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pretation, or to invite fresh opposition and possibly risk another schism by tightening the bond. We may be sure that Pius IX. would never consent to the first plan, and there is probably enough of the wisdom of the serpent in his trusted advisers, if not in himself-and he does not lack shrewdness-to preclude the second. There is another objection of a more vulgar and prosaic but very practical kind to the reassembling of the Council in the present state of Rome. Readers of the Letters of Quirinus will not require to be reminded how very efficient a part the Papal police played in the subjugation of the recalcitrant minority. Thus, to take but a few examples which could easily be multiplied, no member of the opposition was allowed to publish a line in Rome, and what was printed on that side elsewhere could only be smuggled into the holy city by some ingenious evasion of the established regulations. The Giornale di Roma plainly reminded the Bishops that they were liable to arrest, and could not leave Rome without permission. The whole impression of a work ascribed to Ketteler was seized at the Post Office; some prelates were threatened with imprisonment; and an Armenian Archbishop with his secretary and interpreter was actually incarcerated for a time by the Inquisition, in spite of his appeal to the protection of the Turkish ambassador. It is obvious that with the loss of the temporal power this means of controlling the action of the Council is at an end. The instrument which in Papal Rome required a good deal of manipulation might prove more unruly in the freer atmosphere of the capital of Italy.

the Synod has been adjourned and not dissolved is no doubt a remarkable fact; and to prelates who, like the late Cardinal Vitelleschi, regard the decrees of 1870 with alarm and disgust and look anxiously for future explanations of what cannot decorously be repealed, it will naturally seem to offer a providential opportunity of escape from a serious dilemma, whenever the time for taking advantage of it shall arrive. But they will be the first to acknowledge that no such opportunity can occur during the life of the present pontiff. All speculation about the person or policy of the successor of Pius IX. is not only premature but pure guess-work. There are no adequate data to form the basis of even plausible conjecture, and it is worse than idle to waste time in twisting ropes of sand. What may pretty safely be assumed is that a Council which has been dragooned into committing moral felo de se, by abdicating in favor of the Papacy what were supposed to be the exclusive and inalienable prerogatives of such bodies, will not be galvanized into a second and shadowy existence for no intelligible object and at risk of serious inconvenience, by the very authorities who extorted from it this confession of its own inherent futility. Indeed a later telegram only two days ago reports that, in consequence of the declaration of the Sacred College that it is not opportune for the Council to resume its labors, "the Pope has distributed for study the questions left undecided, with a view to determine if by his proper authority he can solve them.' But that point has been already "determined" by the Vatican decree, and Pius IX. is the last person living likely to forget it. Whatever questions may have been left unsolved, it is obvious that the "proper" and the only proper authority for solving them rests with the infallible pontiff.—Saturday Review.

Other reasons might be added, but enough has perhaps been said to show the extreme improbability of the rumor that the Pope has in contemplation the reopening of the Vatican Council. That

HOW WE COME BY OUR KNOWLEDGE.

BY PROF. G. CROOM ROBERTSON.

THE old question of the relation of Knowledge and Experience is generally thought to have passed into a new phase in recent years. Nobody nowadays seriously maintains the sensationalist posiNEW SERIES.-VOL. XXV., No. 5

tion of the eighteenth century. Even those who attach most value to Locke's way of thinking are ready to scout the notion of tabula rasa, and to allow that the old supporters of innate ideas, native

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intuitions or whatever else they were called, had a real insight into the nature of knowledge as manifested by every human mind. There is an element or factor in the individual's knowledge that is there before or, at all events, apart from that which happens to come to him by way of ordinary experience.

think, no way of conceiving how human beings come by the knowledge that we seem all to have in normal circumstances; as, accordingly, when the inheritance is plainly abnormal,-for instance, in idiots-the mode or amount of knowledge is clearly different from what it is in other men. At the same time it does This other element or factor is now not seem possible upon this line to get most commonly represented as an inher- beyond a general conviction that the itance that each human being brings into way of men's knowing is prescribed for life with him. The inheritance can per- them by ancestral conditions. Or, if the haps be most definitely conceived in attempt is made to determine the details terms of the nervous organisation which, of our intellectual heritage, it seems imit is practically certain, is involved in all possible to stop and not fall into the nomental goings-on, but it must admit of tion that original endowment is everyexpression in terms of consciousness thing, and a man's life-experience little also. We are to understand that a hu- or nothing, towards the sum of his knowman child being what he is-the off- ledge. The latest phase of modern phispring of particular parents, of a partic- losophic thought, then, becomes hardly ular nation, of a particular race, born at distinguishable from the high speculative a particular stage in the race's develop- doctrine of Leibniz-that in knowledge ment-does know and feel and will there is, properly speaking, no acquisition otherwise than he would if all or any of at all, but every mind (or monad) simply these circumstances were different. Nor developes into activity all the potency does this apply only to the general laws within it, not really affected by or affectand limits of his knowing, feeling and ing any other mind or thing. The nowilling it must apply also to his simplest tion is of course suicidal; for how can conscious experience of any sort. An An there be, on the whole, a progressive artist's sense of color or sound will be evolution of all, except there be action something different from a costermon- and reaction among individuals, as the ger's, and not merely because of a differ- condition of working up to higher and ence in the experience they have had higher stages of being? Nevertheless, and stored up. Their sensible experi- it is no exaggeration to say that the tenence will have been of intrinsically dif- dency of recent evolutionism in psycholferent quality from the beginning; and ogy is to reduce to a minimum, or even the principle of heredity must contain crush out, the influence of incidental the explanation of such differences, if it experience as a factor in the developdoes explain the general uniformities to ment of the individual's knowledge. which intelligence appears to be subject What can happen to the individual in in all minds alike. his little life seems to be so mere a trifle by the side of all that has before happened for him through the ages!

Confining attention, however, on the present occasion, with philosophers in general, to the uniformities of knowledge -such, for example, as the reference we all make of sensible qualities to a substance or underlying thing in which they inhere, or the conviction we have that every event has been caused-I cannot for my own part doubt that human beings are determined by inherited constitutions (mental or nervous, or mental and nervous) to interpret and order their incidental experience in a certain common fashion. In the absence of a definite mental constitution, which must be inherited because the corresponding nervous organism is inherited, there is, I

Once recognise a more or less constant à priori element in knowledge as coming by way of inheritance, and what is then wanted for the explanation in detail of the uniformity that appears in the knowledge of different men is an adequate conception of the actual life-experience of individuals. It is truly surprising how meagre and artificial-artificial in the sense of coming short of the fulness of natural fact-the conception current among philosophers has been. Sensationalists in particular were concerned to take no narrow view of the case. In point of fact, they so read

for the guidance of muscular acts; but they would not be the rational educable creatures that even mudlarks, living the social life, are at the age of three.

'The social life '-in these words is indicated the grand condition of intellectual development which the older psychologists are far more to be condemned for overlooking, than they can be blamed for not anticipating the notion of heredity that has grown out of the biology of the present century. In the last century, other sciences had not advanced far enough to make scientific biology possible; and psychology, in as far as it depends on true biological notions, could not but suffer accordingly. But in the. last century, as at other times, it was sufficiently plain that children, in being born into the world, are born into society, and are under overpowering social influences, before (if one may so speak) they have any chance of being their proper selves. To say nothing of the bodily tendance they receive-though this is really a fundamental condition of their ever having an intellectual development

their famous formula about Sense and Intellect as to throw away a cause that in itself was far from weak. The notion was that children coming into the world had everything to do and find out for themselves. The world was there, and the little creatures, all naked without and their minds like a sheet of white paper within, were thrown down before it, at once to struggle for bodily exist ence and to take on mentally what impress they might from surrounding things. If they managed to survive, as somehow they generally did, they were found after a time in possession of a certain amount of knowledge about the world and themselves; and (most remarkable!) this knowledge, though it might be limited, as of course children's knowledge must be expected to be, was yet so definite in each and uniform in all, that it had only to be expressed by a system of signs (which, after long doing without them, men had somehow agreed to use), and the children were turned into sociable creatures with whom it was possible to hold rational converse. Now it is not to be denied that, in working out their theory, the Sensationalists were the first to determine with some exactness the elements of sensible experience involved in many of our most important cognitions, and also those intellectual laws of association under which these elements are ordered or fused (as the case may be). But it cannot be allowed that they gave anything like an adequate analysis of knowledge generally, or, in particular, rendered a likely account of the way in which the swarm of jostling sensations and other strictly subjective experiences settled down and were transformed into the coherent and orderly mental representation of boys and girls beginning to communicate with one another and with their parents and friends. The least consideration, indeed, might have revealed the error of the point of view. Children are as little left to work out their knowledge for themselves as to nurture their bodies. If they were left to struggle alone against the world for bodily life, they would assuredly perish. If they were left to find out everything in the way of knowledge by themselves, they might (always supposing their bodily life sustained for the first year or two) come to combine sensible impressions

let it be considered how determinate their experience is rendered by circumstances or the will of those about them. For long months-such are the conditions of human life - children are confined to the experience of but a few objects; and even these they become familiar with more through the direct action of others, carrying them about, than through initiative of their own. Apparently a restriction, this first effect of the social relation is, in truth, a potent factor in the development of knowledge. It supplies the best conditions for that association and fusion of impressions on the different senses which in some form must unquestionably be got through at the earliest stage of intellectual growth. Being destined to enter into a fabric of general knowledge, the discrete sense-impressions received by children must be elaborated in quite another way, and to quite another extent, than if, as in animals, they were merely to be used for the guidance of immediate action. It is no small thing for children, that the range of their early experience is so narrowed as to give them a chance of becoming perfectly familiar with all the details of it.

It is not, however, till a stage after the

earliest though still a very early onethat the effect of social conditions upon the intellectual development of children becomes most marked. Before they are themselves able to speak and become full social factors, they begin to have the benefit of the spoken language that holds a society together. What can better help a child to identify as one object a complex of impressions appearing amid evervarying circumstances, than hearing it always indicated by the sound of the same name? The first business of children, before they rise to comprehensive knowledge, is to have a definite apprehension of objects in space; and to this they are helped not least effectively by the fact that there is a current medium of social communication about things, the advantage of which is, strictly speaking, forced upon them. Constraint there is, when one thinks how people are for ever obtruding names upon the child's ear, both when they have occasion to speak among themselves, and when they take occasion (as some are always found ready) to lavish attention upon babies. And though it may well be doubted whether children always relish the outpourings of social tenderness to which they must submit, there can be no question as to the intellectual advantages that, even through suffering, they receive. Their chief end, on emerging from infancy with their little stock of knowledge, is to understand and be understood by others; and, meanwhile, they have entered, without effort of their own, into possession of a store of names adapted to all the exigencies of intelligent intercourse.

But this is only the first, and not the chief, intellectual gain that accrues to children from the existence of readymade language. Whatever the occasion may have been that first called into play the expressive faculty between man and man, it is beyond dispute that language is required mainly for purposes of general knowledge. The language spoken by a race of men is an accurate index to the grade of intellectual comprehension attained by that race, and the intellectual progress of the race may be traced in the gradual development of its speech. See, then, what comes to the opening mind of the child with the use of his mother-tongue. The words and senten

ces that fall upon his ear and are soon upon his lips, express not so much his subjective experience, as the common experience of his kind which becomes, as it were, an objective rule or measure to which his shall conform. Why, for example, does a child have no difficulty about the relation of substance and qualities that has given philosophers so much trouble? and why do all children understand or seem to understand it alike, whatever their experience may have been? Why? but because the language put into their mouths, and which they must e'en use, settles the point for them, one and all; involving, as it does, a metaphysical theory which, whether in itself unexceptionable or not, has been found serviceable through all the generations of men. tions of men. Or, to take that other great uniformity or law of knowledge which has become so prominent in philosophical speculation since the time of Leibnitz and Kant,-why do we all assume that every event must have a cause? Let it be granted-though this is, perhaps, doubtful-that all men do and must always make the assumption. The philosophical difficulty is how any human mind can so far transcend its own limited experience as to make an assertion about all possible experience in all times and places, and it is well known how it has been met by the opposite schools those at one extreme declaring in various phrase that it is the mind's nature, before all experience, so to interpret any experience; and those at the other extreme making what shift they can to show how the conviction springs up with, or is developed from, the individual's experience. For my part, I can agree with neither. I cannot go with those who declare that no amount of experience, in any shape or form, can be the ground of such conviction as we do, in fact, have of universal causation. But I can as little go with the other class of thinkers, when they suppose that a conviction like that is left to the individual to acquire by private experience or effort. Long before children have the least occasion to try what they can do in the way of generalisation upon their incidental experiences, it is sounded in their ears that things in the world are thus and thus; and that child were indeed a prodigy of pure reason who

should pause and gravely determine not to take on the yoke of social opinion till he could prove it, of himself, well founded. He does he must-accept what he is told; and in general he is only too glad to find his own experience in accordance with it. And if to this it be objected that children cannot understand the generalities they hear unless by reason of native principles in their intellectual consciousness, the answer is, that they do not by any means begin by understanding them. This comes only very gradually to the best of us, and to some comes hardly at all.

ledge as to be able fully to make-to conceive how insignificant such a creature's knowledge would be.

On the whole, then, the description I would give of our early progress in knowledge and the early progress is decisive of our whole manner of knowing till the end-is something like this: that we use our incidental, by which I mean our natural subjective, experience mainly to decipher and verify the ready-made scheme of knowledge that is given to us en bloc with the words of our mothertongue. This scheme is the result of the thinking, less or more conscious, and mainly practical, of all the generations of articulately speaking men, passed on with gradual increase from each to each. For the rest, I should be the last to deny, having before asserted, that the part we are intellectually called to play is predetermined for each of us by a native constitution of mind, which, on one side, assimilates us in way of thinking to all other men of our race and time, if also, on another side, it marks us off from all other men and contains the deepest ground of what is for each of us our proper self. But I desire to express the opinion that there is no explanation of any mind's knowledge from this position, even when account is taken also of all the modes of natural experience noted by psychologists, unless there is added, over and above, the stupendous influence of social conditions, exercised mainly through language. How far would his native mental constitution (whether regarded as an inheritance or not) with all his senses and all his natural activities carry a child in the direction of knowledge, supposing him to grow up face to face with nature in utter loneliness? I believe it would need an effort which none of us can so far abstract from the conditions of our know

It should be understood that the question raised in this short paper (written originally as a mere thesis for discussion) is a strictly psychological one. The psychologist's concern in knowledge is to show how it is generated in the mind. For this, he must carefully analyse knowledge, as it appears in himself and others, so as to have insight into the matter he would explain, and his work is done when he then shows how knowledge arises in each of us naturally. It is another and very different question-what knowledge is to be held as objectively true or valid for all minds alike. When is my knowledge such that I may claim your assent to it? To answer this question, or, in other words, to determine the conditions of scientific knowledge, belongs to philosophy in general or logic in particular, and remains an imperative task after any amount of psychological inquiry. But the psychological question, within its own limits, is a very real one, and it is indeed the natural, if not the necessary, preliminary to the other.

Even as psychological, however, the question is here in various ways narrowed. It is a question referring only to knowledge, to the exclusion of feeling and willing, and to knowledge only as it appears (naturally) with a character of uniformity among different men. The social influence insisted upon does nothing to explain the intellectual idiosyncrasies of each individual: these, if explicable at all in their variety, musí be traced to special inheritance (as suggested above) or incidental experience. On the other hand, it is plain that the influence extends beyond intelligence proper to the other great mental phases of feeling and willing. The tendency of men to feel and act alike is indeed even more apparent than to think alike, and assuredly has its explanation not least from the social tie which, from the first, is as a spell upon the individual; though here again, it may be remarked, there is an ulterior question-whether the feelings and acts naturally excited in men, from association with their fellows, are justifiable in the sight of philosophic reason. The effect of the social relation on the

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