July 21, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



85 



satisfactory in all its parts, and, speaking for 

 myself, I can not but think the last two divi- 

 sions of the book much superior to the two 

 which precede them. The reason for the dif- 

 ference in value seems to be that the author 

 is much more at home in the psychological 

 problems with which these sections mainly 

 deal than in the realm of pure logic and 

 epistemology. Indeed, the very presence of 

 Part I. might, perhaps, be regarded as an 

 unfortunate mistake. The conception of the 

 experienced world as consisting of ' states of 

 consciousness ' is not only in itself an absurd- 

 ity, as Professor Pullerton himself shows con- 

 clusively, and not without humor, in the chap- 

 ters of Part III. which deal with the doctrines 

 of Clifford and Karl Pearson, but is an ab- 

 surdity not likely to be entertained by the 

 student except as the result of misguidance 

 at the hands of a psychologizing metaphysi- 

 cian. Hence it seems a pity to start the 

 reader off on a false scent for the purpose of 

 afterwards demonstrating his error to him. 

 Surely it would have been better to make a 

 beginning with the * naive realism ' which is 

 habitual to all of us in our every-day life, 

 and to assume from the first as a working 

 hjTpothesis that we have a direct perception of 

 objects which, whatever their nature, are to be 

 carefully distinguished from the processes by 

 which they are cognized. 



The author's second part is, perhaps, the 

 least satisfactory portion of the whole work. 

 Mr. Pullerton is apparently quite unfamiliar 

 with the indispensable foundation of any 

 satisfactory doctrine of space and time, viz., 

 the modern mathematical theory of infinity 

 and continuity. Hence his attack upon the 

 Kantian ' Aesthetik ' inevitably becomes a 

 very grave ignoratio elenchi. The real ob- 

 jection to the ' Aesthetik ' is, of course, that 

 no analysis of mathematical concepte can be 

 adequate which fails to recognize that their 

 application to space and time is logically a 

 secondary affair, and requires to be preceded 

 by the logical investigation of relations of 

 number and order considered in complete ab- 

 straction from the special nature of the terms 

 numbered and ordered. This fundamental 



point is ignored by the author, who prefers to 

 furbish up old difficulties about motion which 

 may puzzle the non-mathematical reader, but 

 will be seen at once by those acquainted with 

 the mere outlines of modern investigations 

 into infinity and continuity to be idle fallacies, 

 and that of a kind which, if sustained at all, 

 must be fatal not merely to the special theories 

 of Kant, but to the whole spatial and tem- 

 poral scheme of mathematical physics. Mr. 

 Pullerton himself attempts to find a way out 

 of his own self -created difficulties by adopting 

 Berkeley's analysis of space and time as per- 

 ceived by the senses, but with the mental 

 reservation that the space and time which are 

 conditions of the existence of the real extra- 

 mental world are just what the mathematical 

 physicist declares them to be. He forgets 

 that according to Berkeley there is no extra- 

 mental world and, therefore, no such ' real ' 

 space or time, and that according to himself 

 the infinitely divisible and continuous space 

 and time of the physicist are full of logical 

 contradictions and must, therefore, be purely 

 unreal. 



Even in the latter half of the work the 

 writer does not seem to be by any means as 

 successful on the constructive as on the de- 

 structive side. Thus, ingenious as his defense 

 of ' parallelism ' is, he nowhere seems to have 

 given any more cogent reason for adopting a 

 parallelistic rather than an interactionist posi- 

 tion than the obvious reflection that interac- 

 tion is inconsistent with a purely mechanical 

 interpretation of the universe. But that any 

 science really demands our acceptance of ab- 

 solute mechanism as the truth about things 

 is a statement which he makes no attempt to 

 prove, nor does he show any real comprehen- 

 sion of the meaning of anti-mechanistic phi- 

 losophers, or of the gravity of the difficulties 

 which have to be faced by a relentless and 

 consistent theory of pure mechanism. A 

 reader who should take his notions on the sub- 

 ject from Mr. Pullerton's fifteenth chapter 

 would, indeed, probably go away with the no- 

 tion that Dr. Ward (and? Mach) is an un- 

 scientific and credulous person who thinks 

 that after all there is ' nothing in ' modern 



