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The introduction of the positive spirit into the observation of the facts of society was not to be expected until the Cartesian philosophy, with its reliance on inexplicable intuitions and its exaggeration of the method of hypothesis, had been laid aside.

In her affliction Susan at least saw only those affected like herself and that helped not a little, helped the whiskey to confuse and distort her outlook upon life. The old Cartesian formula "I think, therefore I am" would come nearer to expressing a truth, were it reversed "I am, therefore I think." Our characters are compressed, and our thoughts bent by our environment.

Here comes one of the consequences of the Cartesian Dualism: as if [Greek: s

And yet this single page of print, which outweighs libraries, and is stronger than all the armies of Napoleon, is not the work of superior minds, and bears no mark of the lion's claw. The stamp of Cartesian clearness is upon it, but without the logic, the precision, the thoroughness of French thought.

But Berkeley, alarmed by the tendency of the Cartesian doctrines to materialism and mechanical necessity, reduces the 'primary' to the level of the 'secondary, and proceeds to abolish the whole world of matter. We are thus left with nothing but 'ideas, and the ideas are naturally 'subjective' and therefore in some sense unreal.

I realised the insufficiency of what is called spiritualism; the Cartesian proofs of the existence of a soul distinct from the body always struck me as being very inadequate, and thus I became an idealist and not a spiritualist in the ordinary acceptation of the term. An endless fieri, a ceaseless metamorphosis seemed to me to be the law of the world.

Now comes the definition by method. Numbers of authors have supposed that it is by its method that psychology is distinguished from the other sciences. It is a vague idea, but becomes precise in a good many metaphors, and has given rise to several forms of speech. Though no longer quite the Cartesian dualism, this is still a dualism.

As plainly, therefore, as the one is true, must the other be false, and Cartesian idealism, in so far as its character has been exhibited above, has, I submit, been demonstrated to be true. The greater the pity that it was not brought to maturity by its author.

Echoes of the Cartesian idea of the soul seem to ring in this statement; but it could not have been written by anyone who had mastered the Aristotelian or the Scholastic explanation of matter and form. But let us take this question of Regeneration; the power which all living things have, in some measure, though in very different measure, of reconstructing themselves when injured.

It is needless to remark that this whole argument, whatever may be said of the former one, is a pure fallacy, and a petitio principii throughout. The Cartesian form of it is the most glaringly fallacious, and indeed exposes itself; for by that reasoning we might prove the existence of a fiery dragon or any other phantom of the brain. But even King's more concealed sophism is equally absurd.