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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY

a theory of "transfigured realism";[1] and a hundred other theories that have all the obfuscating power of metaphysics rather than the clarifying virtue of a matter-of-fact psychology. In these volumes we leave realistic England and go "back to Kant."

What strikes us at once is that for the first time in the history of psychology, we get here a resolutely evolutionist point of view, an attempt at genetic explanations, an effort to trace the bewildering complexities of thought down to the simplest of nervous operations, and finally to the motions of matter. It is true that this effort fails; but who has ever succeeded in such an attempt? Spencer sets out with a magnificent program for the unveiling of the processes whereby consciousness has been evolved; in the end he is compelled to posit consciousness everywhere,[2] in order to evolve it. He insists that there has been one continuous evolution from nebula to mind, and at last confesses that matter is known only through mind. Perhaps the most significant paragraphs in these volumes are those in which the materialist philosophy is abandoned:

Can the oscillation of a molecule be represented in consciousness side by side with a nervous shock, and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion, becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into jutaxposition. And the immediate verdict of consciousness thus given, might be analytically justified;…for it might be shown that the conception of an oscillating molecule is built out of many units of feeling." (I.e., our knowledge of matter is built up out of units of mind–sensations and memories and ideas). "…Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physi-
  1. ↑ Spencer means by this that although the objects of experience may very well be transfigured by perception, and be quite other than they seem, they have an existence which does not all depend upon perceiving them.—II, 494.
  2. ↑ Autob., ii, 549.
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