April 9, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



337 



we fancy that nearly every reader of moderately 

 good acquaintance with the history of thought 

 will feel in going over this earlier portion of Dr. 

 Abbot's book. Here is a scholar of undoubted 

 learning and ability, who has himself a doctrine 

 to advance, that, however he tries or fails to prove 

 it, can only be described as the ancient objective 

 idealism of the whole Platonic tradition in philoso- 

 phy. He spends half his volume, however, in a 

 violent denunciation of all idealists, whose method, 

 he is convinced, could only lead logically to some- 

 thing known as solipsism. He sets over against 

 them, as an example for their better instruction, 

 the progressive realism of science, with its as- 

 surance that the world is there and is compre- 

 hensible, once for all. With this assurance, he 

 thinks, philosophy must be set out, or else it must 

 remain fruitless dreaming. The third alternative, 

 however, the simple and obvious truth that phi- 

 losophy rests neither upon an acceptance nor upon 

 a rejection of such assumptions as this one, Dr. 

 Abbot utterly forgets. Philosophy is in fact, at 

 the very start, an effort to comprehend these as- 

 sumptions of life and of science, and therefore can- 

 not possibly begin by simply taking them as they 

 are, unquestioned, just as it cannot possibly begin 

 by casting them aside. It is highly comical, there- 

 fore, to find an accomplished philosophical student 

 protesting against all writers who have ever asked 

 hoiv an individual consciousness can know a real 

 world, and replying to then- queries by the simple 

 repetition of his personal assurance that we do 

 know an external world. What, then, is philoso- 

 phy there for, if not to answer, first of all, just 

 the question, How ? where common sense has con- 

 tented itself with a bare that ? How can a thinker 

 of Dr. Abbot's experience be ignorant of this funda- 

 mental distinction between philosophizing about 

 life, and livmg apart from philosophy? Life 

 makes assumptions, and philosophy critically 

 analyzes them ; and that is precisely the cardinal 

 point of difference in question. Now, empirical 

 scientific investigation as such is just one form, 

 though a very highly developed form, of living. 

 It therefore does not reflect upon its own presup- 

 positions. Why should it ? But philosophizing is 

 coming to self -consciousness about the foundation 

 of your presuppositions. This work of merciless 

 reflection must of course, in the beginning, take 

 upon itself the sceptical form. Nothing is sacred 

 to it : it is cold, dry, passionless, in spirit and in 

 method. Yet its ultimate aim is not negation, 

 nor yet scepticism, but clear consciousness, and 

 nothing less than clear consciousness. Nobody is 

 bound to pursue such an investigation unless he 

 is so disposed ; but for a professional philosopher 

 himself to appear before us, ridiculing the very 



business of his art as necessarily worthless, pro- 

 duces a strange impression. It is as if a poet 

 should begin by assuring us that all verse is a 

 vain show and a wicked distortion of facts. Yet 

 what else is all this introductory philippic of Dr. 

 Abbot's but an abuse of the philosophers of former 

 ages for having tried to philosophize? " The first 

 objection to phenomenism," he writes, " is that 

 science is actual knowledge of a noumenal uni- 

 verse, and therefore refutes by its bare existence " 

 phenomenism (p. 79). "Noumenism," on the other 

 hand, " is the only just and philosophical interpre- 

 tation of the scientific method " (p. 127). The 

 scientific method, moreover, is "the true and only 

 organon for the discovery of truth : and the proof 

 of its validity is the rapid progress of actual dis- 

 covery " (p. 62). However, after all, "the truth 

 of perception cannot be logically proved," as Dr. 

 Abbot with charming simplicity remarks on p. 

 180, adding, "But if the wonderful increase of 

 human knowledge by the use of the scientific 

 method be not verification of the original scien- 

 tific hypothesis [i.e., of the existence of a nou- 

 menal world], then there is no such thing as 

 verification, and all human knowledge is a melan- 

 choly lie." These remarks are sufficient of them- 

 selves to characterize Dr. Abbot's not uncommon, 

 but highly amusing state of mind. His philoso- 

 phy thus rests upon two assertions, whereof the 

 one is the statement that no truly fundamental 

 philosophical reflection is needed at all, since ' the 

 actual existence ' of science is a sufficiently funda- 

 mental basis for our beliefs ; while the other is the 

 equally interesting statement that no fundamental 

 philosophy is even possible, since "the truth of 

 perception cannot be logically proved." The out- 

 come of these two assertions of the uselessness 

 and the impossibility of philosophy, is something 

 that calls itself a ' philosophy of science,' and 

 that announces itself as destined to revolutionize 

 human thought about these matters. Its culmina- 

 tion in the k Religion of science,' a truly beautiful 

 and pious doctrine, for which of course it can 

 give no sort of fundamental reason, we have 

 already seen. In fine, then, Dr. Abbot's book 

 gives us the positive theory that the objective 

 idealists of the past discovered, held, and tried in 

 a critical and thorough-going way, to demonstrate. 

 This theory Dr. Abbot himself maintains by some 

 very halting empirical arguments, and by a few 

 scholastic word-puzzles. Those objective idealists 

 of the past, however, he meanwhile fiercely up- 

 braids, for that they, the wretches, in their 

 tediously critical fashion, actually tried to get to 

 the bottom of things, to discover fundamental 

 principles, and even to demonstrate with philo- 

 sophical thoroughness their positive doctrine and 



