Metaphysic

METAPHYSIC

THE term metaphysic, originally intended to mark the place of a particular treatise in the collection of Aristotle’s works, has, mainly owing to a misunderstanding, survived several other titles,—such as “First Philosophy,” “Ontology,” and “Theology,” which Aristotle himself used or suggested. Neo-Platonic mystics interpreted it as signifying that which is not merely “after” but “beyond” physics, and found in it a fit designation for a science which, as they held, could not be attained except by one who had turned his back upon the natural world. And writers of a different tendency in a later time gladly accepted it as a convenient nickname for theories which they regarded as having no basis in experience, in the same spirit in which the great German minister Stein used the analogous title of “metapolitics” for airy and unpractical schemes of social reform. A brief indication of the contents of Aristotle’s treatise may enable us to give a general definition of the science which was first distinctly constituted by it, and to determine in what sense the subjects which that science has to consider are beyond nature and experience.

For Aristotle, metaphysic is the science which has to do with Being as such, Being in general, as distinguished from the special sciences jvhich deal with special forms of being. There are certain questions which, in Aristotle’s view, we have a right to ask in regard to everything that presents itself as real. We may ask what is its ideal nature or definition, and what are the conditions of its realization; we may ask by what or whom it was produced, and for what end; we may ask, in other words, for the formal and the material, for the efficient and the final causes of everything that is. These different questions point to different elements in our notion of Being, elements which may be considered in their general relations apart from any particular case of their union. These, therefore, the first philosophy must investigate. But, further, this science of being cannot be entirely separated from the science of knowing, but must determine at least its most general principles. For the science that deals with what is most universal in being is, for that very reason, dealing with the objects which are most nearly akin to the intelligence. These, indeed, are not the objects which are first presented to our minds; we begin with the particular, not the universal, with a πρώτον ηplv which is not πρώτον φυσeL-, but science reaches its true form only when the order of thought is made one with the order of nature, and the particular is known through the universal. Yet this-conversion or revolution of the intellectual point of view is not to be regarded as an absolute change from error to truth; for Aristotle holds that nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, in the meaning that in sense perception there is already the working of that discriminative intelligence which, beginning in sense perception, with the distinction of particular from particular, can rest only when it has apprehended things in their universal forms or definitions. Looking at knowledge formally, the highest law of thought, the law of contradiction (or, as we might call it, to indicate Aristotle’s meaning more exactly, the law of definition or distinction), is already implied in the first act of perception by which one thing is distinguished from another. Looking at it materially, the reason of man is to be conceived as potentially all that is knowable ; i.e., objects are so related to it that for it to know them in their essential definitions is only to know itself. The aim of science, in this view, is to break through the husk of matter, and to apprehend things in their forms, in which they are one with the mind that knows them. Hence also it follows that in rising to the most universal science, the science of Being in general, the mind is not leaving the region of immediate experience, in which it is at home, for a far-off region of abstractions. Rather it is returning to itself, apprehending that which is most closely related to itself, and which therefore, though it is late in being made the direct object of investigation, is yet presupposed in all that is, and is known.

Metaphysic, then, is the science which deals with the principles which are presupposed in all being and knowing, though they are brought to light only by philosophy. Another trait completes the Aristotelian account of it. It is theology, or the science of God. Now God is voησι<s voησeως, pure self-consciousness, the absolute thought which is one with its object, and He is therefore the first cause of all existence. For, while the world of nature is a world of motion and change, in which form is realized in matter, this process of the finite can be explained only by referring it back to an unmoved mover, in whom there is no distinction of matter and form, and who is, therefore, in Aristotle’s view, to be conceived as pure form, the purely ideal or theoretic activity of a consciousness whose object is itself. Such a conception, however, while it secures the independence and absoluteness of the unmoved mover, by removing him from all relation to what is other than himself, seems to make his connexion with the world inexplicable. We can on this theory refer the world to God, but not God to the world. Hence Aristotle seems sometimes to say that God is the first mover only as He is the last end after which all creation strives, and this leads him to attribute to nature a desire or will which is directed towards the good as its object or end.

Aristotle then brings together in his metaphysic three elements which are often separated from each other, and the connexion of which is far from being at once obvious. It is to him the science of the first principles of being. It is also the science of the first principles of knowing. Lastly, it is the science of God, as the beginning and end of all things, the absolute unity of being and thought, in which all the differences of finite thought and existence are either excluded or overcome.

To some this description of the contents of Aristotle’s treatise, and especially the last part of it, may seem to be a confirmation of all the worst charges brought against metaphysic. For at both extremes this supposed science seems to deal with that which is beyond experience, and which therefore cannot be verified by it. It takes us back to a beginning which is prior to the existence as well as to the consciousness of finite objects in time and space, and on to an end to which no scientific prophecy based upon our consciousness of such objects can reach. In the former aspect of it, it has to do with notions so abstract and general that it seems as if they could not be fixed or tested by reference to any experience, but must necessarily be the playthings of dialectical sophistry. In the latter aspect of it, it entangles us in questions as to the final cause and ultimate meaning of things, questions involving so comprehensive a view of the infinite universe in which we are insignificant parts that it seems as if any attempt to answer them must be for us vain and presumptuous. On both sides, therefore, metaphysic appears to be an attempt to occupy regions which are beyond the habitable space of the intelligible world—to deal with ideas which are either so vague and abstract that they cannot be fastened to any definite meaning, or so complex and far-reaching that they can never by any possibility be verified. For beings like men, fixed within these narrow limits of space and time, the true course, it would seem, is to “cultivate their gardens,” asking neither whence they come nor whither they go, or asking it only within the possible limits of history and scientific prophecy. To go back to the beginning or on to the end is beyond them, even in a temporal, still more in a metaphysical, sense. That which is πpωτov φυσeL escapes us even more absolutely than the prehistorical and pregeological records of man and his world. That which is ύστατον φύσει escapes us even more absolutely than the far-off future type of civilization, which social science vainly endeavours to anticipate. Our state is best pictured by that early Anglican philosopher who compared it to a bird flying through a lighted room “between the night and the night.” The true aim of philosophy is, therefore, it would seem, to direct our thoughts to the careful examination and utilization of the narrow space allotted to us by an inscrutable power, and with scientific self-restraint to refrain from all speculation either on first or on final causes.

The main questions as to the possibility and the nature of metaphysic, according to Aristotle’s conception of it, may be summed up under two heads. We may ask whether we can in any sense reach that which is beyond experience, and, if so, whether this “beyond” is a first or a last principle, a pre-condition or a final cause of nature and experience, or both. The former question branches out into two, according as we look at metaphysic from the objective or the subjective side, or, to express the matter more accurately, according as we consider it in relation to those natural objects which are merely objects of knowledge, or in relation to those spiritual objects which are also subjects of knowledge. We shall therefore consider metaphysic, first, in relation to science in general, and, secondly, in relation to the special science of psychology. The latter question also has two aspects; for, while the idea of a first cause or principle points to the connexion between metaphysic and logic, the idea of a last principle or final cause connects metaphysic with theology. We shall therefore consider in the third place the relation of metaphysic to logic, and in the fourth place its relation to religion and the philosophy of religion.

1. The Relation of Metaphysic to Science.— The beginnings of science and metaphysic are identical, though there is a sense in which it may be admitted that the metaphysical comes before the scientific or positive era. The first efforts of philosophy grasp at once at the prize of absolute knowledge. No sooner did the Greeks become dissatisfied with the pictorial synthesis of mythology by which their thoughts were first lifted above the confusion of particular things, than they asked for one universal principle which should explain all things. The Ionic school sought to find some one phenomenon of nature which might be used as the key to all other phenomena. The Eleatics, seeing the futility of making one finite thing the explanation of all other finite things, tried to find that explanation in the very notion of unity or being itself. We need not underestimate the speculative value of such bold attempts to sum up all the variety of the world in one idea, but it is obvious that they rather give a name to the problem than solve it, or that they put the very consciousness of the problem in place of the solution of it. Science is possible only if we can rise from the particular to the universal, from a subjective view of things as they immediately present themselves to us in perception to an objective determination of them through laws and principles which have no special relation to any particular set of events or to any one individual subject. But this is only one aspect of the matter. To advance from a conception of the world in ordine ad individuum to one in ordine ad universum, and so to discount and eliminate what is merely subjective and accidental in our first consciousness of the world, is the beginning of knowledge. But little is gained unless the universal, which we reach through the negation of the particulars, is more than their mere negation; unless it is a law or principle by means of which we can explain the particulars. Now the defect of early philosophy was that its universal was “the one beyond the many,” not the “one in the many,”—in other words, that it was not a law or principle by which the particulars subsumed under it could be explained, but simply the abstraction of an element common to them. But the process of knowledge is a process that involves both analysis and synthesis, negation and reaffirmation of the particulars with which we start. If we exaggerate the former aspect of it, we enter upon the via negativa of the mystics, the way of pure abstraction and negation, which would open the mind to the ideal reality of things simply by shutting it to all the perceptions of sensible phenomena. And, if we follow out this method to its legitimate result, we must treat the highest abstraction, the abstraction of Being, as if it were the sum of all reality, and the Neo-Platonic ecstasy in which all distinction, even the distinction of subject and object, is lost as the only attitude of mind in which truth can be apprehended.

In the philosophy of the Socratic school we find the first attempt at a systematic as opposed to an abstract theory— the first attempt to bring together the one and the many, and so to determine the former that it should throw light upon the latter. Yet even in Plato the tendency to oppose the universal to the particular is stronger than the tendency to relate them to each other, and in some of his dialogues, as, e.g. ∖ in the Phsedo, we find a near approach to that identification of the process of knowledge with abstraction which is the characteristic of mysticism. Aristotle, therefore, had some ground for taking the Platonic principle that “the real is the universal” in a sense which excludes the reality of the individual. Yet, though he detected Plato’s error in opposing the universal to the particular, and though, at the same time, he did not entirely lose sight of the truth which Plato had exaggerated, that the particular is intelligible only through the universal, Aristotle was not able to escape the influence of that dualism which had marred the philosophy of his predecessor. Hence the effect of his protest against a philosophy of abstraction was partly neutralized by his separation between the divine Being as pure form and nature as the unity of form and matter, and again by his separation of the pure reason which apprehends the forms of things from the perceptions of sense which deal with forms realized in matter. And after Aristotle’s time the tendency of philosophy was more and more to withdraw from contact with experience. The Neo-Platonic philosophy, and the Christian theology which was so strongly influenced by it, contained, indeed, an idea of the reconciliation of God and nature, and hence of form and matter, which must ultimately be fatal to dualism, and therefore to the method of mere abstraction. But the explicit meaning of the philosophy of the Middle Ages was still dualistic, and the mode in which the Aristotelian formulae were wrought into the substance of Christian doctrine by the scholastics tended more and more to conceal that idea of the unity of opposites which was involved in Christianity. Hence mediaeval realism presented, in its most one-sided form, the doctrine that “the real is the universal,” meaning by the universal nothing more than the abstract. And, as a natural consequence, the modern insurrection of the scientific spirit against scholasticism took its start from an equally bald and one-sided assertion of the opposite principle, that “the real is the individual,” meaning by that the individual of immediate perception. If Platonism had dwelt too exclusively on one aspect of the process of knowledge, viz., that it seeks to rise above the particular, the sensible, the subjective, to the universal, the intelligible, the objective, as if in the latter alone were reality to be found, modern men of science learnt from their first nominalistic teachers to regard the universal as nothing more than an abbreviated expression for the particulars, and science itself as a mere generalization of the facts of sensible perception. But this view of scientific knowledge, as a mere reaffirmation of what is immediately given in sense, is as imperfect as the opposite theory, which reduces it to the mere negation of what is so given. An ideal world utterly and entirely divorced from the phenomenal, and an ideal world which is simply a repetition of the phenomenal, are equally meaningless. The processes of science have both a negative and a positive side; they involve a negation of the particular as it is immediately presented in sense, but only with a view to its being reaffirmed with a new determination through the universal. The fact as it is first presented to us is not the fact as it is; for, though it is from the fact as given that we rise to the knowledge of the law, it is the law that first enables us to understand what the fact really means. Our first consciousness of things is thus, not an immovable foundation upon which science may build, but rather a hypothetical and self-contradictory starting-point of investigation, which becomes changed and transformed as we advance.

The nominalism of scientific men in modern times is due to two special causes, one of which has already been mentioned. It is partly due to the traditions of a time when mediaeval realism was the great enemy of science. The Baconian protest against the “anticipation of nature” was a relative truth when it was urged against a class of writers who supposed that true theories could be attained without regard to facts; the Baconian assertion of the necessity of attending to ajciomata media was the necessary correction of the tendencies of mystics, who supposed that philosophy could attain its end by grasping at once at absolute unity, and contented themselves, therefore, with a unity which did nothing to explain the differences. But, when the former was turned into the dogmatic assertion that the mind is, or ought to be, passive in the process of knowledge, as having in itself no principle for the explanation of things, and when the latter was turned into the dogmatic assertion that science can only proceed from part to part and never from the whole to the parts, these relative truths became a source of error. And this error was confirmed and increased by the mistaken views of those who first tried to correct it. For these, admitting that scientific truth is entirely derived from external experience, only ventured to assert the existence of a priori knowledge alongside of, and in addition to, that which is a posteriori. In other words, they sought in inner experience a basis for those beliefs which outward experience seemed unable to support. But this basis was soon found to be treacherous. Introspection, observation of the inner life as opposed to and distinguished from the outer life, could be only an observation of the facts of the individual consciousness as such; and to base religion and morality on such a foundation was to treat God and right as subjective phenomena, which do not necessarily correspond to any objective reality. Nor was this conclusion really evaded by the assertion of the self-evidencing necessity of such ideas and beliefs, or of the principles upon which they are founded. For this necessity, as a subjective phenomenon, might be accounted for otherwise than by the supposition of their objective validity. Such scepticism, further, was favoured by the progress of science, which, as it advanced from physics to biology and sociology, became more and more inconsistent with the idea of an absolute breach between inner and outer experience, and narrowed the sphere which had been hitherto reserved for the former. Man, it was urged, is but a part in a greater whole, not exempted from the law of action and reaction which connects all parts of that whole with each other. His individual life contains only a few links in a chain of causation that goes back to a beginning and onward to an end of which he knows nothing. And, as Spinoza says, vis qua unaquaeque res in existendo perseverat a causis externis infinite superatur. Hence to treat ideas which are only states of the individual consciousness as the explanation of the world, instead of treating them as phenomena to be explained by its relation to that world, seemed to be an absurdity. The particular beliefs and tendencies of the mind were to be regarded, not as ultimate facts in reference to which everything is to be interpreted, but rather as facts which are themselves to be referred to more general causes and laws. It thus appeared that the attempt to divide truth into an a posteriori and an a priori part, the latter of which should find its evidence in an inner experience as the former in an outer experience, is an illusive process. If the a priori is reduced to the level of the a posteriori, it becomes impossible to base on the a priori any beliefs that go beyond the range of subjective experience. If the self and the not-self are taken simply as different finite things, which we can observe in turn, their relations must be brought under the general laws of the connexion of finite things with each other; and the phenomena of mind must be treated, like the phenomena of matter, as facts to be accounted for according to these laws.

But this of itself indicates a way of escape both from the introspective theory and from the empiricism to which it is opposed. For it suggests the question—What is the source of those very laws which guide the procedure of science in accounting for facts, psychological facts among others? When a scientific psychologist of the modern school attempts to show how by habituation of the individual and the race the necessity of thought expressed in the law of causation was produced in the minds of the present generation of men, it is obvious that his whole investigation and argument presuppose the law whose genesis he is accounting for. A glaring instance of such circular reasoning is found in the writings of the most prominent representative of the school in the present day. Mr Spencer begins by laying down as a first postulate of science that necessity of thought must be taken as a criterion of truth. It is by the continual aid of this postulate that he constructs his system of nature, and finally his psychological theory of the development of consciousness in man. Yet the main object of this psychological theory seems to be to account for the very necessities with which the author starts. Obviously such a philosophy contains elements of which the author is imperfectly conscious; for it involves that mind is not only the last product but the first presupposition of nature, or, in other words, that in mind nature returns upon its first principle. But to admit this is at once to lift the conscious being as such above the position which he would hold as merely a finite part of a finite world. It is to assert that nature has an essential relation to a consciousness which is developed in man, and that in the growth of this consciousness we have, not an evolution which is the result of the action of nature as a system of external causes upon him, but an evolution in which nature is really “coming to itself,” i.e., coming to self-consciousness, in him.

Now it was Kant who first—though with a certain limitation of aim—brought this idea of the relativity of thought and being to the consciousness of the modern world. In the Critique of Pure Reason, thought, indeed, is not set up as an absolute prius, in relation to which all existence must be conceived, but it is set up as the prius of experience, and so of all existences which are objects of our knowledge. Experience is for Kant essentially relative to the conscious self; it exists through the necessary subsumption of the forms and matter of sense under the categories, as, on the other hand, the consciousness of self is recognized as essentially dependent on this process. On this view, the a priori and a posteriori factors of experience do not really exist apart as two separate portions of knowledge. If they are severed, each loses all its meaning. Perceptions in themselves are void; categories in themselves are empty. We do not look outwards for one kind of truth and inwards for another, nor do we even, by an external process, bring facts given as contingent under principles recognized as necessary; but the a priori is the condition under which alone the a posteriori exists for us. Even if it is allowed that the facts of inner and outer experience contain a contingent element or matter, given under the conditions of time and space, yet neither time nor space nor the facts of experience conditioned by them exist for us except as elements of an experience which is organized according to the categories.

This is the essential truth which Kant had to express. It is marred in his statement of it by the persistent influence of the abstract division between contingent matter given from without and necessary principles supplied from within, a division essentially inconsistent with the attempt to show that the contingent matter is necessarily subsumed under these principles, and indeed exists for us only as it is so subsumed. But Kant himself puts into our hands the means of correcting his own inadequacy, when he reduces the inaccessible thing in itself, which he at first speaks of as affecting our sensibility and so giving rise to the contingent matter of experience, to a noumenon (yoovpcvov) which is projected by reason itself. The Dialectic exhibits the idea of thought as not only constituting finite experience but also reaching beyond it, though as yet only in a negative way. The mind is, on this view, so far unlimited that it knows its own limits; it is conscious of the defects of its experience, of the contingency of its sensible matter, and the emptiness and finitude of its categories; and by reason of this consciousness it is always seeking in experience an ideal which it is impossible to realize there. Thought measures experience by its own nature, and finds it wanting. It demands a kind of unity or identity in its objects which it is unable to find in the actual objects of experience. It is this demand of reason which lifts man above a mere animal existence, and forces him by aid of the categories to determine the matter of sense as a world of objects; yet, as this finite world of experience can never satisfy the demand of reason, the consciousness of it is immediately combined with the consciousness of its limited and phenomenal character. The student of the Critique of Pure Reason cannot but recognize the strange balance between the real and the phenomenal in which it ends, allowing to man the consciousness of each so far as to enable him to see the defects of the other,—so that by aid of the pure identity of reason he can criticize and condemn the “blindness” or unresolved difference of experience, and by means of the concreteness and complexity of experience he can condemn the “empty” identity of reason.

In order, however, to understand the full bearing of Kant’s criticism of knowledge, and at the same time to find the meeting-point of the opposite currents of thought which alternately prevail in it, it will be necessary to consider the subject a little more closely. The lesson of the Critique may be gathered up into two points. In the first place, it is a refutation of the ordinary view of experience as something immediately given for thought and not constituted by it. In the second place, it is a demonstration of the merely phenomenal character of the objects of experience, i.e., the demonstration that the objects of experience, even as determined by science, are not things in themselves. Both these results require to be kept clearly in view if we would understand the movement of thought excited by Kant. On the one hand Kant had to teach that what is ordinarily regarded as real, the world of experience, is transcendently ideal, i.e.. is determined as real by a priori forms of thought. On the other hand he had to teach that the world so determined is empirically and not transcendentally real, i.e., its reality is merely phenomenal. With the former lesson he met the man of science, and compelled him to renounce his materialistic explanation of the world as a thing which exists in independence of the mind that knows it. The world we know is a world which exists only as it exists for its, for the thinking subject; hence the thinking subject, the ego, cannot be taken as an object like other objects, an object the phenomena of which are to be explained like other phenomena by their place in the connexion of experience. Having, however, thus repelled scientific materialism by the proof that the reality of experience is ideal, Kant refuses to proceed to the complete identification of reality with ideality, and meets the claims of the metaphysician with the assertion that the reality of experience is merely phenomenal. Hence he rejects any idealism that would involve the negation of things in themselves beyond phenomena, or the identification of the objects of experience with these things. The reality we know is a reality which exists only for us as conscious subjects, but this, though it is the only reality we can know, is not the absolute reality.

It is, however, to be observed that the nature of this opposition between phenomena and things in themselves seems to change as we advance from the Analytic, where the existence of such things is presupposed, to the Dialectic, where the grounds of that presupposition are examined. At first the opposition seems to be between what is present in consciousness and what is absolutely beyond consciousness. The matter of experience is regarded as given externally in the affections of the sensible subject,—affections caused by an unknown thing in itself, of which, however, they can tell us nothing. On the other hand the form of experience, the categories and principles of judgment which turn these affections into objects of knowledge, are not pure expressions of the real nature, the pure identity, of the subject in itself, but only products of the identity of the self in relation to the sensibility and its forms of time and space. Hence, on both sides we must regard experience as merely phenomenal, alike in relation to the noumenal object and in relation to the noumenal subject, which lurk behind the veil and send forth into experience on the one side affections which become objects through their determination by the unity of thought, and on the other side an identity of thought which becomes self-conscious in relation to the objects so determined bv itself.

Kant, however, having thus answered the question of the possibility of experience by reference to two things in themselves which are out of experience, is obliged to ask himself how the consciousness of these two things in themselves, and the criticism of experience in relation to them, is possible. And here, obviously, the opposition can no longer be conceived as an opposition between that which is and that which is not in consciousness. For the things in themselves must be present to consciousness in some fashion in order that they may be contrasted with the phenomena. If, therefore, phenomena are now regarded as unreal, it must be because we have an idea of reality to which the reality of experience does not fully correspond. In the Analytic Kant had beenιspeaking as if the real consisted in something which is not present to the conscious subject at all, though we, by analysis of his experience, can refer to it as the cause of that which is so present. Now in the Dialectic he has to account for the fact that the conscious subject himself is able to transcend his experience, and to contrast the objects of it as phenomenal with things in themselves.

Now it is obvious that such an opposition is possible only so far as the thought, which constitutes experience, is at the same time conscious of itself in opposition to the experience it constitutes. The reason why experience is condemned as phenomenal is, therefore, not because it is that which exists for thought as opposed to that which does not exist for thought, but because it imperfectly corresponds to the determination of thought in itself. In other words, it is condemned as unreal, not because it is ideal, but because it is imperfectly ideal. And the absolute reality is represented, not as that which exists without relation to thought, but as that which is identical with the thought for which it is. In the Dialectic, therefore, the noumenon is substituted for the thing in itself, and the noumenon is, as Kant tells us, the object as it exists for an intuitive or perceptive understanding, i.e., an understanding which does not synthetically combine the given matter of sense into objects by means of categories, but whose thought is one with the existence of the objects it knows. It is the idea of such a pure identity of knowing and being, as suggested by thought itself, which leads us to regard our actual empirical knowledge as imperfect, and its objects as not, in an absolute sense, real objects. The noumena are not, therefore, the unknown causes by whose action and reaction conscious experience is produced; they represent a unity of thought with itself to which it finds experience inadequate. This higher unity of thought with itself is what Kant calls reason, and he identifies it with the faculty of syllogizing. Further, he finds in the three forms of syllogism a guiding thread which brings him to the recognition of three forms in which the pure unity of reason presents itself to us in opposition to the merely synthetic unity of experience, a psychological, a cosmological, and a theological form. In each of these cases the empirical process of knowledge is accompanied, guided, and stimulated by an idea which nevertheless it is unable to realize or verify. In psychology we have ever present to us an idea of the identity of the self, which is never realized in our actual self-consciousness, because the self of which we are conscious is manifold in its states and because it stands in relation to an external world. The idea of simple identity is, therefore, something we may set before us as the goal of an ideal psychology, to which we may approximate in so far as we can trace unity of faculty through all the differences of mental phenomena, but to which we can never attain owing to the nature of the matter with which we deal. Again, in our scientific attempts to explain our external experience, the unity of reason takes the form of an idea of the world as a completed infinite whole, which contains all the objects known to us and all other possible objects; but this cannot be realized in an experience which is conditioned by space and time, and is, therefore, ever incomplete. The idea of totality is, therefore, an ideal, which guides and stimulates our scientific progress, without which such a thing as science could not exist, but which at the same time can never be realized by science. Lastly, the unity of reason takes a third form in which identity and totality are combined,— as the idea of a unity in which all differences, even the difference of subject and object, are transcended,—the idea of a unity of all things with each other and with the mind that knows them. This idea also is one which science can neither surrender nor realize. It cannot surrender it without giving up that striving after unity without which science would not exist; and it cannot realize it, for the difference between the world, as it is presented to us in actual experience, and the subjective determination of our thinking consciousness cannot be overcome. We can, indeed, use the idea that the world is an organic whole, determined in relation to an end which consciousness sets for itself, as an heuristic principle to guide us in following the connexion of things with each other; but, as we cannot by means of any such idea anticipate what the facts of external experience will be, so we cannot prove that for a mind other than ours the unity of things which we represent in this way might not take a quite different aspect. Indeed we have reason to think it would; for, while we always think of a designing mind as using materials which have an existence and nature independent of the purposes to which they are put, the absolute mind must be conceived as creating the materials themselves by the same act whereby they are determined to an end. We must conceive it, in short, as an intuitive understanding for which end and means, objective and subjective, are one, or, in other words, as an intelligence whose consciousness of itself is or contains the existence of all that is object for it.

This new view of the things in themselves as noumena or ideals of reason involves a new attitude of thought towards them different from that dogmatic attitude which is provisionally adopted in the Analytic. Accordingly, we now find Kant speaking of them, not as things which exist independently of their being conceived, but as “problematical conceptions” of which we cannot even determine whether they correspond to any objects at all. They are “limitative” notions which have a negative value, in so far as they keep open a vacant space beyond experience, but do not enable us to fill that space with any positive realities. They are like dark lanterns which cast light upon the empirical world, and show what are its boundaries, but leave their own nature in obscurity. All that we can say of the noumenal self or subject is that it corresponds to the unity implied in all knowledge, but whether there is such a self, independent of the process of empirical synthesis and the self-consciousness which accompanies that process, we cannot tell. All that we can say of the noumenal reality of the objective world is that it corresponds to the idea of the objects of experience as a completed whole in themselves apart from the process whereby we know them, but whether there is any such real world independent of the process of experience it is impossible to say. Lastly, all that we can say of God is that He corresponds to the idea of the unity of all things with the mind that knows them,— an ideal which is involved in all knowledge,—but whether the realization of this idea in an intuitive understanding is even possible we have no means of determining, however we may suspect that understanding and sensibility are “branches springing from the same unknown root.” The Criticism, of Pure Reason ends, therefore, in a kind of seesaw between two forms of consciousness—a thinking consciousness, which transcends experience and sets before us an idea of absolute reality, but which cannot attain to any knowledge or even certitude of any object corresponding to this idea, and an empirical consciousness, which gives us true knowledge of its objects, but whose objects are determined as merely phenomenal and not absolutely real.

The equipoise thus maintained between the empirical and the intelligible world is, however, in the Critique of Practical Reason, overbalanced in favour of the latter. What the theoretical reason could not do “in that it was weak through the flesh,” through its dependence on the very empirical consciousness which it sought to transcend, is possible to the practical reason, because it is primarily determined by itself. In our moral consciousness we find ourselves under a law which calls upon us to act as beings who are absolutely self-determined or free, and which, therefore, assures us that our intelligible self is our real self, and conclusively determines our empirical self in contrast with it as phenomenal. Thus the moral law gives reality to the intelligible world; or, as Kant expresses it, “the idea of an intelligible world is a point of view beyond the phenomenal which the reason sees itself compelled to take up, in order to think of itself as practical.” In other words, the moral law presupposes freedom or determination in the rational being as such, and makes him regard himself, not merely as a link in the chain of conditioned existences in time and space, but as the original source of his own life. The blank space beyond the phenomenal thus begins to be filled up by the idea of a free causality which again postulates a world adequate and conformable to itself. And the man who, as an empiric individuality, is obliged to regard himself merely as an individual being determined by other individual beings and things is authorized as a moral being to treat this apparent necessity as having its reality in freedom, and to look upon himself as the denizen of a spiritual world where nothing is determined for him from without which is not simply the expression of his own self-determination from within. “Thus we have found, what Aristotle could not find, a fixed point on which reason can set its lever, not in any present or future world, but in its own inner idea of freedom,—a point fixed for it by the immovable moral law, as a secure basis from which it can move the human will, even against the opposition of all the powers of nature.” Starting from this idea of freedom, therefore, Kant proceeds to reconstruct for faith the unseen world, which in the Critique of Pure Reason he had denied as an object of knowledge. Nor is he content to leave the two worlds in sharp antithesis to each other, but even in the Critique of Practical Reason, and still more in the Critique of Judgment, he brings them into relation to each other, and so gives to theoretical reason a kind of authority to use for the explanation of the phenomenal world those ideas which of itself it might be inclined to regard as illusive.

In all this, however, it is difficult to avoid seeing a partial retractation of Kant’s first view as to the irreconcilable opposition of the phenomenal and the noumenal. For, in the first place, the moral imperative is addressed to a self which is at one and the same time regarded in both characters, and which is called upon to subsume under the moral law acts which otherwise derive their character and meaning from the relations of the phenomenal world. That the particular nature of men as phenomenal individuals can be the means of realizing the universal law of reason is implied in all Kant’s statements of the latter, and particularly in his conception of men as constituting together a “kingdom of ends”; for it is difficult to conceive this kingdom otherwise than as an organic unity of society, in which each individual, by reason of his special tendencies and capacities, has a definite office to fulfil in realizing the universal principle that binds all the members of the kingdom to each other. The summum, bonum i again, is said to consist in the union of happiness with goodness, i.e., of the empirical conditions of man’s individual life as a sensible subject with the pure self-determination of the intelligible self; and God is postulated as a Deus ex machina to bind together these two unrelated elements,— a conception which shows the difficulty into which Kant has brought himself by defining them as unrelated. Still more obvious is the effort of Kant to get beyond the dualism of his first view of things in the Critique of Judgment. For in that work he maintains that the consciousness of the beautiful and the sublime is or involves a harmony of the understanding or the reason with sense; and, what is still more important, he points out that the idea of organic unity, without which we cannot explain the phenomena of life, contains in it a possibility of the reconciliation of freedom and necessity, of the intelligible and the phenomenal. This idea, he argues, we are authorized by our moral consciousness to apply to the whole course of the things in the phenomenal world, and so to regard it as a process to realize the moral ideal. No doubt he again partially retracts this view when he declares that we must treat the idea of final causality as merely a subjective principle of judgment, which, even in the case of living beings, is to be regarded only as necessary for us as finite intelligences. But such saving clauses, in which Kant recurs to the dualism with which he started, cannot hide from us how near he has come to the renunciation of it.

When we regard Kant in this way as asserting from one point of view an absolute limit which from another point of view he permits us to transcend, it becomes obvious that his philosophy is in an unstable equilibrium, which cannot but be disturbed by any one who attempts to develop or even to restate his ideas. Hence we need not wonder that those who take in earnest his denunciations of any attempt to transcend experience generally,—like Professor Huxley,—reject as worthless all Kant’s later work; and that, on the other side, those who take in earnest his ideas of freedom, of organic unity, of an intuitive understanding, and of a summum bonum in which freedom and necessity meet together, are compelled to break through the arbitrary line which he drew between knowledge and belief. In favour of the former course it is easy in many places to appeal to the letter of Kant. In favour of the latter it need only be pointed out that, in Kant’s view, all experience rests upon, or is in its development guided by, those ideas which yet he will not permit us to treat as sources of knowledge. Hence the principles of the Critique cannot legitimately be used against metaphysic, except by those who are prepared to admit the ideas of reason, up to the point to which he admits them, as ideas that limit and direct our experience,—while rejecting all use of them to cast light upon that which is beyond experience. In other words, they must maintain the possibility of a purely negative knowledge, of the knowledge of a limit by one who yet cannot go beyond it. They must show how we can have an ideal of knowledge which enables us to criticize experience without enabling us to transform it; they must show how ideas of the supersensible can so far be present to our thought as to make visible the boundaries of the prison of sense in which we are confined, without in any way enabling us to escape from it.

Is this possible? We may gather up the Kantian antithesis in the assertion that experience is the imperfect realization of an ideal of knowledge, derived from reason, with materials, derived from sense and understanding, the nature of which is such that they can never be brought into correspondence with the ideal. But this ideal, in all its three forms, as we have seen, is simply the idea of a pure unity or identity in which all differences are lost or dissolved—whether they be the differences of the inner or of the outer life, or finally the difference of inner and outer, subjective and objective, from each other. Kant’s view therefore is, in effect, this, that thought carries with it the consciousness of an identity or unity, to which our actual experience in none of its forms fully corresponds. On the other hand, Kant does not hesitate equally to condemn the identity of thought as “empty” and subjective, because it does not contain in itself nor can evolve from itself the complex matter of experience. But this alternate condemnation of experience as unreal from the point of view of the ideas, and of the ideas as unreal from the point of view of experience, seems to show that both are unreal, as being abstract elements, which have no value save in their relation to each other, and which lose all their meaning when separated from the unity to which they belong. According to this view, ideas and experience, noumena and phenomena, if they are opposed, are also necessarily related to each other. If our empirical consciousness of the world of objects in space and time, as determined by the categories, does not correspond to the unity or identity of thought which is our ideal of knowledge, yet that idea of unity or identity is set up by thought in relation to experience, and cannot, therefore, be essentially irreconcilable with it. The two terms may be opposed, but their opposition cannot be absolute, seeing that they are in essential relation to each other. It is a great logical error not to discern that a negative relation is still a relation, i.e., that it has a positive unity beyond it. This positive unity may not, indeed, be consciously present to us in our immediate apprehension of the relation in question, but it is necessarily implied in it. Now it is just because, in his separation of noumena and phenomena, Kant omits to note their essential relativity that he is forced to regard the former as a set of abstract identities of which nothing can be known, and the latter as the imperfect products of a synthesis which can never be completed or brought to a true unity. Yet the value of his whole treatment of the ideas of reason in relation to our intellectual and moral experience arises from the fact that in practice he does not hold to this abstract separation of the two elements. Ideas absolutely incommensurable with experience could neither stimulate nor guide our empirical synthesis; they could not even be brought into any connexion with it. When, therefore, Kant brings them into this connexion, he necessarily alters their meaning. Hence the pure abstract identity which excludes all difference is changed, in its application, into the idea of an organic unity, of which the highest type is found in self-consciousness, with its transparent difference of the subjective and objective self. It would be absurd and meaningless to say that science seeks to reduce experience to an abstract identity, in which there is no difference, unless for this were tacitly substituted what is really an entirely different proposition, that science seeks to find in the infinitely diversified world of space and time that unity in difference of which self-consciousness has in itself the pattern. It is in reference to the former kind of identity—the abstract oneness of formal logic—that Kant proves that it is impossible for experience to be made adequate to ideas. But it is only of the latter kind of identity—the oneness of self-consciousness—that it can be said that it furnishes a guiding principle to scientific investigation or an ideal of knowledge. The same confusion is still more evident in Kant’s account of our moral experience, in dealing with which he directly attempts to get synthetic propositions out of the pure identity of reason, in other words, to draw definite moral laws out of the logical principle of non-contradiction. Whatever success he attains is gained by substituting for the formal principle of self-consistency the positive idea of consistency •with the self, and again by conceiving this self as a concrete individual, the member of a society, and so standing in essential relation to other selves. The pure abstraction from all the external results of action and from all motives of desire, which at the beginning of the Metaphysic of Ethics Kant declares to be essential to morality, is modified and indeed transformed, as we go on, by the admissions that other rational beings are not external to us in any sense that excludes their good from being an end of our endeavour, and that the desires are not irrational and immoral except in so far as they are directed to the pleasures of the sensuous individual (which in a conscious being they never entirely are). Both in the speculative and in the practical sphere, therefore, the absolute opposition of the ideal or noumenal to the empirical disappears, as soon as Kant attempts to apply it. For in both the abstract identity of formal logic, which is really the meaning of the noumenon as absolutely opposed to and incommensurable with experience, gives way to the unity of self-consciousness,—a unity which is so far from being absolutely opposed to the difference of the empirical consciousness that it necessarily implies it. For selfconsciousness presupposes the consciousness of objects; though it is opposed to that consciousness, it is essentially correlated with it, and therefore its opposition cannot be regarded as absolute, or incapable of being transcended.

These considerations may throw some light on the relation of the Analytic and Dialectic of Kant, and on the nature of the opposition of noumenon and phenomenon as it is presented in the latter. In the deduction of the categories, Kant pointed out the essential relation of the objective world of experience to what he called the “transcendental unity of apperception”; i.e., he pointed out that the unity of consciousness is implied in all its objects. This unity, he further showed, must be conceived as “capable of self-consciousness ”; but it actually becomes conscious of self only in relation, though also in opposition, to the other objects determined by it. Now it is this consciousness of itself in opposition to other objects which is the source of Kant’s “ideas of reason,” of the dissatisfaction of the mind with its empirical knowledge, even in its scientific form, and of the demand for a higher kind of knowledge to which experience is not adequate. That a standard is set up for experience by which it is condemned is simply a result of the further development of that unity which is implied in experience—a result of the progress of thought from consciousness to self-consciousness, and of the contrast between the former and the latter. The problem with which Kant’s Dialectic attempts to deal, and which it treats as insoluble, is, therefore, simply the problem of raising consciousness to the form of self-consciousness ; in other words, of attaining to a knowledge of the world of experience as not merely a “synthetic,’’and therefore imperfect, unity of things external to each other, but as an organic unity of transparent differences, a self-differentiating, self-integrating unity, such as seems to be presented to us in pure self-consciousness. Nor can this problem be regarded as insoluble; for the unity of self-consciousness is identical with the unity of consciousness; it is only that unity become self-conscious. Hence the point of view at which consciousness and selfconsciousness seem to be absolutely opposed to each other,— the highest point of view which Kant distinctly reaches,— can be regarded only as a stage of transition from the point at which their relative difference and opposition is not yet developed to the point at which they are seen to be the factors or elements of a still higher unity.

The later philosophy of Germany, from Kant to Hegel, is little more than the development of the idea just stated in its twofold aspect. In the first place, it is an attempt to show what is involved in the idea of thought or selfconsciousness as in itself an organic whole, a many-in-one, a unity which expresses itself in difference, yet so that the difference remains transparent, and therefore is immediately recognized as expression of the unity. In the second place, it is an attempt to bridge over the difference between thought or self-consciousness and the external world of experience, and to show that this opposition also is subordinated to a higher unity. Or, to put it more directly, the idealistic philosophy of Germany seeks, on the one hand, to develop a logic or metaphysic which bases itself, not, like formal logic, on the idea of bare identity, but on the idea of self-consciousness; and, on the other hand, to show, in a philosophy of nature and spirit, how, by means of this logic, the opposition of thought to its object, or of the a priori to the a posteriori in knowledge, may be transcended. In the third and fourth sections of this article something more will be said of the manner in which this task was fulfilled. Here only a few words are necessary to sum up the results reached, and to give more distinctness to the new ideal of knowledge which those results suggest. We have seen that Kant’s critical attitude involved two things,—on the one hand, the assertion that the existence we know is necessarily existence for thought, and, on the other hand, the denial that that which exists for our thought is absolute reality, a denial which again involves the presence to our thought of an ideal of knowledge, by which our actual knowledge is condemned. This ideal, however, was falsely conceived by Kant as an identity without any difference, and, in this sense, he does not hesitate to apply it even to self-consciousness itself. For, in a remarkable passage, he attempts to prove that the consciousness of self is not a knowledge of the self, by a simple reference to the duality of the self knowing and the self known, arguing that the ego “stands in its own way,” just because it exists only/or itself, i.e., because in knowing itself it presupposes itself. Kant evidently thinks that to know the real self it would be necessary to apprehend it in simple identity as purely an object without reference to a subject, or purely a subject without reference to an object. Yet to this it seems sufficient to answer that such an object or subject would lose its character as object or subject and become equivalent to mere being in general, and that, as such being is a mere abstraction, to know it cannot be the ideal of knowledge. If therefore there be a unity or identity of thought which is not realized in experience, and in reference to which we can regard experience as an jmperfect form of knowledge, it cannot be found in this abstract identity of being. In truth, as we have seen, it is found in that very idea of self-consciousness which Kant is criticizing. Just because we are self-conscious, and therefore oppose the unity of the conscious self to the manifoldness of the world in space and time, do we seek in the world of space and time for a transparent unity which we cannot at first find there. But, when this is seen, we find in Kant himself the partial solution of the difficulty, Self-consciousness presupposes consciousness; for, while the apprehension of objects in consciousness is possible only in relation to the unity of the self, yet it is only in relation to and distinction from these objects that we are conscious of that unity. Hence the two opposites, self and not-self, are bound together, and presuppose a unity which reveals itself in their opposition, and which, when made explicit, must reconcile them. If, therefore, selfconsciousness, in its first opposition to consciousness, gives rise to an ideal of knowledge to which our empirical knowledge of objects is inadequate, this arises from the fact that not only empirical knowledge but also the ideal to which it is opposed is imperfect, or that they both point to a unity which is manifested in their difference, and which is capable of containing and resolving it. In other words, the opposition of science to its ideal, which Kant has stated in his Antinomies, is not an absolute opposition, but one the origin and end of which can be seen.

This opposition reaches its highest point in the contrast between the transparent unity of self-consciousness, in which the difference of knower and known is evanescent, and the essential manifoldness and self-externality of the world in space, in which the differences seem to be insoluble. We must, indeed, think of self-consciousness as having life in itself and therefore as differentiating itself from itself; but this differentiation is held within the limit of its unity, it is a separation of movements which are separated only as they are united. On the other hand, the world in space presents itself as the sphere of external determination, in which things are primarily disunited and act only as they are acted on from without, and in which this external influence never goes so far as to destroy their reciprocal externality. In this sense it is that the opposition of mind and matter was taken by Descartes, and it is a survival of the same mode of thought that leads many even now to draw absolute lines of division between a priori and a posteriori, between ideas and facts, between spiritual and natural. Kant and Fichte give a new aspect to the difficulty by showing that the difficulty is one of reconciling consciousness and self-consciousness, and that in consciousness there is already present the unity which is manifested in self-consciousness, as, on the other hand, it is only through consciousness and in opposition to it that self-consciousness is possible. And Fichte made a further step when he attempted to show that the categories and the forms of perception, time and space, which Kant had taken as inexplicable facts, are implied in this contrast of consciousness and self-consciousness. The error that clings to Fichte’s speculations is, however, that he treats consciousness merely as a necessary illusion which exists simply with a view to self-consciousness, and hence is led to regard self-consciousness itself—because it is essentially related to this necessary illusion—as a schema or image of an unknowable absolute. In fact, in the end Fichte falls back upon the abstract identity in which Kant had found his noumenon, and so ends his philosophy with mysticism. Even Schelling, though he saw that the absolute unity must be one that transcends the difference of self and not-self, did not finally escape the tendency to merge all difference in absolute oneness. On the other hand, it was the endeavour of Hegel to proceed in the opposite way,— not to lose self-consciousness or subjectivity in a mere unity of substance, but rather to show that the absolute substance can be truly defined only as a self-conscious subject. And just because he did this he was prepared to take a further step, and to regard the external world, uot as Fichte regarded it, as merely the opposite of spirit, nor as Schelling regarded it, as merely the repetition and co-equal of spirit, but rather as its necessary manifestation or as that in and through which alone it can realize itself. His doctrine therefore might be summed up in two propositions,—first, that the absolute substance is spiritual or self-conscious, and, secondly, that the absolute subject or spirit can be conceived as realizing itself only through that very world of externality which at first appears as its opposite. In both respects Hegel’s philosophy reverses the via negativa of mysticism, and teaches that it is only through the exhaustion of difference that the unity of science, of which the mind contains in itself the certitude, is to be realized. For mind or spirit, viewed in itself, is conceived as a self-differentiating unity, a unity which exists only through opposition of itself to itself. And it is but a necessary result of such a conception that spirit can fully realize its unity only through a world which in the first instance must present itself as the extreme opposite of spirit. Hence the process of thought in itself, which is exhibited in the logic, ends in the opposition to thought of a world which is its negative counterpart. And the “absolute spirit” of Hegel is thus, not pure self-consciousness, but that more concrete unity of self-consciousness with itself which it attains through and by means of this world.

The effect of this view upon the relation of metaphysic to science, which we are at present considering, is noticeable. It does not, as is often supposed, supersede science by an a priori construction of the universe, nor does it leave the results of science unchanged and simply provide for it a deeper foundation. The latter was the point at which Kant and Fichte stopped; for, while they showed the relativity of experience to the principle of self-consciousness, they conceived that the function of metaphysic is completed in showing the phenomenal character of the objects of science, and in reserving a free space beyond the phenomenal world for “God, freedom, and immortality.” Schelling, on the other hand, as he did not adopt this merely negative view of the relation of spirit to nature or of a priori to empirical truth, was obliged to reinterpret the latter by the former. As, however, he did not recognize any distinctions which were not merely quantitative, he was led to apply the same easy key to every lock, and to think that he had explained all the different forms of existence, organic and inorganic, when he had merely pointed out a certain analogy between them. The metaphysic of Hegel, whatever may be said of the actual philosophy of nature produced by its author, contains no necessity for any such arbitrary procedure. In his Logic, indeed, he attempts to give us in abstracto the movement of thought in itself, from its simplest determination of being as qualitative or quantitative, through the reflective categories of substance and cause, up to its full consciousness of itself in its organic unity. And in so doing he of course gives us an account of the various categories which science uses in the interpretation of nature. He further attempts to show that the highest categories of science are in themselves imperfect and self-contradictory,—in other words, that they mark a stage of thought which falls short of that unity of being and knowing after which science is striving, and which is the presupposition as well as the goal of all intelligence. But, while he does this, he clearly acknowledges two things,—on the one hand that nature is essentially different from pure selfconsciousness, and that therefore logic can never by direct evolution of its categories anticipate the investigations of science, and, in the second place, that the final interpretation of nature through the highest categories presupposes its interpretation by the lower categories, and cannot be directly achieved without it. In other words, science must first determine the laws of nature according to the principles of causality and reciprocity, ere philosophy can be in a position to discover the ultimate meaning of nature by the aid of higher principles. “The philosophy of nature,” says Hegel, “takes up the material which physical science by direct dealing with experience has prepared for it at the point to which science has brought it, and again transforms this formed material without going back to experience to verify it. Science must, therefore, work into the hands of philosophy, in order that philosophy in its turn may translate the lower universality of the understanding realized by science into the higher universality of reason, and may show how in the light of this higher universality the intelligible world takes the aspect of a whole which has its necessity in itself. The philosophic way of looking at things is not a capricious attempt, once in a way for a change, to walk upon one’s head after one has got tired of walking upon one’s feet, or to transform one’s work-a-day face by painting it over; but, just because the scientific manner of knowing does not satisfy the whole demand of intelligence, philosophy must supplement it by another manner of knowing.”

The result then may be briefly expressed thus. Kant and his successors showed the relativity of the object of knowledge to the knowing mind. He thus pointed out that the ordinary consciousness, and even science, are abstract and imperfect modes of knowing, in so far as in their determination of objects they take no account of a factor which is always present, to wit, the knowing subject. For their purposes, indeed, this abstraction is justifiable and necessary, for by it they are enabled within their prescribed limits to give a more complete view of these objects in their relation to each other than if the attempt had been made to regard them also in relation to the knowing subject. At the same time the scientific result so arrived at is imperfect and incomplete, and it has to be reconsidered in the light of a philosophy which retracts this provisional abstraction. For it must be remembered that the fact that science looks at things only in their relation to each other, and not to the knowing mind, narrows the points of view or categories under which it is able to regard them, or, in other words, limits the questions which the mind is able to put to nature. Just because science does not treat its objects as essentially related to the mind, it is unable to rise to what Hegel calls the point of view of reason, or of the “notion”; i.e., it is obliged to treat objects and their relations merely under a set of categories, the highest of which are those of causality and reciprocity, and it is incapable of attaining to the conception of their organic unity. In other words, it is able to reach only a synthetic unity of given differences, and it cannot discover a principle of unity out of which the differences spring and to which they return. Now philosophy goes beyond science just because, along with the idea of the relativity of things to the mind, it brings in the conception of such a unity. Its highest aim is, therefore, not merely, as Kant still held, to secure a place for the supersensible beyond the region of experience, but to reinterpret experience, in the light of a unity which is presupposed in it, but which cannot be made conscious or explicit until the relation of experience to the thinking self is seen,—the unity of all things with each other and with the mind that knows them.

2. Relation of Metaphysic to Psychology. — It has already been shown that the doctrine that the thinking subject is presupposed in all objects of knowledge—or, in other words, that existence means existence for a conscious self —is not to be taken in a psychological sense. The idea that all science is based on psychology, and that, therefore, metaphysic and psychology are identical, cannot be retained by any one who has entered into the full meaning of the Kantian criticism. It is, however, so natural a misinterpretation of it, and it is so much favoured by the letter of the very book in which it was first decisively refuted, that it will be useful to point out more directly the fallacy involved in it, especially as this will place us in a better position to determine the true relation of the two parts of philosophy thus confounded.

The misunderstanding first took a definite form in the introduction to Locke’s Essay, in which he proposes to provide against any undue application of the intellectual powers of man to problems which are too high for them, by first examining and measuring the powers themselves. Stated in this way, it is obvious that the proposal involves an absurdity; for we have nothing to measure with, except the very powers that are to be measured. To see round our knowledge and find its boundary, we must stand outside of it, and where is such a standing ground to be found? We cannot by knowing prescribe limits to knowledge, or, if we seem to be able to do so, it can only be because we compare our actual knowledge with some idea of knowledge which we presuppose. In this way the ancient sceptics—and modern writers like Sir W. Hamilton and Mr Spencer who have followed them—turned the duality involved in the idea of knowledge against its unity, and argued that, because we cannot know the object except as different from and related to the subject, we cannot know it as it is in itself. Obviously in this argument it is involved that in true or absolute knowledge the object must not be distinguished at all from the subject, —to which the easy answer is that without such distinction knowledge would be impossible. The sceptic argument, therefore, lands us in the unhappy case pictured in the German proverb: “If water chokes us, what shall we drink?” The object cannot be known if it is distinguished from the subject, and it cannot be known if it is not distinguished from the subject. Obviously the one objection is as good as the other, and both combined only show that the idea of knowledge involves distinction as well as unity, and unity as well as distinction. The sceptic insists on one of these characteristics to the exclusion of the other, and condemns our actual knowledge because it contains both. In Kant there is undoubtedly some trace of the same fallacy, in so far as the idea by contrast with which he condemns the objects of experience as phenomenal is the idea of an abstract identity without any difference; but we have seen that with him this abstract identity is on the point of passing into an altogether different idea—the idea of self-consciousness as the type of knowledge.

It appears, then, that the idea of measuring our powers before we employ them rests on a paralogism; for what is really meant is that we abstract one of the elements of the idea of knowledge, and then condemn knowledge for having other elements in it. It is possible to criticize and condemn special conceptions, as not conforming to our idea of knowledge; but it is not possible to criticize the idea of knowledge itself; all we can do is to explain it. It is possible to see the limited and hypothetical character of certain of our ideas or explanations of things, because we are conscious that in developing them we have left out of account certain elements necessary to the whole truth; but this criticism itself implies, as the standard to which we appeal, a consciousness of truth and reality, a consciousness which we cannot further criticize. Here, therefore, we come upon what must seem to all who think it admissible to question the very possibility of knowledge an inevitable reasoning in a circle. We can answer objections only by means of the very idea which they dispute. But the answer is nevertheless a good one; for the objector also stands within the very circle which he seeks to break, and has no means of breaking it except itself. As soon as he speaks, he can be refuted by his own words; for his doubts also presuppose that unity of the intelligence and the intelligible world which he pretends to deny.

The error, however, cannot be fully corrected until we consider what gives it plausibility. The confusion of the metaphysical with the psychological problem is due to the fact that the being who is the subject of knowledge, for whom all exists that does exist, appears to be one, and only one, of the many objects of knowledge. When we say that existence means only an existence for a thinking self, we seem to be identifying the whole world with the feelings and ideas of men, i.e., with certain phenomena that belong to the life of a class of beings which only forms a part of that world,—phenomena, moreover, that are not exactly the same in any two of that class of beings. If we are to escape this difficulty it is obvious that we must be able to separate the conscious self or subject, as it is implied in all knowledge, from the nature of man as a being who “though formally self-conscious” is yet “part of this partial world,” i.e., one of the objects which we know along with and in distinction from other objects, and in whom “the self-consciousness which is in itself complete, and which in its completeness includes the world as its object,” is only progressively realized. Metaphysic has to deal with conditions of the knowable, and hence with self-consciousness as that unity which is implied in all that is and is known. Psychology has to inquire how this self-consciousness is realized or developed in man, in whom the consciousness of self grows with the consciousness of a world in space and time, of which he individually is only a part, and to parts of which only he stands in immediate relation. In considering the former question we are considering the sphere within which all knowledge and all objects of knowledge are contained. In considering the latter we are selecting one particular object or class of objects within this sphere,— although no doubt it must make a great difference in our treatment of this object that we have to consider it as existing not only for us but for itself. If nature “becomes self-conscious in man,” it is impossible to treat man merely as one among the other objects of nature. But it is not less true that he is one of those objects, and, in this point of view, the department of science and philosophy that deals with his life is as distinct from metaphysic— which deals with the conditions of all knowing and being —as is astronomy or physics. In both cases we have before us objects which we may consider in themselves apart from their relations to the conscious subject, and in both cases we must take cognizance of these relations if we would have a complete and final view of those objects. It is possible to have a purely objective anthropology or psychology—which abstracts from the relation of man to the mind that knows him—just as it is possible to have a purely objective science of nature. Such a natural science of man, however, will necessarily abstract at the same time from the fact that in man is manifested that universal principle in relation to which all things are and are known. In other words, it will omit that distinctive characteristic of man’s being in virtue of which he is a subject of knowledge and a moral agent. Hence the abstraction in this case is more likely to lead to positive error, more likely to produce not only an imperfect but a distorted view of the object. Inorganic nature, if we take it in itself, is not untruly viewed, under the categories of causality and reciprocity, as a collection of objects externally determined by each other; the error lies only in taking it as if it could exist in itself. Even organic beings do not suffer much injustice in being brought under such categories; for, though, as living and still more as sensitive beings, they involve in themselves and in their relation to the world a kind of unity of differences to which the categories of external relation imperfectly correspond, yet they are not such unities for themselves, but only forus. In other words, the principle through which they are and are known is still external to them. Hence also they are determined by outward influences, though these influences act rather as stimuli to what we may call the self-determined movement of their own life than as mechanical or chemical forces which change it. But in man, in so far as he is self-conscious,—and it is self-consciousness that makes him man, —the unity through which all things are and are known is manifested; and therefore he is emancipated, or at least is continually emancipating himself, from the law of external influence. Nature and necessity exist for him as that from which his life starts, in relation to which he becomes conscious of himself, against which he has to assert himself, and in the complete overcoming of which lies the end of all his endeavour. Nature is the negative rather than the positive starting-point of his existence, the presupposition against which he reacts rather than that on which he proceeds; and, therefore, to treat him simply as a natural being is even more inaccurate and misleading than to forget or deny his relation to nature altogether. A true psychology must, however, avoid both errors: it must conceive man as at once spiritual and natural; it must find a reconciliation of freedom and necessity. It must face all the difficulties involved in the conception of the absolute principle of self-consciousness,—through which all things are and are known,—as manifesting itself in the life of a being like man, who “comes to himself” only by a long process of development out of the unconsciousness of a merely animal existence.

This problem first presented itself in a distinct form in the discussions of the Socratic school as to the nature of knowledge, discussions which turn mainly upon the relation of the conscious to the unconscious element in thought. Socrates, by his method more than by any direct statement, drew attention to the fact that all particular judgments in morals involve or presuppose a universal principle. At the same time he pointed out that, so far from this universal principle being known to those who are continually making such judgments, they are not even conscious of its existence. They constantly use general terms whose meaning they have never even thought of defining. The beginning of a rational life for them must therefore lie in their becoming conscious of their ignorance, i.e., conscious that they have been all along judging, and therefore acting, on untested and even unknown assumptions. They must bring the unconscious universal to the light of day and define it, for until that is done it is impossible to live a moral, that is, a rational life. “Virtue is knowledge,” i.e., it is acting, not according to opinions, or particular judgments,—whose universal is unknown, and which therefore may be regarded as expressing merely the impulses or habits of the individual,—but in view of a universal principle determined by reason.

The onesidedness of this view—which absolutely condemns as vice all virtue that is not based on conscious principle—was partly corrected by another part of the doctrine of Socrates, who taught that knowledge is something that must be evolved from within the mind, and not merely communicated to it from without. For this implies that the moral principle may be present in men’s minds, and may rule their thoughts and actions, long before they become directly conscious of it. They are rational although they have never thought about reason, and they do not wait for scientific ethics to judge and act morally, any more than they wait for logic to reason correctly. It is this line of thought which is universalized and mythically expressed by Plato in his doctrine of “reminiscence.” According to this myth, we were conscious of ideas or universals in our pre-natal state ; we forgot them in the shock of birth into this mortal life; but in feeling or sharing the rapture of the poet or the lover we recall them as identified or confused with individual objects which “are like them, or partake in them.” The same explanation is given of the practical skill of the general and the statesman, and even of the “right opinion” which guides the ordinary good man. Such opinion is neither knowledge nor ignorance: not knowledge, for general principles or ideas are not in it present to the mind as ideas, and therefore the particular cannot be distinctly subsumed under them; yet not ignorance, for the ideas are after all present, though wrapped up in the particulars or confused with them. Nay, in the Theaetetus, Plato endeavours to show that the pure particular without the universal, sensations without ideas, cannot enter into our consciousness at all, and that therefore the lowest point to which a conscious being can descend is “opinion,” in which particular and universal, sensible and intelligible, are mingled together. In other words, no conscious being can apprehend the particular except through the universal, though that universal may be present only in consciousness and not to it. The task of philosophy is therefore only to make men “recollect themselves,” i.e., to make self-conscious that universality of thought in which all rational beings “partake,” or which, in the language of later philosophy, constitutes reason. The imperfection of Plato’s view lay, however, in this, that, while he clearly recognized that the condition of all consciousness of the particular is the universal, he did not see with equal clearness that the universal has a meaning only in relation to the particular. And this tendency to separate universal from particular is naturally accompanied by a tendency to set the subjective against the objective, and to regard the world, not as the manifestation of reason, but as a dualistic world, in which reason is chained to a lower principle—a world which can at best only give a hint or suggestion to the mind to enable it to recollect itself and recover for itself its own treasures. Thus the false method of introspection, the “high priori road” of mysticism, was at least opened up by Plato, if he did not altogether forsake the narrower and harder way to the spiritual world through nature and experience.

The great step in advance taken by Aristotle was due to his seeing the danger of this tendency. Those, however, who have maintained that Aristotle is the great a posteriori philosopher,—as Plato is the great a priori philosopher,— have entirely mistaken the bearing of Aristotle’s criticism •of the Platonic theory. As strongly as Plato does Aristotle maintain that reason is δw<i∕χeι πάντα τα νοητά, and that, therefore, the apprehension of truth by the mind is not a mere external communication of it to the mind, but rather is the mind coming to a consciousness of itself. As firmly as Plato does he declare that truth in its highest form is self-evidencing, i.e., that the principles of science, the laws of nature, when once they have been discovered, are seen to be true by their own light. His statements to this •effect have been neglected or explained away, because they were supposed to be inconsistent with his still more frequently reiterated assertions that it is only from experience and by induction that the truth of things can be discovered. Writers of a later day,—who came to Aristotle with an idea of a fixed opposition between a priori and a posteriori, and who held that the only possible alternatives were either to divide knowledge between the two or to explain away one of them,—could not comprehend that Aristotle might be in earnest both in asserting that knowledge is derived from experience and in asserting that it is an apprehension by reason of that which is identical with itself and needs no extraneous evidence. But Aristotle started with no such fixed opposition. On the contrary, any one who reads the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics will see that he had no difficulty in maintaining that knowledge begins in the apprehension of το καθ' eκaστov in sense perception, and that it proceeds from many perceptions to experience, and from many experiences to science; while at the same time he declared that the principles of science have their evidence in themselves. And the meaning of this declaration is shown in the De Anima, where we find him speaking of knowledge as the realization in the “passive reason” of man of an “active reason” which is eternal and unchangeable, and which in the consciousness of itself includes the knowledge of all things. Of this realization, indeed, there is in man only the potentiality or capacity, but just because this is a pure or universal capacity, because, as Aristotle puts it, it has no quality or determination of its own to stand between it and its objects, it is a capacity in which the absolute reason can realize itself, a capacity of knowing all things. Here we have Plato’s myth of reminiscence freed from the metaphor of memory, and reduced to scientific terms ; for that myth simply meant that the evolution of knowledge is the development of the mind to the consciousness of itself, and of all that is potentially in it. Only, by the combination of this doctrine with the idea of the necessity of induction, Aristotle at the same time guards against the purely subjective interpretation to which in Plato it was liable. For the process by which the mind “comes to itself” is conceived as a process by which at the same time it rises from the particular to the universal, from the γνώριμα ήμΐν to the γνώριμα απλώς, from the bare apprehension of the facts of experience to the knowledge of them through their principles or laws.

Yet Aristotle was as little able as Plato to work out fully a theory of the relation between the universal and the individual reason; and the cause of this failure was in both cases substantially the same. In Plato’s philosophy, the ideal tended to divorce itself from the phenomenal world in such wise that the latter was regarded only as suggesting or partaking in the former, but not as entirely explicable by it. It was not merely that, to the mind of the individual in its progress, the veil was only gradually lifted from the rationality of the world, but that in the world there was an irrational element from which the mind could save itself only by flight into the region of abstraction. And, though Aristotle by his doctrine of the essential relation of ideas to experience, or of the development of the mind to the acquisition of knowledge of the world, seemed to be on the way to correct this error, yet he too shrinks from regarding the phenomenal world as in itself intelligible. To him also an irrational matter mingles with things, and is in them a source of contingency and imperfection. Chance is not merely the reflexion upon the world of our imperfect knowledge, but a fact of experience, and there is therefore a region in which our best science cannot rise above generality to universality. In this way there remains for Aristotle an absolute a posteriori, a reality which cannot be understood, and which we can scarcely conceive as existing at all for the divine intelligence. At this point the Aristotelian philosophy appears to stand between two alternatives, either that, in the sense of pantheism, the finite world and its contingency is an illusion, or that it is contingent only for the growing intelligence of man, which fully understands neither itself nor the world which is its object. Aristotle, however, does not choose either horn of the dilemma, and leaves us therefore with an unresolved dualism between thought and its object; and this again necessarily involves a dualism between the active reason, which, as he asserts, realizes itself in man, and the passive reason which constitutes his nature as a finite being.

In the Middle Ages the Platonic and Aristotelian idea that the apprehension of objective truth is one with the evolution of the mind to self-consciousness seemed to be entirely lost. Knowledge of the finite world was regarded as indifferent, and knowledge of the infinite was conceived to be something given on authority, and in reference to which the mind was confined to an attitude of passive reception or implicit faith. No greater slavery of the spirit can be conceived than that in which even the truths of religion and morality—the truths that regard the inmost life of the spirit itself—were taken as a lesson to be learned by rote from the lips of a teacher. Yet the consciousness that such truth, if it was to be received by the mind, still more if it was to transform the mind, could not be entirely foreign to it, found a voice in the scholastic philosophy. And the compromise or truce between faith and reason expressed in the saying of Anselm credo ut intelligam,— according to which reason was to confine itself to the analysis and demonstration of the data received in implicit faith from the church,—prepared the way for the recognition that the two are not essentially at variance. The mind that proceeds from veneratio to delectatio, from awe and submission to the doctrine to enjoyment and appreciation of it, must already in its awe and submission have the beginnings of an intelligent appreciation. Anselm’s saying might be understood simply as meaning that we must have spiritual experience ere we can understand the things of the spirit. And in this sense it was adopted by the Reformers to express an idea almost the opposite of that with which the scholastics had associated it,—the idea that the direct apprehension of spiritual truth as entering into the inner life of the subject, as identified with his very consciousness of self, is the basis of all knowledge of it. In the Protestant church of the period after the Reformation, we find a growing tendency to insist on the subjectivity of religion, in the same exclusive and one-sided way in which the mediaeval church had insisted on its objectivity. In some extreme representatives of Protestantism this went so far as to lead to a disregard, almost to a rejection, of all objective doctrine, and a reduction of theology to an account of the religious consciousness. On the other hand, while religion was thus made subjective, science claimed to be purely objective, and the followers of Bacon seemed to adopt towards nature the same attitude of passive receptivity which the mediaeval Christian was taught to hold towards the church. While man was to learn everything from himself in religion, he was to learn nothing from himself in science. His aim must be to exclude subjective idola, in other words, to accept the facts as they were given, and keep himself out of the way. The inevitable result of this difference of view as to the nature of knowledge in these two different regions was, however, on the one hand a withdrawal of religion from all connexion with finite interests, and, especially from the attempt to connect religious principles with the knowledge of the finite world, and, on the other hand, an increasing tendency in those who represented finite science to regard religion as something merely subjective and even individual, as a feeling which could not be translated into thought or made the basis of any knowledge of the objective world.

The opposite principles of certitude which were thus set up for religious truth and truth of science need only to be brought together and contrasted to betray that they vest upon opposite abstractions, neither of which expresses the complete nature of truth or knowledge. On the one hand the truths of religion were maintained just because they were not, or were not merely, objective, but were capable of being tested by inner experience, and identified with the self-consciousness of the individual. On the other hand the truths of science were maintained because they were not, or were not merely, subjective, but were capable of being verified in objective experience. It was rightly seen on the one side that mere subjective feelings or opinions have no validity for any one but the subject of them, and on the other side that what is merely objective or externally given can have permanent value and interest for the intelligence only as it ceases to be mere isolated and unrelated fact—nay, that, even when science has discovered law and order in nature, it still wants the highest value and interest so long as that law and order are not seen as standing in essential relation to the intelligence itself. The idea of truth or knowledge as that which is at once objective and subjective, as the unity of things with the mind that knows them, enables us to understand the condemnation which the religious mind passed upon a merely external dogma, and even its lack of interest in a science which presented itself as an account of merely objective or external facts. And it enables us also to understand the way in which scientific men insisted upon objective fact as the basis of all knowledge, and the disrespect which they felt for a religion which seemed to admit that it had no such support. What is wanted to clear up the confusion on both sides is the growth of the perception among scientific men that the objectivity which they are seeking cannot be mere objectivity (which would be unmeaning), but an objectivity that stands in essential relation to the intelligence, and, on the other hand, the growth of the perception among religious men that the subjectivity of religion only means that God, whois the objective principle by whom things are, and are known, is spiritual, and can therefore be revealed to the spirit. When these two corrections have been made, it must become obvious that the religious consciousness is not the consciousness of another object than that which is present in finite experience and science, but simply a higher way of knowing the same object. And in this it is also involved that the two ideas of a priori and a posteriori, of that which is evolved from within and that which is given from without, are not essentially opposed to each other, but that the a posteriori is simply the first form of a consciousness which in its ultimate development must become a priori.

In that philosophy of compromise which λvas initiated by Descartes, one part of knowledge was regarded as innate, or developed from within, and another part as empirical, or imparted from without. In the second period of the history of modern philosophy this compromise was broken, and the names of Locke and Leibnitz—though with some hesitation on both sides—represent respectively the theories that all knowledge is a posteriori and that all knowledge is a priori. The compromise seemed to be renewed with Kant, but the form in which it was renewed pointed, as has been already shown, to something more than a compromise, for his doctrine was that the a posteriori element, the facts, exist for us only under a priori conditions, or, in other words, that what is usually called a posteriori is in part a priori. The criticism of this view need not be repeated. It is sufficient here to say that if, as Kant shows, the elements are inseparable or organically united, it is impossible to allege that so much belongs to the one and so much to the other. Furthermore, the consciousness of an essential difference in the elements of knowledge is possible only so far as that difference is transcended by the unity of knowledge. We can distinguish the a priori from the a posteriori only on condition that we can transcend the distinction, and this means that the distinction itself is not absolute, but that there is a point of view from which the a posteriori may be regarded as a priori, and that which is given from without to the spirit may be referred to its own self-determined development.

Now it is just here that we come upon the turning-point of the philosophical controversy, in the form which it has taken in modern times. The problem may be expressed thus—In what sense can we apply the idea of development to the human spirit 1 Are we to treat that development as merely a determination from without, or as an evolution from within, or as partly the one and partly the other? In a sense all writers of the present day would admit that this last is the case. For, on the one hand, even the Darwinian theory accounts for development by aid of what we may call the a priori tendency of the individual to maintain itself in the struggle for existence, though it supposes that the condition or medium in which the individual is placed determines the direction in which that development proceeds. And, on the other hand, no one now would adopt the Leibnitzian theory that the individual is a monad, whose self-development is entirely conditioned by itself in such a sense that all the relations which it has to other existences are merely apparent, and that the coincidence of its life with the life of the world is the result of a pre-established harmony. On both sides, therefore, the idea of self-determination would be admitted, though the tendency of the Darwinians would be to regard this self-determination as something merely formal; and on both sides it would also be admitted that the self-determination does not exclude a determination from without, though extreme opponents of Darwin might be inclined to reduce this determination to a mere stimulus or external condition of the development of the nature of the subject to which the stimulus is applied. The question, however, remains whether, after all, this opposition of without and within is an absolute one, or whether there is any point of view from which it may be transcended. To Aristotle it seemed possible to answer this question in the affirmative, because he conceived that the reason of man is a pure or universal δwα∕us, the evolution of which to complete selfconsciousness is one with the process whereby the objective world comes to be known. Yet, as Aristotle admitted the existence in the world of a material principle which was essentially different from the ideal principle of reason, he was obliged to limit his statement as to the possible unity of the subjective and the objective consciousness, and to say merely that “in things without matter the knower is identical with the known.” But this would immediately lead to the conclusion that the pure development of reason must be secured by abstraction from all finite and material objects, rather than by a thorough comprehension of them. The freedom of the spirit, on this theory, must be a negative and not a positive freedom, a freedom won, not by overcoming the world, but by withdrawing ourselves from its influence. It remained, therefore, for modern philosophy to work out the Aristotelian idea that the rational being as such, in spite of its necessary relation to and dependence on an external world, is never in an absolute sense externally determined. And, as we have already seen, the Kantian philosophy brought this problem within the reach of solution, in so far as it showed, first, that objective existence can have no meaning except existence for a thinking self, and, secondly, that existence for a thinking self means existence the consciousness of which is “capable of being combined with the consciousness of self.” Add further to these propositions what was shown by Kant’s successors, that that only can be combined with the consciousness of self which is essentially related to it, and we arrive at an idealistic theory of the world, which enables us at once to understand the relative value of the distinction between self-determination and determination from without, and at the same time to see that its value is only relative. If it be true that nothing exists which is not a possible object of consciousness, and again that there is no possible object of consciousness which is not essentially related to self-consciousness, then the phenomena of the external world, which at first present themselves under the aspect of contingent facts, must be capable of being ultimately recognized as the manifestation of reason; and the history of the conscious being in his relations with that world is not a struggle between two independent and unrelated forces, but the evolution by antagonism of one spiritual principle. It is, on this view, the same life which within us is striving for development, and which without us conditions that development. And the reason why the two terms, the self and the not-self, thus appear to be independent of each other, or to be brought together only as they externally act or react upon each other, lies in this, that the object is imperfectly known, and the subject is imperfectly self-conscious. This, however, does not make it less true that in self-consciousness is to be found the principle in reference to which the whole process may be explained, and therefore that the self-conscious subject, as such, lives a life which belongs to him, not merely as one object among others, but as having in himself the principle from which the life and being of all proceeds.

From this point of view, as has been already indicated, the relative value of a theory of human development, such as that which might be based on the ideas of Darwin, would not be denied. The conscious being may be regarded simply as an externally determined object, and the incorrectness of this assumption will not entirely destroy the value of the results attained, especially if, as is often the case with those who seek to construct a natural science of man, the assumption itself is not very strictly adhered to, but corrected by the tacit admission of other conceptions somewhat inconsistent with it. But, at the same time, it would require to be pointed out that such a science is necessarily abstract and imperfect, as it omits from its view the central fact in the life of the object of which it treats. It can do nothing to account for man’s consciousness, or his capacity of becoming conscious, of the influences by which he is supposed to be determined; or, to put it from the other side, it takes for granted that the objects that influence man are intelligible objects, “capable of being combined with the consciousness of self,” without seeing how much is involved in this assumption. Now it is evident that the consciousness of an influence cannot be explained by the influence itself, nor even by that taken together with the nature of the sensitive beings subjected to it. It is evident also that an influence mediated by consciousness is not, strictly speaking, an external influence, but that it is already transformed, and in process of being further transformed, by the development of the self to which it is present. For the dawn of consciousness, in which the external object first comes into existence for us as opposed to the self, is at the same time the beginning of the process by which its externality is negated or overcome. Self-consciousness is that which makes us individuals in. a sense in which individuality can be predicated of none but a self-conscious being. For, in determining himself as a self, the individual at the same time excludes from himself every other thing and being, and determines them as external objects. He emancipates himself from the world at the same time that he repels the world from himself. Yet this movement of thought, by which his individuality is constituted, is also that by which he is lifted above mere individuality, for, in becoming conscious of self and not-self in their opposition and relation, he ceases to be simply identified with the one to the exclusion of the other. His finite individuality is regarded by him from a universal point of view, in which it has no less and no more importance than any other individuality, or in which its greater or less importance is determined only by its place in the whole. On this universality of consciousness rests the possibility of science and of morality. For all science is just a contemplation of the world in ordine ad universum and not in ordine ad individuum, ; and all morality is just action with a view to an interest which belongs to the agent, not as this individual, but as a member of a greater whole, and ultimately of the absolute whole in which all men and all things are included.

In this nature of the conscious subject lies also the possibility of metaphysic in the sense of Aristotle, as that science which goes back to a πρώτον φυσeι, a beginning which is prior to the existence in consciousness of the individual self, and onward to an end in which the divisions of the finite consciousness are transcended,—as including, in short, ontology, or metaphysic in the narrower sense, on the one side, and theology, or the philosophy of religion, on the other. In truth, these two extremes of science are necessarily bound together: we can only go back to the beginning if we can go on to the end; we can only recover the first unity if we can anticipate the last. Or, to free the subject more definitely from the associations of time, we cannot apprehend the unity which is involved or presupposed in all the differences of our conscious life except in so far as we can look at our individual existence from the point of view of the whole to which it belongs. This will become evident if we consider the nature of the limits which have to be transcended by such a science. The individual conscious subject, as he finds himself at first, is but one being in a world that stretches out, apparently without limits, on every side of him. Of the things by which he is immediately surrounded he sees but a small part, and the influences which he receives from them are, as he knows, like the wave that breaks upon a shore from an unknown ocean, only the last partial expression of impulses that come from regions beyond his ken. Again, he finds himself as one in a changing series of beings, of which he knows only the last preceding terms, and he is aware that in a few years he, as one of this series, will cease to be. He is thus to himself a definitely limited being, and though his knowledge of himself and his world may be gradually widened so as to reach some little way back into the past, and anticipate a little of the future, or may go outwards in space to embrace a widening circle of existences around him, yet he always stops at a limit, of which he is conscious that it is no absolute limit, but simply an arbitrary halting-place where vision grows indistinct and imperfect. When he reflects upon himself from this point of view, he is forced to regard himself as but a fragment, and a fragment of an unknown whole, by which his whole being is determined to be what it is. His highest knowledge seems to be but a consciousness of his ignorance, his highest freedom a determination by motives the ultimate meaning of which is hid from him.

So far there seems to be no room for any metaphysical knowledge, any knowledge of ourselves and our world which is other than relative and in ordine ad individuum. But further reflexion shows that in this very consciousness of limit there is implied a consciousness of that which is beyond limit. While we proceed from part to part, beginning with ourselves and our immediate surroundings, and following out lines of connexion that lose themselves in the distance, we are guided by a consciousness of the whole as a unity through which the parts are determined. Nay, it is just the presence of this consciousness that makes us capable of what seems the piecework of our knowledge, in which, by the aid of the principle of causality, we connect particular with particular, and so gradually extend the sphere of light into the encompassing darkness. For that principle simply means that the limited external object does not sufficiently explain to us its own existence, and that therefore we are foroed to explain it by a reference to something beyond it. It means, in other words, that we cannot rest in that which is not a self-bounded, self-determined whole. The application of the category of external determination has therefore an essential reference to the higher category of self-determination. The mere endlessness of space and time has no meaning except in opposition, yet in relation, to the true infinity’of which we find the type in self-conscious thought. Or, to put it in the Kantian form in which it is already familiar to us, the consciousness of the objective world in space and time stands in essential relation to the unity of self-consciousness. And if when we regard the former exclusively we are forced to view ourselves as insignificant and shortsighted finite beings in an infinite universe, when we regard the latter we are enabled to see that in all this universe there is revealed only that spiritual principle which we find also in ourselves. In this way a new light is thrown on our first consciousness of ignorance. The strivings of our reason after knowledge can no longer be regarded as strivings after an unknown goal, but rather after a goal which it has prescribed for itself. The narrow limits of our individual life are not removed, but they cease to be for us the limits of a narrow circle of definition within a formless infinite. They become the limits of a sphere within a sphere, a sphere which is defined by the idea of knowledge or self-consciousness itself, and in which therefore, however we may wander, we are everywhere at home. In religious language, the sphere is not a mere universe, but God, who is without us only as He is within us, so that “by the God within we can understand the God without.”

Again, as this consciousness takes man beyond his immediate existence, and énables him to determine it in relation to an absolute unity of all things in God, so it enables him to go back to a unity which is behind or prior to that existence. For, if the individual can look at himself as he looks at others, and at others as he looks at himself, i.e., from a point of view which is unaffected by his individuality, and in which that individuality is for him only what it is for impartial reason, he can have nothing in him which binds his consciousness to his individuality as mere individuality; as therefore he can go beyond himself to apprehend the whole in which his individuality has a place, there is nothing to prevent him from going back upon himself, and upon the conditions which are prior to his own individual being. He is not tied to his immediate life, and can go below it just as he can rise above it.

“0 God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee,” said Kepler. In reading the “thoughts” written in the planetary system, Kepler was discovering the meaning of that which is simpler and more elementary than the existence of man, as a cycle of mechanical relations are simpler and more elementary than self-consciousness. Yet it was a true feeling that led him to connect this descent into the mechanical world with God. For it is only in virtue of the same faculty which enables us to rise to the absolute life which includes and subordinates our own that we can so free us from the image of our own conscious life as to apprehend and fix in thought the simpler relations of purely physical existence. But the same faculty of going back upon ourselves has a still deeper manifestation. Not only can we abstract from ourselves so as to understand the inorganic world, we can also abstract from ourselves so as to understand the conditions which are prior to the thought, and therefore to the existence, of any objective external world at all, the universal conditions of the knowable and therefore also of reality. In doing so, to use Hegel’s metaphor, which is but an extension of Kepler’s, we are “thinking what God thought and was before the creation of the world,” i.e., we are thinking the spiritual unity presupposed in all knowledge, and therefore in all objects of knowledge—the consciousness in relation to which everything is, and is known.

3. The Relation of Logic to Metaphysic.— The ordinary view of logic is based on two presuppositions which tend to separate it almost entirely from metaphysic: it is based on the presupposition of an opposition, or at least a merely external relation, between thought and its object, and again of an opposition, or merely external relation, between the form or method and the content or matter of thought. The intelligence is regarded as dealing with an object which is given to it externally, and to which, therefore, it can be true only if it leaves it unchanged and introduces into it nothing of its own. Truth, to use a well-known definition, is the agreement of our conceptions with their objects, and in bringing about this agreement all the concessions must be on the side of thought. Conformably to this view, the processes of thought must be purely analytic; i.e., thought may break up the given idea of the object into its constituent elements, and again out of these elements it may recompose the idea in its unity, but it can add nothing and take nothing away. It is like an instrument which alternately dissects a solid mass into smaller parts and again mechanically presses them together, but which never penetrates and dissolves the hard matter, still less fuses it into a new form by bringing it into contact with new chemical elements.

This conception, like much of the philosophy of which it is a specimen, is a kind of exaggerated caricature of one aspect of the philosophy of Aristotle. Aristotle is the great analytic philosopher. He first laid down boundaries in that continuous domain of science which Plato had first surveyed. Not that he ever completely lost sight of the unity or continuity of the different sciences which he thus distinguished. His unrivalled speculative genius is shown nowhere more clearly than in those not unfrequent utterances of speculative insight into the unity of things different, by which, as at a stroke, he makes his own landmarks and all landmarks to disappear. Yet such utterances generally stand by themselves, and do not alter the general analytic spirit of his philosophy. They are not so developed as to show distinctly the merely relative character of the divisions and distinctions which are set up, or the limits of the sphere within which they hold good. Hence it was easy for minds which possessed something of Aristotle’s keenness of understanding without his speculative depth to neglect such expressions, or to explain them away. And this process of degradation was the more rapid as the philosophy of Aristotle soon ceased to be studied in his own writings, and became a traditionary possession of the schools. In this way we may partly explain how logic came to be regarded by mediaeval philosophy as a form of thought which could be altogether separated from the matter, and by the application of which that matter could be in no way affected or changed. But for such a view, indeed, it is difficult to conceive how the schoolmen could have ventured to apply any logical processes at all to the sacred matter of dogma. The idea of externally adding anything to the faith once delivered to the saints was excluded by the principle of authority; and the idea of developing out of that faith anything that was not immediately contained in it had not yet presented itself to any one. Hence the business of thought seemed to be purely formal and analytic, and it was only on the plea of its being such that its activity could be tolerated at all. Nor was this view of logic at once changed by the revolt against scholasticism. The first philosophical exponents of the modern scientific movement, while they rejected the matter of dogma as fictitious, or at least as transcending the sphere of positive knowledge, and while they substituted in its place, as the object of investigation, the facts of experience, did not realize any more than the schoolmen that the form and method of knowledge could be other than analytic of given matter. Bacon, their protagonist, was above all solicitous to guard against any subjective anticipatio naturae·, nor did he see that the questions which, in his theory of forms, he proposed that science should ask of nature themselves involved any preconceived theory regarding it. Conscious, as every true scientific man must be, that the study of nature involves a constant self-abnegation, a patient selfdistrustful course of experiment and observation, he and his followers did not realize the presuppositions that make the inquiry possible, and by which it must be guided. Still less did they recognize that the separation between the mind and its object which they took for granted can only be a relative division, i.e., a division on the basis of a unity, and that therefore the self-abnegation of the mind in its investigation of facts cannot be an absolute self-abnegation, but is only the first step on the way to the discovery that the facts are intelligible, and so essentially related to the intelligence. Hence to them logic still seemed a mere analytic process, the end and aim of which was understood to be that a world, existing in itself out of relation to thought, should be reproduced in a more or less imperfect image in thought. And, when it came to be suspected by a less naive philosophy of experience that, after all, certain presuppositions, not given in experience itself, were involved in the scientific interpretation of it, various expedients were devised to reduce these presuppositions in an indirect way to empirical truths,—expedients of which Mill’s attempt to base the law of causality upon an inductio per enumerationem simplicem may be taken as the type.

When we go back to Aristotle,—who was the “founder of logic” in the sense that he was the first who treated logical method as a separate branch of science,—we find that his division of logic from metaphysic is by no means so definite and complete as it was made by some of his successors. The verification of the highest principle of thought, the law of contradiction, is treated by him as the business of metaphysic. And, though he separates the idea of truth from the idea of reality, and regards the former as involving a relation of thought to a reality which is determined in itself independent of that relation, yet he does not regard this independence as by any means absolute. Truth is defined by him as a connexion or distinction of ideas which corresponds to a union or separation of things, but does not necessarily so correspond. This definition, however, holds good only in so far as things are not scientifically known, or in so far as things not essentially related are brought together κατά σvμβeβηκo<i. Where necessity comes in, and is apprehended by reason, the case is different. For in that case we have not merely an external synthesis, but an essential identity, i.e., a unity of elements which can neither be, nor be known, apart from each other. In relation to the principles of science, therefore, Aristotle holds that error, i.e., a connexion of ideas not corresponding to a connexion of things, is impossible, and that the only alternatives are knowledge and ignorance. Either we possess the idea or we do not possess it; as Aristotle otherwise expresses it, in thought we are either in contact with the things or not in contact with them; there is no third possibility. The meaning of Aristotle becomes clearer when we remember that, according to his view, the intelligence, in apprehending the indivisible unity of elements in the object, is at the same time apprehending the unity of the object with itself. The mind cannot be deceived in regard to that which forms a part of its consciousness of itself. In freeing the essential conception of the object from the contingency of matter, science has freed the object from that which made it foreign to intelligence, and the relation of thought to things ceases to be one of correspondence, and becomes one of identity.

The legitimate inference from this view of the relation of the intelligence to the intelligible world would seem to be that the partial separation of thought from its object and its imperfect correspondence with it is characteristic of our first empirical consciousness of things, and of the progress from that consciousness to science, but that in completed science the division ceases. The esse of things is not their percipi, but their intelligi. But, if this be taken as the truth, then it can no longer be supposed that the process by which scientific knowledge is attained consists simply in an analysis of the object as it is given in immediate perception. On the contrary, it must be held that, if our thought has to submit itself to the object, and to be brought into conformity with it, by a process of induction, it is equally true that in this process the object also must be changed, that it may be brought into conformity with the principle of thought. The genesis of science, according to this view, is not merely an analysis of given facts, but a process of vital transformation by which consciousness on the one side and the object on the other are brought into unity with each other. The idea, indeed, of an empty process, a process in which the activity of the mind is merely formal, is one which will not stand the slightest examination. A mind without categories, if such a thing were conceivable, would have no questions to ask in relation to the object presented to it, and could therefore get no answers. Those who make a pretence of approaching a subject in an absolutely receptive attitude, and without any presuppositions, only show that they are unconscious of the categories by which their thought is ruled; and they will be most slavishly guided by these categories just because they are unconscious of them. The schoolmen, when they applied their logical principles to the matter of Christian dogma, did not recognize that they were doing more than analysing and bringing out clearly the meaning of that dogma. But the effect of their work was to turn the system of divinity into a collection of insoluble puzzles; for the doctrine was a doctrine of reconciliation between divine and human, infinite and finite, universal and particular, and the principle of their method was to treat all these oppositions as absolute. In like manner it might be shown that the analysis of social phenomena which was made in the last century was inadequate and superficial, just because of the latent assumption of individualism on which it proceeded, and that the greater success of writers like Comte and Spencer does not arise merely or mainly from their being more careful observers of the phenomena of social life, but in great part from the fact that, rather by the unconscious movement of opinion than by any distinct metaphysic, their minds have become possessed by more adequate categories.

The idea that the process of thought is merely formal, or analytic of given matter, is, however, an error that has a truth underlying it. This is the truth expressed by Aristotle in his much misunderstood comparison of the intelligence of man to a tabula rasa, upon which nothing at first is written, and again in his assertion—already quoted—that the miud is a pure δwαμi5, without any distinguishing quality of its own which could prevent it from apprehending the real nature of other things. In other words, self-conscious reason is not a special thing in the world, but the principle through which all things are, and are understood; and hence, as regards the distinction of things from each other, it is in the first instance undetermined and indifferent, and therefore open to be determined in one way or another, according to the object to which it is directed. But this simply means that the conscious subject, as such, is not bound to his own individuality, but can regard things, nay, in a sense, must regard them, from a point of view which is independent of it. This is what makes possible the self-restraint and self-abnegation prescribed to the scientific man, whose whole duty, as it is often said, is to keep himself out of the way and let the objects speak, to lay aside all subjective idola and prejudices that stand between him and the reality of things. This at first sight may seem to be equivalent to the assertion that the mind ought to be in a state of simple passivity or receptivity towards objects. What is really meant, however, is not that the intelligence should go out of itself, or cease to be itself, that it may know its object, but simply that it should show itself in its universality, or freedom from the limits of the individual nature. The self-abnegation of science is an endeavour, so to speak, to see the object with its own eyes, but this it can do only in so far as the consciousness for which the object is is that consciousness in relation to which alone all objects are, and are understood. Or, to put it in another form, the conscious self in its scientific self-abnegation does not give itself up to another, and become purely passive; it only gives up all activity which is not the activity of that universal thought for which and through which all things are. Hence, when it has so abnegated itself, its most intense constructive activity is just beginning, though, just so far as the self-abnegation has been real, that constructive activity has become one with the self-revelation of the object. As, however, it is only through the constructive activity of thought that there exists for us any object at all, so it is only through its continued activity that the conception of the object is changed, till it is completely revealed and known. And this activity involves a continuous synthesis, by which an ever wider range of facts is brought together in an ever more definite unity, until the mind has, if we may use the expression, exhausted its store of categories upon the world, and until the world has completely revealed itself in its unity with itself and with the mind.

To combine these two ideas—on the one hand that science begins in a self-abnegation by which the mind renounces all subjective prejudices, and thereby attains a purely objective attitude, and on the other hand that this purely objective attitude is not a mere attitude of reception, but one in which the mind is continually transforming the object by its own categories,—to see that the universality of the mind in knowing is not mere emptiness, and that its activity is synthetic just when it is most free from all presuppositions extraneous to the nature of its object,—is one of the greatest difficulties of the student of metaphysic. Universality at first looks so like emptiness, and a universal activity so like a merely formal activity, that it is no wonder that the one should be mistaken for the other. But if we make such a confusion, we may soon be forced to choose between a sensationalism that makes knowledge impossible and a mysticism which makes it empty. The pure identity of thought with itself which is involved in the process of analysis is put on the one side, and the manifold matter of experience which is the object of thought on the other, and between these opposites no mediation is possible. If we take our stand upon the latter, we are forced to reject all mental synthesis as invalid, because it involves a subjective addition to the facts; if we take our stand on the former, we are compelled to regard all objective experience as irrational, because it does not correspond to the pure identity of thought.

In Aristotle’s view of logic it cannot be said that this difficulty is clearly solved, though he seems to have seen the error of both extremes. On the one hand he often recognizes the synthetic character of the process of induction, as when he speaks of the universal idea or law as a central principle, in which we must find the key to all the difficulties suggested by different aspects of a given subject. Yet in other places we trace the influence of a merely analytic conception of that process as a process in which the universal is to be reached by abstracting from the peculiarities of individuals. And this conception of it is favoured by Aristotle’s metaphysical theory, according to which the forms of things in the finite world are manifested in a resisting matter, a matter which prevents them from being perfectly or universally realized. For, in so far as this is the case, the facts will not be entirely explained by the knowledge of the form, and the knowledge of the form must be obtained, not by combining all the facts, but rather by abstracting from them. Again, in Aristotle’s account of the process of thought in the Prior Analytics, he regards it as a formal deductive process; and, though in the Posterior Analytics he attempts to give a synthetic meaning to the syllogism by treating it as the method in which the properties of a thing may be proved of it, or combined with it, through its essential definition, yet this adventitious meaning bestowed upon the syllogistic process does not alter its essential nature. The ultimate source of this inadequate view of the process of thought seems to lie in Aristotle’s imperfect conception of the unity or identity which is for him the type of knowledge. For, though, both in the Metaphysic and the De Anima, he defines that identity as self-consciousness or as a consciousness of objects which is identical with self-consciousness, yet he does not seem clearly to distinguish between a unity in which there is no difference and a unity in which difference is transcended and reconciled. This seems to be shown by his description of the principles which reason apprehends as individua or indivisible unities, rather than unities which imply, while they transcend, difference. Yet, in this definition of the unity of knowledge as self-consciousness, Aristotle has implicitly admitted that there is a duality or difference in the unity itself, and this might have been expected to modify his conception of the relation of consciousness to its objects. For, as self-consciousness is not simple like a chemical element, but only in the sense that it is an indissoluble unity of opposites, it might have been anticipated that one who had realized self-consciousness as the principle of knowledge would be able to regard the opposition between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of the world as itself also capable of being conceived as a unity.

This misconception of Aristotle may be shown in another way. In the Metaphysic we find him laying down what is called the logical law of contradiction as the ultimate principle of knowledge. The meaning of this principle, however, as Aristotle states it, is simply that thought in its essence is definition or distinction. If, as Heraclitus says, everything at once is and is not, if we cannot attach any definite predicates to things by which they may be distinguished from each other, then, as Aristotle argues, thought is chaos, and knowledge is impossible. If determination be not negation, if the assertion of A be not the negation of not-A, then there is no meaning in words. The criticism to be made on this view is obviously, not that it is a false statement of the law of thought, but that it is an imperfect statement of it.

Thought is undoubtedly distinction; and, if all distinction be confounded, no meaning can be apprehended or expressed. But thought is also relation and connexion of the things distinguished, and this aspect of it is equally important with the other. Aristotle shows his one-sidedness—a one-sidedness which throws him into opposition to Plato, but which enables him to correct Plato only by falling into the opposite error—when he exclusively fixes his attention on the “differentiating” aspect of knowledge, and takes no notice of the “integrating” aspect of it. It is easy to see that this exclusive attention to one side of the truth may lead in many ways to a distorted view both of the world and of the intelligence that apprehends it. If Heraclitus be interpreted as simply denying the right of thought to introduce its definiteness into the flux of sense, nothing but absolute scepticism can come out of his philosophy; and Aristotle was right in maintaining that it is only as the flux is brought to a stand, and the universal is fixed as a permanent and definite object of thought, 1 that knowledge becomes possible. But, on the other hand, if distinction be taken as absolute, if the definite assertion of a thing be taken as a negation of all relation to what it is not, if the fixity of thought be taken as an abstract selfidentity which excludes all the movement of finite things wherein they show their finitude and pass beyond themselves into other things, then knowledge will be equally impossible. Our consciousness, on such a theory, would be disintegrated into parts which would own no connexion with each other; nor would it be possible for us to think of things as, in spite of their differences, bound together into the unity of one world. The law of contradiction or distinction, therefore, is likely to lead to serious misconceptions, unless it be complemented by a law of relation— a law expressing the truth that there is a unity which transcends all distinction. For all intelligible distinction —all distinction of things in the intelligible world—must be subordinate to their unity as belonging to that world, and therefore essentially connected with each other and with the intelligence. In such a world, in other words, there can be no absolute distinctions or differences (not even between being and not-being); for distinction without relation is impossible, and a conception held in absolute isolation from all correlated conceptions ceases to have any meaning. This does not, of course, imply a negation of the law of contradiction within its own sphere, but it does imply that that sphere is limited, and that there is no absolute contradiction. All opposition is within a presupposed unity, and therefore points to a higher reconciliation, a reconciliation which is reached when we show that the opposition is one of correlative elements.

The great step in logical theory which was taken by the idealistic philosophy of the post-Kantian period was simply to dissipate the confusion which had prevailed so long between that bare or formal identity, which is but the beginning of thought and knowledge, and that concrete unity of difference, which is its highest idea and end. It was, in other words, to correct and complete the conceptions of thought as analytical, and as externally synthetical, by the conception of it as self-determining, to show that it is a unity which manifests itself in difference and opposition, yet in all this, even when it seems to be dealing with an object which is altogether external to it, is really developing and revealing itself. This new movement of thought might, in one point of view, be described as the addition of another logic to the logic of analysis and the logic of inductive synthesis which were already in existence. But it was really more than this; for the new logic was not merely an external addition 1 i]peμ∙η<τavτos του καθόλου iv τp ψυχp, An. Post., ii. 19.

to the old logics, it also put a new meaning into these logics by bringing to light the principles that were involved in them. At the same time it broke down the division that had been supposed to exist between logic and metaphysic, between the form or method of thought and its matter. It showed that thought itself contains a matter from which it cannot be separated, and that it is only by reason of this matter that it is able to ask intelligent questions of nature, and to get from nature intelligible answers. A short space must be devoted to explain this relation of the three logics to each other.

The analytic logic fairly represents our first scientific attitude to the world, in which we concentrate our attention upon the facts as they are given in experience, with no thought of any mental synthesis through which they are given. To ourselves we seem to have to do with an object which is altogether independent of our thought, and what we need in order to know it is to keep ourselves in a purely receptive attitude. All we can do is to analyse what is given, without adding anything of our own to it. It has, however, already been pointed out that this apparent self-abnegation is possible only because, in abnegating our individual point of view, we do not abnegate the point of view that belongs to us as universal or thinking subjects. In other words, the objectivity of knowledge thus attained is not the ceasing of the activity of our thought, but rather of all that interferes with that activity. We seem to abstract from ourselves, but what we do abstract from is only the individuality that stands between us and the world. The scientific observer who has thus denied himself, however, is not necessarily conscious of the meaning of what he has done. The immediate expression of his consciousness is not “I think the object,” but “it, the object, is”; and the more intensely active he is the more his activity is lost for him in the object of it. His whole work is, for himself, only the analysis of given facts, and for the rest he seems to have nothing to do but to take the world as he finds it. The voice of nature to which he listens is for him not his own voice but the voice of a stranger, and it does not occur to him to reflect that nature could not speak to any one but a conscious self. His business is to determine things as they present themselves, to enumerate their qualities, to measure their quantities; and his logic accordingly is a logic governed by the idea of the relative comprehension and extension of the things which he thus names and classifies. Such an analytic logic seems to be all that is necessary, because the only predicates by which things are as yet determined are those which are involved in their presence to us in perception, and as perceived they seem to be at once given in all their reality to the mind that apprehends them.

A step is taken beyond this first naive consciousness of things, whenever a distinction is made between appearance and reality, or whenever it is seen that the things perceived are essentially related to each other, and that therefore they cannot be known by their immediate presence to sense, but only by a mind which relates that which is, to that which is not, immediately perceived. If “the shows of things are least themselves,” we must go beyond the shows in order to know them; we must seek out the permanent for that which is given as transient, the law for the phenomenon, the cause for the effect. The process of thought in knowledge therefore is no longer lost in its immediate object, but is, partly at least, distinguished from it. For just in proportion as the reality is separated from the appearance does the knower become conscious of an activity of his own thought in determining things. From this point of view nature is no longer an object which spontaneously reveals itself to us, but rather one which hides its meaning from us, and out of which we must wring its secret by persistent questioning. And, as this questioning process obviously has not its direction determined purely by the object itself, it becomes manifest that the mind must bring with it the categories by which it seeks to make nature intelligible. To ask for the causes of things, or the laws of things, presupposes that the immediate appearance of them does not correspond to an idea of reality which the mind brings with it, and by which it judges the appearance. Nature is supposed to be given to or perceived by us as a multitude of objects in space passing through successive changes in time; and what science seeks is to discover a necessity of connexion running through all this apparently contingent coexistence and succession and binding it into a system. Science, therefore, seems to question nature by means of an idea of the necessary interdependence and connexion of all things, as parts of one systematic whole governed by general laws—an idea which it does not get from nature, but which it brings to nature. Hence the logic in which this process of investigation expresses its consciousness of itself will be a synthetic logic, a logic built on certain principles which are conceived to be independent of experience, and by the aid of which we may so transform that experience, so penetrate into it or get beyond it, as to find for it a better explanation than that which it immediately gives of itself. The Posterior Analytic, in which Aristotle brings in the idea of cause to vivify the syllogistic process, or supply a real meaning to it, may already be regarded as a first essay in this direction. And the theory of inductive logic, as explained by Bacon and his successors down to Mill, is a continuous attempt to determine what are the principles and methods on which experience must be questioned, in order to extract from it a knowledge which is not given in immediate perception.

It was, however, Hume who first brought into a clear light the subjectivity of the principles postulated in this logic, and especially of the principle of causality, which is the most important of them. In thus contrasting the subjectivity of the principles of science with the objectivity of the facts to which they are applied, it was his intention to cast doubt on the science which is based on the application of the former to the latter. The principles, he maintains, are not legitimately derived from the facts, therefore they cannot legitimately be used to interpret them. They are due to the influence of habit, which by an illegitimate process raises frequency of occurrence into the universality and necessity of law, and so changes a mere subjective association of ideas into an assured belief and expectation of objective facts. The answer given by Kant to this sceptical criticism of science involved a rejection of that very opposition of subjective and objective upon which it was based. Without necessary and universal principles, the experience of things as qualitatively and quantitatively determined objects, coexisting in space and passing through changes in time (or even the determination of the successive states of the subject as successive), would itself have been impossible. Hence necessity of thought cannot be derived from a frequent experience of such objects. It is true that the determination of things as permanent substances reciprocally acting on each other, according to universal laws, goes beyond the determination of them as qualified and quantified phenomena in space and time. But both determinations are possible only through the same a priori principle, and we cannot admit the former determination without implicitly admitting the latter. As, therefore, it is through the necessity and universality of thought that objects exist for us, even before the application to them of the principles of scientific induction, and as the application of those principles is only a further step in that a priori synthesis which is already involved in the nerception of these objects, we have no reason for treating the former kind of synthesis as objectively valid which does not equally apply to the latter.

This vindication of the principles of induction has, however, a further consequence, which was not clearly seen by Kant. It is fatal to the antithesis of the “given” and the “known,” of what is perceived and what is conceived, of natura materialiter spectata and natura formaliter spectata, which he still admitted. For that antithesis really rested on the idea that there is no universal and necessary principle of determination of things involved in the apprehension of them as qualified and quantified phenomena in space and time. So soon, therefore, as it is seen that there is such a principle, and that the first determination of things as objects of perception is due to the same a priori synthesis which determines them in the second place as objects of experience, the ground for that contrast between reality and appearance on which the theory of induction rested is taken away. Kant, indeed, finds a new meaning for that contrast by interpreting it as referring, not to the opposition between things as they are given and things as they are known, but to a supposed opposition between things as they are given and known in experience and things as they are in themselves out of experience. This new antithesis of reality and appearance, however, only means that the former antithesis has broken down, and that therefore the ideal of knowledge based upon it has yielded to a new ideal. The so-called things in themselves are noumena, the objects of an intuitive or perceptive understanding, i.e., objects in which the contrast of perception and conception, of given and known, is transcended. We can make Kant’s theory consistent only by supposing him to mean that the conception of the world as a system of substances determining each other according to universal laws does not yet satisfy the idea of knowledge which reason brings with it. In other words, just as science from the point of view of necessary law found something wanting in the conception of the world as a mere complex of quantified and qualified phenomena in space and time, so philosophy, in view of a still higher ideal of knowledge, may condemn the conception of the world as a system of objects determined by necessary laws of relation as itself inadequate and imperfect. And we have seen that this higher ideal is that which is involved in the unity of self-consciousness. Unfortunately Kant was unable, as Aristotle had been unable, to distinguish this idea from the idea of an abstract identity in which there is no room for even a relative difference of perception and conception, and therefore the perceptive understanding was named by him only to be rejected.

If, however, we correct this inadequacy of Kant’s statement, as his later works enable us partly to correct it, we see that it involves a new idea of knowledge and a new logic,—a logic governed by the idea of organic unity and development, just as the analytic logic had been governed by the idea of identity, and as the inductive logic had been governed by the idea of necessary law. For, if the unity of self-consciousness be our type of knowledge, truth must mean to us, not the apprehension of objects as self-identical things, distinguished from each other in quantity and quality, nor even the determination of such things as standing in necessary relations to each other. It must mean the determination of the world (and of whatever in it is in any sense an independent reality, so far as it is so independent) as a unity which realizes itself in and through difference, a unity which is indeed determined, but determined by itself. In a view of the world which is governed by this category, correlation must be reinterpreted as organic unity, and causation as development. Its logical method must be neither analytical nor synthetical, or rather it must be both at once, i.e., it must endeavour to exhibit the process of things as the evolution of a unity which is at once self-differentiating and self-integrating, which manifests itself in difference, that through difference it may return upon itself. Further, as this logic arises simply out of a deeper consciousness of that which was contained in the two previous logics, so it first enables us to explain them. In other words, the advance from the analytic to the inductive logic, and again from the inductive to what may be called the genetic logic, may itself be shown to be a self-determined development of thought, in which the first two steps are the imperfect manifestation of a principle fully revealed only in the last step. The consciousness of self-identical objects, independent of each other and of thought, is thus only the beginning of a process of knowledge which reaches its second stage in the determination of these objects as essentially related to each other, and which finds its ultimate end in the knowledge of the correlated objects as essentially related to the mind that knows them. Or if, in this last point of view, things are still conceived as having a certain relative independence of the mind, it can only be in so far as they are in the Leibnitzian sense monads, or microcosms,— i.e., in so far as they are self-determined, and so have, in the narrower circle of their individual life, something analogous to the selfcompleted nature of the world, when it is contemplated in its unity with its spiritual principle.

Such a genetic logic is inconsistent with any absolute distinction between the a priori and a posteriori element in knowledge. For here the a priori is not simply a law of necessary connexion to be applied to an external matter, but a principle of organic development, a principle which, from the very nature of it, cannot be applied to a foreign matter. To treat the world as organic is to apply to it a category which is inconsistent with its being something merely given or externally presented to thought. The relation of things to thought must itself be brought under the same category of organic unity which is applied to the relation of things to each other in the world, otherwise the externality of the world to the thought for which it is will contradict the conception of the world as itself organic. Hence the distinction of a priori and a posteriori, so far as it is maintained at all, must shrink to something secondary and relative. It can be maintained only as a distinction of thought from its object, which presupposes their ultimate unity. From this point of view logic may be said to deal with the a priori, in so far as it treats the general conditions and methods of knowledge without reference to any particular object. Logic must exhibit abstractly the process by which the intelligence establishes its unity with the intelligible world; or, to put it in another way, it must demonstrate that the being of things can be truly conceived only as their being for thought. It is limited to the a priori, in the sense that it ends with the idea that the esse of things is their intelligi, and does not consider how this real intelligence or intelligible reality manifests itself in the concrete world of nature and spirit.

In this sense logic cannot be separated from metaphysic if metaphysic be confined to ontology. They are simply two aspects of one science, which we may regard either as determining the idea of being or the idea of knowing. The process of knowing is never really a formal process; it always involves the application of certain categories, and these categories are simply successive definitions of being or reality. We cannot separate the category from the movement of thought by which it is evolved and applied, nor the transition from lower to higher categories from changes of logical method. Hence a logic divorced from metaphysic inevitably becomes empty and unreal, and a metaphysic divorced from logic reduces itself to a kind of dictionary of abstract terms, which are put in no living relation to each other. For such a logic and such a metaphysic must rest on the assumption of an absolute division between being and thought, the very two terms the unity of which it must be the utmost object of both logic and metaphysic to prove and to produce.

4. The Relation of Metaphysic to Philosophy of Religion. —The possibility of a “first philosophy,” as we have already seen, is essentially bound up with the possibility of what we may call a last philosophy. It is only in so far as we can rise above the point of view of the individual and the dualism of the ordinary consciousness—in so far, in other words, as we can have at least an anticipative consciousness of that last unity in which all the differences of things from each other and from the mind that knows them are explained and transcended—that we are able to go back to that first unity which all these differences presuppose. The life of man begins with a divided consciousness, with a consciousness of self which is opposed to the consciousness of what is not-self, with a consciousness of a multiplicity of particulars which do not seem to be bound together by any one universal principle. Such division and apparent independence of what are really parts of one whole is characteristic of nature, and in spirit it is at first only so far transcended that it has become conscious of itself. A conscious difference, however, as it is a difference in consciousness, is no longer an unmediated difference. It is a difference through which the unity has begun to show itself, and which therefore the unity is on the way to subordinate. And all the development of consciousness and self-consciousness is just the process through which this subordination is carried out, up to the point at which the difference is seen to be nothing but the manifestation of the unity. Just so far, therefore, as this end is present to us,—so far as we are able to look forward to the solution or reconciliation of all the divisions and oppositions of which we are conscious and to see that there is an allembracing unity which they cannot destroy,—is it possible that we should look back to the beginning or first unity, and recognize that these divisions and oppositions are but the manifestations of it. Thus the extremes of abstractness and of concreteness of thought are bound up together. The freedom of intelligence by which we get rid of the complexity of our actual life, and direct our thoughts to the simplest and most elementary conditions of being and knowing, is possible only to those who are not limited to that life, but can regard it and all its finite concerns from the point of view of the infinite and the universal. In this sense it is true that religion and metaphysic spring from the same source, and that it is possible to vindicate the rationality of religion only on metaphysical principles. The philosophy of religion is, in fact, only the last application or final expression of metaphysic; and, conversely, a metaphysic which is not capable of furnishing an explanation of religion contradicts itself.

This last remark affords us a kind of criterion of a true metaphysic. Can it or can it not explain religion? If it cannot, it must be equally unable to explain its own possibility, and therefore implicitly it condemns itself. Thus a pantheistic system, which loses the subject in the absolute substance, cannot explain how that subject should apprehend the substance of which it is but a transitory mode, nor, on the other hand, can it explain why the substance should manifest itself in and to a subject. And the same criticism maybe made on all theories in which the first or metaphysical unity is abstractly opposed to the manifoldness and contingency of things. Not only of Spinoza, but also of Kant, of Fichte, and even of Schelling, it might with some truth be said that their absQlute is like the lion’s den, towards which all the tracks are directed, while none come from it. It is essential that the first unity should be such as to explain the possibility of difference and division, for, if it is not, then the return to unity out of difference is made as accidental as the difference itself. When Aristotle represented the Divine Being as pure self-consciousness, pure form without matter, he found himself unable to account for the existence of any world in which form was realized in matter. When therefore he speaks of tho process of the finite world by which it returns to God, and attributes to nature a will, which is directed to the good as its final cause, his theory seems to be little more than a metaphor in which the analogy of consciousness is applied to the unconscious. For, if the Divine Being is not manifested in the world, any tendency of the world to realize the good becomes an inexplicable fact. A similar difficulty is, as we saw, involved in Kant’s confusion of the bare identity of understanding with the absolute unity of knowledge. Reducing the unity of self-consciousness to such a bare identity, Kant could not be expected to see, what Aristotle had not seen, that pure self-consciousness is essentially related to anything but itself. Hence the various attempts which he made in his ethical works and in his Criticism of Judgment to find a link of connexion between the noumenal and the empirical were necessarily condemned even by himself as the expressions of a merely regulative and subjective principle of knowledge. Even Fichte, who found in the thought, which is for him the prius of all existence, a principle of differentiation and integration which explained how self-consciousness in us should be necessarily correlative with the consciousness of a world, was unable to free himself from the Kantian opposition of a noumenal identity in which there is no difference to a phenomenal unity which is realized in difference. Hence by him also the return out of difference is regarded as an impossibility, or as a processus in infinitum, and the absolute unity as that which is beyond all knowledge and only apprehended by faith.

If we look to completely elaborated theories, and disregard all tentative and imperfect sketches, it may fairly be said that all that has as yet been done in the region of pure metaphysic is contained in two works, in the Metaphysic of Aristotle and the Logic of Hegel. And up to a certain point the lesson which they teach is one and the same, viz., that the ultimate unity which is presupposed in all differences is the unity of thought with itself, the unity of self-consciousness, and that in this unity is contained the type of all science, and the form of all existence; in other words, I = I is the formula of the universe. The difference between these two works has, however, already been indicated. With Aristotle, because he neglects the essential relation of self-consciousness to consciousness, or of the conscious self to the world of objects in space and time, the unity of self-consciousness tends to pass, as it did pass with the Neo-Platonists, into a pure identity without difference. In the Hegelian logic, on the other hand, selfconsciousness is interpreted as a unity which realizes itself through difference and the reconciliation of difference—as, in fact, an organic unity of elements, which exist only as they pass into each other. In other words, it is shown that the differentiating movement by which the subjective and the objective self are opposed and the integrating movement by which they are reunited are both essential. Hence we cannot think of the conscious self as a simple resting identity, but only as an active self-determining principle; nor can we think of its self-determination as a pure affirmation of itself, without any negation, but only as an affirmation which involves a double negation—an opposition of two elements which yet are essentially united. Each factor in this unity, in fact, is necessarily conceived as passing beyond itself into the other; the subject is subject only as it relates itself to the object, the object is object only as it relates itself to the subject. It is this tension against each other of elements which yet are correlated and indissolubly united, this self-surrender to each other of elements which yet are maintained in their distinction, which constitutes the organic unity of thought in itself, and separates it from the mere abstract unity of mysticism. When, however, the concrete or self-differentiating character of the unity of self-consciousness is apprehended in this way,—so that it is impossible to confuse its indivisible unity with the simplicity of that which is one merely because it has no differences in it,—the problem of the relation of pure self-consciousness to the world in space and time ceases to be insoluble. Thought, as it is seen to have difference in itself, is no longer irreconcilable with the world of difference; nor is it necessary to introduce a foreign υλη to make their connexion intelligible. For, as thought is a principle of difference as well as of unity, of analysis as well as of synthesis, and as it cannot realize itself in its unity except through the utmost development of difference, abstract self-consciousness, with its transparent or merely ideal difference, cannot be its ultimate form. On the contrary, the consciousness of self is possible only in distinction from, and in relation to, a world of objects. In other words, the unity of the thinking subject presupposes, not merely the opposition of the subjective and the objective self, but also the opposition of the self in its pure self-identity to a world of externality and difference. The pure intelligence, which is the prius of all things, must not, therefore, be regarded—as Aristotle regarded it—as merely theoretical, but also as practical. It must be conceived as a living principle, a principle which only in selfmanifestation can be conscious of itself, and to the very nature of which, therefore, self-manifestation is essential. In this way Hegel—just because he grasped the concrete character of the unity of thought in itself—was enabled to understand the necessary unity of thought or self-consciousness with the world, and to heal the division of physics from metaphysic, which Aristotle had admitted.

Schelling and others who have raised objections to the Hegelian method have specially directed their criticisms against this transition from logic to the philosophy of nature, from pure self-consciousness to the external world in space and time. In doing so, they have practically fallen back upon the Aristotelian theory, with its opposition of God, as pure form, to the finite world. But this in effect is to deny that “the real is the rational” or intelligible, and to introduce into the world, as the ground of its distinction from reason, a purely irrational or contingent element. A modern follower of Schelling’s later positive philosophy only draws the necessary consequence from this view when he teaches the pessimist creed that the highest good is the negation or extinction of the finite. Nor can we wonder that the same writer who denies that the absolute self-consciousness is essentially related to or manifested in the world should proceed to reduce this self-consciousness to a mystic identity which comes out of itself and becomes self-conscious only by an inscrutable act of will. The fact, indeed, that those who deny the possibility of a rational transition from self-consciousness to the world are forced by the logic of their position to reduce self-consciousness to an abstract identity may be regarded as a kind of indirect proof that the principle of self-consciousness, truly conceived, does involve that transition. Another step in the same direction may be made if we consider how the Cartesian philosophy treated the same opposition, which it also regarded as absolute. By Descartes mind and matter, thought and extension, are defined as abstract opposites, every quality of each finding its contradictory counterpart in a quality of the other. Mind is a pure self-determined unity, which is as it knows itself and knows itself as it is, which has no discretion of parts or capacity of division or determination from without. Matter is essentially discrete or infinitely divided; it is a pure passivity; and all its determination comes to it from without. The world is therefore, as it were, “cut in two with a hatchet,” divided into two unrelated existences, which are held together only by the will of God. Spinoza cuts the knot, and avoids the arbitrariness of this solution, by treating extension and thought as two attributes separated only in respect of our intelligence, but each expressing fully the absolute substance. And something like the same view has been revived in recent times, by writers like Lewes and Mr Spencer, who speak of feelings and motions as two opposite “aspects” of the same fact. When we ask, however, for whom these attributes or aspects are a unity, it becomes clear that the intelligence which is regarded as standing on one side of the dualism must also be taken as transcending it, and relating the two sides to each other. Moreover, the correspondence of the two attributes upon which Spinoza insists and their contrariety upon which Descartes insists, when taken together, give us the idea of a correlative opposition, i.e., of an opposition of elements which yet are necessary to each other. If, therefore, they cannot be simply identified as Spinoza identifies them, yet they need no external bond such as Descartes introduces to combine them; for they cannot exist apart from each other. Their opposition is held within the limits of their unity, and is no absolute contradiction, but rather an opposition which exists only as it is transcended. In other words, it is an abstract opposition, i.e., it is an opposition of elements which seem to be irreconcilable till it is observed that they are correlative, that each exists or has a meaning only as it relates itself to, or passes out of itself into, the other, and that each, held in its abstraction and separation from the other, loses all the meaning that it seemed to have. For, as in an organic body each member or organ lives only in tension against the others, yet only as continually relating itself to the others, so the utmost opposition of mind to matter, of the intelligence to the intelligible world, presupposes their unity, and is only the realization of it.

There is here, however, something more than an ordinary case of correlation, for in this unity of opposites mind appears twice, once as one of the opposites, and again as the unity which transcends the opposition. This ambiguity becomes most obvious in theories like that of Mr Spencer, who speaks of “two consciousnesses,” which cannot be resolved into each other, but yet which strangely form inseparable parts of one and the same consciousness. What, however, is really involved in such a statement is that the external world, which in the first instance presents itself as absolutely opposed in nature to the subject whose object it is, is yet one with that subject, and that therefore the antagonism of mind to its object is only the last differentiation through which it realizes its unity with itself. In Hegel’s language, that which presents itself as other than mind is its other—“an other which is not another,” whose difference and opposition to itself it overreaches and overcomes. We must, therefore, regard the independence and externality of nature, its indifference, and even, as it seems, opposition, to the development of the moral and intellectual life of man, as merely apparent. For man, in this point of view, is not merely one natural being among others, but the being in whom nature is at once completed and transcended. If, therefore, at first he appears to stand in merely accidental and external relations to the other existences among which he finds himself, yet the whole process of his life—the process by which he comes to know the external world, and by which, reacting upon it, he makes it the means to the realization of an individual and social life of his own—is the negation of this contingency and externality. In all this process he is showing himself to be a being who can only know himself as he knows the objective world, and who can only realize himself as he makes himself the agent of a Divine purpose, to which all things are contributing.

Such an idea of man’s relation to the world is necessarily involved in any theory that goes beyond that subjective idealism or sensationalism which denies to him every object of knowledge except his own states of feeling, and every end of action except his own pleasures and pains. Recent speculation, indeed, has suggested a compromise by which this dilemma is supposed to be evaded, and mankind are represented as forming an organic unity in themselves, though they are still conceived as standing in an external and accidental relation to nature, the forces of which by their knowledge and skill they have subdued and are more and more subduing to their service. Such a compromise we find in the philosophy of Comte, the first writer who, starting from an apparently empirical basis, was able to break through the individualistic prejudices of the school of Locke. In the latter volumes of his Positive Philosophy, still more in his Positive Politics, Comte so far transcends individualism as to deny the externality of men to each other, and to declare that “the individual, as such, is an abstraction,” and that in reality he cannot be separated from the social organism, which is thus not merely an extraneous condition of his development, but essential to his very existence as man. Thus individual men exist only through the universal—through the spirit of the family, of the nation, of humanity, which manifests itself in them as a principle of life and development. Yet this organic unity, according to Comte, is in contact with a world which in relation to it is external and contingent. Nature has not its final cause in man, but on the contrary is, at first, rather his enemy; and it is to humanity itself that the praise is due if to a certain extent the enemy has been turned into a servant. The unity of life which manifests itself in humanity cannot therefore be considered as a universal principle, as the principle of the whole universe, but simply as the principle of the limited existence of man, which is hemmed in on every side by external and, in the main, unknown conditions. If humanity therefore is an organism, it is an organism existing in a medium which in reference to it is inorganic, i.e., in a medium which has no essential relation to the life which animates man.

It is obvious, however, that this theory is an illogical attempt to find a standing ground between two opposite philosophies,—between the philosophy which treats man merely as a natural individual, placed among other individual beings and things, and which therefore regards his relation to them as something accidental and external, and the philosophy which treats him as a spiritual subject, a conscious and self-conscious being, and regards him therefore as having no merely external relations either to other men or to nature. Comte shrinks from regarding the world without us as the manifestation of that spiritual principle which is also within us, which constitutes our very nature as individual men, and therefore connects us with the world at the same time that it separates us from it. Yet he recognizes the existence in us of a principle which is so far universal that it constitutes a community between all men. He thinks that the individual can transcend himself, so far as to see all things, not indeed from a Divine point of view, sub specie aetemitatis, but from the point of view of universal humanity, and that in conformity with this theoretical consciousness, he can live a practical life of altruism, i.e., a life in which he identifies his own good with the good of humanity. But the philosophy that has gone so far must logically go further. It is impossible to treat humanity as an organism without extending the organic idea to the conditions under which the social life of humanity is developed. The medium by aid of which, or in reacting against which, the organized being maintains itself is an essential part of its life; it remains organic only in so far as it can mould itself to its conditions, and its conditions to itself. This is true even of the animal organism in relation to its small circle of conditions, which, however, is part of a larger circle to which the animal has no relation. But a conscious being is a universal centre of relations; there is nothing which it, as conscious, cannot make part of its own life. Hence the application of the organic idea to it involves its application to the whole world. And, if the recognition of a universal principle manifested in humanity naturally led Comte to the idea of the worship of humanity, the recognition of a universal principle manifested in man and nature alike must lead to the idea of the worship of God.

The rationality of religion, then, rests on the possibility of an ultimate synthesis in which man and nature are regarded as the manifestation of one spiritual principle. For religion involves a faith that, in our efforts to realize the good of humanity, we are not merely straining after an ideal beyond us, which may or may not be realized, but are animated by a principle which within us and without us is necessarily realizing itself, because it is the ultimate principle by which all things are, and are known. This absolute certitude that we work effectually because all the universe is working with us, or, in other words, because God is working in us, can find its explanation and defence only in a philosophy for which “the real is the rational, and the rational is the real.” And such a philosophy, beginning with the Kantian doctrine that existence means existence for a spiritual or thinking subject, must go on to prove that that only can exist for such a subject which is the manifestation of thought or spirit; and, conversely, that spirit or intelligence is essentially self-manifesting, or, in other words, that it cannot be conceived except as standing in essential relation to an external and material world. Finally, if nature be thus regarded as a necessary manifestation of spirit, it can be opposed to spirit only in so far as spirit in its realization becomes opposed to itself. In other words, nature must be regarded as, from a higher point of view, included in spirit. Nature exists that it may show itself to be spiritual in and to man, who transcends it yet implies it, who finds in it the necessary basis of his thought and action, but only that he may build upon it a higher spiritual life.

Nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean: so over the art Which, you say, adds to nature is an art Which nature makes.”

Only the order of precedence suggested by these words must be inverted. For, as nature only is for spirit, so the spiritual energy which reacts upon nature is that which manifests for the first time what nature in reality is. It is the consciousness of this— i.e., of the identity of that which is realizing itself within and without us,—the consciousness that the necessity which is the precondition of our freedom is the manifestation of the same spirit which makes us free—which turns morality into religion. For it is this alone which enables us to regard the realization of the highest ends of human life as no mere happy accident, or as a conquest to be won by the cunning of man from an unfriendly or indifferent destiny, but as the result towards which all things are working.

In this philosophy, which finds its most adequate expression in the works of Hegel, there are two things which may be distinguished—the general idealistic view of the world, and the dialectical movement of thought in which Hegel develops and expresses it. And there are perhaps many at the present time who are prepared to accept the former, but who yet suspect, or even reject, the latter. And no doubt there is much in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Spirit, and still more in his Philosophy of Nature, which there is reason to regard with distrust. In clever hands that are not checked by a sufficient consciousness of the whole, the Hegelian dialectic may be made into the means of producing a seeming proof of anything. Nor is it always easy to determine how far Hegel himself was tempted by an impatient consciousness of the universality of his method to employ it in cases where the conditions of its successful application were wanting. Sometimes he seems to forget, what he himself teaches, that science must first have generalized experience and determined it by its finite categories, ere it is possible for philosophy to give its final interpretation. Yet, when we realize the nature of that interpretation, and of the transformation of science which philosophy by means of it proposes to effect, it becomes clear that the dialectic of Hegel is no extraneous addition to his idealism, but is part and parcel of the same movement of thought. For this dialectic rests on the idea that thought or self-consciousness finds in its own organic unity the ultimate key to all difficulties in regard to the objects of thought and their relations to each other and to the mind. Self-consciousness, as has been already shown, is implicitly the whole web of categories which it throws over the world, and by aid of which it makes the world intelligible. All these it contains in itself; and, as it proceeds to determine the meaning of things, it simply produces its store, and exhausts itself on the object. Now, if it be idealism, in the strict sense of the word, to make thought or self-consciousness the principle and ultimate explanation of all that exists, it is obvious that we cannot separate idealism from such a dialectic as this, which is nothing more than the mind’s consciousness of its own movement or process of self-affirmation. If to find thought in things be more than an empty word, then the movement or process which thought is must explain at once the transition from thought to what in opposition to it we call “things,” and must give us the means of reconciling that opposition. In other words, the same movement by which thought determines itself as self-conscious, i.e., as a unity realized through difference, must also be conceived as the explanation of the difference between pure thought and the world, and as the solution of that difference in the idea of absolute spirit.

Such idealism has a close relation to Christianity; it may be even said to be but Christianity theorized. It has often been asserted that Hegel’s philosophy of religion is but an artificial accommodation to Christian doctrine of a philosophy which has no inherent relation to Christianity. If, however, we regard the actual development of that philosophy it would be truer to say that it was the study of Christian ideas which first produced it. What delivered Hegel from the mysticism in which the later philosophies of Fichte and Schelling tended to lose themselves, and led him, in his own language, to regard the absolute “not merely as substance but as subject,”—what made him recognize with Fichte that the absolute principle is spiritual, and yet enabled him with Schelling to see in nature, as the opposite of spirit, the very means of its realization,— was his thorough appreciation of the ethical and religious meaning of Christianity. In the great Christian aphorism that “he who loseth his life alone can save it” he found a key to the difficulties of ethics, a reconciliation of hedonism and asceticism. For what this saying implies is that a spiritual or self-conscious being is one who is in contradiction with himself when he makes his individual self his end. In opposing his own interest to that of others, he is preventing their interests from becoming his; all things are his, and his only, who has died to himself. But if this be the truth of morality, it is something more, for “morality is the nature of things.” We cannot separate the law of the life of man from the law of the world in which he lives. And, if it is the nature of things, as it is the nature of spirit, that he who loseth his life shall save it, the world must be referred to a spiritual principle, and the Christian doctrine of the nature of God is only the converse of the Christian law of ethics. To Hegel, starting from this point, a new light was thrown on the Fichtean treatment of the idea of self, and the Fichtean proof that the consciousness of self implies a relation to an object which is opposed to the self, and which yet from another point of view—since an object exists only for a subject—cannot be anything but an element of its own life. It was seen that this movement of thought is no mere fluctuation between contradictory positions, to be terminated finally by an ipse dixit of faith, but that the unity of the opposite elements is apprehensible by the intelligence, and that indeed it is its presence to the intelligence which makes the consciousness of opposition possible. It was in this sense that Hegel could say that that unity of opposites which had been called unintelligible by previous writers was just the very nature of the intelligence, and that only a view of the world guided by this idea could be properly intelligible, while every other view must contain in it an unsolved contradiction, an element that remains permanently impervious to thought.

The great objection to a metaphysic like this, at least an objection which weighs much in the minds of many, is that which springs from the contrast between the claim of absolute knowledge which it seems to involve and the actual limitations which our intelligence encounters in every direction. If the theory were true, it is felt we ought to be nearer the solution of the problems of our life, practical and speculative, than we are; the riddle of the painful earth ought to vex us less; we ought to find our way more easily through the entanglement of facts, and to be able to deal with practical difficulties in a less tentative manner. Yet there is really no antagonism between such a doctrine and a consciousness of the limitation of our faculties; nay rather, it is only on such a theory that a rational distrust of ourselves can be based. When Aristotle meets the warning that we should think finite and human things since we are finite and human with the answer that we ought rather, so far as in us lies, to rise to what is immortal and divine, he is not denying the limits of man’s knowledge and power; on the contrary, he is rather pointing to the very principle which makes us conscious of those limits; for it is just because there is in man a principle of infinity that he knows his finitude, and, conversely, it is just in the consciousness of this finitude that he rises above it. A rational humility is possible only to one who has in himself the measure of his own weakness, and who, if he “trembles like a guilty thing surprised,” is yet conscious that he is trembling before himself. This truth is often expressed by Kant with special relation to the moral consciousness, as where he contrasts the limitation of man, as a sensible being, occupying an infinitesimal space in the boundless world of sense, with his freedom from all limitation as a personal self, a member of the truly infinite world of intelligence. But it is not necessary to adopt Kant’s abstract division of the sensible from the intelligible world to see that the consciousness of the greatness of the problem which has to be solved in human life and thought is deepened and widened by that very idea of philosophy which yet gives us the assurance that the problem is not insoluble, and even that, in principle, it is already solved (e. c.)