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 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 
 
 By THE EDITOR OP 
 
 ''THE CONTEMPOEAEY EEVIEW." 
 
 {Reprinted from "The Contemporary Review'' for April, 1881.)
 
 LONDON : PRINTEP BY 
 
 BALLANTTNE, HANSON AND CO., CHAND03 STREET 
 
 AND PAUL'S WORK, EDINBUKGH
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 
 
 An Inquiry into the Procesg of Muman Experience : 
 attempting to set forth its Lower Laws ; with some Hints 
 as to the IHi/lier Phenomena of Consciousness. By 
 William Ctples. London. 1880. 
 
 THE book naincd above lias now been before the public for more 
 than a year. Having been myself interested by a first perusal of it, 
 I have Avatched with some curiosity the reception it has met with from 
 the critics. Tlie precise degree of praise or blame given to his per- 
 formance, the author may be left to measure for himself, with what 
 philosophy the writing of a big treatise on that topic may have bestowed. 
 But in what quarters appreciation has been shown, and in what others 
 non- appreciation, of what purports to be, and I believe is, an original 
 book in the higher field of thinking, is a matter of more public signifi- 
 cance. A consideration of it will tell us something of the present 
 intellectual activity of literary and philosophical criticism among us. 
 I ^think I may, with interest to the reader, combine that aim, more or 
 less, with the main purpose of the present paper, namely, to give 
 some account of Mr. Cyples's volume itself. 
 
 Let me at once say that it is very curious, and must be significant of 
 the condition of criticism, that the writers in several religious organs 
 have quite failed to see that the book is a quarry from Avliich may be 
 got a variety of reasonings, each one of which is as a weapon in the 
 hands of those who hold anti-materialistic views. These arguments, it 
 is true, are not used by ]\[r. Cyplcs to point any doctrinal conclusions ; 
 but none the less there they are in his pages ; and the very fact that 
 he has come upon them, as it seems, in a mere way of exhaustively 
 inquiring into psycho- physiological matters, irrespective of dogmatic 
 bias, might have been urged by the champions of spiritual beliefs 
 as a recommendation, rather than otherwise. The critics on that 
 side appear, so far as I can judge, to have been confused, and, in 
 some cases, perhaps, one should say alarmed, by the large extent to 
 which Mr. Cyplcs uses the language of the physicists. But they ought
 
 4 THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. 
 
 to be able to detect new psychical and physiological affirmations favour- 
 able to them (for the book purports, as I will show directly, to make 
 a number of these), even if they are presented in the terms which 
 the physicists employ. But a further remark requires to be made 
 in order to state fully the explanation which is suggested to my 
 own mind of the attitude which most of the writers in the theo- 
 logical reviews have taken up as to the volume. It is easy to 
 sec that all who hold orthodox views will be certain to be honestly 
 dissatisfied by what will appear to them the altogether too large 
 admissions it makes of the scientists' explanations of the physio- 
 logical process of human consciousness, and of the reign of phy- 
 sical law in the world. That is a fair controversy, which the author 
 must wage for himself. 1 am not, in this paper, going to inter- 
 meddle in it. I limit myself to repeating, that, in my own opinion, 
 something which is the opposite of acuteness has been shown by the 
 critics on that side in not recognizing a series of new reasonings 
 available for their ends, because they were not couched in doctrinal 
 shibboleths. The writer of one of the reviews of the book which I 
 happened to read in a denominational publication made it a first objection 
 to it, that, in an early chapter of this psycho-physiological Inquiry, the 
 author has stated that a nervous system acting specifically, with adequate 
 blood supply, &c., is needed for human consciousness. This is rather de- 
 pressing when looked at as marking the mental level at which in those 
 quarters philosophical criticism stands at this moment. It is tantamount 
 to accusing Mr. Cyples of having wilfully and heretically invented such 
 things as swoon, sleej?, and death. I think he may fairly plead that 
 he did not do so, but that he has only reasoned about them long after 
 they were in existence. 
 
 I have turned to this aspect of the book first of all, but I scarcely 
 expect the writer of " The Process of Human Experience^' will feel 
 that he owes anybody many thanks who does so. I infer that he 
 would like what he would call the scientific element in the work to 
 be first put forward. His treatment of the complicated problem of 
 " Attention ;" his tracking out of the working rules of the Association 
 of Ideas ; his more detailed appreciation of the use in intellectual opera- 
 tion of the Language-faculty ; these would be, I suppose, the parts of 
 the book he would wish to be earliest looked at. He has a passion for 
 framing formulas, generalizing laws, and coining fresh and very 
 imattractivc words and phrases ; doing this Avith what seems to me a very 
 droll obtuseness to the fact that the ordinary reader wishes to have, not as 
 much as possible, but as little as may be of this sort of thing. Even 
 the most favourable critics — at least, all whose notices I have perused 
 — agree that the book is very hard reading. Mr. Cyples has made his 
 own defence on this score, in a paper published in Mind, entitled, 
 '' Four New Philosophical Terms;" but I am sure that he has under- 
 estimated the obstacl'^s in the way of getting a new nomenclature accepted.
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 5 
 
 In my own opinion^ too, there are special diflficultics just now hinder- 
 ing the success of such an experiment, owing to the thinkers in the realm 
 of English philosophy wlio for more than a generation jjast have had the 
 public ear, studiously avoiding technology in their works. Certain critics 
 of Mr. Mill state that they find his language loose when it is strictly 
 scrutinized, — Professor Stanley Jcvons has said so in these pages, — but 
 it is undeniable that it has an appearance of lucidness. Mr. Darwin 
 uses a few catch-phrases, but they are free from what is commonly meant 
 by technicality, and, in fact, the ease of his style has greatly helped the 
 spreading of his views. Professors Huxley and Tyndall have each a 
 rare art of making plain what they urge ; and Professor Bain is only a 
 little less a master of simple statement. Mr. Matthew Arnold, of late 
 years, has seemed to accumulate a phraseology of his own ; but it con- 
 sists not of new terms but of parts of sentences, familiar enough 
 when the words are taken separately, and only made special by allotment 
 to a particular meaning, and by a strenuous iteration afterwards in their 
 use. In Mr. Herbert Spencer's works, a nomenclature of some intricacy 
 is to be met with, but he, again, has shown much skill in habituating 
 his readers to it. If Mr. Cyples says, as I gather he .does, that in 
 arriving at what he believes to be new conclusions, he found that the 
 mental process developed these new terms of expression, and that he 
 has had to work with them, it has to be allowed that he knows best 
 what happened in his own case. All that he has now to do is to get 
 the public to use his terminology, and to speak of " the neurotic dia- 
 gram,^ ^ '^ egoistic- actualisation,'" "the Executive System,^^ &e. I myself 
 think that he would have made his task not a little easier if he had 
 just reversed the order of the contents of his volume, and begun with 
 what is now the ending of it, — that is, the portion in which the use of 
 the technology is the least frequent. Anyhow that is the plan "which I, 
 who wish to do what I think a notable book a service, find my judgment 
 suggests. 
 
 In Chapter XXI., that is, in the last chapter, if we except the short 
 conclusion of the work, the author deals with " Art : its Functions.''^ 
 I should like to let him speak at once for himself, by quoting the 
 opening sections defining Art generally, or else by giving a novel 
 hypothesis he puts forward on the once much-debated question of the 
 origin of the Sublime. But I will go on to a shorter passage, 
 where an explanation of the puzzle as to what may be called the 
 emotional excess which has always been noted in the case of Music 
 is thus hinted at : — 
 
 "The emotional charm of Music has struck men as a great mystery. There 
 appears to be no doubt that it gets all the marvellous effects it has beyond the 
 mere pleasing of the ear, from its random but multitudinous summonses ol' the 
 efferent-activity, which at its vague challenges stirs unceasingly in faintly 
 tumultuous irrelevancy. In this way, INIusic arouses aimlessly, but splendidly, 
 the sheer, as yet unfulfilled, potentiality within us."
 
 G THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. 
 
 Throughout this chapter, great use is made of the function ascribed 
 to " the cflcrent-activity." For instance, our author, in considering 
 the question which has bulked rather largely in critical literature of 
 late, what bearings morality has on Art, thus speaks: — 
 
 " Before Art can clRa-ninate, it must become petty ; before it can make us 
 morbid, it must descend to gross rcabsm. So long as Art keeps the sense- 
 impressions on which it relies large and noble, and docs not carry them into 
 such grouped detail as to give precise cues to the efferent impulses, the question 
 of morality has no relevancy to it. Its true purpose is then seen clear and full 
 — that of habituating us to larger living by fragmentary exercises of the 
 actualising-process on a scale more magnificent than the previous practical 
 experiences. But, for this, the inflations of the personality must be general : 
 the Art inspirations must be left broad and anonymous, to be allotted definitely 
 hereafter in some way of conduct. The efferent-activity must preserve its own 
 real reminiscences intact ; Art, or what passes for it, cannot touch those without 
 killing them. Nor can Art be saved from its own corruption but by timely 
 periodical infusions of the Sublime." 
 
 Further on, there is a passage as to the province of the Comic in 
 
 Art, which may he quoted : — 
 
 " Art always stirs the ultimate sense of the human fortune, by either pretending 
 that the world is lighter, gayer, easier than it had before seemed, or by arousingly 
 challenging us ourselves to be nobler, larger, gigantic, in facing its difficulties. 
 In both these cases, though in different ways, what is vitally concerned is the 
 
 efferent-activity The Comic seems to borrow in its own queer manner 
 
 from both the realms just mentioned. It is true, it must not present the world 
 as really gay and light, having the appearance of being wholly trivial — that -would 
 give no comicality at all. On the other hand, its rough catastrophes must not 
 fully challenge right sympathetic activity in us. This is saying, that while 
 comicality apes seriousness, it must really be without permanent ill consequences. 
 In fact, both the above Art-functions are in Humour essayed together, but are 
 transposed in the fulfilling, and so are alike more-or-less nullified, though not 
 before much gratification has been had. In Humour we havea burlesque appeal 
 to the sense of human fortune, making of it nothing but fun ; doing this by 
 means of sheer blunder, stupidity, and miscarriage. The reason of the 
 perennial popular charm of Humour is at once seen when this is remem- 
 bered — it lies in comicality utterly resting the ordinary efferent-activity and 
 relaxing the Btrain of every sensory nervous co-ordination. Comedy, taken in 
 the broad meaning, asks for its full success even moderate ugliness in the persons 
 most concerned in it, with awk^vardness of gesture, inexact speech, irrelevancy 
 of doing. But this is exactly the same as the eye, ear, &c., only half-attending; 
 the first rude infantile groupings of the sense-activities again become sufficient, 
 easing all the laboured additions of the later acquired nervous co-ordinations ; 
 and further, in spite of a great bustle and pother, — for this there must be the 
 show of, — there is nothing to be done but to sit still and behold. The easily- 
 afforded energy which is stirred by the first cues of this make-believe, bubbles 
 away in laughter ; the man finding himself perfectly efficient without an effort, 
 for all obligation of duty is given up. Is it wonderful that most men like it?" 
 
 Another quotation will describe what is classified by the author as 
 the realm of the lightly amusing. He says : — 
 
 "This realm of the lightly amusing is extensive. At its best it rises into 
 glories of elegance and beauty, but, in the extremes, it descends to tinsel and 
 filigree ; and, for the furthest, lowest, dimmest points of it, mere gimcrack is 
 enough. It would, however, save much well-intentioned but somewhat stupid
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 7 
 
 criticism condemning the unreality of the theatre, protesting against a kind of 
 preposterousness in some parts of our dress, and in the upholstering of certain 
 apartments in our houses, and as being also shown in some of the manners 
 allotted to the more leisurely hours of social intercourse, if it were borne in mind 
 that, beneath the grotesqueness, these things have a real use in the sudden and 
 complete disengagement of our ordinary efforts of attention, new adjustments 
 being in these ways challenged in their place. It is easy to ridicule the circum- 
 stance of the chief room in every house being tricked out in a style which 
 Avould seem to be only befitting if we were sophisticated fairies playing at an 
 ornamental domesticity for a few hours now-and-again of an evening; also, there 
 undeniably is palpable absurdity in opera being performed in a foreign language, 
 and the full dress of both sexes, though in different kinds, has an admitted 
 preposterousness. All that can be said on the other hand is, that universal 
 experience shows this artificiality to be in a manner natural ; since alongside the 
 world of business and of practical life, a long-descended, shining, holiday tradition 
 of an opposite, unserious sj^here, wholly unlike common reality, has had to be 
 kept up by sheer way of balance. Periodically, the artificiality grows ridiculously 
 elaborate ; amusement becomes more laborious than work, — the two almost 
 exchange places. Then, Satire finds its true duty in exposing the failure, and 
 effecting a sobering through the freshness of a return to plain reality ; the laying 
 aside the ponderous triviality being a temporary relief and recreation. But 
 there is an abiding need for positive, unmitigated relaxation. The proper test 
 is, whether the influence of the artificiality is to really lighten the spirits ; if so, 
 this second function of Art is discharged by it. Criticism must wait for depres- 
 sion setting in — the ceasing of a U^ht, natural laughter is Satire's due signal." 
 
 I am tempted to find space for yet another passage, where the writer — 
 still inquiring into the explanation of the feeling of Sublimity — argues 
 that in Terror there is always a perception of more than Novelty. 
 He observes : — 
 
 " A mountain with no scars upon its sides telling of the rage of storms ; no dizzy- 
 ing sheer descents of plunging precipice ; no gulfs ; no inaccessible peaks ; but a 
 mountain showing all gradual, smooth, shining, — this would not be sublime in 
 the second of the two senses above specified, no matter what its mere size. To 
 give it sublimity of that kind you must mark it with violence. It needs hcre- 
 and-there singeing and seaming with traces of the flaming thunderbolt ; fringes 
 of black struggling pines must show dwarfed and painful on the narrow edges of its 
 unsheltering cliffs ; you must hang somewhere amidst its higher snows the fatal 
 avalanche, held only by creaking faulty chains of ice ; the beaked-aad-taloncd 
 eagle has to sweep and soar about its clifFs ; it must have mysterious ravines, 
 usually black with silence, in Avliich you know lie bleaching the bones of victims 
 of the precipices and the eagles — those dark abysses changing at times into the 
 sudden crash and roar of unexplained tumult. The secret of the fearful addition 
 to sublimity thus got is this, — that each circumstance in that list covers a nervous 
 disintegration." 
 
 There is a good deal more in the chapter that must be left unnoticed 
 here — the author's views of the function of Tragedy, and of a certain art- 
 cfibct which he looks for from the progress of physical science. Literature 
 he styles the final department of Art, doing so on the ground that, by 
 employing words as its medium, " it alone can use multiformity of 
 associations, being able in a single phrase to mix the cues for starting 
 several senses." But it may take some readers by surprise to fiiul what 
 is the writer's last word on this suljject of Art : it is a long way from 
 being wholly eulogistic. He says : —
 
 8 THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. 
 
 " Though Art, using the tonn with the above understood limitation, and 
 reserving Literature, is able to give prompt, large actualisations of the Ego at an 
 easy low level of untransformed, or very little transformed sensory-experience, 
 yet, apart from the provisional uses we have spoken of, — viz., filling up otherwise 
 empty spaces in life, restfully alternating attention, &c., — none of these egoistic- 
 actualisations can be estimated as of much intrinsic value. They only occupy 
 the intervals between man's better living. Not only cannot Art give the Y&ry 
 highest complexities of sentiency, substituting the egoistic-actualisations which 
 are rendered by Conduct, but at the times it is having sway, it must preclude 
 these by a preoccupation of the sensory apparatus peripherally. The nervous 
 system has to work the other way — from the interior — in all heightenings of 
 character. As compared with Conduct, Art has small subtlety, little intricacy of 
 inter-appeal to the consciousness, but only masses some simpler forms of 
 sentiency ; it necessarily offers no reality answering to that of personal relation- 
 ships stirred by practical doing. It is owing to this de6ciency that many men 
 seeking after what is termed spirituality are prompted so greatly to dispense with 
 Art ; though, let us hasten to add, if they neglect it wholly they do so at the 
 risk of becoming narrow froiu the sheer lack of the larger habituations of 
 the nervous-apparatus which it gives — these being always needed at some 
 points." 
 
 Very likely, a reader of the above extracts who may happen to have 
 also seen some of the critiques I earlier hinted at, speaking of the 
 volume as written in an involved, confuse^, " Latinised^^ or " Grecised^^ 
 style, will be a little perplexed at not finding the reading more difficult. 
 Two of Mr. Cyples's largely-used technical phrases — i.e., " egoistic- 
 actualisation^' and " efferent-activity'^ — are brought into play ; but for 
 the rest, I myself believe that I see in the passages I have given 
 traces of a practised, ready pen. The fact is, that the critics who 
 have spoken in this way of the style of the author, have confused the 
 deliberate and studied adoption of a set technology, used in perfect, and I 
 may add relentless consistency, with a lack of ability to write simple 
 composition. The above citations are from the plainest portion of the 
 book, but the plainness there is owing merely to the absence of the new 
 technical terms which are used so copiously elsewhere ; and in any part 
 of the book, the skill in composition, allowing for the nature of the topics 
 dealt with, reappears whenever the use of the terminology is suspended. 
 
 I can conceive that the author had a misgiving that some of his 
 reviewers would make the blunder of not knowing a technology when 
 they saw it, and that he nearly wholly dispensed with it in the writing 
 of this chapter, as providing himself with a trap wherein to catch them. 
 If he did so, he has succeeded, for they have fallen right into it. At 
 the same time, convicting your critics of not knowing their own 
 business by first laying in their way a temptation to rail at your 
 volume is not the height of wisdom in an author, and I think 
 Mr. Cyples would have done much better to have made his book easier 
 reading throughout. But he may, if he will, fairly retort that there is 
 certainly some defect of skill in philosophical criticism among us at 
 this moment when it makes no distinction between an author^s purposed 
 and careful use of ? technical vocabulary, and mere ineptitude in
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 9 
 
 composition. If the reader finds any of the latter in the preceding 
 quotations^ he "will do what I have not done. 
 
 But I wish to give some account of the book as a whole. Adequately 
 to notice in a single article a volume dealing connectedly with all the 
 fundamental questions of philosophy, and which in doing so itself 
 occupies over eight hundred pages, is not easy. It is made the harder 
 by the unusually large claims the author puts forward for originality, 
 alike in matters of observed facts and of explanatory hypotheses. I will, 
 first of all, attempt a rough catalogue of the leading instances. 
 
 Mr. Cyples, then, asserts that, by the observing of minute facts, which 
 he specifies, connected with reverie, the management of Attention, &c., 
 he has made out what he styles an initiatory law of human experience 
 to this purport, — that no one of the senses can operate so as to give the 
 consciousness belonging to it without a certain aggregation of its activity, 
 which is only got by the associated working of muscular machinery con- 
 nected with it. Obviously, this is a subtle point, but it is also a very 
 important one, as any one will discover who notes the use the alleged 
 generalization is made of in the author's detailed explanations of the 
 puzzling phenomena of Attention ; of the facts which have recently been 
 made the basis of what is called the doctrine of Relativity ; and of the 
 circumstance that the conceptions of Space and Time enter into all 
 our experience. I cannot myself say that I am satisfied the evidence 
 the author puts forward is ample enough to demonstrate his case ; I 
 think that it should have been worked out with more particularity ; but 
 there is no denying that the alleged law seems, at the least, to throw a 
 good deal of light on the process of Attention. It is only fair to quote 
 a few words from the author's statement. He says : — 
 
 "Each of tlio senses is always being acted upon; the skin never fails to be in 
 contact with something ; there is no door to the passage of the ear ; light can 
 penetrate the eyelid when dropped; and the temperature of the air surrounding 
 us is ever rising and falling." 
 
 "■ Everybody knows that we can have eyes open in broad daylight without 
 seeing ; that the ear may be fully vibrating without our hearing ; and so with 
 all the other senses," 
 
 " In smell, there is movement of the nostril ; in taste there is always a degree 
 of pressure." 
 
 "The allotment of the special sense-organs in the bodily frame — in particular 
 the spreading of the apparatus of touch over nearly the whole external super- 
 ficies, with the partial extension of it internally, in the mouth, &c. — make it 
 impracticable for the muscular machinery (except when operating below the 
 minimum fixed by the Law of ElFcctiveness) to act isolatedly.'' 
 
 '•' Immobility of the motory apparatus connected Avith the different senses, no 
 matter how slight or momentary it may be, arrests experience in respect of the 
 sense. Fix the eye, and if you do it completely, you cease to see ; give over 
 altering pressure, and the sensation of touch stops." 
 
 "In every sensation, there mingles the experience of Time and Space, which 
 all thinkers now agree must involve the action of the muscular sense." 
 
 The writer argues that we manage our Attention, alike in the way of 
 observing any object more closely and in purposed ceasing to attend, by
 
 10 THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. 
 
 an acquired power of volitionally and automatically controlling this coin- 
 cidence in activity between any sense and the muscular machinery having 
 connection with it. In the f/e'^sociation of this conjoint activity through 
 over-use^ the influence of narcotics, &c., he finds the explanation of 
 fatigue, swoon, sleep, &c. 
 
 As forming the second novelty of importance may be named the 
 striking hypothesis on the subjects of Pleasure and Pain, propounded 
 in Chapter III. So far as the problem of the phenomenon of Pain 
 is not wholly shirked by the modern philosophers who found their 
 psychology on physiology, the solution hinted at is that pain is the 
 accompaniment of any abatement of vitality. This is the view of 
 both Professor Bain and Mr. Spencer. But the explanation has not 
 satisfied Mr. Cyples. In a long passage he points out what he terms 
 the " irrationality^' and irrelevancy which pain shows when it occurs. 
 He says that some injuries and some diseases do not cause pain in 
 anything like a degree proportionate to their abatement of vitality ; 
 while, on the other hand, the tortures of corns and toothache are, he 
 affirms, penalties great enough for bad emperors who have abused the 
 purple by all excesses of wrong indulgence. He poiuts also to the fact, 
 that ausesthetics, See, can blot out pain. The hypothesis put forward 
 by himself is to the effect that pain arises whenever a nervous grouping 
 is '^disintegrated'"' by being made to act in a way of partial non-repeti- 
 tion of its former full activity. 
 
 The view is followed out into minute detail ; eight sub-laws being 
 traced as operating in the occurrence of pain. I must confine myself 
 to quoting a single passage : — 
 
 " The experience of fatigue, or tiring, offers a striking example of the law. 
 It is an experiment within everybody's power. Put out the arm, leaving it to 
 sustain its own weight. It will not be long before the not unsatisfactory sensa- 
 tion got from integrating the vigorous muscular co-ordinations decreases ; the 
 ieeling will sliortly turn into one of discomfort ; if the position be preserved it 
 will become painful. Rapidly the experience will be that of torment, and it is 
 possible to make the pain acummulate to agony. What has ha2)pened to cause 
 this alteration of experience ? A progressive disintegration of the nervous 
 co-ordinations, as one bundle of fibres after another becomes disabled in use." 
 
 The working of this alleged law is exemplified by instances given of all 
 kinds, taken from the mental and moral as well as the sensory regions 
 of our experience. That the reviewers of the book in publications 
 whose main business is the defence of spiritual beliefs have not seen 
 the favourable significance of this new speculation for their side, is one 
 of the things which I have before said is to me surprising. Mr. 
 Cyples, with the reticence in that direction which is a characteristic of 
 his volume, stops short of urging the theory to its extreme point ; but 
 there is no question that if this hypothesis can be established, it cuts 
 ]'ight into the heart of Materialism, striking at the very key of its chief 
 position. I will cite just two or three sentences scattered in this and
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 11 
 
 other chapters^ and which, I venture to think, ought to have been noted 
 keenly by the critics : — 
 
 " Pain, as a first rough definition, may be said to be a protest whicli conscious- 
 ness malves against its own dwindling." 
 
 " In pain, the consciousness is somehow in excess of the lessened physical 
 
 activity then in use Non-impression affects us, and becomes a real event 
 
 in our experience." 
 
 " The egoistic experience, in cases of pain, is not merely made feeble, or faint, 
 or narrow ; it is vividly ill, intensely self-unsatisfactory." 
 
 " How comes pain to be, if Mind is only constituted in proportionate quantifi- 
 cation by the neurotic-diagram then existing ?" 
 
 It scarcely needs to be indicated to the reflective reader that all this 
 reasoning points straight to the substantiality of the Ego, and its more 
 or less independence (after it is actualized by and in sensation) of 
 physical conditions; — these being the very cardinal points which the 
 anti-materialists have to prove. Mr. Cyples^s hypothesis of Pain, in a 
 word, affects all the controversial reasoning ou these subjects. 
 
 He has a related theory of Pleasure which, in the case of " sensory- 
 experience,^^ he works out into what he proposes as a strict Law of the 
 Beautiful. In the case of all the specific kinds of sensations, whether 
 in colours, odours, taste, touch, &c., he affirms that the secret of their 
 pleasurableness consists in their offering " accumulation of conscious- 
 ness by multiplying identical impression. ^^ 
 
 Not attempting to observe any strict order in cataloguing points 
 which seem to me to be new, I may go at once to a novel view which 
 occurs in the chapter on " The Will." After conceding all the facts that 
 the most rigid Determinists posit, the author leaves their final conclusion 
 quite in the air by a series of subtle hypothetical suggestions, based 
 on what seems to be a minuter observing of the physiological process 
 of Conduct than has hitherto been made. I can only hint at his 
 method. He thus sums up the objections which the scientists urge 
 against Will : — 
 
 " It is mathematically demonstrable that any arrest, alteration, or extra 
 occurrence of a physical process necessarily implies increase of Energy, and 
 
 ultimately of mass of IMatter in the Avorld Any conceivable alteration in 
 
 the prior order of atoms, centres of force, or elemental activities, reckoned in 
 any terms of Motion, must, in fact, have the effect of increasing the sum total." 
 
 But, in pursuing his exhaustive statement of the case, the writer points out 
 that the mathematical calculus is not as yet perfect enough to deal par- 
 ticularly with all actual quantities. He says that if the increments of 
 energy needed to^make valid the persuasion we have of physical sequence 
 being altered in our activity in Conduct, be below a certain limit of size 
 and frequency, the present calculus cannot pronounce that the increments 
 are not " masked" in the ordinary mundane dynamics. Next he makes 
 a curious inquiry into the size and the frequency of the increments of 
 energy which might subserve the needs of a Conduct that should be 
 definable as moral in the old meaning of the word. In the course of 
 the inquiry he affirms that in the case of the lower order of volitions, —
 
 12 THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. 
 
 those connecting with the passions, — " ideatory- cerebration^' ceases in the 
 same quantitative proportion as muscular exertion takes place ; while 
 he asserts that where the higher matters of Conduct are concerned — 
 in every instance of which restraint of automatic impulse is seen — 
 tlic above rule is precisely reversed, there being increase of idea- 
 tion and abatement of habitual muscular activity. For this, he 
 states, addition of cerebral structure is needed, but — and here is the 
 significant point — the increment of energy required for it may be in- 
 finitesimal. But whence comes the addition of energy, and what 
 determines its granting ? Here our autlior brings in an alleged 
 " duplicity of faculty" in the Ego, in proof of which he quotes the 
 facts on Avhich the modern doctrine of Relativity rests ; and to this 
 faculty, he says, if Conduct is not wholly illusory, must be ascribed a 
 potentiality for which the best available name is " aspiration" — the 
 opportunity for its exercise or non-exercise arising when previously- 
 acquired cerebral structure is in full use, which it always is when 
 Conscience is acting. As matter of fact, he points out that all the men 
 in whom experience rises highest, affirm that if " aspiration" be exercised, 
 a law or a Force comes into play by which a positive increase of 
 energy is given from and by a Creative Source. 
 
 But, surprising to say, a writer of one of the critiques I have seen 
 of this book, in a religious publication, thinks that the above reasoning 
 is materialistic. On the other hand, Mr. James Sully, in his a^jprecia- 
 tive review of the volume in 3Iind, spoke of it, I remember, as the 
 author^s '^ new mysticism." If these views be "mysticism," it is stated 
 ill a severely scientific form ; and it would seem that if "physicists," with 
 the mental habitudes given by their studies, are ever to reach Faith, it 
 must be along some such lines. 
 
 I liad marked a number of other topics as to which the writer claims 
 to have worked out original scientific conclusions. He explains that 
 the fundamental process of the Intellect consists in our making our own 
 " efferent-activities" represent, and practically measure, the larger opera- 
 tions of the physical world ; he seems, in considering the difficult ques- 
 tion of Attention, to establish as a fact that the " unit of impression" 
 and " the unit of consciousness " are not the same ; in his detailed 
 inquiry into the Laws of the Succession of Ideas, he formulates no 
 fewer than fifteen generalizations, as explaining Avhat he terms the per- 
 mutation of thought. I may just mention with respect to this last- 
 named inquiry, that, in reading it, I was reminded that the late Mr. 
 G. H. Lewes, in the last volume of his " Problems of Life and Mind," 
 states that, as far back as 1868, IMr. Cyples communicated to him a 
 newly-framed law upon the Association of Ideas. I note that the law 
 as there quoted by Mr. Lewes is modified in the present book, — see 
 p. 182. Chapter IV. is devoted to explaining a theory of the author 
 as to the mechanism of Memory. In it, he asserts that for remi-
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 13 
 
 niscence cerebral fibres must " repeat the activity they underwent in the 
 original act of experience." He quotes, in support of this, the curious 
 facts witnessed in persons suffering from aphasia. It is here that he 
 puts forward the technical term which has so staggered some of his 
 critics, — " The Neurotic Piagram -j" for he not only assumes that the 
 cerebral fibres have, from moment to moment of our consciousness, to 
 be acting in a specific grouping or configuration, but he intimates that, 
 in reminiscent consciousness, as distinguished from consciousness which 
 is being sustained by peripheral impression, a '^ duplicated set of fibres" 
 and an arrangement of '^ central molecules" arc brought into play. If 
 Mr. Cyples has been inside his own brain, or anybody else's, when it 
 was in full activity, and has seen all this going forward, well and good. 
 But, in reading this chapter, and also other portions of the work, I 
 was again and again reminded of Mr. Lewes^s remark, that there is a 
 strong tendency in some modern thinkers to assume a much more 
 detailed knowledge of cerebral operations than it is possible for them 
 or for anybody, really to possess in the present state of physiological 
 science. It is true that Mr. Cyples may say that in a case where 
 experiment is so greatly barred as it is in the case of the brain, hypo- 
 thesis is the only tool left for an inquirer to work with. But the fact 
 of your grounds being perforce conjectural, is scarcely a justification 
 for hurrying to positive conclusions. 
 
 A great part of the author^s big volume yet remains unnoticed. So 
 far, not much more than its psychology has been dealt with. It would re- 
 quire another paper to give a detailed account of its philosophical doctrine. 
 The author is a Realist in so far that he recognizes a physical system 
 which exists independently of our consciousness, and gives, indeed, the 
 occasions for the consciousness ; but he says that this physical world is 
 only " intellectually inferred" by us, not sensorially cognized. In his 
 peculiar terminology, all that we know of it is that it is an " Executive 
 System," extending beyond ourselves, in connection with some of whose 
 events, and only with some of them, sensations, &c., happen to us. 
 But all our consciousness, he resolutely argues, is, whenever it arises, 
 so much addition to the sum-total of Being otherwise existing ; neither 
 the beginnings nor the ceasings of consciousness having any efl'ect quan- 
 titatively upon the operations of the Executive System of Nature. A little 
 space must be made for extracts, just to hint the author's arguments : — 
 
 " In all the brain-activities accompanying our experience, the physical and 
 chemical changes go on in the same modes, observe the same order, and give 
 the same (quantitative results as if no sensation, thinking, and feeling had arisen." 
 
 "Motion-in-general does not condition consciousness; the movements along 
 with which our experience occurs have to be specific ones. They must be of 
 certain rates, volumes, &c." 
 
 " Either the added event of our consciousness is given by an increase of 
 efficacy which developcs in or along with Matter's activity -within our bodily 
 frame, or else it is assignable to such an increase occurring along Avith Matter's 
 activity in certain larger, extra-bodily situations of the Cosmical Executive- 
 System, operating at the same time on, in, and through the body."
 
 14 THE (JOJSTEMFOliAHY REVIEW. 
 
 " In reminiscence and imagination, we can have repetition of sensations with- 
 out the events in the larger Executive-System with which they jirimarily 
 occurred, and indeed they can exist along with very different events there 
 happening. We can in dream see the sun in the sky at midnight ; by means of 
 waking fancies, we can at any time, with more or less of completeness, subjec- 
 tively enjoy tastes, odours, contacts, sounds So little as this does the 
 
 general cosmical situation necessarily avail." 
 
 " Strictly speaking, it is not the whole of the executive-operation in the volume, 
 rate, &c., with which our consciousness arises, that connects causatively with 
 the enlargement of efficacy giving it, but only the small differentiating quantity 
 which heightens or abates the prior existing dynamics to just the specific volume, 
 rate, &c., that is effective. But the intellect finds itself obliged to consider these 
 differentiating dynamical quantities as interchangeable, since in the executive- 
 operation itself they are simply equivalent, and subtractable and addable 
 
 But each of them is found to be singly ineffective for conditioning consciousness." 
 
 Here, again, it is obvious that if this reasoning can be fully estab- 
 lished, it makes a great breach in Materialism ; rendering it necessary, 
 in order to account for the human Ego and its experience, to bring in 
 a potentiality for varying the quantity of phenomena in a way which 
 limits physical conceptions to their own field, and adds another field 
 beyond. The author's chapters entitled, " The Ego," and " Is there 
 Evidence of Entity other than Matter ?" contain much novel reasoning, in 
 addition to the above. The general effect of it, though he does not utterly 
 push home the conclusions, — always seeming to affect the reticence of 
 an inquirer merely who only states the facts as he finds them, — is that 
 our ^' egoistic-actualisation" is to be referred to a system of Mind which 
 extends beyond the present limits of the Ego ; for, as to the latter, he 
 says the " irrationality" of some of the " happenings" of our pleasures 
 and pains, and the persuasion we all have of possessing a physical power 
 of interfering with material sequence, seem to intimate that a historic 
 catastrophe has at some time befallen the egoistic consciousness of the 
 race. I cannot follow up these matters ; nor can I find space for ex- 
 plaining Mr. Cyples's modification of the old, commonly-adopted theory 
 of Impression. I may add, that, as most readers who have accom- 
 panied me up to this point would very likely expect, he adopts, with 
 respect to merely physical organization, the principle of Evolution, — 
 remarking that, so far as concerns the development of all physiological 
 difference, it is rational to suppose that the field of modification 
 in the later species would be intra-uterine, not extra-uterine. His 
 airiness in making the concession is, I suppose, explained by the fact, 
 that it in no way affects his other main conclusions. It will give 
 some idea of the range of the author's inquiries, if I quote the head- 
 ings of a few of the chapters : — " The Emotions : their General Mode," 
 "Conscience," "Is there a llational Basis for Dogma?" "Hypothesis 
 of the Soul," "The Problem of Evil," "The Organization of Ex- 
 perience." Incidentally, the questions of Utilitarianism, Comtism, 
 &c., are discussed at length. 
 
 I may just note a significant side-hint which the writer throws out 
 in inquiring into the genesis of modern scepticism. He asks, whether
 
 SOME NEW PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS. 15 
 
 physical science, despite its priceless practical progress, has not really 
 for a time simplified " cerebration" in respect of the chief generaliza- 
 tions of our meditative thinking on the human lot ? I believe that he 
 is right in thinking that this is so ; and in that fact seems to lie 
 whatever of hope there is of any recovery of Faith on the part of those 
 who have lost it on merely intellectual grounds. 
 
 When turning over the pages, the eye not infrequently falls upon 
 single remarks worth pondering. Take two or three specimens : — 
 
 " Scientifically regarded, the evil of falseliood is, that it is always in some 
 degree destructive of reminiscence, which is the very stuff of our life." 
 
 " Bare potentiality is the conception of all others most native to man." 
 
 " A man may know whether or not he is improving or degenerating in conduct 
 by noting if the emotions require larger or smaller sensory-cues. In the former 
 case, he is certainly going backward." 
 
 "Such a word as 'ever' gives a reverberation more prolonged than suits 
 mundane periods of time ; it appears to the heart resoundingly to echo on into 
 eternity." 
 
 In conclusion, I will only say that, though Mr. Cyples seems to me 
 to indulge much too freely in hypothesis, and has, by the adoption of a 
 difficult technology, placed a huge obstacle in the way of the populari- 
 zation of his book, yet I believe no one who is a professed student in 
 the higher fields of thought can neglect his volume, save at the risk 
 of not being acquainted with some of the most laboriously worked-out 
 philosophical thinking done for some time past.
 
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