January 27, 1899.] 



SCIENCE. 



149 



tainty and necessity are not derived from its 

 relation to anything else. Moreover, these 

 truths are directly apprehended by our power 

 of intellectual intuition (p. 104). It is those 

 fundamental certainties which constitute ' the 

 groundwork of science,' and the author enu- 

 merates the list several times with what appears 

 to be slight variations (pp. 106, 241 ff., 310 flf). 

 In this list are found : (1) the possibility of ab- 

 solute certainty ; (2) the existence of an ex- 

 ternal world of real objects ; (3) our own sub- 

 stantial and continuous personal existence ; (4) 

 the possibility of drawing conclusions from 

 premises ; (5) the existence of self-evident 

 truths ; (6) the law of contradiction ; (7) self- 

 evident axioms ; (8) the principle of causality ; 

 (9) the principle of uniformity ; (10) the fact 

 that some things are contingent and some 

 necessary. 



It is well-known that Aristotle maintained 

 that all knowledge presupposes the existence 

 of certain self-evident propositions which 

 neither require nor are capable of proof. The 

 earlier Scottish philosophers, also, adopting the 

 same position, made several attempts to furnish 

 lists of self-evident truths. But this doctrine 

 no more belongs to the philosophical thought 

 of to-day than does ' phlogiston ' to modern 

 chemistry, or ' vital force ' to biology. In the 

 first place, experience has shown that each 

 thinker who defends intuitive truths is likely 

 to have certain propositions of his own which 

 seem to him specially sacred, and which he is 

 anxious to place beyond the pale of examina- 

 tion and criticism. Secondly, what we believe 

 to be a truer conception of the nature of mind, 

 has led us to see that all knowledge is organic 

 — that all of the facts of our experience are in- 

 terrelated and mutually dependent. There 

 are no truths, then, which are isolated and 

 self-sufficient ; every fact is known to be true 

 and necessary only through its connection 

 with other facts. The so-called self-evident 

 propositions must be proved and justified in 

 exactly the same way in which scientific hy- 

 pothesis are shown to be true. Thus, for ex- 

 ample, when I say that it is self-evident that 

 an external world exists, or that nature is uni- 

 form, I mean that these propositions are ob- 

 viously true because in no other way can I 



account for the facts of my experience. The 

 proof in these cases may be easier and more 

 convincing than the demonstration of the natu- 

 ral-selection hypothesis, but the former are no 

 more s«//- evident than the latter. 



If space permitted, I should like to examine 

 in some detail the doctrine of new beginnings, 

 'breaches of continuity,' at certain points in 

 the world process. Here, again, it seems to me 

 that the conclusions reached by Mr. Mivart 

 are not in accord with the results of modern 

 scientific and philosophical thought. The 

 modern defender of teleology does not, it seems 

 to me, rest his case upon breaches of continuity 

 in natural law, or upon new beginnings at this 

 point or that. He rather insists that no part 

 of the world — not even the inorganic — can be 

 completely understood without regarding it as 

 the manifestation of an energy in some way 

 analogous, at least, to his own intelligence. If 

 Mr. Mivart had made use of the idealistic prin- 

 ciple which he so clearly expresses at the end 

 of his book, and to which I have already re- 

 ferred, he would have found a surer defence 

 against materialism, and would have avoided 

 what must seem to many scientists an attempt 

 to introduce final causes into the field of natural 

 science. 



In conclusion, I can not refrain from saying 

 that it seems to me unfortunate that this book 

 should represent Epistemology in a series which 

 undertakes to deal 'with the most recent advances 

 in the various sciences. The volume doubtless 

 contains a good deal that is interesting and sug- 

 gestive ; but, at the same time, it is at once evi- 

 dent that the writer's special work has been in 

 a different field from that of Epistemology. It 

 seems to me that it is suflSciently clear, from 

 what has been already said, that the author 

 has not followed at all the epistemological dis- 

 cussions of the last twenty years. I add two or 

 three illustrations of very serious confusions 

 with regard to the facts and problems of mod- 

 ern philosophical systems which are not un- 

 common in the book. " The whole philos- 

 ophy of Germany and Holland," we are in- 

 formed, "from Spinoza to Hartmann, has been 

 the result of the mental seed first sown in men's 

 minds by Berkeley, who explicitly produced 

 what was implicitly contained in I'jocke " (pp. 



