662 PSYCHOLOGY . 



I should like to do so. But I hesitate to use the terrra 

 on account of the odium which controversial history has 

 made the whole of their connotation for man}^ worthy per- 

 sons. The most politic way not to alienate these readers 

 is to flourish the name of the immortal Locke. For in truth 

 I have done nothing more in the previous pages than to 

 make a little more explicit the teachings of Locke's fourth 

 book : 



"The immutability of the same relations betwecjn the same im- 

 mutable things is now the idea that shows him that if the three angles of 

 a triangle were once equal to two right angles, they will always be 

 equal to two right ones. And hence he comes to be certain that what 

 was once true in the case is always true ; what ideas once agreed will 

 always agree . . . Upon this ground it is that particular demonstrations 

 in mathematics afford general knowledge. If, then, the perception 

 that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations 

 be not a suflficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge 

 of general propositions in mathematics. . . . All general knowledge 

 lies only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of 

 our abstract ideas. Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagree- 

 ment amongst them, there we have general knowledge ; and by putting 

 the names of those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with 

 certainty pronounce general truths. . . . What is once known of such 

 ideas will be perpetually and forever true. So that, as to all general 

 knowledge, we must search and find it only in our own minds and it is 

 only the e.xamining of our own ideas that furnisheth us with that. 

 Truths belonging to essences of things (that is, to abstract ideas) are 



being the case, the question "at what point does the new state of mind 

 ceSiS,^ io he implicit in the. o\(\'i" is too vague to be answered. The only 

 sharp way of detiuing synthetic propositions would be to say that they ex- 

 press a relation between two data at least. But it is hard to find any prop- 

 osition which cannot be construed as doing this. Even verbal definitions 

 do it. Such painstaking attempts as that latest one by Mr. D. G. Thomp- 

 son to prove all necessary judgments to be analytic (System of Psychology, 

 II. pp. 233 ft.) seem accordingly but nugm difficiles, and little better than 

 wastes of ink and paper. All philosophic interest vanishes from the 

 question, the moment one ceases to ascribe to any a priori truths 

 (whether analytic or synthetic) that "legislative character for all possible 

 experience " which Kant believed in. We ourselves have denied such 

 legislative character, and contended that it was for experience itself to 

 prove wiielher its data can or cannot be assimilated to those ideal terms 

 between which a p7•^or^ relations obtain. The analytic-synthetic debate is 

 thus for us devoid of all signiticance. On the whole, the best recent treat- 

 ment of the question known to me is in one of A. Spir's works, his Denkeu 

 und Wirklichkeit, 1 think, bull cannot now hud the page. 



