubted. Where does he get the " voluntary movement " 

 which is essential to our perception of space ? We are 

 not quite sure that his "intellective synthesis " gives him 

 a right to a world of " intersubjective intercourse" at all. 

 It is, to use an illustration of his own, a case of genii each 

 hermetically sealed in his bottle, but collectively at large. 

 Or it is natural realism. Again, his mental "activity" 

 is in collision with the teaching of Mr. Bradley. 



Dr. Ward must have creative agency for thought if 

 " nature is spirit " (though if this be so in a plain, straight- 

 forward sense, then why naturalism is wrong from the 

 point of view of spirit is hard to see). But all thought 

 that we know is accompanied with body, and does not 

 create. Huxley " quite rightly refuses to convert invari- 

 able concomitance into necessary conjunction." If that 

 is so, what becomes of Dr. Ward's formula as to parallelism 

 and causal independence, apart from his fallacious use of 

 it to establish interaction, when the " community " need 

 not imply more than that they are aspects or, if Dr. Ward 

 will have it so, co-effects of the same real ? 



Prof. Ward declines to allow analysis to be adequate 

 unless you can find your way back to complete synthesis. 

 Judged by this test, what becomes of Spiritualistic 

 Monism ? Indeed, the double edge of Dr. Ward's argu- 

 ments is one of the marked characteristics of his book. 

 What is good for " non-matter in motion " is good for 

 Green's "relations without relaia." What is good for 

 Lord Kelvin's Plenum is good for Mr. Bradley's Reality. 

 A dialectical process, which must take place in a time 

 considered to be riddled with self-contradictions and 

 is analogous to the form of evolution that 



