Part VII, "General Analysis"). And yet Professor Birks tacitly makes me responsible for the incongruities which result from uniting this theory with the opposed theory.
From this sample of critical truthfulness let us pass now to a sample of critical acumen.
In arguing against Hamilton and Mansell in § 26, I have said: "It is rigorously impossible to conceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of appearances only, without at the same time conceiving a reality of which they are appearances; for appearance without reality is unthinkable." On page 121 of his work, Professor Birks, quoting the last five words of this sentence, continues, "This is true, when once the conception of distance has been gained by actual experience." And he then proceeds to comment upon visual impressions, illusive and other. Again, on page 135, when criticising my argument concerning the indestructibility of matter. Professor Birks says: "Matter, as knowable, is declared to be not the unseen reality, but the sensible appearances, or phenomenal matter alone. Phenomenal matter, it appears from daily and hourly experience, appears and disappears, perishes and is new-created continually. . . . The cloud vanishes, the star sets, or a mist blots it out, the drop evaporates, the ship melts into the yeast of waves, the candle is burned away and comes to an end. The substance may last in another form, but the phenomenon or appearance is gone. . . . Thus, by the theory, of Matter, the Noumenon, we know nothing, and therefore can not know that it is indestructible. Of Matter, the Phenomenon, we may know much. And one main thing we know of it, proved by hourly experience, is that it both may be and continually is destroyed. For an appearance is destroyed and perishes, when it ceases to appear." In which sentences, as in all accompanying sentences covering several pages, the implication is that Professor Birks identifies appearance in the philosophical sense with appearance in the popular sense! Everywhere his expressions and arguments make manifest the fact that Professor Birks thinks the meaning of phenomenon in metaphysical discussion is no wider than that implied by its derivation—something visible! Sounds, smells, tastes are in his view not phenomena; nor are touches, pressures, tensions. And hence it results that since when a pound of salt is dissolved in water it ceases to be visible, its existence, phenomenally considered, ends: its continued power of affecting our senses by its weight, to the same extent as before the solution, not being considered as a phenomenal manifestation of its existence!
In § 46, when commenting on the mental confusion which metaphysical discussions often produce, I have ascribed this in part to the misleading connotations of the words "appearance" and "phenomenon"; and after illustrating this have said: "So that the implication of uncertainty has infected the very word appearance. Hence, philosophy, by giving it an extended meaning, leads us to think of all
