from metaphysics to a philosophy of immediate experience as altogether wholesome. Abstract reason is not in its own field a false thing, nor is it without indispensable usefulness in the application of experience to life; nevertheless, not through it shall we come into intimate touch with reality, but through life itself; the truth for us is not what we have defined logically, but what we actually feel and will. It does not follow, however, that in accepting heartily this method we must equally accept Mr. James's statement of the relative values of what he reports as obtained by the method; we may even suspect that in his evaluation he is still imprisoned in the very error from which he is so eager to save us. Consciousness, he says, is not discrete, or divided into discontinuous moments, as it is presented to us by the reason, but is continuous; nor has it any conformity with the static void of monism. Time and change are of its essence, and if we wish to know reality we must "dive back into the flux itself." His cry is like the command of Faust to leave the musty cell and throw one's self into the stream of the world -Hinaus ins Freie! There is grave irony as well as stirring exhortation in Mr. James's personal appeal to his audience:

If Oxford men could be ignorant of anything, it might almost seem that they had remained ignorant of the great empirical movement towards a pluralistic panpsychic view

of the universe, into which our own generation has been drawn, and which threatens to short-circuit their methods [of monistic dogmatism] entirely and become their religious rival unless they are willing to make themselves its allies. Yet wedded as they seem to be to the logical machinery and technical apparatus of absolutism, I cannot but believe that their fidelity to the religious ideal in general is deeper still. . . . Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to begin. That great awakening of a new popular interest in philosophy, which is so striking a phenomenon at the present day in all countries, is undoubtedly due in part to religious demands.

A pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe -that is to say: as our only knowledge is experience and our experience is an inner consciousness flowing with ceaseless change about endlessly differing sensations presented to it from without, so the truth of the world for us is not monism, but pluralism. We are du réel dans le réel; but this reality is an infinite group of interacting interpenetrating forces, over which no absolute law can be found to govern. And as these forces, like our states of consciousness, are in a constant mutation, so, like ourselves, they may very well be, in part at least, other streams of consciousness, meeting and embracing and repelling one another. How else, indeed, can they have any meaning or reality to us? The universe may thus be panpsychic, and one of the most interesting of Mr. James's lectures is a revival of Fech

ner's animism, with his vision of the world-soul enveloping and nourishing the souls of men. For the proof of such a theory Mr. James goes to what he deems the facts of experience:

In a word, the believer is continuous, to his own consciousness, at any rate, with a wider self from which saving experiences flow in. Those who have such experiences distinctly enough and often enough to live in the light of them remain quite unmoved by criticism, from whatever quarter it may come, be it academic or scientific, or be it merely the voice of logical common-sense. They have had their vision and they know that is enough-that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environment from which help comes, our soul being mysteriously one with a larger soul whose instruments we are.

By such steps the pragmatist, now rather choosing to be called the radical empiricist, arrives at the belief in a deity, who is by no means the static timeless absolute of the monist, with its foreignness from all things human, but a mighty God above other gods, “having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves."

It is a seductive theory and has at least that quality of "thickness" which Mr. James, with his genius for phrase-making, contrasts with the "thinness" of idealism. It is charming, but then the dog that trails always at the heels of the pragmatist will have his bark: Is it true? This "pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe," we are told, belongs to a "great em

pirical movement." We remember then that Mr. James himself has condemned the empiricists for "smashing the absolute" by means of a conceptualist logic, and we begin to wonder whether he is quite as free as he would have us believe from the rationalistic net. Somehow one cannot be quite at ease in this new pluralistic panpsychic Zion, and, reading M. Luquet's analysis of Bergsonism, I seem to divine where the trouble lies. When we enter upon the study of psychology, says that expositor, we must begin by discarding the logic which we used in the sciences. In this field contradictories no longer exclude each other. Every state of consciousness is at once an existence and a knowledge, the thing known and the knower, a part and the whole, unity and multiplicity. Here identity and change, past and present, are simultaneous attributes of the same subject. And he continues:

Hence we explain at once the existence and the falseness, at least relative, of the two opposed psychological doctrines called phenomenalism and spiritism. The latter sees in the ego an immutable substance which looks on with indifference at the unrolling states of consciousness; the former sees in the ego only a succession, a collection of isolated states of consciousness, of which the first has ceased when the second is produced.

This truth explains, I surmise, something more than the two present modes of psychology.

Is not this irreconcilable dualism of consciousness the source of the two opposing schools of philosophy, which, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus set forth the paradox of absolute rest and absolute motion, unity and multiplicity, identity and change, have been at each other's throats? Logic demands the rejection of a contradictory; and as the temperament of a man leads him to dwell on one or the other phase of his inner experience, so, if he is a metaphysician, he forthwith sets out to build a rational theory of the universe on that phase to the exclusion of the other. What, at bottom, is this Pluralism of Mr. James, but the same ancient presumption of the reason which he has himself so shrewdly denounced. His feeling for flux and change and multiplicity as an undeniable part of our conscious experience is a reality, a great and desirable reality, set over against the monist's exclusive sense of unity; but is it the whole of reality? How can one recall the innumerable witnesses of religion, or hearken to the selfrevelation of the poets, how can one look into the mirror of one's own life, and not perceive that the sense of something immutable and unmoved exists in some way side by side with the sense of everlasting flux, that there is within us

some

central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation?