that a reform of spelling is impossible." "Whether it is impos sible or not," he leaves to "men of the world to decide." Alas for reform, men of the world are likely to act as if they had decided that it is impossible. But if it be impossible, English will still live, and the people will prosper using it. Nay, "men of the world" have decided that English, the very English which learned reformers pronounce "effete," is destined to be the language of the world. With all its ugliness and weakness, it commands the respect and deference of the nations and the communities emerging from their barbarism are springing up with eager desire to participate in its beauty and grandeur and wealth of blessing.

It should be remembered, also, that there is a rectification of evils in our orthography lying within the limits of the sound and healthy life of the language, that is accordingly possible and hopeful. With the awakened sense of the vices existing and a corresponding desire to correct them, beginnings can be hopefully made here and there by any true genius in language which the attentive and docile people shall readily take up and carry through. The alphabetic sounds and characters-the phonology and the phonotypy-must of course remain unchanged; but reforms in pronunciation and in answering orthography may be started with probably successful results, provided the changes proposed do not strike against established principles in the language. There are cases of words the spelling of which can be justified by no principle. These anomalies may be corrected. There are others sustained by no principle, but only by inconsiderate usage which yet violate some settled rule; words of this class may be reformed. And so elsewhere reforms may be freely proposed; the genius of the language may approve and adopt them. Many of the diseases or the defects at least, the strong life of the language may heal or supply. In this way a reform to an indefinite extent may be carried on.

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The thorough rectification of all that is now esteemed faulty in our orthography, may, however, be the strong purpose many, who may think it not only desirable but also possible, to bring our language up to the ideal phonetic standard. We have endeavored to set forth to some degree the conditions indispen

sable to success. The phonology must be perfected; the pronunciation be examined and healed of its vices; the phonotypy, in all its departments of print, script, and punch, be reformed by careful labor of artist and mechanic joined in coöperation with the scholar; the etiology of linguistic disease be submitted to careful investigation and study; the modes and degrees of reformation be determined and every step in advance be in clear sight of goal and path. Above all, union is indispensable-union on a scale so large and comprehensive that the entire diversified life of the people speaking the language shall be enlisted in the work with fair representative authority, so that the reform shall be not the isolated, sporadic leaps of individuals and local communities and seasons, but the strong, steady, conspiring and persistent work of the whole vast body of the English-speaking people.

ARTICLE IV.-QUALITIES OF MATTER AS RELATED TO PERCEPTION.

WHEN I look at an object, say for the sake of simplicity a piece of iron, what do I see? Simply a piece of iron; not its qualities, nor its properties; not its form, nor the light reflected from it, nor the sensation which it occasions in my mind, nor the impression which it makes on my sense-organs. The popular word "see" cannot be twisted to mean any of these things without ambiguity and confusion. It may be said to include them all, but it is as the word "bread" may be said to include oxygen and hydrogen and potassium and phosphorus. No one means such things in actually using the word. Thus when

Sir W. Hamilton said that every man sees a different sun, he unwarrantably twisted a popular word into a scientific meaning, giving the effect of an untrue statement. We all see the same sun; but we each have a different sensation occasioned by it, and we each perceive in it whatever we are enabled to perceive by the nature and condition of our eyes and our glasses, the state of our brains and our minds.

But when I see a piece of iron, what do I perceive? This cannot be answered so briefly; the word perceive, besides its popular meaning in the phrase "to perceive an argument, or a truth," has at least two distinctly scientific uses. One is, to perceive by the senses; to express this it would be well if usage permitted us to use the word "to sense," and to say, "I sense the color of the bit of iron." But we are obliged to use the word perceive both of this immediate, direct, incomplete knowledge through one sense, and also for the compounded, acquired knowledge, in which association, memory, judgment, etc., all play their part. When I see a piece of iron I perceive, in the first sense, only what the rays of light can convey to me, that is, nothing but color. In order to perceive color I must see a colored surface, and this involves some knowledge of space. Next, I perceive this colored patch as having form, that is, as bounded by definite outline separating it from other

extension, by the muscular movements of the eye, following around its boundary line. But even this cannot properly be called a direct perception, and the perceptions of solidity and distance certainly cannot be so called, but must be called indirect or acquired. And associated with these are a host of other perceptions. I have seen so many pieces of iron before, have felt, handled, weighed, pounded, heated, melted, burned, filed, drilled, magnetized, dissolved, so many pieces of iron that a vast number of perceptions, derived from the many sensations which it has occasioned in me, are connected together, associated, so that when I see a piece of iron all or many of these sensations are revived, the facts I have learned about iron are suggested, and I perceive it, not as my eyes see it, but with the whole mind, know it as I have learned it in my experience.

An object, then, may have many capabilities of occasioning sensations in us. These are called its qualities. Here the question arises, Are qualities one thing and objects another; are the qualities something which the object may have or not have, and which may exist either with or without an object, a substance or substratum ? Mr. Mill replies that there is nothing in matter but qualities; that they do not belong to or inhere in anything; that an object is only a permanent possibility of sensations, and there is no substance or substratum. Berkeley is generally understood to have held the same view; whether he really did so we will not stop to enquire. Hume distinctly denied the existence of a substance or real thing to which qualities belong. Kant, Spencer, etc., maintain that there is such a real existence, a noumenon, but that it is unknowable by us. Other philosophers have in general held that there is a real being in which the qualities of an object inhere, or to which they belong, and perhaps the commonest way of expressing this has been, that we have an intuitive idea of substance, so that when we perceive a quality we irresistibly and intuitively know that it inheres in a substance. Neither view seems to be of much real value as an explanation. On the one hand, if we speak of an object as having qualities, we must mean that these qualities belong to something, inhere in a substratum. The two terms are correlative; we cannot sep

arate them. Like husband and wife, triangle and three sides, each implies the other, and we cannot possibly think of them apart. So much seems a mere matter of terms. On the other hand, the constitution of our minds is undoubtedly such that when we perceive an object we perceive it as really existing. If I look at a piece of iron, or better, if I feel it and find that it resists my muscular exertions, I cannot help the conviction that it is real; my mind in this relation acts under the category of being, and I can never practically accept the belief that the object is nothing but a set of subjective sensations. No argument can make this any clearer.

The unphilosophical and unreflective mind stops here, accepts the truth that our sensations are normally occasioned by reality outside of us, and has no need of any further analysis. But when philosophy has taught me that my piece of iron has qualities, color, weight, extension, size, hardness, heat, etc., the effect is apt to be confusing. I feel as though my piece of iron were slipping away from me, only a metaphysical abstraction being left. And, in fact, the effect is somewhat like that of awkwardly dividing the mind into different faculties. But what does consciousness testify as to the actual state of things in perception? Do we naturally think of the impressions made upon our sense-organs as made by qualities of bodies? Do we perceive an object as made up of substance and attribute? Certainly not. The whole relation of substance and attribute belongs, not to practical observation, but to the refinements of philosophy, and we make it before we observe it, like the distinction between mind and faculty of mind.

Before going further we wish to examine the ordinary mode of describing and classifying the qualities of matter. It is not necessary to our purpose to go back to Aristotle, or even to Descartes. We may learn the common theory well enough from John Locke (Essay, Bk. 2, Ch. 8). It has not been materially improved upon since his time. "The power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is." "As they are sensations or percep tions in our understandings, I call them ideas." "Qualities thus considered in bodies are, first, such as are utterly insep