Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/245

GEORGE STUART FULLERTON, A System of Metaphysics. 231 one long effort, in various regions, to track and expose this original sin of thought, and, in revealing the error, to reveal the truth. A metaphysical insight, like a gymnastic feat, has not only to be achieved but to be practised before it is made one's own, and usually old habits of " co-ordination " have to be unlearned before the new is acquired. The trained metaphysician in his impatience must not forget that there are others who need such a patient initiation ; nor that it may even be suspected that, precisely be- cause of his training, he needs it himself. The metaphysical discussion begins with what the author calls " the psychological standpoint " with regard to the external world ; the notion that a man in his private mind, confined to the circle of his own perceptions, knows through these a world of a different order beyond them. We have an analysis of representation. " We can only know through a representative those things which this representative can truly represent. ... A representative can never stand for something else in so far as that other thing differs from it " (p. 52). Further, to know that our representative repre- sents, nay, even to take it for a representative, is to be provoked by its presence to conceive something beyond it, and this we cannot be without prior experience, both of things represented and their representatives ; a prior experience that can only have been im- mediate, since it makes mediate experience for the first time pos- sible. " It requires a certain amount of information to be able to recognise that a given experience is a representative of something beyond itself." An "external" world of matter cannot therefore be represented by a consciousness that lacks the characters of materiality and is wholly "internal". Such a consciousness has neither reason nor power to infer such a world. " For such a mind it is inconceivable that the external world should exist at all." But if representative knowledge of an essentially non- mental world is impossible, the author also notices briefly a suggestion (coincident on one side with that which Mr. G. E. Moore has been ingeniously elaborating) "which grants the mind a direct knowledge of external things independently of the existence in it of such a representative image". And he puts his finger at once on the weak spot in the conception. " How, on such a basis, can the psychologist explain the possibility of being deceived about the natures of things? How explain an hallucination?" If the non-mental thing were " immediately present to the mind " "no mistake " as to its reality " would be possible ". In part ii. we find elaborated "a view," in the author's modest words, " of the external world which, I am glad to think, is not fundamentally new, even though it differs in some details from other doctrines with which the reader is familiar. Possibly some will be tempted to call it, at first glance, idealistic ; but this name, with the associations that cling to it, can only lead to a misappre- hension of its true nature." The long exposition is a masterpiece of dialectical construction, from which in our inadequate summary