148 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IX. No. 213 



treat some department of science with refer- 

 ence to the most recent advances, and will be 

 contributed by an author of acknowledged 

 authority." The book before us represents 

 epistemology, or the science of knowledge, in 

 this series. It does not, as one might perhaps 

 expect from the title, treat primarily of the 

 methods of science, or of the fundamental 

 conceptions which science employs, but deals 

 with the essential nature of knowledge, or 

 ' science ' in the broader sense, as developed by 

 the human mind, in its relation to a world of 

 real objects. , 



The table of contents shows the following 

 list of chapters : (I.) Introductory; (II.) An 

 Enumeration of the Sciences ; (III.) The Ob- 

 jects of Science ; (IV.) The Methods of Science; 

 (V.) The Physical Antecedents of Science ; 

 (VI.) The Psychical Antecedents of Science ; 

 (VII.) Language and Science ; (VIII.) Intel- 

 lectual Antecedents of Science ; (IX.) Causes 

 of Scientific Knowledge; (X.) The Nature of 

 the Groundwork of Science. The author re- 

 gards as futile all attempts to furnish either a 

 systematic or a historical classification of the 

 sciences. He, therefore, contents himself with 

 an enumeration of tliem, indicating briefly at 

 the same time some of their more general log- 

 ical relations. 



It will be of advantage to state at once the 

 principal results of the book, and thus to show 

 the main theses which the author defends 

 against what he regards as certain more or less 

 widely prevalent tendencies of the present age. 

 These are as follows : (1) The continuous exist- 

 ence of the Self or Ego; (2) the existence of a real 

 world of extended things in themselves; (3) the 

 necessity of assuming as intuitively known cer- 

 tain propositions which cannot be proved ; (4\ 

 the possibility of absolute scientific certainty 

 about some things ; (5) the existence of breaches 

 of continuity at certain points in the world-pro- 

 cess, as, for example, between the organic and 

 the inorganic, between insentient and sentient 

 organisms, and especially betvi'een merely sensu- 

 ous and emotional states of consciousness and 

 the intellectual or rational life ; (6) the inad- 

 equacy of a purely mechanical or naturalistic 

 theory of evolution, and especially the impos- 

 sibility of explaining in this way the various 



forms of life, and the intellectual and moral 

 nature of man. 



We may now look a little more closely at one 

 or two of these propositions. The long chap- 

 ter, 'The Objects of Science ' (pp. 34-88), is 

 occupied almost wholly with a refutation of 

 idealism. The author feels "that if idealism 

 were true, the authority and certainty of other 

 self-evident truths would be gravely compro- 

 mised, especially if a truth so self-evident as the 

 existence of our own body (as we and most men 

 understand that body to exist) were but an illu- 

 sion and self-deception of the mind"(p. viii). Un- 

 fortunately, Mr. Mivart is here fighting a prod- 

 uct of his own imagination. He regards ideal- 

 ism as the doctrine which denies the existence 

 of au external world, and which can be summed 

 up in Berkeley's somewhat unfortunate phrase, 

 ' the esse of things is their percipi.' His own ar- 

 guments consist mainly in an oft-repeated decla- 

 ration that ' ' we have an intuitive knowledge of 

 the external world as extended. "This, of 

 course, is as obvious an example of ignoratio 

 elenchi as were the appeals of the Scottish philos- 

 ophers to ' Common Sense ' in behalf of what 

 neither Berkeley nor anyone else has ever 

 dreamed of denying. Moreover, the assertion 

 in this chapter that there is a world of things in 

 themselves, existing apart, and not dependent 

 upon any mind, is sufficiently refuted by the 

 passage with which the book closes. There we 

 are told that "the action of an all-pervading 

 but unimaginable intelligence alone affords us 

 any satisfactory conception of the universe as a 

 whole, or of any single portion of the cosmos 

 which may be selected for exclusive study ' ' 

 (p. 321). In spite of the author's protestations, 

 then, we shall have to regard him as an idealist, 

 in exactly the same sense as we regard Aristotle 

 and Hegel as idealists. 



Numerous discussions are devoted to the 

 question of intuitively certain or self-evident 

 truths. The author's position seems to be that 

 all inference rests upon the existence of certain 

 indemonstrable propositions, which have to be 

 accepted as intuitively self-evident (pp. vi, 103 

 flf, 240 f , 309). These truths are of an entirely 

 different order from the facts known to us by 

 perception or by inference. Each is known as 

 certain and necessary in itself, and this cer- 



