Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/580

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XX.

sion of the Church—a thesis backed apparently by a strong anti-German feeling. Incidentally, the writer's sentiments would appear to be anti-Semitic as well. Much less significance can be assigned to another side of Leonardo's philosophy, in which, however, the author seems to follow him with equal admiration. This is the doctrine of 'analogy,' through which after limiting 'experience' to the description of the laws of phenomena, a loose and fanciful way is found of reasserting the spiritual truths which the dogmatic scientist too hastily rejects. This consists to all practical intents in establishing a miscellaneous collection of psychological, ethical, and religious beliefs which happen to meet our approval, by discovering analogies to them in the natural world—much the same method as exemplified, for example, in Comenius's grounding of educational principles in nature. The point of view of the writer is perhaps sufficiently suggested in a quotation: "Trois voies conduisent à la vérité: la foi, la raison, et l'expérience. Chacune de ses voies correspond à une catégorie mentale, absolument irreductible; et le croyant, le philosophe, le savant ne mentent pas en prétendant posséder la vérité; elle résulterait de leur concordat. Jusqu à ce qu'il s'établisse, la voile de la grande Isis, déchiré en trois morceaux, formera des bannières ennemies qui grouperont des fidèles, suivant la personelle tendance." What is likely to be the philosophical fruitfulness of such a formula, the reviewer is not very much interested to inquire.

A. K. Rogers.

University of Missouri.

The Presentation of Reality. By Helen Wodehouse. Cambridge, University Press, 1910.—pp. x, 163.

Brevity, thoroughness, and incisiveness are among the qualities displayed by this essay, intended, says the author, "as a psychological preface to metaphysics," or "a description of knowledge from the point of view of a philosophical psychology." Knowledge, error, and the nature of reality, the latter in certain of its epistemological aspects, are successively treated in the fourteen chapters of the book.

The author's position may be described as epistemological realism. The thesis is maintained "that in all cognitive experience we come into immediate contact with objective reality, of the existence of which we have in experience an irrefutable witness, and that on all levels of cognition, sensuous or intellectual, this happens in the same way, namely, by the presentation of an object to a subject" (p. x. Cf. also pp. 65, 118, 146, 157). Simply "'to have a presentation,' for us, means ... to know reality" (p. 4), and "even sensation, elementary as it is, must on my view, be still considered as knowledge of an object by a subject ..." (p. 12).

The author finds matter for adverse comment in the aloofness of a scientific psychology from the problems of philosophy, deprecates the abstract treatment of sensation as "a mere modification of consciousness" which gives us no direct information about the real world, and disapproves of the idealistic position that knowledge is a creative act and the reality known a construction (pp. 7, 8, 72, 74, 76, 119, 124, 157). "Even if the whole world grows by means