An attractively simple answer would be to add up the respective amounts of positive and of negative hedonic effect, and subtract one sum from the other, leaving a surplus of either pleasure or pain, or a hedonistic zero. And, no doubt, there is a great deal of truth in this answer. If a man, at a given moment, could be made to choose between being annihilated next moment or going on living ad indefinitum with exactly so much pleasure or pain as he was then feeling, no doubt his best plan would be to make some such calculation, and live or die accordingly. But the fact of his being able to make such a calculation implies that this result of addition and subtraction does not really represent the actual state of his consciousness. The actual amounts of hedonic effect are what he somehow gets hold of and manipulates. The wellknown difficulty-how we can estimate what is not presented, need not disturb us here; for we cannot in either case escape it except by denying it: if the several amounts of feeling cannot be estimated because they are only felt and not presented, the same must apply to their result. And what we seem to find by introspection is an indefinite number or mass of simultaneous presentations, few, if any of them, hedonically indifferent, but each causing a certain amount of feeling which keeps varying with the intensity of the presentation; this intensity itself varying, other things equal, with the amount of attention directed to it.

But since attention cannot be concentrated wholly on one presentation, we are, at any one time, attending, more or less, to them all, and are hedonically affected by them all. Some of them give pleasure, and some pain; therefore we are, at any one time, hedonically affected both positively and negatively. That is to say, our feeling, at any one time, consists of both pleasure and pain, is both pleasure and pain, is, then, so far as neither predominates, neutral feeling.

If this is true, then Prof. Bain is right in saying that there is neutral feeling as well as pleasure and pain; only we recognise in his neutral excitement an unanalysed element of volition. And Dr. Ward is right in saying that feeling is nothing but pleasure and pain; only, in our view, feeling may be, at any one time, pleasure and pain, not necessarily pleasure or pain.1

It only remains for me to say that if this suggested solution of the difficulty appears presumptuous, it would appear so to no one more than to myself if I did not intend it merely as a suggestion. I have stated it as baldly and unreservedly as possible; first, because I have so many doubts about so many points in it that it was useless to mention the few for which there might have been space; next, because the simpler the form of an error, the more easily is it exposed. And I hope some one will take the trouble to refute this, if it is wrong. For like reasons, I have not thought it worth while to enter on other lines of argument which seem to me to lead to the same result.

If there are states of mind in which there are no pleasant or no painful presentations, we are not concerned with them here.

VI.-CRITICAL NOTICES.

Hegelianism and Personality. By ANDREW SETH, M.A., Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics in the University of St. Andrews. "Balfour Philosophical Lectures, University of Edinburgh," Second Series. Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1887. Pp. xi., 230.

Et tu, Brute! The kindly rehabilitation of Reid in Prof. Seth's first series of Balfour Lectures and the suggestions in their concluding paragraph of problems unsatisfactorily treated by Hegelianism had hardly prepared us for the fierce blows here bestowed upon the "Neo-Kantians". But, though at first one is apt to think this attack by a friend of Idealism the most unkindest cut of all,' yet undoubtedly the most valuable of criticisms is that made by some one who has himself seen from inside the position he is criticising. Not only does Prof. Seth express in the strongest terms his own "great personal obligations to Hegel" (p. 229), but he has in an eloquent passage (p. 59) spoken of the feelings experienced by those who have lived through the phase of thought represented by the Idealism of Fichte or of the late Prof. Green. Moreover, though we have indications (e.g., p. 20 n., p. 109) of a gradual change or modification in some of Prof. Seth's opinions, even in the work before us he still accepts as the starting-point of philosophy the Kantian problem, viz., an analysis of knowledge "with a view to discover its indispensable constitutive elements" (p. 16), and he accepts Kant's proof "so far as it asserts that these forms [of space and time], and with them these categories or principles of mutual relation and explanation, are necessarily involved in our experience of the known world, and that without them no knowledge would be possible at all" (pp. 10, 11). "The central position of Kantian and subsequent idealism" is also accepted, viz., "the necessity of a permanent subject of knowledge" (p. 11). "All knowable existence is existence for a self" (p. 12). But while Prof. Seth rejects Kant's own retention of " things-in-themselves," as unknowable cause of the "matter" of knowledge (a retention inconsistent with restriction of cause to the phenomenal sphere), neither will he now accept the system of idealism reared upon Kant's foundation.

In the second lecture, which deals with Fichte, it is pointed out that the position of Green bears a closer resemblance to that of Fichte than to that of Hegel (p. 39). This is a very true remark, particularly so with respect to ethics (cp. p. 209): it is all the more interesting because, so far as I know, Green himself was never in any special way a student of Fichte. Perhaps the element of moral enthusiasm in both of them-an element somewhat lacking in Hegel-is the real explanation of the resemblance.

Prof. Seth's quarrel with Green is that he deifies the unifying principle in knowledge, like Hegel, converting logic into metaphysics or ontology. Now, how, we would ask, is an acceptance of Kant's central position compatible with the belief in any possible science of ontology or in any metaphysics distinct from the transcendental logic or theory of knowledge? What is this "reality" which is perpetually set up over against knowledge and in comparison with which knowledge is despised? The only answer we can find in Prof. Seth's book is that "the individual alone is the real" (p. 128). Hegel and the Neo-Kantians are condemned, as Plato is condemned by Aristotle, for making the universal the real. But what does Prof. Seth mean by "the individual"? That question is nowhere distinctly answered. On p. 125 it is said: "The meanest thing that exists has a life of its own, absolutely unique and individual," &c. Is it implied that a fragment of stone, for example, is such a "real individual"? The fragments of this will in turn be real, and so on till we come to the atoms. And on p. 124 we are told that "even an atom is more than a category". Now, what is an atom except a category-a conception by help of which we may find it convenient to make the world intelligible to ourselves? If the reality of things consists in their being composed of atoms, then it follows that their reality consists in their being thought. Again, how can we know any individual except in its universal aspect? Is not the individual unknown just in so far as we cannot universalise it? so that the real would then appear to mean the unknown, if not the unknowable. But in Scottish Philosophy (p. 203) the Unknowable received its quietus. If, however, the real is the unknown, reality must disappear with the advance of knowledge. On the other hand, on p. 118 it is said: "That there is a world at all, we know only through the immediate assurance, perception or feeling of our own existence, and through ourselves of other persons and things". The assurance, &c., of other persons and things" obviously cannot be "immediate"; for that would contradict " through ourselves "; so that the ultimate real must be the self-a position which would quite coincide with that of idealism.

66

The

But it will be said: "The real is the individual self, not the universal self, the latter being only a logical abstraction". And on pp. 29, 30, 218, we are told that the universal Ego is only a hypostatised abstraction. Now, surely Prof. Seth does not deny that "universal" (kafóλov) has another and a (καθόλου) more important meaning than a sum of individuals. individuals apart from the universal are as much an abstraction as the universal apart from the individuals; and this is admitted on pp. 215, 216, where it is said: "The mere individual is a fiction of philosophic thought". How, then, is the individual any more real than the universal? "There could be no interaction between individuals unless they were all embraced within one Reality" (p. 216). But what is this "reality" (with or

without a capital letter) except the unity of the cosmos? and whence do we get this unity except from the unity of self-consciousness? Is not this derivation admitted in the admission of Kant's central position? But "each Self," Prof. Seth says, "is a unique existence, which is perfectly impervious, if I may so speak, to other selves-impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue" (p. 216). So on p. 64The real self is one and indivisible, and is unique in each individual. This is the unequivocal testimony of consciousness." Does consciousness testify to anything more than the existence of the subject? All other selves are matter of inference only, 'ejects,' as Clifford called them. The different selves, we are told, are absolutely and for ever exclusive". Grant that this is a possible hypothesis; but why assert it dogmatically? how can anyone possibly know this? One Ego we know as fact: a plurality of similar Ego's is an inference, a hypothesis to explain the phenomena. So that the "idealist" (or whatever we call him) is at the least explaining the universe by a hypothesis based on the one absolutely certain fact: the "individualist realist" is basing one hypothesis on another.

The idealist argument is not fairly stated as a fallacious inference that, because each self is "I," therefore the "I" is identical in all (p. 64). The argument is the "transcendental proof" whose validity Prof. Seth has already admitted, and which, as he has very clearly pointed out, is nothing difficult or mystical, but only "the time-honoured logical reductio per impossibile" (Scottish Philosophy, p. 117). The fact of knowledge and that unity of the cosmos which is the necessary condition of any science of nature are only explicable on the assumption of a "Transcendental Ego," which cannot be in time, because it is the condition of time. To explain the relation of this Ego to the various individual human organisms we must have recourse to hypothesis. But that this "Universal Ego," or whatever we choose to call it, exists and is the ultimate "Reality" is a necessary inference, because the denial of it involves all our experience in contradiction. Perhaps it was a mistake of Green's to call it a "spiritual principle"; or perhaps we ought to be very careful, as Green himself was, to spell "spiritual" and "eternal" without capital letters. It may be true that "such a principle of unity

. does not satisfy in any real sense the requirements of Theism"-whatever these may be. Persons proclaiming themselves Theists may so formulate their requirements that no philosophy can or ought to satisfy them. And this consideration may warn us off from some of the hasty applications which have been made of Idealism to defend this or that theological opinion. But if the theological question has to be raised, and it cannot well be avoided, the Idealist may at least claim the same right to use the name of God for the ultimate principle of the universe, which is assumed by every hot-gospeller, who talks about God as

he might do about the man in the next street'.

Idealism,

either of the Neo-Kantian or of Hegel, seems at least to render explicable, in a way in which no other philosophical theory does, why some of the world's greatest minds have held certain theological doctrines, which from the point of view of the logic of "common sense must appear mere senseless ravings, while at the same time it contains nothing necessarily antagonistic to the most "materialistic" scientific results, provided only these results be sufficiently purged of the unconscious antique metaphysics in which many scientific men are apt to express themselves. This approximation of Idealism and Materialism is made a reproach to the former by Prof. Seth (e.g., pp. 76, 192 n.). But surely a philosophical theory, which can assimilate any results that the sciences using their own methods can attain, and which yet makes the most mystical theology explicable (though not necessarily "true"), has at least the greatest claims in its favour, if it be merely regarded as a hypothesis. Whereas the view of God, nature and man, to which the ontology apparently (for we cannot speak with certainty) favoured by Prof. Seth seems to lead, would make it difficult to explain the idea of the creation of the world by God (which is assuredly Thought making Nature), and would also make it impossible to assert the omnipotence of God. A consistent application of any theory which assumes a plurality of individual selves "absolutely and for ever exclusive" would allow at the most the belief in a Deity of limited powers. This (if we are to fling about theological nicknames) is a sort of Deism which may not be Pantheistic, but is certainly not Christian. Surely Prof. Seth is not going to label systems Pantheism-for external application only,' as if that condemned a system forthwith. He speaks of the Pantheistic tendency in the great mediaval schoolmen (p. 218). Is there not to be found in all the greatest theologians and in all the greatest religious thinkers what seems a Pantheistic tendency to those who are under the sway of the "abstract understanding" and can only think of God as a particular being among other beings?

When Mr. Balfour (quoted by Prof. Seth on p. 24), speaking of Green's metaphysics, says that "we must allow that it is as correct to say that nature makes mind as that mind makes nature; that the World created God as that God created the World" (MIND ix. 80), he is (pace Prof. Seth) travestying the Neo-Kantian position, because of the ambiguity in the term "makes" and because of the theological connotation imported in the word "creates ". As a process in time nature precedes mind and mind is the outcome of nature; yet nature only exists as an intelligible system for mind. Prof. Seth himself fully accepts the Aristotelian conception "that the ultimate metaphysical explanation of existence must be sought not so much in a prius out of which things emerge as in the goal towards which they move" (p. 82). And so, if the name of God