Ward, Dr. Rashdall and Prof. Bernardino Varisco. Ward and Varisco agree in refusing to accept the unfavourable verdict of pragmatism and Bergson on the worth of the intellect in philoso- phy, and are so far pronounced rationalists as to require of any philosophical theory of the world that it should be able to justify itself before the bar of reason; neither is, however, an " in- tellectualist," since neither ascribes to cognition a primacy in importance for the philosophical interpretation of the world over feeling and conation; and both admit, like Kant, our right to believe what we cannot demonstrate, provided that such belief, if accepted, would form the natural completion of the conceptions to which strictly logical analysis of the contents of science points. Both hold in common with Bergson and the pragmatists the reality of contingency and the production of the genuinely " new," but both deny that there is anything irrational or re- pugnant to the intellect in these conceptions. Ward's views find their development in his Realms of Ends (1911), Varisco's in / Massimi Problemi (1910) and Conosci te stesso (1912). Both thinkers show very markedly the influence of Lotze, whose final results in the main agree with theirs; Ward is, on the whole, Kantian, Varisco Leibnitzian in manner.
Ward's starting point is afforded by the contrast between the unity which thought demands of its world and the apparent plurality which meets us in the world of sense perception. The problem which philosophy has to solve is, according to him, on what lines the world of experience can be thought of as one without our ceasing to recognize that it is also truly many. The history of the post-Kantian " idealist " schools has demon- strated that the problem is insoluble if we attack it from the side of the " one." Since the world of perception is not primarily given to us as one but as many, we have to start from its given multiplicity and work toward such a final conception of its unity of plan as our data will permit. Ward thus begins by a tentative inquiry how far the metaphysical assumptions of pluralism will allow us to recognize the experience-world as exhibiting unity. This leads him, inter alia, to a brilliant criticism of the concepts of mechanism and " evolution " as they figure in singularist philosophies. The result of the criticism is much that of Berg- son's critique of the " geometrical " bias ascribed by him to the intellect. A mechanistic monism must reduce " evolution " to a process by which things unfold what has all along been in them in an " incapsulated " form; but the. process known to genuine science by the unhappy name of evolution is really more properly " epigenesis," the growth of the qualitatively new, and therefore unpredictable, out of the old. Starting with an original pure pluralism which resolves the course of things into inter- actions between agents, each of whom is independent of any other, we can see that a pluralistic universe would develop a tendency to unity in the very process by which its members establish a modus vivendi among themselves, but it is uncertain whether such a tendency would give us the amount of unity we presuppose in the real world when we assume the validity for it of general laws, and it certainly does not warrant our ascribing to it such a unity as would justify the belief that the universe is such as to permit the realization of our moral and spiritual ideals. //, however, the pluralist should modify his hypothesis by regarding one member of his universe as a God from whom the rest derive their real but dependent existence, we could find in the existence of such a God good ground for faith in the per- sistence of spiritual life after bodily death, and the final victory of good over evil; the alleged difficulties of Theism, in particular the alleged impossibility of reconciling the goodness of God with the presence of evil in His world, have no conclusive force. Thus we are free, as Kant held, to exercise a reasonable faith in God and in immortality; and such a faith, while meeting the demands of morality and religion, involves no breach with the intellect, as it amounts only to a further step along the road which the pluralist is forced to tread in accounting for the presence of even so much unity of plan as he has to admit in the visible world.
Varisco reaches a very similar position as the result of a polemic against the empiricist metaphysic of the ordinary Comtist. He begins with an analysis of the actual moment of sense per-
ception. The objects apprehended in such perception stand at once in two sets of relations. On the one hand, they are con- nected in various ways with one another, and as so connected they form a system which lies open to the perception not only of the special " I " who speak of apprehending them, but to the perception of innumerable other beings, each of whom can equally say " I apprehend " them. Considered from this point of view the system of sense-data and their interconnections may be said to form the common perceived world of mankind at large. But also a given sense-datum which I apprehend is, at the moment of its apprehension, present along with experiences (feelings, conations) which are intimate and private to me and directly accessible to no other being which calls itself " I." In this sense the perceived objects may be said to be my objects. Thus there is a sense in which the whole world of fact to which the individual has to adjust himself in action is inseparably bound up with the individual's inner life. Varisco develops this idea in a way which may remind us strongly of T. H. Green, but is at least equally reminiscent of Leibnitz, the one great philosopher whom Green persistently misunderstood. It is fatal to the empiricist theories which regard the " external world " as simply given in sensation that the world reveals itself to science as a complicated network of relations between terms, and neither the universals which pervade it nor some at least of the terms they connect are sense-data. The universals are apprehended by thought, and the self to which they are known, the only thing which we apprehend directly as it is, is also no sense-datum. It is our immediate non-sensuous apprehension of the self which owns its " states " that supplies us with our standard of real Being. Hence Varisco is led to postulate as indispensable factors in the scheme of the universe not only the sense-data and the system of relations between them, but the plurality of persons whose sense-data they are and whose thought apprehends their complicated relations. From these considera- tions follows the reality of freedom and contingency. For each individual has its unique qualitative character, by which it is distinguished from every other, and the course of phenomenal events thus depends on two factors, the unique characters of individuals and the universal relations between them, and the former factor is obviously incalculable with certainty just because it is what is not common to two or more individuals. Hence the actual course of things is only partly calculable, and this ad- mission of contingency, or spontaneity in the individual, involves no breach with the principle that it is for philosophy to satisfy our intellectual demands. We may call the element of sponta- neity a logical (since logic is concerned solely with the universal laws of interconnection and interaction), but not irrational.
At this point arises the supreme issue for a philosophical interpretation of the universe, an issue which is one of value or worth. The question is whether we regard the principle of organization in the universe as immanent, and manifesting itself in an endless succession of individuals which are all transitory; or whether we are to think of it as itself a transcendent individual, and of the finite individuals in which it exhibits itself as per- manent factors in the universe. In the former case, the values of the individuals will be all relative, and there will be no meaning in attaching value or purpose to the world-order itself, as it is only the individual which properly has either; in the second case, there will be a meaning in regarding the values we ascribe to human personalities as absolute, and we shall be able to ascribe value and purpose to the universe as a whole, no less than to its various members. Varisco's view is that philosophy as such cannot decide this issue between an impersonal immanent prin- ciple of order and " the traditional Christian conception of God." Our decision will turn upon the intensity of our faith in the cor- respondence between the order of facts and our spiritual ideals. His own preference is for the Christian solution, as an expression of personal faith.
In the sphere of ethics, the attention of modern philosophers of all schools has seemed to be more concentrated on the inquiry into the presuppositions and .methods of science than on the interpretation of our inner life. " Erkenntnistheorie " is more
