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NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE. 317 basing themselves on certain common or similar assumptions, instead of saying that they were alike in basing themselves on experience alone, the statement would have been unobjectionable. An alliance on this basis might have been mutually advantageous, had it been practicable. One at least of the proposed allies was in considerable need of aid. English psychological philosophy received a deadly blow from cc. 11 and 12 of J. S. Mill's Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, the chapters entitled respectively " The Psychological Theory of the Belief in an External World " and " The Psychological Theory of the Belief in Matter, how far applicable to Mind," wherein the great empiricist frankly and honestly admitted that he found himself in presence of "the final inexplicability". This was in fact an admission that the psychological theory had broken down in philosophy, as a theory seeking to give a final explication of all things by referring them to other things, after the fashion of science, might have been expected to do. Now Prof. Dewey thinks, that the psychological theory can be restored to philosophical efficiency, if only it borrows from Transcendentalism the principle of identifying the individual with the universal consciousness, by "viewing" the former "in its finality" (MiND No. 41, p. 18). Un- fortunately an individual consciousness " viewed in its finality " is not a reality capable of having experience, is not a real Subject at all, but merely a philosopher's idealisation of one. To identify the individual with the universal consciousness is to assume that all individuals are omniscient. Few Englishmen will find it easy to make this assumption. In reality it is English Philosophy that is attacked by being identified in principle with English Psychological Philosophy, when the latter is simultaneously identified in principle with German Transcendentalism. For the double identification not only robs English Philosophy of that which is its special attribute, its foundation in experience alone, but transfers that attribute to its ancient antagonist, the a priori school of thought, in the person of its modern offspring Transcendentalism. There was a charming audacity about the transference, which, while it charmed, incited to a reply. If the proposed allies forgather, I thought, they shall at least not make off with their ill-gotten booty undetected. It is doubtless in a very large measure to the natural re-action against J. S. Mill's empiricism, whether held to have broken down or not, that the recent recourse to Transcendentalism on the part of many students of philosophy in this country is owing. They did not, however, like Prof. Dewey, dream of an alliance, but took refuge in what they thought was the antagonistic principle. They saw that to appeal to empirical experience was not to appeal to experience simply ; but that Transcendentalism also was at bottom an appeal to empirical experience, this they saw not. In reality the other of empirical experience, its explanation, or translation into philosophic thought, is not obtained by transcending it, but by analysing it. Now analysis is the work of experience simply. Barring the writings of Salomon Maimon, a younger contemporary of Kant's, to which I have drawn attention elsewhere, my own is the only attempt, so far as I know, to base philosophy directly arid solely upon -experience, distinguished from empiricism, and without admitting assump- tions ; unless, indeed, John Grote's admirable Exploratio Philosophica, published in 1865, the same year as my Time and Space, may count as the preliminary of one. The term philosophy I take of course in its widest and fullest sense, in which it means the endeavour to make the Universe intelligible to human thought ; not to assign its first cause, or real con- dition, as if it was a particular finite object, but to give a rationale of it, always from a human point of view, a point of view from which, not the