Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Some New Philosophical Views
Attention; his tracking out of the working rules of the Association of Ideas his more detailed appreciation of the use in intellectual Opera tion of the Language-faculty; these would be, I suppose, the parts of the book he would wish to be earliest looked at. He has a passion for framing formulas, generalizing laws, and coining fresh and very unattractive words and phrases 3 doing this with what seems to me a very droll obtuseness to the fact that the ordinary reader wishes to have, not as much as possible, but as little as may be of this sort of thing. Even the most favourable critics - at least, all whose notices I have perused - agree that the book is very hard reading Mr. Cyples has made his own defence on this score, in a paper published in Mind, entitled, Four New Philosophical Terms 5 but I am sure that he has under estimated the obstacles in the way of getting a new nomenclature accepted. In my own opinion, too, there are special difficulties just now hinder i ng the success of such an experiment, owing to the thinkers in the realm of English philosophy who for more than a generation past have had the public car, studiously avoiding technology in their works. Certain critics of Mr. Mill state that they find his language loose when it is strictly scrutinized, -professor Stanley J evons has said so in these pages, -but it is undeniable that it has an appearance of lucidness. Mr. Darwin uses a few catch-phrases, but they are free from what is commonly meant by technicality, and, in fact, the ease of his style has greatly helped the spreading of his views. Professors Huxley and Tyndall have each a rare art of making plain what they urge and Professor Bain is only a little less a master of simple statement. Mr. Matthew Arnold, of late years, has seemed to accumulate a phraseology of his own; but it con sists not of new terms but of parts of sentences, familiar enough when the words are taken separately, and only made special by allotment to a particular meaning, and by a strenuous iteration afterwards in their use. In Mr. Herbert Spencer's works, a nomenclature of some intricacy is to be met with, but he, again, has shown much skill in habituating his readers to it. If Mr. Cyples says, as I gather he does, that in arriving at what he believes to be new conclusions, he found that the mental process developed these new terms of expression, and that he has had to work with them, it has to be allowed that he knows best what happened in his own case. All that he has now to do is to get the public to use his terminology, and to speak of the neurotic dia gram, egoistic-actualisation, the Executive System, 850. I myself think that he would have made his task not a little easier if he had just reversed the order of the contents of his volume, and begun with what is now the ending of it, -that is, the portion in which the use of the technology is the least frequent. Anyhow that is the plan which I, who wish to do what I think a notable book a service, find mv judgment suggests. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
