made in the direction of a solution—certainly no constructive system bids fair to endure save in the history of philosophy. That there has been incidental profit from the ceaseless efforts of the various schools is beyond question. The science of psychology has derived enduring advantage. The work of Fechner, Wundt, etc., and of our own eminent English psychologists, Sully, Bain, etc., is certainly not of an ephemeral character. Yet even this brings us no nearer to the all-absorbing questions of anthropology—the nature and the destiny of the mind. One point, indeed, of some importance has secured a very general acceptance—the theory of a division of the possible objects of perception into noumena and phenomena, and the complementary doctrine of the phenomenal character of all our perceptions. The distinction is claimed to be Platonic in origin, though Plato's clear distinction into objects of sense and objects of mind (nous) can hardly be said to coincide accurately with Kant's. However, both Transcendentalists, Empiricists, and Hamiltonians agree in accepting the distinction, and it is pointed to as a permanent acquisition to metaphysics. Yet even here the opposition of the scientific Materialists must be included in the estimate; a system that numbers Tyndall, Clifford, Maudsley, Bastian, Draper, Pinet, Broussais, Moleschott, Helmholz, Büchner, Vogt, Feuerbach, and Strauss cannot be set aside as a negligeable quantity. Whether the distinction into noumena and phenomena be Platonic or not, it is certainly Aristotelic; it corresponds with the distinction into substance and accidents which the Stagyrite fully developed, and which plays a conspicuous part in mediaeval philosophy. Now, the tendency of modern science is to suppress the duality which the metaphysicians have created. The schoolmen went so far as to teach the absolute separability of accidents from substance (as the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation seemed to demand); modern phenomenalists, teaching the cognoscibility of phenomena and the imperceptibility of noumena, do not seem to be far behind them. But one by one their phenomena—sounds, odours, colours, etc.—have been conclusively shown to be merely modes of the sonorous, odorous, or coloured body, only separable from it by an abstraction. Hence to the scientist it must seem just as perplexing to talk of perceiving colours, etc., and not coloured things, as
