Experience and Substance by DeWitt H. Parker (review)

670 BOOK; REVIEWS ascertain this or not. Causal explanation does not do away with teleology; they are not opposed but correlated. All our knowledge is bound up with time and thus with history. Neither mathematics nor language is" applied" to nature; they stem from 'her. We can never escape reality because we are reality too and because reality ia. Justifying nature's ways and knowing them are two different things. The only true problem is how to enlarge our knowledge of nature's ways. Morality pertains to nature not less than anything else, although nature'" does not intend moral order, but rather subtends it." Nature is the only object of knowledge, but there are things as necessary as knowledge 'to which not knowledge but faith is the adequate answer. Ceremonial cult is the expression of the acknowledgment of the supernatural, and religion is the personal acceptance of this acknowledgment. It is the pursuit of happiness which reveals the supernatural. The dualism of knowledgment and happiness is fundamental in human existence. Knowledge discovers nature, but does not justify it. This justification the mind demands, faith supplies. The supernatural is the justification of nature. Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C. RUDOLF ALI..ERs. E:x;perience and Substance. By DEWITT H. PARKER. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1941. Pp. x +871, with index. $8.00. The title indicates the two main sets of problems: experience refers to knowledge, substance to metaphysics. The general viewpoint is idealistic, although not without some peculiarities. The basic metaphysical conception is monadistic and finitistic. There is much of Kantianism, but it is modified so as to go farther beyond Hume than Kant himself does. Parallel to the idealistic trend runs a definitely antinominalistic and, therefore, antipositivistic strain. The latter becomes particularly noticeable in Chapters XXIV , dealing with the theory of relations and the problem of causality. Hume's solution is rejected because it does not afford any explanation of the note of necessity adherin~ to all awareness of causal relations. These chapters also contain an interesting analysis of probability and of many of the statements, common. among philosophers of science, regarding the philosophical implications of modern physics, especially the relativity theory, the notion of statistical law, and the general bearing of science on philosophy. Substance is characterized by being subject, never ~redicate; independent, causally efficient, conserved through change. These characteristics apply to what Parker calls the matrix self; they do not apply to matter as conceived by materialistic metaphysics. Experience is substance, and substance is only an experience. Existence ,can be credited only to what is actually in ex- BOOK REVIEWS 671 perience, neither possible nor past events have existence, nor have universals existence apart from the concreta in which they are discovered. The universals are timeless objects, not however eternal. The eternal reveals itself to an examination of the levels of causality, of which there are three. There is first the personal level, secondly, the level of biological causation, and finally, underlying the other two, the physico-chemical level which is referred to as the " Omega system." The higher level depends in its existe~ce and in its functioning on the next lower level. The lowest level, on which all being and eventing depends is the eternal level. Eternal and Omega system are identified. The reader, at this point, may recall that a similar notion has been proposed , under perhaps not dissimilar conditions of general mentality and problematics, once before in the history of human thought. This reviewer, at least, cannot help remembering the curious notion of David of Dinant who identified prime matter with God Himself. And back of David's mind there may have been a dilemma not unlike the one which apparently determines Professor Parker's somewhat startling assertion. The question is how to co-ordinate the fact that the inferior level undubitably conditions the functioning and the existence of the beings of the higher levels, on one hand and the equally impressive and evident ontological superiority of ~he higher levels on the other. David and Parker solve the difficulty by locating , as it were, ontological eminence in the level of being which apparently is the most necessary and most general...