expected from an author whose earlier book was chiefly notable
for the vigour with which it defended the position that the self,
while unquestionably real, is neither the body nor any part of it)
free from the tendency of many " new realists " to depreciate
the importance of mind in the scheme of things.

It was as yet too early in 1921 to feel sure what the value of
this revival of " realism " was. As against the older tendency
to regard Nature as very largely the creation of the human mind
and, in fact, something of an " illusion " which happens un-
accountably to be shared by every one, it may fairly be said to
be largely justified, and it seems also likely to prove a serviceable
ally to the moralist who believes in " objective " obligation
against the perennial endeavour of the mere anthropologist to
confound moral distinctions with capricious " personal " likings
and dislikes. It is a strong point of the doctrine that it refuses to
regard the universals of science and ethics as " figments " (like
the older sensationalism), or (like Kantianism) as " creations of
the mind." They are genuinely there " in the facts," and have
to be accepted no less than the deliverances of sense as " part
of the facts." In so far as the " realistic " tendency seems likely
to deliver us in natural philosophy from the belief in a " material
substrate " and the rejection of the wealth of " sensible qualities "
to the realm of illusion, and in ethics from the theory that moral
values are purely "subjective," it promises to do admirable work
for the clarification of thought. But it may be suspected that
some of the protagonists of the movement are too much in a
hurry to philosophize with due discrimination. The " neutral
monism " to which they seem to tend in metaphysics is no new
thing, and one may doubt whether it really deserves to survive
its drastic criticism by J. Ward at the end of the last century
(Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1899). It seems probable that
some of the dialectical victories of the " realist " are easily won
by substituting the alleged dualism of matter and mind for the
very different duality of knower and known. To deny that the
universe consists of two classes of substances, radically distinct
and disparate in all their properties, is one thing; to maintain,
as some, if not all, " new realists " do, that minds might disappear
from the universe and yet leave it with all its colours, tones,
odours, perhaps with all its " values," unaffected is quite another.
Reference to the " subject " of knowledge may be irrelevant to
the discussion of particular problems in nature precisely because



9 8



PHILOSOPHY



the " subject " is equally relevant to the whole of Nature. To the
present writer, at least, it seems that none of the " realists "
of the moment has so clear an insight into the real significance
of the " subject " and the real character of " Nature " as was
shown long ago by John Grote in his remarkable, but unfortu-
nately not very readable, work Exploratio Philosophka.

(3) The third tendency which calls for note is what one may
call " Spiritualist Pluralism." According to this view the uni-
verse consists in the end of a vast plurality of minds, but there
is no one central and supreme mind controlling its destiny.
Anti-materialism and atheism are thus conjoined. The view
itself is, indeed, not a new one. It has been long upheld, as an
interpretation of Hegelianism, by J. M. E. McTaggart, and is,
of course, not so very different from the " theism " of those
" personal idealists " who make a point of objecting to the
traditional doctrine of the Divine Omnipotence. But the plu-
ralistic universe of spirits, as conceived by these thinkers, is,
of course, an orderly one. The believers in a " finite God " have
always stipulated that the limits of their Deity's knowledge or
power shall be so widely drawn as to leave Him in a position to
act as an overruling Providence to the rest of us. McTaggart's
scheme does not include a God at all, but, for reasons which he
has, perhaps, not made fully apparent, he is persuaded that it is
in the nature of spirits to fall into line with one another and even
to advance inevitably by a natural law to complete fruition of
perfection and happiness. His world, to use an illustration of his
own, is like the senior common room of a college without a
master. (Have we here a last vestige of the old, comfortable
Godwinian dogma of the "perfectibility of human nature"?
There is a distinct flavour of the 18th-century optimism, against
which Candide was a protest, about this metaphysic. The times
of violence, it is taken for granted, lie behind us in the dim past ;
" culture " and " enlightenment " are a sufficient guarantee
against their return, exactly as was thought by those repre-
sentatives of the French noblesse who came up to Paris for the
meeting of the States-General in 1789.) Naturally enough, the
events of the recent years of world-wide war (1914-8), which
made even the most optimistic feel how very insecure the
foundations of our " moral civilization " are, were not favour-
able to spiritualistic pluralism of this easy-going and cheerful
kind. Aerial bombardments and poison gases brought it home
to all of us that the world is as " dangerous " as Nietzsche
could have wished it to be. But an anarchic version of spirit-
ualistic pluralism was enunciated with great vigour at the end
of the war by the brilliant Italian philosopher, A. Aliotta,
who had formerly professed a theistic " personal idealism,"
in his small but striking manifesto La guerra eterna ed
U dramma dell' existenza. According to Aliotta, what the "real
world " of spirits resembles is not a college in the long vacation
but one of the fronts of the recent war. Spirits are ingenerable
and indestructible, and their life is an unending warfare for
incompatible ideals. The issue of the conflict is unknown and
unknowable, and, indeed, it is just the fact that it is unknowable
which makes the fight worth while. It seems even to be held that
good would not really be good unless there was some one to hate
and resist it. Arma amens capio nee sat rationis inarmis. Aliotta,
in his later phase, rejects Theism with disdain. His reasons appear
to be primarily ethical. If there is a " God above," it is argued,
we know already that the issue of the secular warfare of good
with evil is decided. Good is going to win and we know it; the
battle is thus as good as over already, and there is no more
heroism in playing a man's part in the world than there is in
charging an unloaded battery on a day of field manoeuvres.
Aliotta's zeal and energy have created, apparently, a whole band
of enthusiasts for a pluralism of this kind among the younger
Italian philosophers. The weak points in the intellectual con-
struction are, however, obvious. The alleged ethical objections
to Theism only hold good on the assumption that Divine Provi-
dence is absolutely incompatible with human freedom, and no
serious attempt is made to justify this assumption that Theism
means hyper-Calvinism. That in a theistic universe good will be
triumphant " in God's good time " may be certain, but it does



not follow that it will triumph without our efforts or that it does
not depend largely on us when that " good time " shall be.
Again, it must not be forgotten that the Theist does not com-
monly profess to be able to demonstrate his creed with mathe-
matical certainty. He lives by faith and hope and usually pro-
fesses to prove no more than that the scheme of things leaves
him room to hope. It is probably impossible to reason an in-
tellectually alert but morally frivolous man into belief in God.
Still more unreasonable does it seem to hold, as Aliotta and his
followers sometimes appear to hold, that the very meaning of
" good " is " something which one has to fight for." If this were
so, evil would clearly become very good if it were so generally
hated by most men that its partisans were compelled to fight
very hard on its behalf. It must always be more than a meaning-
less form of words to ask the question: " Is what you propose
to fight about worth fighting for?" To put it differently, the
proposition " that for which I am fighting is good " is always
a synthetic proposition in Kant's sense of that phrase.

The years from 1918 to 1921, at all events in Great Britain,
seem to have been rather barren in works of practical philosophy
of outstanding importance. There were, of course, many reasons
for this: the disturbance, by the war, of the ordinary avocations
of the class by whom such works are chiefly produced, the rise
in the cost of living which lowered the demand for books,
and above all the great increase in the cost of paper and labour.
Mention should, however, be made of one admirable work,
L. T. Hobhouse's, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918).
Hobhouse's work is a hostile criticism of the Hegelian tendency
to deify the State as a sort of " super-person," which he takes as
exemplified by B. Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State,
and a reassertion of the traditional " liberal " conception of the
State as a system of machinery for the promotion of the welfare
of individuals. The criticism of the Hegelian adoption of Rous-
seau's conception of the " general will " is severe but illuminating.
It may be that Hegelianism tends to make men conservatives
(though our own Hegelians have as often been socialists), and
that Hobhouse's personal political inclinations at times run
away with him. He seems so convinced of the antecedent prob-
ability that any governmental enactment will be a bad one as
almost to hold that any " rebel " (a Marat or an Hebert?) may
be presumed to be in the right until it is proved that he is in
the wrong. But in view of the dangerous tendency of present
society to " look to Government " for everything, and of the
serious moral abuses to which the metaphor of the " personality "
of the State may lead when it is taken to be more than a metaphor,
the book must be regarded as a singularly timely contribution
to philosophical politics.

In pure logic perhaps the most important English publication
of very recent years has been the issue in 1921 of the first volume
of W. E. Johnston's long-expected Logic. Mention should also
be made of B. Bosanquet's Implication and Linear Inference,
a welcome appendix to the more voluminous logical work of the
veteran philosopher which throws a good deal of fresh light on
his fundamental position.

The years of war and uneasy reconstruction have not been
barren of useful work in the history of philosophy. In N. Kemp
Smith's Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1918),
we have at last in English an adequate historical and exegetical
companion to the most famous of all German works on meta-
physics and the theory of knowledge which will be indispensable
to all serious students and may take rank with anything which
the Germans themselves have done for their illustrious philoso-
pher. If Smith's work is not quite on the gigantic scale of
Vaihinger's great German commentary, it has the advantage of
covering the whole of the Critique, whereas Vaihinger breaks
off at the end of the Transcendental Aesthetic. In all other respects
the British commentator may fairly sustain comparison with his
Continental predecessor. Another very welcome contribution
to the history of modern thought is J. Gibson's Locke's Theory
of Knowledge (1917), which should do a great deal towards mak-
ing the real greatness of Locke as a rationalist philosopher clear
to his countrymen and dispelling the strange conception of him as



PHILOSOPHY



99



a sensationalistic empiricist made current among us in the
'seventies of the last century by T. H. Green's Introduction to
the Green and Grose edition of Hume. It were much to be wished
that some competent scholar would do for Hume, a philosopher
who has been no less strangely misunderstood, what Gibson has
done for Locke. We still need to have it established by a really
historical study of the Treatise and the dialogues on Natural
Religion that Hume was neither an empiricist, as Green would
make him, nor a positivist, as Huxley represents, but precisely
what he calls himself, an " academic or sceptical " philosopher,
and that the true measure of his intellectual greatness can only
be taken when this simple fact is kept steadily in mind. A gap is
also filled in our philosophical literature by the appearance of
W. R. Sorley's History of English Philosophy (1920), which
begins with Alcuin of York and carries the story down to the
end of the igth century. The veteran J. T. Merz completed
his masterly History of European Thought, a work to which it
would be hard to find a parallel in its scope and the accuracy of
knowledge in many fields which it displays, by the issue of the
fourth volume in 1914. He has since given us an interesting
addendum, containing an outline of his own philosophical inter-
pretation of experience in A Fragment on the Human Mind (1919),
where it is interesting to see how profoundly a thinker at home in
all the developments of French and German thought has been
influenced by our own Berkeley and Hume. The Fragment is
one of many signs that there is possibly a great future before
a really critical Neo-Berkeleyanism. Berkeley received scant
justice at the hands of the Anglo-Hegelian " Idealists " of the
late igth century, who seem to have been under the impression
that his best-known doctrine was meant as a kind of " subjectiv-
ism." The zoth century seems likely, by laying stress on the
very real element of " natf realism " in his work, to arrive at a
more intelligent and more generous estimate of its permanent
value. We should not omit to chronicle the real service done
to philosophical literature by the Open Court Publishing Com-
pany in the reissue (1916) of the epoch-making work of Boole
on the Laws of Thought, the original edition of which had become
very scarce. It is a great misfortune, owing presumably to the
deaths of Dr. Paul Carus and Mr. P. E. B. Jourdain, that the
complete republication of the logical writings of G. Boole and
his great contemporary Augustus De Morgan has not been
proceeded with. A reprint of De Morgan's Formal Logic, his
contributions to the logic of relatives, and Trigonometry and
Double Algebra, if of no other of his works, is badly needed by
the student of the history of modern exact logic.

It is gratifying to note that the study of the great Greek
founders of science and philosophy is still zealously prosecuted
in Great Britain and in other countries, notably in Italy, which
has been remarkably fertile in recent years in all departments of
philosophical literature. It may be recorded that all through the
war the issue of the great Oxford translation of Aristotle provided
for by the will of Jowett slowly proceeded, the last part issued
up to the middle of 1921 being the revision of Jowett's own ver-
sion of the Politics by W. D. Ross. The Aristotelian student may
be excused if he feels a little impatient at the continued non-
appearance of just those Aristotelian works which are at once the
most interesting and the least adequately represented in English,
the Organon, Physics, De Caelo, De Generalione and Meteorologica.
But for these logical and cosmological writings the English
Aristotle was in 1921 well-nigh complete. Another most valuable
work which progressed steadily after 1914, and in 1921 needed
only one more volume to be completed, is the handsome edition
of Kant's works with that indispensable subsidium, a full collec-
tion of variant readings edited by the eminent scholar, E. Cas-
sirer. If, in binding and quality of paper, the later volumes
inevitably fall off to some extent from the high standard of the
earlier, this edition is in all other respects what an edition of a
great classic ought to be. It was at last possible to read Kant
with pleasure to the eye and with full certainty whether what
one had before one was what Kant himself actually allowed to
be printed or a (good or bad) conjecture of some modern Kant-
scholar. We have too long acquiesced, and that not only in



philosophical works, in a standard of textual accuracy where
modern writers are concerned which would be rightly deemed
barbarous in editions of the Greek and Latin classics. It is to
be hoped that this bad practice will not be tolerated much longer
by self-respecting scholars.

The changes in the third edition (1921) of J. Burnet's Early
Greek Philosophy, the most critical and careful study of the
beginnings of Greek science, are an interesting indication of the
advance our knowledge of classical antiquity had made since
1908. No contemporary work on the primary Greek philosophers
is of quite such first-rate importance as L. Robin's important
La Theorie Platonicienne of 1908, the one modern work which
systematically and in detail begins the investigation of Plato's
philosophy with the proper initial question, what Plato was
understood to mean by men like Xenocrates and Aristotle, who
heard his doctrines from his own lips. J. Burnet's Greek Philoso-
phy, Thales to Plato (1914) proceeds on similar lines, but the
writer is limited by the facts that Plato is only one part of his
subject and that he has perforce to give most of his space to the
exposition of the dialogues. His actual interpretation of Plato
was deferred to his second volume, not yet published in 1921.
But Robin had issued a brief but important appendix to his main
work, Etudes sur la signification el la place ae la Physique dans
la Philosophic de Platan (1919). Mention should also be made of
the admirable Platonic studies of Adolfo Levi, Sulle interpre-
tazioni immanent istiche della filosofia di Platone and // Concetto
del Tempo nella filosofia di Platone (1920). These are contribu-
tions of first-rate importance to the recovery of the genuine
tradition of the first generations of the Platonic Academy. It
ought to be clear that it is on the recovery of this tradition, for
which there is ample available evidence, that our hopes of
definitely ascertaining the real meaning of the first and greatest
of all philosophical writers must depend.

The Neo-Thomist movement in the Catholic universities of
the Continent still continued, in 1921, to flourish vigorously
and to show its vitality in the general excellence of the work
in such journals as the Italian Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica
and the Revue Ne.o-Scolastique de Philosophie issued by the
philosophical faculty of the university of Louvain. Among the
actual books produced quite recently by the movement, mention
may be made of the brief but highly condensed and valuable
study of St. Thomas's thought in its entirety, Le Thomisme, by
E. Gilson of the university of Strassburg. The English reader
will get an admirable introduction to a great philosophy too
little known among us by combining the study of this general
introduction to Thomism with that of the very sympathetic
exposition of Thomist natural theology by P. H. Wicksteed,
The Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy Illustrated from
the Works of S. Thomas (1920). The appearance of works like this
last leads one to hope that it might soon be impossible for the
average historian of philosophy among us to write as though
nothing of any significance had been thought or said in philosophy
between Plotinus (or even Aristotle) and Descartes. Two other
recent contributions to the study of ancient and mediaeval
thought may be mentioned. G. M. Stratton's Greek Physiological
Psychology (1917) is a painstaking and laudable attempt to edit
the important fragment of Theophrastus de Sensu with a transla-
tion and full explanatory commentary. In Opera hactenus in-
edita Rogeri Bacon fasc. V. (1920), A. G. Steele happily resumed
the task, interrupted by the war since 1913, of providing a
complete edition of Roger Bacon's writings.

In U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's two large volumes en-
titled Platan (vol. i., 1917; vol. ii., 1919), the veteran German
professor makes some interesting and valuable suggestions,
but he is debarred from acting as a competent interpreter of
Plato partly by complete lack of training in philosophical thought,
partly by a habit of treating ingenious guesses of his own about
the motives of a classical writer and the circumstances in which
his various works were composed as certainties, partly by a
curious want of finish in verbal Greek scholarship which makes
his long series of conjectural emendations, in spite of a few
felicities, into a systematic depravation of the Platonic text.



100



PHYSIOLOGY



During the decade, many of the familiar figures of the philo-
sophical world were removed by death. This was only to be ex-
pected in the case of octogenarians like Wundt and Windelband and
J. F. Brentano, still more in that of a nonagenarian like the Italian
positivist, R. Ardigo (1828-1020). In Great Britain there were
few losses among the elder philosophers since the death of the
nonagenarian, A. Campbell Fraser. Of the elderly, but not old,
the United States lost their leading philosopher, Josiah Royce;
France, Gaston Milhaud and Emile Boutroux (1845-1921); and
Austria, Alexis Meinong. Still more regrettable was the death
of men who were still young or in their intellectual prime, as
Louis Couturat in France and Oswald Kulpe in Germany.

(A. E. T.)

PHYSIOLOGY (see 21.554;. Since 1910 increased attention
has been paid, in physiological research, to phenomena common
to living beings in general, and recent investigation has added
considerably to our knowledge and corrected earlier theories.

As distinguished from Morphology, the science of the form
and structure of living organisms, Physiology may be said to be
concerned with their activities, chemical and physical. But
there can be no hard and fast line between the two bodies of
doctrine. A function depends on the way the machine is made.
And many provinces of modern research, such as those depend-
ing on changes of general form in response to external agents,
combine morphology and physiology. For convenience of re-
search, physiology is often divided into biochemistry and bio-
physics. But this distinction can scarcely be regarded as a
scientific one, since in all vital processes both chemical and
physical factors intervene. It is true that some of the problems
of the biochemist consist in the elucidation of the chemical
nature of vital products, and might be looked upon as the
chemical side of morphology; but the methods of investiga-
tion distinguish them from those of the organic chemist.

Animal and Plant. There is no real or fundamental difference
beCween the animal and plant organism. Great as may appear
to be the external differences between a dog and a tree, when
we proceed to examine the physiological factors of which their
life is made up, we find that the elementary processes are
essentially alike. The most striking contrast, that of move-
ment, does not exist in the simplest members of the two king-
doms. While certain plants, such as algae and bacteria, are
motile in some stages, certain polyps and ascidians become
fixed in the later periods of their life. Other instances might
be given. The difference between the net result of the chemical
changes occurring in the green plants and those occurring in
animals is due to the presence in the former of the green pig-
ment, chlorophyll, and does not show itself in fungi. By the
aid of chlorophyll, the energy of the sun's light is used to build
up the carbon dioxide, formed in the combustion of food by all
cells, into sugar and oxygen. These again become available as
sources of energy to living matter. In this connexion, it may
be noted that the work of Willstatter and Stoll has made it
practically certain that carbon dioxide and water become at-
tached in some way to the chlorophyll particles, a molecular
rearrangement takes place with addition of energy when light
is absorbed, a peroxide of formaldehyde is produced, and this
is then decomposed into gaseous oxygen and formaldehyde by
the agency of an enzyme (catalase). From formaldehyde the
higher sugars are readily produced by polymerization. The
precise chemistry of the reactions is 'not yet clear it may be
that formic acid and hydrogen peroxide result from the action
of water on the formaldehyde peroxide. In this case, catalase
splits up hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen, while the
formic acid is reduced by light (absorbed by chlorophyll) to
formaldehyde. However this may be, the final result of the
process is that, in the light, green plants take up carbon diox-