184 
sciousness and will be found to be a trans- 
cendent term in relation to an actual con- 
sciousness. It will include the realized content 
of the actual consciousness ; also that which is 
simply present in or to consciousness, together 
with an extra-conscious sphere which exists as 
yet only as implicate or postulate ’’ (90). The 
extra-conscious as implicate of consciousness! 
Are we able to attach any clear idea to what is 
either unthinkable or else a concatenation of 
mere words? Again, in Ormond’s definition 
of Category, the cloven-hoof of the Devil whose 
delight lies in shattering human experience, 
plants itself firmly. ‘‘A category may then 
be defined ; subjectively, as the constitutional 
mode through and in which the subject-con- 
sciousness penetrates its world, and reduces it 
to ideal content, and objectively, as the form 
which the world or not-self is obliged to 
assume in order to present itself to and in con- 
sciousness and become content of its world- 
idea’”’ (117). ‘Obliged’ were truly a sympto- 
matic term. The problem of the unity of 
experience seems to be trebled here. For we 
have a hint of no less than three universes, 
to wit, a subject-universe, an object-universe 
and a category-universe. The conception that 
ideas are forms (the conception, be it remem- 
bered, which has retarded so seriously meta- 
physical advance, and progress in unitary un- 
derstanding of the world, by rendering science 
and philosophy alien from each other) has 
once more elbowed out the hopeful contem- 
porary insight, that ideas are forces; that 
‘matter,’ in so far as amenable to scientific 
treatment, is intelligent, because intelligible ; 
that the universe is a universe, because built 
in one piece, and allinclusive. Yet again, (1) 
‘Without cause no beginning of change would 
be conceivable, but without substance the very 
notion of change would be absurd. Cause is 
the principle in accordance with which changes 
are organized into a mutually dependent sys- 
tem; substance is the principle which in its 
notion of permanence supplies the condition 
which our world demands in order that the 
system of changes may be possible.’? * * * 
(2) ‘The points of rest are relative, there- 
fore, and have their common presupposition 
in the central activity of self-consciousness ’’ 
SCLENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. XIII. No. 318. 
(192-3). Here a very old friend puts in ap- 
pearance, no doubt with face washed or 
smeared somewhat, yet with character un- 
altered. So far as the statement of process goes, 
(1) and (2) land at last in mutual exclusions, as 
they have ever done. 
As Ormond is aware, no modern thinker 
would deny the existence or the potency of the 
element which he calls ‘transcendent.’ But the 
moment you term it ‘transcendent,’ you turn 
it into a kind of waste-paper basket, the 
convenient receptacle for every sort of incon- 
venient question. For instance, gravitation is 
an undeniable fact for the physicist’s experi- 
ence. But whenever you suggest its ‘ transcend- 
ency,’ as Ormond’s reasoning would, you leave 
the realm of experience and serve yourself some 
fine, mysterious feeding. The truth is that 
gravitation, like other ‘ ultimates,’ is transcend- 
ental, and in the sole legitimate sense of this 
term; that is to say, it is constitutive. Here 
we come to ourselves again, and well within 
the sweep of experience. This solid footing 
reached, we cannot forbear to make the some- 
what cruel point that the ‘transcendent’ is all 
too apt to provide tranquilizing refuge for those 
who have learned nothing and forgotten noth- 
ing. With these mummies of intellect Ormond 
has no commerce. But he has wandered per- 
ilously near their catacombs; nearer than he 
knows, possibly, when he writes thus: ‘‘ There 
is no reason to suppose then that the distinction 
between the absolute and relative is other than 
ineradicable, but, on the contrary, the whole 
trend of experience tends to confirm what is 
also a necessity of thinking ; namely, that the 
grounding of any distinction in the absolute is 
the highest guarantee we can have of its reality 
and permanence’’ (419-420). Moreover, the 
results of this excursion into a field so perilous 
crop out continually in the curious attitudes he 
adopts so often in the third Part. What is the 
man, who is looking for guidance from the 
very last word uttered in metaphysics, to make 
of this? ‘‘The notion of revelation will be 
completed then in the idea of the direct func- 
tion of the transcendent other in introducing a 
new and superordinary content into our con- 
sciousness, the subjective condition of the re- 
ception and realization of which is that state of 
