Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/566

.552 CRITICAL NOTICES: ' system ' into which each judgment is expanded is a static and not ^ dynamic ' whole ' as demanded by the ideal (p. 114) ; (2) it turns out that the ideal experience is a ' significant whole ' in a different .sense from the significance of a science. For the ideal experience is ' substantial reality itself in its self-fulfilment ' (p. 117), whereas the content of a science is, after all, subjective in that it is ' about ' -reality, and is not reality itself. And thus the back of the co- herence-theory is broken on the Dualism of knowledge and reality. Now the point in this argument of which I complain is that Mr. Joachim passes from the conception of science to the conception of the ideal experience by means of the fact that they are both ' sig- nificant wholes '. But in the end it appears that they are signifi- cant wholes in different senses, so that the link of connexion is plainly broken, and the legitimacy of the derivation disappears. And though Mr. Joachim may reply that the difference points to -an underlying unity, and that, after all, our finite knowledge must be an element in the ' substantial life ' of the ideal experience, yet this is just the very problem which Mr. Joachim does not solve ; and until a solution is forthcoming, we may fairly challenge his .right to argue as if it were already established. Or to put the same criticism in different words : there is no objection to a meta- physical conception of the ideal, provided it is established by metaphysical arguments. But under cover of the ambiguity of the term ' significant whole,' Mr. Joachim passes from the logical .standpoint of science with its implied Dualism to the metaphysical standpoint of the Absolute which denies that Dualism. And since he approaches his ideal in this way, it remains a conception insufficiently justified and supported. For not only does Mr. Joachim's attempt to show that the ideal holds good for human science admittedly fail, but one is surprised to find that Mr. Joachim straightway lays the fault at the door of human experience, and denounces the Dualism of current Logic. He never seems to consider the other alternative, viz., that his conception of the ideal might be defective. His attitude becomes intelligible, when one recollects that the ideal rests on metaphysical arguments. But these are just the arguments which the book does not give. All this is the more to be regretted as Mr. Joachim's conception of a ' self-fulfilled and self-fulfilling experience ' might fruitfully have been applied to science, if we regard it, as I indicated above, as a ' living and growing body of knowledge '. The obnoxious Dualism of subject and object need, perhaps, not have been touched on at all, but instead the aspect of progress in knowledge, which in a very real sense is a ' self -fulfilment,' would have received the attention it deserves. One could have wished that Mr. Joachim had not relied for his illustrations on such stale examples as ' 3 x 3 = 9' or ' this tree is green,' but that he had obeyed his own hint (p. 98) and by an analysis of some scientific problem recently settled or even still sub judice enabled us to steal a glimpse into ihe workshop of the mind, and to watch how ' truth ' emerges