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less, the fact of this rotation would have considerable influence ondetermining his perception of the movements of Paul and his clock,or even his speedometer, if we are allowed to introduce this into theproblem.

J. MERRITT MATTHEWS.SAN DiBGo, CALIF.

BOOK REVIEWS

Der Begriff der Tatsache in der positivistichen Philosophie des 19.Jahrhunderts. LUCIA GRUNICKE. Halle: Max Niemeyer. 1930.

199 pp.Positivism might almost be called 'Fact-ism,' if the latter

sounded a little less harsh to the ear, for it professes to be thephilosophy which confines itself to facts and their relations. Littleargument is needed to establish the obvious centrality, in any dis-cussion of positivism, of the question: What is a fact? So crucialis its importance that the author of this monograph alleges that itcan be only answered in terms of whole systems. What any individ-

ual positivist means by a fact can be fully understood only in thelight of his entire philosophy.

In this book she undertakes to apply this thesis to the systems ofComte, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Laas, Schuppe, Avenarius, andMach. The resulting study is largely one of German positivism inthe nineteenth century, which, as everyone knows, differs in manyrespects from the French and English varieties. The writers mostthoroughly treated are the idealistic or economical positivists

rather than their more empirical brethren, who receive, on the whole,short shrift. Auguste Comte, the author maintains, is rightly re-garded as the founder of positivism, but he is by no means a typicalpositivist (one suspects that this should read a typical Germanpositivist ). He relied naively on the facts of the natural sciences,by which he meant what had been observed in accordance withscientific criteria which he did not take the trouble to scrutinize.Self-analysis by the knower he rejected, and with it any possibility

(Professor Levy Briihl's protestations to the contrary notwithstand-ing) of a genuine psychology. Laws and facts have for Comte thesame degree of objectivity, and the subjective factors in both are de-plorably slighted. John Stuart Mill took a more sophisticated posi-tion: facts, for him, are admittedly facts of consciousness, and aredivided into the purely subjective and the partly objective, the latterreferring merely to the unknown and inscrutable process by whichthe subjective or psychological fact is brought to pass. Facts rest

upon sensations,and

ultimately uponthe

mysteriouscauses of sensa-

tions. How the unknown cause, Body, affects the unknown re-

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cipient, Mind, in such a way as to make inductive knowledge re-liable, remains a puzzle. Herbert Spencer similarly evokes relativeknowledge in terms of sensations from two absolute unknowables.He goes beyond Mill in endeavoring to base sensations upon a meta-physical foundation, an absolute which can be known to exist andyet remains itself unknowable. He did not distinguish clearly be-tween categorical and empirical ordering-principles, says the author,or between his inner and outer relations. The classic Englishand French positivists are thus indictable on at least two counts:they can not get along without metaphysics; and their theories ofknowledge, to put it mildly, lack psychological subtlety.

The latter, of course, German positivism abundantly supplies.Ernst Laas, in many ways its clearest representative, also achievesa singular degree of abstention from metaphysics. The core of hisdoctrine is his emphasis upon the notion of perceptions (and pos-sible perceptions) as indications of correlations between subject andobject. When these inseparable subject-object correlations are exam-ined further, however, it is the objective aspect that gains in im-portance. Objects are neither in us nor outside us, but arerather in relation to us as we are in relation to them. Kant,although he is recognized as halbpositivistisch by Laas, was writ-ing mere psychology. Wir haben zt lernen, nicht zu 'machen.'Wilhelm Schuppe resembles Laas in bieginning with a given fusionof subject-object in which the ego appears as the first and surest offacts. What appears to be headed for subjective idealism turns outto be a doctrine of immanence, in which an outer world exists inde-pendently of (although it is only discoverable in) a sort of commonconsciousness. Richard Avenarius likewise takes experience as hispoint of departure, refines it, and emerges with a pure experiencethat is neither physical nor mental, except for purposes of dis-course, but rather an aggregate of homogeneous elements which maybe arranged into many sorts of systems. This expands enormouslythe domain of the factual, for, according to Wundt, Avenarius re-gards as a fact anything that belongs among the contents of pureexperience. Ernst Mach shares with Avenarius this breadth ofhospitality toward all manner of facts. Anything experienceablemay be a fact. For it to become a fact for us, however, its neutralelements must go through a process of complex-making that we callthinking. But by building his known world from sensations, Machruns a great risk of slipping over into metaphysics.

The book closes with an all-too-brief critical comment on positi-vism, especially in the light of Kant, which confines itself to point-ing out its fundamental epistemological problems: those of a start-

ing point for knowledge (all the given, or what parts?), and of the

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disputed division (as between subjective and objective) of the variouselements which constitute facts. Since Kant, the roads open to thepositivists have been fairly well defined. If the subjective elementsare not to be entirely withdrawn from nature, they must be locatedin some scheme of progressive discovery or invention of natural lawsby men and nature acting in concert. Comte's contribution was theidea of a collective knower enlarging the stock of relative knowl-edge (relative in several senses) through distinguishable historicalepochs. But this, according to our author, does not solve the realproblem of positivism, which concerns the determination of thenature and validity of scientific tllinking uiberhaupt, apart from all

historical considerations whatever.All positivists, it seems, agree in being relativists about knowl-

edge, but what many of them do not seem to realize is that if knowl-edge is to be suspended in some sort of subjective-objective con-catenation in the midst of nature, many kinds of relativity are in-volved. It is, therefore, just as illegitimate to construct a theoryof knowledge around a single kind of relativity as typical, as it isto construct an absolute from an arbitrarily selected sample of hu-

man experience. Both are measures of economy which misrepre-sent life. Positivism will continue to display its traditional weak-ness in epistemology until some one appears who refuses to over-simplify the complexities entailed in any theory of knowledge whichrejects transcendentalism. It may even turn out that the posi-tivists, like their arch-opponents, the absolute idealists, but for adifferent reason, may have to wait until all facts are known beforethey can be sure what a fact is.

HAROLD A. LARRABEE.UNION COLLEGE.

The Problem of God. EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN. New York:The Abingdon Press. 1930. 209 pp.In the present volume are incorporated a series of lectures, de-

livered on the Adams Memorial Foundation of the First MethodistEpiscopal Church of Bloomington, Indiana, the Church of the Wes-

ley Foundation at Indiana University, together with a GoldwinSmith Lecture delivered at Cornell University in 1929. The book isplanned for those who have problems and who sympathize with theproblems of others (p. 9). It is not a point of criticism, therefore,that the discussion is attuned to catch the popular ear, and wouldnot be unwelcome in the same women's clubs which Walter Lipp-mann has so naughtily invaded (p. 14). The opening lectures, inwhich Contemporary Doubt and present-day Substitutes for

God come in for strong handling, make the way easy for the layreader, with neat flings of wit and irony: the rising tide of doubt ;