Essays Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James, Professor in Harvard University (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1908 Excerpt: ... Berkeley's doctrine as preposterous, and taking little note of this particular claim of his, undertook to vindicate against him the natural realism of the human mind. Hume, in essential sympathy with Berkeley's method of thinking, disallowed his claim in regard to the plain man, and gave a new account of the plain man's notion, which notion he admitted however to be unphilosophical. German idealists have in general been content to leave the plain man behind; yet if challenged they too would mostly have said that they had no quarrel with his notion. In English philosophy again, it is perhaps not always remembered that Mill's resolution of matter into "permanent possibilities of sensation" was intended as psychology as well as philosophy; not only as an account of the facts, but as an analysis of our instinctive view of them. Clifford, on one side at least of his theory, has the same intention. Most of these philosophers, then, have not felt that they were estranged from naive realism at all. It has been left to their opponents to feel it. Now it is at least possible that to fix our minds on the question in what character matter naturally appears to us may forward us in solving the problem of what matter is. In partial measure the former question is considered: metaphysicians study the perception of matter. But they do not with an equal scrutiny study its apperception. Of course we cannot do the latter without the former; so that in the following we shall be partly on thickly trodden ground and partly on neighboring ground that is less frequented. Be it remembered that whatever profit may accrue to our metaphysics, the immediate aim here is psychological, the analysis of an instinctive conception. Consider first the account given by long-established realistic...