Chapter 59

and XXVIII, "The Existence of Other Minds," and "The Distribution of Minds."

Writers seem to be divided into three camps on this question of other minds.

(1) I have treated our knowledge of other minds as due to an inference. This is the position usually taken.

(2) We have seen that Huxley and Clifford cast doubts upon the validity of the inference, but, nevertheless, made it. Professor Strong, in the work mentioned in the notes to the previous chapter, maintains that it is not an inference, and that we do not directly perceive other minds, but that we are assured of their existence just the same. He makes our knowledge an "intuition" in the old-fashioned sense of the word, a something to be accepted but not to be accounted for.

(3) Writers who have been influenced more or less by the Neo-Kantian or Neo-Hegelian doctrine are apt to speak as though we had the same direct evidence of the existence of other minds that we have of the existence of our own. I have never seen a systematic and detailed exposition of this doctrine. It appears rather in the form of hints dropped in passing. A number of such are to be found in Taylor's "Elements of Metaphysics."

Section 43. The "Mind-stuff" doctrine is examined at length and its origin discussed in Chapter XXXI of the "System of Metaphysics," "Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus." It is well worth while for the student to read the whole of Clifford's essay "On the Nature of Things-in-themselves," even if he is pressed for time.