872 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 962 



fines his attitude to the relational theory. He 

 observes (pp. 156-163) that our errors are 

 largely mere omissions and not creations; 

 that even illusions " deceive no -well-informed 

 person " ; and that " were men sufficiently 

 well-informed, and were such experiences 

 sufficiently common, there would in no case 

 be the shadow of an illusion," which seems to 

 mean only that if there were no illusions 

 there would be no illusions. The fact remains 

 that illusions, hallucinations and dreams 

 occur; and the question is whether (as some 

 neo-realists hold) the content presented in 

 these can be said to exist in real, objective 

 space, at the time of its presence in conscious- 

 ness, and whether there is any justification 

 for, or meaning in, calling it " independent " 

 of consciousness. To this question, with 

 which the other new realists so laboriously 

 deal, Fullerton, so far as I can see, gives no 

 entirely plain answer; and it is for this rea- 

 son that the relation of his realism to theirs 

 remains, at the most significant point of all, 

 obscure. I take it, however, that he does not 

 view consciousness as an absolutely function- 

 less relation, and that he would reject the 

 paradox of the objectivity of the illusory. 



Assuming this to be his meaning. Fuller- 

 ton must be understood to regard some con- 

 tent of perception as purely mental, or sub- 

 jective, and some as wholly objective and inde- 

 pendent. The further question remains : 

 Where, and by what criterion, shall we draw 

 the line between the two? Patient and subtle 

 as are Fullerton's reasonings upon this point, 

 I do not find them altogether clear or con- 

 vincing. His desire, evidently, is to make the 

 realm of the subjective a very little one; 

 hence his exclusion from it even of the secon- 

 dary qualities, and his apparent reduction of 

 it to the hallucinatory and imaginary merely. 

 But his reasons for drawing the line where he 

 does appear to me blurred through a failure 

 to give and adhere to a single, clear definition 

 of " external " and " objective." In a general 

 way one gathers that (pp. 111-115) things 

 and qualities are external, in the proper sense, 

 when they do not involve a " relation to our 

 sense-organs," when I " can account for them 



without referring to the relation of my body 

 to them." But this throws little light upon 

 the subject. How am I to know when data 

 which are obviously mediated through my 

 sense-organs involve no relation thereto? 

 When (as in the case of color) specific varia- 

 tions in my sense-organs are uniformly ac- 

 companied by specific variations in the quali- 

 ties which appear in consciousness, are not 

 the latter, in accordance with the definition 

 given, " internal " or mental ? But in that 

 case, what becomes of the proof of the exter- 

 nality of color-qualities? Does Fullerton, 

 then, mean that anything is external which 

 without contradiction can be conceived as ex- 

 isting without involving the idea of my body? 

 If this is what is meant, one must still object 

 that there are familiar arguments which seem 

 to show that most of the perceived qualities 

 which one object presents to diilerent percipi- 

 ents are reciprocally contradictory, so long as 

 the qualities are regarded as inhering inde- 

 pendently in the object by itself, and not as 

 functions of its diverse relations to those 

 percipients. These points not being satisfac- 

 torily dealt with, Fullerton's realistic con- 

 struction fails of complete definiteness of out- 

 line and consequently of cogency. 



A noteworthy part of the book is the inter- 

 pretation of Kant as the " first great modern 

 realist " (Chaps. V.-VII.) ; this view is not 

 new, but it has never, perhaps, been so forcibly 

 presented. The most brilliant chapters in the 

 volume are the critical ones. The passages on 

 absolute idealism and on pragmatism are de- 

 lightfully witty, yet eminently searching, ex- 

 amples of philosophic satire. The latter, I 

 think, is less than just to some aspects of 

 pragmatism; but the former (Chaps. XIII.- 

 XV.) is a masterpiece in its kind. 



Arthur O. Lovejoy 

 The Johns Hopkins University 



Handhuch der Entomologie. Herausgegeben 



von Professor Dr. Chr. Schroder. Jena, 



Gustav Fischer. 1913. 



For the past twenty years Kolbe's " Ein- 



leitung " has been the best known German 



text-book on entomology. Now Dr. Schroder 



