CRITICAL NOTICES: Morgan's "Animal Life and Intelligence";
Croll's "Philosophical Basis of Evolution"; Ladd's
"Introduction to Philosophy"; Stumpf's "Tonpsychologie, II."
Mr. Hodgson states that the kernel of the problem of Free-Will lies in the question whether, as imagined by Compulsory Determinists, the strongest motive has from the first governed the deliberation or process of choosing, as it subsequently governs the action chosen, or whether the victorious motive owes its superior strength to the act or process of deliberation, which terminates in choice, as much as to its own initial degree of strength. In favor of the latter view, he states that choice involves deliberation, and such deliberation involves a consciousness of incompatible or alternative desires, and a comparison of their relative degrees of desirability. The act of choice is the same in nature as the act of selective attention in perception and thought, and is known by the sense of effort or tension which gives it the character of an act, and the consciousness of a decisive change in the relative desirabilities of the alternative desires represented in the deliberation, which gives it the character of an act of choice. All true volition is choice, whether the desire, almost instantaneously adopted, is adopted because the will is weak, or because it is strong. In the former case, the will is mastered by a powerful motive; in the latter case, the motive which it follows receives its strength from the will itself, in the character of a deliberating agency. To the extent of the deliberation there is freedom. Freedom in willing is merely the power to will. Volition is the name for the whole action of which Freedom is the potential state, and Choice or Resolve the completing act.
Mr. Stout's article is in continuation of that on "Apperception and the Movement of Attention" in the last number of Mind. Intuitional thinking is independent of language and other expressive signs. Language is a way of attending indirectly to that which cannot be attended to directly, and signs which fulfil such a function are expressive signs. An expressive sign must be carefully distinguished from a suggestive sign, which merely calls up a certain idea which may then be attended to independently of it, and a substitute sign, which is a means of not thinking about the meaning which it symbolises. The development of language is a development of self-consciousness. A concept is an apperceptive system objectified by means of an expressive sign. Expressive signs are the form, as distinguished from the matter, of conceptual thought. The distinction between formal and formless languages acts as a line of demarcation between the language of natural signs and that of conventional signs. Gesture-language may be described as formless. It is an instrument of conceptual thinking, in which the natural signs are either demonstrative or imitative. Onomatopœia is a phonetic gesture. Conventional signs, being free from the necessary limitations of natural signs, are capable of expressing adequately and accurately the most specific and the most abstract concepts.
In his article on the "Nature of Consciousness," Mr. Shand seeks to show that consciousness, when abstracted from the other acts combined with it, is a unique judgment, and as an act of judging it is simple and unanalysable. As a union of act and object, however, consciousness is complex. The whole is a judgment which, besides its object, contains also the difference between its act and its object. Here is shown its contrast with the Transcendent Judgment, which merely judges its object. But there is a fundamental unity between them. Each is a judgment—an act concerned about an object different from its act, and, as an act, each is a simple reality. Judgment, universally as an act, is such a simple reality. Reality in consciousness means no more than presentation, and the act of being conscious is the subject exercising one of its functions. This mysterious something, the subject, cannot be resolved into any association of presentations, nor into any one of them, nor be derived by abstraction from them, so far at least as the act of being conscious is concerned, which is a genuine function of the subject.
Professor Land gives a sketch of the life and work of Arnold Geulincx, the Flemish thinker of the seventeenth century known to students of philosophy in connection with the doctrine of Occasionalism. The key to Geulincx's view of philosophy is to be found in his statement that the utterances of our own reason are far less regarded than the shows of senses and fantasy; although they have their source in the bodily life, which is radically foreign to the soul, and can only darken the knowledge of our self and of its true interests. The dualism of mind and body is for Geulincx a determined fact. Professor Land has undertaken to prepare a complete edition of Geulincx's works, the expenses of the publication of which will be defrayed from the balance remaining over from the Spinoza Memorial fund.
In his discussion on "thought-relations," Mr. Eastwood states that this puzzling expression is interwoven with the whole of Green's writings, and requires to be thoroughly explained. The proof that the Real is identical with the Thinkable was Green's great problem, and to Hegel's inquiry what are the essential features of thought? he replied: the constitution of relations. Green found, however, that they are not fully adequate in themselves and he called to their aid a spiritual principle or eternal subject. But the reference of relations to the Eternal Mind as their subject is a reference to the unknown, and therefore is, on grounds of strict reason, illegitimate. Thought-relations are essentially finite, and are the connecting links of the phenomenal world. In the evolution of thought the absolute is nothing short of the whole, and especially, it is the whole process of transition from Being to the Idea. The more we try to externalise it or to arrest its movement, by impressing it with the immutability of thought-relations, the more it recedes from our grasp.
In his Notes on Volition, Professor Bain considers whether pain is to be regarded as the sole motive in voluntary action, or whether the motive is a growing pleasure or a diminishing pleasure, in concurrence with some form of active exertion. Considerations arising from the great differences among pleasures themselves leads him to reject the view that the stimulus of the will is uneasiness pure and simple, and that pleasure, as such, leads to quiescence and contentment. A taste of pleasure constitutes an impetus to seek for more and may be accepted as the normal situation of the human will. The graded scale of voluntary action ranges from the lowest depths of pain, at which the motive power is at its maximum, to the highest assignable or attainable modes of pleasure, approaching which the motive power gradually dies away.
Mr. Mackenzie points out, in considering Mr. Alexander's criticisms of his Introduction to Social Philosophy, the importance of distinguishing, when dealing with the subject of organic development, between the psychological and the metaphysical points of view, and that he wrote entirely from the metaphysical point of view. (London: Williams & Norgate.)