the metaphysic, if not the methodology, of natural realism may be maintained. Psychologically, realism is tenable; for (1) pure sensations, as yet unassociated and unrelated, must underlie all psychic combination; (2) externality is an original datum in sensation. Philosophically, an abandonment of realism is not necessitated by the objections of idealism. These objections Dr. Schwarz discusses upon the old lines of the thing-in-itself, which he will not permit his opponents to disclaim (pp. 385 ff.), but hardly so as to convince one that he has fully appreciated their strength. The book concludes with a declaration (p. 406) that it is best and simplest to regard perception as an ultimate process which does not admit of further analysis, and leads to a trustworthy, though not complete, cognition of an existence independent of consciousness.
From the philosophic point of view the chief merit of Dr. Schwarz's learned book seems to lie in the fulness of the illustration it affords of the scientific inadequacy of the obsolete metaphysic which still serves as the working theory on which scientific procedure is based. And considering the practical purpose and mutual isolation, which have so long prevailed in the physical sciences, their inconsistencies and inadequacies will seem pardonable. Still Dr. Schwarz has done good service by pointing out these difficulties specifically and in detail. We may thank him also for his admission that a possible solution of the difficulty lies in the direction of a comprehensive idealistic metaphysic, all the more if his own proposal of a reversion to primitive realism should prove unacceptable. His delusion on this subject seems to be largely due to the fact that he has substituted for the actual opinions of the "plain man" with all their grotesque crudity, an expurgated version thereof, which philosophers have constructed for purposes of convenience in academic discussion, and entitled "Natural Realism," much as they have constructed the two varieties of "subjective idealism" which Dr. Schwarz ascribes to Berkeley and Fichte. The truth is, that the plain man's view is very different from Dr. Schwarz's realism, and ten times more inconsistent and incoherent than the physicist's view which is developed from it. And though our author's view is enabled to maintain some degree of coherence, until it is brought face to face with all the facts, and asked, e.g. to explain what is the reality perceived in dreams or in the hallucinations and illusions of delirium (what can the doctrine of the non-deceptiveness of the senses make of such facts?) a final collapse seems inevitable as soon as criticism is directed upon it in its turn. It would hardly be necessary even to ask what is meant by "independent of, or external to" consciousness. The truth seems rather to be, that the effort to understand the universe starts much further back than Dr. Schwarz's pseudo-natural realism, in a chaos where fact, illusion, and fancy are not yet distinguished, and where there is as yet no pretence at coherence. This amorphous mass of primitive
