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NEW BOOKS. 429 author considers a mistake. The tendency to realise abstractions by no means coincides with metaphysical philosophy as a whole ; nor has positivism explained why this tendency should characterise the transition from theology to science. His own attempt to account for it forms the most original and ingenious part of the present work. As usual efficient causation supplies the master-key. Abstractions come to be mistaken for objective realities as a result of their being first confounded with working causes ; and they are so confounded because the chains of demonstrative reasoning into which they enter are mistaken for actual chains of ante- cedents and consequents. Plato, the founder of Kealism, always presents his objectified Ideas as linked together by a dialectic method of pro- gressive differentiation and specification ; and analogous systems of de- duction have been attempted by his modern successors, Spinoza, Hegel, and Taine. None of these thinkers ascribes to his realised abstractions an existence apart from the phenomena which they inform ; but for all they constitute the driving mechanism by which phenomena are produced and intelligibly connected. And it is just this conception of realised ideas as forming a living organic unity which distinguishes their phil- osophy from the Realism of the schoolmen whose ideas are, as the author happily puts it, mere fossils, the relics of a misunderstood Platonism. Hegel's system is very slightly treated in the sections on Dialectic Realism, and Taine's views on the subject, having never been systernati- sally developed, afford little scope for serious criticism. It is otherwise rith Plato and Spinoza ; and Prof. Guastella's interpretation of their idealism, whether quite successful or not, is certainly original, searching, uid suggestive. It seems to me that the latest developments of ?latonism are not here sufficiently taken into account, and that Plato's 3ndency more and more to substitute the activity of concrete mind for the dialectic linking together of Ideas as the key to physical phenomena rather goes against the theory that he ever regarded the Ideas as efficient luses. It also seems arbitrary to dismiss Plato's own destructive analysis of the One and the Many in the Parmenides as consciously artificial and sophistic because it stands in the way of the new view. And Spinoza's declared nominalism opposes itself as a serious obstacle to the realistic interpretation of his philosophy. But these are questions for Platonic and Spinozistic experts, to whose attention the second volume of this Essay is earnestly recommended. Prof. Guastella looks on the notion that there are efficient causes, in the sense of causes which explain their effects, as an illusion not peculiar to an early stage of mental evolution, but as necessarily inherent in the lental mechanism at all times. I do not agree with him there. In my opinion both what we call primitive men and civilised men who are not metaphysicians have no other idea of causation than unconditional ante- sdence, experimentally verified as such. Their interest does not lie in mderstanding how things are produced, but in producing them, or in getting other people to produce them. For this purpose it is vitally im- jortant to distinguish between unconditional antecedents and more or less accidental concomitants ; and so by the time that disinterested speculation begins the necessities of practical life have already made people sufficiently familiar with the mechanism of experimental elimina- tion. Why is night not looked on as the cause of day ? Because to pro- luce artificial darkness, as by closing up a cave, does not, after any interval of time, result in a blaze of light, whereas a judicious use of the fire-drill or of flint and steel does. Why is lightning not mistaken for the cause of thunder ? Because the production of light is not in practice followed by a crashing sound. The collision or the bursting of clouds suggests itself as an antecedent more in harmony with common experience.