Ω.
ON SAMENESS AND IDENTITY. By George Stuart Fullerton. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mr. Fullerton's psychological study is the first of a series of contributions to Philosophy to be issued by the University of Pennsylvania. It is truly entitled a "contribution to the foundations of a Theory of Knowledge," and is an attempt to arrive at an accurate conclusion as to the several senses in which the word same is used; with an historical and critical statement of the use of the word in a wrong sense. Mr. Fullerton finds that same has seven different meanings according to the mode in which it is applied. In the first case it has the sense of identity, and in the second that of similarity. Thirdly, the "external" bundle of qualities may be regarded as being the same at two different times, while in a fourth sense, two "external" things, or "external" qualities, existing at one time, may be called the same to mark similarity. Again, an "external" thing or an "external" quality may be called the same with its external representative, as the identification of a thing with its reflection in a mirror. This is the fifth sense; the sixth is where the same "external" object is said to be perceived by different persons. Finally, an "external" thing may be said to be the same "with its representative in consciousness or with the substance or noumenon assumed to underlie it."
On searching for the reason why such various experiences are expressed by the use of one word, Mr. Fullerton discovers that the common notion which unites them is the idea of similarity. But how can we speak of similarity when strictly only one thing is in question? The answer given is that we have "a series of experiences, beginning with one in which two objects are recognised as similar and yet are very clearly distinguished as two objects, continued in others in which the sense of duality falls more and more into the background, and ending in one in which there is no consciousness of duality at all." The last of these experiences is not wholly different from the others. It differs from them "not in the element which has led us to declare two objects similar—the element which they have in common—but in that which has led us to declare them two and different. It is by adding to this last experience, so to speak, that we get the others. They contain it and more." The experience in which two things are not distinguished, is at the bottom of all our experiences of similarity. The use of the expression "X is X," then, emphasises the fact that one is not to pass from X to any Y or Z, and it, moreover, puts a period to one's thinking, and fixes the thought upon X alone. When the words "identity" and "sameness" are intended to be used with some degree of precision, the former word indicates "sameness in which there is no consciousness of duality, or in which the consciousness of duality has fallen into the background and may easily be overlooked."
More than half of Mr. Fullerton's work is occupied by an historical and critical consideration of the use of the word same in a wrong sense, beginning with Heraclitus and coming down to Prof. W. K. Clifford. The examples he has given of that confusion of thought justifies the assertion of "the need of much greater care and exactitude than one commonly finds in metaphysical reasonings," and at the same time the hair-splitting for which Mr. Fullerton needlessly considers himself called on to plead guilty.
Ω.
INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION. WITH OTHER ESSAYS. By Constance C. W. Naden.
Edited by R. Lewins, M. D. London: Bickers & Son.
The chief of the essays comprised in this volume is an "historical and critical sketch of successive philosophical conceptions respecting the relations between inductive and deductive thought." It was awarded the Heslop Gold Medal as the best dissertation by a student of Mason College, Birmingham (England), in 1887, and Miss Naden was also rewarded for it by being made an Associate of the College, an honor she well deserved. The dissertation displays a wide knowledge of scientific facts with a rare capacity for dealing with them in a philosophical spirit, and a power of acute reasoning such as few other women have ever possessed. Whether her opinions are always correct is another question. It is a profound remark that we are obliged to regard nature as a system, "because we can consider its multiplicity only in relation to one thinking subject." But we must challenge her statement that we have no certainty for assuming that the laws of nature will always remain unchanged. A change in the laws of nature would be the replacing of it by a different nature of which man could not take cognisance, and which therefore we cannot reasonably conceive to be possible. There might be a change of conditions which would introduce other laws, but these must be in conformity with, and not in opposition to, the present laws of nature, as otherwise they could not exist for us, seeing that "experience is possible in virtue of the original constitution of the mind," and therefore, according to the views of which Miss Naden is an exponent, they could not exist at all.
The most interesting of her essays are those which explain the system to which her editor Dr. Robert Lewins gives the name of Hylo-Idealism. This is described as the "brain theory of mind and matter," and it is so described because it asserts that every man is the maker of his own cosmos, all his perceptions having merely a subjective existence and being generated by the brain, "which focuses converging rays of sense from all parts of the body, and unites them into the white light of consciousness." It would be a mistake, however, to think that, according to this theory there is nothing outside of the percipient subject, that is, beyond man himself. The real existence of matter is not denied and, indeed, "so far from being a nonentity, matter is the fons et origo of all entities." Hylo-Idealism deals only with the relative, "ignoring the absolute as utterly beyond human gnosis." While asserting that "the only cosmos known to man, or in any way concerning him, is manufactured in his own brain-cells," it affirms the existence of another cosmos, the external universe of other systems. The mind does not however passively apprehend external objects, but actively constructs them. "We make the mountains, and the sea, and the sun himself; for sunshine is nothing if not visible, and if there were no eye and no brain, there could be no sunshine." The defect of this reasoning is that it makes man the only measure of all things. Because our senses are necessary to us to distinguish certain phenomena, it does not follow that the same phenomena cannot be distinguished under other conditions. The protozoa which have no organs of special sense are affected by the vibrations of light, sound, and probably smell, which would not be possible if those phenomena are "constructed" by the human mind.
The utmost that can be said with any show of reason is that the imaging in our consciousness of external objects does not give an actual representation of them. This is required by the theory of Hylo-Idealism, which goes still further, however, and declares that the universe does not exist as we know it. It seems to us that this view is not consistent with even the principles of Hylo-Idealism. Dr. Lewins specially points out that this system "in no sense denies the objective, but only contends for identity of object and subject, proved as it is by natural Realism itself, from the doctrine of molecular metamorphosis, which shows the Ego continually undergoing transubstantiation with the 'Non-Ego,' and vice versâ, so far as to form one indivisible organism." He compares the Ego and the Non-Ego, that is, subject and object, or our bodies and the "external universe," to a porous vessel of ice, filled with water, immersed in an infinite ocean. "What is within and without, and the septum that seems to divide the two, are all three consubstantial or identical." If they are identical, however, they must perfectly respond to each other, which would not be the case if the object in the mind did not give a true representation of the objects in external nature. Otherwise the identity of subject and object can be predicated, on the condition only of abolishing the "external universe," and affirming of it, as Dr. Lewins affirms of the stars, "What you see is a vision, or organic function, of your own sensifacient organism."