found a centre for receiving and giving influences. This is the mere dizziness of thought. Speculation is brought to its knees by too heavy a blow of the sensuous mallet of mechanism" (p. 497).
As conspicuous examples of the inadequacy of the author's presentations we may instance his summary description of Locke's ethical theories (p. 211). (Ct. Sidgwick's History of Ethics and Curtis's Outline of Locke's Ethical Philosophy.) In a chapter on the English ethical writers who dissent from Utilitarianism, he informs us that Bishop Butler's work of widest influence was the Analogy, and does not even mention the Sermons on Human Nature. On page 432 we are told that "Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797) was the first of the German Idealists." One would gladly believe that this is a mere slip of the pen. It must, however, be noticed that the author has not merely confused the Christian name of the elder Fichte with that of his son, but that there is also a substitution of dates which renders the mistake incomprehensible. The same confusion of son and father occurs also in the table of contents.
The position from which Professor Bascom criticises is that of naïve representationism, or doctrine of mediate perception, which, however, he dignifies with the name of 'Constructive Realism.' This is most clearly stated in his criticism of the Scottish School. "Our experiences are purely personal experiences referrible under causation to the properties of objects external to the mind. . . . Properties and object are an inference from sensation" (p. 295). "Nothing which is not phenomenal to mind can be embraced within consciousness; all direct knowledge is so embraced. If the object to which I refer a group of sensations were directly known, it would be a phenomenon of mind. It remains to be inferred because it is exterior to mind, not a part of its own experience" (p. 296). "All that is known directly is thereby shown to be phenomenal, all that is known indirectly is transcendent, unphenomenal" (p. 297). This, surely, is the very doctrine that Reid abandoned because Hume had shown once for all that if we start with sensations it is impossible to pass to the existence of external bodies. Professor Bascom regards the assertions of the Scottish school in reference to an immediate apprehension of things, and to the distinction between subject and object, as a special deliverance of the Scottish consciousness, and declares that they are "made in the face of almost all philosophy materialistic, idealistic, and intuitive" (p. 315). Is not just the opposite the fact, that this analysis of the testimony of consciousness is at the present day accepted by all psychologists and by every school of philosophy? The psychology of Reid is indisputable; it was because he had not completely freed himself from 'the doctrine of ideas' that he relapsed into dualism.—In criticising Kant's distinction of phenomena and noumena, our author occupies an entirely different position. "We know matter, mind," he tells us, "fully and finally in knowing the phenomena to which they give rise. There is not a residuum of being beyond these manifestations. It is that we may explain these phenomena, and for this
