notoriously subjective import ("affinity," "attraction," "preference," "repulsion," etc., etc.). We may, in fact, affirm that the monadologist only clears up with full reflective consciousness what many a hostile man of science grasps confusedly. An entire rethinking of chemistry and physics on monadological lines will doubtless be one of the leading feats of the next century. A work of such a character would be of momentous interest and one valid page of it would outweigh all the arid scholasticism of Hegel's "logic" and that of the modern guild-philosophers who have smothered idealism in words in the hope of exalting "reason."

Monadology is obviously an enormous subject, and I do not, of course, pretend here to do more than indicate aspects of this fact. Much has been already done by Leibnitz, Herbart, and others, and I, too, have done my humble best to strengthen and extend monadist doctrine. But by far the greater part of the work remains over for others to complete. With a vital meaning for the cruces of external perception (normal and supernormal), of freedom, of the neurosis-psychosis relation, of sensation-genesis, of ethics, theism, pessimism, the world-purpose, import of the individual, etc., etc., and, indeed, of all metaphysical questions whatever, monadology may well task the most earnest efforts of the inquirer. Monads, human, subhuman, superhuman, are the WELL-SPRINGS of reality, and no idealism ignoring them can prove adequate. Unlike Hegelianism, which never gets near a fact, and deludes the book-worm with word-spinning and hollow dialectic, monadology admits of exploration by induction on the lines of the complete method.1 Once established in decently adequate fashion it must appeal to every storm-tost wayfarer as the phrases of academic scholasticism never did and never will. The "riddle of this painful world" as treated by the guild-philosophers breeds pessimism and disgust with metaphysic. Interpreted by a severely critical monadology, it will be found to lose its forbidding aspect. I am, of course, only in favor

1 Doubters may be referred, in passing, to the pregnant declaration of Mill, Exam. of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 259, 5th edition, for the timely observation that induction is not necessarily confined to the sphere of the individual consciousness.

of admitting results where the latter are enforced by careful inquiry (though some of my less honest or more lazy critics have thought fit to say otherwise). The consolatory aspect of a doctrine should be obviously only an afterthought.

Before closing this paper I should like to say a few words touching the current Hegelian treatment of external perception, a treatment which a monadist rethinking of things seems to render wholly superfluous. As is so well known, Kant, anxious to import universality and necessity into the external experience, loosened by Hume, thought fit to assume various categories or "pure concepts," subsumed under which phenomena unified in space and time become objective. In the Kantian handling of this hypothesis, the categories are discussed as if superimposed by the ego on the phenomena (the "matter" of which is "given" and unified in space and time), and importing into them universality and necessity. With Hegel the categories are immanent in the phenomena, reason or the concept being implicit in nature previous to becoming explicit in our adult consciousness. It is urged that experience is not possible except on the lines thus indicated. A more absurd contention could scarcely be advanced.

On what ground is the category-doctrine defended? On thisno such categories, no experience such as we have. How are the categories got at, as they are never given unalloyed to the inquirer? By abstractly analytic reduction of experience to its "elements," obviously the only resource. But it is as well in this process to see that the "elements" arrived at were really conjoined primarily and are not mere figments of the philosopher. Take the so-called category of being. Now I would urge that no such category is immanent in objects at all—"being" is a general conception only empirically derived from observation of things. "Ah," says the Hegelian, "you forget that you cannot abstract from things what is not there to be abstracted!" This is a good objection, as it enables one to state the opposed view more clearly. The truth is that "being" is not a thought or concept save for reflexion; the being of things is a feeling, a sensation, and no thought or concept at all. And how does it arise? From the concrete opposition of its content to itself by which

the monad mediates its consciousness, an activity wholly alien to the contemplative passive and abstract character of reason. I am glad in this connexion to note that that able critic of Hegel, E. Belfort Bax, has in his Problem of Reality declared that being in the percept is not logical but alogical. Good this, but why does not Mr. Bax go further? Clearly, however, the Hegelian dialectic must suffer if being is thus treated as alogical. The starting point declared faulty, what of the succeeding journey? Mr. Bax's dictum should cause the Hegelians to rage.1

Mr. Bax would retain nevertheless such categories as "causality," "substance," etc., as instruments wherewith his Subject of experience in general constructs our perceptions. This subject thinks the categories into the presentment, and we get the result as a readymade world of objects. I have previously stated my objections to this "universal subject" theory and need not repeat them here. Even on monadist lines, however, it might be urged by Bax that categories latent in our subjects help to construct objects. But the hypothesis is superfluous. The native objectivity of sensation is admitted in his treatment of being, and, this important admission once made, the call for the other categories loses its force. For the rest we may rely on "association" as so richly expounded by British psychologists, such association" (whether harking back to ancestral experiences or not) being viewed as reflexion in our central monads of the workings of the monads of our brains. As I have urged elsewhere:

"Not categories, but cerebral monads mediate the fuller objectivation of sensation into the ripe world we know; their activities being passively duplicated in the subject [central monad] as the infant consciousness dawns. Nerves and brain wirepull the adjustments of organisms to surroundings and the reflex of this adjustive mechanism in the subject Is the very process of the fuller objectivation itself.”— Riddle of the Universe, p. 337.

While dwelling on this point, I will add that a grave mistake

1 Stirling well observes, and the concession from him is striking, that Hegel's logic, "though containing much that is of material importance, is still principally formal... if the start be but an artifice and a convenience, is it all ascertained yet that the means of progress, the dialectic, is in any respect better?"

of the past, and, to a lesser extent, of the present, was and is the view that "relations" are necessarily generically other than the supposed terms they relate. It would be better to recognise "relations" as really only a kind of sensations as particular as the other sensations along with which we have them. "Being" in the object is a sensation, so, too, is "causality," which consists mainly, if not wholly, of ideal sensations of effort felt along with some time-sequence, and felt, too, with varying force according to the nature of the time-sequence; a most notable fact. A metaphysic of real utility should concern itself not with phantoms of the book-worm, such as categories, but with the origin of the many-hued concrete sensory experience whence these categories and indeed all concepts are ultimately derived. Conception is the process of "taking together" agreeing aspects of the given: a concept is the result, a name connoting this agreement. To say that we abstract concepts from things is not to say that the concepts are implicit as such in them, like plums ripe for picking. There is no concept "tree" in the perceived world, but only indefinitely numerous concrete trees which resemble each other in certain ways bearing on our interests and are classed accordingly. Similarly there are no concepts being and substance "realising themselves in multiplicity," as the phrase goes, in this world. There are certain phases of reality, certain powers of sensation in part primitive, in part acquired, which mingled inextricably with other sensations make up the concrete whole of sense. True every phase of this whole is related to every other, but this is because they are modes only of that presentation-continuum in which the unitary subject unfolds itself. Unrelated phases there are none, but the relations are in no sense "thoughts." Out of this continuum arise both "universals" and "particulars," and to inquire into its genesis should be the most studied aim of the metaphysician or mystic. Not fussing about empty "notions," but researches as to the genesis of the experience yielding the notion is the really important affair. From having certain sequences in our monads we probably get the notion of causality, but this notion, be it observed, in no way helps us to understand why these sequences occur as they actually do, why, for instance, a stone when released

falls to the ground. Here the notion-juggling Hegelians fail us, as they always do when any problem of real interest crops up. The only clue is that of monadology, exploited on the lines of the "complete" method and in full accord with psychology and physical science generally. At this point, however, conscious of having unduly extended my remarks, I must bid the reader adieu, trusting that he may find ultimately idealist monadology to be as competent to answer the world-riddle as I have. Stray hints are occasionally of value, and despite the exigencies of space it may be that one or two in this paper may find a permanent lodgment in minds open to conviction.

DEVON, ENGLAND.

E. DOUGLAS FAWCETT.