[In the following essay, Jordan reviews The Philosophy of "As If," noting the work's significance to philosophical methodology.]

This translation of the Philosophy of 'As If' is "based upon the definitive Sixth Edition of the original, revised for the purpose by the author, who himself undertook the task of abbreviating various passages of purely historical interest or otherwise superfluous in an English version. In response to many suggestions, Professor Vaihinger's own account of his Life-work and of the spirit in which The Philosophy of 'As If' was written has been added by way of General Introduction, and this, together with an Analytical Table of Contents and a double Index, should add considerably to the interest and utility of the volume" (Translator's Note). In the Autobiography the author explains that the ideas incorporated in the volume were in process of development through the long period between 1876 and 1911.

The result is a solid and exhaustive, even if not perhaps finally conclusive, contribution to the discussion of the basic problems of philosophical methodology. As the work was originally published as early as 1911, it may be taken for granted that the author's point of view and the fundamentals of his philosophy are generally known. The book represents the extreme analytical tendency which has reached its fullest development in British empiricism—the author acknowledges his primary indebtedness to Hume and Mill—and, while the author regards himself as a follower of Kant, it is primarily the analytic and positivist aspect of Kant which gives both form and content to the work. Accepting the more rigoristic limits which Kant imposed upon concepts of scientific method in the distinction between constitutive and regulative principles, the author adopts the element of sense-content as the criterion of truth, and relegates to the realm of 'fiction' all the formal aspects of experience through which the relations of sense-fact are mediated. But the contradiction involved in accepting as a criterion of truth something the nature of which is incommensurable with every known character of truth leads the author to adopt a fiction which is fatal to all 'practical' philosophies—the fiction that truth, in so far, at least, as it affects the significance of thought-constructs, is a matter of utility.

Under this conception, a logical device that is found useful is a fiction; and this is defined as a concept known to be false but yet is found capable of yielding practically useful results. How anything could be known to be false while all the methods of knowledge are vitiated by the fictive uncertainty appears here as a somewhat baffling question. However, it is not difficult to show that the fundamental concepts of mathematics and science and of ethics, law, etc., as well, also the multitudinous forms of 'let's play' found necessary or convenient in simple practical relations have no several or one-to-one correspondence to sensibly determined objects; but just that seems to be the purpose of the book, and the result is an extraordinary amount of repetition as well as an unnecessary attempt to apply the doctrine of fictions in every conceivable circumstance. If such were all that the forms of thought mean in their logical implications, and the author goes beyond the practicality of his weaker brother the American pragmatist in recognizing mat questions of truth are logical and not psychological or biological, the proof of the fact in one instance would be not only sufficient ground for the author's voluntarism and pessimism, but also would furnish a justification for the scepticism and intellectual nihilism which are inherent in all narrowly 'practical' philosophies. Thus the author is justified, on his sensationalistic presuppositions, in arguing that any logic which presupposes agreement between thought and reality is a false logic, since the agreement cannot be shown in any instance while the real is assumed to be identical with sensuous content. He is also justified in arguing that the dogma that the reason is altogether incapable of making any contact with the real is a self-destroying scepticism, a scepticism which would deny justification to the attempt to write a thick book on the 'as if.' So the only way out is Hume's "I dine, I play a game of backgammon," etc., which the author states thus: "When I see a deer feeding in the forest, when I see a child at play, when I see a man at work or sport, above all when I myself am working or playing, where are the problems with which my mind has been torturing itself unnecessarily?" The doctrine that truth is utility is more useful than the doctrine that it involves a courageous facing of the possibility that there are reals other than those determined in sensation alone, in that it enables its advocate to stick his head in the sand.

But the author attempts to face the logical issue squarely in the question of the relation of the fictive construct to the principles of analogy and hypothesis. The fiction furnishes a useful standard with which to compare the real of sense experience. It is thus merely an expedient which aids in description, and presumably leads to the abstract generalizations which science tends to create. But why not face the fact that the ideal or fictive construct is itself derived from a synthesis of the characters of particulars, and thus transcends the generalization in a real universal? Analogy and hypothesis are and remain meaningless until they find their equilibrium in a principle, and until the fictive construct attains the status of a guiding criterion there is no point to assimilating its imaginary characters with sensory characters given in fact. Again, in the relation of the fiction to the hypothesis, the same weakness of the sense criterion appears. The fiction, says the author, is known to be false, and yet it points to the reality through its utility. The hypothesis, on the contrary, is a proposition on the way to being either validated by proof, or eliminated as useless. But it is difficult to see how it becomes anything other than a thought construct, even though it should become one of the ultimates of mathematics, and as a thought construct, it remains, for the author, still short of identification with the sensory given which he insists it must do if it is to be real. That is, on his own presuppositions, logical validity, though complete and demonstrable, is no nearer the reality than the mind's first and faintest interpretative hint; and the hypothesis which has become even an axiom remains a fiction still. So the author's acceptance of irrationalism is understandable. He has at the outset accepted as the only type of the real an element which is, because of its own nature, unrealizable, consequently all thought effort expended upon it is foredoomed to failure, and all thought instruments and media to it are a priori false. It is also at this point an interesting question, while truth and reality are matters of actual or possible sensations, how anything could be known to be false. How I can now know, on a sensationalistic theory of truth, that I never can experience a given sensation, is an interesting situation for the sensationalist.

But somewhere between the pure fiction and the pure hypomesis there is plenty of room for that instance of the type which, as constructed by thought on a basis of the order or orderliness of the given, is the real or concrete universal, or the species through which the real, including the useful, gets what significance is due to it. The treatment of the thought construct as a useful fiction is itself thus the prime instance of the pure fiction, the fiction which is by no methods realizable; so the fiction theory is itself the typical pure fiction. There are of course no grounds for denying that in the thought process there are many abstract symbols used primarily in the function of giving stability to thought elements while memory is engaged in endowing bodies of them with effective order; that is, meanings are symbolized in sensuous forms while their organization into higher unities is being effected by the synthetic functions of memory and imagination; it is equally true that these symbols are dropped the moment they become 'useless' to the unity effected and thus cease to be instrumental to the continuity of the thought process: there are fictions or methodological devices used in thinking, devices that are even used up in thinking, but that does not justify the monstrous conclusion that there are no substantive elements in the thought process besides the sense data.

Thus it is questionable whether a philosophy in its logical aspects can be constructed incidentally and as a by-product of the process of epistemological research. If a philosophy is to be a system of consistent convictions about reality, then a methodology will miss being that just by the difference between incontrovertible fact and the mere subjectivity of a mental state. And if sensation is taken as the characteristic mental state, the element of reality in fact will disappear in the instant that sensation is shown to have no independent status in the real, and that sensation has no real status is about the only indubitable result of the science of psychology. The hypothesis which makes a mental state the veritable real or the criterion of truth is disproved upon the discovery that the mental state has no contacts through references to the fact system whose rationality necessitated the hypothesis, and there is nothing left for the hypothetical real but to symbolize a useful but bootless abstract process. It is thus that utility issues in futility when made an instrument of logic, and the pursuit of the real is abandoned in the interest of a mental state, a mere groundless attitude. As a necessary result of the insufficiency of his method, therefore, the author abandons philosophy, and accepts what comfort he can get from the negative attitudes of pessimism and irrationalism. The attempt to justify the substitution of an emotional attitude for a consistent philosophical point of view, and to mediate the substitution with a logical process which justly claims the respect of instructed minds, in fact, compels that respect, should serve in its sorry issue as a significant hint to other pragmatists. It represents a degree of utility and practicality so proficient as to deceive itself, in spite of the fact that its candor is throughout unquestionable. For those who see the weight of such a contradiction in logic, which at the same time carries with it so compelling an ethical and religious significance, the question of the ontological status of 'mere' attitudes becomes itself the ground of a system of hypotheses for a real practical philosophy. But no such practical philosophy is yet written, and the author's pragmatics gives him no hint of its possibility.

But the book is of extraordinary value, just because it treats the fiction theory with the thoroughness which it merits, and because in doing so it furnishes in its sceptical and negativist issues an interesting but overwhelming reductio of the various prevailing types of 'practical' philosophy. Its appearance in English at this time when the theory of legal fictions is being turned to a criticism of social theory will contribute greatly to philosophical utility even if it adds little or nothing to a sound appreciation of philosophical methodology.