we make in order to make the "thing" intelligible to ourselves, but again it is simpler to take it as one element or aspect, which the nature of reality forces us to acknowledge in everything we know, the other being the differences or relations in which the unity reveals itself.

A difficulty might indeed be raised in connection with other selves. Is it meant that we have no more immediate knowledge of our own than of other minds? This, it may be admitted, is contrary to prevailing prejudices. For it is commonly assumed that we start from an immediately given self, and arrive later, by a process of analogical inference, at a consciousness of the existence of other minds. Yet one would have thought that recent psychological analysis, laying emphasis as it does on the part which the recognition by others plays in the growth of self-consciousness,1 would have led us to suspect this account. It is, of course, true that we interpret other minds and wills by the analogy of our own, but it is equally true that it is in the minds and through the wills of others that we come to know our own. The knowledge of ourselves is in as true a sense mediated as our knowledge of others. We may say, if we like, that we only infer the existence of other minds as the hypothesis that best explains the facts of experience. But no argument can be brought in support of the view that the existence of other minds is hypothetical, which would not apply equally mutatis mutandis to the existence of our own. Here, as in the case of subject and object in general, it is better to say that "others' consciousness" is one of two factors which the analysis of self-consciousness yields to the psychologist, "own-consciousness" being

1 See, e.g., SULLY, Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 100 foll.

the other. They thus stand on the same level of immediacy, for neither is really immediate at all.1

If these contentions are valid, the unity of apperception does not really stand in antithesis to the unity of the percept, as the transparent to the opaque. The two stand on the same level, and must be treated alike. They were so treated by Kant, who placed the ultimate reality of both beyond the sphere of discursive intelligence. The contention of this paper is that this is an überwundene Standpunkt. Its error is, in a word, that it mistakes mere existence for reality. Instead of being the fullest of the predicates of thought containing the reality of the thing as an unrevealed and (let us be frank) unrevealable secret, the determination of it as an existing "this" is the emptiest and most abstract. For it is just that one which cuts it off from other things, and from the mind which thinks it; and just as the surest way to miss the reality of mind is to look for it in abstraction from the world it knows, so the surest way to miss the reality of the object is to look for it in abstraction from its relations to other things, and to the mind for which these relations exist.

To sum up: We have seen in the first place that knowledge aims on the one hand at exhausting, and on the other at reducing to unity the complex contents of experience. In the second place these two (complete differentiation and complete unification) are not two different ideals, but different sides of the same. They take their place as constituent elements in the process, by which individuality, significance, reality is given to

1 One undoubted advantage of this way of putting the matter is that we cut the ground from underneath the form of solipsism which battens upon the ordinary psychological analysis.

things. Coming in the third place to the question of the relation of such individuality to ultimate essence, I have tried to show that there is no reason to hold that the system of predicates, which is the form this individuality takes in the mind, is a mere appearance, which, in order that it may correspond to the nature of the thing as it is in itself, must lose this form, and be merged in another, which is no longer knowledge. To maintain this, as has recently been done, is to revive Kant's doctrine of the Thing-in-itself in a form which ignores without meeting the most characteristic contention of modern philosophy, that reality is to be looked for not in the abstract, but in the concrete individual.

III.

HYPOTHESIS.

I. TREATMENT OF HYPOTHESIS BY ENGLISH LOGICIANS.

EVONS begins his chapter on Hypothesis1 with the

JEVONS

remark that "All inductive investigation consists in the marriage of hypothesis and experiment." This has not always been the view of English logicians. Bacon's objections to hypothetical anticipations of nature, and to the deductive method in general, are well known. Newton's statement of the law of gravitation was accompanied with a self-denying ordinance in respect to hypothetical causes. Along with the great discoverers of his own and the succeeding age, he would undoubtedly have disclaimed the a priori method of medieval thought, and would have identified with it a process, the essence of which was to start with an unverified assumption, and go on to deduce consequences from it. And this view was thought, at a later date, to be established on a sound philosophical basis by the speculations of Locke and Hume as to the source of all our knowledge. It is true that, try as he would, Bacon was unable to exclude deduction from his own method, that his great contemporaries and successors, who had already entered on the modern epoch of scientific discovery, consistently employed methods which the prevailing 1 Principles of Science, p. 504.

philosophy renounced, and that Newton himself propounded hypotheses in the light of which his celebrated disclaimer bears the appearance of irony. But this only shows that the methods these investigators employed were in advance of the means they possessed of analysing them. And it remains true that the attitude of English logicians towards hypothesis during this whole period was one of suspicion and hostility. It is not till we come to our own time that the important place in all scientific investigations of the preliminary assumption, the deduction of the consequences which must flow from it, and the comparison of these with actual fact, was recognised.

The reaction against the purely empirical method is clearly marked in J. S. Mill, who devotes a large section in the middle of his Logic to a description of the deductive method, and to defining the place of hypothesis in science. Jevons gives him credit for the part he took in initiating this reaction, but justly observes that his conclusions in this part of his system are inconsistent with his disparagement of the deductive process in the early part of his work, and his continual appeal to inference from particular to particular as the true type of reasoning. "Mill," he concludes, "would have saved much confusion of thought had he not failed to observe that the inverse use of deduction constitutes induction."

Jevons himself, as we have already seen, cannot be accused of undervaluing the "inverse method." He is too much of a mathematician to permit his psychological empiricism to invade the sphere of geometry and formal logic. In his view the deductions of these abstract sciences take their place beside the direct intuitions of experience as types of certainty. Similarly,