The Principles of Psychology

Abstract

II.

TO the healthy scientific mind the fine-spun arguments and the wonderful logical achievements of metaphysicians are at once so bewildering and so distasteful that men of science can scarcely be got to listen even to those who would undertake to show that the arguments are but cobwebs, the logic but jingle, and the seeming profundity little more than a jumble of incongruous ideas shrouded in a mist of words. Hence, it is hardly known that one of the two living thinkers who in philosophy stand head and shoulders above all their contemporaries, has put forth all his strength in a grand effort to demonstrate the baselessness, the inconsistency, the unreality of all anti-realistic metaphysics. The disciples of Berkeley and Hume, skilful in argument, and generally armed with a psychology superior to that of their antagonists, have hitherto gained easy victories over the hosts of theologians, who, confident in the truth of their cause, have stood forward, as one might say, unarmed and with naked breast, to fight for the reality of mind and matter. So easily and so invariably have the sceptics and idealists remained masters of the field against all-comers that they have agreed among themselves to regard realism as an exploded superstition “ altogether unworthy of the name of philosophy” (Prof. Bain). But the end is not yet. They will have once more to look to their weapons. In Mr. Spencer realism has for the first time found a champion that can do it justice. Nothing behind the acutest idealist in subtlety and force of intellect, he brings to bear on the great metaphysical question of the reality of an external world a psychology as much superior to that of the idealists, as their mental science was superior to that of the divines they so easily vanquished.

The Principles of Psychology.

By Herbert Spencer. Second edition. (Williams and Norgate.)