against current criticism." The chapter throughout is interesting and important, and the criticisms of rival ethical theories are characterized by vigor and fairness.
Towards the close of this discussion, the author gives an explicit statement of his method of treatment, which certainly is a great help in bringing all criticism of this work to a point. "I do not know whether these reflections upon the meaning of 'obligation' and 'validity' will meet with the reader's approval; to me the conclusion we have arrived at seems unavoidable so long as you accept our premises, which were, that whatever is real must be in the last resort reducible to some fact or facts which fall within an actual experience." "The purport of the present discussion may therefore be said to be the elimination from our concepts of validity and obligation of the 'symbolic' elements which in common usage they include, and the definition of them as far as possible in terms of 'pure' experience." The deductions can be refuted only by an assault on the principle itself, and not by appeals to 'conscience' or 'common sense' (pp. 366f.). Such is undeniably the case, and those of us who find ourselves obliged to dissent from Mr. Taylor's point of view, will gladly avow that the disagreement throughout is due to a different understanding of what constitutes explanation, and to an opposed conception of epistemology. The dualism of Bradley's metaphysics and ethics may safely be said to result from the dualism of his epistemology, which looks upon our primary experiences as if they somehow brought us face to face with reality, whereas all further elaboration on the part of thought means the addition of ideal contents or wandering mental predicates, resulting in a kind of 'symbolic' knowledge that is not to be discovered in the first 'pure' experiences. For an account of the facts we must, on these premises, be sent to the primary data, and investigate the nature of them before they undergo 'symbolic' transformations. On the other hand, if our epistemology leads us to insist that the processes of knowledge are all the same in character, that judgment is the primary act of consciousness, that the so-called facts of experience are not given in any unique way, but are already related and interpreted by the activity of the mind, there is no reason for asserting that the later and more complex judgments are 'symbolic,' and the original ones true of actual experience. The discussion cannot, of course, be expanded here, but the point is of interest as showing that our epistemology has a very much deeper influence upon our theory of ethics than upon physics, for example. Our views of the knowing process cannot affect our scientific accounts of physical phenomena, but they do exercise a very vital
