William Caldwell

“ Intellectual evolution can never really be considered apart from the conditions which constitute what we call a society. Society draws from its own bosom the persistent causes of its own development and change. The hierarchy of conceptions which is actually evolved consists in the four orders of knowledge: knowledge scientific, knowledge philosophic, knowledge æsthetic, and knowledge practical or technical — science, philosophy, art, industry; into these four phases of evolution does intellectual evolution resolve itself. ”

“ Are we then to hold that only a completed science can be a complete philosophy? We are apt to ask this in reading the book, for our author is always able to point out that such and such a state of science results in such and such a conception of the world; indeed, he calls this fact the supreme law of philosophical evolution. The strength of the book lies in its successful presentation of the evolution of nineteenth century philosophy in its relation to the history and problem of philosophy in general, and in the criticism it offers especially of Positivism and of Evolution. ”

“ M. de Roberty of course does not imagine that philosophy can be independent of science; he holds, he says, to the idea of the general equivalence of science and philosophy, while disbelieving altogether in the equivalence of the philosophical and scientific constructions of the world as they have appeared in history. The true scientific philosophy has not yet arisen, because there are yet gaps in the whole of knowledge. ”

“ We are still to-day in the theological phase of thinking, and cannot immediately hope to find the scientific philosophy; modern agnosticism is a sleeping stage of thought. Philosophy will be a systematic arrangement of the teaching of science without the use of hypotheses; induction in philosophy, indeed, will preclude the use of hypotheses. ”

“ He found that the world-conception which satisfied the world-problem must be a conception whose content is pure experience. But scientific study may lead to the belief that all we know is what is within our consciousness; i.e. may lead back to the point of departure of Idealism. How is it then that one seems to take to Realism to get away from Idealism, and then to be led by Realism to the same dualism of what is within and what is without consciousness which the Idealist tries to explain away? ”

“ M. de Roberty thinks that the philosophy of the nineteenth century can be reduced to the three forms of Criticism, Positivism, and Evolutionism. He suggests that the origin of Criticism is to be found in Idealism, as critical philosophy arrives at idealities or abstractions such as the Infinite. The origin of Positivism is to be sought in Materialism as the dogmatic reaction against Idealism; and the origin of Evolutionism is to be sought in Sensationalism which, in the hands of physiologists and empiricists, led to excursions into biological science. ”

“ M. de Roberty's real idea of philosophy is that it ought to banish from its sphere all special problems, and that it ought to be the general systematization of the sciences or their co-ordination in view of a single end: a single integral conception of the world would be a final conception, and the conception of finality should lose its old teleological signification. ”

“ Unless it is very carefully shown how it is that the world is one, and can be thought as one, Monism is apt to appear as somewhat otiose philosophy (πάντα καλά λίαν) , and, as the outcome of philosophizing, hardly a pronounced step beyond the expression of the postulate with which all philosophy begins — that the world must be one. ”

“ We have really before us a systematized phenomenology of knowledge in its transition from naïve realism in which object and perception, being and thought, are not distinguished to self-consciousness or reflected knowledge, through the discriminative work of the logical understanding and the hypothetical constructions of the imagination as seen in different stages of human culture. ”

“ As to content, a philosophy can never be more than a systematization of the knowledge of a given epoch, but formally regarded philosophy ought to be able to lay down not an absolute system, but the outlines of such a system. ”

“ A person who is convinced of the utter unfruitfulness of philosophical idealism [Idealism, our author suggests, comports itself only too well alongside of practical realism, and under circumstances of even Materialism] may simply neglect the initial position of an idealistic epistemology about immediate subjective consciousness (not such a baneful position in Psychology as in Epistemology) , and resolve to study experience without a presupposition of any kind. ”

“ In the first half of his work the author thinks out for himself seven different senses of sameness; he deals first with sameness in things that he finds to be immediately known, and then with sameness which may obtain in a world or worlds beyond consciousness, finding that these seven senses of the word cover all actual and possible applications of it. The common notion that unites them is the idea of similarity. Identity is a kind of sameness, the sense of sameness where the consciousness of duality has fallen into the background. ”

“ While the author has done wisely, it seems to me, in discarding the subjectivistic conclusions of the critical philosophy, I think he sinks too much the idea of criticism into that of realism, which latter idea too he carries out at the expense of what one might call a legitimate nominalism. ”

“ The turning-point of the reasoning by which Professor Avenarius seeks to answer these questions is a criticism of what he calls introjection (Introjektion, Beilegung, Einlegung) , that is, of the introspective standpoint, the separation of self from the world and from fellow-men on the part of all men; he studies and develops what this really means and how it comes about and how it is possible, and then tries to answer the question whether this introspection or anything else necessitates us to change our preliminary world-concept. ”

“ Instead, he tells us, of admitting the immediate action of the whole of positive science on the conceptions of the world, the majority of modern thinkers hold that one mere minimal part of our knowledge — the theory of cognition — suffices to explain the march of the philosophical development. ”

“ Again, while one admires the way in which our author pursues his aim without entangling himself in theories of perception, whether subjective or realistic, showing the representatives of these theories along with the common-sensist and the sceptic how they are affected by his strictures about sameness, one would have wished him to indicate which way of regarding knowledge seems to him freest of difficulties, as tested by the categories he is dealing in. ”

“ One feels somehow that the author has not defined sharply enough the standard by which all philosophical development can be estimated as a thing in itself, even although no one would wish to separate that development from the general development of man or society by which it is influenced and which it influences. ”

“ The real point that Der Menschliche Weltbegriff tries to answer is whether or not the systematic study or examination of our experience necessarily leads to dualism, say the dualism represented by the antithetical schemes of Idealism and Materialism. ”

“ But my impression is, that the ordinary intelligent reader, who cannot be supposed to read between the lines, would, while admiring the eminent clearness of the book, feel in it a disappointing absence of a definite point of view. ”

“ Carus is what is expressed in the Schliesse dich an ein Ganzes of Goethe, rather than in the In suo esse conservari of Spinoza or, for that part, of the evolutionist. His book, though, deserves study at the hands of all who have an interest in the development of philosophy. ”

“ He keeps his aim so perfectly in view throughout his brochure that he has given students a model of investigative work. He apologizes for hair-splitting and for being uninteresting, but his subject is thorny. ”

“ There is a great similarity in tone, and method, and scope between this study and Dr. Pikler's recent volume on objective existence; both books to my mind represent the best sense in which philosophers may go "back" previously to going steadily onwards. ”