114 NEW BOOKS. agnosticism on the one hand, and, on the other, an attempt to conceive Keality as consisting in " relations of relations of relations of ... and so on to infinity " ? " Immediacy " in psychology merely reviving the Kantian antithesis of Sense and Thought ? These questions are at least possible subjects of discussion. S. H. MELLONE. The Functional versus the Representational Theory of Knowledge in Locke's Essay. By ADDISON WEBSTER MOORE. University of Chicago Contributions to Philosophy, vol. iii., No. 1. 1902. Pp. 67. There is a fundamental paradox about knowledge which consists in the fact that in proportion as it becomes practically more reliable it grows theoretically more doubtful. And so we finally have the philosopher, e.g., Mr. Bradley, mournfully deciding that unless we can know every- thing we can really know nothing, and that strict truth remains the inaccessible preserve of an Absolute. Meanwhile the actual knowers in the workshop and the laboratory are working with the practical know- ledge, which the metaphysician finds so indigestible, and ever giving us more and more control over our experience. Prof. Moore finds that the source of this paradox lies in the fact that practical and scientific thinking is purposive, and in aiming at certain concrete results uses its methods as means, whereas in epistemological analysis these processes are taken in abstraction from their actual function and so reduced to inanity. Thus ' analysis ' in epistemology becomes something wholly different from what it was in science : in the latter an ' element ' was whatever served as a means to get the result ; in the former the problem is to find an eternal structure which exists independently of us and our efforts to know it. Only if such a completed system of reality could be found arid we could obtain a precise transcript thereof, would our knowledge be valid, certain and necessary. As no knowledge can be found to satisfy these a priori demands, such a ' theory of knowledge ' is bound to end in scepticism. But the English thinkers, with their healthy sense of fact, always in their practice operated with the ' functional ' theory of knowledge, whatever theoretical homage they felt bound to pay to the scholastic ideal of a pure thought divorced from action. Bacon demanded a knowledge which should be power, though he could not disabuse himself of the idea that it was to be had for the mere looking. In Hobbes, Locke, Hume this struggle between the antithetical criteria of knowledge continues, and all the contradictions and confusions in Locke's theory in particular are shown to arise from this source. This latter point Prof. Moore studies carefully and in detail, and to my thinking establishes conclusively. Altogether the clearness with which he makes his point and the pertinacity with which he sticks to it, constitute his monograph a refreshing advance on the ordinary run of Ph.D. theses, and render it a valuable and im- portant contribution to that pragmatist revision of the whole current theory of knowledge which is now beginning, and in which it is satis- factory to find the Chicago philosophers, under the auspices of Prof. Dewey, prepared to co-operate. Prof. Moore gives chapter and verse for Prof. James's dictum that the true critical method can best be found by working out the suggestions contained in the English tradition in philosophy. F. C. S. SCHILLER.
