Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/109

HENRY STURT, Personal Idealism. 95 of which we ourselves are the last to come. Slowly but surely, the world is forming itself according to demand. Mr. Schiller applies this evolutionary conception to mental categories as well as to physical facts, and boldly takes, s an example whereby to test his theory, the principle of identity itself. We postulated it be- cause we needed it, and its ' truth ' grew by the successful use we made of it. Practical activity came first and theoretic reason was secondary. Abstract identity, never found, had to be made as an ideal, and facts then found which ministered to it. Nature con- doned our audacity. " Human nature is thus the sole key to nature which we possess, and if it will not unlock the Arcana, we must resign ourselves to sceptical despair. . . . Hence the anthropomorphisa- tion of the world is itself a legitimate postulate. . . . We never find out * what a thing really is ' by asking ' what it was in the beginning '. . . . What it is appears from what it does, and so we must study its whole career. We study its past to forecast its future, and to find out what it is really ' driving at '. Complete explanation therefore is by final causes, and implies a knowledge of ends and aims," among which are our own. Pure intellectu- alism is insufficient philosophy is partly thought and partly deed. The next paper is one on ' The Problem of Freedom,' by W. E. Boyce Gibson. The most important thing in this paper, it seems to me, is the distinction which its author makes between the two types of Psychology, the inductive type, which describes things from without, and the direct type which puts itself at the subject's or ' experient's ' point of view. When we describe a mental phenomenon by its general 'conditions,' we methodically place ourselves outside of the inner attitude of the subject to whom the phenomenon belongs. The core of its individuality, as it exists in him, is the sense which it gives him then and there of tending to the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of some interest by which he is possessed. In this consciousness of furthering or being checked we seem to have the original of our ideas of activity and cause. To realise conscious facts in -this way is to vitalise our theories about them. We de-vitalise psychology on the other hand, when we explain inner states by objective categories, whether of associa- tion or of brain-process, with the causal energy which they carry in them left out of our account. Psychology need in no way be guilty of this usual omission, for the active inwardness can be told-about and described as well as any other feature of the pro- cess, and treated moreover in our cosmic theories as a real cause. This sense of prosperous immanent activity in the individual moment of experience is what we mean by freedom, and according to Mr. Gibson, as I understand him, indeterminism of the future is not essential to the idea. Of the next paper, ' The Limits of Evolution,' by G. E. Under- bill, I find it less easy to give a summary account. It seems