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HILOSOPHY AND EXPERIENCE.
An Address
DELIVERED BEFORE THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY,
OCTOBER 26, 1885
(BEING THE ANNUAL PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS FOR THE SEVENTH
SESSION OF THE SOCIETY),
173
BY
SHADWORTH H. HODGSON,
HONORARY LL.D. EDIN., HONORARY FELLOW OF C.C.C. OXFORD,
HOPET TRY.
PRESIDENT.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON ;
AND 20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH,
1885.
Price Two Shillings.

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KUPCIMAUZIMU SATIETENSJETILISHA KOMUTATO%20UJLITEREZAS

An Address
PHILOSOPHY AND EXPERIENCE.
DELIVERED BEFORE THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY,
OCTOBER 26, 1885
173
(BEING THE ANNUAL PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS FOR THE SEVENTH
SESSION OF THE SOCIETY),
BY
SHADWORTH H. HODGSON,
collway
HONORARY LL.D. EDIN., HONORARY FELLOW OF C.C.C. OXFORD,
PRESIDENT.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
DELIEBER
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON ;
AND 20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH,
1885.
•
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41
.H69

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PHILOSOPHY AND EXPERIENCE.
ONCE more we have met to kindle the sacred torch of
philosophical enquiry among ourselves, and raise it if
possible also as a witness to others, in a time which,
whatever its degree of scientific enlightenment, has still
but a vague, and perhaps on the whole even an unfavour-
able, conception of the nature, validity, and importance,
of any method which is distinctly philosophical. Most
people know and recognise common sense; many know
and recognise science; few, very few in comparison, have
any knowledge or appreciation of philosophy. What most
people, it may be feared, understand by philosophising is
simply indulging, by the light of nature, in ingenious
speculations concerning the general purposes of creation.
In my remarks this evening, I wish to bring to some
sort of completion that subject which has been the staple
of my preceding Addresses, the subject of philosophical
Method. Various sides and relations of philosophy have
been brought forward in the course of those Addresses,
but throughout there has run, as the guiding thread, the
thought of Method, the consideration what the distinct
mode of proceeding and enquiry must be, if Philosophy
itself is to exist as an autonomous pursuit, if in short there
be such a thing as Philosophy at all. This latter point
was the one which I endeavoured, as you may remember,
to establish in my first Address, chiefly by reference to
the history of Philosophy. And the result I summed up
in a brief phrase, not a definition but the foundation of
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one, to the effect, that the aim and purpose of Philo-
sophy was to render the Universe of Things intelligible
to thought, to give a Rationale of the Universe, so far as
it was attainable by human powers. Thus I endeavoured
to indicate, that the purpose of philosophy is to give
systematic unity to human thought concerning the
Universe, not necessarily to discover the principle or
principles, the source or sources, from which the Universe
proceeds. Whether this latter does or does not exceed
human powers is a point for philosophy itself to determine.
In my second Address, "The Practical Bearing of
Speculative Philosophy," the distinction between the two
main branches of Philosophy, the speculative and the
practical, was brought forward, and an answer drawn
therefrom to the question, supposed to be propounded by
a sceptic,-What, if any, was the good of Philosophy?
My third Address attacked the question of Method
more directly, and from an analysis of the constant and
essential feature in all distinct knowledge, that is to say,
of the moment of Reflective Perception, called Appercep-
tion by Kant, elicited the fact, that all knowledge is
knowledge because it contains, in its objects of whatever
kind, the two contrasted but inseparable aspects of the
what and the that, the nature of anything and the fact of
its existence. And this, in combination with what had
previously been said, led us to a formula defining philo-
sophical method as-subjective analysis of objects of con-
sciousness by means of the distinction between conditions of
their essence and conditions of their existence.
My fourth Address was occupied with the further
examination of this fundamental distinction of method, in
connection with, and in the light of, the facts of experi-
ence to which it is applicable, and resulted in establishing
two different senses in which we use the terms, real,
objective, existent, and the like; the first sense denoting
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their simple perceivability, the simple fact of their exist-
ence, and the second sense denoting their foundation in,
and dependence on, the laws which govern the order of
nature, whether this order is or is not specifically known
to us (See particularly pp. 30-33 of that Address). We
thus obtain, it should be noted, a further specification and
restriction of the term real condition, from the larger sense
in which it covers both senses of reality, and in which it
was used in the previous Address. A certain obscurity
attaching to this twofold use of the term real condition +
and its congeners, which I am conscious of having left
unremoved in my third Address, will, I hope, be com-
pletely dispelled by my remarks to-night, partly in con-
sequence of the greater comprehensiveness of the present
survey, partly perhaps of my own thought being now
somewhat more definite and mature.
Lastly, in my Address of last year, the distinction
between real conditioning, in this restricted sense, and
the nature or essence of real objects, in the first sense of
reality, was made the basis of drawing the line of demar-
cation between philosophy and science; philosophy, it
was said, drawing the distinction, and thereby covering
in some sort both domains, and at the same time assign-
ing them severally, one to itself and the other to science,
as their special provinces; that is to say, assigning to
science all investigation of the order of real conditioning,
whether in physics or in psychology, and retaining for
itself all subjective analysis of essence, under which head
falls, I may repeat, the drawing of the distinction itself.
The term philosophy has thus both a broader and a nar-
rower meaning. In the broader, it embraces all analysis
of fact, including the fact of contrast between itself and
science; in the narrower, it is analysis of fact, contrasted
with the discovery of real conditions, which is the special
province of science.
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It is to philosophy in the broader sense that I wish to
return to-night, as I hope my title Philosophy and Expe-
rience sufficiently indicates; to that broader sense which
is contemplated by the phrase Rationale of the Universe,
and also expressed by the definition of Method given in
my third Address. The distinction between the two
senses of Reality, which was drawn in my fourth Address,
and upon which the distinction between philosophy and
science was founded in my fifth, must itself be considered
as a result obtained by applying the method as previously
defined, that is, defined by means of the general distinc-
tion between conditions of essence and conditions of
existence. I wish to-night to complete the outlines of
this subject, by giving a sketch of the main departments
into which philosophy is divisible; that is to say, of its
organic articulation as a system of thought, in conse-
quence of applying this same guiding distinction of
method to the analysis of experience as a whole.
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[There is no larger word than Experience. It is the
equivalent of Consciousness. Kant defines it in several
places by the phrase empirisches Erkenntniss, empirical
knowledge. (E.g. in the Kritik d. R.V. Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories, 2nd edit., p. 132 of Harten-
stein's edition of 1853. Again in the same work, in the
* The part between brackets, the whole of Section I., down to the
words perfect comprehensiveness, was omitted in delivery, and the follow-
ing short transition substituted :-In proceeding to do this, it must be
recalled in the first place, that experience, in the sense of empirical
knowledge, Kant's "empirisches Erkenntniss," is alike our only basis
and our only means of verification; secondly that, since in beginning
to philosophise we find experience already in the form of a world of
objects, as known to ordinary common sense, which are also the objects
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Beweis of the Analogien der Erfahrung, p. 177. And
again in the Metaphysische Aufangsgründe der Naturwiss-
enschaft, Rosenkranz u. Schubert's edition of the Werke,
vol. v. p. 312). It is in this alone that both the material
and the verification of all our enquiries, and all our
theorising, are found. Even if we ask, as Kant did, How
experience itself is possible?—still the proofs, in support
of whatever source or sources may be alleged transcend-
ing it, must be drawn from it, and have their own
analogies in the experiential world. Except from expe-
rience we have in the last resort no means or materials
for framing an hypothesis at all. But this is far from
implying that error is impossible, or that experience is
always in harmony with itself. When we try to harmon-
ise different parts of our experience with each other, the
main question is, whether by the experience which we
take as our source, or by that which we take as our veri-
fication, we mean experiential data pure and simple, or
on the contrary are giving the name of simple experience
to data which are not pure and simple, but have passed
through a transforming process in our minds, by means
of arbitrary associations which have been forgotten. In
the latter case, we are really treating unconscious
assumptions as simple and undoubted facts of experience,
their only true place in experience, did we but know it,
being the category of errors.
investigated by positive science, philosophy necessarily comes forward
as a third way of regarding the objective world, and presupposes the
two other ways of common sense and positive science. Lastly it must
be borne in mind, that philosophy is not merely a Theory of Know-
ledge (Erkenntnisstheorie), but a Theory, or rather, to use a less am-
bitious word, let us say a conspectus or general view, of Knowledge and
its Objects together, a general view taken of Being in the largest sense.
These are preliminaries on which I would gladly dwell at greater
length, if time permitted. As it is, I hasten to my main theme.
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A distrust of hypotheses on the ground of the extreme
difficulty of obtaining experience in its ultimate sim-
plicity, or lowest terms, unmixed with imagination, has
been very frequent and prominent among Englishmen.
If there is, properly speaking, an English School of phi-
losophy at all, this distrust of hypothesis, and the conse-
quent tendency to appeal to experience alone, would be
its distinguishing characteristic. Consider the names of
Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Butler, Tucker, Hartley,
Hume, the Mills, John Grote, G. H. Lewes. Amid all
their differences, all their antagonisms, this insistance on
experience, and experience alone, is common to them all.
The Platonising philosophers must be placed in an oppo-
site category, Henry More, Cudworth, Taylor, and others.
Also it must be noted, that with Bentham and Coleridge,
who, as J. S. Mill has remarked, were the two leading
minds in philosophical thought in England, at the end of
the last and beginning of the present century, there
occurs a break in the tradition. Bentham's powerful but
partial treatment of Ethic, from a law-reformer's point of
view, had the effect of keeping in the background its
dependence upon the analysis of human consciousness in
its whole range, and thereby obscuring for a time the
importance of that more comprehensive analysis. Cole-
ridge, whose genius combined in rarest union the emo-
tional and imaginative nature of a poet with deep and
subtil intellectual power, who was besides a master in
experience, and well aware of its supreme importance in
philosophy, was nevertheless caught and carried along by
the wave of German ontological speculation, then swell-
ing onwards almost irresistibly; and the best results
were lost, which otherwise might well have followed
from that rare combination of endowments. "My head
was with Spinoza," he records in his Biographia, “my
heart with Paul and John." Thank God for those words,
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and others of similar import scattered here and there
throughout his writings. They at least indicate the
aim, by describing the chief difficulty, of philosophy;
namely, to produce a system which, by satisfying the
claims, shall reconcile the antagonism of head and
heart.
The chaos which arose from this break in the tradition
of English philosophy John Stuart Mill endeavoured to
reduce to order, by returning to the old basis of expe-
rience. This is an honour which can never be denied
him. Nor have his efforts in this direction been fruitless.
They have had a great and lasting effect, the benefit of
which we are now reaping, although they were not
crowned with complete success. From him we have
again learnt the necessity of cleaving to experience, and
building only on that traditional basis. But much more
than this may be said of the writer whom I have named
next to the Mills in my list, I mean John Grote, the
author of Exploratio Philosophica. In that work, which
was published in 1865, a comprehensive survey is made
of the whole field of philosophy, its divisions are mapped
afresh, the results of former progress are appraised and
brought to a head, a new start is made on that basis, and
a new, which is the present, epoch of English experiential
philosophy begins. Due honour has never yet been done,
in my opinion, to this great leader of philosophical thought,
whose eminence time alone will fully bring to light. I
think the writers whom I have named as belonging to
one tradition, though I do not by any means put the list
forward as exhaustive, may fairly be taken as representa-
tive of an English School, the characteristic mark of
which may be called Experientialism, the resolve to
obtain experience pure and simple, to see it whole and
without addition, unmixed with imaginations, which come
indeed from experience ultimately, but which have under-
Mo
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gone modifications by filtration through the mental
medium of the observer.*
Experientialism in this sense is not to be confounded
with Positivism. Indeed Positivism supplies an instruc-
tive contrast. It simulates experientialism so far as its
rejection of imagination goes, but it refuses to go all the
way with experience. It begins by saying what kind of
results it will aim at, what kind of enquiries it will alone
consider valuable. It is as much an arbitrary dealing
with experience by way of restriction, as overhaste to
account for things by imagined entities or powers is an
arbitrary dealing with it by way of amplification. We
want the whole of experience on the one hand, as much
as we want nothing but experience on the other. When
once it is seen how difficult it is to obtain this, and that
the source of the difficulty lies in the unconscious modifi-
cations of the human mind, arising partly from the mere
process of association, partly from the interest with which
we look on some things in preference to others, then we
are led to devise methods for the express purpose of
obtaining experiential data pure; and the name of an
experiential method may fairly be given to any method
devised for this purpose. Be it noted, that I state the
contrast between experience pure and experience adul-
terated in terms of ordinary life, and on the ordinary
psychological assumption of minds in presence of an
-
*There is one writer in particular, the late Dean Mansel, whom I
would gladly claim as a member of the English school, did the avowedly
Kantian basis of his speculation permit. His refusal to follow Kant in
that development of his theory which is contained in the Critic of
Practical Reason is not the same thing as exchanging a Kantian for an
experiential basis. Nevertheless it may be truly said, that, so far as
the question of man's ability or inability to comprehend the Infinite is
concerned, there are few to whom philosophy in this country owes a
deeper debt, than to the brilliant author of the Bampton Lectures for
1858, on The Limits of Religious Thought.
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external world. To state it in terms of philosophical
analysis would be premature, even if it were possible;
and moreover would not serve our present purpose of
connecting philosophical with ordinary method.
Method in philosophy holds very much the same place
that Hypothesis holds in science. Both must be tested
by their results. But while results in science are tested
by successful and verified prediction, and there is no
prediction in philosophy, a Rationale of the Existent
being its aim, the question is, what are the results which,
in philosophy, test the value and soundness of the method?
They are the removal of all gratuitous and merely logical
puzzles, the harmonising of all parts or facts of conscious-
ness, or what is the same thing, of experience, with each
other, and thereby by degrees obtaining such a systematic
Rationale of the whole, as was contemplated in my first
Address, and there exhibited as the great purpose of
philosophy. Puzzles are introduced into philosophy by
making tacit and unsuspected assumptions; in contrast
thereby to the assumptions of science, which are hypo-
theses adopted for some express purpose, and with full
awareness of their hypothetical character. The sound-
ness of a method in philosophy consists, therefore, in its
leading to the successful detection and avoidance of
unwitting assumptions.
Philosophy begins with questioning experience as it
is found in the præjudicia of common sense, the world of
common-sense things and persons, events and actions.
The problems which it has to solve are proposed to it by
the common-sense view of things; it does not invent, or
begin by proposing, problems of its own. In growing up
from infancy, we acquire a considerable measure of com-
mon-sense ideas and knowledge, habits and maxims, long
before we philosophise, if indeed we ever arrive at philo-
sophising at all. In those early years we are said to be
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acquiring experience, which is undeniably real, and often
extremely definite, and extremely varied. We are more-
over trained necessarily, from infancy, by the care of those
about us, to think of objects, and to distinguish objects,
in the way in which those about us have distinguished
and thought about them. We grow up continuing and
confirming the tradition of our elders. We group the
same percepts together, and call them by the same names.
Our native language becomes for us a familiar possession,
corresponding in all its vocabulary, grammar, and idiom,
to the supposed realities of things. Very high degrees of
enlightenment, acuteness, culture, and refinement, may
be, and often are, reached by persons who have never
made any scientific or technical acquisition, outside this
ordinary circle of ideas, which is common to the scientific
and the unscientific alike, the ordinary world of common
sense.
It must not be supposed, that this common-sense world,
this common-sense way of viewing experience, is ever
reversed or abolished, or imagined by philosophers to be
so, in favour of some other more accurate results of science
or of philosophy, which step into its place. When this
idea is entertained, it is due to a prejudice of common
sense itself. Scientific or philosophic results, compared
to the ideas of common sense, are not opposed to them as
the real is opposed to the apparent. The difference is
not in point of reality, but in point of method, and strict-
ness in obeying it. Standing on the level of common-
sense knowledge, as his acknowledged basis and starting-
point, the man of science proceeds to analyse, to compare,
to measure, to make experiments, to frame hypotheses, to
predict, to verify. In all this, he never leaves the order
of ideas which we designate common sense. His mole-
cules and atoms are but ordinary visible and tangible
bodies, taken on a smaller scale, and with their actions
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imagined as corresponding to their number, size, position,
and environment, precisely as if they were ordinary bodies
in ordinary environments.
What science does is simply to apply a mental micro-
scope, telescope, and magnifying glass, to the ordinary
world, thereby revealing in detail, and summing up in
general and abstract statements, the hidden mechanism
by which it works. Mathematic in its two branches of
geometry and calculation, combined with experiment in
actual matter,—this is the great instrument of the reve-
lation. Another world, and yet the same, is thus created,
as it were, from the ribs of the old world of common
sense. Eve is evoked from Adam's side. Familiarity is
the note of the old world, law of the new. The same
phenomena are distributed afresh. Instead of being seen
in result, they are seen in process of production and
operation. But every class of contributories to the result
is separately examined, and falls under a special branch
of science. And this separate examination it is, which
enables the process of production and operation to be seen;
enables the mental construction of the whole, by showing
how the several kinds of matter and energy, which have
been severally studied by the several sciences, are actually
combined.
Two ways of examining experience and acquiring
fresh knowledge from the examination are now in out
line before us; the first is that of common sense, which
gives us our ordinary and familiar world; the second is
that of science, which traces the laws and mechanism of
that same world, mechanism and laws which, but for what
I have called the mental lens of science, would have been
totally hidden from us. But as it is, there is no corner
of the world into which it does not pry, in search for the
causes of things. Consider but the array presented by
the greater divisions of the army of those sciences which,
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from the perfect generality of their scope, may be called
speculative. At the head of all stand the mathematical
sciences, calculation, geometry, kinematic. Next come
those which treat of force as manifested in inorganic
matter, dynamics and statics; then chemistry; then those
parts of physics which have what are called the imponder-
ables for their object; then, passing to organic matter,
biology; and lastly that science, to which it belongs to
examine the deepest forces which are operative in human
consciousness, psychology.
Add to these the divisions of the other wing of the
scientific army, I mean the chronological and historical
wing, relating to the actual series of events which we
have reason to think has taken place, and is taking place,
in our world,—astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, com-
prising the theory of the evolution of living beings, as
well as that of the social and political evolution of the
educable races, mankind at the head of them.
Lastly consider the list of what, in comparison with
what I have called the speculative and the historical, may
best perhaps be called the practical group of sciences, I
mean those under which are ranged, and by means of
which are deduced, the various arts of life, from the
mechanical arts at one end of the series to the ars artium
at the other, the art of living well, both for individuals
and for communities,-ethic, politic, and also, in view of
man's connection with the Universe, as well as with the
earth and the inhabitants of earth, theology, the study of
man's relations with the Divine.
Science and common sense, the world as known by
science, and the world as known by common sense, two
faculties and two worlds, the same and yet different,
which might seem not only mutually to supplement one
another, as in fact they do, but also to exhaust between
them all possible fields and kinds of knowledge, so that
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what was not within possible contemplation as a problem
for science could not possibly arise as a problem at all.
Common sense at the periphery, and science at the centre,
seem to have the whole sphere of existence within their
range, at any rate, though they may not be able to pene-
trate every recess therein. But the point to which I wish
to lead you is, that this is not entirely so; that there is
an omission on the part of both the faculties or methods
now named, which is fatal to their claim of all-compre-
hensiveness; that there is a third faculty or method, which
rectifies that omission, seizes on a question which has been
passed over, and thereby educes a third world, a world
again different and yet again the same, from the ribs of
the second, as the second was educed from the ribs of the
first;—and that this third faculty is philosophy.
Familiarity, I said above, is the note of the common-
sense world; common sense takes its objects as given, as
ready-made and given objects; asking no question as to
what giving is, that is, what it is to exist and be. In this
point, science exactly follows her lead; she changes in-
deed the personnel, so to speak, of the existents; she
speaks of molecules, atoms, ethers, motions, and so on, as
existent, where common sense spoke of rocks and trees,
light and air, plants and animals, as existent; but the
conception of existence is left where it was, unquestioned.
The supposed Cosmic Nebula, when it is supposed, is
supposed to have existed, is taken as an existent. But
what is an existent? What is it to Be? What do we
mean by Being?
The question in this wide generality of meaning, for
there is nothing to which it does not apply, is never
asked either by common sense or by science. Existence
is taken as something per se notum.
In other words,
existents, rà ŏvra, are taken as absolutes, independent of
anything else, unless it be other existents, fragments as it
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were of causal energy striking root of themselves, though
derived originally, it may be, from some primeval but
existent source, underived itself, the Causa Sui et Mundi.
Such is the problem transmitted by common sense and
science to philosophy, -the problem of the absolute,-
What is it to Be?
Now this question opens an entirely new domain, an
entirely new series, of enquiries. The question, not the
answer to it, is the entrance to philosophy. It is not as
if philosophy had a new and striking answer to give to
this question at first setting out, an answer which, carry-
ing conviction with it, thereby proved the value of philo-
sophy, by helping science and common sense out of an
embarrassment. The answer ultimately given by philo-
sophy is one implicitly known already, and even when
given produces no impression of novelty. It is the ques-
tion which is important, as being the first of a new kind
of questions, a kind which puts a new face upon the whole
of knowledge, and evokes a third out of the two former
worlds, different from and yet the same with them both.
The question about Being is a limit-question; the
whole of experience is included in it. We cannot go
beyond experience, and assign a larger term, under which
Being can be subsumed, and so explained. It may be
pictured either as lying within a fixed barrier set to
thought, with vacuity, that is, non-being, beyond it, or as
lying within an elastic barrier to thought, which recedes
as thought advances, so as to include every new object
thought of. It is one of those ultimate terms, to seek a
reason for which is to destroy reason, in Aristotle's phrase.
In all rational account of anything, Being must be taken
as known, in order to obtain a rational account at all.
When therefore we reach this limit, when we ask the
question, What Being means?—then it is plain we in
some sort turn back upon our own footsteps; we no longer
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go on to a further explanation, beyond Being, but we ask
this question in a different sense from the previous ones.
In what sense do we ask it? Clearly in the sense of
bringing to light some thought, or some feature, which
was implicitly present in our use of the term, but which
we have not had explicitly presented to us. What is that
we mean by this term Being, which we have been using?
Such is our question. And this question is plainly reflec-
tive or retrospective, and aims at obtaining a further and
more distinct knowledge of our own knowing.
Yet note, on the other hand, that the question does
not relate solely to our own individual knowledge, or to
ourselves, as something different and apart from the things
to which we apply the term being. If that were the case,
the question would be already classed as belonging to
psychology, from its assuming the existence of Subjects;
and at the same time would be guilty of the absurdity of
assuming its own answer to be already known, inasmuch
as both we and our knowledge would be assumed as
really existing, that is, as belonging to an already known
category. But this is not the sense or scope of the ques-
tion about the meaning of the term being generally. The
question is, not how we, as individual beings, come to
use this term in preference to other terms, but what
relation between knowledge and objects of knowledge is
designated by it. Not the relation between one class of
objects and another, not the relation either between things
and things, or between thoughts and thoughts, but the
relation between things generally and thoughts generally,
or between objects and knowledge of them, is the thing
aimed at.
This circumstance, this drift of the question, it is,
which gives it cardinal importance in opening up the
philosophical line of enquiry, as distinguished from the
common-sense and the scientific lines. The relation be-
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tween thoughts and things, between objective thought
and objects thought of, between knowledge and reality,
or in one word, between the subjective and objective
aspects of existence, this is the peculiar aim and pro-
vince of philosophy, as distinguished from the two other
lines of thought which precede it. The field is the same,
but in philosophy it is considered always in a double
reference, or under a double aspect. Knowledge and its
object, not the knowing being and the things he knows,
-this is the distinction in which philosophy originates,
and by which it is governed. This distinction also gives
it greater grasp. For the knowing being cannot other-
wise be got at. He is an object thought of; to assume
him as the subjective aspect of the remainder of the
universe is to assume one atom of the universe as the
subjective equivalent of the whole, and that without
throwing any new light on his own nature. He, as a
real existent and agent, endowed with real powers and
modes of feeling, knowing, and acting, is the object of
psychology. His knowledge, abstracting from the laws of
that agency by which in him it is brought about,—his
knowledge, compared not with its real conditions in him,
but with the real objects of which it is the knowledge,—
and having those real objects confronted with it,—that is
to say, the relation between knowing, as such, and being,
as such, this is the first starting-point and standing
ground of philosophy, in the strict sense of the term.
Philosophy is thus as properly a theory of knowing as
of being, as much an enquiry into the nature of know-
ledge as into the nature of existence. It is the one just
because it is the other. The two aspects are inseparable.
Knowledge is the subjective aspect of existence, and
existence the objective aspect of knowledge. This is
sometimes expressed by saying, that we know something
of something else. It is this relation to its own subjective
19
■.
2"
aspect, to knowledge generally, that is meant by the
phrase relativity of existence; not its relation to us as the
Subjects of the knowledge. Any relation of an existent
to us, as Subjects of the knowledge of it, would be a rela-
tion of it to other existents, a relation not between know-
ing and being, but between two or more beings, two or
more existents. It is knowledge, not man, that is the
subjective aspect of existence; not man, but man's know-
ledge that in a certain sense, is πάντων μέτρον. Thus not
only does the relativity or doubleness of aspect exclude
the idea of absolute existence, but the exclusion of it is
owing to something which is at once essential to know-
ledge, namely, its being necessarily knowledge of some-
thing, and at the same time essential to existence, namely,
its being necessarily existence for knowledge, since other-
wise the term existence would be meaningless. It is in
this sense, and for this reason only, that the Absolute is
an impossible and self-contradictory idea. So far from
the Absolute being, as sometimes supposed, the object-
matter which is characteristic of philosophy, the reverse
is the case.
It is rather a conception characteristic of
common sense and positive science, in contradistinction
from philosophy. From these philosophy inherits it, as a
conception till then undoubted, a conception the legiti-
macy of which it alone is in a position to criticise. Abso-
lutes are physical, not metaphysical, entities; the Absolute
is a scientific, not a philosophical, conception.
I hope I have now made it evident, that philosophy is
no pursuit apart from the interests and methods of ordi-
nary life, requiring some special intuition, or based on
some special axioms, which men in general cannot be
expected to admit; but that it is the third and last of a
group or series of methods, which together cover the
whole field of knowledge real or possible, the two prior
members of which are common sense and positive science.
..
4:1
."
*
20
Moreover it will be evident, I hope, that it is in a most
important sense continuous with these prior methods,
springing out of them simply by turning their object-
matter round, as it were, and bringing another aspect
of it into view, taking their largest and limiting category,
that of Being, and instituting a retrospective and critical
enquiry into it as such, that is, in its character of the
largest and limiting category of experience.
But what is the enabling principle, I would ask in the
next place, or rather what principle of method is neces-
sarily involved in our thus taking the category of Being
in this its utmost and all-embracing scope?
We are
enabled to do so simply in virtue of our distinguishing
and abstracting from the question how comes, and retain-
ing solely the question what is. How Being comes to be
Being, this is plainly a question which cannot be pro-
pounded without contradiction in the thought of the pro-
pounder. Being in its largest scope plainly includes the
Being of causes as well as the Being of effects. And
therefore to ask how Being comes to Be is either self-
contradictory, or else asked about Being in the sense of
conditioned Being only, and not of Being conditioned and
unconditioned alike, nor yet of Being conditioning only.
The question, what Being is, is prior to every other in a
comprehensive, critical, and retrospective enquiry. Causa-
tion or Conditioning is a distinction which pre-supposes
Being generally. And the question, when taken in this
large sense, can mean only, What is meant by Being, or
in other words, What is its subjective aspect, its differentia
in knowledge?
1
In short, there is but one way of approaching the
question of Being, which is the question of philosophy.
It consists in asking what we know of it, what Being is
known as ? In this consists the constantly remarked sub-
jective character of modern philosophy. Aristotle's First
:
21
Philosophy, or Theology, afterwards called Metaphysic,
marked out for itself the enquiry into Being as its field,—
τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὂν, καὶ τὰ τόντῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ' αυτό. The progress
of modern times has slowly brought us to see, that the
only way of enquiring into Being is to enquire what we
know of Being, or what Being is known as. With this
change to subjectivity in the method, Aristotle's view of
the scope of philosophy remains true. It is still Being
that is the object of it, only that we are now aware of the
fact, that we see it, not from outside, but from within, the
philosopher being himself taken as a part of the whole
object contemplated; or, to put the same thing in another
way, abstraction being made of who or where is the con-
templator, and attention being fixed solely on the content
contemplated.
When the Absolute is taken as the object, or part of
the object, of philosophy, a wider field is apparently
taken, but a narrower one really. It is sometimes said,
that all knowledge is indeed of the relative, but that this
relative knowledge of ours necessarily implies an absolute
and unknowable reality beyond our knowledge. The
Absolute is thus made to appear as an unknowable, self-
existent, background to knowledge. But again the ques-
tion occurs, is not this very statement of the Absolute
a statement of it as relative? It would seem that,
granting we cannot grasp the Absolute, we can and do
grasp our knowledge of it, so that the question of its
Being becomes again the question, What its Being is
known as ?
Or again another turn may be given to the thought of
the Absolute, by regarding it as containing either the
conditions of the relative, or the conditions of our know-
ledge of the relative. The Absolute then becomes the
Transcendent, or the Noumenal, as opposed to the pheno-
menal in knowledge, or the phenomenal in existence.
..
22
¿
But again the same remark is applicable. The terms
transcendent and noumenal are only apparently wider and
larger than the term phenomenal. They are so apparently,
because they cover a region of conditions, which is inde-
finite compared to the conditioned existence, and condi-
tioned knowledge, with which they are contrasted. They
are not so really, because, granting the real conditions of
that indefinite region, still we surmise them as part of
Being, and after all it is but the content of one part of
our knowledge, namely, our surmise, which is larger than
that of another part, namely, our more definite knowledge.
In short, the distinctions between the Absolute and the
Relative, the Transcendent and the Phenomenal, the
Noumenal and the Phenomenal, are as much distinctions
in the content of our knowledge, as they are in the con-
tent of Being, the object of knowledge.
Similar remarks apply to another conception which is
a derivative of two of the foregoing, the transcendent
and the noumenal. I mean the conception of a priori
Forms, in which all phenomenal knowledge, and conse-
quently all phenomena which are its objects, are restricted
to appear. By their aid the noumenal and transcendent
Subject is supposed to carve, or construct, out of the
noumenal and transcendent Object, the phenomenally
objective world. The a priori Forms mediate, as it were,
between the two otherwise unknowable regions of exist-
ence, and render the Absolute phenomenally manifest.
But the transcendent Subject and the transcendent Object
are entirely hypothetical. Since they are assumed as in
themselves unknowable, it is a pure hypothesis to assign
them the functions indicated by the names Subject and
Object. That the Forms, called a priori, are constant,
and, so far as we can see, essential features, in phenomena
and phenomenal knowledge or experience, is no ground
for supposing that they have a root or source in something
:
י.
23
✪
݂ܕ
*
which on the one hand exists, but on the other cannot
be thought of, independently of themselves. Moreover,
granting that they had a source in the unknowable and
the absolute, still they would help us only to a partial
and incidental view of that world which they are supposed
to manifest; the phenomenal world would be merely the
world as seen by those beings, in whose constitution these
particular a priori Forms were inwrought, or on whose
cognitive powers they were imposed.
The Kantian Transcendental Hypothesis, therefore,-
for you will have seen that this is what is in question,—
so far from bearing a philosophical character, so far from
affording a free and unrestricted outlook over the whole
field of knowledge, existence, or experience, bears a cha-
racter the very opposite, the character, I mean, of a
scientific hypothesis, an hypothesis to account for the
genesis of human experience as we know it, on the
assumption that it is not experience of the truth of
things. Four assumptions are made,—first that there is
an unknowable Absolute, next that there are transcend-
ent Agencies therein, thirdly that these agencies act in
certain known Forms, and lastly that these actions con-
stitute human experience. By these assumptions it is
sought to connect human experience with the unknowable
source and centre of absolute existence.
7
Philosophy, however, painfully aware of long and
fruitless wanderings in these quasi-scientific and non-
philosophic paths, has come at last to put the simple
question-What is there in experience to justify the
assumption of an Unknowable Absolute at all? She
recalls the circumstance, that, in every moment or in-
stance of distinct knowing, that is, of consciousness, the
distinction of knowing from being known is observable, and
suspects that the being known has been erected into an
unknowable existence by an illusory separation from its
.
24
**
other aspect or moment, knowing, which is really in expe-
rience inseparable from it; arguing that, if experience is
the test of truth, an unknowable existence is a fiction.
Farther she reminds us, that the business of experience,
which is also the business of philosophy, is not to be, but
to know; and that, since, in knowing, the known is
always involved, and we never know without knowing
something, therefore we cannot in experience, or in
philosophy, escape from the inseparability of the two
moments.
Supposing, indeed, it were our business, in philosophy,
not to know but to be, then indeed it might for an
instant be imagined, that we could very well be without
knowing it, and thus that the moment of being was separ-
able. But would our being, even then, be wholly un-
known,—unknown to intelligence in every respect, as
(by supposition) to ourselves? Surely not. We cannot
make the supposition, that our own being is unknown to
intelligence in every respect, and therefore it is a verbal
fallacy to profess to do so, for we are assuming it as
known, namely, to ourselves now, in making the suppo-
sition itself. It is only to ourselves in a restricted sense,
namely, as particular objects of our present knowledge,
that we can suppose our own being to be unknown. A
being wholly and in every respect unknown is a not-being.
In the very meaning of being, knowability is involved.
To escape, therefore, from the ultimate inseparability of
the two moments of experience, knowing and being
known, is to escape not from relative into absolute exist-
ence, but from relative existence into nonentity. By
Being, by Existence, we mean that which is of a piece
with what is known, and not that which is known as
unknowable, or which is unrelated in relation to know-
ledge. The conception which, on the experiential method
of philosophy, replaces that of the unknowable absolute
25
is the conception of the Universe, regarded in its deepest,
essential, and constant features.
At the same time it must be distinctly remarked, that,
while the very nature of knowledge excludes the exist
ence of an unknowable, this same nature of knowledge
involves, and necessarily involves, the existence of an
unknown. Knowledge has been described above as being
always knowledge of something, we know something of
something else. The something is the known part, and
the something else is the unknown part of our knowledge.
The something is "objective thought," and the something
else is "object thought of,"-expressions whic.. will be
familiar to you from my last Address. Our knowledge is
thus, as it were, at every moment astride the universe of
things, one side known, the other unknown. Of the
unknown side we know two things, first that it is un-
known, and secondly that it is the other side of, and
continuous with, the known. It is no unknowable, trans-
cendent, noumenal, or absolute existence, but a constant
category in our knowledge, applicable now to one thing, now
to another, owing to the fact, that knowing is a process.
Just as light reveals three things, itself, and objects, and
darkness, so knowledge reveals itself, the known, and the
unknown. The darkness is as much a phenomenon to
light, as the light itself and the illumined objects are;
and similarly the unknown is a phenomenon to know-
ledge, just as rightfully as the knowledge itself and the
objects known. The unknown is no unknowable existent,
but a category, and constant as a category, in our know-
ledge.
•
It is evident, moreover, that we can ascribe no really
effective content or character to the unknown, except by
ascribing to it characteristics drawn from our knowledge
of the known, and imagining it to act in ways analogous
to those of known real agents. Theories, therefore,
*
'तुं
26
which hypostasise the unknown as a noumenal or trans-
cendent agent, or agents, are really making hypotheses
similar to the hypotheses of positive science, in a field
which avowedly lies beyond the reach, not of positive
science only, but of every kind of speculative knowledge.
What justification can there be for ascribing agency at
all, or any other attribute which draws its meaning from
experience, to the absolutely unknowable? It is ascrib-
ing efficient agency to nothingness. If however, as
philosophy must maintain, our knowledge of the unknown
is derived from that of the known, as the knowledge of
darkness is derived from that of light, then, and from
this point of view, which is the subjective point of view
of philosophy, we embrace even the unknown in our
purview, when we put the first question of philosophy,-
What Being means. We embrace the unknown as a
category or rubric including unknown objects, but with-
out hypostasising it as an absolute First Cause.
Slightly to vary the expression of my meaning, the
conception of Things-in-themselves, or unknowable exist-
ents, and the distinction between them and phenomena,
are a part of our way of regarding experience, and ought
therefore to be reckoned to method, and not made abso-
lute. Making the distinction absolute is a remnant of
the objective method in philosophy, surviving even in
Kantianism. The distinction by which it is replaced, on
the subjective and experiential method, is that between
things regarded in their thatness, or as de facto existents,
and the same things regarded in their whatness, or as
known in consciousness. The old distinction is given up,
not so much because the conception on which it rests
(existents known to be unknowable) is self-contradictory,
as because it is an assumption made concerning the uni-
verse, prior to examining our knowledge of the universe.
The mystery of de facto existence may remain for ever as
2
27
unfathomable by the subjective method, as it is repre-
sented to be by the old distinction. But it will not also,
and at the same time, be represented as a mystery attach-
ing to a definite object, or objects, isolated from know-
ledge, which is the conception required by the old
distinction,—instead of attaching to de facto existence
altogether.
It is cheering to see, that even Germans are at last
awaking to a partial sense of these truths, are becoming
alive to the untenability both of Kant's Transcendental-
ism, and of the subjective or idealistic Absolutism which
was its natural development, are beginning to conceive
subjective analysis of experience as the main business of
philosophy, and philosophy itself as a work to which all
genuine students may contribute something, instead of
being the appanage of some individual genius who, read-
ing by inspiration the riddle of the universe, and giving
a name to the energy known, by an a priori assumption,
to be its eternal source, may construct once and for all
the sole sufficient theory of its system. I refer more
particularly to a recent work, in which these views are
expressed, Dr. R. von Schubert-Soldern's Grundlagen
einer Erkenntnisstheorie, Leipzig, 1884, in the Introduction
which (p. 3) the names of several other well-known
riters are mentioned, as representatives, in different
degrees, of the same general line of thought.
Cheering, however, as it doubtless is, to find that
views, which harmonise so well with what one has been
maintaining for twenty years, are at last beginning to
recommend themselves to notice, yet an Englishman may
well be permitted to doubt, whether a method, which has
the appearance of being simply a revival of Kantianism
minus Kant's transcendental hypotheses, can either itself
take the place of philosophy, or be of any real service as
its preliminary or propedeutic. In fact we are compelled

28
·
to put the question to this new creation of the German
mind, Erkenntnisstheorie, which seems to have taken the
place of Ontology deceased, on what ground it professes
to stand. Does it stand on the ground of common sense,
or of psychology, or of philosophy? Or is it merely a
new a priori logic of abstractions?
Kant's critical and transcendental system, which is
contained in his three great works, the Critic of Pure
Reason, the Critic of Practical Reason, and the Critic of
Judgment, was in reality a piece of psychology founded
on unwarranted and even unthinkable assumptions. He
himself regarded it merely as the preliminary to a philo-
sophy, or philosophical Doctrine, which should consist of
two branches, one theoretical, the other practical, one
being the Metaphysic of Nature, the other the Metaphysic
of Morals. This conception of philosophy as a doctrine
of reality, having two branches theoretical (or speculative
as I prefer to call it) and practical, was no doubt perfectly
correct in itself, and so far as it went, being founded on
facts of immediate experience. Kant was only wrong in
allowing it to be overridden by the psychological concep-
tion of a "pure" knowledge derived from a priori prin-
ciples; the carrying out of which latter conception could
issue only in systems of Idealistic Ontology, which wa
in fact the result in Germany. It is true, that thes
systems made away, more or less completely, with Kant's
idea of Things-in-themselves; but this is only one part, and
that the dependent part, of his whole hypothesis. They
still retained the hypothesis of energy, or agency, some-
where or somehow bound up with consciousness, or with
the Subject as distinguished from Objects, and therefore
still attempted to construct their objective world a priori.
Kant's view of philosophy as a doctrine of reality,
having two branches, theoretical (or speculative) and
practical, the general truth of which is verified by expe-

29
rience, is what we, at the present day, have still to work
out; not however on a priori principles, but by subjec-
tive analysis of experience, independent of psychological
assumptions. But what is meant by a Theory of Know-
ledge? Kant's position at any rate was perfectly intel-
ligible. His hypothesis of a noumenal Subject, endowed
with definite faculties, each of which worked in distinct
and nameable forms, supplied him with a basis, on which
his criticism of knowledge and its necessary limits could
be founded. And such a criticism could plausibly lay
claim to be a necessary preliminary for a positive doctrine
of Being. But a system of general criticism of knowledge
does not become philosophy, merely by omitting psycho-
logical assumptions. What vantage-ground does the
knowledge criticising occupy, in respect of the knowledge
criticised? On what basis does its criticism rest? It has
the appearance of being psychology omitting the psychical
agent, instead of imagining a fictitious one, as Kant did.
But to surrender one basis is not to acquire another. Its
being bad as psychology does not show, that it is good
as philosophy. Philosophy has aims and requirements of
its own, to which a mere Theory of Knowledge is pre-
sumably inadequate. On the one hand, philosophy is the
theory of Being; not of knowledge only (Erkenntniss-
theorie), but of Knowing and Being together. And on
the other hand, to say that a method is analysis, or even
subjective analysis, is not to show its sufficiency as a
method. Not analysis only, but a method of the analysis,
a guide in analysing, is required; a guide, however, which
at the same time shall not import any foregone conclu-
sion, or pre-conceived ideas, into the analytic process or
its results. This guide, as you will remember, I suppose
myself to have found in "the distinction between condi-
tions of essence and conditions of existence." And some
such guide at any rate seems necessary, before we can

"
30
:
speak of subjective analysis as a sufficient and indepen-
dent method of philosophising.
For these reasons, while adopting subjective analysis
as the main and fundamental business of philosophy, and
standing thus on the traditional ground of the English
school, a frank appeal to experience and experience alone,
I also characterise philosophy by its traditional name of
Metaphysic, indicating thereby, that it is no mere prelimi-
nary criticism of the cognitive powers, no mere propræ-
deutic of investigations into the laws of Being, but that
it is at one and the same time a critical investigation into
what we know, and an analytical investigation into what
we know as being. The name Theory of Knowledge
(Erkenntnisstheorie), which is also, I believe, derived ori-
ginally from Kant, is open, in my opinion, to precisely
the same objection in principle, as the opposite name
Ontology would be, if applied to philosophy. The one
suggests that Knowledge can be studied apart from
Being; the other, that Being can be studied apart from
Knowledge, and thus that the absolute essence of the
universe can be grasped by man, revealed by some a priori
intuition superior to criticism.

Again, a Theory of Knowledge, which is not also at
the same time a Theory of Being, is but a particular or
special branch of knowledge, founded on the fact, that
its object, knowledge, has been marked off from other
objects, previous to being made the object of a theory.
Standing thus on a prior distinction, which it adopts
ready drawn to its hand from elsewhere, a Theory of
Knowledge which is not also a Theory of Being is depen-
dent on that prior distribution of object-matter which it
adopts, and therefore on some Theory of Being prior to
itself. Dependence and speciality, therefore, are sug-
gested by the very name Theory of Knowledge, and render
it unsuitable to be the name of an enquiry, which lays
31
claim, as philosophy, to complete autonomy and perfect
comprehensiveness.]
II.
TURNING, then, from this view of philosophy which I
have now taken, as the last in a series of three modes of
regarding things, the two first being common sense and
positive science, I come to a closer consideration of its
method, or mode of operation in articulating a system of
philosophical thought, including the general heads of
division and distribution of the object-matter, which arise
in consequence of the guiding distinction of its method
being applied thereto. And in the first place I would
note, that this guiding distinction, by which of course I
mean the distinction between conditions of essence and
conditions of existence, or nature and genesis, is not
invented or arbitrarily adopted by philosophy, but that it
is found already implicit in every, even the simplest, act
of questioning, or attention to a content; and that this
universality of its presence in all questioning is one
necessary condition of its validity, when chosen as the
guiding distinction of philosophy, that is, when explicitly
adopted as the guide in putting the first strictly philo-
sophical question, the limit-question, What is Being? and
the further questions which result from the answer first
obtained to it.
For philosophy at starting does not begin with a
tabula rasa, but with a known and familiar world of
objects already given; that is to say, it begins from the
ordinary world of common sense, the world of empirical
absolutes, things and persons, events and actions. No one
begins to philosophise at birth. It is only about the
common-sense world and its objects that the philosophic
question What? can originally be put. A man who
begins to philosophise is already familiar with this world,
+
"
-:-
1
Di
1.
32
and with himself as an inhabitant and member of it. In
most cases also he is familiar with some parts of the
world of positive science, which is also a world of abso-
lutes, though consisting of a different set from those of
the common-sense world. By himself, for instance, he
means, in common sense, his consciousness and his organ-
ism together; in the science of psychology, he means by
it the real agent animating his organism, whatever that
agent may turn out to be. These two worlds being pre-
supposed, philosophy begins with the simple question—
What is meant by the Being of them?-expecting an
answer different in kind from the answers given by com-
mon sense and positive science, inasmuch as the question
has a different sense, namely this,-How is Being to be
characterised, seeing that there is no larger category, as
there is in the case of everything else, under which it can
be subsumed, and from which it can be distinguished by
differentiation, and in that manner classified?
Observe another point also. A conscious being and
its consciousness, belonging originally to the world of
common sense and science, now come to belong, in ask-
ing this question, to the world of philosophy. That is to
say, not the Object of knowledge only, but the Subject of
it also passes over into the philosophic domain, with the
putting of this limit-question. The same consciousness is
continued into a new line of enquiry. The consciousness
is continued; the new departure being marked only by a
particular kind of question being asked, the limit-question
about Being. Philosophic consciousness is thus a con-
tinuation of pre-philosophic; that is to say, it is a con-
tinuation of that consciousness which has developed with
our development from infancy onwards, and as part of
which our whole knowledge of the objects composing the
common-sense and scientific worlds has developed up to
the point marked by the first philosophic or limit-question.
S
33
ہو
Observe also, that the objects of the pre-philosophic world
consist really of objective and subjective aspects together,
just as much as those of the philosophic world do, though
it is not consciously and explicitly observed that they do
so, prior to the philosophic question. Indeed this is the
very fact which becomes explicit in the first answer to
the limit-question, What is Being? that answer consisting
in this, as I have brought out in a former Address, that
esse is percipi; which is simply assigning an obverse
aspect to being, namely knowing, and at the same time
an obverse aspect to knowing, namely being.
Philosophic consciousness, then, is a continuation of
that pre-philosophic consciousness which has developed
with us from infancy onwards, and which has given us
our knowledge of the empirical objects of common sense
and science. And it is also essential to notice, that this
last named knowledge has been attained by the very same
method of questioning and attention which is continued
into philosophy, I mean by asking the question what, as
the prior indispensable condition of asking the further
question how comes, in any and every object. The ques-
tion what is the name or formula describing the purpose
of the act of attention as a cognitive or perceptive act.
And obviously, to have a content distinctly present to
consciousness, which is the purpose of this act, and which
is expressed by the question, what is this content, is a pre-
requisite to asking distinctly any other question about it,
such as, what it resembles, or from what it differs, or
generally in what relations it stands to other contents or
objects of consciousness, among which relations is the
relation to its conditions of existence, or things to which
it stands related as a dependent. Observe, I speak only
of distinct perceptions. I do not deny, that difference
indistinctly perceived is a pre-requisite of distinct per-
ception. But I maintain, that a distinct perception of
с
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+
+
+
PAN
34
what a percept is per se, or in relation to consciousness
alone, is both logically and psychologically a pre-requisite
to its being compared with other percepts, and conse-
quently prior to classifying and naming it.
One more point remains to be noted in regard to the
continuation of pre-philosophic consciousness into philo-
sophic. It is this. Putting the limit-question about
Being, which marks the transition, is not putting a ques-
tion about the nature of the knowing agent, or Subject,
as distinguished from the nature of the things known,
or Object. It is one thing to ask a question about the
nature of Being generally, under which both the Subject
and the Object are included, and quite another thing to
ask a question about the differentia of the Subject from
the Object. The distinction between these two questions
lies across the threshold of philosophy, and confusing
them prevents numbers from ever setting foot within
philosophy at all.*
The confusion is increased and worse confounded by
the circumstance, that the most usual and almost neces-
sary phrases by which knowledge is described, those for
instance which employ "I" and "We" and their deri
vatives, afford no aids to perceiving the distinction, but
rather help to obliterate and obscure it. For it always
seems, in consequence of their use, that a question about
our knowledge, we being the Subjects knowing, must be
a question about ourselves, and that a question about the
objects of our knowledge must be a question about the
objects as distinguished from the part which we contri-
bute to the knowledge of them. Besides which, very
many of the important substantive words in constant
use are ambiguous, from including more than one dis-
tinguishable thing in their meaning. Perception and
* On this point see my paper, Subjectivity in Philosophy,—A Reply,
in MIND, xxix. Jan. 1883.
depe
35
7
knowing, for instance, even after being distinguished from
percept and thing known, imply an action, as well as a
state, or a content, of consciousness. The structure of
language may indeed afford many useful hints as to the
mechanism of thought, but it is very far from being an
adequate mirror of its subtilties.
Now the truth is that, in putting the limit-question,
What is Being?—our Self, or Subject, or knowing Agent,
is properly included among the Beings concerning whom
(or which) that question is asked; and when we put that
question under the guidance of our method, we con-
sciously and purposely include it among them. In putting
it, therefore, we consciously abstract from the circum-
stance, that a Subject is required to put it, and is putting
it actually; and we leave the special nature of that Sub-
ject, which for our thought at the time is an existent
Object, for future enquiry, along with other Objects, when
once we shall have seen what is the nature of Being, the
nature which is shared by all Objects alike. The ques-
tion concerning the nature of Being concerns all Existents
alike, including consciousness itself when taken as an exist-
ent; all alike, including consciousness itself, being distin-
guished from the nature of Knowledge, taken as knowledge.
But why and how, it may be asked, is the Subject for
us an existent Object, when its very name indicates its
essential contrast with objects, and when without it all
knowledge, the whole subjective aspect of things, would
confessedly be impossible? The answer is plain from
what has gone before. The Subject is to us, when enter-
ing on philosophy, an object among objects, because we
then have before us, no tabula rasa, but the world of
empirical objects as known to common sense and positive
science. If philosophy were an a priori construction out
of intuitions, or laws of thought, independent of the
empirical world, the case would be altered. We should
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then have no other source to go to, for the fundamental
intuitions or laws of our construction, but some hypo-
thesis or other concerning the nature of abstract intelli-
gence hypostasised as an agent. But as it is, we have
a familiar knowledge of ourselves as empirical existents
to begin with and to question, just as much as we have
of empirical existents which are not ourselves. Just as
much knowledge, and it must be added, just as little.
However certain we may be of the independent agency of
material things, it is yet extremely improbable that we
possessed this idea, still more that we felt certain of its
truth, when, as newly born infants, we experienced visual
and tactual perceptions for the first time in combination.
Similarly, however certain we may be of the independent
agency of our immaterial Self, it is equally improbable,
that we possessed this idea, with certainty of its truth,
in the first moments of conscious life or conscious per-
ception. No. The existence of Matter and the existence
of Mind, as we think of them and believe in them when
we begin to philosophise, are equally familiar, equally
questionable, equally products of experience from infancy
onwards, equally formed out of perceptions by means of
inference and verification, equally therefore dependent
upon putting the questions what and how comes, which are
the very same questions by which they have again in
philosophy to be tested.
Here, then, we begin to see, and shall see still more
clearly as we advance, the drift and function of our
guiding distinction of method, namely, that it raises
explicitly this very question, which lies across the thresh-
old of philosophy, and forbids an answer to it being
given hastily, one way or the other, without a distinct
consciousness of the confusion to which it is exposed.
The distinction is a necessary one in all questioning, as
we have already seen; that is, it is one which sooner or
37
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later must be brought to bear upon all parts, all views, of
knowledge or reality; and therefore it cannot be pre-
tended that, by putting it in this instance, we are
rendering impossible beforehand the answer which I
have now supposed may be due to confusion, the answer
affirming the complete and ultimate coalescence of con-
sciousness and the conscious agent, or Subject, into a
single Existent.
We may conceivably find hereafter, that this coales-
cence is a necessary inference concerning the primary
constitution of consciousness; and if so, since conscious-
ness is confessedly in some sense co-extensive with exist-
ence, that is to say, no one (barring believers in the
Unknowable, to whom all things are possible) can think
of anything's existing without thinking in general terms
of the thing itself, it would follow at once, that the exist
ence of Subjects and their consciousness was the only
existence possible, being that mode of it in which all
other modes were included; and thereby the theory
known as Idealism would be forthwith established. But
plainly this answer, which affirms the
ry coal-
escence of consciousness and S
ur consciousness
into existent units, in the character of mutual contri-
butories to, co-elements or co-factors of, each other's
existence, and that of the unit they compose, cannot be
admitted without first distinctly raising the questions,
what consciousness per se is known as, and what the Sub-
ject per se is known as, apart from the questions,—what
consciousness as known, and what the Subject as known,
respectively depend on, whether either of them is self-
dependent, or causa sui, or whether they are mutually
dependent on each other. By saying that every being
has a knowing as its obverse aspect, it is not meant, that
the being knows, or is the bearer of the knowledge in
question, which would be predicating action of the being,
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but only that it is known, that esse is percipi. Whether it
is also always and necessarily the bearer of the know-
ledge, or whether another being is sometimes or always
requisite to know it, these are points not pre-judged by
the statement, but intended to be reserved for future
enquiry.
A
Distinction of Aspects.
And now to summarise the results of the foregoing
remarks, and report progress so far as we have gone.
The simple fact of perception over against the simple fact
of something perceived,-a doubleness of fact against
fact which is itself perceived only in and by becoming
afterwards a simple fact perceived, over against the
simple perception of it, or which, in other words, is a fact
repeated in all immediately observed instances of per-
ception or thought, that is to say, in all remembered or
renewable experience,—is that relation which we charac-
terise as the relation of the subjective and objective
aspects to each other. The psychological name for the
secondary perceptual act, which is the act constitutive of
experience, or in which experience is constantly originating,
--and by psychological name I mean its name as a func-
tion among other functions of a conscious being,-which
name also marks its character as perception, not simply
of percepts, but of perception of percepts,-is Reflection,
or in Kant's nomenclature Apperception. The perceptive
act of one moment is objective to the perceptive act of
the subsequent moment, and in that second act we perceive
two things, 1st the content of consciousness, or whatness,
of the first act, 2nd the fact that it was perceived, and
has now become a content for consciousness.
But a name will also be required for those perceptive
acts, which per se, or until perceived by subsequent acts,
39
are not conscious perceptions of aspects, but simply acts
of, or states or events in, consciousness. These may
perhaps be best called primary perceptions, or states of
primary consciousness, and their content primary percepts.
But we must remember that the same doubleness of aspect
is really involved in them, only that we do not distinctly
perceive it without an act of attention, the supervening of
which is the arising of a secondary perception, or reflec-
tion. I mean, that even in primary perceptions we must
distinguish, in thought, the process of perception, as an
act or event, and the completion of it as a state or content,
in consciousness; that is, distinguish the perceiving from
the percept; without considering them as objective to
consciousness, until the secondary act supervenes.
These, then, are the two aspects. Both are objective to
the secondly perceptive, or reflective, act; that is, are for
it existents; and also, from being inseparable in per-
ception, are obverse aspects of existence. Whatever we
in any way perceive, have cognisance of, or imagine,—
that we say exists. If the term existence has meaning at
all, it must at the least have this meaning. And this
relation we can, in thought, distinguish from all others,
irrespective of whether or not we may afterwards find,
that the two aspects have necessarily any other relations,
besides this relation of one being the knowledge of the
other, a relation which we fix and retain for use, when
once it is itself made objective to subsequent perception,
by calling the subjective member of it, or knowledge,
objective thought, and the objective member of it, or exist-
ence, object thought of. These latter terms are names of
the obverse aspects, when these are themselves considered
as being together the object of a subsequent perception.
Both are objective; but the one, objective thought, is know-
ledge qua existent; the other, object thought of, is existence
qua known to exist.
40
Here, then, we make our first halting place, mark off
our first division, in methodical and philosophical thought,
-at this distinction between the two ever inseparable
but ever distinguishable companions, the subjective and
objective aspects. Farther than this, as a first step,
nothing warrants us in going. In fact, even in order to
see whether the two aspects, which form an inseparable
pair, stand in any further or still more intimate relation
to each other, whether they are in any sense identical, or
coalescent, or condition and conditionate, we must first
have seen that they are distinguishable, though insepar-
able, and there for a moment pause. And this justifies
us in establishing the distinction of aspects as the first great
rubric, category, or division, of method; for it is evident,
that everything without exception, from the universe to
an atom, from the vaguest and largest thought, taken as
an existent, to the smallest and minutest sensation, falls
under this rubric, since it stands in this relation, and must
so stand, or it would not for us exist at all, nor could we
surmise it even in a dream.
B
Analysis of Elements.
Our first step in analysis having resulted in giving us
the two aspects, both of them objective to reflection, what
we have next to do is to apply again the same guiding
principle of method to this result, and analyse it by
putting to it the same question What. The two aspects
are now our object-matter, instead of the world of empiri-
cal absolutes, the world of common sense and positive
science, with which we began. We have still indeed, in
one sense, the same world, the same facts, before us, but
they are distributed and arranged differently. The limit-
41
question about Being has thrown them into the crucible,
and the answer to it has reproduced them in a new shape.
The content of experience or of consciousness, which
before appeared as the ordinary empirical world, now
appears as a series or a system of objective thoughts,
over against and representing, either item for item, or
general outline for items unknown in detail, a series or a
system of objects thought of; the former system contain-
ing what we know or imagine of the latter. For ulti-
mately and in last resort, the meaning of which restriction
will be seen more clearly as we proceed, we know nothing
of the nature or whatness of objects thought of, save
through objective thought, always of course taking thought
as including perception and feeling, which are constituents
of it. Just as Being generally is the object of reflective
perception, and the two aspects perceived by that reflec-
tion are the whatness of Being, so, at this second stage
of the analysis, the objects thought of are existents whose
whatness is given in their obverse or subjective aspect,
the objective thoughts corresponding to them.
Clearly, then, our immediate business is with the series
or system of objective thoughts, as objects of reflection,
and our business with it is to ask what it is, both in
general and in detail, both in totals and in parts of totals;
to ask what we immediately know it as being, or in
other words, to analyse it for its whatness. And it is
obvious, in the first place, that as a whole this inseparable
aspect of Being, objective thought, cannot be character-
ised by anything not included in itself; cannot, therefore,
be classified under any larger category, any more than
(as remarked above) Being itself can. Its analysis, there-
fore, must consist in the observation, comparison, and
classification, of differences and similarities within itself,
of one part or feature of it with others, or of the various
relations between them, the whole object-matter being
42
2.
taken to consist of thoughts, or states of consciousness in
the widest sense of the term, but in no wise transcending
consciousness or thought, which, as we have already seen,
is a phrase aiming to express a contradiction as if it were
non-contradictory. Accordingly I characterise this rubric,
or division, of our enquiry as analysis of elements, meaning
thereby the constituents or components, either of the
content of objective thought in general, or of any objec
tive thought taken singly, or again of any group of
objective thoughts, whether more or less complex.
It is here that the proper work-a-day business of phi-
losophy begins. It is under this rubric, that by far the
larger as well as the more important part of its work is
done. The former rubric contains work which clears the
ground, secures the field, ascertains the scope, for the
work to be done under this. What sort of Universe the
world we live in makes part of, is a question which, in
all its details, depends ultimately, for any solution we
can obtain, upon the results of the analysis of objective
thought under this rubric. It is this analysis which
establishes the premisses for all conclusions in that matter.
It is by this, that the very meaning of the terms, universe,
world, and life, have to be ascertained. The question is,
what do we immediately know of the objects provisionally
designated, in common sense and in science, by these and
other names of similar character. It is this that gives
substance to the title metaphysical applied to philosophy,
I mean the circumstance of its being the analysis of ob-
jective thought, which contains all we know of objects
thought of, whether these are provisionally designated
material or spiritual objects.
It would be entirely out of place to attempt to indi-
cate here how, in my opinion, it is best to set to work
in instituting this analysis, and still more to mention
any, even the most general, results which I may suppose
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43
to have been obtained by its means. But I would desire,
if possible, to make present to your minds the immense
extent and richness of the field for that analysis, by
recalling in general terms the provinces which it covers,
and the contents of which it redistributes from its own
point of view; that is to say, by taking them in their
character of objective thoughts, or, as we may figura-
tively describe it, regarding them as composing one
side of the same shield which has its other side turned
towards common sense and positive science. I would
remind you then, that all the phenomena belonging to all
the departments of knowledge, however demarcated,
belong equally and alike, in virtue of their subjective cha-
racter, to this department of philosophy; that is to say,
those belonging 1st to Logic, Ethic, Esthetic, Mathe-
matic, Theology; 2nd to Dynamics, Physics, Chemistry,
Biology, Psychology; 3rd to the immense group of
sciences of concrete human action, Sociology, Politic,
Jurisprudence, Political Economy, Language, and many
others; and lastly to the still more minute and complex
subdivisions formed out of these or out of their interlacing
ramifications, which it would be hopeless for me to
enumerate.
I make no attempt at logical accuracy of classification.
What I wish to bring home to you is, that nothing is
excluded from the single all-embracing field of subjective
analysis, but that this field singly covers, and is co-exten-
sive with, the fields of all other departments of knowledge
taken together, so far as those departments treat their
several fields objectively, as objects thought of, and not
as objective thoughts. A department which treats, or so
far as it treats, its field of phenomena subjectively, Ethic,
for instance, or Logic, is eo ipso a branch of philosophy,
and has its roots in this department of it. The whole of
experience, then, in its character of objective thought,
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falls under this subjective analysis; and, as the object-
matter of that analysis, may be compared to a moving or
changing panorama; an image which indeed is itself
nothing but pars pro toto; visual objects, which are but a
single class, being made to stand for all classes, or the
whole content of consciousness. Moreover it must be
remembered, not only that the field of philosophy em-
braces the whole of experience, but that in analysing it,
or any part of it, we bring it again before us in the same
manner in which it was experienced originally; that is
to say, we are again looking at it through and in reflec-
tive perception; we repeat the act which is constitutive
of experience, and is the constant feature in it, and which
therefore, supposing it contributes anything to its objects,
contributes equally and alike to all of them.
We have then a vast field, and an immense task, of
analysis before us under this rubric, a task, however, upon
which we are not now to enter. But the question must
be asked,—supposing this task entered on, and accom-
plished by each of us in his own way, and so far as he
may be able to accomplish it, how far is the analysis cap-
able of being pushed, and what is the purpose, what the
ultimate proposed limits, of the enquiry? The answer
can only be, that the analysis must be pushed until we
see two things, 1st the de facto order, both of co-existence
and sequence, in which the objective thoughts have actu-
ally occurred and been brought together so as to compose
our panorama in its largest extent, and 2nd the logical
arrangement, co-ordination, and subordination, of those
same objective thoughts into an organic whole, so that
the relations between them may be expressed as general
facts or laws, under which the particular objective thoughts
are brought as cases or instances. The analysis of the
panorama and all its parts will not be complete, until
both these insights have been obtained. But how im-
45
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measurably remote that attainment is, hardly needs
pointing out. If we had a perfect memory of the history
of our thought from the first dawn of consciousness, we
should have attained the first; if we had, besides this,
perfect powers of discrimination and comparison, we
should have attained the second; and this I say merely
to show the extreme magnitude and complexity of the
task.
f
For as it is, we are left to infer almost the whole of
the first, by attending to those additions to the panorama,
which have occurred since the time when we began to
analyse it philosophically. And a knowledge of the first,
at least to a very considerable extent, is an indispensable
pre-requisite to the attainment of the second. No mere
analysis of the panorama itself, or of its parts, as we have
them before us at any single given time of philosophising,
will give us a knowledge of the historical order in which
the panorama itself, or any of its more complex parts, has
been put together, by synthesis or amalgamation of part
with part, in our consciousness, during the time of its
development. And yet the history of the panorama in
our consciousness is part and parcel of the panorama
itself, in the large sense in which we have been under-
standing the term hitherto. We find the panorama, at
any given time, not only as a given panorama, but as one
which is then and there being added to, receiving new
accretions, or as a process of increasing knowledge which
is actually going on, making its own history. It is a
moving or changing panorama; and its growth, or the
genesis of its parts, is an essential feature in it.
The question of genesis, not indeed of the panorama as
a whole, but of its parts, their de facto historical connec-
tion with each other, is thus raised. Here is the logical
origin of that question; I mean the locus of the concep-
tion of genesis in the whole panorama of objective thought,
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which as a whole is our analysandum. The de facto con-
nection of parts in historical order, which is part of the
process or growth of the panorama, is as essential a con-
stituent of the analysandum, as either the logical and
generalised connection of parts, in any portion of the
panorama which may have come into view in consequence
of that process, or the specific content and quality of any
part or group of parts which it embraces.
Moreover it will be noticed, that genesis of parts, the
enquiry into which thus distinctly arises out of our ana-
lysis of the panorama of objective thought, is one member
of the guiding distinction of our method,—the distinction
between nature and genesis, conditions of essence and
conditions of existence. The question is indeed put
originally, and at present, only about objective thoughts,
-how these severally arise and come into the panorama,
—but the whole question of the nature of genesis every-
where is thereby opened. We began by adopting, as our
principle of method, a distinction drawn between nature
and genesis, as things the difference of which was pro-
visionally known. But now we see, that genesis itself,
as known to us in the panorama, is a fact which is sub-
ordinate to the fact of nature, or has itself a nature into
which we are forced to enquire.
We find from analysing the panorama of objective
thoughts, that there is a de facto order of co-existence
and sequence in them, which is capable of being reduced,
partially or wholly, to uniformity and regularity, and sub-
sumed under general facts, or laws, of co-existence and
sequence. The term genesis is a general name for it.
But general names are never explanations of the facts
which they cover. The explanation lies, if anywhere, in
the facts as analysed, and not in the names which sum
up the results of analysis. The question, What makes a
given objective thought appear in the panorama at any
47
particular juncture, or a given place in the panorama be
occupied by an individual thought of specific and indi-
vidualised quality, still remains. The name, whatever it
be, which we give to the fact which we suppose will
answer this question, is always a general name, and a
general name only. Call it energy, or agency, or will, or
thought, or consciousness, or spirit, or Subject, or Object, or
the Absolute,-call it what you like,-still these names
have no specific, individual, content; they are general
names meaning that which makes, does, acts, produces,
causes, generates, and so on,—assuming that there is an
agent at work there, but a hidden agent. This hidden
agent and agency, which appear to be at work in the
panorama of consciousness, are what we want, if possible,
to arrive at and ascertain. At any rate we want to ascer-
tain whether they are ascertainable, and if not, why not;
or, if they are an illusion, why they are illusory, and how
the illusion arises. These are questions which we must
be careful not to prejudge, or answer by assumptions, one
way or the other. At this point, therefore, of philosophi-
cal enquiry, we close the department headed analysis of
elements, and open our enquiry into the agency at work,
by placing that enquiry under an entirely new rubric or
title.
с
The Order of Real Conditioning.
Again we have a fresh start to make, again we have
to review the present position of our philosophical en-
quiry as a whole, and again we have to apply our
guiding principle of method. We closed the rubric of
analysis of elements, because we found it unable to reveal
the de facto order in which the history of its own object-
matter had taken place in the past, and in which it is
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still taking place as we examine it. It does not follow
that, supposing we obtain light on these points from
elsewhere, the knowledge so obtained will not take its
place and be incorporated into the total panorama of
objective thought. Indeed this is the very result which
we aim at. To obtain knowledge of anything is eo ipso
to incorporate it into the panorama of objective thought.
It was with this very purpose in view, that we dwelt
upon the characteristics of objective thought itself, and
particularly upon its demarcation from its cwn obverse
aspect, object thought of, which was forced upon us by
the very nature of the act of experiencing. We have
now had some specific evidence for what was stated per-
haps somewhat dogmatically at the outset, namely, that
our whole knowledge of objects thought of comes in the
form of objective thoughts, or that we know nothing of
objects thought of per se, apart from our thoughts of them.
They, per se, can afford us no explanation of objective
thoughts, because except by objective thoughts they are
totally unknown. And yet where else is it possible to
look, for an enlargement of our knowledge of objective
thoughts? This is our first question.
Now if we consider our present position in connection
with the purpose of philosophy as a whole, we shall, I
think, see at a glance the quarter to which we must turn.
The purpose aimed at by philosophy, namely, a Rationale
of the universe so far as attainable by man, includes a
harmonising of the ordinary world of objects, as seen by
common sense and positive science, with the world as
seen by philosophy; which means, in other words, incor-
porating the results of common sense and positive science
with the specifically philosophical results of subjective
analysis of objective thoughts, which is a specifically
philosophical rubric. Philosophy, as we saw, comes into
being as the last in a series of three lines of thought, and
49
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starts from the basis afforded by the two earlier ones, the
facts of experience as they are presented by common
sense and positive science. The term has therefore both
a narrower and a broader signification, according as it is
considered either as contradistinguished by its method
from common sense and positive science, or else as aim-
ing at a harmony, to be established by itself, between
itself and them; a harmony to be attained, not by using
the results of science, as they stand at any given epoch,
as unalterable criteria or tests of philosophical truth, as
if both stood on the same footing, or were reached by the
same method, but by so combining the results obtained
from time to time by both, as mutually to illustrate and
supplement each other.
It is therefore greatly to be wished, that philosophers
should acquaint themselves, so far as practicable, with the
methods and results of positive science, and men of science
also, so far as practicable, with the method and results of
philosophy. This is a view the very opposite of that
which is unhappily but too prevalent at present on both
sides, and more particularly opposed to that view of phi-
losophy which conceives it, not only as totally and in its
whole course independent of science, but even as called
upon to prescribe a priori laws, and establish a priori
delimitations, for science, within its own scientific domain.
Approaching, then, the question of real conditioning
with such views as I have described, philosophy is met
by the fact, which it learns from common sense and posi-
tive science, that real objects are always regarded by
them as objects thought of, and not as combinations of
objective thoughts. They do not put the question, what
the objects are known as;—do not put it at all;—but,
assuming that certain objects exist as realities, proceed
at once to ask how they are produced, and how they
behave. That is to say, taking certain combinations of
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objective thoughts as identical with objects thought of,
they enter at once upon the order of real conditioning, to
which, as objects thought of, they belong.
The next significant fact which philosophy learns from
its new instructors is this, and here we shall begin, if I
mistake not, to see light, that these real and concrete
objects thought of have, as such, and in that character,
another analysis, besides the subjective one into aggre-
gates or combinations of objective thoughts, namely, an
analysis into other objects thought of. This analysis is
given by positive science in different branches, belonging
to one or more of the general heads of Dynamics, Physics,
Chemistry, Biology, and Psychology. Atoms, molecules,
masses, ethers, gases, chemical compounds, living tissues,
cells, minds, souls, or whatever may be the agents in
conscious beings, and specific powers of mind or soul, e.g.,
the will, and the reason, or other specific functions of
organs in conscious beings; and also the modes in which
all these are severally and respectively combined, and the
modes of action proper to each severally, and in their
respective combinations ;-are all so many objects thought
of,-which have indeed again an analysis into objective
thoughts (or we could not lay hold of them, so to speak,
in thought at all),—but which exist and operate, as there
is abundant evidence taken from objective thought to
show, quite independently of their subjective analysis
into objective thoughts, and quite irrespective of our
making or not making that analysis.
We see, then, that there are some groups of objective
thoughts which have a double analysis, one as objective
thoughts into other objective thoughts, and one as objects
thought of into other objects thought of. And not only
so, but they behave quite differently in the two characters.
That is to say, the groups of objects thought of, given by
the one analysis, behave quite differently from the groups
G
51
of objective thoughts given by the other. Things, in com-
mon language, behave quite differently from the thoughts
about them. The two are torn asunder from each other,
and localised differently; they are duplicated in point of
space. Thoughts are localised in living bodies, that is,
have a constant environment of a particular set of
thoughts, called (as object thought of) a body. But the
things thought of by those thoughts, other than the body
and its parts, which is their constant environment, are
localised in space outside the body, and form a total
which is called the material world. And not only so, but
it is found also, that the occurrences of thoughts depend,
in many instances, upon the existence of things which
are not the objects thought of by them, but follow laws.
and sets of laws of their own, as things and not as
thoughts.
For instance, the occurrence, say, of a thunderstorm
last night, which is analysable into a group of objective
thoughts, is not traceable to any other objective thoughts
which have either previously or simultaneously occurred
as parts of my system of experience, but to the occurrence
of certain objects of thought, whether thought of or not
at or before the occurrence of the thunderstorm, but which,
like the thunderstorm, can be analysed into groups of
objective thoughts. Nothing ultimately and in the last
resort (as was said above) escapes analysis into objective
thoughts; but not only does this fact fail to explain the
occurrence of objective thoughts, in that order of co-
existence and sequence in which they occur actually, but
on the contrary the occurrence of objective thoughts
depends, at least in instances like the foregoing, both
upon the existence of objects thought of, and upon their
occurrence, not only to conscious beings, but also inter se,
or to each other, independently of their occurrence to
conscious beings.
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Now it is undeniable that, in bringing together these
two worlds, of things and of thoughts about things, phi-
losophy is only bringing together things which belong to
its own first and second rubrics, objective thoughts and
objects thought of, inasmuch as all objects thought of
have an analysis into objective thoughts, and are un-
knowable otherwise. Separated as these now are into
two different worlds, each following its own laws, philo-
sophy still brings them together under its first and second
rubrics, and indeed, in the second rubric, as knowable
things, under the single category of objective thoughts.
Yet it has not thereby, as at first sight it might seem to
do, contradicted its own assertion, that objects thought
of are knowable only in the form of objective thoughts,
and by so doing transcended the world of phenomena,
and laid claim to a knowledge of the unknowable, or of
things-in-themselves, which are nothing but the objec-
tivity of objects thought of taken alone, or the bare
thought of existence hypostasised as an object. For the
objects now thought of are not so many cases of the
mere obverse aspect of objective thoughts taken alone,
but are objects of common sense and positive science, that
is, are objects which are already, as such, in the form of
objective thoughts, though they are also treated by com-
mon sense and by positive science (but not by philosophy)
as if they were only objects thought of, and not also
objective thoughts. It is common-sense and scientific
thought which omits to notice, that the double aspect is
essential to all phenomena, and which consequently treats
its objects as if they belonged to the objective aspect
alone, an aspect which philosophy shows to involve a
contradiction, when isolated in that fashion.
Philosophy, therefore, makes a great change in the
objects of common sense and positive science, when it
takes them up into its own system; and the change con-
53
De La Dolc
sists in stripping them of their absolute character, while
retaining their concrete and empirical character; that is,
it continues to treat them as concrete and empirical, but
ceases to regard them as absolute existents. Stated
briefly the case is this,-what philosophy seeks in the
objects, which common sense and positive science treat
as and call objects thought of, is the filling up, the detail,
the individualised content, not of its own category of
object thought of,—which would be contradictory,—but
of some general term, or terms, included in its own objec-
tive thought, namely, those of genesis, cause, real condi-
tioning, energy, and the like.
The term object thought of has, therefore. a different
meaning, in this third rubric of philosophy, both from its
meaning in common sense and positive science, out of
which it drops the absolutism, and from its meaning in
the second rubric of philosophy, out of which it drops the
character of being a purely logical abstraction, namely,
bare abstract existence. Similarly, and simultaneously,
the corresponding term objective thought assumes a changed
meaning, by dropping out of its former meaning the real
conditioning or real genesis of the content, which was
before included in it, but only as covered and expressed
by general terms. This part of its former meaning has
now passed over to the term which is its opposite, but
which no longer expresses its obverse aspect,—namely,
object thought of. A Chimæra, for instance, is a group of
objective thoughts. Its obverse aspect, or object thought
of, in the sense of the second rubric, is the Chimæra as
existent. But its object thought of, in the sense of the
present third rubric, is that set of real conditions, be
they what they may, which produce the objective thought
Chimera in consciousness.
Philosophy, therefore, in bringing these two things
together in their changed meanings, has also brought
देन
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them together in a changed relation, that of real con-
dition and conditionate. We see moreover that, while
all real conditions are both objective thoughts and
objects thought of, in the old meaning of these terms, it
does not follow, that all objective thoughts with their
objects thought of, in the old meaning, are real con-
ditions, or objects thought of in the new meaning, the
Chimæra for instance. Objective thoughts are now con-
ditionates of objects thought of; and objects thought of
are now real conditions, both of each other and of objec-
tive thoughts. The question, then, which we now have
to consider is, what or rather which kinds of objective
thoughts with their objects thought of,—that is, objective
thoughts taken as existents,-in the old sense of the
terms, are capable of being, or actually are, real condi-
tions of others; that is, are objects thought of, in the
new sense of the present rubric; and which kinds, on the
other hand, are objective thoughts only, or are what com-
mon sense and positive science call mere creatures of the
mind.
The difference between the strictly philosophical and
the strictly scientific meaning of the terms objective thought
and object thought of arises solely from a difference of
starting point and method. Science begins by assuming
the existence of real objects, and then immediately puts
the question of their genesis and behaviour, while phi-
losophy asks what is meant by their existence. In the
case of external objects actually perceived, the object
thought of, which science contemplates, is thus not only
a real condition of itself as at that time known, that is, of
the objective thought which is its obverse aspect, but it
is much more besides,—a perfect mine of surprises for the
investigator. All these are covered by the assumption
of its existence as a real condition, inasmuch as they are
included in its reality as an existent, with properties as
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yet unknown.
Science leaves this assumption unex-
amined, in putting the question of genesis before the
question, what its objects are for consciousness. To put
that question first, is to assume the real existence of a
whole army of properties, which may or may not come
into knowledge afterwards; and this assumption of real
but unknown existents, which are also real conditions, is
therefore involved in the first principle of scientific
method. Philosophy on the other hand, in asking simply
what existence means, discovers the fact in consciousness,
that every existent, or property of an existent, whether
positively known or only assumed, has its objective
thought, by which knowledge, as it were, lays hold of it,
an objective thought which is not the conditionate, but
the obverse aspect, of the existent known or assumed to
exist. The logical transition from the one point of view
to the other, and consequent proof of the compatibility of
their results, are what has to be effected in detail by
philosophy, under this its third rubric.
Here accordingly we apply again our guiding distinc-
tion of philosophical method, by putting the question
what to real conditions. What is meant by a real condi-
tion, what is the nature of it? And we intend, of course,
by this question, what is that, in any object thought of,
which gives it, or in which consists, what we call gener-
ally conditioning power? What specifically is that which
makes, causes, does, produces, or determines anything?
What specifically are agency, energy, power, force, and so
on? We have taken positive science into council on this
question, because positive science has made the study of
real conditions specifically taken its peculiar province.
Disregarding generalities, it fixes its attention upon the
analysis of individual concrete things into their actual
individual components, upon things as perceived, instead
of things as conceptually generalised. Here then, if any-
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where, we may expect aid towards finally answering our
great question, What is Being, and making a step on-
wards towards a Rationale of the sum of things.
The clue followed must of course be the distinction
between objects thought of and objective thought, in the
sense of this third rubric, which in other words is the
distinction between real conditions, as empirical objects
with a partially known content, and objective thoughts
taken simply as existing in consciousness alone, and not
as the obverse aspect of the real conditions which may be
in question. We thus follow the line of thought followed
by positive science. But there is one among the positive
sciences, which stands in a peculiarly close connection
with philosophy, inasmuch as it has objective thought as
part of its special object-matter. I mean of course psy-
chology, which treats of the genesis of consciousness, or
of consciousness in connection with its real conditions;
that is, in connection, not with objects thought of in their
whole range, but with those which are the real conditions
of objective thoughts.
Following, then, the line of scientific thought, in which
real conditions are taken in fusion with, and undistin-
guished from, the objective thoughts which are their
obverse aspect, and at the same time separated in thought
from the objective thoughts which they condition, the
first distinction, which we observe between them, is into
those conditions of consciousness which are internal, and
those which are external, to the body of the conscious
Subject; the body, as already noted, being the name for
that set of objective thoughts, treated as an object
thought of, which is the constant environment of con-
sciousness, the object constantly present to it, at the
centre of its field of vision, whatever other objects are
present or absent. Those real conditions of conscious-
ness which are internal to the body are called provision-
57
ally its proximate conditions, those which are external its
remote conditions. I say provisionally, to mark that I
am here speaking only of the first step from common
sense to science; for we find, that science afterwards
restricts the proximate conditions within the narrower
bounds of the nerve and brain system. In this way it is,
that psychology, as a positive science, approaches the
question of the genesis of consciousness, and this ap-
proach to it is in perfect harmony with the general system
of philosophy.
And here it must be noticed, that the question of
genesis is thus proposed in its greatest extent and com-
prehensiveness. It was raised originally, in the second
rubric, as a question within the limits of consciousness, a
question concerning the genesis of parts within the pano-
rama of objective thought, that is, of some parts out of
others, and not concerning the genesis of the whole
panorama. But now it is seen, that the question con-
cerns the whole, just as much as it concerns the parts;
for it appears, from considerations belonging to common
sense and positive science, that a concrete conscious being
is, everywhere and always, one at least of the indis-
pensable real conditions of changes in the panorama of
consciousness; and, since all consciousness, consciousness
itself, includes, requires, or partly consists of change, it
necessarily follows, that a concrete conscious being is
also an indispensable real condition of consciousness
altogether.
But though the question of genesis concerns the whole
as much as it concerns the parts, it does not concern it in
the same way. The moment it is put concerning the genesis
of the panorama of objective thoughts as a single whole, it
is put concerning its real existence; but its real existence
has hitherto been pre-supposed, including that of its parts,
as the object perceived under the first rubric; and this real
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existence is expressed, under the second rubric, as the object,
or objects, thought of; which objects are known in no other
way save in the form of objective thoughts. Conse-
quently, there is either no answer possible to the question
concerning the genesis of the panorama as a single whole,
since its object thought of is its real existence, and can-
not at the same time be the real condition or cause of its
existence, that is, of itself; or else the concrete conscious
being, or beings, which we have now seen to be among
the indispensable real conditions of the panorama as a
whole, are conditions of it in a different way, or different
respect, from that in which some parts within it have been
hitherto taken as conditions of others. Concrete con-
scious beings are themselves concrete existents forming
part of the whole panorama. And therefore the whole
panorama seems to depend, for its genesis or existence
as a reality, upon concrete existents which have no other
real existence than as parts of the panorama dependent
upon other parts of it.
We are thus led by our method itself, and the system
which is its development, to bring up for solution those
very questions which were expressly noticed above, in
speaking of a certain ambiguity which I described as
lying across the very threshold of philosophy, and which
were then expressly reserved for future investigation ;-
I mean the questions concerning the nature of the Sub-
ject of consciousness or thought, and the nature of its
Object; that is, the nature of the Subject taken as an
object among objects, but contradistinguished from the
rest of them. It is from common sense and positive
science that these notions are originally derived, and
therefore it is inevitable that they should come forward
for investigation, when the general view taken by com-
mon sense and positive science comes forward for incor-
poration into the philosophical system. And the solution
59
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will be found, if anywhere, in that transformation in the
meaning of the terms objective thought and object thought of,
which has just above been described.
From this it will appear that, as all objects thought of
are now identified with concrete real conditions, so all
objective thoughts must also be identified with the pano-
rama of objective thought minus its real conditions; and
therefore that Subjects and Objects, as real conditions of
each other and of consciousness, must be conceived as the
real conditions, not of the whole world of consciousness or
thought including the real existence of its objects, but of
the whole world of consciousness or thought as contradis-
tinguished from the reality of its objects. In other words,
the genesis of consciousness as a whole is a scientific and
psychological question, as distinguished from a metaphy-
sical one; and its solution depends upon our acquiring a
scientific knowledge of the nature of the Subject, as a
real existent and real condition, and also of the laws of
its interaction with other objects which are real in the
same sense of the term. The alternative conception is
one which is alike absurd in common sense and self-con-
tradictory in logic, namely, that the individual Subject,
or every individual Subject, if more than one, is at once
unknowable and the author of the whole of Nature.
Our third philosophical rubric may now, I think, be
regarded as fairly established, and its logical position
sufficiently justified. It will not be expected of me in
this case, any more than under the second rubric, to
enter upon any substantive treatment of its problems, or
to indicate what I may conceive as results obtained,
or likely to be obtained hereafter, by pursuing them. My
present business is solely to exhibit the articulation of
the system of philosophy, so far as it depends on the
principle of method which it adopts. But another ques-
tion, similar to one asked in the previous case, must also
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be asked in this, namely, what are the ultimate scope and
limits of the enquiry, and how far is the analysis of real
conditions to be pushed? The answer here is very simple.
It is to be pushed as far as the positive sciences, one and
all, can push it. It has no other scope and limits but
theirs. Their results are what it is desired to incorporate
into a philosophical system. It is the interest of philo-
sophy to take up these results simply as science gives
them, unaltered by any bias, or by assumptions derived
from a philosophical source. One change, and one only,
philosophy makes, which is indeed the necessary con-
dition of incorporating them,--the abandonment of the
absolute character attached by imagination to the objects
thought of, an abandonment which, I think, no man of
science will hesitate to make, the moment his attention
is fairly drawn to its meaning and purport.
[Let* us see what it means in the case of the physical
sciences. Its meaning is, that we cannot know of Matter,
that is, of any material object, process, or mode of action,
without having it in some way present to thought or
imagination, whether by means of symbols or otherwise.
In other words, everything is relative to knowledge, or
has a subjective aspect. And the value of this for philo-
sophy, as a means of incorporating the results of science
into a philosophical system, consists in the fact, that our
conceptions of the ultimate elements, or ultimate laws, of
the material world, which have this subjective aspect, are
always liable to the question what we mean by them, what
the elements or laws are definitely known or imagined as
being; whereby it is seen, whether they are capable of a
further analysis in thought or not. It thus secures us
against too readily acquiescing in any view of matter and
material processes as ultimate, when it is not really
* The part within brackets, down to the words—now been combating,
was omitted for brevity's sake in delivery.
61
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7
pushed to the furthest degree of minuteness attainable
though it may be practically sufficient for immediate
scientific needs, on the plea that the real nature of every-
thing is transcendent, or that Things-in-themselves, though
existent, are unknowable.
Turning to psychological science, the meaning, and
therefore also the practicability, of the abandonment is
less plain. Psychology is the science which has one half
of its object-matter, I mean consciousness, in common with
philosophy; the difference consisting in the way in which
this object-matter is treated by each respectively. Psy-
chology treats it in respect of its genesis, philosophy in
respect of its analysis. Yet psychology also analyses it,
though only in relation to its real conditions, while philo-
sophy analyses its content generally, without this restric-
tion. This gives rise to complications, which make it less
easy for psychologists frankly to abandon the absolute
character of the real condition of consciousness, taken as
a whole. I mean, of course, by the real condition of con-
sciousness as a whole, our old friend the Subject. The
difficulty is this:-if consciousness as a whole, including
every part or every thought which it contains, depends
upon the Subject, how can the Subject be liable to the
question, what we mean by it, since its meaning must consist
in a thought, or thoughts, in consciousness, which in all
its thoughts depends upon the Subject? It seems, then,
that the Subject at least, whatever may be the case with
objects, is necessarily transcendent, that is, prior to and
independent of consciousness altogether, including even
its most general thought, the relation of objectivity and
subjectivity; or in other words, that it exists in itself, out
of and beyond all relations of thought, as the condition.
generating thought itself, and therefore the prior con-
dition of any relation of thought existing at all. If, then,
the Subject is the real condition of consciousness, and is
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itself unknowable, as having no possible meaning in terms
of consciousness, it follows that we are precluded from
any real knowledge of how consciousness is conditioned,
and psychology becomes a science without an object, its
object-matter being shared between an a priori philosophy
of the Absolute, on one side, and a mere registration of
unreal phenomena, on the other.
?
Psychologists are therefore in this dilemma, either to
abandon this reasoning which robs their science of its
knowable object-matter, or to admit that the Subject is
an empirical and concrete object among objects, the laws
of whose action are open to scientific investigation. If
what has been said above, under the present rubric, holds
good, their judgment cannot long remain in suspense.
For we have now the means of detecting the fallacy of
one of the alternatives. The premiss of the reasoning,
which makes the Subject an unknowable absolute, is am-
biguous. The premiss is, that consciousness in all its
parts, or thoughts, depends upon the Subject. But this,
which is true, when consciousness, of which it is said, is
taken as a term of already ascertained meaning, is tacitly
understood to imply what is false, namely, that conscious-
ness, the meaning of which has been left unascertained,
depends upon the Subject for its nature, and for the
nature of its thoughts, as well as for their genesis. This
tacit assumption empties consciousness of its content in
every respect, and leaves it a non-entity. Whereas we
have seen, that the question of genesis cannot and does
not arise concerning a non-entity, and consequently that
consciousness, when the question of genesis is asked con-
cerning it, cannot mean less than the series or panorama
of objective thoughts, taken simply as a series of occur-
rences, having indeed a nature of their own, but abstract-
ing from their relation to the objects thought of, which
are their obverse aspect.
63
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Similarly we saw, that those things only which are
already known as real existents, and have already a mean-
ing in consciousness, can be held to be real conditions of
anything else. The Subject, therefore, is a particular
object thought of; and to transfer to it in potentia the
whole content of consciousness indiscriminately is to
rob it of its own particular content, contrary to the
conditions of the problem. In truth, the fact that
what we know as consciousness, which in its lowest
form is simply feeling, sentience, or awareness, and has
no other definition but a name, arises in the Subject,-
this fact is due proximately to the existence and opera-
tion of the Subject itself; the Subject being at the same
time taken as a real existent, with a nature already partly
known to us who reason about it, though not necessarily
to itself while giving rise to consciousness. And the ques-
tion which we have, if possible, to answer in psychology
is, what specifically is that feature or characteristic in the
Subject, upon the existence of which, in any of its forms,
consciousness in any of its forms comes into existence.
The root of the fallacy in the reasoning, which makes the
Subject an unknowable absolute, lies in forgetting to ask
what is meant by consciousness, before proceeding to put
the question of its genesis. In every case of genesis, both
the conditionate and its condition must have some ascer-
tained content or meaning, if the genesis of the condition-
ate is to be discovered. Its nature cannot be surrendered,
or transferred to its condition in the character of a cause,
without reducing the question of its genesis to an absurdity.
Accordingly, the true relation between consciousness
and the Subject is, that the Subject depends upon con-
sciousness, not for its genesis, but for its knowledge of its
own nature, while consciousness depends upon the Sub-
ject for its genesis, but not for its nature, which, as we
saw under the first rubric, is something per se notum, the
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ultimate or most original thing in knowledge. Moreover
the distinction which lies at the basis of all further dis-
crimination of their respective functions, and thereby
enables us to demarcate with accuracy the provinces of
philosophy and psychology, is one which was also brought
out in our first rubric, as common and essential to all
distinct consciousness, I mean the distinction between
whatness and thatness, a distinction which runs down, so
to speak, right through the middle both of consciousness
itself, and of all objects of consciousness, of whatever
kind. On this distinction the whole question of genesis
depends, inasmuch as it belongs and relates only to the
objective aspect of experience; because we must first
know or assume that a thing exists, before we can put the
question, how it comes, or how it behares. But this does
not prevent our asking, on what consciousness itself
depends, because we logically can, and actually do, take
consciousness as an existent, in asking the question. Our
great distinction of method, between nature and genesis,
is therefore applicable even to consciousness, but only in
virtue of whatness and thatness being a distinction which
is universally found in consciousness itself.
Now we have already placed, as it were, consciousness
as conditionate, and the Subject as its real condition,
over against each other. On the one hand we have states
and changes of states of consciousness in all their mani-
fold variety, on the other we have states and changes of
states of the Subject, in a variety corresponding point
for point with the former. But the states and changes of
either series have both a whatness and a thatness, and it
is with their thatness alone that real conditioning has
immediately to do. The thatness of those in conscious-
ness depends on the thatness of those in the Subject;
and in this de facto dependence the real conditioning of
consciousness by the Subject consists. The whatness of
'.
65
the states and changes in the two series is only a means
of knowing the fact of their correspondence with each
other, since they correspond in point of whatness, as well
as in point of sequence or simultaneity of occurrence. But
the correspondence, in point of whatness, of the states
and changes of states belonging to the two series, is not
identity. If they were identical in the point of whatness,
as well as concomitant in occurrence, they would be
related as obverse aspects to each other, and not as
condition and conditionate. But as it is, the whatness of
a state or change of state in consciousness is not the
whatness of the corresponding state or change in the
Subject. The two series are thus essentially hetero-
geneous. It is necessary to dwell somewhat longer on
this point.
The essential feature which runs throughout con-
sciousness, and serves to differentiate it from its real
condition, is what has been already mentioned as feeling,
sentience, or awareness. No object thought of possesses
this characteristic, as an object simply. Subjects possess
it, not in their character of objects thought of, that is, as
a part of their own content as objects, but as the bearers
of it, that is, as being the real conditions in which, and in
dependence upon whose action, it arises and is maintained.
There is therefore a fundamental heterogeneity between
Subjects and their consciousness. But it is a heterogeneity
which is discovered only when we begin to compare the
two aspects of concrete existents, or of the panorama of
consciousness, in respect of their share in the order of
real conditioning, and put the question of genesis to the
series of objective thoughts separated in thought from
objects thought of, which, as we have seen, is work
belonging to our present third rubric. The difference
between objects which are possessed of sentience and
those which are not is one familiar to common sense, and
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fully recognised by science. But that this difference
involves and pre-supposes a heterogeneity between the
objects possessing and the sentience possessed, is a
thought which arises only when we bring together into
one view our analysis of objects, simply as known, and
their relations to their conditions and conditionates.
The first we see clearly, that the possession of sentience
is a relation between things, each of which has a nature
and analysis of its own, and definitely remove sentience
from the analysis of the Subject per se. If the Subject is
sentient, then it is not sentience. If on the other hand
it is sentience, then it is not condition but conditionate.
Life is a mode of motion in organisms, inherent in their
substance, and therefore belongs solely to biology. But
consciousness is not a mode of motion; it is changing
sentience; dependent on life, but different from that on
which it depends, and which in relation to it we call its
Subject. And accordingly, consciousness does not belong
solely to psychology, which treats of this relation, but is
also the object-matter of another department of know-
ledge, which treats of it in its nature, namely, of philo-
sophy.
Taking sentience, then, as the differentia of conscious-
ness, as conditionate, from its real condition, we shall
find that this differentia runs through the whole of it, and
is the ground of its difference from the Subject in point
of whatness. The simple qualities of feeling, as such,
are something different in kind from the objects, or pro-
perties of objects, which give rise to them. Hardness to
touch, for instance, is different as a feeling from hardness
as a property of bodies. Resistance to pressure likewise.
As properties of bodies, they are properties of things
which are objects of thought and inference, as much
as of sense. Nor does it in the least signify, whether
the objects, to which these and similar properties, and
67
the motions, tensions, and interactions depending on them,
inherently belong, are objects external to the nerve or-
ganism, or are parts or properties internal to it; I mean
supposing it to be the proximate real condition of con-
sciousness. In every case, they are different in kind from
the feelings, of which they are the immediate conditions.
The difference is still more obvious in the case of
sensations of sight. The sensations of red and blue, for
instance, have no resemblance to the vibrations or other
motions in the organ of sight, on the occurrence of which
they arise as sensations. I need not multiply instances.
The same may be said of all feelings which have a dis-
tinguishable quality, including feelings of pleasure and
pain, emotions, desires, and what are called feelings of
action, to which belong sense of effort and volition.
These are, if possible, still more unlike anything which
we can imagine in the Subject as their immediate condi-
tion.
Again, even those properties of states and changes of
states of consciousness which are quantitative, I mean
degree of intensity, or strength, or vividness in feeling,
relative duration, relative magnitude or volume, and
relative place in mental imagery, are not the same as the
corresponding properties in the states and changes of
states which are their conditions. They only vary in
correspondence with them.
Thus the two series are fundamentally heterogeneous
throughout, but there is a close correspondence between
their changes, both in point of actual concomitance, and
in the quantitative properties, by the aid of which that
actual concomitance is made known to us.
We see,
therefore, that it is not the whatness of the one series
which depends either upon the whatness, or upon the
thatness, of the other; but the existence of the one what-
ness upon the existence of the other. In putting the
*->*
:
+
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2
68
..
question of genesis, both the condition and the condition-
ate must be taken simply as existents, but without rob-
bing them of their content; that is to say, the de facto
existence of the concrete and empirical states and changes
in the one is the condition of the de facto existence of
the concrete and empirical states and changes in the
other.
Strictly speaking, therefore, the states and changes
of states in the Subject explain nothing in the corre-
sponding states and changes in consciousness, but their
coming into, continuing in, and vanishing from, the pano-
rama of objective thought. And it is upon the occurrence
of the former that the occurrence of the latter is condi-
tioned. Moreover, since the Subject stands in close con-
nection and interaction with external Nature, upon whose
states and changes of states its own are conditioned, it is
plain, that consciousness also is thereby brought into a
mediate but assured dependence upon the external world.
And it should also be noted, that it signifies nothing
to the foregoing argument, what hypothesis we make as
to the nature of the Subject; that is, whether we take it
to be the nerve organism, or some fine etherial matter in
nerve or brain, or even to be an immaterial substance in
unison with them, provided only it be a real existent, and
not merely a logical abstraction made by imagination out
of the abstract Whatness of consciousness, as Things-in-
themselves are made out of its abstract Thatness. I would
only observe that, if an immaterial substance is the hypo-
thesis adopted, the heterogeneity between its states and
changes and those of consciousness is rather increased
than lessened, owing to the extreme difficulty, to say the
least, of imagining in what its states and changes of
states can consist. I place an immaterial substance, com-
monly known as a Soul or Mind, among possible hypo-
theses, not because I can myself throw it into an intel-
69
.
ligible shape, but in order, by taking an extreme case, to
include all hypotheses, concerning the nature of the
Subject, which are really conceivable, and therefore with-
in the limits of positive science. It is not against any
positive mode of conceiving the Subject, however adven-
turous, that I have now been arguing, but against con-
ceiving it as an absolute existent, a conception which
would remove it from the range of science altogether,
and make psychology a creature of a priori speculation.-
On the whole, I think it may be held, in view of the fore-
going considerations, that the real conditioning of the
existence of consciousness, its states, and its changes, by
or upon the existence of a corresponding series of states
and changes in the Subject, as a real but not absolute
existent, is the only true province of psychology.
This position I will endeavour to make clear by means
of a simile, which however is not to be taken as more
than an illustration of it. Suppose a candle brought at
night into some vast hall, lighted, and then left to burn
itself out. And let this represent the conscious life of a
man from birth to death. The hall, with whatever it
contains, is the world; the space outside is the rest of
the universe; the candle is the Subject; the light of the
candle is consciousness or knowledge; the objects seen
in the sphere which it illumines are the contents of con-
sciousness or the knowledge of objects; the darkness left
unillumined is the unknown region beyond positive
knowledge.
Now just as light reveals three things, itself, and
objects, and darkness, so consciousness reveals itself, and
the known, and the unknown; that is, it reveals the fact
of the existence, and something of the nature, of all three.
And just as the ligat of the candle depends for its exist-
ence upon the existence of the candle, so consciousness
depends for its existence upon the existence of the Sub-
L
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:
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70
ject. And just as the revelation of the objects in the
illumined sphere depends for its taking place upon the
candle being lighted, and lasts until the candle is burnt
out, so the taking place, or genesis, of our knowledge of
objects depends upon the life, and lasts until the death,
of the Subject. And as the light reveals the existence
and something of the nature of the candle, so conscious-
ness reveals the existence and something of the nature of
the Subject. The candle is one of the objects revealed
by its own light; the Subject is one of the objects
revealed by its own consciousness. And the Subject's
consciousness may well depend for its existence upon the-
existence of the Subject, just as the light of the candle
depends for its existence on that of the candle.—Finally,
as the existence and nature of the objects in the illumined
sphere, and in the darkness beyond, are independent of
the candle being lighted and illumining them, so the
objects which are known by consciousness, both those
within the range of positive knowledge, and those sur-
mised beyond it, are or may be, in point of their exist-
ence, independent both of the Subject's life, and of the
existence of the Subject's knowledge. They are at least
conceived by the Subject as lasting much longer than his
own life, and the existence of his own knowledge of
them. A single moment of the existence of knowledge
may have an indefinitely long duration as its object, just
as a single moment of sight may cover immeasurable
distances in space.
W
Psychology deals with the connection between the
existence and nature of the Subject, on one side, and the
existence and nature of his consciousness on the other;
philosophy, as contradistinguished from psychology, with
the connection between his consciousness and its objects.
And the fact in philosophy, that the Subject's knowledge
of himself forms part of his total knowledge of objects, no
71
+
more clashes with the fact in psychology, that the exist-
ence of both parts of bis knowledge depends on his own
existence, than the fact, that the candle is one of the
objects revealed by its own light, clashes with the fact,
that the existence of the light, whatever it reveals,
depends on the existence of the candle. Supposing the
candle and its light were a conscious being aud his con-
sciousness, the candle would be conscious of its own
existence solely by means of its own light; and yet its
consciousness would depend entirely on its own prior
existence as a candle. This latter point, in the case of
the candle, we have means of knowing, as spectators ab
extra, although to the candle itself it might be doubtful;
just as we see, that the corresponding point in the real
case of our own consciousness has been doubted, and
still leads some psychologists to surmise a transcendent
Subject to explain it.
I must warn you that I do not bring forward this
illustration as an argument against that form of Idealism
which is founded on this transcendental hypothesis, but
only to show that we are not logically compelled to make
or admit that hypothesis. I am not now engaged in
proving against Idealists, that the reality of the world of
objects other than the Subject, is a reality independent
of the reality of the Subject, but only that the Subject's
phenomenal reality is independent of a supposed trans-
cendental reality in the Subject. The question now
before us is not whether the Subject, taken either as
transcendent or as phenomenal, creates its world of
objects by perceiving them; but whether, supposing all
other objects of thought to have a wholly knowable and
relative reality, the Subject can logically think of its own
reality as wholly knowable and relative also, or on the
contrary is compelled to think of it as an absolute exist-
ence. In short, I am not now arguing the question of
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72
M
this form of Idealism; though I do not deny, that Ideal-
ism in both its forms, since the one leads necessarily to
the other, is the natural consequence of taking the Sub-
ject as a non-phenomenal, or transcendent and absolute
existent. I am standing at the point of view of psycho-
logy as a positive science, and wish from that point of
view to make evident, that the conception of the Subject,
or conscious being, as a real and operative, but not a
transcendent or absolute, existent, in fact as the proxi-
mate real condition, without which his consciousness
would not exist, is in perfect accordance with the fact,
that his knowledge of himself is amenable to the criteria,
because it shares the nature, of every other part of his
knowledge.
In passing from the analysis of consciousness, under
the second rubric, to its genesis under the third, we pass
from the consideration of it in its generality, or as em-
bracing all knowledge, to the consideration of it as a
particular consciousness depending upon a particular Sub-
ject. But since generality and particularity are terms liable
to great misunderstanding, a word or two is requisite
to give precision to the foregoing statement.
Examining the nature of anything by simple analysis
is a process which abstracts from the consideration of
whether or not there are similar instances, which would
give the same or similar results in analysis. Supposing a
number of similar instances to exist, their analyses would
be similar, and the analysis made for one would apply,
with certain differences, to the rest. The single analysis
would have general applicability, in case the similar
instances really existed; but the analysis alone says
nothing of their real existence. Now it is such an ana-
lysis which we have supposed the Subject to make of his
own consciousness, under our second rubric. We have
supposed him to abstract from the fact, that he is a par-
73
ticular Subject of a particular consciousness, inasmuch as
this is a piece of common-sense knowledge, and he begins
to philosophise with the question, What is Being, simply.
Since we start from a common-sense and not an a priori
basis, there is nothing which can justify us in supposing,
that the consciousness which we analyse, and in which
the meaning of Being is the first question, is either other
people's consciousness, or a world-consciousness. Nature
has provided that, as a matter of fact, it is our own par-
ticular consciousness. But we abstract from our common-
sense knowledge of this fact, in instituting a philosophical
analysis of it.
The analysis, therefore, is one which would apply
generally, but with certain differences, to the conscious-
ness of similar Subjects, supposing them to exist. But of
their real existence, or existence as real conditions, the
analysis alone says nothing. The Subject knows them,
as he knows himself, only in the form of objective thoughts
in the content of his own consciousness; and he knows
himself only as the real condition of his own conscious-
ness, and not of theirs. If they are taken as real existents,
they are and must be taken also as the real conditions
each of his own consciousness. Although, therefore, the
analysis of a single consciousness, which we have sup-
posed to be made under our second rubric, has general
applicability to other cases, yet it is not its generality in
this sense from which we have passed, in passing from
the second to the third rubric, because generality in this
sense has not entered into the consideration of the second
rubric at all. It is rather to than from generality, in this
sense, that we have passed.
But there is another sense in which the term generality
truly applies to the content analysed, in which its mean-
ing is more liable to be confused with that of its opposite
particularity, and the particular existence which falls under
•
3
1
4
74
**
•
7
it. The content of consciousness has been spoken of above
as a whole including all its parts, or all its thoughts.
Now, although all its thoughts are also parts of it, yet a
different relation to each other, and to the whole, is indi-
cated by the name thoughts, namely, their common rela-
tion to consciousness in its whatness, as their summum
genus. Thoughts are parts which have, or are considered
as having, relations to other parts besides those which
precede, accompany, or follow them, in actual historical
order of suggestion; that is, other relations to the rest of
consciousness than relations of position in order of time.
They are therefore modifications, or differentiations, as
well as simply parts, of consciousness. Consciousness is
common to all, as well as divided into all. Its generality
consists in the former relation, its particularity in the
latter. It is from the generality to the particularity of
consciousness, in this sense of the terms, that we have
passed, in passing from the second to the third rubric.
Everything that falls under whatness belongs to the first,
everything that falls under thatness to the second. All
existence, even the existence of consciousness, falls under
the thatness of consciousness. And therefore, in taking
the whole of consciousness as an existent, which we do
in the third rubric, we take it both as a logical particular,
as a particular instance of thatness, and also in its own
particularity, or as consisting of parts, which in its case
are thoughts occurring in succession, but not excluding
the possibility of some occurring simultaneously with
others in the succession.
·
It is only in this sense of consciousness, namely, as a
particular existent, consisting of parts succeeding or ac-
companying one another in a time series, that conscious-
ness can be a conditionate, or can be held to depend upon
its Subject. Consciousness is then one particular exist-
ent, and the Subject is another, both being objects of con-
75
sciousness in that larger sense of the term, in which it
has a nature, which includes both a whatness and thatness,
as set forth in our first rubric. This is the logical justi-
fication for what we have already found consonant with
facts; namely, that on the one hand the Subject, as an
object among objects, is the proximate real condition of
the genesis of consciousness, as a single series of states
and changes, and on the other, that groups of states and
changes in consciousness constitute a knowledge of the
Subject, but in no way generate or give rise to it. And
therefore, unless we avowedly stand on a basis of a priori
assumptions, it is sheer confusion of thought to hold, either
that consciousness is the real condition of the Subject, on
the plea that the Subject is known only in consciousness,
or that the Subject, as the real condition of conscious-
ness, must exist as an absolute, beyond consciousness alto-
gether. For, as to the first point, the only priority which
consciousness has over existence is merely a logical pri-
ority in knowledge; and as to the second, some positive
knowledge of a thing, as an existent simply, is logically
pre-supposed in knowledge of it as the real condition of
any other thing.
If these points are granted, then it will follow, that
the positive sciences, one and all, will form part of a
great philosophical system, yet without losing an iota
of their scientific independence and autonomy. It is no
part of science, but only a bit of bad philosophy, which
they are called on to abandon, in abandoning that form
of absolutism which I have now been combating.]
Abandoning it they will enter the philosophical sys-
tem on the footing, not of being prescribed to, but of
prescribing. Philosophy, in my view, asks nothing better
than to take up whatever results science may arrive at,
and assigns to them, for that purpose, a special depart-
ment or rubric in its own system.
A
76
But there is still a further question. Supposing that
positive science abandons this form of absolutism, and
that philosophy fairly accepts its guidance to the utmost
attainable limits, can we say what and where those limits
are; or more precisely, whether any final solution, which
can be conceived as attainable by scientific methods, is
of a nature to include within it all possible knowledge?
Granting that there will always be a vast interval between
the utmost knowledge, which we may hope to attain
actually, and any such final solution, ideally comprehen-
sive of all possible problems, as we have now in view;
granting that there will always be a broad penumbra of
the unexplored; still the question must be put, whether
the ideally final solution, whatever its particular character
may be, can embrace the Sum of Things, or whether we
must conceive, that there are modes of existence beyond
its range, which it does not embrace at all?
Now at first sight it seems, that some final solution,
which shall ideally be all-embracing, must be conceivably
attainable on these scientific lines, for the question of
genesis has been put concerning the whole panorama of
objective thought exhibited under our second rubric, and
there shown to embrace the whole of its own obverse
aspect, the whole object thought of; and then, under our
present third rubric, the whole of this panorama has been
redistributed into real conditions and conditionates, so
that no corner of the whole is left, ideally, out of account
or unexplained. Every part within the limits of the whole
panorama has had the question of genesis, ideally speak-
ing, asked and answered concerning it. And if we cannot
put the question of genesis again concerning the nature
of the panorama, that is to say, concerning the panorama
and its objects thought of taken together, as a single
whole, this circumstance, it may be said, only shows that
a scientific analysis of the whole, when combined with a
77
subjective or philosophical analysis of the whole, which is
what we are now supposing to have been virtually accom-
plished, is the final solution, beyond which no solution
can be expected only because, and for the very reason
that, no question or problem can arise beyond it.
Certain current forms of such scientific solutions, it
may also be said by those who take this view, may indeed
have to be abandoned as inadequate. As for instance,
the physicist's hypothesis of Matter and its physical
forces or energies, or something analogous to it, as the
primæval source and permanent substrate of all other
forms of existence. Or again the psychologist's hypothesis
of a single vast conscious being or Mind, producing and
sustaining all things, and ordering them by some pre-
conceived design, for purposes imposed by his own reason
upon his own will. Or again the more abstract hypotheses
of reason by itself, or will by itself; or again of reason
stripped of consciousness, but in intimate conjunction
with matter; or of unconscious will in the same combina-
tion. Or again the hypothesis of a tertium quid between,
or compounded of, matter and consciousness, such as we
may suppose to be aimed at by the term Mind-stuff. But
then we are not restricted to hypotheses of this sort. As
the question is now raised, a scientific solution would be
all-embracing and final, if it could show anything, no
matter what, constant and permanent in the whole, by
scientific analysis of the whole into its parts and their
relations inter se, or in other words could discover a law,
or combination of laws, to which the whole in all its parts
and all its processes was subject. Consequently it would
appear, that a solution is at least conceivable under thi
third rubric, which if attained would at once be
utmost limit of knowledge, and mark the utmost
dary of existence, and therefore be a bar to all
speculation.

78
But the foregoing argument overlooks one important
fact in the total panorama of the object-matter, which is
fatal to its conclusiveness. It omits to notice the elas-
ticity, the fluctuation, in the limits of the panorama. It
treats the panorama with its objects as a whole, not only
in the sense that no question of genesis can be asked con-
cerning it, which is true, but also in the sense that it is
a definite whole, with circumscribed limits, which is false.
The panorama, as actually experienced, is always being
added to at one end, and vanishing out of consciousness
at the other. We never have anything but a portion of
it before us at once, and never find any portion definitely
circumscribed and isolated, or without what may be called
a penumbra where it fades into unconsciousness at either
end. We may recall indeed into a single view whatever
has once actually passed through the moment of distinct
perception; that is, we may treat as a circumscribed total
the whole, as well as any part, of past experience; but we
cannot so treat what is to come, not even the content of
the next future moment. The future escapes inclusion
in the ideal scientific solution, and yet the future, just as
much as the past, is part and parcel of the whole pano-
rama in the largest sense of the term. The ideal scientific
solution would be conceivably final, if the whole panorama,
in the largest sense, could be treated like a lake, instead
of being treated like an indefinite portion in the course of
a river, or if the Universe, which is its object thought of,
could be regarded as a molecule enormously magnified, or
as a conscious being with powers enormously intensified.

Now this circumscription and isolation of objects is an
ssential part of the method of science. Its concrete real
ditions must be taken as rounded off totals, since
wise they would be mere elements, aspects, or some
rt of abstraction. Science inherits this view no
common sense, on which it stands and out
79
of which it rises, just as philosophy stands on and rises
out of common sense and positive science taken together.
But it not only inherits, it also adopts and works with it.
And therefore its method can result in nothing else than
a conception of the Universe itself as a rounded off and
self-contained total, relative indeed in all its parts to
knowledge, but in contradiction with the fact, that know-
ledge is incapable of a similar circumscription. This it
is which forbids any ideal solution, conceivably to be
attained by scientific methods, being conceived as a final
one, even when science is incorporated into a philo-
sophical system, and works in harmony with philosophy,
as it is enabled to do by laying aside the conception,
that its rounded off and concrete existents are absolute
existents.
There is, then, a department or place in philosophy,
for questions of a different kind from any that we have
contemplated hitherto, questions concerning the nature
of the limits of existence as known, cr of existence and
our knowledge of it taken together. We have to see, if
possible, how our knowledge has been enlarged hitherto,
or may be enlarged hereafter, by accretions arising, not
from further investigation of what we have already got
some hold of in general outline, by analogy, anticipatory
imagination, or some kind or other of symbolisation, but
from what is unknown, or future in respect of knowledge,
altogether. In a word, the nature of the limits between
the known and the unknown is what we have to see, and
whether from this we can infer anything concerning the
unknown as such, or as contradistinguished from know-
ledge.
In order to do this, we must take up the question of
the nature of perception, or of percepts, in their lowest
terms, their ne plus ultra of simplicity, abstracting from
everything but their most essential and indispensable
80
}
features.
We must go back to that point in our system,
where our second rubric originates out of our first, and
ascertain, if possible, the whatness, nature, or content, of
percepts simply as perceived, irrespective of their place
among, or relation to, other percepts; that is, go some-
what more closely into the analysis of that total object of
perception, which we have already distinguished into the
two obverse aspects named respectively objective thought
and object thought of. We have distributed this content
differently in the third rubric from its distribution in the
second rubric. But it does not follow, because these two
distributions are co-extensive and cover one another, that
therefore no other distribution can be made.
We have now to see something more of the nature of
the moment of perception itself, abstracting from the
relations, reciprocal or other, between those particular
objective thoughts, or percepts, which have at any time
passed through the moment of perception. We have to
see the connection between what has passed through that
moment, what is passing through it, and what is, at that
moment, at once future in respect of its genesis into
experience, and as yet unknown in respect of knowledge.
It is from this analysis that we must derive our concep-
tion of the position of our positively known and positively
knowable world towards the unknown world surmised
beyond it. The analysis when made will take its place
in, and be an enlargement of, our total panorama of
objective thought; but inasmuch as it will tell us how we
must think of a world otherwise unknown, a world beyond
the world of positive science, and wholly unknowable by
its methods; and inasmuch as whatever we think of that
unknown region will be a construction of thought, though
a construction made by means of analysis of what is given
in the known region; the name for our next and final
rubric must be one which makes this new feature of con-
81
struction prominent. Its name must mark the fact, that
its problem is no longer analysis or investigation of a
given object-matter, but construction out of previous
analysis and investigation.
D
The Constructive Branch of Philosophy.
In entering on a rubric entitled constructive, the first
question must be,-what becomes of our guiding principle
of method, the distinction between nature and genesis?
It might seem at first sight to fail us altogether. And it
is true, that its practical aid as a guiding distinction is
not at first needed; but why? Because in this region,
where we have, at first starting, but one single object
before us, namely, the object of perception qua perceived,
filling the whole field of mental vision, no question of
genesis is possible, and we are perforce restricted to
analyse the object for its nature alone. The construction
itself occupies the place of the question of genesis. For
the conception of the unknown or unperceived comes
directly out of that analysis. In this respect it is like
the conception of genesis itself, and the other relations
discovered in, and primarily falling under, the second
rubric, all of which, being relations between parts of
knowledge which have positive content, such as condi-
tion and conditionate, whole and part, similar and dis-
similar, fail us here, where we come to the object of
perception in its lowest terms, or in a form which is
involved in, and pre-supposed by, all the rest.
We are familiar with the idea, that an unknown
region, something unknown, is implied in the fact of all
finite knowledge, or in other words, that finite know-
ledge reveals something unknown beyond itself; which
is in fact only saying over again that the knowledge is
F
82
finite, or is bounded by what, for the present at any rate,
is not knowledge but ignorance. That light reveals both
itself and darkness, is a particular case of this more
general fact, that knowledge reveals the existence both of
itself and of ignorance, that is, of the unknown. If it did
not, it would be, not merely knowledge, but unbounded
or infinite knowledge, that is omniscience. The root and
source of this general fact is what we have now to investi-
gate; and if we find it in the analysis of objects per-
ceived, simply qua perceived, the necessary connection of
this fourth rubric with those which precede it will be
made apparent, and at the same time the class of ques-
tions which it contemplates will be marked out.
Generally it may be said (though time forbids me to
go into greater detail this evening)*—generally it may
be said, that the rubric depends on the nature of the
limits between knowledge and ignorance, and embraces
all questions which connect a theory of the Universe in
its entirety with a theory, or distinct perception, of those
limits; or which, in other words, include the region which
is wholly beyond positive knowledge in their purview.
The well known "Agnoiology" in Ferrier's Institutes of
Metaphysic may be regarded as an introduction to the
whole subject. But to look somewhat more nearly at the
questions which it embraces, it will be found, if I mistake
not, that it is in this region, which I place under the
rubric of the Constructive Branch of Philosophy, that sys-
tems of Absolute Idealism have their being, that on these
heights only are they met, and here alone can they he
criticised; I mean systems which are not merely abso-
lutist and monistic, but idealistic also. Hegel for instance,
the greatest master, certainly in modern times, of this
line of thought, constructs the Universe out of an analysis
* The part below in brackets, from On the present occasion down to
infinite existence, was omitted in delivery.
83
•
of objects perceived or thought of, simply as perceived or
thought of. Under the same head will come also, I believe,
though on this I speak with great diffidence, the three
chief systems of Hindu philosophy, in which those ideas
are formulated, which underlie both the Brahminical and the
Buddhist religions.* In the next place, as already said, it
is in this region of thought that the conception first arises
of an infinite Universe, as distinguished from a World of
possibly finite but indefinitely known circumscription;
the term infinite meaning whatever has, from the nature
of the case, not only no knowable, but also no possible
limits, or in other words is known to be unlimited.
Finally it is in this region that the question concerning
the nature of God, the Object of Religion, arises. A First
Cause, whose existence should be conceived merely as a
solution of the problems of our third rubric, would, at best
and highest, be nothing more than a Demiurge, to whom
the attribute of Infinity, which is essential to all religious
feeling, must be denied.-These are the main problems, the
main controversies, which fall under the present fourth
rubric. Their closely similar and at the same time special
nature seems imperatively to require some special depart-
ment of philosophy to be assigned to them. Indeed, it is
ith questions of this nature, in the opinion of many persons,
at philosophy itself begins, and consequently it is on
ese that, in their opinion, the solution of all other ques-
ons depends. These alone, with their immediate con-
equences, they reckon philosophical. The whole subject
matter of my two first rubrics they set down as mere
psychology, with which philosophy proper,-which never-
theless includes what I should call an a priori psycho-
logy, has little or nothing to do. We have, however,

* See Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy comprising the Nyaya,
the Sankhya, and the Vedant. By the Rev. K. M. Banerjea. Wil-
liams & Norgate. 1861.
84
already seen how the present rubric grows out of those
preceding it, grows spontaneously as it were, and by the
mere application of our principle of method.
[On the present occasion, however, a discussion of
these problems would be out of place. I can enter on
them only to such an extent as may be requisite to secure
the ground of this fourth rubric, by showing that its
questions are not mere logomachies, but that the possi-
bilities which it contemplates have a real ground in know-
ledge as possibilities, and must therefore have some special
place or other, within philosophy, appropriated for their
discussion. We found the methods of the third rubric
inadequate to deal with the solution of the unknown to
knowledge, and yet leading those who followed them
exclusively to identify the unknown with the non-existent,
by a sort of foregone conclusion. The question therefore
is, what light is thrown by knowledge itself, taken simply as
knowledge, on this relation? We once more have recourse
to the strictly subjective method of philosophy, while
keeping steadily in view the concrete and positive nature
of that known existence, which is one member of the
relation to be examined.

We go back accordingly to our first philosophic
starting point, and endeavour to make another analy
of the object or content of that kind of perception whi
has been characterised as primary, under our first rubi
Primary Perception was there described as being virtual
though not consciously reflective; that is, as being refle
tive perception which does not as yet perceive its own re-
flective character. It has nevertheless a content or object
perceived; that is, a content which is characterised as
object in the secondary or properly reflective perception
which supervenes upon the first or primary perception.
To this extent its analysis has been given under our first
rubric, where it was said, that the two aspects, objective
85
and subjective, are together the object of secondary or
distinctly reflective perception, of that kind of perception
which perceives both a content and the fact that this con-
tent is perceived, which latter fact is the objectivity of
the former, its thatness or existence for perception. It was
this analysis of the content of primary perception, as the
total object of reflective, which was then followed out in
the second and third rubrics.
But we have now to enquire, whether this same con-
tent of primary perception has not another analysis,
besides the analysis which shows it as the object of
reflective perception, that is, besides its duplication or
distinction into the two obverse aspects, objective and
subjective, and also besides that analysis of it into ele-
ments, which belongs to the second rubric. We have in
fact to see, whether we can or cannot help making another
analysis of it as a whole, different from its analysis as a
whole into obverse aspects, in which it is taken as the
object of reflective perception, as well as different from
the analysis of its subjective aspect, objective thought, into
elements, of which our second rubric gave a general
sketch. It does not in the least follow, because we have
analysed this content in one way, that we cannot analyse
it again in another. It may be capable, for aught we
know, of many different analyses, the first being neces-
sarily the analysis of it as a contributory to the moment
of reflective perception, which is the moment of experience,
the moment of distinct consciousness, the moment in
which we first lay hold of anything as an object at all;
and which was the moment sketched in our first rubric.
The filling up or content of this reflective moment of
experiencing anything is and must be concrete, that is, of
such a nature as only to disclose its wealth under repeated
examinations.
Let us then take any object whatever of reflective
86
perception, and in thought strip from it everything which
it requires a special act of attention for us to be aware
of, thus both isolating it from its context in the actual
stream of thought, and abolishing all distinct contrasts
within itself. We shall then find, that the minimum to
which we come in the process, before reducing the object
to zero, is a positive content, present to consciousness, .
having some undefined duration, and in contrast to two
vacua, one preceding and the other following it, both
vacua being perceived, that is, being states of conscious-
ness at all, only in attendance upon, and in contrast with,
the positive content between them. If it was not there,
they would not be there; if it is there, they must be. And
the only way we have to describe the positive con-
tent of this total percept is by some such words as That!
T'here!
Now this description is applicable to the residuum or
minimum in consciousness of any object of reflective per-
ception, whatever its complexity, extent, or magnitude,
from a single presentative sensation to the thought of
the entire universe. The total of the residuum or mini-
mum is always, if described subjectively, that is, by
reference to the threshold of consciousness, a minus, plus,
minus; if objectively, or as a content, a nothing, something,
nothing. The transitions between these moments, that is,
between the minus, the plus, and the minus, or between
the nothing, the something, and the nothing, require no
special act of attention to be perceived, but are part and
parcel of the total content. And, what is most remark-
able, the something comes in between the two nothings, and
is the first in order of knowledge, since they are known
only in contrast with it, while in order of existence the
something, the positive portion, seems to come second,
following one nothing and preceding the other. It is as
if it were a single gleam of light falling on some dark
87
pre-existing stream, which save for that gleam would be
invisible.
The facts which I have thus given as the analysis of
the percept in primary perception are those which Hegel
lays at the basis of his system. At least, in attempting
to bring his views into comparison with my own, and
measuring then so to speak by my own standard,—which
is, I suppose, what every one must do, who tries to form
an independent judgment of another's theory,—I cannot
avoid thinking, that these facts are his basis, analysed of
course in a somewhat different way. He took, I imagine,
these facts as his ultimates, but at the same time iden-
tified the object which I have described as a positive
between two negatives (which is in a certain sense a pro-
cess, since it has duration differentiated into former and
latter states), with the process of secondary or reflective
perception, which has this process as its object. Whereby
the object, minus, plus, minus, or nothing, something, nothing,
becomes, not only a process of consciousness simply, but
a process of consciousness, a process of thought, and a
process of real genesis in the object, all in one; a process,
moreover, having its principle of movement within itself,
the principle of moving by negativity or contradiction,
which is a logical principle, or principle of thought.
Hegel thus identifies the energy or motive power in
things perceived with the logical law of thought perceiv-
ing them, and thus it is that his system is a system of
Absolute Idealism. The principle of Causality, which
Kant laid at the basis of his system, but at the same
time left unanalysed, Hegel thus resolves into an attri-
bute of Thought. Thinking is with him the only action;
the only real deed is thought.
The lowest terms in which the Universe is expressible
are accordingly, for Hegel,—Seyn, Nichts [or Nichts, Seyn],
Werden, Etwas; or the passage of something without
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content into something with content. And the whole
Universe, in its utmost comprehensiveness and complexity,
is embraced by the theory, because the unknown or nega-
tive parts in the total object of primary perception are
not, as on my analysis, left always outside its positive
content, as an unknown Beyond, but are included within
it, as parts essential to its composition and movement.
Hegel thus constructs the entire Universe out of the
indispensable and necessary features of an object in its
lowest terms, abstracted from its context in actual expe-
rience, but in close union with reflective perception, of
which it is an object. In other words, he constructs the
entire content of my second and third rubrics out of the
analysis which I suppose him to make of the content of
my first rubric; the essential results of that analysis
being two, first the identification of energy with thought,
and second, the inclusion of the unknown within the
boundary of the known. Hence his Universe comes out,
not only as an Universe of Thought, an universal Mind,
but also as an Absolute, or rounded off and self-contained
total, just similar, in this respect, to the Universe as it
would be conceived in a final solution attained by
methods of positive science, if such a solution were really
attainable.
But to return to our own analysis. It will be ob-
served, that we have obtained our object of primary per-
ception reduced to its lowest terms, in which it seems to
rise like an island out of a sea of nothingness, by con-
sciously abstracting and isolating a concrete object from
its context in the actually experienced stream of thought
or consciousness. As actually experienced, it does not
come between two nothings, but between two other states
of consciousness with positive content. At the same
time it is true, that we not only may but must think in
the same way of the whole stream of actual experience,
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that is, the whole panorama of objective thought in its
largest sense, in which it includes the whole series or
system of real conditions as its object thought of, so soon
as we begin to think of it as a total. It too rises out of
unconsciousness, and ends in unconsciousness again, and
that not only in its historical existence as the experience
of an individual's lifetime, but also as the objective corre-
late of that experience, the real world of existence, of
which the historical individual, with his consciousness, is
a part.
The whole Universe, thought of by an individual con-
scious being, can only be thought of by him as seen from
within and not from without. He cannot see its limits,
he cannot see the context, so to speak, of his panorama
as a whole, as we see the context of any particular object,
either in the real world, or in the stream of conscious-
ness as it actually occurs. This is a simple fact,. the
reason for which is partly at any rate psychological, and
is indicated by the distinction stated at the end of the
last paragraph. It is not because the panorama as a
whole is built up out of ultimate percepts, each of which
has an atmosphere of negation or nothingness round it,—
for this is not the case,-but because the total panorama
of real existence is conditioned, for the individual Subject,
by the way in which it is brought before him in his actual
experience, that is to say, by a process of experiencing
which is always going on during his lifetime, and is
always incomplete, the past being always in process of
vanishing, and the future always in process of appearing.
Abstraction from a context, which we perform arti-
ficially in the case of particular objects, is performed for
us perforce by nature in the case of the whole panorama,
including the order of real conditioning, so soon as we
begin to think of it as a whole. For us it is bounded by
unconsciousness historically, at the beginning and end of
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life, and as a panorama by ignorance both at its begin-
ning and end, when thought of historically, and at all
those points, or facts, of its content, for which we can
give no reason, but must accept as facts, and which from
that circumstance we call ultimates, when thought of ana-
lytically. In short, the Universe, as positively known to
us, both when we have reduced it to its lowest terms in
thought, that is, to the least number of its simplest ulti-
mate data, and also when we have amplified it to its
largest knowable extent and complexity of content, is for
us precisely in the position of an object of primary per-
ception, of which we can only say That! and There!
The result is, that the conception of the Universe, as
composed of a positive content bounded by the Unknown
as by an atmosphere, is a true conception; that is to say,
is the only conception of it which harmonises with all the
known facts, and other conceptions known to be true.
To whatever limits we amplify the positive content of
our panorama, it is always bounded by an atmosphere of
the unknown. And we mark this difference between the
positive but indefinitely elastic content of knowledge and
the same content surrounded by its atmosphere, the infi-
nite unknown, by calling one the total panorama of posi-
tive knowledge, which is its name as a system of objective
thought, and the known (or positively knowable) world,
or part of the universe, which are names for it as object
thought of; while for the other we reserve the name of
the Universe simply.
But if this be so, the question immediately and in-
evitably occurs,-How, then, is it possible to make any
construction of the totally unknown region beyond the
limits of the positively knowable, limits which include
(be it noted) the penumbra of unexplored phenomena, or
facts which may at any time fall within the cognisance of
positive science, and which would be embraced by its
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ideally final solution, spoken of above, supposing such a
solution were attained? For not only can we have no
facts or phenomena to build with, but our positive con-
ceptions of positive relations, which belong to the pano-
rama of objective thought, are one and all, as it seems,
inapplicable here. There is left only the positive con-
ception of Being, and that defined merely by the bare
conception of Percipi, its own subjective aspect, inasmuch
as we have the infinite unknown as an object of reflec-
tion, an abstract object without positive content. What
real difference is there after all, it must be asked, between
what is always, totally, and necessarily unknown, and
what others frankly and boldly call the Unknowable?
The answer is twofold, if the method which I am
following be correct. First, the Unknown is known as
infinite, which is to some extent a construction of it; and
secondly, it is known as continuous with the known or
positively knowable, notwithstanding that our positive
knowledge breaks off sheer with given ultimate data in
one direction, and with their imagined ultimate results
in the other; which is again a construction to a certain
extent. We have in fact some sort of hold even of the
unknown "Beyond," by the mere fact that it is thought
of by us at all, that it is a percept, percipitur, or is an
object of reflective perception, notwithstanding that we
cannot conceive either its reality, or its relation to the
known, under any of the positive relations which belong
to the analysis of the positively known panorama. Com-
pared with all these relations, its reality, as an object
defined by the percipi simply, is, to use a favourite Neo-
platonist term, ὑπερούσιος.
But the consequences which flow from these two points
of construction, the infinity of the unknown Beyond, and
its continuity with the known, are not unimportant. Some
of these and the bearing of them I will endeavour to indi-
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cate as briefly as possible. These two points, it must be
noted, are known facts, that is, belong to the reality of
the unknown as we must think of it, or as objective to us.
So far as they are concerned, we know the real nature of
the unknown, just as we know the real nature of objects
within the positively known region, within the panorama,
within the world of common sense and positive science;
--a circumstance which forbids our characterising the
unknown as transcendent, or as a world of Things-in-
themselves. They are at the same time a construction
derived from analysis of given experience, a construction
which forms the basis or foundation of further construc-
tions. And these further constructions also must, like
them, be derived from analysis of the given; but they are
constructions which, unlike the first, we are not compelled
by the analysed facts to make, as constructions of the
unknown; which therefore we are not justified in attri-
buting to the unknown, as belonging to its real objec-
tivity, or as forming part of its real and known nature.
They are thoughts by which we endeavour to represent a
reality, which at the same time we know to be really
beyond the reach of representation by any such thoughts.
It follows that, in speaking of the Unknown Beyond,
we are in this singular position. We are compelled to
use terms and phrases drawn from our positive knowledge
of the world within the panorama of objective thought,
which yet we know are not applicable to the reality of that
to which we apply them. Except the three terms, Real
Existence, Infinity, and Continuity with the Known, which
express known facts concerning the otherwise Unknown,
all the terms which we use concerning it are drawn from
something which is special, not universal, in experience,
and therefore are only figuratively applicable to the
Unknown. But it does not follow from this, that all are
either alike applicable or alike inapplicable to it, in this
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figurative sense. The latter of these consequences would
be the case, not only with these figurative terms, but
also with the three terms which, as it is, are really appli-
cable, if the Unknown were strictly an Unknowable, or
wholly out of experience. All terms would then be inap-
plicable alike. This is an important difference. The
terms, if any, which we may find applicable to the un-
known infinite, will therefore be rather names of the
directions in which we are to place, or the analogies
under which we are to conceive, its real attributes, than
names describing those attributes themselves. They will
be names of relations between positive realities within
our own knowledge, standing for realities which we know
not positively, but only as having analogous relations to
the object of our positive knowledge as a whole. But
there is a wide difference between such knowledge of
the unknown infinite as this and an absence of knowledge
altogether.
Let us see, then, in the first place, what it is that we
are doing, in distinguishing the unknown from the known
at all. We are taking the universe analytically, and
distinguishing one part of it, the whole panorama includ-
ing all real conditions, as the known, from the rest as the
unknown. The whole universe is thus taken as real in
both the senses of reality defined in my fourth Address,
that is, both as a percept simply and as belonging to the
order of real conditioning. But while the known part
contains known real conditions, and among them the real
conditions of our perceiving the existence of the unknown,
it is uncertain whether the unknown part contains any-
thing which may be figuratively, but with substantial
truth, called a real condition of the known, or not. It
may be merely the conditionate of the known, though real
as an object of reflection; it may, like consciousness itself,
be conditioned proximately on the existence of the Sub-
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ject, without having in it any existent which is a real
condition, as well as a conditionate, of the known with
which it is continuous.
At the same time it is clear, that the unknown is
placed by thought, relatively to the known, in the posi-
tion at least which would be occupied by a real condition
of it, inasmuch as it is necessarily thought of as preceding
and surrounding it, as well as following and depending
on it. The known or positively knowable part of the
universe is bounded by the unknown or ignorance, first,
at all points or facts which are ultimate data of know-
ledge, secondly, at all points or facts which mark out
its largest conceivable limits in extent and complexity.
Its ultimate principia in knowledge, and their ultimate
consequences or results in knowledge, are alike in contact
or continuity with the unknown; that is, at those points,
or with those facts, it ceases to be positively known or
knowable to us, and our ignorance begins. But does our
ignorance conceal what, if we could know it positively,
we should know as the real condition of what we now
know, or think of as knowable, positively? Is there some
unknown form of what we call, in the known world,
Agency, Power, Efficiency? For again it must be repeated,
we cannot know the unknown as a real condition of the
known, in the strict sense of real condition, because this
would not only be knowing more of it than the three
predicates named above (the possibility of which in some
sense is what we want to know), but it would be in con-
tradiction with one of them, namely, infinity. For to know
anything as a real condition is to know it definitely and
positively, that is, as a finite existent.
Now if at this point we look back to the conclusion
reached at the end of our third rubric, we shall find that
this question is the very one which the scientific method
failed to answer, the very one for failing to answer which
95
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it was shown, that any solution, which might conceivably
be attained by the methods of science, could be regarded
only as a partial solution in philosophy, and not as a
complete and final one. The scientific view of things,
adopted in our third rubric, transformed what, in our
second rubric, were called objects thought of into objects
thought of as real conditions. And we found that no definite
real condition, or definite law among real conditions,
could be conceived, which should be an adequate explana-
tion of the infinity involved in what was there called the
elasticity of knowledge. For that would imply the con-
tradiction of the real condition, or real law, proposed as
a solution, being thought of as definite and infinite at
Consequently, in carrying over into the present
fourth rubric the final problem bequeathed by the third,
the problem of the Real Condition of or in the whole
infinite Universe, taken as infinite, is the real question
carried over.
And what we have been doing in the
present rubric, up to this point, is arriving at this same
question from the subjective or strictly philosophical side,
namely, by analysis of percepts simply as perceived.
once.
The present question, therefore, which is the chief
question of the present rubric, is this,-whether we can
truly think of the unknown as containing anything
analogous to real conditions which act and re-act upon
the known? Is there, or is there not, in the unknown,
not only a reality for thought, which can be modified as
thought by the Subject, but a reality upon which the
known and positively knowable world, or any part of it,
depends, and which is also modified by the known world
in its turn, as consciousness depends upon and is modified
by the Subject, or as the Subject depends upon, modifies,
and is modified by, the material conditions of its existence?
The great question of the present rubric being thus
stated, I would next remark, that the sole interest which
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man has in imagining or reasoning about the unknown is
of a practical kind. He would have a speculative interest
in it also, namely, that of acquiring knowledge for its
own sake, if it were possible for him to acquire it. But
so soon as he sees, that his positive knowledge of it as a
reality is restricted to the three predicates which have
been named (real existence, infinity, continuity with the
known), his speculative interest in the question ceases,
because it is evident that no positive or demonstrable
answer is to be attained on any terms; and he pursues
his speculation solely for the sake of the light which those
three predicates may throw back upon his knowledge of
the known or positively knowable world, including that
of his own mysterious nature, the action or conduct in
which it displays itself, and the destiny which may pos-
sibly await it in the unknown future. The continuity
between the known and the unknown is a real relation
between them; and, since he knows himself as the proxi-
mate real condition of his own knowledge, he already in
one sense knows the unknown as a conditionate of himself,
seeing that it is a part of that knowledge which wholly
depends for its existence as consciousness on his own
existence. Ignorance is the name for it as forming part
of consciousness. Its name as object thought of is the
Unknown. But is he to make his ignorance the measure
of existence? Can he ignore the possibility, that the
unknown may contain more than he knows it as containing,
that is to say, may be more than the vacuity surrounding
his panorama? It is evident that his ignorance no more
necessarily exhausts the possibilities of its objective aspect,
the unknown, than his perception of any positive object,
at any given time, necessarily exhausts the positive pro-
perties, which on further examination it may be found to
contain. He has, therefore, reason to suspect, that, as
he would be intellectually dull, if he ignored the fact of a
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real relation existing, so he would be practically foolish,
if he neglected the possibility, that the unknown may
contain agencies which actually affect his own destiny in
the unknown future, through the medium of his own
action and conduct in the present known world, over
which alone he has a determining power. There is, how-
ever, a great difference between the two things. The
real relation is demonstrable, and must be admitted by
all; the real agencies, not being demonstrable, can if we
choose be neglected. The one is a matter of speculative
notoriety, the other a matter of personal choice, which
each individual must decide for himself, and in which no
one can prescribe to another.
Once more, then, let us go back to our analytical point
of view, which we have quitted for a moment in speaking
of a destiny in the unknown future. The whole of known
or positively knowable existence may be once more likened
to that famous shield which, with its gold and silver
sides, has served so frequently and so well in philosophic
warfare. This time it is its solid substance and orbicular
outline to which I look for aid. The gold and silver sides,
that is, the subjective and objective aspects of existence,
are both included in that which I now use the shield to
represent, namely, the whole known and knowable part
of the universe, including all known and positively know-
able real conditions. But I no longer use the sides to
represent those obverse aspects. The whole shield, as it
advances to the front, moves forward in time into the
unknown future, to meet and experience its destiny, to
make its fortune in what is, historically speaking, un-
known. That is an unknown in order of historical genesis;
the unknown a parte post; and there is also an historical
unknown at its earliest imaginable or conceivable com-
mencement, an unknown a parte ante. But it is not this
historical unknown, either at the knowable beginning or
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at the knowable end, that we are now concerned with,
but with that unknown upon which the destiny of the
whole historical future may depend, I mean the unknown
in analytical order, the unknown in point, not of genesis,
but of nature, the unknown which we picture as lying
beyond the utmost circumference of the shield, measuring
from its centre; which lies beyond it, not only at any one
time or epoch of its history, or advance in historical order,
but at all times of its history; which closes round it at
whatever time in the past we may conceive its history as
a shield, that is, as a positively knowable world, to have
begun; and which will close round it again, at whatever
time in the future we may conceive its historical exist-
ence to terminate.
The whole orb of the solid shield, bounded by the
surfaces of its circumference and of its two sides, repre-
sents the nature of the known and positively knowable
real world, containing objects which are real conditions
as well as conditionates. The side surfaces we may
picture as covered by a minute mosaic, to represent the
analysis of its real nature; the backward-facing surface
depicting its nature as it springs out of the past, the for-
ward-looking surface its nature as it enters on the future;
and the solid content, which connects portions of the
opposite surfaces with each other, standing for individual
existents in their character of real conditions. These
solid portions of mosaic, which have both a forward and a
backward looking surface, we may imagine also as arranged
in order of increasing complexity in structure and func-
tion, beginning from the centre, so that those which stand
for men would occupy the outer circle of the shield, where
it was bounded by the circumference. Every solid por-
tion of the mosaic is a real condition. And every indi-
vidual human being may well feel, as he advances with
the rest of mankind, and with the whole world of Nature,
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organic and inorganic, into the unknown future, that on
his own action, at every present moment, the real con-
ditioning of his own future chiefly depends, and also to
some extent that of his race, though in an infinitesimal
and almost inappreciable degree.
For every individual shares in a nature which, so far
as he positively knows, is the highest and most complex
of all real existences. He is therefore a being whose
nature, analytically speaking, is in contact and continuity
with the unknown regarded in its nature, be that nature
what it may; a circumstance which we have figured by
his place in the shield. In other words, the human nature
in which he shares, if estimated and placed in the order
of value, which is part of the analytical order, is the
crowning achievement of Nature as a whole; there is no
positively known nature above it, either in moral worth,
or in complexity of organisation. He is moreover, in the
action of every present moment, moving on into, and con-
tributing to condition, the historically unknown future.
The question is, whether in that action he is contributing
also to condition the unknown, which we figure as lying
beyond and around it, and as necessarily continuing
to exist, supposing the historical existence of the known
and positively knowable world, including himself, to close
and cease? Is a real destiny possibly awaiting him in
eternity, a destiny which his own action in the present
world may contribute to determine?
One more preliminary remark must be interposed,
before we quite let go our illustration of the shield. It is
necessary to be clear as to what belongs to the real pro-
blem, and what belongs to the imaginary illustration.
The whole known and positively knowable world, which
is imaged by the shield, and is an object thought of, and
is real in the second sense of reality (inasmuch as it is
itself the order of real conditioning, so far as that order
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is positively knowable), exists in space. But the objective
thought, in and by which we know it, when taken in the
same reference to the order of real conditioning, and
therefore taken in the same second sense of reality, exists
primarily in time only. That is to say, it exists in space
only as dependent on a real existent, the Subject, which
is part of the object thought of. Now our problem is
concerning the relation between the world, which is the
object thought of, and the unknown beyond it. We do
not know that it has space beyond it. Whether it has or
not, is part of the problem of the Unknown. Whatever
can be positively figured as existing in space, and all
figurations of space itself, even if belonging to dimensions
of space other than the well known three, belong, if not
to the known, at least to the positively knowable world,
which is that penumbra of unexplored phenomena already
spoken of, and which we may figure, if we will, by a
fringe or halo, attaching like an atmosphere to the cir-
cumference of the shield in our illustration.
Accordingly, when we speak of the unknown as lying
beyond, and as being in continuity, and at certain points in
contact, with the known or knowable world, we are speak-
ing of a limit, a continuity, and a contact, in our objective
thought of the world; and these features of our objective
thought are drawn from that mode of it which we call
space. It does not follow, that space, as part of the
object thought of, lies beyond the known and positively
knowable world, or in other words, that the unknown
part of the Universe is spatial. We know it as ignorance
in continuity with knowledge. It is within our objective
thought, but beyond the object positively thought of. Our
problem is, whether in this unknown, which is not even
known as spatial, we have grounds for inferring anything
analogous to real conditions, which are conditions of the
existence of the known. Now our illustration tends to
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make us forget this circumstance, by figuring the shield
as surrounded on all sides by space. It necessarily
figures it so, because it is a part of our objective thought,
and is employed to picture the known world, which as
object thought of is spatial, but of which we do not know,
as we know of the shield, that it has space beyond its
own limits, or in other words, that it does not share the
infinity which belongs to space as a mode of objective
thought, while itself being an object thought of.
Another point which the illustration of the shield
tends to obscure is the following. The ignorance in our
objective thought, which has the unknown for its object
thought of, is ignorance, or a blank, in the process of
thinking; the infinity of the unknown, which is its object
thought of, is therefore infinity in point of time, not of
space. But our illustration of the shield has led us to
picture this infinity as an infinity of space, as an unlimited
space, surrounding a definite figure, existing for some
indefinite portion of time. It leads us therefore to mis-
take the duration of the known and positively knowable
world for the duration of time altogether; and thereby
to exclude from time in its whole generality that unknown
portion of the Universe which is infinite, but which it
represents under the figure of infinite space. Time really
includes the duration of the infinite unknown, with all
which it may contain, as well as the duration of the
known and positively knowable world from its beginning
to its end, wherever these may be taken. The infinity
out of which they are carved, again to speak figuratively,
is an infinity of time, and this infinity is what is known
by the name of eternity.
But now to return to our problem, which, as it was
last stated, was stated as a question put by an individual
to himself concerning his own destiny. In the first place,
then, I must observe, that this question, so far as it con-
102
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cerns the agent individually, is only a part of the larger
question concerning the whole known world, the whole
mosaic of the shield's surface. He can only answer it, as
it concerns himself individually, by answering it as it
concerns the whole. Taken merely as it concerns him-
self, it is but the point at which, or the instance in which,
the question concerning the whole is brought under his
immediate inspection, or at which he is called upon to
form a judgment, one way or the other, about it. In
other words, it is a practical and personal question, not
because it concerns an individual agent and his destiny
only, (for this is not the case), but because he has to
give a virtual and implicit answer to it, yes or no, in
every distinct choice which he makes between opposite
lines of conduct; and therefore, in default of speculative
grounds to guide his judgment, his answer must be drawn
from motives, or the consideration of motives, which come
home to him personally, and the force of which no one
can demonstrate to another. His reasons are personal to
himself, but the question which they decide is a question
concerning the world;-what he is to think of its real
conditions and consequences in the infinite unknown.
Are there or are there not real conditions in the unknown,
which affect and are affected by those belonging to the
known world?
The alternatives attach to actions in their character
of real conditions, and therefore the agent cannot escape
deciding, merely by refusing to entertain the question as
a speculative one. The refusal is itself a decision. Not
to entertain the question is practically to answer it in the
negative. In acting, therefore, the agent is in reality
deciding between the two alternatives of which we have
been speaking, besides the alternatives which are osten-
sibly before him, the two lines of conduct presented to
his choice Actions either have, or else have not, real
+
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consequences in the infinite unknown world. If, in the
case of his own actions, he acts as if they had, he vir-
tually chooses the affirmative; if he acts as if they had
not, he virtually chooses the negative; for he acts in
either case on an idea assumed to be true for the purposes
of that action. The idea which he entertains and adopts,
whether with or without examination, is the rationale or
rational justification of his action. Which idea, then,
which of the alternative ideas, has he practical grounds
for adopting, seeing that all speculative grounds fail him?
The overwhelming importance of the affirmative, if it
should be true, cannot fail to fix his attention, and compel
him seriously to entertain the question, the moment it is
seen, that a practical decision cannot be avoided, even by
refusing to entertain it speculatively. This is part of
what is meant by saying, that the question is a practical
and personal one.
But there is something more. By the question being
practical and not speculative is meant, that it is not pri-
marily a question of what is true, but of what is best; a
question of the relative value or worth of the two alter-
natives. Speculative questions are questions primarily
of what is true, and best only because true. Practical
questions are questions of choice, and all choice is between
a better and a worse. The true is something known, the
best is something chosen. And we have seen that, in the
We are
present case, all grounds of knowledge fail us.
compelled, then, since we must decide between two alter-
natives, and no third course is open, to decide what is
virtually a speculative question, since one alternative
must be true and the other untrue, by our practical
knowledge, our knowledge of which is the best or most
desirable of the two.
Now the choice between definite alternatives, espe-
cially when they have such large and far-reaching con-
.
1
:
inte
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ཝཱ
ל
igh
.
1.
R
.
*
•
Mil
•
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3
sequences as in the present case, can never be arbitrary;
they must always stand in some definite relations, or have
some definite affinities, with other known facts or ideas,
which enable a rational judgment to be formed about their
relative preferability. And there is a function in man, to
which all such alternatives are referable, and which
decides between them, a function which is the ultimate
arbiter or judge of relative worth or value in every case
of choice, both as respects the things to be chosen from,
and as respects the volitions and actions in which choos-
ing consists and is carried out,-a function which is known
as conscience. This function is the ultimate judge, because
there is no appeal from it to anything else, but only to
the same function again, at a future time. And it is
moreover a function which is conscious of this its own
supremacy, and of the final validity of its own judg-
ments.*
But conscience is no abstract entity; it is merely the
name describing the whole person, or conscious being,
so far as he judges his own acts in the moment of acting.
It is that mode of reflective perception which takes the
relative preferability of motives, as they are actually felt,
for its object-matter. But since motives are feelings
which are difficult to discriminate, and in which a man
may easily persuade himself that he really perceives what
he wishes to perceive, the essential characteristic of con-
science consists in conscious attention to this possibility,
in judging the relative preferability of motives; that is,
in attention to its own sincerity in judging. All judg-
ments are volitional actions, and therefore conscience is
itself an act of choosing the best motives; that is to say,
it is choice and criticism of choice in one; though this
* See Butler's Dissertation Of the nature of Virtue, appended to his
Analogy of Religion; particularly the footnote to the first paragraph.
And see also his second and third Sermons Upon Human Nature.
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choice in knowledge may or may not be adopted by a
further act of choice, known as the fiat of the will, so as
to become the motive finally operative in the resulting
action. Apart, however, from this further fiat of the will,
conscience is still concrete, and may be described as con-
sisting essentially of two elements, knowledge and feeling,
combined in an act of judgment felt to have the highest
validity attainable at the time.
But why felt to have this highest validity? Because
its decision is of a nature to be verified; but verified, not,
as in the case of speculative judgments, by facts which
may be known from other sources independently of the
judgment, but only by another judgment, the same in
kind but more mature, of which it is the sole object; that
is to say, a judgment in which the conscience reflects
upon itself, and judges its former judgments, as judg-
ments simply, or in respect of their sincerity, and which
combines purer feeling with deeper insight, or in a word
possesses more thorough self-knowledge. Every judg-
ment which a man sincerely passes on his own choice, in
the moment of choosing, includes the conviction, that it
will be affirmed to have been right at the time of choos-
ing, by future judgments belonging to the same function,
and possessing the same essential characteristic of sin-
cerity, to whatever higher degree of insight in point of
knowledge, or of purity in point of feeling, he may attain.
It is in this conviction that his sense of the validity, as dis-
tinct from the sincerity, of his present judgment consists.
The later of the two judgments will thus be virtually a
continuation of the former which it criticises, affirming its
validity for the past, but admitting its imperfection for
the present, that is, for those circumstances under which
the later and more mature judgment has now to deter-
mine the agent's onward course.
Conscience then is an exercise or act of judgment,
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106
which can justify its own sense of the validity of its
judgments only by assuming its own perfectibility as a
function, that is, the possibility of its indefinite advance
in insight, which is knowledge, and in goodness or purity
which belongs to feeling. And therefore, when the ques-
tion between the present alternatives comes before it for
decision as a practical question, it must necessarily reject
the alternative which denies the possibility of that inde-
finite advance. Conscience can never admit the thought,
that a time will ever come, at which the difference be-
tween sincerity and insincerity, that is, between right
and wrong, in practical choice of feeling and action, will
be abolished. But this would be the case, if the two
kinds of action, the good and the bad, were alike arrested
in their development, by both alike ceasing to exist with
the existence of the known world. The opposite thought,
that time will make their essential difference more and
more prominent, is the one motive power on which con-
science depends for enforcing obedience to its decisions,
in the face of opposing and distracting inclinations, and
for giving that practical efficacy to its acts of judgment
as actions, without which their validity as knowledge would
be an empty name. To limit the efficacy is to change the
nature of the action of conscience; it would destroy it en-
tirely as the known source of right, and leave it standing
with no other than a de facto character. If conscience
does not know its own ultimate validity, it must sur-
render all claim to unconditional obedience as a judge
between conflicting inclinations. Kant's undying service
to morals and religion consists in having enforced atten-
tion to this central point, however much he may have
injured its efficacy by making it rest upon a transcendental
theory. It follows, that conscience does not confine itself
to repeating, what was assumed in putting the question,
that its own indefinite advance in perfection may be true,
107
ཀཎྞཾ །
:.
but positively enjoins the adoption of that alternative, on
which alone it can be affirmed that it will be true; which
is saying, in other words, that there are real conditions
in the unknown world, which affect and are affected by
those belonging to the known world.
To avoid a possible misconception, another point must
be noted. It must not be thought that the actual validity
of judgments of conscience in the present depends on
their being verified hereafter by a perfected conscience;
for, in order of existence, the present can never be con-
ditioned on the future. Validity means, that the judg-
ment and the choice commanded by it are right now,
irrespective of actual consequences, that is, whatever the
consequences may be, and whether they will have any
de facto consequences or not. But the validity and the
rightness are felt and known as such; are thought and
object thought of in one; and this involves the judgment
being felt as verifiable, if the function were to be per-
fected, and even if perfected indefinitely. Validity and
the sense of validity are for the conscious agent, in the
moment of acting, one and the same thing. The one is
all that is then known of the other. The perfectibility of
the function is an idea which enters into the analysis of
the sense of validity, when the question is asked, in what
the sense of validity consists, and whether it is to be
justified as a true feeling. Then it is that we see, that
the idea of validity implies confirmation by a future
judgment, and also that this judgment must be of the
same nature as that which it judges. Validity is thus
perceived to be inherent in the nature of the judgments
of conscience, though a distinct act of reflection is re-
quired, in the first instance, for the perception. You can-
not prove that a choice is right, any more than you can
prove that a colour is red. You cannot demonstrate the
difference between right and wrong, any more than you
*
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can demonstrate the difference between black and white.
Yet sense alone does not tell us that it is ultimate and
indemonstrable, though as feeling it is immediate and
certain; this requires a distinct act of reflection. So
also with conscience. A distinct act of reflection is
required to justify its sense of validity, and raise it to the
rank of a knowledge of validity. Sense and conscience
are both ultimate, and therefore ultimately indemonstrable.
But there is this great difference, that sense is ultimate
in the region of fact simply, while conscience is ultimate
in that of choice, and therefore to some extent commands
the future, in commanding action. This perception in the
case of conscience, when once attained, is incorporated
with conscience, as the knowledge which it has of its own
validity, that is, of itself as the source of right.
The idea of perfectibility, which is reached and em-
ployed, as it were, on the way to this knowledge, is not
suggested to reflection by the moral character of the
judgments of conscience. They derive this property
from a deeper or rather an ampler source, namely, from
their being practical judgments, as distinguished from
speculative. A few words must be devoted to this point.
The end aimed at by every practical judgment is indefinite
in its issue or final result, its general outline only being
definable, and that definable only by the line taken in
initiating it, or as determined by the judgment which
decides the immediate action. A practical judgment is
one which, by looking back at past experience, decides
the direction of the next step forward into the unknown.
If a definite end is set before the agent, as the end which
he has already resolved to aim at, his judgment is a
judgment of means to an end, a comparison of known
probabilities, and is to that extent a speculative judg-
ment. Judgments of this kind form a class within prac-
tical judgments, a narrower class which may be called
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prudential. They are not judgments of the comparative
preferability of ends simply, but only of subordinate ends
as means to others, that is, of the relations which certain
definable actions bear to ends already known or assumed
as relatively final. The solution which they aim at is the
solution of some definite problem. In this they resemble
all speculative solutions, and though often called practical,
and confused with judgments and solutions which really
are so in the larger sense of the term, they differ in the
essential point now named from those which we have
hitherto been speaking of as distinguished from the
speculative class, and to which all judgments of conscience
belong. Speculative solutions aim at results which are
definite as anticipated results, practical solutions at results
which are indefinite as anticipated results, though of a
definite kind, and yet necessarily assume that the results
which they aim at are attainable. They adopt a line
of action which they conceive as possibly issuing in a
series of real though at present indefinitely known attain-
ments.
Practical judgments, then, simply as such, have a
validity of their own, which is, however, nothing more
than the promise or hope which every practical choice of
a line of action bears within itself, of leading to some real
result which will be preferable to the results of an opposite
line of action. This forward looking hope is essential to
practical choice, and is the characteristic distinguishing it
from speculative choice, which affirms only what can be
inferred as a fact from actual experience. Both practical
and speculative judgments are modes of reflective per-
ception, looking back upon past experience; but while
speculative judgments do this with a view to acquire
more accurate knowledge of facts considered as already
and extraneously determined, practical judgments do it
in order to determine new facts, by determining choice of
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new action. All action as such, that is, as distinguished
from feeling and from knowledge, is movement forward
in time, and the content of an action, as distinguished
from the content of a feeling, or of a knowing, is definable
only by reference to the termini which its onward move-
ment connects. All conscious action, therefore, involves
a conscious reference to futurity. And in this nature of
action, as action simply, lies the ultimate reason why a
forward looking hope is necessarily bound up with all
conscious choice of action, that is, with all practical judg-
ment.
Perhaps it may be well at this place to recall the fact,
that it is here, namely, in the distinction between action
as such, from feeling and knowing, that the practical or
ethical branch of philosophy has its point of divergence
from the speculative branch. This fundamental distinc-
tion is part of the general analysis of the elements of
consciousness embraced by our second rubric, and thus it
is that both branches of philosophy alike have their parent
stem in the subjective analysis of consciousness generally,
which is speculative philosophy in the wider sense of the
term, as both also are alike grounded in the facts of human
nature, which are the object-matter of that analysis.
Now conscience, which is itself a form of practical
judgment, commands, as we have seen, the adoption of
that alternative which affirms, that real conditions in the
known world have real consequences in the infinite and
unknown world; and it commands its adoption, because
it is bound up with its own knowledge of validity as the
function of moral judgments, which again is bound up
with the felt validity of the function of practical judg-
ments simply. But in this it does not lay aside its own
fundamental character of being practical choice between
alternatives, or forfeit the promise which every practical
choice bears within itself of leading to some indefinitely
1
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111
known result, which will be at once the consequence and the
justification of its present action. It is the unknown future
to which it looks for the realisation of its hopes, which
are inseparably bound up with its practical decisions.
Conscience, therefore, in commanding the adoption of the
idea, that real conditions in the known world have real
consequences in the infinite and unknown world, is in
fact ideally projecting itself into, or conceiving an ideali-
sation of itself as really existing in, the unknown world;
that is, as having existed indefinitely, and to exist in-
definitely, in eternity. For its ideal consists in two things,
perfect knowledge combined with perfect goodness; and
this ideal, in consequence of its adopting the affirmative
idea of real conditions in the unknown, with which idea
it is bound up, is thenceforward conceived as effectuated
and made actual in eternity by infinite power.
Conscience in its double character, of practical forward
looking action and ultimate judgment of right or best
action, at once imagines the realisation of its own ideal in
the unknown future, and commands the expectation of it
as a duty. And inasmuch as conscience is but another
name for the highest form of practical judgment which is
known to us, there is literally no reason to be urged in
favour of the opposite alternative. For this nothing can be
urged, unless it be the pleasure of maintaining the absolute
origination of existence in time; I mean, of course, the
existence of the known and positively knowable world; a
creation, by the created, ex nihilo; joined with the plea-
sure of imagining its return in nihilum again. Perhaps
the force of this motive may be underrated. A good
logical absurdity would seem, for some minds, to have all
the attractiveness of vice, to be "as easy as lying," and
a good deal pleasanter. Everything which is good in
man's nature speaks in favour of the belief, that the
unknown is so constituted as to realise and confirm the
112
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dictates of conscience. And it may be added, that there
are secret springs of energy in human nature, which are
unlocked and called forth into activity, only by dwelling
on this idea.
On this line of thought we conceive, or rather en-
deavour to conceive, the Universe as infinite power
actuating infinite knowledge and infinite goodness. The
combination is impossible to realise in a single thought,
since to realise it in thought would be to imagine a single
real conscious being, or person, in whom these infinite
attributes should be combined, and every single real
existent must be thought of as finite. We are therefore
unable to consider these attributes as together constituting
a single conscious being, by reference to whose nature
or action either the nature or the laws of the known
world can be explained. Even if the conception were
logically possible,-which it is not, the single conscious
being, who would be the object of it, would be finite, and
the attempted explanation would therefore be open to the
same objection, which was above held fatal to the pre-
tensions of any ideally final solution supposed to be
attainable by scientific methods. The combination of the
three attributes, of infinite power, knowledge, and good-
ness, is man's attempt to realise the thought of that
infinite and eternal Universe, which he can only see or
think of from within, but which he must think of as exist-
ing in accordance with his own limited and positive
knowledge. In other words, Reality (in the sense of real
conditioning power) resides, not in an existent formed by
the union of these attributes, but in the Infinite, of which
they are the part intelligible to man.
The reality beyond is power, and more; knowledge,
and more; goodness, and more; their combination in a
person, and more. The reality is man's highest ideal and
infinite besides, a Being or a Power which is real, though
1
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1
1.
unimaginable to human thought. This Infinite Reality,
laid hold of mentally, rather than conceived, by means of
these attributes, and upon which the known and posi-
tively knowable world depends for its existence, man has
named God; trusting it Faith; obeying it, in obeying
conscience, Religion. It is of the essence of religion to
rest on faith, not on knowledge. If (per impossibile) it
rested on knowledge, it would no longer be religion but
prudence. All which religion requires from knowledge is
a basis on which faith may stand, the perception that
there is an Infinite beyond knowledge, involved in know-
ledge itself.
Thus in result we see, that the problems of the present
rubric, the Constructive Branch of Philosophy, escape the
grasp of speculation, only to fall within the province of
practice, and its highest function of practical judgment,
conscience. The Universe cannot be embraced in its
whole nature by any speculative conception which man
can frame, but man can frame a conception of his own
relation to the Universe, or in other words, of what the
Universe is to him, at once sufficiently definite, and indis-
pensably necessary, for his practical guidance. The basis
of that conception is analytical and speculative, the super-
structure constructive and practical. Philosophy begins
with knowledge of the seen, and ends with faith in the
unseen; knowledge itself testifying that the Universe
exceeds its power of intellectual comprehension. The
last word of knowledge is faith, the last word of phi-
losophy is religion.
The history of the forms which religion has taken,
from the earliest stages known to us in human history to
the present day, is a history of the changes in human
thought regarding the Unknown Infinite. All such
thought is anthropomorphic, that is, it invests some un-
known Beyond, surmised as existing or embodied now in
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,
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114
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one kind of object, now in another, with the attributes of
human personality. The devolpment is twofold, consist-
ing in two concomitant series of changes, in combination
with and reciprocally affecting each other. One of these
is the growth of positive knowledge of natural phe-
nomena; the other the development of human character,
and consequent change in moral feeling, as civilisation
advances. The stage reached at the present day, which
is also necessarily anthropomorphic, is what I have had
before me in endeavouring to analyse the train of thought,
which connects our positive knowledge with our concep-
tions of the unknown infinite. Our knowledge has at
length reached a point, at which we can clearly dis-
tinguish the whole range of positive knowledge, actual
or possible, from the infinite ignorance which lies beyond
it, and thus make our ignorance itself objective. Accord-
ingly we no longer surmise the unknown Beyond as
embodied, or manifesting itself, in objects of any kind,
even in those of the highest kind we know of, that is, in
men, nor yet in the whole positively known or knowable
world; but we conceive it as being the unknown part of
an infinite whole, which is pervaded, in both its parts
alike, by the attributes under which alone we can lay hold
of it in thought. The power or agency in the known
world, the That which makes, or does, or acts, and which,
as we have seen, escapes our positive and scientific know-
ledge, is thus identified with the infinite power which
sustains both worlds, known and unknown, alike, and
which, together with the attendant attributes of know-
ledge and goodness, we conceive as Divine, that is, as a
Majesty inhabiting Eternity. It is this Beyond, namely,
the unknown in our positive knowledge, which we invest
with human attributes, acknowledging at the same time,
that we do so because it is a necessity of practical human
thought, and therefore that these attributes are partial
*
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and feeble adumbrations of the infinite reality, which both
in its infinity, and in its other real attributes specula-
tively taken, escapes at once the largest grasp and the
deepest insight possible to man.
I make this remark on the history of religion, because
in the history we again touch the ground of the common-
sense world. As with the whole of philosophy, so it is
with that part of it which is the philosophy of religion.
Philosophy develops out of its own actual history, and at
the same time sheds upon its history in retrospect a
clearer and clearer light. The history both of philosophy
as a whole, and of the philosophy of religion, begins with
the common-sense world. It is to that world that all
popular religious creeds belong. Standing on grounds of
common sense, they are subject to the laws which govern
the rise, development, modification, and decay, of beliefs
and systems of belief in that domain. It is therefore on
the acknowledged footing, that philosophical systems and
popular religious creeds belong respectively to two quite
different regions of thought, that the relations between
them will have henceforward to be judged, and an agree-
ment between philosopher and non-philosopher to be
established, concerning the articles of religious faith
which are tenable by both in common.
Popular religious creeds are no more abolished, in
point of general and substantial truth to reality, by the
philosophy of religion, than the common-sense belief in
the real objective existence of the material world is abol-
ished, in point of general and substantial truth to reality,
by philosophical analysis in its entirety. As an infant, in
growing up to childhood, gradually forms his common-
sense belief in the external material world, aided by his
inherited mental organisation and aptitudes, and by the
iristruction of his elders, so also, by the same means, and
pari passu, he gradually forms his common-sense belief in
蠢
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the existence and nature of the Divine. Analogous to
both these branches of an individual's entire belief, is the
development of belief and knowledge concerning the
World and God, in the various races of mankind, and in
mankind as a whole, in their progress to maturity. It is
at a certain epoch of this development, in the history
alike of individuals, of races, and of mankind at large,
that philosophy arises; beginning with the first con-
sciously introspective question which a man puts to him-
self, concerning the nature and validity of his own know-
ledge. In one sense, it is true, in entering on philosophy
he quits the ground of common sense. He quits it as a
department of knowledge distinguished from the philo-
sophical department on which he is entering, but not as
the experiential basis which all philosophical knowledge
pre-supposes. It is that form of experience which is the
explicandum of philosophy, that indispensable condition
without which philosophy would lack, not only a de facto
or actual, but also a rational or de jure existence.
Common sense, science, and philosophy, are three
modes of regarding the same Universe, of which science
is more profound and exhaustive than common sense,
and philosophy more profound and exhaustive than
science. Each of the three has its own office and func-
tion; each is a supplement, not a substitute for the
others. This would not be the case, if any of the three
attained or could attain to an absolute knowledge, which
from its nature must either absorb or abolish knowledge
of every other kind. It is common sense which, at the
present day, is the most reluctant to renounce this unten-
able pretension. Philosophy need not fear, in renouncing
it, that mankind will ever cease to cultivate a mode of
enquiry which is recognised as more profound and ex-
haustive than other modes, merely because it no longer pro-
fesses, either to be completely exhaustive of existence, or to
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117
give a knowledge of the existent in itself. On the one
hand, to do the best we can, though it may not be the
absolute best, is ingrained in human nature; and on the
other, it is of the essence of knowledge to be relative to a
knowable, so that, for thought, the in itself is the non-exist-
ent. The three modes are indeed so many stages on the
road towards an exhaustive knowledge of existence; but
the road on which they are stages is infinite, and the inter-
vals which lie between their highest several attainments
are infinitesimal, compared to the infinite interval by
which the highest attainment of the highest of them
is divided from omniscience.
One more remark I would make, if I have not already
tried your patience too far. The idea which has been
occupying us above, that the existence of the Subject
may possibly be prolonged into the Unknown, is quite
different from the idea of a future life, or immortality, as
commonly stated. The known world, which we have now
been contrasting with the unknown, includes within itself
the positively knowable, which is that portion of it de-
scribed above, under the third rubric, as a sort of penum-
bra of unexplored facts within the competence of positive
science, a region lying between the final results, which
are at any time actually attained by positive science, and
the ideally final solution which is conceivably within the
reach of its methods. To this region at present belong
the questions, first, whether there is or is not a world of
immaterial or etherial conscious beings beyond the actually
known world, and secondly, whether men, or other posi-
tively known conscious beings, may have their life pro-
longed beyond death, which is the event with which their
life in the actually known world closes. In other words,
the question of a future life, as a possibly demonstrable
reality, and the question of the real existence of a world
of spiritual beings other than man, are questions for
118
;
science, or for the scientific department of philosophy,
and not for our present rubric.
The idea, I confess, has frequently occurred to me,
building upon the same hypothesis of an etherial medium,
which Mr. Knowles has made the basis of his well known
theory of brain-waves,* that it may be one function of the
nerve and brain organism, while serving as the proximate
real condition of consciousness, to build up within itself,
and along with its own development, an etherial organ-
ism, which, after the death of the grosser organism which
is its parent, may be capable of a separate existence under
quite different conditions from those at present known to
us. And farther, this etherial organism, thus entering on
a new life, may be the Subject of a new consciousness,
which may retain the memory, and be in fact the con-
tinuation, of the consciousness, which, in the present state
of existence, is conditioned upon the parent organism.
Roughly speaking, this would be to regard the "Soul"
as the product, instead of the condition, of the vital and
conscious powers of the body. Be this however as it
may, if the two questions now mentioned, or either of
them, should ever be answered by science in the affirma-
tive, the effect would be to include what is now the posi-
tively knowable within the limits of the positively known.
But this would in no way alter the relation, now set forth,
between the known and positively knowable, taken toge-
ther, and the unknown Beyond. Wherever the circum-
scribing limits of the known world are drawn, it is there,
and there only, that it is in contact and continuity with
unknown and infinite existence.]
* See the Nineteenth Century for June 1882 (Vol. xi. p. 900), refer-
ring to an earlier paper, in the Spectator for Jan. 30, 1869.
1
1
119
III.
SUCH are the outlines of the organic articulation of
philosophy as I conceive it, the main divisions into which,
in my opinion, philosophy will mould itself, if it is based
on experience, and pursued on definite principles of
method, that method being dictated by experience alone.
I cannot think of any problem which does not readily fall
into rank, and present itself for treatment, under some
one or more of its four rubrics, so soon as the method of
asking first what, and then how comes, is applied to it. I
do not say that every problem can be solved, if it is so
treated; some problems are insoluble in every shape;
others are mares' nests from the first, owing their very
origin as questions to misconception. But in every case,
the treatment now proposed will show whether a problem
is soluble or not, and if the latter, will disclose the grounds
of its insolubility. The four rubrics themselves would at
least seem to be exhaustive. Under the first, everything
is treated simply as present to consciousness. Under the
second, everything is analysed for its content. Under
the third, everything is examined as to its genesis and
behaviour. Under the fourth, the limits of knowledge
itself in every respect are brought under discussion.
But quite apart from the question whether this method
be the true one or not, a point on which I do not presume
to dogmatise, there is another point on which, as Presi-
dent of a Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy,
I am bound to insist. It is this, that the question of
method is a vital question, a question of life or death for
philosophy, at the present day. Philosophy exists at
present in the form of some half-dozen or dozen separate
philosophies, each based on principles antagonistic to
those of the rest. Moreover this dismemberment of phi-
losophy is progressive, and, unless checked, can issue
Uk
$
120
only in the discredit and virtual annihilation of philo-
sophy in the intellectual world. Now every distinct and
autonomous branch of knowledge is defined by two things
in conjunction. It must have a distinctive purpose and
a distinctive method. The question, then, must be fairly
faced by a Society like ours, whether philosophy, as such,
has a distinctive purpose and a distinctive method; and
this question is vital, not merely for philosophy, but for
our Society, the existence of which is justified only by the
existence of philosophy as a distinct branch of knowledge.
Observe, I do not say, that the method and purpose of
philosophy must necessarily be those for which I have
been arguing; nor do I say, that they may not ultimately
be found in some one of the existing philosophies, which
are now striving for exclusive possession of the field. But
this I say, that the question, what they are and where
they are to be found, is the first and most vital question
for us to face, as a Society for the systematic study of
philosophy. I hold it an immense advantage, that we
admit discussion, and welcome the representatives, of
every school and phase of philosophic opinion. Every
school must face this vital question. And in laying my
own views of method before you, I would have them
regarded only as my individual contribution to its distinct
enunciation and settlement.
The method which I have described places philosophy,
as I venture to think, in an independent and unique posi-
tion among intellectual pursuits, and raises it to the rank
of a definite discipline, aiming at the acquisition of a
definite kind of knowledge, in which various students
may labour independently, without clashing, and to a
common end; may labour not only in different depart-
ments, or on different parts of the subject, but at once on
the same parts in the same department; the systematic
distinction of departments being that which secures, not
121
of course agreement in the several analyses made by
independent students of the facts before them, but that
the facts before them are recognised as the same. It
ascertains the sameness or difference of the facts, or sets
of facts, which are severally intended by different and
independent students, and prevents their speaking of the
same facts while thinking them to be different, or of dif-
ferent facts while thinking them to be the same, and thus
either affirming or denying the results obtained by one
another, under misconception as to what the results really
profess to be, and to what part of the subject they belong.
And what is perhaps a still greater boon, it permits a
student to own himself mistaken, and mistaken in his
analysis even of the most important matters, without
thereby robbing his whole philosophical work of its value,
as it would have been robbed by admission of what must
appear, under existing methods, as a flaw in some vital
part of his theory.
This could never be the case, nor could there be any
room for different and independent workers at the same
sets of facts, so long as philosophy was conceived as the
attempt to unlock the secret adytum of the Universe by
the master key of some happily conceived thought, and
thereby develop its system from some single truth, by
which at once its whole outline was comprehended and
its inmost essence penetrated; as for instance, Hegel's
conception of Self-creative Thought acting on the logical
principle of Contradiction. Still less, if possible, could it
be the case, so long as philosophical systems were made
to rest on unproved assumptions; as for instance, the
scholastic, orthodox, or dualistic assumption of Absolute
Mind as the creator of Matter, or on the more refined
assumption, made by Kant, of a transcendent Appercipient
as the constructor of experience. When Kant proposed
the question, How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?
I
go
122
-.
*
:
as the fundamental one, he ought to have added, on the
assumption of an unknowable agent constructing his own expe-
rience. If he had mastered his own method sufficiently
to have enabled him to do this, he would probably
have saved himself and his disciples much unnecessary
trouble.
Attempts like the instance first mentioned are a re-
versal of the true method, by taking the most difficult
questions first, the questions of the Constructive Branch.
But all alike are departures from the basis of experience,
which is our only foundation. Experience patiently
watched and carefully analysed is the only secure founda-
tion for philosophy, just as it is the only foundation com-
mon to all observers. In this respect philosophy must
follow the example of science, yet without deserting its
own subjective method. Experience alone can deliver us
from the arbitrary; and the first form in which experience
comes to us, the first body which any mass of experience
assumes, its first questionable shape, if I may adopt that
well known phrase, is the shape of common sense, or
experience of a world of common-sense objects.
So far as the philosophy of religion is concerned, the
questions regarding which lie wholly within the Construc-
tive Branch of Philosophy, there can be but little practical
difference between the results of the three methods, which
I have just named, and those to be obtained by the
method of experience. All the three, really and as a fact,
derive their conception of the unknown and infinite world
from the facts of human practical experience as conscience
judges them, that is, from an ethical estimate. And
therefore, so far as the character of the results alone is
considered, it signifies comparatively little, whether their
establishment is or is not combined with the speculative
pretension to have accommodated Infinity (whether as a
noumenon or as an absolute) within the limits of positive
123
7'
knowledge. The question between these methods and
the present one does not turn on the source from which
man's conceptions of the infinite and unknown world are
derived, but rather on the consideration, that a specula-
tive pretension, so exorbitant as the one mentioned, must
at last, when found to be untenable, tend to the discredit
of the true results with which it has been associated.
I venture therefore to think, that a strict adherence
to the method of experience, even in these high regions
of thought, is the truest wisdom. I cannot but think,
that the interests of religion will gain, not lose, by the
exactest investigation of the facts of experience, provided
these are taken in their entire range, and in their inte-
grity as experienced. If religion has not its foot firmly
planted on earth, it can fix no steadfast gaze on heaven.
Religion and philosophy, like philosophy and science, are
not rivals but allies. Philosophy is something different
both from science and from religion, and forms the neces-
sary link between them. The transition from the one to
the other is effected only in philosophy. The thoughts
of the one lie, as it were, unconformably upon those of
the other. There is a break between the two kingdoms,
which the philosophical line of thought is required to
bridge and harmonise. Philosophy alone can perform
this service, because philosophy alone can take a com-
prehensive survey of the whole of knowledge. For that
which enables a comprehensive survey to be taken is
something which is distinctively characteristic of philo-
sophy, I mean, its standing at the subjective point of view,
and submitting all phenomena to subjective analysis.
I
(
*
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