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86 A. E. TAYLOR: of having ever made any statement in the least like what Mr. Schiller here imputes to me. That devotion to knowledge may be disinterested in the sense of satisfying no further incidental interest beyond the desire to know itself, just as devotion to a moral end may be, and ought to be, disinterested in the same sense of detach- ment from extraneous interests, I certainly have maintained, and do still maintain. But I believe it would puzzle my critic to pro- duce a reference to any passage in which I have denied that the desire to know is itself an emotional interest. In any case Mr. Schiller's present criticism seems quite inconsistent with his former assertion (MIND, N.S., No. 52, p. 541) that in my Elements of Met(b- physics the ' Absolute ' itself is introduced as a mere emotional postulate. Still that assertion was itself a mere mistake, and, for anything I know, it may be a doctrine of Mr. Schiller's ' new ' logic that whatever is inconsistent with an untrue proposition is necessarily true. To myself it still appears true that two state- ments may be mutually incompatible, and yet both be false, and I believe this is the case with Mr. Schiller's strictures upon myself. 1 With Mr. Schiller's concluding depreciation of creeds, dogmas and a canon of philosophic orthodoxy I am glad to find myself in complete accord. But I must remind him that it is he, and not we, who stands most in need of the warning. The ' Absolutists ' have at any rate attempted to give reasons for their beliefs, and may fairly claim that, if their reasons are adequate, their doctrine should be accepted, if they are inadequate, the inadequacy should be exhibited by some more conclusive method than the wholesale employment of ' dyslogistic ' epithets. In such a claim I can find no trace of the spirit of dogmatism. It is Mr. Schiller himself who manifests the dogmatic temper when he tries to foreclose investiga- tion by a Machtspruch, and stultifies his own declaration for the freedom of prophesying by combining with it a pontifical excom- munication of the philosophies he happens to dislike. To such a Thrasymachean &v eyo> aTrtiirov TOVTWV n aTTOKpivrJ ; I for one can only reply with Socrates, OVK av 6a.vp.da-a.ifju, el fjiOL CTAcc^ayxevw ourw So^eiev. P.S. The foregoing pages were already written when I received a copy of Mr. Schiller's polemic against myself in MIND, N.S., No. 55, pages 348 ff. To this latest exposition of the truth as it is in Prof. James, I should not feel inclined to make any special reply, as I can find in it no solution whatever of the logical difficulties by which I have been forced to choose between attributing to Mr. Schiller's main revelation either a sense in which it is hopelessly 1 1 altogether fail to understand how any one can charge either my Problem of Conduct or my Elements of Metaphysics with neglect to em- phasise the importance of emotion and the non-cognitive aspect of experience generally. If Mr. Schiller seriously wishes his readers to take me for an extreme ' intellectualist ' in my general philosophical position, I must suppose he is either unacquainted with my writings or presumes his readers to be unacquainted with them.