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 Foundations of knowledge In three parts 
 
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 3 1924 029 025 654 
 
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FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
^m 
 
FOUNDATIONS OF 
 KNOWLEDGE 
 
 IN THREE PARTS 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDEE THOMAS ORMOND 
 
 MOOOSH PBOFESSOR 'QP PHILOSOPHY IN 
 PBINCETON uifKBBSITY 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW TOEK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1900 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 GENERAL INTEODUCTION. 
 
 Need of reconstruction arising out of present conditions of thought. How 
 the constructive impulse passed from Germany to Britain in the latter 
 half of the nineteenth century. Lines of constructive effort. Sir 
 William Hamilton. J. S. Mill and the union of the Humian tradition 
 with Positivism. Geo. H. Lewes as the completer of this union and 
 the exponent of Neo-Positivism. The Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert 
 Spencer and his school. How it differs from Positivism. Neo- 
 Positivism and the Synthetic Philosophy as the two leading con- 
 structive systems of Empiricism. Some leading defects of the New 
 Empiricism: (1) of Neo-Positivism: (2) of the Synthetic Philosophy. 
 Neo-Rationalism ; finds important motive in the helplessness of 
 Empiricism in presence of spiritual issues. Origin and development 
 of the movement. Stirling's Secret of Hegel. Thomas Hill Green and 
 his critical work. Development of the school in Great Britain and 
 America. Fundamental defects of the movements giving rise to the 
 demand for reconstruction : (1) Neo-Empiricism, its strength and its 
 characteristic weakness ; (2) Neo-Rationalism ; its strength and its 
 besetting weakness. This criticism not equally applicable to all the 
 members of the school. Must the thinker be absolute in order to 
 conceive the Absolute ? Bearing of the doctrine of Evolution on 
 Epistemology — not so important as its bearing on Psychology. The 
 permanent conditions of a well-founded theory of knowledge, 
 
 pp. 1-20 
 
viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 GROUND-CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 
 
 Superficial and profounder conceptions of Experience — the latter identifying 
 it with the realizing activity in consoiouaneas. Various forma of the 
 latter conception. Sensationalism and Bationalism : one-sidedness of 
 each. Theories of Immediacy or Mediacy. Immediacy of feeling ; 
 the principle of Mysticism. Immediacy of intellect ; Platonism — Intui- 
 tionism. Theories of Mediacy. Dialecticians and Ontologists. Hegel 
 as the typical Ontologist. How these schools represent conflicting 
 views of Experience. Necessity of a Critique of Experience — to remove 
 confusion and reduce the notion of Experience to a definite concept. The 
 internal distinctions of consciousness : (1) between what is presupposed 
 and whab is actually in consciousness. The fundamental duality of 
 consciousness in its diflerent stages, (a) in the lowest stage — the 
 immediacy of Sensation. Implicit distinction of subject and object. 
 Simplicity only relative — its dominantly objective character. (6) 
 The stage of mediacy. Duality becomes explicit, (c) Stage of higher 
 immediacy — dominantly subjective. Not a stage of absolute simplicity. 
 Immanent distinctions. Investigation of the definition of Experience. 
 Can Experience and Consciousness be identified? Negative answer. 
 The greater intension and less extension of Experience. In view of form, 
 is a mode of realizing conscious content. Conflicting views as to 
 the nature of the Experience-activity. Rationalists — Volitionalists — 
 Mystics. Inadequacy of these views. The activity of Experience a 
 synthesis of thought, feeling, and volition. The notion of personality. 
 Personal form of the Experience-activity. Summary of results. 
 Proximate definition, pp. 21-51 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 
 
 Question as to the nature of the Real. Bradley's separative logic which 
 reduces the world of relation and distinction to illusion. Difficulties 
 involved in this method of treating the world. Dualism between a 
 real that is a dead identity and a phenomenal that is self-contradictory. 
 Bradley's logic conclusive against an abstract phenomenism. But in 
 the end falls into the pit along with the phenomenist. The pheno- 
 menal not self-contradictory when conceived as a manifestation of a 
 
CONTENTS. ix 
 
 deeper reality. Bradley's theory of relations inconsistent with the 
 ascription of any degree of reality to the phenomenon. Distinction 
 between mere appearance and true manifestation. The principle of 
 illusion. Synthetic character of the real. Its notion is that of internal 
 nature in manifestation. The real as being in manifestation. The 
 phenomenon is real and self-consistent when it is a normal expression 
 of some nature, pp. 52-66 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 
 
 The subject and object consciousness. How presentation and feeling are 
 both included. The primary pulse of conscious activity — ^how far 
 determinable. Cognition and volition in the spontaneous and reflective 
 stages. The germ of intellection. The concept ; its rise and nature 
 as a universal. Limit of the concept. Rise of judgment which is 
 eventually a pulse of self-unifying consciousness. Provisional definition 
 of Knowledge. Relation of Knowledge so defined, to Experience. 
 Knowledge as an included process of Experience. Relation shown 
 in three stages of apprehension, (a) The lower immediacy. (6) The 
 mediacy of conception. (c) The higher immediacy of feeling and 
 symbol. Finality of emotional experience. Why the intellectual and 
 volitional do not possess finality. Emotion as feeling informed with 
 ideal vision. How this highest form of Experience may yield both the 
 idiosyncratic and the universal. Final determination of the relation of 
 Knowledge to Experience. Knowledge and Reality. In what sense 
 Knowledge begins with Reality. Reality as the content of Knowledge. 
 Summary — sense in which the real may be defined as Knowledge — 
 content, pp. 67-92 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 THE IDEA OF METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Relation of logic to epistemological method. The two possible standpoints 
 of logic. (1) That of the Aristotelian logic, founded on selective 
 principle of identity-contradiction. Its value as formulating the 
 ordinary movement of scientific thinking ; its defect. (2) That of the 
 Hegelian dialectic — the principle of the organic unity of the real as a 
 whole. Lotze's attempt to mediate the two points of view : involves no 
 new principle. The method of logic too formal and external for 
 Epistemology. First requirement of method is that the notion of 
 Epistemology be distinguished from that of Logic. Epistemology is 
 concerned equally with form and content. Its categories are direct 
 
xii CONTENTS. 
 
 of universality and necessity. Kind of agency involved in causal 
 initiative. How related to series of changes. Persistence of the 
 core of agency. The prius of cause is the Self-existent or Self- 
 active pp. 161-175 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SUBSTANCE. 
 
 Concrete particularity of the first notion of Substance. Distinction which 
 this notion involves. Germ of Substance — the experience of persistence. 
 Persistence and solidity. Substance and change — point of rest in a 
 world of change. Relation of Substance to Time. Substance as 
 point of present departure for organization of experiences in time. 
 Reflective notion of Substance — its distinction from quality. Is there 
 any substance apart from qualities? Locke's affirmative answer. 
 Sceptical treatment by Berkeley and Hume. Summary of Hume's 
 criticism — his blindness. Kant as founder of the Epistemological 
 concept of Substance. His insistence on stable points of departure. 
 Made clear the close analogy between the notion of Substance and that 
 of Self. Thus Substance becomes the analogue of a living subject. The 
 Post-Kantians and the notion of Substance. Stages in the development 
 of the reflective notion of Substance. Kant's " Copernican revolution. " 
 Dependence of things on experience— activities. How the revolution 
 restores faith in objective reality. Bearing on Substance. Apparent 
 subjectivity but real objectivity. Scepticism of subjective view 
 cured. The new doctrine of Substance as analogue of subject-activity. 
 The Post-Kantian Realists and the self-asserting individuality of 
 Substance. Its volitional and pluralistic character. Defect of the 
 doctrine of Post-Kantian Realism. Extreme individualism. The 
 sound reflection at its heart. Substance as the persistent self- 
 assertiveness of the /-point in experience. Cause and substance. 
 
 pp. 176-193 
 
 CHAPTER VH. 
 
 COMMUNITY OR INTERACTION. 
 
 The notion of Community in modern Philosophy. Social situation out of 
 which it arises. Psychologic-volitional character of the experience 
 involved. Abstracted from will it still involves the notion of com- 
 munity of aim. Reduction of causes to substances gives rise to notion 
 of system of co-existing units in relations of reciprocal influence. 
 Necessity of this category in the evolution of our experience of the 
 world. Change effected in our mode of conceiving the world. What 
 is involved in the notion of interaction — the billiard balls. Services 
 of Lotze in this field. His contention that all substances are reducible 
 
CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 to the Self-type, and that all agency Is, in the last analysis, internal. 
 Failure to completely occupy his position. Must achieve the concept 
 of internal agency of interacting parts. Importance of the Social 
 Psychologists in this connection. The Self, by means of its inclusion 
 of the agency of its fellow, becomes a social unit. Completion of the 
 Lotzean doctrine of things in the light of the social intuition. The 
 abstraction necessary in order that the doctrine may be applicable to 
 things. The notion of things as non-conscious social units necessary, 
 though involving difficulties, pp. 194-204 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE BYNAMIO CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Dynamic character of the volitional categories. The dynamic form of 
 Consoittusness. The two worlds incorporated in one experience. 
 Spontaneous and reflective stages of the dynamic Consciousness. Only 
 in the latter do the categories assert themselves as universal and 
 necessary. Dynamic categories as supplying the basal concepts of 
 Physical Science. Order of development here, (1) cause and the 
 principle of scientific explanation which it grounds. Statement of the 
 principle. (2) Substance — prejudices associated with it. Sense in 
 which the Category is used. Statement of the principle of science 
 which it grounds. (3) Community or Interaction — why the Category is 
 scientifically necessary. Statement of the principle which it grounds. 
 Fundamental character of these three principles. The mechanical 
 conception of the world — its elements. Its legitimacy and its limits. 
 The world as conceived under the mathematical and dynamic cate- 
 gories. No question as to legitimacy. Nature of mechanical science. 
 How in the notion of interaction mechanism reaches a point where its 
 own transcendence becomes implicit pp. 205-218 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 
 
 Feeling as pleasure-pain quality of Consciousness. The two forms of 
 pleasure-pain reaction, (1) mediate, (2) immediate. The latter or 
 Aesthetic reaction. The aesthetic consciousness and its psychosis. 
 Distinctive characteristics of aesthetic reaction ; {a) more subjective 
 than other reactions ; (&) will express itself in forms of satisfaction or 
 dissatisfaction. How it embodies itself objectively in an ideal demand. 
 Categories of the aesthetic consciousness. Unity and its conditions : 
 as principle of world-construction. Statement of principle. Sufficient 
 Reason and its aesthetic root. Application (1) to world of Space and 
 Time, giving rise to the aestho-meohanical form, (2) to the dynamic 
 
xiv CONTENTS. 
 
 categories. Giving rise to the aestho-dynamio form. The principle as 
 arising out of the incorporation of the lower categories with the 
 aesthetic demand for unity. Reason as the consummate flower of the 
 Psychic nature. Relation of the logical form of sufficient reason to its 
 experience-form : the latter extra-logical, . . . pp. 219-232 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE SUBJECT CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Has a development parallel with the consciousness of the objective. Form 
 of activity in which Self-consciousness is specially involved. Judgment 
 and feeling — the essentially cognitive nature of feeling. Volitional 
 element in the feeling-psychosis — the special quickener of Self -conscious- 
 ness. Judgment and volition identical in form : differ in content and 
 objective aim. How both are functions of prior experience — content. 
 But volition has in view the good or bad while the aim of judgment 
 is the true or false. The relative standard of the true and false — 
 the requirement of the whole experience — content. Expresses itself 
 as harmony, congruity, unity. Judgment distinctively a function 
 of the Aesthetic Consciousness. Why all judgments are not 
 judgments of Art. Species of judgment determined by the nature of 
 the content it deals with and the categories under which it is 
 objectively acting. The principle and species of judgment. The 
 judgment of art and the judgment of science as epistemological 
 functions. Evolution of the stages of Self-consciousness in connection 
 with the function of judgment. Will correspond with stages of Ob- 
 jective Consciousness. (1) The I of the Space and Time world. (2) 
 The / of the Dynamic Consciousness. Kant's Transcendental unity of 
 apperception. Overlooks the subject-side of the dynamic Experience 
 in which the real self becomes for first time definitely self-conscious. 
 Type of Self-consciousness that develops — that of self-agency. Gives 
 intuition of self-agency standing over against objective agency of 
 not-self. Duality of this result. Point overlooked by Kant. The 
 Self not logical notion of unity but real subject that defines itself in 
 relation to its world. (3) The / of the Aesthetic Consciousness. Here 
 the duality is partially transcended through the category of unity. 
 This leads to self's apprehension of its relation to an objective world in 
 which it is included pp. 233-253 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 CATEGORIES OF THE SUBJECT CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Why the content of Self-consciousness is not so clearly definable as 
 objective content. That the Self is, nevertheless, definable. The 
 Knowledge-Psychosis and the forms it takes. The category of 
 
CONTENTS. XV 
 
 Individuality. Form of the Self as the unitary principle of an experience 
 which becomes united and related in one being. Self-identity involves 
 the notion of persistence in change. The Self asserts itself as a persist- 
 ent individual. The last secret of substance — Personality ; Etymology 
 of term ; later significance. A synthesis of individual self -identical 
 being and its manifestation. This manifestation a fundamental mode 
 of self-expression. Personality as intellectual, volitional, emotional. 
 Its unitary and plural aspects. Definition. Personal Identity, as 
 persistence of self-identical nature through variations of outward form. 
 What is involved in the maintenance of personal identity. Continuity 
 in time not essential. This may be broken and fragmentary. Nature 
 of the Soul as an intra-experiential agent. The Soul a necessary 
 datum in Epistemology. Application of the objective categories to 
 the definition of the Soul : Space, Time, Cause, Substance, and 
 Community. The Soul as a Socius. The category of unity and its 
 relation to the Soul pp. 254-271 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALS. 
 
 The individuating quality of Experience. The thought-activity as indi- 
 viduating. Special question here, one of selection ; why just these 
 individuals ? How far the question is tenable. The selective activity 
 volitional. The categories and the process by which the individual is 
 realized. The Soul as supplying the type of individuality. The 
 selective motive in a, world of individuals. The question not com- 
 pletely solvable from the finite point of view. How we come to know 
 other individuals besides ourselves. The posit of self as involving the 
 posit of the other. Reality of the world of individuals. The relative 
 tests of reality. The inevitableness of things. Fallacy of subjective 
 idealism. Relativity of our experience. Pinal test, . pp. 272-282 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 
 
 The notion of internal and included agency. Involves that of living as 
 distinguished from non-living activity. The mechanical form of 
 agency as involving the minimum of self-asserting individuality. 
 Includes pulsion but not end-selection. Biological individuality — 
 organic form of agency — definition of. The categories of organic 
 activity. These the categories of mechanism transformed. Psychic 
 and social individuality — here the activity not only pulsive but 
 directly selective and end-realizing. How the object term (environ- 
 ment) of biology becomes internal to Consciousness. End-realizing as 
 imf^-realizing. Analysis of the sense of kind. Its dual root — function 
 
i CONTENTS. 
 
 of imitation. The social individual as end-realizing. The moment of 
 diflferenoe in the social dialectic. Social basis of egoism and altruism. 
 Nature of the Community Consoiousness. Collision and conflict as 
 sharing the honours with imitation. Fallacy of the doctrine of Hobbes 
 and Benjamin Kidd. Categories of the Community Consciousness. 
 Further transformation of the mechanical categories. Social function 
 of the categories of time, cause, substance, interaction and unification. 
 Interaction the social category par excellence. Social dialectic between 
 the subjective and objective selves. The objective as the world of 
 social individuals — includes the self that contemplates it. How the 
 individual comes to regard himself as at the same time an individual 
 unit and an undivided part of the , social organism. Independent 
 status and also incorporation into the socio-political organism. 
 Eationale of the supremacy of the social over the individual conscious- 
 ness. The individual's assent to this claim and the rise of the sense of 
 social law. The pulse of Egoism and that of assent to the legislative 
 claim of the objective social — these the two fundamental moments of 
 the social life. The notion of law jural and ethical, . pp. 283-300 
 
 PART III. 
 THE TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 
 
 The plain man's need of distinguishing between knowledge and belief. 
 Respects in which knowing and believing are the same. Both involve 
 the congruity of presented content with experience as a whole. This 
 congruity may have reference to either the good or the true. Interest 
 in the good as subjective ground of belief. Coalescence of this motive 
 
 with epistemological interest. Objective grounds of distinction the 
 
 coerciveness of the knowledge-act. This rests on the possibility of 
 reducing our judgments to a basis of immediate apprehension or 
 necessity, Simple belief lacks this basis — hence the sense of objective 
 freedom or option. This objective contingency consistent with sub- 
 jective necessity. How the contingency of belief arises. The two 
 classes of beliefs. Beliefs that are not reducible to the cognitive basis. 
 These will involve the real point of departure between judgments of 
 knowledge and judgments of simple belief ; illustration. The plain man's 
 
 conclusion. The knowledge-form and the belief-form. The former 
 
 conceptual definition by means of the categories. The latter 
 
 defining process supplemented by the symbol. Nature of the symbol 
 and symbolic representation— defines content not directly but through 
 
CONTENTS. xvii 
 
 some form of suggestion. Definition of symbol. How imitation and 
 analogy enter into its constitution. Relation between concept and 
 symbol. Point where the symbol becomes necessary as supplement to 
 concept. The transcendent an immediate certainty of experience. 
 Function of the symbol as a mode of indirectly defining the trans- 
 cendent. The Absolute not definable — hence the agnostic dilemma. 
 The way out of this. Germ concepts of the Absolute. Approximate 
 definition through symbolism. Symbolism as entering into the texture 
 of our conceptions of the transcendent. Relation of symbolism to the 
 distinction between knowledge and belief. Symbolic knowledge and 
 symbolic belief, pp. 301-322 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 
 
 Relation of Science and Metaphysics to the transcendent. Constructs of 
 Science and Metaphysics. How Science originates — its relation to 
 ordinary experience. Science as reduction of content of experience to 
 law. Greek concept — involved no distinction of Science proper from 
 Metaphysics. This first recognized by Aristotle. How Science reaches 
 its basal constructs — incorporates the categories with their respective 
 points of transcendence. How far Science proceeds in the development 
 of the transcendent. Respect in which an ultimate term of Science 
 will be metaphysically defective. Not ultimately self-consistent. 
 And therefore metaphysically invalid. Basal constructs of Meta- 
 physics will be defining concepts of the nature of the transcendent in 
 experience. Use of the symbolic method. How far the plain man's 
 reflection is guided by Science. Point where the need of metaphysical 
 reflection arises. Variability of relative standards of truth. But the 
 ultimate standard cannot be mutable. Hence the need of an absolute 
 standard — to save truth from sands of foundationless expediency. 
 The negative side and the possibility of error. Error as the incon- 
 gruous. Here similar conclusions follow. Science and Metaphysics 
 as complementary methods of reaching a common goal — a comprehen- 
 sive and adequate concept of experience, . . . pp. 323-336 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND JUDGMENTS OF VALUE. 
 
 Ground of distinction between the two species. The Kanto-Lotzean 
 development of this distinction. Species of the judgment of value. 
 The species that is not translatable into cognitive form. Degrees of 
 value. The judgment of moral necessity — when it becomes tanta- 
 mount to a, judgment of knowledge. Lower degrees of value, which 
 fall short of necessity. Determination of the certitude-value of judg- 
 
 b 
 
xviii CONTENTS. 
 
 ments of belief in general. Negative and positive criteria. The two 
 cases of practical judgment: (1) practical necessity ; when may possess 
 the certitude-value of knowledge — immortality of the soul. (2) Judg- 
 ments that fall short of necessity, but are more or less consonant with 
 reason — may have a high degree of probability. Belief and Authority. 
 Authority for conduct and authority for conviction — the latter only 
 considered here. That certitude cannot, in the last analysis, rest on 
 authority. Illustrations from perceptual and historical knowledge. 
 Authority a first rather than a final condition of certitude. Relation 
 of authority to belief — not an ultimate but rather a preliminary con- 
 dition. Rightful place of authority in matters of knowledge and 
 belief. More important for belief than for knowledge. The will to 
 believe — a generator of beliefs, but no guarantee of their truth. Final 
 ground of the validity of the belief — ^judgment. Authority as related 
 to belief and conduct. The will to believe and reasons for believing. 
 The last grounds of belief, pp. 337-355 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 
 
 That the transcendent is involved in Experience. Consequences of its 
 denial. Points of transcendence — perceptual and conceptual. Arise 
 in connection with the categories. Objective agency and its trans- 
 cendent implication. The Self and the implication of its conscious 
 activity. Intra-experiential bearings of the transcendent. The 
 nature of the transcendent. The Agnostic denial at this point and its 
 measure of justification. Were the transcendent an isolated term then 
 only negative characterization would be possible. How it is impli- 
 cated in the whole texture of experience, and is thus brought within 
 the limits of positive determination. How the data of the transcendent 
 in experience supply points of departure for an intelligible conception 
 of its nature. The transcendent as a form of experience. How impli- 
 cated in the possibility of truth and error. The ultimate ground of 
 truth only to be found in the concept of an Absolute Experience. 
 Elimination of the ultra-experiential. Confirmation of the transcendent 
 derived from the implications of special points in experience. The 
 transcendent at the same time presupposed in our finite experience and 
 included in the notion of an Absolute Experience. How far the nature 
 of absolute experience is determinable. Internal complexity of the 
 Absolute nature. Distinctions involved. Subject and object. Conscious 
 or unconscious. Distinction of intellectual, volitional, and emotional 
 forms of psychosis. How far valid for the absolute. Modifications 
 involved in their application. The point of absoluteness in thought, 
 feeling, and will. Consideration of a difficulty. Absolute freedom not 
 caprice but absolute stability. Internal unity and solidarity of the 
 
CONTENTS. xix 
 
 Absolute Experience. The negative in relation to the theoretic and 
 practical activities of the Absolute. How this is essential to the rational 
 grounding of the true and good. The absolute experience and its con- 
 tained individuals. Opposite tendencies in philosophy : (1) to suppress 
 the individual in the interest of the universal ; (2) to suppress the 
 universal in the interest of individuality. How this opposition is 
 transcended in the notion of an individuating experience. The universal 
 as tending everywhere to take the individual form. The true ground 
 of individuality to be found in the objective activity of Absolute Experi- 
 ence. Bearings of the notion of Absolute Experience on the ultimate 
 relations of the true and good. It leads to the postulate of their 
 ultimate identity and to the final concept of the principle of 
 Rationality, pp. 356-381 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 
 
 The Kantian antinomies — how they arise. Reform of the position. The 
 categories intra-experiential in both root and function. The categories 
 as functions of a growing experience. How they lead to the point of 
 their own transcendence, but not to the transcendence of experience. 
 This shown (1) in the sphere of the mathematical, (2) in that of the 
 dynamic, consciousness. The notions of conditioned activity and 
 dependent being. Their presuppositions. Does the Absolute transcend 
 experience, or is there an Absolute Experience ? The former the 
 Kantian alternative ; the latter chosen here. The points of transcend- 
 ence as terms in an Absolute Experience. Bearing of conclusion on 
 freedom and necessity. Determination of the nature of the trans- 
 cendent object of Cosmology. The Concept of Energy (1) as related to 
 the time-series. The notion of Evolution — is it ultimate ? This question 
 considered (1) in relation to time, (2) in relation to the notion of a con- 
 ditioned-series. The notion of a self-centred system and the infinite 
 series. The world as transcending the time-series in both its beginning 
 and its end. Evolution an affair of the conditioned-series. This not 
 final. The Evolution process has a transcendent presupposition. 
 Criticism of Spencer and Cliflford. The Cyclic notion of Evolution- 
 its value. Does not escape the difficulty of the endless series. The 
 complete relativity of the notion of development. Is limited from the 
 point of view of time as well as from that of process. How the first 
 assumptions of Science involve the transcendent. The deeper aspect 
 of the world which presents itself under the dynamic Categories. The 
 notion of internal agency — what it involves. Correlation of the two 
 aspects of the world. How it involves a passage from the concept of 
 Evolution to that of a co-existent system of interacting individuals. 
 
 Resulting Postulate of Cosmology pp. 382-401 
 
 62 
 
XX CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 
 
 Reform of the Kantian doctrine of Self. Must be conceived as intra- 
 experiential and as real subject. Sense in which the Kantian notion 
 of transcendence is untenable. The real transcendent as subject of an 
 Infinite and Absolute experience. Criticism of Kant. The logical 
 subject and the ens realissimwm. The Kantian paralogism. The real 
 Self as ground of the postulate of a transcendent Subject. The genetic 
 concept of Self not final. Leads to deeper view in which the subject- 
 world becomes self-centred. Self-agency from this deeper point of 
 view. How its relativity leads to the postulate of an agent that is 
 self-active and seK-dependent. Real significance of Kant's reasoning. 
 The ens realissimum, and how it is achieved. The relative world and 
 the Absolute Subject. Not mutually exclusive nor yet identical. 
 Distinction but not absolute separation — Jacob's ladder. Dual re- 
 quirement of an adequate metaphysic at this point. The point of 
 origination for the finite and relative as identical with the initiation of 
 plurality and differentiation of content. This a distinction in reality. 
 How a, finite being may be defined. The Transcendent Subject as 
 all-inclusive. How Pantheism is escaped at this point. The distinc- 
 tion of relative from absolute is interned to experience, and arises in 
 some sense of limit or dependence. The internal posit of individuality 
 — what it involves ; (1) the internal grounding of the individual ; 
 (2) that the individual is, in the last analysis, rooted in the Absolute 
 nature. The ineradicableness of the distinction between absolute and 
 relative. Bearing of the distinction between subject and object 
 consciousness on the problem of individuality. The finite individual 
 as the posit of the objective consciousness of the Absolute. This 
 objective consciousness as supplying the pou sto of the finite individual. 
 That a direct objective posit involves finitude as well as individuality. 
 But in that posit the finite individual is not separated from that of 
 which it is a posit. The transcendent has its last root in the Absolute 
 Subject which is presuppositionless. The Absolute Subject as dis- 
 tinguishing itself from its objective finite content in the concepts of 
 finite individual existence, pp. 402-425 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OP RELIGION. 
 
 The central fact of religious experience. How it involves transcendence. 
 The metaphysical ground of religion. Sense of the transcendent as 
 differentiating the religious from the social. The central pulse of 
 Religion. Criticism of Kidd and Marshall. Religion as distinguished 
 from Morality. How far the transcendent object of Religion may be 
 
OoNTENTS. XXI 
 
 rendered intelligible. Identity of the object of Religion with the 
 Transcendent Subject of experience. Further determination of the 
 object of Religion, (1) from the point of view of the categories of 
 objective agency ; (2) from that of the subject categories ; individuality, 
 self-identity, and personality. Personality as involving a synthesis of 
 unitary nature and plural manifestation. How the personality of the 
 Absolute is to be conceived. The Absolute personality as immutable, 
 almighty, free, sovereign, and creative. The object of religion as a 
 transcendent Self. The object of religion and the heart of goodness. 
 Reflection of Lotze. How the Absolute can be good. Individual good 
 as an end-category. View of Thomas Aquinas. Ground on which 
 the heart of goodness may be ascribed to the Absolute. Evil as a 
 factor in the world. Evil as the opposite of Being. The Absolute's 
 love of good is, in the last analysis, identical with its conserving love 
 of being. Hence the relativity of evil as an intra-experiential term. 
 Sense in which evil may be regarded as absolute. Evil presupposes 
 good. The hate of being self-destructive and contradictory. Per- 
 durability of the individual grounded in selective love of the Absolute. 
 Final identification of the Absolute with the God of Religion. Final 
 consideration of evil. Edwards and his definition of good as " Being's 
 assent to Entity." Here the principle of good is identified with that 
 of being itself. St. Augustine and the problem of evil. The possi- 
 bility of evil as grounded in will. How egoistic self-assertion may 
 cause the finite individual to collide with the good. Evil as pain, 
 accident, sin. Relation of evil to the Divine Economy. How evil and 
 even sin may have a necessary place in this economy. The mediational 
 feature of Religion. How related to evil and sin. The need of 
 mediation fundamental and constitutional. Its expiatory feature. 
 Metaphysical significance of the idea of mediation in Religion, pp. 426-454 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 Final consideration of the relation of the good and the true. Ultimate 
 ground of Rationality. Freedom and Necessity, (1) as terms in an 
 Absolute Experience. Freedom as presuppositionless experience — a 
 subject function. Necessity as the unconditional objective activity 
 of the Absolute. (2) As terms of relative experience. Freedom and 
 dependence on the Absolute. Freedom and the modified agency of 
 the finite self. Nature of the freedom open to the finite individual. 
 Modified necessity of objective finite agency — not absolutely pre- 
 dictable. Meohaniam and Teleology. Nature of the two conceptions. 
 Mechanism and its applications; (1) to the causal series in time; (2) 
 to the world of interacting individuals. Mechanism as relative. 
 As completing itself in an Absolute Experience. Qualitative trans- 
 
xxli CONTENTS. 
 
 oendence of Mechanism in the notion of internal agency. Root of 
 the notion of Teleology. Point of transition from the mechanical to 
 the teleological. The Finite Individual. Ultimate root of the 
 individuating activity of the world. The Absolute and the finite 
 individual. The objective posit of the Absolute not an empty form, 
 but informed and guided by a concept-purpose or end-category. 
 This the idea of the instituted nature. Why this idea terminates 
 in a finite individual. The determining conditions of finitude not 
 essential to the idea of the individual, but arise in the process of 
 its realization. Germ of absoluteness in the individual nature. This 
 the source of our inextinguishable sense of freedom. The absolute 
 archetype of the finite individual. Ultimate type of individuality. 
 Distinction of the posit in which the individual originates, from its 
 own process of self-realization. Individua minima. The process of 
 realization as passage from individua, minima to individua maxima. 
 Belongs to the internal history of the finite. Darwinian-Hegelian cate- 
 gory of development. The institution of individuals as the central 
 pulse of objective activity. The perdurability of the individual. 
 How grounded in the conserving love of the Absolute. Its relation 
 to the rationality of the world, pp. 455-479 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 The source and origin of Mysticism. Its objective character. Criticism 
 of R^c^jac's view. The functional activity of the mystic conscious- 
 ness. Is it subjective or objective? Grounds of the objective view. 
 Objective interpretation of mystical phenomena. The mystical organ. 
 How related to the transcendent object. The two moments in the 
 superordinary experience, (1) inspiration, (2) revelation. The method 
 of Mysticism. Symbolic. Nature of the symbol. How it defines 
 superordinary content. Illustrations. The mystical sphere the 
 true home of the symbol. Herbert Spencer's rejection of this use 
 of symbolism as invalid. Weakness of the position. How the 
 mystical content is achieved. The transcendent impression. Nature 
 of the mystic Inspiration. Is a function of an excited emotional con- 
 sciousness. The objective Revelatory function. Its differentiae and 
 definition. Relation of the symbol to the Revelatory process. Shad- 
 ing oflF from symbolism to direct definition. Content that is un- 
 representable. Validity of the mystical content. Not completely 
 absolved from Science and ordinary tests of truth. Relation of the 
 symbol to ordinary experience. Only that which resists symbolism 
 can claim exemption from the ordinary tests of experience. The 
 idiosyncratic and the general in the sphere of mystical content. Are 
 open to the broad tests of experience. These not to be mechani- 
 
COiJTEUl'S. xxiii 
 
 cally applied. Possibility of the transformation of the whole of 
 experience by the introduction of the new content, must be admitted. 
 Dialectic of a growing experience. Claims of the saperordinary in 
 general. Best proximately on its relation to the good. The ethical 
 demand. Ultimately they rest on the presumption of the identity of 
 the good and the true in a completely rational world. Mysticism 
 as an organ of truth. Final consideration of the value of the super- 
 ordinary for knowledge, . . . ' . . . pp. 480-501 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS— CONCLUSION. 
 
 The Social root of the Ethical consciousness. Exclusive claims for the 
 social. Spencer's account of the genesis of Obligation. The internal 
 sense of obligation. Idea of the tribal consciousnesss — its value. 
 Egoism and Altruism— theory of Benjamin Eidd. Huxley's antinomy 
 between Natural Selection and the Moral consciousness. Why natural 
 selection is unethical. Natural Selection not purely egoistic. Un- 
 conscious conservation of kind. The principle of Obligation in the 
 Moral and Jural spheres. Its ultimate grounding. The assent of the 
 egoistic will to the claim of the objective will. Rests on recognition 
 of objective will as organ of larger and including whole. Identity of 
 the principle of Authority here developed with that of the highest 
 Rationality. Assent to the demand of will as obligatory involves assent 
 to it as right. And this will be resolvable into two propositions: 
 (1) that the idea of Right involves conformity to some nature taken 
 as an ultimate standard; (2) that this nature can be no other than 
 the Absolute. Right involves, therefore, the highest Rationality, 
 Necessity of the metaphysical basis of Ethics; (1) in order that the 
 absoluteness of obligation may be intelligible ; (2) that the fundamental 
 objective categories of Morality, the Right and the Good, may be 
 completely valid. Ethical assent to Obligation, and the assent of the 
 Socio-Folitical consciousness. Absoluteness of the Ethical. Relation 
 of Ethics and Religion. Common root in the personal nature of 
 the Absolute. But personal root of Religion is the feeling of depen- 
 dence, while that of Ethics is the feeling of individual freedom. 
 Correlation of the two moments. ConclusioUr . . pp. 502-517 
 
 CONCLUSION, 518 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE, 524 
 
 INDEX, 526 
 
ERRATA. 
 
 Paoe 11. For Hutchinson Sterling read Hutchison Stirling. 
 
 Pages 27, 86. For Rdo^gao read R^o^jac. 
 
 Page 81. F<yr Foulle^ read Fouill^e. 
 
 Page 201. For transeant read transeunt. 
 
 Page 273. For individual or the read individuating. 
 
 Page 321. For vigorous read rigorous. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 It is not the aim of this preface to relieve the body of 
 the work of the responsibility of making itself clear. 
 Nevertheless there are two or three topics on which a 
 preliminary observation or two may not be amiss. In the 
 first place, it scarcely needs saying that the work is meant as 
 a first rather than a final word on the topics with which it 
 deals. Completeness has not, therefore, been one of its aims. 
 This should be borne in mind in making out the list of sins 
 of omission and commission of which the author is to be 
 held guilty. Again, while the work aims to be broadly 
 experiential in the sense that the notion of experience is 
 to be regarded as all-comprehensive, yet the application to 
 it of the term empirical in any narrow or partizan sense 
 may fairly be resented. For as regards the ordinary issues 
 between empiricism and rationalism or intuitionism, they 
 are simply transcended by the inclusion of reason and 
 intuition among the functions of experience ; for it is 
 clear that experience cannot dispense with intuition, and 
 it is no less obvious that the supreme intra-experiential test 
 is that of rationality. 
 
 One of the points of theory insisted on as cardinal is the 
 place assigned to the notion and function of experience. 
 That knowledge is an intra-experiential term and that 
 philosophy must be an interpretation of experience in the 
 broad sense, are taken to be propositions that are not open 
 
xxvi PEEPACE. 
 
 to serious dispute. Again, the doctrine of the internal 
 complexity of being must be regarded as one of fundamental 
 importance. For if being is conceived to be in the last 
 analysis, internally simple and structureless, it follows that 
 it will be opaque to knowledge and that philosophy must 
 give it up in despair. If, on the contrary, being is to be 
 conceived as internally complex, then a real manifestation 
 of its internal nature becomes possible, and our world lies 
 open to knowledge and philosophy. Furthermore, this 
 doctrine of internal complexity supplies a point of view 
 from which the subject and object distinction in conscious- 
 ness becomes primary, and on this basis is developed what 
 is doubtless one of the principal features of the book ; 
 namely, the distinction between the subjective and objective 
 consciousness of the absolute and the relating of the absolute 
 through its objective consciousness, in a constitutive way, to 
 the world of finite individuals. That the objective conscious- 
 ness of the absolute is constitutionally individuating, in the 
 sense developed in the discussions, is taken to be a truth of 
 cardinal importance for philosophy, inasmuch as it supplies 
 a non-partizan principle on which both the individual and 
 the universal may be conserved. 
 
 Of course, the doctrine of the categories is fundamental, 
 and in this field Kant is still the great teacher. While 
 admitting this and giving due respect to Kant, the author 
 has not been restrained from attempting a fresh construction 
 of the category, and one that it is hoped will be found more 
 responsive to the demands of contemporary thought. The 
 second division of the treatise in which the category is 
 central, is the part that is most closely related to the 
 foundations of science. In regard to this branch of the 
 discussion, it is perhaps needful to say that the aim is not 
 to define the concepts of science — an over-presumptuous task 
 for a layman — but rather to investigate, and as far as possible 
 define, the processes and types of consciousness which 
 underlie these concepts, and through which man becomes, in 
 the first instance, intelligibly related to his world. No 
 
PREFACE. xxvii 
 
 attempt, for example, is made to lay down the law to the 
 mathematician in his own sphere, but it is believed, never- 
 theless, that something important is said regarding the 
 psychic grounds out of which mathematical conceptions 
 arise. 
 
 The bearing of the discussions on some of the funda- 
 mental questions of religion will be obvious. It is believed 
 that the distinction which is made and insisted on between 
 the subject- and object-activities of the absolute, supplies an 
 adequate basis for a theory of individuality, in which the 
 finite individual may be at the same time included and 
 conserved in the consciousness of the absolute. The danger 
 of pantheistic absorption is thus escaped. Furthermore, the 
 method of approximation which is developed and applied 
 to intra-experiential terms in order to reach an intelligible 
 conception of the transcendent, will, it is believed, solve the 
 dif3ficulty of anthropomorphism by evincing how the self- 
 analogy may be used in a valid way in the development of 
 the idea of a being that is at once intelligible and transcen- 
 dent of finite limits. 
 
 Aside from general debts which are acknowledged here, 
 special obligation is confessed to my friend and colleague, 
 Henry B. Fine, for helpful criticisms and suggestions on 
 several points where mathematical conceptions were involved ; 
 although for the views expressed, and especially for the 
 mistakes, I, of course, claim full and unshared responsibility. 
 I am also indebted to my friend and sometime pupil, 
 Alexander Pringle, for valuable assistance rendered while 
 these sheets were going through the press. I can only 
 regret in conclusion that the text of this work was com- 
 pleted before I had the privilege of reading Ladd's Theory of 
 Beality, Ward's Natv/ralism and Agnosticism, or Eoyce's 
 The World and the Individual. Otherwise their important 
 suggestions would no doubt have modified my own work. 
 
 ALEXANDER THOMAS ORMOND. 
 Princeton, April 21, 1900. 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Looking back over the last half of the century that is just 
 closing, it becomes evident from the survey that some 
 fundamental reconsideration of the whole problem of Phil- 
 osophy will be one of the first duties of the century upon 
 which the world is about to enter. The rise and speedy 
 triumph of the doctrine of Evolution, bearing with it a 
 transformation of the whole traditional conception of the 
 world, could not but exercise an important influence on the 
 conditions of the problem of knowledge. This effect is 
 most marked in the form which in recent thought has 
 been taken by the old issue between Empiricism and 
 Eationalism which supplied the leading motive of Kant's 
 thinking. Through Kant's own work, together with the 
 transforming influence of evolutionary conceptions the old 
 question has taken a new form and has been raised to a 
 higher plane. In the reflection of Kant the two moments, 
 empirical and rational, which had played separate roles in 
 the movements of pre-Kantian thought, giving rise to 
 mutually exclusive and antagonistic developments, were 
 brought together, and it was the aim of Kant to lay the 
 foundations of a concept of knowledge that should be at 
 once true to experience and just to the rational presupposi- 
 tions which experience seemed to involve. Into the details 
 of the Kantian theory it is not necessary at this point to 
 enter. Eecognizing the fact, however, that the two moments 
 of experience and rational presupposition are everywhere 
 
 A 
 
2 FOUNDATIONS OP KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 immanent in the system of Kant, and that his concept of 
 their relation led to the postulate of an ultra-experiential 
 term that is at the same time essential to experience and yet 
 inaccessible to knowledge, we will not be at a loss to 
 account for the great lines of cleavage that mark the post- 
 Kantian movements. We have only to deny the dualism 
 between knowledge and the world of rational presupposition 
 in which Kantism culminated, in order to realize the motive 
 of the great idealistic outburst that followed and reached its 
 conclusion in the thought of Hegel. And we have only to 
 affirm that dualism, at the same time putting the supreme 
 emphasis on the moment of experience, to be able to under- 
 stand the great reaction from the standpoint of Kant toward 
 that of Hume which was characteristic of the movements 
 that arose outside and antagonized idealism. We cannot 
 enter into details here, but if we take the thought of Kant 
 as the immediate source of the intellectual movements which 
 followed and characterized the first six or seven decades 
 of the nineteenth century and recognize the duality of 
 experience and rational presupposition as constituting its 
 dialectical centre, it will become obvious that in this dia- 
 lectical centre will be found the spring of the great post- 
 Kantian schism, into which the thinking of the century was 
 at length driven. It was only necessary, on the one hand, 
 to deny the dualism and emphasize the notion of reason, 
 and, on the other, to affirm the dualism in connection with 
 the accentuation of the notion of experience in order to break 
 the vital bond of Kantism and set the imprisoned elements 
 free as independent motives in new movements of thought. 
 
 We do not take into account here the work of mediating 
 thinkers of which there have been a few, but are aiming 
 simply to characterize the great trends of the thought of the 
 century and the influences which were mainly instrumental 
 in determining its great epochs. The idealistic reaction 
 first ran its course and reached its final expression in the 
 splendid and, in many respects, enduring system of Hegel. 
 Now, in relation to Kant we get the central thought of 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 Hegel if we suppose the imprisoned moment of reason to be 
 set free and conceived to be the unitary heart of reality. 
 This was doubtless the first step. Then let us conceive the 
 dialectic, which to Kant was largely external, as internal to 
 this moment of reason and as expressing itself in incessant 
 pulsations of position, antithesis, and synthesis, we thus 
 arrive at the developed notion of Hegel, what he conceived 
 to be the inner pulse, the living heart of reality. Hegelism 
 is thus, motived and informed by. an unmodified and absolute 
 principle of rationality to which the activity of experience 
 must be subordinated, and within which, so far as it is to 
 obtain recognition at all, it is to be an included moment. 
 There is in Hegelism no distinctive point of view that may 
 be called experiential but the world is first and primarily 
 rational, and the notion of experience is everywhere medi- 
 ated by reason. It was inevitable that Hegelism should be 
 rebelled against as a deification of reason at the expense 
 and even in defiance, of experience, and that this result 
 should take the form of a one-sided emphasis of the experi- 
 ence moment in Kant and the practical reinstatement of 
 the empirical standpoint of Hume. We are not attempting 
 to write a history of philosophy here and shall have little 
 to say of the post-Hegelian movements in German thought, 
 important as they are and including as they do the work of 
 that great mediating thinker Lotze, for it becomes evident 
 that the reinstatement of the notion of experience shifts the 
 pole of thinking and reconnects it with the traditions of 
 Hume. The result that followed this change was that at 
 about the same period, the latter half of the second quarter 
 of the nineteenth century, German thought ceased to be 
 constructive and began to devote its main energies, outside 
 of pure science, to history and criticism, while in English 
 thought there arose a constructive impulse that created a new 
 era and led to the most characteristic results of the century. 
 The vital centre of constructive thinking in the latter 
 half of the century is English, therefore, rather than Ger- 
 man, and it is on English soil that we will have to trace 
 
4 FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 the empirical reaction from Kant which re-established its 
 historic continuity and its characteristic tradition in the 
 reinstatement of Hume. The first step in that reaction was 
 taken by the school of Sir "Wm. Hamilton whose character- 
 istic position may be described as English-Kantism, and 
 whose central motive was a desire to incorporate the Kantian 
 dualism with the traditions of English thinking. Hamilton 
 and his school were in truth engaged in the somewhat 
 visionary enterprise of transferring bodily to English soil 
 that dialectic of experience and transcendent rational pre- 
 supposition, which in Kantian thinking had been a fruitful 
 mother of negative offspring, and it required no large gift of 
 prescience to anticipate the result. The school soon degen- 
 erated, on the one hand, into a sort of jargon of empty 
 dialectics, while, on the other, it was forced to acknowledge 
 its utter incompetency to deal with any of the most funda- 
 mental issues of thinking. The Hamiltonian experiment 
 ended in a morass, and in its helpless plight loudly pro- 
 claimed the futility of knowledge. Historically, the Hamil- 
 tonian attempt to naturalize the Kantian dualism in English 
 soil would be unimportant were it not for an echo of it that 
 has survived in that vestibule to the synthetic philosophy 
 of Herbert Spencer, The Unknowable. 
 
 A much more important step was taken when, in the 
 early sixties, through the instrumentality of J. S. Mill, a 
 marriage was effected between the Humian school of 
 experience, of which he and his father, James Mill, had 
 been the most prominent English exponents, and the 
 principles of Positivism as embodied in the system of its 
 founder, Auguste Comte. The first note of the union was 
 struck in Mill's Auguste Comte and Fositivism, in which the 
 remarkable system of the French philosopher was first 
 made known to English thinkers. The seed thus sown 
 found a fruitful soil, and English Positivism soon attained a 
 more vigorous growth than the parent stem from which it 
 was taken. A great defect in original Positivism was its 
 refusal to recognize its psychological groundwork, and its 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 insistence that only objective phenomena in space and time 
 are knowable. The grafting of Positivism on the Humian 
 branch, which was effected by Mill and his compeers, 
 corrected this defect and infused new vigour into the 
 movement. For the completion in English thought of the 
 foundations of the Positivistic theory in its new form, we must 
 have recourse to the work of George Henry Lewes, a thinker 
 whom it is too much the fashion just at present to treat 
 with neglect. Lewes, whose first impulse to philosophize 
 came from the side of physiology, and at a later stage from 
 general biology, made two important contributions to the 
 Positivistic theory. Starting with the Comte-Hume syn- 
 thesis which Mill had effected, Lewes first incorporates this 
 general movement of empirical thinking with the funda- 
 mental concepts of biology. This marks an apparent return 
 to the earlier stand-point of Comte, and we find Lewes 
 putting forth the claim that psychology does not, in fact, 
 possess the status of an independent science, but must be 
 regarded as a specialized branch of the larger science of life. 
 The lapse was only apparent, however, and Lewes makes it 
 evident in his little treatise on the Study of Psychology that 
 what he is really aiming at is such a concept of the funda- 
 mental categories of consciousness as will bring psychology 
 into harmony with the principles of biology. The first 
 characteristic contribution of Lewes to the completion of 
 the Positivistic theory is, therefore, a proposed and in a 
 certain measure achieved, marriage of biological and psycho- 
 logical categories. The second and most important step 
 was taken, however, in his incorporation of the concepts of 
 evolution into the basis of empiricism, through the sub- 
 stitution of the notions of race experience and heredity for 
 that of individual experience motived by associations, which 
 had been central from Hume to Mill. In this we must 
 admit that Lewes was anticipated by Herbert Spencer, and 
 that he cannot lay claim to complete originality in this 
 respect. Conceding this, however, it will be allowed that 
 Lewes made an independent use of the principle, and was 
 
6 FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 building with it a philosophical tradition different from that 
 of the synthetic philosophy. Herbert Spencer sets us the 
 example here by disclaiming connection with Positivism, 
 and the fundamental difference in the tradition of the two 
 schools is beyond question. English Positivism arose, as 
 we have seen, out of the union of Comte and Hume, while 
 the foundation of the synthetic philosophy was achieved 
 in a union of Hume with Kantism as it had filtered down 
 through the medium of the school of Hamilton. 
 
 When Lewes incorporated the concepts of evolution with 
 the synthetic tradition of Comte and Hume the basis of 
 that form of the new empiricism which we call Positivism 
 was virtually completed. We may characterize the theory 
 as Neo-Positivism, and we will find that the historical 
 elements which entered into it will enable us to understand 
 its most characteristic features. It is, in fact, a synthesis 
 of objective phenomenism with psychological sensation- 
 alism which is the principle of subjective phenomenism. 
 Its internal structural principle is that of a developing 
 experience conceived under the rubrics of evolution, race- 
 experience and heredity, and its phenomenism embodies 
 itself epistemologically in the dicta of Lewes that only the 
 phenomenal is empirical, and, therefore, knowable, while 
 the noumenon or transcendent term of Kantism is met- 
 empirical, and therefore beyond the reach of thought or 
 affirmation. Neo-Positivism, as it came from the hands 
 of Lewes, is therefore a system of empiricism from which 
 the extra-phenomenal is rigorously excluded, and in which 
 the phenomenon becomes an absolute term. 
 
 We have seen that Neo-Positivism represents the second 
 great step in the constructive movement of English thought 
 during this period. The third, and doubtless the most 
 important single step is that embodied in the synthetic 
 philosophy of Herbert Spencer and his school. There was 
 evidently a period in Spencer's thinking when he was in 
 reaction against the old empiricism, which could maintain 
 its position against transcendentalism only by putting an 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 unbearable strain on its individualistic principle, and we 
 may suppose that it was the dawn of insight into the 
 capabilities of evolution when conceived as an inner prin- 
 ciple of experience, that first reconciled him to empiricism, 
 and led to the project of a synthetic philosophy. Aside 
 from this hypothetical conjecture, it is certain that -the 
 groundwork of the system was achieved when it occurred 
 to the mind of Spencer to substitute the categories 
 of race-experience and heredity for the individualistic 
 principle of the old philosophy. This was the first great 
 step, and perhaps as momentous a single step as has ever 
 been taken by the human mind. For it not only reinstated 
 the experience-philosophy on a foundation that appeared to 
 be infinitely stronger and more comprehensive than 
 the one it had displaced, but it brought psychology, and 
 through it philosophy and epistemology, into line with 
 the new developments in the organic and biological 
 sciences. "We are here most vitally interested in the 
 epistemological bearings of the synthetic philosophy, and 
 from the point of view of the new principle it would seem 
 possible to heal the breach between rationalists and empiri- 
 cists on the question of the original and acquired possessions 
 of the human mind, an issue which the old philosophy was 
 unable to close, by conceding the claim of the rationalists 
 that the most important contents of the individual con- 
 sciousness are original capital which he brings with him 
 into the world, but claiming in connection with this that 
 those original possessions are the inherited results of the 
 past experience of the race. On this basis Spencer claims 
 that the conflicting schools can be reconciled, and the new 
 empiricism be proved competent to meet all legitimate 
 requirements. 
 
 Up to this point, however, there is no essential difference 
 between the programme of Positivism and that of the Syn- 
 thetic Philosophy. If another factor had not entered into 
 Mr. Spencer's thinking the Synthetic Philosophy might have 
 assumed an attitude toward the noumenal or transcendent 
 
8 FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 that would have brought it into substantial harmony with 
 Positivism. But we have seen that Spencer borrows a 
 motive from Kant, and the incorporation of this constitutes 
 the second and final step in the completion of the synthetic 
 system. It is not material here to know how Spencer first 
 became acquainted with the writings of the Hamiltonian 
 school, for it is evident that his knowledge of Kant was not, 
 in the first instance, first-hand, but was obtained through 
 the medium of the English Kantians. The important point 
 is the fact that Spencer accepts the negative metaphysic of 
 that school, the doctrine that the absolute or unconditioned, 
 while a necessary presupposition of the relative and pheno- 
 menal, is yet completely transcendent of all the conditions 
 of knowledge, and, therefore, unthinkable. This doctrine 
 Spencer adopts, and incorporates with the groundwork of his 
 system in the first part of his First Principles of Philosophy. 
 In appropriating it, however, he modifies it somewhat by 
 putting more emphasis on its positive aspect than the 
 Hamiltonians had deemed advisable. In his hands the 
 doctrine is embodied in a proposition that involves both an 
 affirmation and a denial. The necessary existence of a trans- 
 cendent absolute as the ground of the relative, and as 
 supplying the ground-principle of science, is afi&rmed and 
 supported by both direct and indirect evidence, while in 
 connection with this it is maintained that the nature of this 
 transcendent object is absolutely unthinkable and must 
 remain for ever shrouded in impenetrable mystery. It is 
 this second step in which an element of Kantism is thus 
 incorporated into its constitution, that differentiates the 
 Synthetic Philosophy from Neo-Positivism, and justifies 
 Spencer in his indignant repudiation of the classification 
 that would confound him with the Positivists. By virtue 
 of this step the Synthetic Philosophy reaches an empirical 
 concept in which the sphere of experience, which is that of 
 possible knowledge, becomes articulated with, and in an 
 important sense grounded in, an absolute, that is repre- 
 sented as weUing up and manifesting itself in the forms of 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 relative existence, but which in its own real nature holds 
 itself aloof and unapproachable. 
 
 We have, then, in the two forms of empiricism, which 
 have embodied themselves in Neo-Positivism and the Syn- 
 thetic Philosophy, the two constructive movements in the 
 empirical thought of the middle section of the nineteenth 
 century. Before going on, however, to a third constructive 
 movement of a different type it will be important to dwell 
 briefly on some of the characteristic defects of the new 
 empiricism as embodied in the forms sketched above. We 
 have seen how Hegelism puts the supreme emphasis on 
 reason, the transcendent noumenon of Kantism, and subordi- 
 nates experience to it as a contained moment. The project 
 of pure empiricism involves an exact reversal of this order, 
 the putting of the supreme and, in fact, exclusive emphasis 
 on experience, while reason has no independent status, and 
 only obtains recognition in so far as it can justify itself from 
 experience data. The procedure of Hume is typical here, 
 and substantially fixes that of all his successors. Now, 
 Neo-Positivism is a system of pure empiricism, and may be 
 judged strictly on that basis. What, then, is the character- 
 istic defect of pure empiricism ? In answering this question 
 we shall appeal simply to the judgment of history upon 
 systems of thought in general, and from this point of view 
 it will become evident that what we are seeking to deter- 
 mine is the characteristic respect in which Neo-Positivism has 
 failed to deal adequately with the problems for the solution 
 of which a philosophy may reasonably be held responsible. 
 It will not be difficult, I think, to point out this character- 
 istic defect. It has its root in the restriction of the notion 
 of experience to the phenomenal and the rigid exclusion 
 of the ultra-phenomenal, as also ultra-experiential, and 
 therefore, to all intents and purposes, unreal. This is what 
 the term metempirical means — the denial of the trans- 
 phenomenal as unreal. But there is that in man's nature 
 which renders it impossible for him to restrict his thoughts 
 and his interests to the empirical sphere as thus defined. 
 
10 FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 His consciousness becomes, in spite of his will, the bearer 
 of questions which lead into the metempirical, and it 
 happens that these are the most vital and persistent of all 
 the problems he has to face. Neo-Positivism has no answer 
 to any of these questions but the denial that any answer 
 is possible. The human spirit will inevitably grow weary 
 in the end of this intellectual snubbing, and will demand 
 a philosophy that can give it more positive assurance. 
 
 The Synthetic Philosophy, on first blush, seems to pre- 
 sent a more hopeful situation. Not only does it contain a 
 repudiation of pure phenomenism, but its entire structure rests 
 on the positive assertion of a transcendent reality, and this 
 reality is clothed with a quasi-religious significance. Spencer 
 grows fervent in his exposition of the shortcomings of pure 
 Positivism. But the appearance here is largely delusive. 
 Historically the Synthetic Philosophy has proved itself 
 weak at two fundamental points. In the first place, its 
 attempt to ground philosophy in a principle that affirms the 
 necessary existence of the unthinkable, seems to involve a 
 subtle self-contradiction, since it is surely incumbent that a 
 thing should be in some sense intelligible before its necessity 
 can be made out. It seems impossible to separate the 
 questions of existence and nature so completely that what 
 bears on one will not also shed light on the other. Again, 
 the bald negative which the Synthetic Philosophy opposes to 
 the most pressingly interesting and vital problems of the 
 human spirit puts it in this respect on the same plane with 
 Positivism. It seems to be a matter of little moment that 
 we can assert a transcendent reality if we are cut off from 
 any intelligible apprehension of its nature or what it may 
 be doing or purposing in the universe. True, by a sort of 
 poetic license we may define a kind of shadowy Geo? on the 
 background of Spencer's unknowable, but the stern logic of 
 the situation will be incessantly reducing our creations to 
 nought and our religious feeling, if we have any, must find 
 its satisfaction in an absolute mystery. Of the two species 
 of Agnosticism with which the thinking of the time is 
 
GENERAL INTBODUCTION. 11 
 
 affected, the denial of everything that transcends the pheno- 
 menal, and the denial of the possibility of knowing a trans- 
 cendent whose existence must nevertheless be affirmed, each 
 in turn fails to meet demands of vital importance, and both 
 alike present an attitude of bald and helpless negation to 
 the most pressing issues of the human mind. 
 
 It was no doubt a sense of the helplessness of empiricism, 
 even in its latest forms, to meet the higher spiritual issues, 
 that led to a third attempt at construction, which we may 
 characterize as Neo-Eationalism. The movement finds its 
 chief inspiration in Hegel, and originated about a generation 
 ago, when Hutchinson Sterling brought out his two-volume 
 work entitled The Secret of Hegel} In spite of the fact that 
 Sterling's effort was received with some merriment and no 
 little incredulity at the time, an irreverent wag describing it 
 as a work in which the Secret of Hegel had been carefully 
 concealed in two volumes, it supplied an important clue to 
 the interpretation of Hegel by connecting his thought 
 directly with the categories of Kant, and what for our 
 purpose is more important still, it proved to be the first step 
 in a Hegelian revival which has assumed large proportions 
 and promises valuable results. Through the interpretation 
 of Sterling the pulsating heart of the Hegelian dialectic was 
 projected into the field of English thinking, and a movement 
 originated of which the late Thomas Hill Green may be 
 taken as the next and individually the most important 
 representative. We are not concerned here with the ethical 
 views of Green, but rather with the central category of his 
 thinking, which was the norm of the Hegelian rationalism. 
 The point d'appid of Green is to be found in the current 
 sensationalism of the time, which Lewes had happily ex- 
 pressed in the dictum; given sensibility and its laws, and 
 everything else may be deduced from them. Green charged 
 sensationalism with blindness in overlooking or denying the 
 internal relational character of the data on which it pro- 
 ceeded, and his aim was to demonstrate the existence of an 
 ' The Secret of Hegel, in two volumes, London, 1865. 
 
12 FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 immanent rational element in all sensation. This insight is 
 central in his monumental Introduction to the Philosophy of 
 Hume, a work in which English philosophical criticism 
 strikes a new and profounder note, and in which it also 
 becomes evident that a new claimant for philosophical 
 honours is on the field. Green's critical work gave the 
 foretaste oi- a constructive movement in which his lamented 
 death prevented him from participating, but the work was 
 taken up and ably pushed by others, until now we have the 
 school covering in its activity every important field of 
 philosophical effort, and including among its adherents the 
 most vigorous thinkers of the time. The school has had an 
 important development in America as well as in Great 
 Britain. Dr. Wm. T. Harris may be regarded as its pioneer 
 and chief representative on the American side of the water. 
 
 Historically, as we have seen, this Neo- rationalistic 
 movement may be regarded as having its origin in a 
 reaction from empiricism, and in particular from its agnos- 
 tic attitude toward the transcendent. The speculative 
 insight of philosophy threatened to go out in darkness, and 
 the pioneers of the new movement, in seeking for a means 
 of reviving it, found it in the central category of Hegelism, 
 the pulsating dialectic of immanent rationality which to 
 Hegel expressed the whole inner truth of reality. We may 
 call it the concept of rationality as distinguished from that 
 of experience on which empiricism had proceeded, and the 
 aim of the school is to show that the pulse of rationality is 
 central, and constitutive in experience itself. The principle 
 of the school was first employed as an organ of destructive 
 criticism to expose the fundamental weakness of the current 
 empirical theory, its attempt to construct knowledge out of 
 abstract sensational data from which all inner rationality 
 had been excluded. 
 
 This is the whole burden of Green's insistence on rela- 
 tions in his criticism of Locke and Hume, and it is the 
 main charge which he has to bring against the later 
 representatives of the empirical school. Later on it be- 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 came the motive of a constructive effort, the watchword of 
 which has been that experience must be through and 
 through rational, and that the notion of reason must in the 
 last analysis be one under which the real may be conceived 
 as a unitary whole. The norm of reason the school finds 
 in the dialectical notion of Hegel, of which it makes first a 
 critical, then a constructive application. 
 
 In the foregoing survey we have not attempted to be 
 exhaustive of the important movements of recent thought,^ 
 but have simply aimed to trace those which seem most 
 characteristic of the time, and in which the leading motives 
 of the following discussions are to be found. Going back 
 now to the main point of departure in the historical survey, 
 the dialectic heart of Kantism in which the two moments 
 of experience and rationality were involved, we have seen 
 how the old issues have been re-opened by the alternate 
 emphasizing of the notions of experience and reason, and 
 how out of the divorce thus effected the schools of Neo- 
 empiricism and Neo-rationalism have sprung into existence 
 and developed. In the remainder of this introduction we 
 wish to indicate what to us seem the fundamental defects of 
 the new movements, in view of which a fresh effort toward 
 reconstruction seems necessary. The empirical movements 
 proceed as we have seen, on the notion of experience and 
 their aim simply expressed is to develop a theory of 
 knowledge from data supplied by experience. If the 
 question be asked whether this programme as thus stated 
 is open to legitimate criticism, I think the answer will have 
 to be in the negative. The strong point of empiricism, that 
 which has rendered it well nigh impregnable, like Antaeus 
 upon his native earth, is its dogged persistence in keeping its 
 stand upon and within experience. To us it is clear that ex- 
 perience must supply to philosophy its point of departure and 
 that the concept of experience must be its supreme category. 
 
 ^ It is only necessary in this connection to note that we have said little 
 of Schopenhauer and Lotze, not to speak of the important developments of 
 the Scottish School in English thought. 
 
14 FOUNDATIONS OP KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 If we are to find fault with empiricism at all, it must not 
 be for making experience its starting point, but rather for 
 its defective conception of the nature of experience. The 
 fundamental weakness of both Positivism and the Synthetic 
 Philosophy was found to arise out of the relation of these 
 systems to the ultra-phenomenal and transcendent, the one 
 meeting the whole issue with a bold and sweeping denial, 
 the other, while postulating an ultra-phenomenal reality, yet 
 boldly denying that it is in any sense knowable. Now the 
 structural defect out of which this denial arises is to be 
 found in the notion of experience with which those schools 
 set out. To neither is experience a term that is all- 
 inclusive but it is inclusive only of the phenomenal and 
 relative. Whether, now, we assume that there is no reality 
 beyond the phenomenal or not, we are at least unable to 
 dismiss the notions of the ultra-phenomenal and absolute 
 from consciousness, or to break their connection with the 
 concepts of the relative. To a notion of experience that is 
 inclusive of the phenomenal only, they constitute therefore 
 an outlying and disturbing factor. We cannot dismiss or 
 suppress the ultra-phenomenal and it cannot be included in 
 our notion of experience. Human thought is thus put into 
 a dilemma the painfulness of which is only intensified by 
 the further conclusion we are driven to, that inasmuch as all 
 the categories of knowledge are intra-experiential, therefore, 
 the spectre of the ultra-phenomenal can never be laid, but 
 must go on haunting us and troubling us with bad dreams 
 for ever. The difficulty here is to be escaped, I think, only 
 by reforming the notion of experience so as to make it all- 
 comprehensive. When this has been done the distinction 
 that before was ultra-experiential becomes internal, and the 
 ultra-phenomenal also becomes a term within experience. 
 It will be clear I think, that this solution not only relieves 
 the great strain of the situation, but it also sheds a hopeful 
 light on the problem of knowledge. In view of the altered 
 condition, and the fact that the distinction between the 
 phenomenal and the ultra-phenomenal, is internal to experi- 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 ence, no a priori reason is left for denying the possibility of 
 conceiving the whole content of experience, inclusive of the 
 ultra-phenomenon, under categories of knowledge. The 
 ground is thus taken away from the dogma of the 
 unknowability of the absolute, and the knowing activity is 
 left free to go its own way and discover its own limits, in 
 the course of the effort to know. If empiricism will admit 
 this fundamental reconstruction of data, then we are ready 
 to espouse its cause and fight out the issues of philosophy 
 on its platform. 
 
 The characteristic defect of the Neo-rationalistic School 
 is to be sought for at the opposite point of the compass. It 
 is a strong point of this school that it substantially accepts 
 the notion of experience as fundamental, and conceives the 
 pulse of rationality to constitute its internal movement. 
 In this we recognize a profound insight, and to the proposi- 
 tion that rationality is the inner heart of experience no 
 legitimate objection can be offered. The point of legitimate 
 criticism may be stated, I think, as follows. If the notion 
 of experience is to be taken as fundamental, then we ought 
 to find our point of departure and the categories of our 
 procedure in experience. It will be consistent with this 
 position to start with the hypothetical presumption that 
 experience must be rational, inasmuch as the concept of an 
 irrational experience is in the last analysis absurd ; but it is 
 not consistent with the position to approach experience with a 
 principle of raiionality that is, in effect, ready-made ; for in 
 that case we cannot he sure that owr principle vnll he in con- 
 formity with the inner nature of eocperience, and that our 
 application of it will not take the form of forcing experience 
 into conformity with our own presupposition. To be more 
 specific, the central moment of Hegelism is a pulse of un- 
 modified absoluteness, and to this is due the characteristic 
 defects of the system — its failure to realize a true point of 
 distinction between absolute and relative, and its failure to 
 ground mechanism as anything but unreal show or appear- 
 ance. Now, the fact that the initial impulse of the new 
 
16 FOUNDATIONS OP KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 school was not to first-hand investigation of experience, but 
 rather to the application to it of the central category of a 
 pre-existing system of thought, would lead us to expect that 
 in the systematic working out of its programme not only 
 would a certain degree of artificiality and maladaptation 
 arise in the application, but that the category itself, if it 
 had any characteristic defects, would tend to generate in the 
 new field of its activity the same species of difficulties which 
 had arisen in the old. If now we approach the work of 
 Green in criticism or that of Caird in the Theory of Eeligion, 
 we find the presumption everywhere to be that a moment of 
 rationality must be one of absoluteness, and the result is 
 that neither Green nor Caird is able to find any qualitative 
 difference between the thought-activity in its finite or rela- 
 tive and its absolute forms. The ingrained tendency in old 
 Hegelism to conceive reality under the notion of unmodified 
 absoluteness, and to reduce the finite and relative to mere 
 Schein, thus perpetuates itself in the new rationalism and 
 forms its most characteristic defect. 
 
 The above criticism is not meant to apply to all the 
 thinkers who may be loosely classed as Neo-rationalists of 
 the Hegelian type, for many of these may not be vulnerable 
 to its point, and I could name some who by virtue of the 
 infusion of new blood have largely outgrown the limits of 
 the old categories, but the stricture is directed rather to 
 the tendencies of the school as a whole. To press the 
 point of the same criticism from a somewhat different 
 angle, let us suppose that we have taken the notion of 
 experience as the fundamental category of our procedure, 
 and that we are convinced, whether from the study of 
 Hegel or from some other source, that experience must 
 be through and through rational. In this conviction we 
 have simply become conscious of the presupposition 
 of all science and philosophy, but we have not thereby 
 determined, a priori, what the form of rationality shall be in 
 experience. The determination of that question involves 
 the entire endeavour of science and philosophy combined. 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 The thinker of the Hegelian type is liable, however, to 
 forget the distinction, and to approach the investigation of 
 experience not only v^ith a postulate of rationality, which is 
 indispensable, but with a pre- determined notion of the form 
 which the rationality of experience must necessarily take. 
 His principle is thus liable to become a procrustean bed 
 upon which experience is to be tortured into the prescribed 
 shape. On the contrary, we claim that experience has the 
 prior right, and that the investigation must in a large sense 
 develop the form of rationality out of the process of investi- 
 gation. And one great advantage that we are prepared to 
 claim for this way, over all others, is the fact that it leaves 
 us open-minded to accept whatever we may find to be 
 demonstrable either on the basis of intuition or rational 
 necessity. Whatever elements of Hegelism may survive in 
 a theory of the world that is developed on such a method 
 will be found to be congruous with a rational scheme of 
 experience. 
 
 To the objection that in order to conceive the absolute 
 the organ of thought must be in the last analysis absolute, 
 the answer is that it is not necessary for consciousness to 
 achieve unmodified absoluteness in order to be able to think 
 the absolute. The moment of passivity and consequent 
 relativity is ever present as a modifying term in conscious- 
 ness, and we can never reach a point where we realize our 
 own agency as absolute. But the moment of absoluteness is 
 internal to our consciousness in the pulse of self-activity, 
 which is never able fully to realize itself. We think the 
 absolute when we think away the passive limit from this 
 moment of self-activity, and we think the necessity of the 
 absolute when we reach a point where it becomes clear to 
 us that the rationality of the finite and relative have their 
 last grounds in an experience that is absolute. The state- 
 ment that the thought of the absolute is achieved by think- 
 ing away the modifications of the finite and relative, and the 
 statement that in conceiving the absolute, consciousness must 
 become absolute, so that its activity will be that of the 
 
18 rOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 absolute thinker itself, are two materially different proposi- 
 tions which are not reducible to a common basis. The first 
 statement involves the principle of the following discussions, 
 a principle the elaboration of which will, as I think, render 
 it intelligible how a finite consciousness may relate itself to 
 the absolute without breaking the molds of its finitude. 
 In order to intelligibly conceive the absolute, and, therefore, 
 to come into spiritual relations with it, we need only employ 
 the resources which are involved in our experience as finite 
 agents, while in order to become identical with the absolute, 
 or to achieve unmodified absoluteness, it would be necessary 
 for us to realize the stand-point of an absolute whole of 
 experience, which is impossible. 
 
 In the first paragraph of this introduction the relation of 
 the doctrine of evolution to the problem of knowledge was 
 referred to, and further on we saw how the categories of 
 evolution, race experience, and heredity had rendered an 
 enlarged and more effective development of empiricism 
 possible. At this point, the question we have to ask is 
 whether, after all, the notion of evolution renders necessary 
 any serious modification of our conceptions of the funda- 
 mental relations of knowledge. It is true, of course, that 
 the psychologist has his whole problem profoundly modified 
 by the notion of evolution and this mainly because to the 
 psychologist the history of the content which he finds in 
 consciousness is vital, and evolution profoundly modifies 
 the categories of history. We may also admit that through 
 its bearing on psychology, evolution has an important in- 
 direct bearing on epistemology inasmuch as the epistemo- 
 logical material is for the most part psychological, but in 
 spite of this when the question is put with respect to the 
 fundamental conditions and relations of knowledge, I think 
 the answer will have to be in the negative. In the first 
 place, while the theory of mental development enables us to 
 reach a more adequate doctrine of self it does not affect the 
 fundamental relation that exists between the knowing sub- 
 ject and its objective content. Again, although the theory 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 of development enables us to trace the genesis of such 
 categories as space, time, and cause in the growing con- 
 sciousness, it does not affect the final form of these categories 
 or the relation they bear to the cognitive process. In short, 
 there is no fundamental condition or relation of knowledge 
 that is materially affected by the notion of evolution, but 
 these conditions and relations remain relatively stable 
 through the flux of change in which development works out 
 its results. From a deeper metaphysical point of view it is 
 the concept of evolution itself that must submit to the 
 determinations of knowledge, for it will be found that in so 
 far as it becomes epistemologically necessary to ground 
 relative processes in an absolute experience just so far will 
 it become necessary also to connect the evolutionary aspect 
 of the world itself with a ground reality that is stable and 
 involves the flux of change only as transcending and in- 
 cluding it. 
 
 Great, therefore, as has been the role which evolution 
 has played in moulding the scientific conceptions of the 
 time it cannot be said with truth that it has seriously 
 affected the fundamental problems of knowledge. The con- 
 ditions of knowledge and its relation to experience remain 
 substantially as they have been since the time of the Greeks, 
 and as they always will be tUl some radical change is 
 effected in the knowing activities themselves. This is not 
 likely to happen, least of all through any possible extension 
 of the concept of evolution. The conditions of the epis- 
 temological enterprise are more stable, then, than are those 
 of psychology or any directly historical science. The most 
 pressing demand for epistemological reconstruction does not 
 spring from the modifying influence of the theory of evolu- 
 tion or from any other extraneous source but primarily and 
 fundamentally from the inadequacy of the basal concepts of 
 epistemology itself. A theory of knowledge must be solidly 
 experiental, while at the same time it avoids the pitfalls of 
 traditional empiricism. It must also make its final appeal 
 to the principle of rationality while avoiding the mistakes 
 
20 FOUNDATIONS OP KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 of traditional rationalism and its one-sided emphasis of the 
 relations of pure thinking. The student of knowledge needs 
 in this respect to learn the lesson of Schopenhauer that 
 there is a moment of wiU in all knowledge, and he cannot 
 afford to scorn the mystics who will teach him that feeling 
 also enters into the heart of rationality. And he will have 
 learned his whole lesson if he realizes the fact that the 
 highest principle of the real in experience is that of the 
 ultimate unity of the true and good. 
 
PART I. 
 
 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 
 
 One of the most unsatisfactory features of modern Philo- 
 sophy has been its tendency to oscillate between two very 
 different modes of conceiving experience ; the one relatively 
 profound and satisfactory, the other to a great degree 
 superficial and inadequate. In the profounder conception, 
 experience represents that kind or activity of consciousness 
 in which the real is supposed to be most immediately and 
 surely apprehended ; while according to the more superficial 
 but widely current view, it stands for a species of custom or 
 sense of uniformity bred of the constantly recurring factors 
 of our conscious life. Now, it has been the misfortune of 
 our modern thinking that the question of the relation of 
 Philosophy to experience has been treated almost invariably 
 on the avowed or tacit assumption of the truth of the 
 superficial view of the nature of experience. To such an 
 extent has this assumption been carried, that, with the 
 majority, the possibility of any other conception has almost 
 ceased to be believed in, and the thinker who is constrained 
 to espouse the profounder view is apt to imagine, like Elijah 
 the Tishbite, that the company he is in is very small and 
 select. Nevertheless, I am disposed to think that appear- 
 ances here are largely deceptive, and that throughout 
 the history of thought there has been present a, for the 
 most part, unacknowledged allegiance to a deeper and truer 
 
 23 
 
24 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 idea of experience. The fact that it has been unacknow- 
 ledged, and to a great degree unrecognized by thinkers 
 themselves, has been a fruitful source of confusion, and is 
 largely responsible for the fact that so many of the leaders 
 of thought have been so chary about admitting the vital 
 relation of knowledge to experience. This has worked 
 harm to Philosophy in various ways; first in giving to 
 sensationalism an apparent monopoly of experience and 
 the prestige which this carries with the public; and what 
 is even worse, breeding in the minds of many profound 
 thinkers the suspicion that experience is too shallow and 
 misleading to have anything of value to say to Philosophy. 
 All this is, of course, deplorable, and is partly responsible 
 for the disrepute into which Philosophy has fallen, not alone 
 with the learned, but also with the intelligent public. For 
 outside of the circles of specialists, and in the common 
 beliefs of men, there is a very close connection between 
 experience and reality, and experience is commonly accepted 
 as a final court of appeal, before which that which asks our 
 belief or allegiance is to have its claims finally adjudicated. 
 Here is an instance, I take it, where the old scripture has 
 been fulfilled, and the truth, hidden from the wise and 
 prudent, has been revealed to babes and sucklings, or at 
 least to those who are comparatively innocent of logical and 
 metaphysical reflection. Philosophy, however, has its remedy 
 at hand, and that is simply an explicit recognition of the 
 deeper conviction on which it has proceeded from the 
 beginning. It has only to free itself from the unconscious 
 dialectic between inconsistent conceptions of experience, of 
 which it has been the victim, and to recognize and proclaim 
 its dependence on experience truly and profoundly conceived, 
 in order to make itself four-square with the intelligent public 
 who are interested in its problems, as well as bring itself 
 into the best attitude for the discovery of truth. If we 
 recognize the fact that in the profounder usage of Philo- 
 sophy experience stands for the mode or organ through 
 which the truth is most directly and surely apprehended. 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 25 
 
 a historical inquiry into the place of experience in Philosophy 
 becomes a search for the most vital principles of the various 
 systems. From this point of view it at once becomes obvious 
 that the conceptions of the nature of experience have been 
 as varied as the systems in which they have arisen, and 
 that they supply data for a really profound classification 
 of the results of thinking. In the first place, to confine 
 our view to modern thought, systems have divided on the 
 question as to what elements in consciousness are the 
 sources of a real experience of truth. To be more explicit, 
 they have split on the question whether sensible repre- 
 sentation or rational conception is to be taken as the 
 organ of truth and reality. The dogma of sensationalism 
 is that sensation and experience are identical, and that 
 sensible representation constitutes the only realizing activity 
 of consciousness. Thinking has no initiative therefore 
 in knowledge, and its function is purely abstractive and 
 elaborative. However much sensationalism may vary in 
 the hands of different members of the school, it is self- 
 consistent throughout in its adherence to its central 
 dogma — its insistence on the sensory character of all real 
 experience. 
 
 Historically, the theory opposed to sensationalism has been 
 known as Eationalism, on the ground that it has sought the 
 principle of true experience, and the realizing activity of 
 consciousness, therefore, in the rational function of thinking 
 or conceiving. The real is that which is concerned in the 
 activity of thought, the truth is not given in sensory 
 processes, but is the object that is envisaged in clear 
 thought. Eationalism does not deny all value to sensation 
 but it declines to allow that it is a real mode of experience. 
 Thinking alone gives truth, and sensation has value only as 
 a confused kind of thinking. We have only to study the 
 systems of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz in order to 
 verify the truth of these representations, and to see, more- 
 over, that rationalism, in all its changes of form, remains 
 true to its central dogma. Thought is the only organ of 
 
26 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. pabt i. 
 
 reality, while to the sensory processes are ascribed only 
 subordinate and derivative value. 
 
 Now while it is true that as respects method the term 
 empirical has been appropriated by sensationalism, and the 
 rationalists have been charged, with how much justice 
 I do not pretend to say here, with ignoring experience, yet 
 we must not allow this to blind us to the more important 
 and significant fact that from the profounder point of view, 
 which we are advocating here, rationalism as truly as 
 sensationalism is a theory of the true nature of experience. 
 A rationalist does not admit that real experience can be 
 given in sensation. True experience, he claims, as well as 
 knowledge, is in the last analysis the prerogative of thought. 
 The fault of rationalism is not its neglect of experience in 
 the large sense, but its neglect of the senses. In the life- 
 history of developing creatures like ourselves, it is obvious 
 that sense bears an initial part in the experience processes. 
 Its neglect will surely, therefore, smite the system guilty of 
 it with leanness and emptiness. This has been the fate of 
 rationalism in the past. But it must not be forgotten that 
 sensationalism has also been called on to suffer for its sins. 
 For its denial of thinking, its reduction of it to a merely 
 abstractive and elaborative function, it has been smitten with 
 blindness in the region of higher truth, the logical result of 
 which is scepticism. The judgment of history is that 
 neither sensationalism nor rationalism, in their traditional 
 forms at least, are able to satisfy the true demands of 
 Philosophy. 
 
 But the distinction between sensationalism and rational- 
 ism is not exhaustive of the tendency to vary in modern 
 doctrines of experience. There is another and wholly 
 different line of cleavage which coincides with the distinc- 
 tion between immediate and mediate processes in conscious- 
 ness. This gives rise to the two opposing conceptions of 
 experience as being identical with mediacy or immediacy in 
 consciousness. (1) Theories of Immediacy rest on the 
 assumption that in the immediate activities of conscious- 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OP EXPERIENCE. 27 
 
 ness, inasmuch as they do not, it is supposed, involve the 
 distinction of subject and object, there is a real identity of 
 knower and known, or of thought and its object. Experience 
 is identified with this function of immediacy, in which the 
 object is one with the activity in which it is apprehended 
 and is thus the reality itself. It is the characteristic 
 tendency of these theories to deny the reality of the mediate 
 activities, or at least to assign them a very subordinate part 
 in the apprehension of truth. All true experience and 
 knowledge arise, they urge, in an activity in which the 
 distinction of subject and object are merged in identity. 
 
 There are two species of this immediacy — that of feeling 
 and that of intellect. The former is the principle of mysti- 
 cism which in all its forms — and they are legion — maintains 
 as its central dogma that truth is not apprehensible by 
 processes of intellection, but must be attained, if at all, 
 through the immediate touch or reaction of feeling. Truth is 
 therefore to be grasped primarily, not in intelligible forms, 
 but rather in an act of appreciation, whose content can only 
 be vaguely symbolized. The primal voice of experience is : I 
 have felt : whereas the intellectual categories by means of 
 which this content of feeling is reduced to intelligibility are 
 secondary and unessential. One has only to read the 
 characteristic products of mysticism from Dionysius to 
 Eec^gac in order to be convinced that the organ of mystic 
 knowledge is the immediacy of the feeling consciousness. 
 On the other hand, if the immediacy of intellect be taken 
 instead of feeling as the real organ of truth, we are in 
 presence of the Platonic form of idealism and of certain 
 types of modern intuitionism. To the Platonist, feeling is 
 present as a motive and an atmosphere, so that the idea is 
 not far from the mystical intuition, but the organ that 
 apprehends is not feeling but reason, in an act of immediate 
 contemplation. The idea which is truth in its essence 
 reveals itself to, and in this activity of reason. It is 
 characteristic of Platonism at the same time to assert that 
 rational intuition is the organ of truth, and to assign to the 
 
28 GROUND CONCEPTS OP KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 discursive activity of thought a function that is not only 
 subordinate, but also preliminary to the real act of 
 knowledge. To neither feeling nor discursive reason does 
 truth reveal herself. She sanctifies herself as a vestal 
 virgin for the supreme moment when reason shall discover 
 her with immediate vision. The most dominant school of 
 modern intuitionism, the so-called Scottish, asserts this 
 intellectual immediacy in a form materially different from 
 that of Platonism. Here immediate vision is not affirmed, 
 but rather the immediate authority of certain principles or 
 deliverances of reason. Scottish intuitionism represents, 
 therefore, an immediate faith of reason, its confidence that 
 those convictions which are fundamental to its life, those 
 categories which are essential to the structure of its know- 
 ledge, are also true.' While, therefore, Platonism asserts 
 the truth of the immediate insights of reason, Scottish intui- 
 tionism maintains the validity of its immediate faiths. In 
 opposition to these theories of immediacy stand those 
 systems in which the recognized organ of truth is some 
 form of ratiocination. The advocates of mediacy, in the 
 midst of almost infinite variations of opinion in other 
 respects, are perfectly unanimous in their denial of the 
 adequacy of immediacy whether of reason or feeling, and in 
 their insistence on the dogma that truth and reality yield 
 themselves only to processes which are logical and reflective. 
 The adherents of this doctrine split into two distinct, and, 
 for the most part, irreconcilable camps, according as the 
 logical understanding or the higher speculative reason is 
 regarded as the organ of truth. The first class, which we 
 shall call the Dialecticians, occupy substantially the ground 
 of the Eationalists of the eighteenth century and the 
 Positivists of the present, maintaining with them that the 
 categories of the logical understanding, as space, time, and 
 cause in the ordinary sense, are the only modes we have 
 
 ' The classic statement of this position will be found in the works of 
 James M'Cosh : particularly in The Intuitions of the Mind and First and 
 fundamental Truths. 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 29 
 
 of discovering truth. They agree with Hume and the 
 letter of Kant, in rejecting metaphysics as illusory, and with 
 Comte in restricting our knowledge of nature to its aspects 
 of phenomenon and change. They are, however, true 
 rationalists in their repudiation of mysticism , and intui- 
 tionism, as well as in their unfaltering belief that no truth 
 is discoverable except through the activities of the human 
 understanding. 
 
 Standing out in the strongest antagonism to the Dialec- 
 ticians is a group of thinkers who may fitly be called 
 Ontologists, inasmuch as they regard the higher or 
 speculative reason as the organ, and, in fact, the sole organ, 
 of absolute truth and reality. Of this group the most 
 conspicuous, as well as typical, representative is Hegel. In 
 Hegelism we find the exclusive validity of the higher 
 ratiocination, as we may call it, asserted in connection with 
 the repudiation of all forms of immediacy. Hegel's objec- 
 tion to Sehelling's Absolute as being shot out of a pistol is 
 characteristic of his whole mode of thinking. To Hegel 
 and the typical Hegelian nothing is true or real until it has 
 been deduced. In fact, this process of deduction or 
 dialectic is itself the essence of reality. The mediacy of 
 truth and reality is involved in the constitution of the 
 notion which stands as the dialectic centre of all being. 
 The real is never merely present to or in consciousness, but 
 it must realize itself there by the threefold activity of the 
 notion. This notion is the form of refiection. Truth and 
 reality can be got at, therefore, only through mediate and 
 reflective channels. The position is ontological in the sense 
 that the notion does not simply reveal the real to conscious- 
 ness, but that in its threefold activity it becomes the real 
 and the only real itself. In this cardinal sense, Hegelism 
 asserts the identity of thought and being. 
 
 If we remember the distinction with which this dis- 
 cussion set out, between the profounder and the more 
 superficial conceptions of experience, it will be clear, I 
 think, that the systems of thought we have been following. 
 
30 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 in their efforts to determine the principle of truth and 
 reality, have also been formulating, though not always, 
 perhaps, with conscious purpose, what they conceive to be 
 the organ of real experience in consciousness. Confining 
 our attention to this profounder sense of the term, it will 
 hardly be disputed that Philosophy must be, if not empirical, 
 which may be a very different matter, at least experiential 
 in the sense that its great business is to apprehend and 
 make intelligible the content of experience. For the guid- 
 ance of Philosophy it becomes, then, a very vital matter to 
 determine with some definiteness what is involved in the 
 notion of experience, and in what way it stands related to 
 the content and methods of Philosophy. The need, in 
 other words, of a critique of the notion of experience is a 
 pressing one, not only in view of the vital relation it bears 
 to the pursuit of truth and reality in general, but also in 
 view of the unfortunate ambiguity in the use or misuse of 
 the term which our historical sketch has revealed. In all 
 the interminable controversies between empiricists and their 
 opponents it has very seldom occurred to anyone that the 
 notion of experience itself is in sore need of critical deter- 
 mination. Even Kant, the author of the critical method, 
 accepted uncritically the notion of experience that had 
 prevailed in the school of Locke and Hume. That this was 
 deplorable wUl be apparent to anyone who attempts to read 
 Kantism in the light of any large and profound conception 
 of experience, we may well ask what Kantism would have 
 become had Kant prefaced his critical activity with a 
 real critique of experience. 
 
 A more recent instance of the need I speak of is to 
 be found in one of the most notable contributions to 
 contemporary metaphysics, P. H. Bradley's treatise on 
 Appearance and Reality. In this work the importance of 
 experience is duly appreciated, and it is evident that the 
 author has no superficial conception of its nature in his 
 mind. But we do not find in his discussion any more than 
 we find in Kant's, a serious effort to reach a critical definition 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 31 
 
 of experience. True, Bradley in one place identifies experi- 
 ence and reality. But, again, he reduces reality to 
 sensation. He also identifies the real with the absolute, 
 and conceives that in the absolute all finite relations and 
 distinctions disappear. If, then, the real is at the same 
 time experience, sensation and the absolute in which all 
 finite distinction lapses, do we not, in effect, reduce ex- 
 perience, in the last analysis, to the immediacy, not of 
 reason, in which, as Hegel teaches us, distinctions are 
 conserved, but of feeling, in which with the lapse of 
 distinction all intelligibility is lost ? That Bradley means 
 to reach a final term in his philosophy in which intelligi- 
 bility will be conserved, is evident from the fact that he 
 uses his best endeavour to rescue his absolute from the pit 
 of the unintelligible. But he has no resource here but a 
 dint of assertion that becomes almost tiresome. Bradley is 
 not a mystic, but he is virtually preaching a mysticism 
 which the majority of mystics would repudiate, when he 
 identifies experience, which he regards as reality itself, with 
 an absolute in which it is completely lost to intelligibility. 
 Would Mr. Bradley, after denying all intelligible modes of 
 conceiving the absolute, still be willing to admit that the 
 absolute may be brought into appreciable relations by 
 means of symbols ? If so, we may hand him over without 
 compunction to the tender mercies of the mystic. 
 
 What is needed obviously is such an analysis of ex- 
 perience as will reduce it, in a measure, to a definite 
 conception, in view of which its relation to knowledge 
 and reality may be determined. To make a preliminary 
 step in this direction, and in the light of the conception 
 reached, to essay the treatment of some of the vexed 
 questions in epistemology and metaphysics is the sole 
 motive of the present somewhat long-winded discussion. 
 
 One of the things so obvious as to be universally over- 
 looked in the discussions of Philosophy, is the distinction 
 that is to be made between what is presupposed only, and 
 what is actually apprehended in consciousness. Distinctions 
 
32 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 may and no doubt do lapse from apprehension, which still 
 survive as conditions of conscious activity. And we do 
 not make a materially different assertion when we say that 
 consciousness may involve presuppositions which it has 
 never taken up in an act of apprehension. In short, m 
 order to perform its functions it is not necessary that 
 consciousness should clearly conceive, or have at any 
 time conceived, all the distinctions that are implied in 
 its activity. In fact it seems to be universally true, that 
 no consciousness is able to criticise its own activity from the 
 level of that activity itself. The function of criticism 
 which involves an awareness of latent distinctions, is only 
 possible from a higher level of consciousness. Professor 
 James has warned us against the psychologist's fallacy 
 which is committed by reading a high-level consciousness 
 into a consciousness of a lower level that is being investi- 
 gated, and the warning is worth heeding. But there is a 
 sense in which the distinction involved in the psychologist's 
 fallacy becomes the metaphysician's guide. When the problem 
 is not the genetic one as to what the low-level conscious- 
 ness is aware of, but rather what distinctions must be 
 presupposed as latent in the low-level consciousness before 
 it can be conceived as performing its functions, then the 
 business is a critical one, and can be transacted only by the 
 high-level consciousness from its own point of view. To be 
 explicit, the metaphysical question is rendered answerable 
 only as the high-level consciousness translates some of its 
 own consciously apprehended distinctions into terms of 
 latency in the low-level consciousness. Now, I am unable 
 to conceive how any consciousness at all would be possible 
 in a medium where all distinctions have lapsed. To be 
 more explicit, it seems to me that where the distinction 
 between the conscious activity and that of which it is aware, 
 however dimly, is supposed not to exist either in some appre- 
 hended form or at least latently, so that it will be effective, 
 though itself in the sub-conscious region; there consciousness 
 itself must be supposed to have lapsed. In short, for the very 
 
CHAP. 1. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 33 
 
 existence of consciousness some duality must be presupposed 
 corresponding in some vague and rudimentary way at least, 
 to the distinction between self and its object in the high- 
 level consciousness of the adult. In dealing with this 
 issue, it is important, it seems to me, that two questions 
 which are often confused should be distinguished : (1) Is 
 it necessary to suppose at the basis of consciousness as such, 
 some distinction analogous to that which differentiates the 
 self from its object ? (2) What is the minimum of 
 distinction that must be presupposed ? The reason for an 
 affirmative answer to the first question has already been 
 given in substance. Without the presupposition of some 
 kind of duality, the very notion of consciousness loses its 
 intelligibility. Foi' consciousness is awareness of somewhat, 
 whether that somewhat be defined as object or not. If we 
 are not prepared to admit an ultimate duality of the real, 
 and that is a different question, we must admit, I think, 
 that consciousness involves duality whether this be con- 
 ceived as internal or external to it. The subject knower 
 will have its other which may be its own content, and this 
 may be ever so obscurely apprehended, but by virtue of there 
 being a consciousness there will be another, and this other 
 will effect somewhat, either as explicit object or as latent 
 condition of conscious activity. But the admission of this 
 does not commit us to the doctrine of a full-fledged subject 
 and object in consciousness, as a necessary condition of its 
 activity, or in fact to any subject and object in the strict sense 
 of these terms. We commit the psychologist's fallacy in 
 a flagrant form when we suppose that consciousness 
 must be fully aware of its own duality in order to get on. 
 All that the most pronounced metaphysics of consciousness 
 needs to insist on at this point, is that in its most 
 rudimentary states some duality is involved out of which 
 the full-fledged distinction of subject and object gradually 
 emerges. The stages of a developing consciousness, pre- 
 supposing this duality of constitution, might be represented 
 as follows : 
 
 c 
 
34 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 Pirst and simplest, the so-called immediacy of sensation. 
 If consciousness at this stage could be reduced to the form 
 of an abstract and isolated pleasure-pain feeling, devoid of 
 latent elements of representation or relation, there would be 
 some plausibility in the supposition that here we have a 
 form of consciousness in which no duality is implied. But 
 it will be admitted, I think, that the existence of such a 
 form of consciousness is purely hypothetical.. It has never 
 been hit upon in any experience or observation, and it has 
 against it the fact that as Professor Dewey phrases 
 it, " the simplest possible consciousness always shows 
 itself to reflection to possess the threefold phases," that is, 
 to be discriminative and purposive as well as pleasant- 
 painful. The hypothesis that the primitive consciousness 
 is pure pleasure-pain seems to carry with it the conclusion 
 that consciousness is in the beginning abstract rather 
 than concrete. But it is not possible to conceive conscious- 
 ness as arising anywhere otherwise than in connection with 
 the reactions of some organism upon the stimulations of its 
 environment, and it is inconceivable that these reactions 
 should be absolutely pleasant or painful without any other 
 characteristics. As plausible would it be to suppose that 
 representation could exist absolutely devoid of feeling, a 
 hypothesis which no one has the hardihood to maintain. 
 Conceding, however, for the sake of the argument that such 
 a form of consciousness could exist, it is still open to doubt 
 whether even a pure pleasure-pain experience would as a 
 matter of fact be wholly free from dual implications. The 
 low-level consciousness, by hypothesis, is simply a feeling or 
 plurality of feelings, of pleasure and pain. This would not, 
 however, entitle the high-level consciousness to say that 
 there is nothing implicit in that pleasure-pain experience 
 that does not appear on the surface. If we connect the 
 psychological with its biological conditions and assume that 
 every psychosis is, biologically speaking, an organic function, 
 then just as in the biological sphere all activities are to be 
 construed, not as blind and aimless reactions, but as acts of 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OP EXPERIENCE. 35 
 
 organic conservation, so in the psychological field every 
 psychosis or conscious act, even the simplest, must be re- 
 garded as not blind and aimless but as related to the life of 
 a psychic organism. In other words, the simplest activity 
 of consciousness will not be mere pleasure-pain feeling 
 without any other character, but it will also be related to 
 the life of the organism. Now a conscious act of self- 
 conservation cannot be wholly devoid of internal character. 
 The character and aim of a pure biosis, if the term may be 
 allowed, may be external to it, but in the nature of the case 
 this cannot be true of a conscious function. It is of the 
 nature of an act of consciousness that it cannot be con- 
 ceived apart from some degree of self-awareness. And if 
 every psychosis, even the simplest, is a self-conserving act, 
 this character cannot be purely external to it, but if it has 
 any sense of itself at all, it must sense itself as self- 
 conserving. This will be its internal character. 
 
 It is not so clear that every psychosis has wrapped up in 
 its internal character the germ of an objective or other- 
 reference. But recourse to biological analogies will help us 
 again at this point. The self-conservation of the organism 
 is secured through adaptation or accommodation to some 
 environment. Accommodation is a means to a more ulti- 
 mate act, that of assimilation. Through accommodation to 
 its environment the organism grows by the assimilation of 
 nutritive elements. Here, again, it will be obvious, I think, 
 that while to the biosis the motive and end of this adaptive 
 process may be wholly external, yet this cannot be true of a 
 psychosis even in its lowest form. Take, for instance, the 
 maternal instinct of birds. It would, of course, be folly to 
 ascribe to the mother-bird, in building her nest at a certain 
 season, in laying her eggs and sitting on them till they are 
 hatched, any of the remote considerations that influence 
 human parents in like circumstances. We may, in fact, 
 suppose that the whole sphere of ultimate aims and motives 
 is hidden from the mother-bird and with it the rationality 
 of her own conduct. But this does not by any means 
 
36 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 reduce her conduct as she is able to compass it, to the 
 categories of blindness and aimlessness. In the very nature 
 of the case our reasoning here must be largely hypothetical, 
 but I think most people who know something about birds, 
 will agree with me in thinking that a sufficiently exhaustive 
 analysis of the mother-bird's experience would bring out the 
 fact that her conduct is not blind or aimless but that in 
 every detail of it it is informed and motived by conscious 
 reaction upon definite stimuli. By this I mean that within 
 the comparatively narrow limits of the bird's conscious life 
 the same kind of conditions exist and the same kind of 
 relations prevail as are found in the larger horizon of the 
 human consciousness. The difference will be found to con- 
 sist in the indefinitely greater scope and complexity of 
 human conduct while the essential relations are the same 
 in both cases. Doubtless the mother-bird is untroubled by 
 remote considerations, but within her narrower horizon her 
 conduct has its motive in the satisfaction of some conscious 
 need and her reactions upon her surroundings are informed 
 through and through with selective intelligence and purpose. 
 The bird knows very well what she is doing even though 
 she might fail to pass a satisfactory examination on the 
 ultimate rationality of her conduct. To go straight to the 
 logical conclusion then, it seems that from the nature of 
 consciousness we have a right to conclude that its simplest 
 acts are not without internal character and that this internal 
 character includes some germ of self-reference as well as 
 some rudimentary form of reference to an object. 
 
 This conclusion may lay us open to the suspicion of 
 anthropomorphism, and we may even be charged with the 
 psychologist's fallacy. Our answer will be partly one of 
 confession and avoidance. The low-level consciousness 
 must be judged, if at all, from the stand-point of the high- 
 level consciousness, and it is possible to be so sedulous in 
 avoiding anthropomorphism as to lose all insight into the 
 workings of minds lower than our own. Besides the 
 determination of the internal character of any psychosis is 
 
OHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 37 
 
 not a purely psychological enterprise ; on the contrary it is 
 largely metaphysical. Moreover, the metaphysician must 
 not stand in too much awe of the psychologist at this 
 point, for while the legitimate psychological inquiry here is 
 genetic and is concerned with the history of the psychosis, 
 the question under investigation is metaphysical and con- 
 cerns the internal character of the psychosis. When the 
 question is what internal structure is indispensable to any 
 psychosis, the high-level consciousness supplies the true 
 stand-point of debate, and the metaphysician has the right of 
 way. But further than this, if we distinguish between 
 absolute and relative simplicity, it will be found that the 
 ascription of absolute homogeneity of internal character to 
 the simplest possible psychosis is unwarranted. To genetic 
 Psychology it may have some value as a hypothetical 
 starting point, provided it be regarded like the corresponding 
 conception of absolute homogeneity in general evolution, as 
 a pure fiction. But just as it is possible to prove the 
 absurdity of postulating absolute homogeneity of any state of 
 matter that can be conceived as actual, so the supposition of 
 an absolutely homogeneous consciousness, if we attempt to 
 conceive it as real in any given case, will prove to be self- 
 contradictory. The most that can be affirmed of any 
 conceivable psychosis is relative simpKcity of internal 
 character which does not involve the denial of internal 
 distinctions but rather their reduction to the lowest terms 
 consistent with the survival of consciousness. 
 
 The simplicity of the lowest consciousness cannot be 
 taken, therefore, as absolute, but only as relative. Conscious- 
 ness in all its forms must be conceived in terms such as will 
 be consistent with the presence of those internal distinctions 
 necessary to its existence and development. The basal dis- 
 tinction, of this character, is no doubt that which inevitably 
 arises, between the feeling of self-conservation and that of 
 selective adaptation to some rudimentary other — and which 
 as we have contended, is internal to every form of psychosis. 
 This distinction may be regarded then as a ground-category 
 
38 GROUND CONCEPTS 01" KNOWLEDGE. pabt i. 
 
 of consciousness without which, in some rudimentary form, 
 no single psychosis could exist. 
 
 To return then to the point with which this discussion 
 set out, the immediacy of the sensory stage of consciousness 
 is to be construed in relative rather than in absolute terms. 
 It is to be so conceived as to be consistent with that 
 structural duality which in the high-level consciousness 
 becomes the developed distinction between self and not-self. 
 At the same time it is not to be overlooked that in putting 
 this construction on the primitive consciousness, the dis- 
 tinction must be thought of as at its lowest terms. To 
 recall at this point the important distinction made by James 
 and Bradley between knowing things and knowing about 
 them, it would be absurd, no doubt, to suppose that the 
 primitive consciousness knows anything about the duality of 
 its constitution, yet that it knows it in some sense appears 
 in the activity of the young partridge when it pursues and 
 captures its food on the instant of emerging from its shelL 
 Such intellection is possible to a very low-level conscious- 
 ness, and may exist in a very rudimentary form. 
 
 The simplest stage of consciousness may then be charac- 
 terized as one of relative immediacy, a stage in which 
 conscious activity is unhampered by complexity and un- 
 mediated by reflection or the desire to know ahout itself, a 
 stage in which stimulations call forth immediate responses, 
 and in which volitions, so far as they exist, are without 
 deliberation. That consciousness in this stage is dominantly 
 subjective, as many suppose, is, I think, open to serious 
 dispute. A consciousness in this stage would be primarily 
 aware, it seems to me, of stimulations, while its own reactions 
 would arouse a secondary feeling of self. The fore- 
 ground would thus be occupied by what we may call the 
 object-consciousness, and the first experience would be 
 of an objective character. What, in the first instance, 
 would chiefly engross it would be stimulations, and not 
 subjective satisfactions. These latter, while they would 
 without doubt, constitute factors in the play of conscious- 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OP EXPERIENCE. 39 
 
 ness as a whole, would not exercise the function of 
 initiative but would find themselves assigned to a secondary 
 role. It is only a question here to which factor in conscious- 
 ness shall be assigned the major part, the consciousness of 
 the stimulations themselves or the feelings which prompt 
 the search for more stimulations. When the question is so 
 stated the primacy of the objective consciousness, in this 
 stage, becomes clear since it is obvious that the attention 
 of an unreflecting consciousness following the order of 
 arousal, will become primarily absorbed in the stimulations 
 and only secondarily in their subjective reactions. 
 
 The second well-marked stage of consciousness is that in 
 which the simplicity of action is mediated by complexity of 
 structure, and, as a partial result of this, by reflection. 
 That thought does not accompany the simple structures is 
 well known. The mechanism for the transmission of stimu- 
 lation and response must become so complicated and the 
 paths of association so intricate as to require the of&ce of a 
 mediator in order to relieve the stress and interference 
 which inevitably arise. Only then will the conditions of 
 reflection and thought be present. It is a law of mental 
 growth that the higher forms of consciousness do not come 
 into active play until they are needed as agents in the 
 economy of adaptation. For this reason reflection must be 
 regarded as absent from the lowest level of consciousness, 
 and its appearance must be taken to mark a distinctive step 
 in mental evolution. The duality of consciousness in this 
 stage is not, of course, open to dispute, for it is that of the 
 ordinary human consciousness, in which many things implicit 
 in the lower consciousness have become explicit. Not only 
 do distinctions of self and not self, subject and object, rise 
 into explicitness, but reflection begins to play upon them, 
 and knowledge of them is supplemented by knowledge about 
 them. Consciousness in this stage makes an object of these 
 distinctions, and conceives reflectively the relation between 
 itself and the things it apprehends. 
 
 The highest conceivable stage of consciousness is that of the 
 
40 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part :. 
 
 so-called higher immediacy, in which, as the adherents of the 
 Hegelian school generally assert, the dualism of self and other 
 is transcended in the identity of consciousness with its object. 
 Now, if we characterize the lower immediacy as the stage 
 of dominantly objective consciousness, and the middle stage 
 of ordinary human adult consciousness as that of the co- 
 ordination of subject and object, it might seem to follow 
 logically that in the higher immediacy we reach a stage in 
 which this dualism lapses in the conscious identity of the 
 two terms. But just as we have seen that the simplicity of 
 the lowest stage cannot be taken as absolute, but as merely 
 relative, so in the highest stage we will find, I think, that 
 the same qualification will be needed. To conceive the 
 higher immediacy as involving the lapse of all internal rela- 
 tion will be found tantamount to reducing the highest con- 
 sciousness to pure unintelligibility. It is possible to say 
 something in favour of a doctrine of ultimate reality in 
 which by transcending internal relations and distinctions it 
 leaves consciousness behind. The unthinkability of such a 
 real involves no necessary contradiction. But to identify 
 the highest reality with consciousness, and to conceive it at 
 the same time as transcending distinction and relation is to 
 involve oneself in a subtle contradiction of the first water. 
 This will become apparent if we try to think conscious 
 activity that is wholly devoid of internal structure. If this 
 devoidance be conceived as absolute we have on our hands 
 a consciousness that presents a dead-level identity like the 
 substance of Spinoza. Such a consciousness would find its 
 symbol in death rather than life. The way to the highest 
 consciousness involves the expulsion of this lifeless mon- 
 strosity, and the substitution of a concept of the highest 
 activity. How shall this be achieved ? We have seen 
 that in the lower immediacy the object is dominant and the 
 subject is relatively passive, while in the intermediate stage 
 there is a duality in which subject and object are in a sense 
 co-ordinate. Following the hne here suggested, we would 
 be led to expect that in the stage of the higher immediacy 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OP EXPERIENCE. 41 
 
 the subject would dominate while the object would be 
 relatively passive. This is what we in fact find to be the 
 case, and we may follow the thought of Aristotle and repre- 
 sent the subject in this stage as self-active. A self-active 
 consciousness is one in which the moment of passivity has 
 become latent, and which is, therefore, self-moving and 
 self-determining. In relation to the lower levels of con- 
 sciousness, the highest will be one of freedom and self- 
 activity. 
 
 Does this higher form of immediacy which we call 
 self-activity involve the lapse of the distinction between 
 subject and object, or self and not-self? This much 
 must be conceded without further parley, namely, that 
 the relation of these terms can no longer be that of 
 co-ordination. In the absolute consciousness the object 
 or not-self must take a place of subordination. But 
 this does not carry with it the conclusion that the distinc- 
 tion has lapsed or has been transcended. The object 
 may still survive, but now as something that has been 
 penetrated and realized. We mean as much as this when 
 we say — God knows us through and through. The question 
 here is — can being be completely penetrated and realized and 
 yet remain an object, a not-self? If not, then the distinc- 
 tion lapses, and the higher immediacy becomes wholly 
 unintelligible. Our world is in the last analysis opaque. 
 But this means that consciousness itself lapses in the 
 absolute. The higher immediacy is not consciousness at all, 
 then, and it has no significance for experience, and the 
 whole question as to the lapse of such distinctions as those 
 of subject and object, self and not-self, in this absolute 
 becomes puerile. The real question that confronts us then 
 is whether this higher immediacy shall be regarded as 
 conscious or as something that transcends consciousness, and 
 our answer to this question will depend largely on our 
 conclusion as to the issue stated above, namely, whether 
 completely penetrated and realized being can remain an 
 object or not-self. Now the only solution of such a question 
 
42 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. paet i. 
 
 that is possible will be by way of approximation. Let us 
 take as our examples the intellectual and emotional rela- 
 tions of man and man. Young Plato becomes a pupil of 
 the philosopher Socrates. Daily intercourse with the youth 
 brings him more and more within the intellectual purview 
 of his master. Socrates comes to know him through and 
 through, so that he can predict his actions and his thoughts 
 on any theme. This growing intimacy of knowledge is 
 accompanied with an approximatingly close relationship 
 between the two men. Does this growing mental pene- 
 tration and realization of the nature of Plato render him 
 any the less an object or a not-self to Socrates ? On the 
 contrary, there is not the slightest tendency towards the 
 mergence of personal distinctions, but there is every reason 
 to think that these, instead of tending to lapse, become 
 clearer and better defined. Let us suppose that an emo- 
 tional relation also springs up between them and that 
 master and pupil become lovers. Now we know that love 
 is a great unifier, and that there is a sense in which lovers 
 become one. But what we have to consider here is whether 
 this unity of love involves in any sense the lapse of the 
 distinction between self and not-self. On the contrary, the 
 very notion of love involves the distinction between the 
 lover and the object loved. Even in the case of self-love, 
 the self must be thrown out and conceived objectively 
 before the emotion is possible, whereas in the case of the 
 love of a not-self, no one can say that there is the slightest 
 tendency on the part of the lover to confound the loved 
 with his own personality. The truth seems to be in the 
 opposite direction and in the clearer definition and distinc- 
 tion of the beloved. 
 
 If this be true of love it is none the less so of hate. 
 There may be, of course, ignorant and unreasoning hate, 
 just as there may be love of that species. But in so far as 
 hate is intelligent, the more completely the hater penetrates 
 and realizes his object the more intense will be his hate. 
 The question here is different in some respects from that of 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 43 
 
 love. Hate in its very nature is separative, and it may be 
 questioned whether the complete penetration and realization 
 of an object is compatible with the hatred of it. But, we 
 may ask, why not ? If our hate is reasonable then it will 
 follow that the more completely we know our object the 
 more reasonable our hate becomes, and if we conceive our 
 knowledge as raised to the infinite, our hate will then have 
 become supremely rational. 
 
 The above illustrations are all approximations, since ia 
 the nature of the case no direct demonstration is possible. 
 But if we apply the principle of approximation as the 
 mathematician does, we may argue that if within finite and 
 determinable limits the clearness and adequacy of the 
 distinction between subject and object or self and not-self 
 are, other things being equal, functions of the completeness 
 with which the knower or lover penetrates and realizes his 
 object, it follows that if the degree of this realization were 
 raised to infinity the recognition of these distinctions would, 
 at that point, reach their maximum of possible adequacy and 
 clearness. It at least follows, to extract the minimum of 
 inference from our premises, that there is no ground for 
 the supposition that the higher immediacy of consciousness 
 involves the lapse of those distinctions which are essential 
 to it in its lower forms, but that the force of the reasoning 
 bears strongly in favour of the conclusion that in the highest 
 stage of consciousness such distinctions as that between self 
 and not-self, instead of lapsing, reach their ripest and 
 maturest form. 
 
 The bearing of this result on the question whether con- 
 sciousness may be ascribed to the self-active and absolute, 
 is obvious. We attempt no demonstration here that the 
 absolute is conscious, but that no contradiction is involved 
 in the ascription of consciousness to it, is now clear enough. 
 For if the self-active is consistent with the distinction of 
 self and not-self, it is also consistent with consciousness, and 
 its activity may be conscious. And this is all that need be 
 asserted at this point, since the main purpose in this stage 
 
44 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. pakt i. 
 
 of our discussion has been attained when we have shown 
 that the highest conceivable type of consciousness is not one 
 in which the distinction of self and not-self lapses, but on 
 the contrary, the type in which this distinction matures and 
 reaches its highest efficiency. 
 
 Shall we then identify experience with consciousness ? 
 It might seem obvious that experience and consciousness 
 have a common content, yet identification on this ground 
 alone would imply a lack of discrimination. If we observe 
 the logical distinction between intensive and comprehensive 
 relations it will become apparent that from the point of view 
 of intension experience is the deeper term, and that there 
 may be phases of consciousness that fall short of experience. 
 In short, experience is a term of realization, and what we 
 experience must, in a sense, be so penetrated as to be both 
 in and for consciousness. There may, however, be content 
 in consciousness which has not, as yet, become fully realized, 
 and which, from the standpoint of a finite experience, perhaps 
 never will be realized. From the point of view of intension, 
 then, consciousness is the broader term, and the identity is 
 not complete. If the question be argued from the point of 
 view of comprehension, which is the ordinary one, the con- 
 clusion will be different. All the activities of an ideally 
 developed consciousness are included in the notion of experi- 
 ence. At any lower stage of consciousness, then, than that 
 of ideal perfection, experience will be found to include not 
 only the conscious but the sub-conscious, and a hypothetical 
 state of latency called the unconscious. Here also the 
 identity is not complete. But it can be said from both 
 points of view that the identity is proximate, and tends to 
 reach completeness in an ideally developed consciousness 
 and an ideally complete experience. 
 
 Again, distinguishing between content and process or 
 form, we may further define experience, in view of its 
 process or form, as a mode of realizing conscious content. 
 Shall this mode be conceived then as unitary, or are there 
 several modes of experience? This question, as we saw in 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 45 
 
 our historical review, is one on which philosophy has split 
 into factions. Kationalism affirms as its central dogma that 
 there is only one form of realization, which is thinking. 
 The real is in the last analysis, thought and aU other forms 
 of apparent realization are phenomenal and lapse as we 
 approach the absolute, while only thought survives. This 
 the Volitionists dispute, and they are as strenuous as the 
 Eationalists in maintaining their dogma of the primacy of 
 some form of effort-consciousness, either blind impulse 
 with Schopenhauer or impulse and idea in synthesis with 
 Lotze and Wundt. Opposed to both Eationalist and Voli- 
 tionist stand the Mystics and a wing of the modern 
 psychologists, who find in feeling, especially in its form of 
 pleasure-pain, the only primary and real conscious function, 
 both Volition and thought being in some sense derivative 
 from feeling. The organism begins with being pained,, 
 say these psychologists, and then reacts upon the painful 
 consciousness. Volition is born out of this secondary re- 
 action, and as to thought, it is a late comer, and even less 
 original than volition. So that only feeling is primary, 
 while thought and will are derivative functions. The 
 question at issue is not simple, but involves several 
 distinct considerations. In the first place, a distinction 
 is necessary between logical priority and priority in time. 
 The prior in time will be relatively low in the scale of 
 organization, while the logically prior will be relatively 
 high. Now, it may well be, for example, that the first 
 consciousness in the order of time will be one that is 
 explicitly pure feeling, or, if you like it, pure pain. We 
 have already given our reasons for thinking, however, that 
 an absolutely pure feeling-consciousness could not exist, 
 and that it must in its lowest and simplest forms involve 
 the rudiments of representation which may be to a great 
 degree latent, but none the less present and real. The 
 bearing of the argument against absolute simplicity is also 
 against the exclusive pretensions of feeling. For if we 
 admit internal structure and germs of representation into 
 
46 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 our psychosis, wo have denied the claim of feeling to be con- 
 sidered the only primary element, although we admit that the 
 psychosis is largely one of feeling. The question of logical 
 priority is to be regarded as altogether distinct from that of 
 genesis. The logical prior is the relatively high in the 
 scale of organization, and may, therefore, be the relatively late 
 in time. In fact the absolute jarius from the logical point 
 of view will be the very last presupposition of being, and 
 will represent the point of absoluteness in our world. And 
 it is to this point of absoluteness that the rival schools of 
 Eationalists and Volitionists must push their claims. From 
 the psychological stand-point such an issue could not arise, 
 inasmuch as psychology deals with the genetic rather than 
 the logical order. But here, where the issues debated 
 involve the logical and metaphysical, the question is ger- 
 mane. Metaphysically, whether we be Eationalists of 
 Volitionists, we are obliged to push our claim to the court 
 of last appeal, and if we put a rationalistic interpretation 
 on the world, then we have to settle issues with the 
 Volitionists by showing that the absolute prius of the world 
 is a pure thought-activity. Now, the position may be 
 maintained, I think, that in the very last resort the point of 
 absoluteness must be found in a thinking activity. If our 
 world is not to be at its heart meaningless, an outcome of 
 blindness or accident, we must believe that the thought or 
 it existed somewhere as the prius of its realization. We 
 cannot regard our world as a world of meaning, and at the 
 same time ascribe it to blind feeling or will. This is the 
 point where Eationalism is impregnable. But it is weak 
 when it becomes one-sided, and applies the principle of 
 exclusion. Eoyce has urged this in his very subtle dis- 
 cussion of the principle of individuation. Though largely 
 in sympathy with the Eationalist's point of view, he sees 
 ■clearly that pure thought supplies no principle of complete 
 realization. A world simply thought is not a world com- 
 pletely real. In order that the world may become real 
 it must not be left to the indifference of thought-alternatives, 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OP EXPERIENCE. 47 
 
 but it must be specifically intended. In order to be 
 intended the world must be object of selective will as well 
 as thought. But selective will is motived by love and its 
 opposite, hate. So that the real world is the object of 
 absolute love. What is this but a very powerful and 
 convincing arraignment of the principle of pure rationalism? 
 Thought, apart from feeling and will, is as powerless to 
 ground and explain our world as is feeling apart from 
 thought and will. 
 
 The pure Yolitionists deserve no better fate. For the 
 will of Schopenhauer is not full-fledged wUl, but mere Trieb 
 or impulsion from which every thought element has been 
 abstracted, and which is, therefore, blind. But that Trid) 
 also includes feeling, as motivation, is obvious. Schopen- 
 hauer's world is one of feeling-will versus reason or thinking, 
 and the question is whether such a world is possible. 
 There are two alternatives here : either feeling-will is to be 
 conceived as an absolute world-principle, or it is to be 
 taken as that of a genetic process. The first alternative 
 brings up the old issue as to the logical prius, and here we 
 are confronted with the alternatives, either a world that is 
 in the last analysis irrational and meaningless, or a world in 
 which thought is absolute. We cannot deny intelligence 
 and yet retain a significant world. Let us take the second 
 alternative and regard feeling-will as the ground-principle of 
 a genetic process. Here it is evident that we are dealing 
 not with a logical term, but with a prius in time ; and it is 
 here the Volitionist will be at his best. For, if we conceive 
 our world as a process in time, and nothing more, it would 
 be absurd to place any developed forms among its first 
 elements. It must be in the beginning a world of rudi- 
 ments, and can only reach maturity through growth. In 
 such a world it is obvious that the rudimentary forms of 
 consciousness will have the priority, and these may well be 
 regarded a^ impulsive, and, for the most part, blind. But 
 there are two objections to this as a final view. In the 
 first place, it is impossible to regard our world as a 
 
48 GROUND CONCEPTS OP KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 genetic process pure and simple. There must be some 
 point of rest in it which transcends the process, or the 
 process itself falls into a chaos of mere unmediated change. 
 It is impossible to conceive genesis as a last term of reality. 
 If we let this pass, however, we meet the second difficulty. 
 Let the first psychosis be some form of Trieb or feeling- 
 will; this cannot be regarded as absolutely simple. But if 
 we admit internal structure we must, as we have shown 
 above, admit internal distinction and germs of representation 
 This means that the rudiment of thought is already in our 
 first psychosis. It would seem, then, that the Volitionist's 
 principle is in the last analysis even less satisfactory than 
 that of the Eationalist. 
 
 We are not concerned here chiefly with the nature of the 
 absolute, but with a doctrine of experience. It follows, 
 from the above discussion, that the activity of experience is 
 not simple but complex. It is an activity that involves not 
 simply thought, but also feeling and will. If we designate 
 this activity as activity of realization, and if we conceive it 
 possible that any given psychosis may be explicitly either a 
 thought, a feeling, or a volition, there will then be three 
 specific forms in which the activity may express itself — the 
 form of thinking, of feeling, or of willing. And each of 
 these will represent a mode of reaction upon the content of 
 consciousness, and a means of penetrating and realizing it. 
 What term shall we adopt, then, as applicable to an activity 
 that is complex in its constitution, as we have seen, but 
 explicitly or overtly, either an act of feeling, thinking, or 
 willing? I think we may apply to it the term personal. 
 The very notion of personality involves that of expression. 
 Some nature utters or manifests itself and thus becomes 
 personal. Now we cannot characterize every distinct psychosis 
 as a distinct personality. The distinctions of personality 
 must rest on fundamental grounds, and a form or mode of 
 personality must represent a fundamental distinction in 
 consciousness. We have seen that consciousness is in- 
 ternally complex, embracing the rudiments, at least, of 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OP EXPERIENCE. 49 
 
 feeling, thinking, and willing, and that explicitly some one 
 of these elements will dominate every psychosis, determining 
 the form of its expression. This may be regarded as the 
 first and most fundamental law of conscious expression, and 
 if we name it the law of personality we have the doctrine 
 of personality not only psychologically, but also metaphysi- 
 cally grounded. For, as we have endeavoured to show 
 above, consciousness in all its forms is internally dual, 
 involving at least a rudimentary self distinguishing itself 
 from a rudimentary object or other, and it is manifest that 
 the self term in this relation is the distinctive bearer of 
 conscious activity, while the not-self stands as content. 
 Personality would then attach to the self-term in the 
 relation, and would represent a primary mode in which the 
 conscious self realizes the not-self or world of content. A 
 person is to be conceived as a self in manifestation, a self 
 reacting upon and realizing its world as content, in a form 
 which may be explicitly either a mode of thinking, or 
 feeling, or willing. 
 
 Now, it is quite possible that the objection will be made 
 here that this way of conceiving personality is inconsistent 
 with the current doctrines on that subject. But I would 
 like to know what current doctrines of personality there are 
 extant. I am unable to remember anything pregnant that 
 philosophy has said on the subject since the time of the 
 early Christian thinkers. Even Kant, with his fine sense of 
 the dignity of the person, has nothing very illuminating to 
 say about it except that it is the bearer of free agency and 
 the imperative of duty. This is true and valuable. But 
 what is it to be a person, psychologically and metaphysically? 
 No answer is vouchsafed, and since Kant it has been the 
 fashion in philosophy to class personality with foreordina- 
 tion and freewill and leave its discussion to the angels. 
 The view developed here is no doubt only the rudiment of a 
 complete doctrine, and it is also no doubt very defective, but 
 it is at least an attempt to deal with a neglected subject 
 with a measure, however small, of insight. 
 
 D 
 
50 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 At this point we are in a position where the main results 
 of the discussion, so far as it has progressed, may be summed 
 up in a provisional definition of experience. We have tried 
 to show that experience in its profounder sense represents 
 in the systems of modern thought the central activity 
 through which truth and reality are supposed to be realized. 
 Our criticism of these systems has shown, we think, that on 
 this cardinal issue they have, as a rule, become partizan 
 rather than catholic, and have given their allegiance to some 
 abstraction. The result has been that while we have had 
 Eationalists, Volitionists, and Mystics in plenty, there have 
 been few to seek a really catholic and comprehensive prin- 
 ciple. Our analysis has brought to light that no psychosis 
 is without internal structure, but is an incipient self react- 
 ing upon a not-self; and we have shown that every 
 psychosis is internally complex, involving elements of rudi- 
 mentary thought, feeling, and volition. The very constitu- 
 tion of consciousness is inimical, therefore, to the partizan- 
 ship of the schools, and points the way to a concreter and 
 more catholic doctrine. We have also seen how these con- 
 clusions with regard to consciousness lead to the grounding 
 of a doctrine of personality on a fundamental law of 
 conscious expression. And with reference to experience we 
 have found reason for identifying it with the fundamental 
 forms of conscious activity, with those modes, in short, 
 which lead consciousness to a more or less complete realiza- 
 tion of its object. Summing up these results, we may define 
 experience as the sum of these personal activities hy Tneans of 
 which a conscious self reacts upon its object or not-self, and 
 translates it into realized content, these activities being inclusive 
 of thought, feeling, and will ; or, objectively — the system, in 
 which these activities are included. Whatever fault may be 
 found with this definition, it is not open, I think, to the 
 charge of partizanship, inasmuch as Eationalists, Volitionists, 
 and Mystics may find shelter in its ample folds. It also 
 emphasizes the dynamic character of experience, and enables 
 us to identify it with the whole realizing activity of con- 
 
CHAP. I. THE NOTION OF EXPERIENCE. 51 
 
 sciousness. And it will be seen, later on, how the definition 
 we have developed here makes it possible to assert the 
 most vital relation between the concepts of experience and 
 reality. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 EXPERIENCE AND EEALITY. 
 
 F. H. Bradley, in his ingenious and suggestive work.i draws 
 a distinction between the world of relation and distinction 
 on the one hand, and that of the Absolute on the other, 
 designating the first Appearance, the second Beality. He 
 also identifies experience with reality. This brings up the 
 whole question as to the nature of reality, and its relation 
 to conscious experience. No term in philosophy, not even 
 experience itself, has been employed more vaguely than that 
 of reality. Everyone except a few sceptics knows that 
 there is reality, but to tell what it is, that is a question of 
 another order, and involves the whole problem of philosophy. 
 Now, there are certain propositions about reality, a criti- 
 cism of which may perhaps pave the way to an intelligent 
 consideration of the main question as to its nature. In the 
 first place, we may say with the pure phenomenist that the 
 real is what exists ; that reality and existence are identical 
 It would follow, then, that everything that is real also 
 exists. But the existent is the actual, and the actual 
 excludes the merely possible, the hypothetical, or the neces- 
 sary. Modern logic, however, has demonstrated that the 
 majority of our general propositions fall into the latter 
 categories. It follows logically, then, that the majority of 
 propositions which we regard as true, are unreal, and that 
 
 ^Appearance and Reality, 2nd Ed., London and New York, 1897. 
 
 52 
 
CHAP. II. EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 53 
 
 only historical statements and statements about matter of 
 fact can be regarded as real. And outside of logic the case 
 is even worse. If the real is strictly identical with the 
 existent, then we must exclude the possible, and say that 
 strength that is nt)t in exercise is unreal, and that we do 
 not really know the multiplication table except when we are 
 repeating it. The past is also unreal except when it is 
 restored in memory, and the future save when we are 
 anticipating it. Moreover, from such a conception of reality 
 the ideal in all its forms must be excluded. It is clear that 
 the relation between reality and existence is not one of 
 complete identity. We may not agree with those meta- 
 physicians who class the existent with the unreal, but on 
 the other hand we cannot af&rm, without absurdity, that 
 existence is absolutely indispensable to reality. That what 
 exists is real is a proposition which, with proper qualification, 
 may be accepted, since it only implies that existence is an 
 aspect of reality. 
 
 But that implication would meet the denial of one who 
 opposes appearance and reality as two mutually exclusive and 
 contradictory terms. For the apparent will include the whole 
 sphere of distinction and relation; that is, the whole sphere 
 of the actual. What would be asserted then is a relation of 
 exclusion between the real and the actual or phenomenal, 
 and since the existent is actual the existent is unreal. 
 Furthermore the actual, which is the finite world of plurality 
 and change, is self-contradictory, and therefore unreal. The 
 only real is the absolute, which maintains internal harmony 
 with itself only by negativing relations and distinctions, and 
 thus attaining the nirvana of complete internal simplicity of 
 nature. The vital question here is, of course, whether the 
 notions of distinction and relation exclude that of reality. 
 It is the old issue in a new form, whether the absolute is 
 to be regarded as transcending all internal complexity in the 
 distinctionless identity of a simple nature, or whether it is 
 to be conceived as constitutionally complex, and therefore as 
 involving the principle of distinction and relation. Bradley's 
 
54 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 whole enterprise rests on the assumption that a relation is a 
 separative term, and therefore inimical to the internal unity 
 of being. He contends that relations break being up into 
 fragments. But what if this, which must of course be 
 acknowledged to be part of the business of relations, were 
 not their whole function ? What if a relation, looked at 
 from the outside, were pluralistic and separative, but, looked 
 at from the inside, structural and organizing ? Outwardly 
 a relation may be a thing of unmitigated plurality and 
 change. But the outward view is by itself an abstraction, 
 and abstractions, as such, are of course unreal. Looked at 
 from within ; that is, from the stand-point of some compre- 
 hending consciousness, a relation is also and primarily, 
 unitary. There can be no starting-point for any kind of 
 thinking without unity. But thinking cannot make a single 
 step out from its starting-point without differentiation and 
 distinction. How are the two conditions realized ? Through 
 relation. Eelation binds ; thought is possible : relation 
 separates and divides ; thought gets on. Bradley has seen 
 very clearly one side of the truth, but, ignoring the other, the 
 half truth generates a whole contradiction. A necessary 
 presupposition of thinking is unity. If this be true we see 
 how an inexorable logic drives a separative thinker like 
 Bradley to his conclusion. 
 
 On the one hand we have the first presumption of 
 thinking, which is unity; on the other, the absolute and 
 unmitigated breaking up of things into fragments. This 
 world of relation and distinction is not real, then, but a 
 mere by-play of illusion. The real world is a world of 
 unity and simple identity. 
 
 Proceeding along this line is absolutely hopeless, for the 
 same logic that forces us to the rejection of the actual 
 world as illusion will also drive us to the conclusion that 
 the real world is unintelligible. For if distinction and 
 relation be given up as illusion, there is no hope for us; 
 our real is reduced to absolute internal simplicity, and 
 becomes a dead identity without difference. With an un- 
 
CHAP. II. EXPERIENCE AND BEALITY. 55 
 
 intelligible absolute on the one hand, and a nugatory- 
 relative on the other, our universe becomes hopelessly 
 irrational and absurd. I do not say that this is the kind 
 of a universe that Bradley or any other thinker of the 
 Eleatic type believes in. All through his book the light 
 of a different sort of intuition is struggling to pierce the 
 darkness. But it is useless. Nothing can be got from 
 thrashing over that straw, except dust and blinded eyes. 
 The Eleatic dilemma arose in the first place out of the 
 apparent contradiction betv^een permanence and change. 
 Being is one, it is therefore unmoved, and motion and 
 change are false appearances. Bradley generalizes the old 
 situation so as to include all the modern categories of 
 relativity. Distinction, relation, qualification, is each 'per se 
 separative and pluralistic; it breaks up being which is one 
 and internally simple. Hence it is the opposite of being 
 and reality. The knot of this trouble is to seek, I am 
 sure, in a false or inadequate conception of distinction and 
 relation. If, when we distinguish or relate, we simply 
 separate or exclude, then nothing further is to be said. 
 But is it so ? Let us take the relation of identity. No 
 one is more strenuous than Bradley, the logician, in opposing 
 the notion of distinctionless identity, which prevailed in the 
 old logics.-^ Identity, in order to be real, must comprehend 
 difference, and this is necessary if reasoning would not be 
 mere tautology. But Bradley the metaphysician seems to 
 forget, and difference abstracted from identity is straightway 
 found to be its contradictory.^ Of course it is contradictory 
 if it be set over against identity. But difference can contra- 
 dict only that which implies its own denial. Does identity 
 involve the denial of difference ? We have Bradley's 
 
 1 See Principles of Logic, pp. 131, 132, 263, 266, 425, and 431. 
 
 ^ Mr. Andrew Seth claims to find two mutually inconsistent views in 
 Bradley's work, and there is some plausibility at least in his contention. 
 That the construction of the book on which these criticisms proceed is con- 
 sistent with its main trend is borne out, I think, not only by the general 
 treatment of relations and distinctions, but also by its manifest failure to 
 reach an intelligible conception of the absolute. 
 
56 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 authority for thinking that true identity implies and 
 comprehends difference. Why then should difference ex- 
 clude identity if it is included in identity ? Surely if there 
 were no differences there could be no identities. Identity 
 is a relation, and relation implies terms that are different. 
 Identity arises in a world of differents. But it says, these 
 are not simply different, for in order to be different there 
 must be in their nature a ground of relation, and in this 
 they will be the same. Difference has a presupposition, 
 then, which is sameness. Pure difference is a mere abstrac- 
 tion. It is only real when it falls within some nature that 
 is unitary. The last presupposition of being is, of course, 
 identity. But the whole argument here turns on the 
 question whether either identity or difference are to be 
 construed abstractly, and in a sense that renders them 
 mutually exclusive, and the doctrine here advocated is that 
 neither can be conceived apart from the other. They are 
 thinkable only when they are together; a world of differ- 
 ences must be a world of sameness, and a world of sameness 
 must be one of difference. This would be metaphysically 
 necessary even in a world of monotony and boredom. The 
 whole point of the contention here is that identity in the 
 concrete is a unification of differents, while difference iu 
 the concrete is distinction in a nature that is one ; that con- 
 tradiction arises only when we disturb this union and set 
 difference and identity cheek by jowl as abstract opposites. 
 
 The same reasoning applies to any other pair of relations. 
 If we take the categories of change and permanence we may 
 array them in hard and fast opposition, for it is clear that 
 in the precise respect in which things change they cannot 
 be permanent, and the converse also is true. If, then, we 
 conceive permanence and change as abstract opposites, it is 
 inevitable that they should fall into contradiction. But let 
 us abolish this isolation and the dilemma vanishes, for the 
 two conceptions belong together, and it is impossible to 
 think permanence without change, or change without per- 
 manence. Abstract permanence or abstract change is only 
 
CHAP. II. EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 57 
 
 a half thought, and is as futile as one blade of a pair of 
 scissors. Again, as to substance and attribute. Here the 
 question is, not how a substance can manifest an attribute, 
 but rather the Herbartian problem as to how one substance 
 can have many attributes. In other words, it is a 
 specialized form of the problem of the one and the many. 
 But the problem of the one and the many is only a form of 
 the general problem of identity and difference. The 
 Herbartian dilemma is self-made, for it proceeds on the 
 assumption of the absolute internal simplicity of being. 
 It vanishes, however, if we reject that assumption as false 
 and admit that being in all its forms must be conceived as 
 involving internal complexity and distinction. If a nature 
 is not absolutely simple, it already contains in it the germ 
 at least of distinction and relation, and what shall we say 
 further ? The principle of qualification is contained in 
 distinction and relation. If we reject the conception of 
 being as absolutely simple, and adopt that of internal 
 complexity which we have seen to be necessary, we have 
 then travelled all the road from the notion of a substance 
 that has no possible mode of expression and can be related 
 to quality and change in a purely external and mechanical 
 way only, to that of a real which by virtue of its 
 internal character inevitably manifests or expresses itself 
 in quality and change. What is contended for here is 
 nothing less than a revolution in the concept of being. 
 The old Eleatic doctrine of the absolute internal simplicity 
 of being has proved itself able to bear but one species of 
 metaphysical fruit. It has been worked to its logical 
 conclusion, time and again, in the history of philosophy, 
 and has invariably reached the same goal. The fundamental 
 dif&culty with it is that it is an utterly powerless and 
 fruitless conception. It leads to no rational doctrine of 
 the world, and it inevitably lands the human mind in a 
 chaos of abstract and unreal contradictions. Let us once for 
 all exorcise the absolutely simple from philosophy, and 
 admit that being is internally complex, that it has within it 
 
58 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. pakt i. 
 
 the germs of distinction and relation. We will then have 
 achieved a fruitful conception, for we will have found in the 
 very heart of the real the principle of its self-expression in 
 a world of plurality and change. 
 
 In saying this I do not mean that Bradley openly espouses 
 the doctrine of the internal simplicity of being. On the 
 contrary, there is a sense in which his absolute comprehends 
 everything, even error and illusion. Every qualification of 
 the relative is somehow comprehended in the absolute. The 
 trouble with Bradley's absolute, however, is that it is a sort 
 of universal maw in which everything is swallowed iip and 
 loses its identity. Internally it may be unmitigated chaos 
 or supreme order. We cannot tell; for there is no principle 
 of intelligibility that admits of valid application to its 
 nature. For this reason, if there is internal complexity or 
 distinction, it is not available. Again, the logic of the 
 principle that reduces all relative distinctions and relations 
 to self-contradiction and illusion leads back to the absolute 
 simplicity of being in its internal nature. The Eleatics drew 
 the right conclusion from their premises. Bradley's logic of 
 relativity is that of the Eleatics, and the result of it is a 
 barren conception of the absolute, tantamount to a dead 
 identity which excludes every living process. 
 
 There is one point of view from which Bradley's dis- 
 cussion of Appearance is without doubt perfectly conclusive. 
 It is a crushing refutation of metaphysical phenomenism. 
 If we are going to stop in our view of the world with the 
 merely phenomenal, and yet regard it as a complete world, 
 we must be prepared to find it honeycombed with contra- 
 dictions. Bradley has the unerring instinct of a sleuth in 
 tracing these contradictions to their coverts. It is not for 
 this that we feel dissatisfied with him, but rather that 
 having so clearly demonstrated the inadequacy of pheno- 
 menism, he himself should fall into the pit along with the 
 phenomenists by virtually divorcing the phenomenal from 
 its ground. If the phenomenon is separable from its 
 ground, or; to be more specific, if difference may be 
 
CHAP. 11. EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 59 
 
 separated from identity, then the phenomenist may be right 
 in attempting to treat it as a separate entity. And it is 
 mainly because this is impossible that Bradley is able to 
 show the absurdity of phenomenism. In doing so, however, 
 he is refuting his own assumptions in the critique of 
 relations, since the whole cogency of his demonstration has 
 its source in the inseparable union of the terms which he, 
 nevertheless, treats as though they were distinct. If it were 
 only meant that the phenomenal world, when taken as the 
 complete reality, is self-contradictory and void, we could not 
 but agree. But the simple logic of this would be that the 
 phenomenal world is not a separate and complete reality, 
 but only becomes real when viewed as an aspect of a 
 larger and profounder world, its connection with which 
 frees it from* contradiction and secures its reality. But 
 Bradley's logic leads in an opposite direction. Since 
 the phenomenal world, when taken as a separate and 
 distinct entity, is a contradictory world, it must not be 
 admitted to the kingdom of reality at all, but must 
 dweU forever outside in the limbo of the unreal. The real 
 must be something entirely different from this and exclusive 
 of it. On this assumption we have the conception of the 
 absolute worked out. The real or absolute is that which 
 transcends all distinction and relation ; in which there is a 
 complete lapse of the principle of phenomenality. It, there- 
 fore, gives the phenomenal the cut direct, and leaves it out 
 in the cold. The phenomenal world is thus hopelessly 
 relegated to the sphere of non-being or worse, while the 
 concept of reality which remains, proves to be no real concept 
 at all, but rather a spell to conjure with. For what boots it 
 to assert that such an absolute is ineffably rich in content or 
 even to fall down before it in mute worship, if it is impossible 
 for us to conceive any principle by means of which it could 
 have any intelligible content, or be in any way distinguished 
 from a Chinese idol ? The absolute that will ground and 
 reify the phenomenal is neither an absolutely simple entity 
 in which all distinctions and relations must be conceived as 
 
60 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 having lapsed, nor a monster that devours its own children, 
 but rather a being internally complex, and having within it 
 the principle of distinction and relation. 
 
 I am convinced that the attempt to develop a contra- 
 diction between the notions of reality and the phenomenal 
 world rests on a false diagnosis of the nature of the real. 
 Thinkers of the Eleatic type proceed on the assumption that 
 being must assert itself as one in such an absolute sense as 
 to exclude the phenomenal, which involves plurality and 
 change, as unreal and illusory. This judgment could not be 
 reached, however, from anything that is found in the nature 
 of the phenomenon. That the world breaks up into 
 plurality and that it is in a state of change has no signi- 
 ficance in itself until we put the metaphysical question, 
 whether plurality and change represent the whole nature of 
 reality. This question leads to a reflection in which we 
 pass either to a nature in which the phenomenon is rooted 
 and grounded, and of which it is, therefore, a real expression, 
 or to one from which it is excluded, and by which it is 
 contradicted. Now, the thinkers in question take the latter 
 course and reach a concept of being that is unitary and 
 self-identical in such a sense as to exclude and deny 
 plurality and change as falsehood and illusion. But the 
 root-principle of this thinking is not to be found in the 
 denial to being of any particular phenomenal expression, 
 but rather in the denial of any possible expression. And 
 such a denial can be logically maintained only on the 
 supposition that being is internally simple in a way that 
 excludes all complexity of nature ; but being, conceived as 
 absolutely simple and uncomplex, must, as we have seen, be 
 dead and motionless, and the Eleatic achieves his permanence 
 in a region of eternal death. 
 
 There is no escape from a dead universe if we cling to 
 the superstition of the relationless simplicity of being, for in 
 that case the principle of manifestation can have no root, 
 and the real can give itself no expression that is not 
 illusion. The opposite of being is, according to this mode 
 
CHAP. II. EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 61 
 
 of thinking, the phenomenon, and what being denies and 
 excludes is the possibility of any truthful outward mani- 
 festation. In opposition to this it is maintained here, that 
 being involves internal distinctions and that it contains in its 
 nature the principle of normal and even necessary pheno- 
 menal expression. The manifestation springs out of the 
 heart of the real, and pulsates with reality. In order to see 
 how the principle of self-manifestation is grounded, we have 
 only to recall the analysis of the preceding chapter, in which 
 the internal nature of being was found to be dual, taking the 
 form of a subject — actively realizing its world as objective 
 content. That being shall realize itself in some mode of 
 expression seems to be involved in the very notion of an 
 internally complex nature and will not be denied, I think, 
 except when the internal complexity itself is denied. This 
 being the case it logically follows that the phenomenal 
 world which is the manifestation of the nature of being, 
 will be presumably true rather than false, and that the 
 unreal will arise only when the conditions of normal mani- 
 festation have been in some way belied. In short, it is not 
 the phenomenal that the real denies and excludes, but 
 rather that which stands in the way of and thwarts its 
 true manifestation. 
 
 The foregoing paragraphs were written before I had the 
 opportunity to read the appendix to the second edition of 
 Appearance and Reality. In view of what is said there, the 
 intention of the author to ascribe a degree of relative reality 
 to the phenomenal world will be no longer in doubt, and 
 the question that remains open is whether his treatment of 
 the phenomenal is, after all, consistent with that purpose. 
 We think that it is not. The crucial test arises, I think, 
 in connection with the notion of relation. Bradley persists 
 in his denial of the reality of relation and professes his 
 inabiUty to understand how relation can be internal. This 
 seems to me to involve the whole point at issue. A 
 relation is a two-sided thing, as we have seen. On one 
 side it is distinction, and this is the aspect of it which 
 
62 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 must in Bradley's view, be purely external. The denial 
 of the possibility of internal relation carries with it the 
 denial of the possibility of internal distinction. But if 
 internal distinction lapses we are back again in the pit of 
 internal simplicity or dead-level identity. What boots it 
 then to say that the absolute is a kind of experience, 
 when once we have denied everything that makes the 
 notion of experience conceivable ? The real will in spite 
 of us transcend all our categories and will admit of 
 only negative definition. "We can escape only by recogniz- 
 ing the internal complexity of being. And, if internal 
 complexity, then distinction and internal' relation. In order 
 that the phenomenal world may be in any sense real it 
 must have its root in the internal complexity of the 
 real which it manifests. On the contrary, the source of 
 unreality will be pure externality. A distinction or 
 relation that is purely external, that has not its root in the 
 internal nature of some being, will have no significance for 
 the meaning of the real. It will profess to manifest, but 
 will belie its pretensions. 
 
 Have we not here come upon the true nature of mere 
 appearance in the phenomenal world ? In the current con- 
 ceptions of men appearance stands opposed to solid fact and 
 reality. An appearance is a lie ; it professes to be that 
 which it is not. How then can anything profess to be that 
 which it is not ? Only by professing to be the expression or 
 manifestation of a nature that is not the actual inner of the 
 manifestation. Thus the appearance is that of my friend, 
 but on investigation I find it to be an illusion, and that my 
 friend is not there. This could take place only in a world 
 of plurality, where by some juncture of conditions the outer 
 garb of a nature that is not actually present is created. 
 This of course suggests its own problem, which we do not 
 stop to consider. It is sufficient for our purpose here 
 to mark the distinction between what may be called mere 
 appearance and the real manifestation of a nature. 
 
 We have now reached a point where the results so far 
 
CHAP. II. EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 63 
 
 attained of our inquiry into the nature of reality may be 
 summed up. In the first place, it is clear that the notion 
 of the absolute simplicity of being, in its last analysis, must 
 be given up. The notion of simplicity is wholly power- 
 less and inane. The absolutely simple neither is anything 
 that can possibly be conceived or rendered intelligible, nor 
 can it possibly do anything. The real must be conceived 
 as being internally complex, as having an internal nature 
 which involves distinction and relation. From this con- 
 clusion there is no escape. But if being is internally 
 complex, then there is no escape from the admission that 
 it has in it the principle of expression or manifestation; 
 that is, the principle of a phenomenal world, and the 
 denial of the reality of the phenomenal becomes impossible. 
 The possibility of the phenomenal as a manifestation of 
 real inner nature is thus secured. In the second place, 
 as to the phenomenal world itself we have found reasons 
 for distipguishing between the real manifestation and 
 the illusory or unreal. In the absolute sphere the 
 principle of unreality is the denial of the phenomenal as 
 such, and this is involved in the doctrine of the absolute 
 simplicity of being. But in the sphere of the phenomenal 
 the unreal is identical with false expression or manifestation, 
 with that which, for any reason, belies or contradicts 
 the inner nature of being. There is, then, a well-grounded 
 distinction possible between reality and illusion in the 
 phenomenal world itself Now the phenomenal world, 
 by which we mean the sphere of manifested distinction 
 and relation, is not only rendered possible but is also 
 vindicated as real; that is, as a true expression of being, 
 when it is connected not simply with internal distinction 
 and relation, but with the inner nature of being as we 
 have found it necessary to represent it. On this point 
 we expect to be more elaborate at a later stage of this 
 discussion. Here the vital position which will at present 
 have to be to some extent assumed, is that in deter- 
 mining the essential inner nature of experience we have 
 
64 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 also to that extent beea determining the inner nature 
 of being. The doctrine that being is not simple but com- 
 plex carries with it this logical necessity, namely, that 
 the internal structure of absolute nature shall be regarded 
 as ideally complete or perfect. Connecting this with the 
 practical identification of being with experience which at 
 this stage is laid down as a postulate,^ it is clear that the 
 determinations of experience may be taken as determinations 
 of the inner nature of being. Admitting this, it becomes 
 not only possible but also logically necessary, to connect the 
 phenomenal world with the inner nature of reality in such 
 a way as will be borne out by the nature of experience. If 
 in experience we have a revelation of the inner nature of 
 being, then the analogy of experience will be valid in the 
 interpretation of being. But we have seen that experience 
 is complex and that it realizes its content ; that is, its 
 phenomenal world, through the activities of thought, feeling, 
 and volition; that it relates itself to its world not only in the 
 conceiving thought, but also in the selective intention in 
 which individual and specialized forms of content are 
 realized. Applying this insight to being, the inner nature 
 of which we have taken experience to represent, it is 
 evident that we find here a principle which enables us to 
 ground the phenomenal world in an intelligible relation to 
 the inner nature of the real. For if being expresses itself in 
 a phenomenal world at all, this world and the objects in it, 
 must have their idea in the thought of being, and the 
 principle of their realization in the selective activity of being. 
 In order to become, then, the phenomenal world must have 
 been conceived and realized in the thought and selective 
 purpose of being. It will then express the meaning of 
 being, and will be real rather than illusory. 
 
 The notion of reality inclvdes, then, a synthesis of being 
 and manifestation. The real is not simply being con- 
 ceived as possessing an internally complex nature. This 
 
 1 This postulate is taken up and investigated in Part III. , in the chapter 
 on "The Transcendent as Experience." 
 
CHAP n. EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 65 
 
 is only one term in reality, and taken apart is an 
 abstraction. Nor is it the phenomenal world which, taken 
 apart, is also an abstraction. The notion of reality is that 
 of an essential inner nature that gives itself a real expression 
 in a sphere of manifested plurality and relation. The real 
 is a synthesis of the two terms in such a way that the 
 internal nature expresses its meaning and intention in the 
 phenomenal world. Such a notion of reality, it is clear, will 
 strike in two directions. On one side as we have seen it is 
 wholly inconsistent with that theory which conceives the 
 unity of the real to be inconsistent with distinction and 
 relation, and which on that ground denies the reality of the 
 phenomenal world. On the other side, it is equally inimical 
 to phenomenism, the theory which denies the unity of being 
 in the interests of plurality and change. The real is, from 
 one point of view, the unity of plurality and change ; from 
 another, the plurality and change, of that which maintains 
 its oneness. 
 
 What shall we say in conclusion as to the relation between 
 reality and experience. They may possibly seem to be 
 identical, since practically all the predicates of the one have 
 been found to apply also to the other. But we cannot assert 
 their identity without ignoring an important distinction. 
 In our analysis of experience we found it necessary to 
 distinguish between the process by which content is realized, 
 and the content itself; and the definition of experience with 
 which the discussion closed was a definition of process rather 
 than one of content although the content was included. 
 If we distinguish between experience-process and experi- 
 ence-content, reality may be taken as the equivalent of 
 the latter. Experience and reality will then become 
 correlative terms, implying one another. It must be 
 observed, however, in order to avoid misconception at this 
 point that this correlation of terms can be taken as complete 
 only from the stand-point of an experience that is absolute. 
 The terms may not be, and in fact will not be, commen- 
 surate in the case of any finite and relative experience. 
 
 E 
 
66 6R0CJND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 The real must always greatly transcend any finite experi- 
 ence and there will be outlying regions of reality which 
 it has not compassed, and doubtless never will. But the 
 relation here will still be approximately true. The correla- 
 tion will express the ideal law of the relation and it will 
 always remain true of every finite being that it can only 
 realize its world through experience. There is no short cut 
 to reality. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 KNOWLEDGE, EXPEEIENCE, AND EEALITY. 
 
 The current notions of the relation of knowledge to experi- 
 ence are, as a rule, vague to the last degree. We sometimes 
 identify the two and again we set them in hard and sharp 
 opposition. The relation is no doubt very close but it does 
 not lie on the surface, and may not yield its secret even to 
 the most penetrating analysis. Knowledge is, of course, a 
 conscious function. Taking it objectively it is a product 
 of what we call the cognitive consciousness. What then 
 is this cognitive consciousness, and how is it related 
 to consciousness in general ? The primary function of 
 a cognitive consciousness is representation. Now the 
 conclusion was reached in the first chapter that all 
 consciousness, and, therefore, consciousness as such, is pre- 
 sentative. But consciousness from another point of view is 
 feeling, and expresses itself as pleasure-pain. These two 
 aspects are inseparable. Here we consider the question 
 why they are inseparable. The primary consciousness, as 
 we do not need to prove here, is conscious activity. But 
 this cannot be characterized as either representation or 
 feeling for it is in its concreteness both of these. But this 
 concreteness does not shut out the possibility that one 
 of these aspects may be absolutely first and the other in a 
 sense secondary. And this is the very point of vital 
 interest here. All consciousness arises, in the first stages, 
 
 67 
 
68 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 as response to stimulation. Now I think it is evident that 
 the initial step in response must be representation, in its 
 mere' rudiments of course, rather than feeling. I do not see 
 how this could be determined by experiment since the ele- 
 ments are so inseparable. But in the indivisible act, which 
 is a recoil from some stimulation, the presentation constitutes 
 the object-reaction while the pleasure-pain is the subject- 
 reaction, and the question is, which form of recoil is pre- 
 supposed in the other. This cannot be settled except from 
 the point of view of ordinary stimulations. Of course some 
 stimulations may be so violent, as in the case of wounds and 
 bruises, that the presentative element is completely drowned 
 in the rush of feeling. But the ordinary stimulation will 
 be one in which the pleasure-pain element is almost in- 
 appreciable. In fact the first stimulation will not, as a 
 rule, be either pleasant or painful, but will rather be the 
 vague sense of some presence, perhaps the shadow of a larger 
 animal, which inspires a feeling of terror; that is, of anti- 
 cipated pain, and leads to some defensive action. It is 
 evident here that the initial response of consciousness is 
 presentative and that the pleasure-pain feeling arises as a 
 secondary recoil from the stimulation. If, however, we 
 attempt to separate feeling and presentation and conceive 
 either as existing abstractly we involve ourselves in illusion. 
 Presentation itself is a kind of feeling, and it is called pre- 
 sentation because in its fore-front it is a kind of awareness. 
 Pleasure-pain is also a kind of awareness; but it is called 
 feeling because in its fore-front it is painful or pleasant 
 rather than presentative. If we call the moment of pre- 
 sentation the cognitive or object-consciousness, and the 
 moment of feeling or pleasure-pain the subject- or self- 
 consciousness, it will be found that the two are absolutely 
 inseparable : they are aspects of one activity which inevitably 
 gives itself both an object and subject expression. That 
 they are inseparable will be apparent if we suppose, for 
 example, that feeling could exist without presentation or 
 idea. In such a case the feeling will be robbed of all 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY 69 
 
 value for action. Let us suppose that the organism has 
 received a stimulation from the environment which arouses 
 a pleasurable feeling. Now, the current doctrine is that 
 this pleasurable experience will lead the organism to seek a 
 repetition of the stimulation which produced it. This is 
 perfectly true, but how is the repetition to be effected? 
 Current opinions seem to alternate for the most part 
 between the hypothesis of blind and tentative search on the 
 one hand and that of a species of happy accident on the 
 other. Neither hypothesis conceives consciousness to be 
 supplied with any organ of direction. On the contrary, I 
 think it can be maintained with a reasonable degree of 
 confidence that in the very constitution of the reactive con- 
 sciousness there is contained not simply a provision for 
 effecting repetitions but also for the direction of the efforts 
 to repeat. If, in connection with the pleasure-feeling, there 
 is an ever so momentary survival of a memory-image of the 
 stimulation, this will serve to intelligently guide the efforts 
 to repeat. The young chick that finds a certain insect 
 unpalatable as food is not condemned to the uncertainties 
 of either happy accident or blind effort to avoid,^ but its 
 reactive consciousness contains in conjunction with the re- 
 pugnant taste an element of cognitive discrimination which 
 enables it to intelligently avoid a repetition of the distasteful 
 experience. This element of discrimination must be some 
 kind and degree of awareness of the object which has become 
 fixed as an antecedent term in consciousness, and which on 
 the reappearance of the obnoxious object revives in memory 
 and brings up its associate, the memory of the repugnant 
 taste that motives the avoidance of the object. The whole 
 process would be unaccountable did we not suppose that 
 the normal relation of presentation to other forms of con- 
 sciousness is that of precedence. It follows, then, that the 
 cognitive or object-consciousness takes precedence of the 
 subject- or feeling-consciousness in the first conscious acts. 
 
 'See Loyd Morgan's Habit and Instinct for the original of this illus- 
 tration. 
 
70 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 This must be recognized, while at the same time it must also 
 be remembered that no abstract separation is possible between 
 the two aspects of consciousness. Every act of conscious- 
 ness involves the germs of both subjectivity and objectivity. 
 We have seen that the reactive consciousness takes on 
 its subject and object forms in feeling and presentation. 
 But it is clear, in the last analysis, that reaction is not 
 a primary form of activity. There must be action before 
 there can be reaction. And the question here is where 
 this initial activity shall be located. It is, of course, 
 possible to conceive the environment as initiating the 
 activity, and consciousness as simply responsive. This, 
 however, would involve the necessity of conceiving a purely 
 passive and inert state of consciousness as the antecedent 
 of its activity. But such a state is unthinkable. To 
 conceive consciousness in a purely passive state is to 
 conceive it as completely annihilated. We cannot then 
 adopt the convenient device of supposing a passive con- 
 sciousness aroused into responsive activity by the initial 
 action of the environment. If consciousness is to be pre- 
 supposed at all, it must be conceived as active before it 
 becomes reactive, and there will be a primary pulse of 
 consciousness that will precede both feeling and cognition. 
 Is there any way in which the nature of this primary 
 pulse can be determined ? We think not beyond the 
 general presumption that every being must have in it the 
 initial impulse to self-expression. We cannot conceive it 
 as internally simple, but as bearing a germinal impulse 
 to self-manifestation. This must be true of consciousness if 
 we consider it a form of being. But that this impulse 
 should be further determinable is in the nature of the 
 case impossible. We must, I think, avoid the identification 
 of this primary pulse of consciousness with any definite form 
 of conscious activity. We cannot say with Schopenhauer that 
 it is will, for it is also the prius of feeling and presentation. 
 It is rather to be conceived as the inner nature of conscious- 
 ness uttering itself in a pulse of activity which has in it 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 71 
 
 the germs of thought, feeling, and volition. The question 
 whether such a pulse be blind or seeing is only determinable 
 in view of our doctrine of the inner nature of being, and in 
 the light of the phenomenal mode in which it expresses itself. 
 Having reached the conclusion, then, that the initial 
 active consciousness cannot be identified with any of the 
 modes of conscious activity which are reactive, but that it 
 must be taken as the primary pulse which contains the 
 germs of all these, we are in a position to make further 
 progress in determining the relation of cognition to other 
 forms of mental activity. In a former chapter we have 
 seen that consciousness is complex, including three dis- 
 tinguishable forms of activity, which we call feeling, think- 
 ing, and willing. We have sought in the above paragraphs 
 to determine the relation of feeling and presentation or 
 thinking. It remains, then, to consider the place of willing 
 in the mental economy. ISTow if we decline to identify 
 will with the primary pulse of consciousness, it is clear 
 that we will have to seek for it among the manifestations 
 of the reactive consciousness. We have seen that feeling 
 arises as the subject-side or aspect of mental reaction, 
 the object-side of which is some form of presentation. 
 This subject reaction will take the form of pleasantness 
 or painfulness which will motive a subjectively initiated 
 recoil upon the environment for the purpose of repeating 
 or avoiding the stimulation that has given the pleasant 
 or painful experience. The case of the young chick quoted 
 above will be in place here. The chick having obtained 
 its first experience of unpleasantness from the disagreeable 
 taste of a certain species of worm, on the recurrence of 
 that form of stimulation, experiences, as we have shown 
 above, a recurrence of memory-images not only of the 
 object but also of its associate the disagreeable taste. These 
 terms mediate a further reaction, the memory-image of 
 the object leading to its identification with the present 
 object, the worm crawling about on the ground, and the 
 associated memory of the disagreeable taste leading to the 
 
72 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. pam i. 
 
 reaction of avoidance and rejection. If the original ex- 
 perience be pleasant the reaction will be one of appreciation, 
 and the agreeable morsel will be swallowed. It is to 
 this form of reaction which is motived and directed by 
 the memory-images of representation and feeling, that the 
 term volition is to be applied. Of course there is included 
 in this act, as there is included in all acts of consciousness, 
 the primal pulse of initial activity (since reaction is not 
 conceivable apart from action), but in this instance the 
 reaction seems to be more completely identified with the 
 initial impulse. And this is reasonable, inasmuch as volition 
 is more explicitly an act of self-conservation than is either 
 feeling or presentation. It is, in fact, the activity in which 
 self-conservation completes and realizes itself. 
 
 It will not be difficult now to determine the relation 
 between cognition and volition. Volition, we have seen, 
 is not a simple but rather a complex function, involving 
 both presentation and feeling. But it is not resolvable into 
 these. It is the distinctive form which the self-conserving 
 impulse of conscious beings assumes, and in this character 
 both presentation and feeling are its servants. Dependent 
 as it is for motive and guidance upon feeling and presen- 
 tation; in its own proper character, and in view of its 
 essential function, they are only parts of the mechanism 
 necessary to its effective action. In the first stages of 
 conscious activity it will then be natural to expect that 
 such a function as cognition will be completely subordinate 
 to volition. The intellect will be in this stage the bond- 
 servant of will, and will have no independent status of 
 its own. Only when intelligence has been considerably 
 developed, and the responses necessary to the well-being 
 of the organism have been relatively well organized, will 
 it become possible for the presentative faculty to secure 
 for itself a sphere of relatively free activity which may be 
 devoted to the independent search for truth. The tendency 
 of mental growth is, however, in this direction, and while 
 we find at the beginning of the process, cognition serving as 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 73 
 
 the willing slave of feeling and volition ; at the end of it 
 knowledge has become master and tends to subordinate 
 everything to itself. 
 
 The point where this transition from servant to master 
 takes place marks an epoch in the history of consciousness. 
 This point is reached at the moment when any consciousness 
 becomes able to arrest the stream of its own representations 
 or ideas, and to make them even for an instant, objects of 
 contemplation. This point of transition to the higher forms 
 of intellection, while it has been recognized, has been con- 
 ceived, as I think, by epistemologists, in too abstract a 
 manner. The tendency is to regard the transition as a 
 purely intellectual transaction. Consciousness, it is said, 
 reaches a point when it begins to objectify its own content, 
 and hold it up for contemplation, and this is conceived as 
 arising out of the exigencies of the cognitive consciousness 
 alone. But I am convinced that it cannot be accounted for 
 without connecting it with other forms of consciousness. In 
 order that the stream of ideas may suffer this arrest it must 
 be connected in some way with the movements of the subject- 
 consciousness. There must be pleasantness or painfulness 
 attached to it in some way through which it acquires a 
 degree of interest that will arrest the feeling side of con- 
 sciousness. This arrest will be followed by attention, which 
 is a volitional function, while interest is emotional. Atten- 
 tion once arrested and fixed, the conditions of the free play 
 of the cognitive faculty upon its content are present, and in 
 this play we have the spring of conception and generaliza- 
 tion. It is true, of course, that conception and generalization, 
 the conditions of their existence being once secured, have 
 motives of their own; but the point of interest here lies in 
 the fact that there is no reason to suppose that the intellect 
 alone, and without the mediation of feeling and volition, 
 would ever make the transition from simple presentation to 
 conception and generalization. The whole resources of 
 consciousness are mustered in order to effect this great 
 step in mental history. 
 
74 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 When the ideal stream has once heen arrested and objec- 
 tified, what we call reflection becomes possible, and reflection 
 is simply the play of consciousness upon its presentational 
 elements. It is, therefore, distinctively cognitive and intel- 
 lectual, but is motived by interest and attention, which, as we 
 have seen, are forms of volition and feeling. In this stage of 
 the intellectual life the order is reversed, and the presentational 
 element, which we will call here the idea, and which in the 
 primary stage was a simple agent of feeling and will, now 
 takes precedence, and becomes the end of the emotional and 
 volitional activity. Eeflection, which in its initial stage 
 takes the form of conception, is simply the interested play 
 of attention upon the elements in the ideal stream. It is 
 not, however, an aimless play, and the question here is what 
 sort of interest it is that motives the reflective activity at 
 this stage ? We can answer this only by going back and 
 relating the process to prior stages of experience. We have 
 seen that the pleasure-pain reaction originates a tendency to 
 repeat certain experiences and to avoid others. For this 
 reason an interest attaches to every memory -image of a past 
 experience, which gives rise to an impulse to appropriation 
 or rejection. This impulse will doubtless survive the birth 
 of reflection, and will supply to it its primary motive, for 
 just as the pleasure-pain feeling associated with certain 
 memory-images motives the impulse to repetition, so when 
 these mental terms have become objects of reflection, the 
 primary interest associated with them survives and generates 
 an impulse to seek other presentations of the same kind. 
 Thus the search for the same arises in the sphere of ideas, 
 and this will be accompanied, of course, with the correspond- 
 ing impulse to reject and cast out those elements to which 
 a painful interest attaches. The first movements of reflec- 
 tion will thus be pretty completely under the guidance of 
 motives that are not distinctively intellectual. When the 
 child first starts out on the trail of identities and differents 
 in its experience, it is not moved to any appreciable extent 
 by purely intellectual motives, but its interests are practical. 
 
CHAP. m. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 75 
 
 and its conceiving activity follows purely practical lines. 
 Gradually, however, through the operation of what James 
 calls the law of dissociation,^ the pleasure-pain interest falls 
 into the background, and the dominating interest becomes 
 intellectual ; that is, attaches to the identities and differents 
 of the ideal stream itself, and the stage of intellection proper 
 has been entered upon. There is then a relative indifference 
 of feeling with respect to the pleasure-pain associates of 
 ideas, and the interest attaches itself more undividedly to 
 the search for samenesses and differences in the ideal terms 
 themselves. The first form which this search takes, if we 
 presuppose the interested attention in which it originates, is 
 comparison, which is simply the conscious seizure of points 
 of sameness on account of their sameness, and of points of 
 difference on account of their difference. Comparison thus 
 involves both identification and differentiation in their 
 simplest forms at least, and is thus a two-sided activity. 
 Comparison results in abstraction ; that is, the selection of 
 points of sameness in the terms compared, and the exclusion 
 of points of difference. Abstraction represents, therefore, 
 the first step of organization in the conceptual world. In 
 it the negative, which is, of course, implicit in comparison, 
 becomes explicit, and we have the fact exemplified that 
 consciousness cannot take a single step forward without 
 denying as well as affirming. Abstraction is a selective 
 function, which cannot be indifferent to points of difference, 
 but must meet them with the attitude of exclusion. It is 
 from the beginning a dual activity of integration and differ- 
 entiation, and its product is the notion or concept which 
 mediates the higher intellectual life of consciousness. 
 
 The new term which we call concept may be considered 
 either from its subject side as an activity, or from its object 
 side as content. On the subject side it is simply a point of 
 view developed by the activity of abstraction, by virtue of 
 which consciousness comes to apprehend the uniformities ; 
 that is, the identities and differences, of its experience. In 
 1 See James' Psychology, vol. i., pp. 486-87. 
 
76 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 other words, the concept is a formula which sums up for us 
 the results of our experience, so that when we have 
 developed a true concept we have achieved a thought which 
 is true , generally of a whole field of experience and will 
 also enable us to anticipate more experience. On the object 
 side of content the concept is realized through generalization ; 
 that is, through the detailed application of the thought to 
 all the particulars in experience of which it is true. The 
 generality of our ideas consists in the scope of their applica- 
 tion. Generalization traces the rays from their focal point 
 out to the multiple objects on which they terminate. It is 
 through generalization that our thought becomes rich in 
 content and maintains its concreteness. 
 
 The concept so originated is called a universal, which is 
 simply a thought that comprehends all the particulars of 
 one kind under a common point of view. The true 
 universal is thus a synthesis of particularity and generality. 
 It does more than merely aggregate the particulars of ex- 
 perience ; it organizes this plurality under a unitary point 
 of view. Through the concept the many in experience 
 becomes truly one inasmuch as its particulars are no longer 
 isolated but take their places as parts of an organic whole. 
 The process of universalizing which is involved in the con- 
 cept also includes the extension of the conceptual activity 
 to its mediate forms which are called inference or reasoning. 
 For it is obvious on the analysis of the inferential process 
 that it is not generally different from conception. If con- 
 ception is a name for the process by means of which the 
 thought of our experience is universalized, then inference is 
 nothing else than an indirect way of furthering that end, 
 and concept and inference may without further ceremony, be 
 classed together as names for the same intellectual process. 
 
 But the concept is not the last, nor the highest step in 
 the cognitive process. We learn this very clearly from 
 Kant's analysis as well as from the analysis of our own 
 conscious processes. The category in Kant represents the 
 concept : at least the concept in its most fundamental form. 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 77 
 
 But the concept itself ends in a plurality. There are 
 several fundamental conceptual unities in experience, there- 
 fore, and the concept does not unify consciousness as a 
 whole, but leaves it split up into fragments. Kant iinds the 
 unifying principle in self-consciousness, but is not very 
 successful in exhibiting the method of its application. 
 Perhaps a fresh analysis at this point may lead to some 
 important results. It seems to me that we have here 
 reached one of those points which form epochs in mental 
 history. Every one will recall John Paul Eichter's account 
 of the point in his experience, when, as by a sudden flash of 
 light, he came to the knowledge of himself, and his world 
 stood before him suddenly transformed. We have here 
 concentrated into a single intense moment an experience 
 that is ordinarily achieved by a relatively long and gradual 
 process. The form of mental activity in which it embodies 
 itself is that oi judgment. For what is judgment essentially? 
 It is the self-appropriation or self-rejection of that which is 
 conceptually present to consciousness. This will be evident 
 from analysis. The primary pulse in judgment is that of 
 affirmation or denial, and affirmation is self-commitment of 
 consciousness as a whole to some conceptual content, while 
 denial is the self-reaction of consciousness as a whole from 
 some conceptual content. It is possible for two contrary 
 conceptual contents to stand side by side in consciousness. 
 This is the principle of alternative which is necessary in 
 order to make judgment a living process. We have seen 
 that the conceptual activity leaves consciousness split up 
 into parts. The situation is even worse than this ; it leaves 
 consciousness divided among alternatives and opposed to 
 itself. There is involved in the very nature of the concept, 
 therefore, an appeal to something higher. The concept does 
 not profess to say the last word in cognition. It supplies 
 the materials and creates the situation for the living exercise 
 of the activity of judgment in which consciousness, as a 
 whole, interposes and heals the breach by committing itself 
 to one alternate and sweeping away the others by denial. 
 
78 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 Judgment is the act therefore in which knowledge ter- 
 minates: it takes the form of a personal endorsement of 
 conceptual content as real, and it results in the unification 
 of the sphere of content; that is, the objective world, by- 
 relating it to the unitary self-activity of consciousness and 
 thus binding in inseparable and living synthesis the subject 
 and object sides of our mental experience. 
 
 If the above account of judgment be correct, it becomes 
 clear that knowledge culminates in an act which is essentially 
 a pulse of self-consciousness. ~So single act of real cogni- 
 tion is at all complete until it has ended in this pulse 
 of self- endorsement or denial. Without it, the concept 
 is only the rudiment of knowledge. We can know only in 
 one way ; that is, in the self-endorsement or self-rejection by 
 consciousness as a whole, of some content presented to it. 
 It is clear, then, that in the function of judgment the pulse 
 of self-consciousness incorporates itself in the very con- 
 stitution of knowledge. No act of knowing can be purely 
 objective. In order that it may complete itself the subject 
 must come forward and put upon it the stamp of its 
 approval, and it is only this final stamp that gives it the 
 right to pass as current coin throughout the realm of 
 consciousness. 
 
 We are now in a position where a provisional definition 
 of knowledge may be attempted. In view of the foregoing 
 analysis we may I think, define knowledge, Jirsi, on the 
 side of process, as that activity of consciousness which begins 
 with presentation and culminates in the self-endorsement or 
 rejection hy consciousness as a whole, and in an act of judgment, 
 of some presented conceptual content; or, secondly, on the side of 
 content : knowledge is that conceptual content of consciousness 
 which has been endorsed as real. Taking this definition as 
 our guide it will not be difficult, I think, to reach some 
 intelligent conclusions as to the relation of knowledge to 
 experience and reality. We have defined experience as the 
 sum of those personal activities by which the self in con- 
 sciousness reacts upon its world and reduces it to realized 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND EEALITY. 79 
 
 content, and it is clear at this point that the activity 
 of knowledge is included in the activities of experience. 
 For, that the knowing activity is personal is proved by the 
 act of judgment in which it reaches completion. Knowing 
 is one of the modes by which the self in consciousness 
 realizes its object. "We are precluded then from represent- 
 ing knowledge and experience as in any sense mutually 
 exclusive terms. Knowledge is included in experience as 
 one of its forms, or as one of the processes by which it 
 realizes itself. Broadly and fundamentally, this is true and 
 it makes it forever impossible to effect any sort of a divorce 
 between knowledge and experience. If however, this 
 fundamental relation be recognized it will be possible to 
 effect a relative but important distinction between know- 
 ledge and experience. Experience includes the emotional 
 and volitional forms of activity as well as that of knowing, 
 and is the more adequate term, therefore, for expressing the 
 whole activity of consciousness. From this point of view it 
 is obviously true that knowledge is to be distinguished from 
 experience, as one of the included processes, from the whole. 
 But, however important this distinction may be, negatively, 
 in saving us from certain kinds of errors, it will not have 
 much positive value until its relation to the experience- 
 processes as a whole has been further determined. What part 
 does the knowing activity perform, we must go on to ask, in 
 the process of experience as a whole ? How is it tributary 
 to experience, and how does it depend on experience ? In 
 order to answer these questions it will be necessary 1 at 
 this point to recall some distinctions made in the iirst and 
 second chapters. We there saw that while it is necessary 
 to reject the notion that any psychosis can be absolutely 
 simple in its internal nature, yet in consciousness as a whole, 
 or in experience as a whole ; genetically conceived, there 
 are stages of relative simplicity and complexity. We saw 
 also that experience presents stages of relative immediacy 
 in its lowest and highest stages and it is this distinction 
 especially that we will find of importance at this point. 
 
80 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 Let US start out with the threefold division of consciousness 
 into the stage of the lower immediacy, the stage of mediacy 
 and that of the higher immediacy. The truth we wish to 
 bring out by means of these distinctions is that of the 
 vital but varying relation of the knowing activity to the 
 process of experience throughout all of its stages. If we 
 take the stage of the lower immediacy in which simple 
 sensation dominates, we will find that here the important 
 factors are feeling or pleasure-pain, and volition. The 
 tendency is for the feeling-motive to lead immediately to 
 action. It is only by analysis that we discover a place in 
 this activity for the knowledge-term. But that it is present 
 is beyond dispute. In a former investigation we have found 
 that the knowledge-term, the presentation, is the very first 
 on the field and that it is necessary not only as a condition 
 of the arousal of the feeling-term, but also for the guidance 
 of the volitional response. The fundamental importance of 
 the presentation cannot then be denied. But in this stage, 
 as we have seen, presentation is only a means to volition, 
 and as the activity here is non-reflective the tendency is for 
 the feeling-motive to pass immediately into volition. The 
 whole foreground of consciousness is filled, therefore, with 
 the sensation and the action while the knowledge-term, 
 though important and indispensable, is crowded out of sight 
 in the background and finds it hard to get recognition. It 
 is only when that first great epoch in the intellectual life 
 occurs, out of which conception is born, that the knowing 
 activity begins to receive some sort of independent recogni- 
 tion, and this point marks also the second great stage of 
 experience, that of mediacy. By the stage of mediacy we 
 mean that point in experience where feeling and action are 
 in a sense forced asunder and a mediating term, reflection 
 or deliberation, makes its appearance. It is characteristic 
 of this period that the whole activity of consciousness 
 changes its form. Its spontaneity is broken up or tends to 
 be so and it begins to approach its ends in a tentative 
 manner. Even feeling changes its form from the immediacy 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 81 
 
 of pleasure-pain which seems to ride over the representation 
 to its end, to emotion in which feeling waits humbly upon 
 representation. The stage of mediacy is characterized by 
 the more or lesS' complete dominance of the intellectual 
 activity over other forms. This we can exhibit in detail. 
 In the first place, let us consider the form of the intellectual 
 activity itself in this period. It is no longer naive unreflec- 
 tive presentation, but its characteristic mode is conception in 
 which the content of experience is thought under general 
 points of view. Now each of these points of view is an 
 idea which once achieved is at the absolute disposal of 
 consciousness. And in view of its origin which we have 
 traced above, each idea will have an interest attached to it 
 and, consequently, at least an implicit intention or energy of 
 realization. The idea is not then a dead and powerless 
 term but we may with Foulle^ designate it an idea-force.-^ 
 The intellectual terms, in short, are not abstract but 
 concrete activities of consciousness, bearing the germs of 
 feeling and volition with them. We are not to suppose 
 then, that the feeling and volitional activities of conscious- 
 ness are at this stage in any sense distinct from or apart 
 from the intellectual. They are implicit in the intellectual. 
 They do not, in the first instance, rouse the intellect but the 
 intellect excites them, and we may consider how this comes 
 to pass. Let us suppose that the idea of some object, say a 
 desirable position rises in consciousness, the interest which 
 attaches to it will cause its arrest in accordance with well- 
 known psychological laws and it wiU become fixed as the 
 object of contemplation. The play of consciousness upon it 
 will tend to develop the germ of feeling which it involves, 
 and through this change to transform it into an emotion to 
 which the idea is no longer external but internal. This leads 
 to a second transformation in which the emotion motives a 
 volitional action or impulse to the appropriation of the 
 desirable object. This moment of the experience is 
 distinguished by the fact that now the activity has become 
 
 '■ See Foulle6, La Psychologie des Idees-Forces, Paris, 1893. 
 F 
 
82 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 explicitly one of will while the feeling-idea has become 
 implicit as motive. 
 
 The relation of the intellectual term to the concrete 
 activity of consciousness at this period is clear enough. 
 Consciousness is dominated by the idea in the sense that 
 it asserts the right of initiative. The active consciousness 
 first shapes itself explicitly in the form of idea. This idea 
 is the eye of consciousness which presents some interesting 
 content to it. And this interesting content stirs the implicit 
 feeling, and the experience becomes an emotion with the 
 idea functioning at its heart to keep it in touch with the 
 arousing content. Were the idea to lapse at any point 
 in the experience the emotion would immediately dissipate. 
 The idea is, therefore, the one condition of the persistence of 
 the emotion. Furthermore, when the experience has 
 become volitional by the arousal of the impulse of appro- 
 priation, and the feeling has become implicit as motive, the 
 idea remains the eye of the soul, and the spring of the 
 whole activity. Let us suppose that at this point of the 
 history the idea should lapse out of consciousness, what 
 would be the result ? Clearly the motive feeling would 
 dry up, and the volitional impulse would cease to exist. 
 The primacy of the idea cannot then be disputed, and the 
 stage of mediacy is represented by that period in mental 
 history in which the idea functions explicitly as the pro- 
 tagonist of the conscious life. This primacy is only 
 rendered the more obvious by the tentative form which 
 conscious activity in this stage tends constantly to assume. 
 An act of deliberation, whether intellectual or practical 
 in its dominating motive, is a transaction which involves 
 a plurality of ideas. We have seen that ideas are not 
 emotionally indifferent, and that they are in reality 
 proposals for volition. When a plurality of these present 
 their interesting content simultaneously, or in close suc- 
 cession, to consciousness, a situation is created which calls 
 for debate and decision. If the dominating interest chances 
 to be intellectual, and the transformation into feeling does 
 
CHAP. HI. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY, 83 
 
 not take place, the transaction will be one of ideas pure 
 and simple, and that alternative will be chosen which is 
 most congruous with that complex of ideas and interests 
 which constitutes the present make-up of consciousness 
 as a whole. If, however, the emotional transformation 
 should take place and lead on to the volitional, only the 
 form of the transaction would be changed, for the domi- 
 nating considerations would be practical rather than ideal, 
 and the alternative chosen would be the one that proved 
 itself to be most congruous to the complex-emotional states 
 and practical aims which constitute the present make-up of 
 consciousness. In both forms of the deliberative process, 
 however, it is clear that the idea holds the key to the 
 situation, and mediates the whole experience. We conclude, 
 then, that the mediate stage of conscious experience be- 
 comes so by virtue of the primacy of the intellect. The 
 characteristic product of experience at this point in its 
 history is the idea, and the idea mediates and determines 
 the activities of feeling and will. But in the exercise of 
 this primacy there is no abstract separation of the intel- 
 lectual from the emotional and volitional activities; but 
 consciousness remains substantially concrete, its ideal terms 
 holding in them the germs of feeling and volition. 
 
 For the third stage of experience, that of the higher im- 
 mediacy, we have to seek our analogies for the most part, not 
 in the mediate, but in the primary consciousness. While the 
 primary consciousness is dominantly sensational, the higher 
 consciousness is to be regarded as dominantly emotional. 
 By this I mean to say that the higher form of experience is 
 reached when the interest of the idea has led to an 
 emotional transformation which tends to be permanent. 
 But why should any emotional transformation tend to be 
 permanent ? We can find an answer to this only by 
 recalling some things which we have already determined. 
 In the first place, we reached the notion of experience as the 
 personal activity of a self by means of which it penetrates 
 and realizes its world. The realized world takes its place 
 
84 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 in consciousness as content of experience, and is that to 
 which we apply the term reality. Again, we have seen 
 that consciousness is constituted by a complex of elements 
 intellectual, emotional, and volitional, which combine in 
 various forms of synthesis in the several stages of the 
 experience process. In the first stage, while feeling seems 
 to dominate, yet, owing to the practical exigencies of life at 
 this point in its history, it is strictly subordinate to practical 
 ends, and is in fact the bond-servant of will. In the 
 mediate stage the intellect dominates and feeling is its 
 servant, and at best a connecting link between intellect and 
 wUl. There is, however, something about feeling, at least 
 in its higher emotional form, which would naturally lead one 
 to regard it as a final term, a point of rest in experience. 
 Feeling is a subject term ; it is the taste which the subject 
 itself gets of its own experience, and, in short, the subject's 
 appropriation of its own experience. We have seen in our 
 analysis of the intellectual function that the activity ends in 
 judgment, which is the self-appropriation or rejection of the 
 presented content of some conception. Judgment is, there- 
 fore, in its essence a pulse of self -feeling, and it is a germinal 
 form of self-consciousness whose business it is to integrate the 
 presented content with consciousness as a whole. Now, if 
 we conceive this judgment-function which is explicitly a 
 self-relating activity, and in that form essentially emotional, 
 as becoming implicit as the unifying core of an emotional 
 state, we will begin to have an idea of that form of ex- 
 perience which we are trying to realize. The judgment of 
 self-consciousness relates the self to the world of its 
 experience as a whole. This world, as a whole, becomes 
 its realized content. But we have seen that the elements 
 of this world, the ideas which constitute our apprehension 
 of it, are interesting, and tend to become transformed into 
 emotional experiences. The world as a whole will, therefore, 
 be interesting, and its apprehension will tend to become 
 transformed into an emotional experience. We mean that 
 in the last analysis the knowing activity cannot be taken as 
 
CHAP. III. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 85 
 
 final. It not only leads on to the emotional, but its end is 
 transformation into emotional experience. 
 
 If the question be asked here why volitional experience 
 is not to be regarded as the final term, we can only point to 
 the fact that volitional activity can be regarded only as a 
 mode of realization, a way in which some condition of 
 consciousness is brought about which is itself not volitional. 
 But an ultra- volitional state of consciousness must be either 
 intellectual or emotional, and this brings us round to the 
 point where we have recognized the finality of emotion. 
 The last and highest stage of experience must be regarded, 
 then, as one in which the self realizes its world in an 
 emotional experience. To this form of experience we may 
 apply the term appreciation} The world of appreciation is a 
 world in which the self realizes its content immediately in 
 an emotional experience. The stage of the higher im- 
 mediacy is then one of appreciation. Knowledge in its 
 ordinary mediating forms has been transcended, but it is 
 pertinent to ask whether knowledge itself has been trans- 
 cended. In the lower stages of experience we have seen 
 that the idea is the eye of the soul, without which it is 
 blind. Has the soul any other eye in this higher stage of 
 its experience ? We think not. The ideal term is no 
 longer explicit, and the experience is emotional in its form. 
 But the idea is implicit, internal in the emotion. Let us 
 eliminate all ideal elements from this higher experience; 
 what remains? Only blind feeling: all insight is gone. The 
 truth is, it is only when the thinking, ideating activity has 
 thus become internal to feeling, and expresses itself in 
 emotional forms, that it becomes what we call the higher 
 reason. The form of feeling is that of immediacy. Think- 
 ing is the seeing activity, the principle of insight, and when 
 thinking acts under forms of feeKng it becomes intuition ; 
 the contents of its thoughts are immediately rather than 
 mediately obtained. Shall we say then with the mystics 
 
 ^ See Royce, Spirit Modem Phil. " Physical Law and Freedom," pp. 
 387, 410. Royce seems to apply the term to the .whole sphere of freedom. 
 
86 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. past i. 
 
 that the intuitions thus obtained are ultra-rational, and that 
 they cannot be correlated with truths apprehended by the 
 ordinary processes of reason ? This also we deny. We 
 are told that the mystic intuition can be achieved only by 
 an act of "self-alienation,"^ that is, by the complete 
 transcendence of experience and by self-identification with 
 the absolute. But in the very nature of the case the trans- 
 cendence of experience is impossible. No being can realize 
 anything, except as a form of its own experience, and 
 experience that is not self-related is impossible and contra- 
 dictory. The mystic intuition, if it is not to be rejected as 
 illusion, must take its place within experience as one of its 
 functions. The mystic intuition is also said to be lacking 
 in the quality of universality ; it is in fact a revelation 
 which, however valuable to the individual consciousness 
 in which it appears, cannot be affirmed as having truth 
 for any other consciousness. It is thus a strictly private 
 affair, and cannot possibly be given a place in a system 
 of truths that possess general validity. But here again 
 I think there is a serious misapprehension. It is true, 
 without doubt, that the higher reason does not achieve 
 generalized universals like those in the conceptual sphere, 
 but that it does not achieve universals cannot be main- 
 tained. For what is the higher reason according to our 
 analysis ? It is the idea become internal or immanent in 
 emotional experience, so that this experience becomes an 
 organ of immediate vision. This vision, when connected 
 with that heightened pulse of self-consciousness which tends 
 to integrate the higher consciousness into a complete unity, 
 and renders all its acts immediate deliverances of conscious- 
 ness as a whole, is what we call rational intuition. It is 
 not a purely intellectual affair; it is rather emotion pervaded 
 and penetrated with intellectual vision. 
 
 To assert that this organ cannot yield a result that is 
 universal, but that it must be, on the contrary, purely idio- 
 
 ' See Recegac, Bases of Mystic Knowledge. Eng. trans. Wo. 7, Scribner'a 
 1899. 
 
CHAP. m. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 87 
 
 syncratic, is, I think, a mistake. The truth seems to be that 
 along with much that is idiosyncratic it also yields a peculiar 
 kind of universal. The ordinary universal of science is one 
 that rests on mediate evidence and whose tests are all mediate. 
 Thus, when we say that man is mortal we assert a pro- 
 position the reasons for which are to be found by a detailed 
 analysis of the contents of our knowledge. But the uni- 
 versal of the higher reason is one that participates in the 
 immediacy of the higher stage of experience. Truth is 
 reducible in the last analysis to an ideal form, and we must 
 bear in mind that the function of the higher reason represents 
 the last analysis, or rather the last synthesis of experience. 
 The higher reason is the organ whose special office it is to 
 conceive truth in its ideal form. We are prepared then to 
 expect that here we will get glimpses of the ideal which 
 will reveal to us lineaments, however fragmentary, of 
 absolute truth, glimpses which in the form of intuition, that 
 is, of immediate apprehension, will bear as their content 
 those fundamental ideas which constitute the ground prin- 
 ciples of the mediate forms of knowledge, and at the same 
 time contain the guarantee of their own truth within them- 
 selves. Let us take any of those basal ideas such as truth, 
 right, duty, good, law, and we will find that each in turn is 
 a presupposition of the lower forms of experience, that it is 
 related to the mediate activities as an integrating, organizing 
 principle, and that when it has been tracked to its last 
 hiding place, it is found to be a principle of immediate 
 validity, shining in the immediacy of its own nature, and 
 lending its authority to the lower forms of experience. 
 
 Now, the doctrine professed here will be misapprehended, 
 unless two important distinctions are recognized. In the 
 first place, these truths of the higher reason are not to be 
 confounded with the ordinary axioms of science which 
 represent simply the first and simplest relations of know- 
 ledge. They are, on the contrary, final rather than first 
 concepts, and they are in the highest degree complex rather 
 than simple, including potentially at least the whole rich 
 
88 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 content of an ideal experience. In the second place, they 
 are to be distinguished from rational content that is purely 
 idiosyncratic. The rational activity being the activity of 
 the whole consciousness in its highest state, vyiU naturally 
 and inevitably yield two kinds of content, the idiosyncratic 
 as well as the truly universal, and these the revealing 
 reason may not be able properly to discriminate. We are 
 not seeking here to withdraw any species of rational content 
 from criticism, but are contending for a thorough and 
 adequate criticism that will lead to a distinction between 
 two kinds of rational content. Failing of this criticism, the 
 mystic leaps to the conclusion that the entire yield of the 
 higher reason is idiosyncratic, and therefore valueless for 
 science and aloof from the ordinary activities of experience. 
 We admit that the higher reason does yield this unique 
 content, and that it may be of extreme value to the 
 individual consciousness ; for every experience may, and, I 
 think, will, contain very rich elements of content that are 
 peculiar to itself and incommunicable. But this idiosyn- 
 cratic element is to be critically distinguished from the 
 universal elements, those basal insights which take their 
 place as organizing principles of all experience and as ideals 
 of a perfected experience. 
 
 The doctrine stated above has the merit, I think, of 
 recognizing the distinctively emotional character of the 
 higher experience and its capacity to yield unique elements 
 of content, while at the same time correlating it with the 
 lower activities of consciousness as the organ of certain 
 truths which are necessary to the organization and com- 
 pletion of the whole field of knowledge. This brings us to 
 a point where it will be possible to reach a relatively ade- 
 quate conception of the relation of knowledge to experience. 
 The knowing activity though not the whole of experience is 
 yet present either implicit or explicit in the whole of ex- 
 perience. It is inseparable from other forms of experience- 
 activity. Starting out as a mere agent of volition it is able 
 to assert for itself a relatively commanding position in the 
 
CHAP. in. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 89 
 
 mediate stage of experience, and feeling and will become in 
 an important sense its servants, at least very dependent 
 upon it, while in the highest stage of experience the knowing 
 activity again becomes internal and consciousness becomes 
 outwardly emotional. The function of knowledge here is 
 vision, and its products are these organizing and unifying 
 conceptions that are necessary to experience As a whole. In 
 every stage of experience the knowing activity is the eye of 
 the soul while at no stage can it be asserted absolutely that 
 knowledge is an end in itself. The final state of conscious- 
 ness, as we have seen, is emotional. What consciousness 
 seeks in its world as its very last end is a state of feeling, a 
 satisfaction in which it can rest. The very last word of 
 experience is not knowledge but edification. If we say then 
 that in the largest and most final sense the business of the 
 whole of experience is .edification or satisfaction it will be 
 clear in this connection that in every stage of that business 
 knowledge is the eye of the soul by whose agency the end 
 is intelligently pursued, and that the highest stage is char- 
 acterized by the immediacy of the relation between the 
 vision and the satisfaction. 
 
 The relation of knowledge to reality is a topic which 
 cannot be elaborately treated at this stage of our discussion. 
 The dictum of M'Cosh that knowledge must begin with 
 reality if it would end with it is no doubt the truth of the 
 matter in a nutshell. Knowledge is a process within ex- 
 perience and starts with experience-data. Now, we have 
 seen in the first chapters that while experience and reality 
 cannot be completely identified, yet the real must be con- 
 ceived as content of experience. Knowledge, then, must 
 start with the real. But in order that our discussion may 
 not come to a stop here an important distinction must be 
 recognized. If the real is to be completely identified with 
 experience- content it must be with the content of a possible 
 rather than an actual experience. At this stage at least 
 where we are not considering the metaphysical question 
 whether it be necessary to postulate an infinite experience 
 
90 GROUND CONCEPTS OP KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 as real, the distinction between actual and possible experi- 
 ence is vitally important, for if we identify reality with the 
 content of actual experience we are manifestly guilty of 
 absurdity unless we bring in the metaphysical postulate. 
 Whereas if, leaving the metaphysical question open, we 
 identify the real with possible experience-content we have 
 achieved a position from which the relation of knowledge 
 to reality may be determined. It becomes obvious that 
 knowledge must begin and end with reality if it would be 
 knowledge at aU and not illusion. The whole business of 
 knowledge is to extend actual experience by an effort to 
 determine the content of a possible experience. As fast as 
 it is determined it, of course, becomes actual. But the very 
 effort of knowing involves a transcendence of the limit of 
 actual experience. The relation of knowledge to reality 
 involves also that of reality to consciousness. "We have 
 seen that a distinction must be recognized between experi- 
 ence-content and conscious-content. There may be that 
 present in or to consciousness that has not been penetrated 
 and realized by consciousness. "We have identified reality 
 with realized content. It can only be conceived as real if 
 it is completely realized in some consciousness. But this 
 can be maintained, it is clear, only in view of a distinction 
 similar to the above. If the real is to be considered realized 
 content of consciousness we must distinguish between actual 
 and possible content of consciousness, and the real can only 
 be identified with possible content of consciousness. Of 
 course we have to make the same reservation here regarding 
 the metaphysical postulate of a consciousness in which the 
 possible is to be conceived as real, as was found necessary 
 above. The real, then, is possible content of consciousness 
 and will be found to be a transcendent term in relation to 
 an actual consciousness. It will include the realized con- 
 tent of the actual consciousness ; also that which is simply 
 present in or to consciousness, together with an extra- 
 conscious sphere which exists as yet only as implicate or 
 postulate. The recognition of these distinctions enables us 
 
CHAP. in. KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE, AND REALITY. 91 
 
 to avoid absurdity and to take a rational position with 
 reference to the relation of knowledge to reality. If we fail 
 to distinguish between actual and possible experience then 
 it is impossible to see how knowledge can get beyond actual 
 experience, or, in fact, how experience can extend its own 
 limits. If we fail to distinguish between actual and possible 
 content of consciousness, it is impossible to see how any- 
 thing can be regarded as real that is not actual content of 
 consciousness, and the reality of the whole sphere of 
 possibility is straightway denied. We must make room in 
 our world of reality, it is clear, not only for the actual 
 content of consciousness, including that which is merely 
 present and not realized, but also for the sphere of possi- 
 bility, the world of postulate and implication. 
 
 When we say, then, that reality is the content of 
 knowledge we speak in terms of achievement. From any 
 attained, or perhaps attainable, standpoint the real must 
 be largely outside of knowledge. To get to know the 
 real as it is, must be the ideal' of all our efforts, but that 
 we shall ever know the real as it is — that is a different 
 question. If it be said that the real as it is, is in its 
 nature unknowable, that is to deny that the real is possible 
 content of consciousness or experience, and we are back 
 in absolute darkness and chaos. If our world is to be 
 made in any sense intelligible, we must cling to intelligible 
 conceptions. We must af&rm that the only real thinkable 
 to us and, therefore, the only real worth affirming, is a 
 real which is the content of a possible experience. We 
 are willing that any other real should become the prey 
 of the sceptic and the agnostic. 
 
 To sum up in a concluding paragraph the leading results 
 of this part of our discussion, the aim has been, in short, to 
 reach better definitions, than are current of some of those 
 leading conceptions which are fundamental to a satisfactory 
 doctrine of knowledge. The result of confusion in this space 
 is that a great deal of our modern energy has been wasted or 
 misdirected. Now it seems to me that a prime condition of 
 
92 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 a rational treatment of the problems of knowledge is the 
 attainment of more adequate conceptions of the significance 
 of such terms as knowledge, experience, reality, and of their 
 relations to one another. In this trinity of conceptions, as 
 we have seen, experience is the all-comprehending term. 
 Knowledge is the product of one of the included modes 
 of experience, while the real is to be regarded as the 
 realized content of experience. If, however, experience is 
 to be regarded as the all-comprehending term, it is only in 
 the ideal sense or in terms of perfection that this can be 
 taken as absolutely true. So far as actual experience is 
 concerned, its content as we have contended will stand for 
 a fragment of reality only. It is the aim of experience 
 to encompass all reality, and reality can be conceived only 
 as content of a possible experience in which it is realized. 
 Likewise, in respect to knowledge it is only the possible 
 ideal experience in which it is completely contained. When 
 we say that knowledge cannot transcend experience, we 
 mean the limits of a possible experience. The actual 
 experience is transcended by every act of knowledge, and 
 knowledge may know things by postulate and implication, 
 which only the possible experience can compass. The same 
 relation of transcendence exists between actual knowledge 
 and reality. When we characterize the real as the content 
 of knowledge, it is possible knowledge we have in view. 
 The real is, of course, more than possible knowledge ; it is 
 possible experience. But its relation to knowledge is that 
 of possible content. So far as actual achievement is con- 
 cerned, it will always be largely transcended. Our world, in 
 the larger part of its extent will be for us a region lying 
 outside the limits of achieved knowledge. If we do not 
 admit that it; is unknowable we must concede that it is for 
 the most part unknown. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 THE IDEA or METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Knowledge is related to experience, as we have seen, not 
 only as a mode by which experience passes from a stage of 
 lower to one of higher immediacy in which reason is immanent 
 in feeling, but in its fundamental relation it is included in 
 experience as one of its activities. Experience includes 
 the activities of choice and feeling, as well as that of 
 representation, and knowledge may in general be conceived 
 as that activity in which conscious experience reduces its 
 content to intelligibility. Now the activity of knowing 
 may be considered from two different points of view, the first, 
 epistemological, in which the subject of investigation is 
 the concrete functions of knowing, and the objective cate- 
 gories under which they define their content ; the second, 
 logical, which is more abstract, and seeks to develop an 
 organon of method. Logic may be designated broadly 
 as a doctrine of the method of knowing as distinguished 
 from its content and its objective categories, and is, therefore, 
 more abstract and formal than general epistemology. In 
 this chapter we aim simply to develop the notion of logical 
 method so far only as it enters essentially into the epistemo- 
 logical processes. Just as epistemology itself deals with one 
 aspect of experience, so logic deals with only one phase of 
 epistemology, the formal aspect that is characterized as 
 method. The discipline called formal logic originated and 
 
 93 
 
94 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 grew up in an effort to abstract the conceptual process, by- 
 means of which experience passes from the lower to the 
 higher stage of immediacy. It is, therefore, a doctrine of 
 the mediate operations of the mind, and has its beginning 
 at that point in the experience process considered as a 
 whole, where the naivete of sensation passes into that 
 reflective activity which conditions all the higher forms of 
 experience. The notion of formal logic is, in short, the 
 notion of reflection abstracted and organized into a method. 
 It occurred to thinkers before Aristotle to seize upon 
 fragments of the reflective process, and develop them into 
 canons of reasoning, but the mind of Aristotle was the first 
 that conceived an adequate notion of logic as the scientific 
 formulation of the whole process of reflection, and the 
 famous peripatetic is, therefore, very justly called the father 
 of logic. Now, assuming that logic involves the abstraction 
 of the reflective process from its concrete context in experi- 
 ence, there are in the last resort but two fundamental points 
 of view from which an organon of logic may be developed. 
 If we take our stand upon the first pulsive movement of 
 thinking, we will find that it is simply a moment of self- 
 assertion, and supplies no principle of distinction or inclu- 
 sion, but in the second moment of the process the pulsive 
 activity will have come upon some objective content, and 
 this forces discrimination in the form of disjunction or 
 alternation. The activity is confronted with an opposition, 
 content standing over against content, and is forced to 
 become selective. To state the same fact in somewhat 
 different phrase, if we start out on any process of thinking 
 we will find that the first step is a straightforward act in 
 which something is conceived ; that is, we apprehend some 
 content. If we continue the process, however, beyond the 
 first act, we will find that this content relates itself by 
 opposition to something that it opposes and excludes. If 
 we think round, we oppose and exclude square, and in doing 
 so our thought has become selective; it has chosen round 
 and rejected square. It is possible for us now to seize on 
 
CHAP. IV. THE IDEA OF METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 95 
 
 this moment of selection as the trae and characteristic 
 movement of reflection, and to develop an organon from it, 
 and this is precisely what the Aristotelian logic has done. 
 This will become obvious if we consider that the principle 
 of identity or contradiction, for the situation is two-sided, is, 
 in fact, a principle of selection. The moment of identity is 
 that of the affirmation or choice of the included content, 
 round, while that of contradiction is the opposite moment of 
 negative choice, the exclusion of the opposing content, 
 square, as inconsistent. The formulation of this dual 
 activity into the principle of identity-contradiction supplies 
 the basis of the whole Aristotelian logic. 
 
 The value of this concept of logic consists in the fact that 
 it does embody fairly well the ordinary movement of scien- 
 tific thinking, which is for the most part an activity of 
 selective discrimination, resulting in the organization of 
 content into a system of concepts concatenated on the basis 
 of their relations of mutual inclusion and exclusion of 
 common or opposed content. The Aristotelian logic proves 
 itself inadequate to the whole process of thinking, however, 
 in the fact that it ends with the moment of contradiction. 
 Its concept of system is in the last analysis, one in which 
 identical elements are rounded up, so to speak, and defined 
 by the negative activity of exclusion. But it will be clear, 
 I think, that the reflective process itself cannot stop with 
 the moment of contradiction if it would be in any sense 
 complete. The truth of this will be clear if we observe 
 that in a world of contradiction there is always a content 
 outside of that which is included. The act of contradiction 
 marks division and exclusion. But what are we going to 
 do with the outside, the excluded and unorganized world ? 
 There is the same motive for organizing it as there was for 
 thinking in the first place, but we will find that if we 
 attempt to organize our whole world of content by means of 
 the principle of contradiction we are condemned to an 
 infinite series of steps involving an endless process of exclu- 
 sion. Our world as a whole eludes all our efforts, and is 
 
96 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. paet i. 
 
 for ever transcending and defying our categories. A logic 
 that will be adequate to the whole demand of reflection 
 must go beyond contradiction, and supply a principle for 
 the comprehension of the whole. 
 
 This leads to the second possible standpoint for a logic of 
 reflection. If we follow the process of reflection from this 
 moment of contradiction we will find that it does not 
 exhaust itself in the double act of inclusion and exclusion 
 of content, but that there is a reflex or return movement, 
 and a relating of the whole to the point where the process 
 originated, a point which we may now call that of individual 
 comprehension, inasmuch as the activity is one that includes 
 and makes internal both moments of identity and contra- 
 diction, and subordinates them to the pulse of unity or 
 comprehension. It is impossible for reflection to complete 
 itself otherwise than in this activity of individual com- 
 prehension, which reduces identity and contradiction to 
 moments of an included world. 
 
 The standpoint we have achieved here is that of dialectic, 
 or the logic of Hegel. The dissatisfaction of Hegel with 
 the Aristotelian concept of logic arose fundamentally out of 
 the conviction that, ending as it does with the moment 
 of contradiction, it lacks any principle for the comprehension 
 of reality as a whole, and, therefore, fails to embody the 
 whole process of reflection. The Hegelian concept of logic 
 will be achieved if we conceive the dual moment of identity- 
 contradiction as the middle term in a threefold activity, 
 which begins with the straightforward pulsive act of selJF- 
 assertion, which the Aristotelians also recognize, moves 
 forward to the second or selective stage, where it becomes 
 dual, and ends in contradiction; and lastly, completes itself 
 in a third stage of individual comprehension, in which the 
 opposition of the second stage is transcended, and the whole 
 world-content is unified. The Hegelian notion involves 
 this threefold internal activity, and the dialectic is simply 
 this inner activity of the notion conceived as completing 
 itself, and then finding in the last act of comprehension the 
 
CHAP. IV. THE IDEA OF METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 97 
 
 motive for the repetition of the process on a higher 
 plane. We thus arrive at the notion of reflection as an 
 incessant and self-completing process of differentiation and 
 higher unification. The Hegelian logic originated like 
 the Aristotehan in the attempt to abstract the inner 
 dialectic of reflection and reduce it to a system of formal 
 categories. 
 
 That there is no other standpoint outside of these two, 
 from which a logic of reflection could be developed, will be 
 obvious without further consideration. It is possible, how- 
 ever, to make the attempt to mediate between these two 
 concepts of logic, and to develop a quasi-genetic history of 
 the process of reflection. This is what Lotze does in his 
 very subtle treatise on logic,^ and whether he succeeds 
 or not in defining any tenable middle ground for logic, 
 which is doubtful, his patient analysis of the windings of 
 thought, is instructive. The chief value of Lotze's discussion 
 arises, we think, from its exhibition of the inability of 
 reflection to complete itself short of an all-comprehending 
 notion of reality. Starting with the activity in which the 
 concept is formed, he shows that the conceptual content 
 cannot maintain its unity, but immediately falls apart and 
 supplies the problem for judgment, which in its effort to deal 
 with the duality reaches as its last step the principle of 
 disjunction in which the effort to conceive our world-content 
 takes the form of an incessant inclusion and exclusion, so 
 that there is always some content left outside of our widest 
 category. The final distinction of content in the logical 
 judgments leads in the various species of inference to 
 attempts to overcome the difficulty. These take the forms, 
 successively, of subsumption, quantitative and qualitative 
 substitution, and comprehension under the notion of classi- 
 fication. The aim of Lotze is to show how each mode of 
 inference supplies the motive for its successor, until, in the 
 attempt to reach a point where the dialectic may rest, we 
 are led to what Lotze calls the form of speculative thought, 
 
 '^ Logic (English Trana.), Oxford, 1888, vol. L, part i. 
 G 
 
98 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 in which the whole content of reality is conceived under 
 some principle of organic unity. 
 
 It is not our purpose here to follow the history of logical 
 doctrine out into any of its details. It is sufficient that we 
 have achieved the two points of view from which it is possible 
 to formulate principles of reflection. The thought of Lotze 
 develops no new standpoint or principle, but simply exhibits 
 the process more or less successfully by which reflection at 
 various stages of its progress takes on relative formulations 
 which, in so far as they embody pure reflection, are easily 
 reducible to the basis of either the logic of contradiction or 
 the logic of unity. The principal motive of the above 
 discussion has been to prepare the way for an objection to 
 the ordinary way in which logic is applied to the problems 
 of epistemology. The tendency is to abstract the form of 
 reflection, and, having developed it into a logical organon, to 
 regard it as an instrument that may be applied externally 
 to the knowing activity, and to which the moments of this 
 activity as a process in experience must conform. This is 
 the presumption that underlies Lotze's procedure, who, having 
 abstracted the process of reflection from its place in the con- 
 crete, is at a loss to see the connection between the formal 
 and the real relations of things. If we abstract the form of 
 the relation-process, and then attempt to apply it to the 
 content of reality in an external and arbitrary fashion we 
 will be certain to meet obstacles that cannot be overcome. 
 Form cannot be imposed on content externally without 
 becoming a procrustean bed. If we name this tendency 
 to superimpose form on content the logician's fallacy 
 then we may say that Kant was a principal offender, 
 for his practice throughout was to conceive form as prior 
 and external to content, and, therefore, to vest it with 
 a legislative prerogative. Hegel was too deep-sighted 
 to miss the true relation of form to content, but it 
 cannot be maintained that he has not sinned in his 
 practice, and as for the Hegelian school, its temptation 
 is to break through all limits, and force the whole rich 
 
CHAP. IV. THE IDEA OP METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 99 
 
 content of reality into conformity with a few cast-iron 
 moulds. 
 
 We do not wish to be understood here as depreciating 
 the value of logic, the study of which is an indispensable 
 condition of clear and methodical thinking, but what it 
 seems to me to be a matter of the highest importance to 
 maintain here, is that the epistemologist simply commits a 
 monumental blunder when he mistakes his office for that of 
 the formal logician, and attempts an external application of 
 his organon to the concrete material of experience. The 
 diflOioulty that confronted Lotze in his epistemological 
 industry, and which rendered his efforts in some measure 
 abortive, the impossibility of discovering any real point of 
 identity between formal and real relations, was largely self- 
 made, and arose out of his effort to conceive some external 
 union between elements that are never separate in reality. 
 How then, we may ask, are we to conceive the relation of 
 logic to epistemology or rather the relation of the forms of 
 logic to the activity of knowledge? The answer to this will 
 not be far to seek. The knowledge-process is internal to the 
 larger process of experience, and in it the form is immanent 
 and not separable from the material content of thinking. 
 "We do well to unfold our formal logical schemes, and there 
 is an important sense in which our logical concepts will 
 have a guiding influence on all our thinking. But the 
 function of these must be regulative rather than constitu- 
 tive; that is, we must think in conformity with logical 
 forms rather than actually think the logical forms into the 
 material of thought. But the constitutive thinking in the 
 evolution of a theory of knowledge that would have reality 
 for its content, must be immanent thinking. We must 
 conceive the logical form as in vital union with real content, 
 and must look into the heart of the real for the actual 
 pulsations of constitutive thinking. 
 
 The doctrine contended for here is one of much more 
 than technical importance. The notion of experience which 
 we have reached is sufficient to show that all reality must 
 
100 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 be conceived as intra-experiential, and that it is impossible 
 to conceive of a logic that would in any sense transcend 
 experience. We have seen, moreover, that the knowing 
 activity is included in the broader activity of experience. 
 Now, logic is a discipline founded on the formal aspect of 
 knowledge. Is there any sense, then, in which logic can 
 take a prescriptive attitude toward knowledge? None 
 except in the subordinate role of a regulative organ of 
 subjective thinking. Our logic may embody our ideal of 
 correct thinking. But we have no prescriptive right to 
 impose this ideal on the concrete processes of experience. 
 We must penetrate these processes and from the internal 
 point of view, follow them whithersoever they go. The 
 windings of reality may not conform at all points to the 
 turns of our logical ideal, and even when we have con- 
 ceived our category truly we only know its real function 
 when we find it actually at work. It is possible for a 
 thinker to have the highest respect for the categories of the 
 Hegelian logic ; in fact to accept them as the truest formal 
 statement of the reality of the world, and yet at the same 
 time to refuse to accept them as infallible a priori guides. 
 The form, however adequately conceived, will not enable us 
 to infallibly anticipate the actual trail of reality, for content 
 has a reactive influence on form that is not a priori calculable. 
 Hence it is that in order to preserve the real trail of 
 knowledge we must keep close to the heart of experience 
 and be ever prepared to find that in their application 
 our formal ideals may require modification. 
 
 The first requirement, then, in order to reach a true 
 conception of epistemological method is that the notion of 
 epistemology be distinguished from that of logic. The 
 notion of logic is that of an organon of the formal aspect of 
 reflection. But epistemology has no exclusive concern with 
 the forms of reflection, but is equally concerned with its 
 content. We have seen that if we abstract the form of 
 thinking from its content and develop it into an organon, its 
 relation to the actual thinking process involved in knowing- 
 
CHAP. IV. THE IDEA OF METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 101 
 
 can be regulative only and not constitutive. Epistemology, 
 however, has no direct concern with regulative processes. 
 The processes in which it is interested are real activities in 
 experience, and, therefore, in so far as it realizes its aim, the 
 organon it constructs will be constitutive ; that is, an antici- 
 pation of the actual process of knowing. How then shall 
 this constitutive relation be achieved ? It would, no doubt, 
 be impossible to give a completely satisfactory answer to 
 this question. But epistemology will approximate to its 
 aim, if in the first place it correctly apprehends the essential 
 situation out of which knowledge develops and the stand- 
 point from which the activity of knowing becomes possible, 
 and secondly if it correctly seizes upon the form-activities in 
 which it directly lays hold of and defines its content. The 
 answer to the first requirement has been largely anticipated 
 in the preceding chapters. It is impossible to define a true 
 standpoint for epistemology apart from an adequate notion 
 of experience and of the relation of knowledge to experience. 
 We have seen that the very notion of experience involves 
 the internal complexity of the nature of which it is a 
 function, and that the fundamental complexity is the 
 tendency of the nature to distinguish itself as subject in 
 relation to objective content. This distinction we have seen 
 to be essential to knowledge which is a form of experi- 
 ence. Again, the distinctive characteristic of knowing, as a 
 form of experience consists in the mode by which it realizes 
 content, which is that of presentative and aconceptual re- 
 presentation, or, in general, the definition of the content of 
 reality in terms of an objective idea. The true stand-point 
 of epistemology is, therefore, that of a conscious subject 
 activity related to content and defining it in terms of some 
 objective idea. 
 
 The second requirement is that we correctly seize upon 
 the form-activities in which the content of the real is 
 defined. These form-activities will be, of course, those of 
 objective apprehension, and these will lay hold of and define 
 the content of knowledge. It is impossible, however, to 
 
102 GROUND CONCEPTS OP KNOWLEDGE. pabt i. 
 
 conceive a subject-activity as immediately apprehending 
 content as objective. There must be some middle terms, 
 and these will be both mediating and defining. It is clear 
 that these middle terms will be elements of form which 
 arise out of the reaction of the subject-activity upon 
 objective stimulations, and that they will appear as functions 
 of an objective consciousness and as defining forms of objec- 
 tive content. This much it is necessary to say here in 
 anticipation of the fuller discussion of the first chapter in 
 Part II. That there is in cognition and the knowing activi- 
 ties in general what Professor Ladd has aptly styled a 
 " trans-subjective reference " ^ will be admitted by every one 
 except the crassest kind of a subjective idealist. But how 
 to exhibit the process in experience by which the trans- 
 subjective is realized in objective form, is a question the 
 terms of which are rarely understood, and the attempted 
 answers to which have been few and, as a rule, insufficient. 
 It is too much the custom of the contemporary student of 
 knowledge to scorn the Kantian notion of categories, and 
 to either imagine that in giving a psychological analysis of 
 conscious activities he has also solved the epistemological 
 problem, or else to content himself with an ad nauseam 
 iteration of the fact that cognition is objective with- 
 out making any effort to show how this is possible. Kant 
 both saw the problem and set a high example of the 
 way to go about its solution. That cognition does not 
 terminate in a subjective consciousness, but that it is truly 
 objective is a fact the recognition of which is an indis- 
 pensable qualification for dealing with the problems of 
 knowledge at all. This insight leads naturally to the 
 question of method. If cognition is a subject function, 
 and yet realizes forms of objective reality, how is this 
 possible, and by what means is it effected ? The answer to 
 this supplies an essential element of epistemological method 
 and will be given in detail in the doctrine of the categories. 
 All that we need say here in addition to what has been 
 1 The Philosophy of Knowledge, New York, 1897. 
 
CHAP. IV. THE IDEA OP METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 103 
 
 advanced already is that the middle term in knowledge, the 
 term in and through which the subject-activity is enabled 
 to realize all objective content, is part of the essential 
 structure of the knowing act, and in fact the part that is 
 most characteristic. 
 
 We have employed the Kantian distinction between 
 constitutive and regulative thinking as a means of dis- 
 tinguishing the internal process of knowledge from the 
 external and regulative ideal that is ordinarily embodied 
 in formal logic, and at this point we may identify that 
 middle term of knowledge in which the transition to true 
 objectivity is effected, with the constitutive principle of the 
 internal method. A true answer to the question, how the 
 trans-subjective reference is possible, and how it is effected, 
 will also be a true answer to the question of method, how 
 are we to proceed internally and constitutively rather than 
 externally and regulatively ? It is only by discovering the 
 mediating terms in cognition, and by observing that they 
 are also forms of an objective consciousness that we will 
 obtain the clue to the internal method. We are proceeding 
 according to that method when we distinguish the processes 
 by which we think about our world from those more direct 
 processes in which we think our world, and endeavour to 
 follow the trail of the latter. That such an enterprise can 
 be realized only by laying hold of and thinking in terms of 
 those mediating categories which render objective knowledge 
 possible, will become obvious to anyone who has patience to 
 make the effort. 
 
 That the distinction of subject and object consciousness is 
 fundamental to the stand-point and method of epistemology 
 has perhaps already been made clear. But we will venture 
 to add a few observations here in order to make " assurance 
 doubly sure." Opposition to the notion of this distinction 
 as being fundamental, comes as a rule from a certain class 
 of psychologists, and yet some of the best psychologizing of 
 the day is showing us that the idea of self is of cardinal 
 importance, and that a rational science of psychological 
 
104 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 doctrine is rendered possible only by connecting all the 
 activities of consciousness with the central self as their 
 subject. Now the epistemologist simply claims the right 
 to take this self which the psychologists are defining and 
 vindicating as central in experience, as the subject and 
 bearer of the knowing activity, and inasmuch as to know 
 is to define in terms of objectivity, the epistemologist finds 
 it necessary to develop from the psychologist's self an 
 immediate implication which the psychologist himself may 
 permit to remain latent ; namely, that there can be no self 
 without its objective other. The self without its other 
 would be an unreal abstraction and in order to achieve a 
 situation that is concrete and real the self must be conceived 
 as in constitutional and fundamental relations with some 
 term that calls forth its effort to objectively define and 
 realize. In view of the fact that the central function with 
 which epistemology deals is that of cognition in which the 
 object term is incorporated, and which is overtly an objec- 
 tive transaction, it becomes obvious that in order to achieve 
 the ground of its own possibility it must develop the latent 
 implication of psychology and regard the object term in 
 consciousness as co-ordinate with that of the subject self. 
 The distinction of subject and object, and of subject and 
 object consciousness is thus seen to be fundamental to 
 epistemology. 
 
 The internal method will start, therefore, with the 
 activity of a subject-consciousness in which is involved a 
 distinction of self from the objective, however latent and 
 rudimentary this distinction may be conceived to be, and the 
 possibility of its procedure will depend, as we have seen, on 
 the function of certain mediating terms, in and through 
 which objective content will be laid hold on and defined. 
 In determining the steps of this process, the epistemologist 
 has to thank the psychologist again for important aid. The 
 genetic study of the self, has led to the discovery that the 
 whole process of self realization is indirect and mediated by 
 an objective activity. The child plays upon and enters into 
 
CHAP. IV. THE IDEA OF METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 105 
 
 its object through processes that are mainly imitative, and 
 by a kind of reflex return of consciousness brings the spoils 
 of its excursus back to the home treasury in the form of an 
 increment of self realization. The law of self development 
 seems to be the realization of self through the appropriation 
 and assimilation of its other and this law includes the 
 biological as well as the psychological in its scope. The 
 student of knowledge needs only to take this law as his 
 guide, and recognizing the fact that the cognitive activity is 
 a function within experience, to look in the objective 
 activities of consciousness, those acts in which some element 
 of objective content is achieved, for the first results of the 
 knowing process. Or, to state the same thing in different 
 phrase, the direct business of knowledge is the determination 
 of objective content. We begin our struggle to penetrate 
 and realize our world and in the course of this effort we 
 come to realize ourselves. This is an all important fact for 
 the doctrine of method. That the knowing activity is a 
 subject function but that its first overt explicit moment is 
 objective, and that the momentary self-consciousness remains 
 latent until the return wave arouses it into activity, the 
 recognition of this is fundamental since upon it hangs 
 the whole law and the prophets of a true epistemological 
 procedure. 
 
 Starting with this concept of the situation the internal 
 method rests for its middle point as we have seen, on those 
 mediating terms which are necessary, in order to render the 
 process of objective realization possible. If the objective 
 could never be brought within the embrace of intelligible 
 form it would be impossible for these imitative processes by 
 which the object is penetrated, to operate. That there may 
 be imitation, there must be something intelligible to imitate. 
 The child must seize upon some element of form before it 
 can have a pon sto for the function we call imitative. The 
 first stage of knowing is thus presupposed in the moment of 
 imitation which originates as a species of reaction upon the 
 objective, and of which a first taste has been obtained in a 
 
106 GROUND CONCEPTS OF KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 more primary activity. Now it is this more primary 
 moment that is contemplated in the method we are advoca- 
 ting here. Just as the genetic psychologist endeavours to 
 seize the actual constitutive principle by which the child 
 enters into and realizes its object, so the epistemologist, if 
 he would follow a method of equal efficiency, must endeavour 
 to lay hold of the principle by which the knowing activity 
 formally appropriates and defines the objective as intelligible 
 content. And in order to successfully achieve this he 
 must not only truly apprehend what these principles or 
 middle terms are but he must also make them the principles 
 of his own thinking. By that I mean that he must make 
 the effort to think his world through, under and by means 
 of the principles he has apprehended. 
 
 From this point of view the internal method will become 
 a species of epistemological dialectic between subjective and 
 objective terms in consciousness. The activity we call 
 knowing will not involve simply a movement of action and 
 reaction between an objective and subjective consciousness, 
 but by virtue of the place which the mediating terms or 
 principles hold in it, becomes dialectical in a higher sense. 
 The mediating terms of objectivity are, in general, points of 
 coalescence for the subject and object consciousness, and 
 they thus become principles for the presentative and con- 
 ceptual apprehension of a world of content. Were there 
 but one mediating principle, or were there no way of passing 
 from principle to principle, our world might become a pro- 
 crustean bed on which we would find ourselves helplessly 
 bound. We do not find this to be the case, however, for 
 we are led to the discovery that as the process of inner 
 reflection preceeds each principle of form, while it proves 
 itself without limit on its own plane, or in its own kind, yet 
 inevitably leads to a point where its transcendence becomes 
 necessary. If, for example, we start with some principle of 
 quantitative determination which involves the notion of 
 dimension, we will not find that the possibility of dimen- 
 sional determination comes to an end somewhere, but what 
 
CHAP. IV. ; THE IDEA OF METHOD IN KNOWLEDGE. 107 
 
 we actually strike will be a qualitative limit. If we apply 
 the principle of dimension to the determination of reality, 
 we will reach a point where another aspect of the real will 
 begin to assert itself, an aspect that does not involve the 
 denial of dimension, but rather transcends and includes it. 
 The significance of such a fact as this is that one principle 
 of objective definition leads on to another as its necessary 
 implication, and that this implied principle proves itself to 
 be not only qualitatively different from the other, but one 
 whose function in relation to the lower principle is one of 
 transcendence and comprehension. The internal method 
 will not lead us to set aside the mechanical in order that 
 we may assert the teleological or spiritual, but rather in the 
 evolution of the mechanical, and the endeavour to think 
 the world under mechanical categories a point will be 
 reached where it will become necessary to conceive the 
 real as qualitatively transcending the rubrics of mechanism, 
 and at this point we will come upon the initiative of a 
 higher and comprehending principle, in the light of which 
 we will be able to achieve a further construct of reality. 
 
 We are in a position now to correlate our doctrine of 
 method with the concepts of experience and reality which 
 have been developed in former chapters. The notion of 
 experience we have seen to be all-comprehensive and inclu- 
 sive of the whole process by which the world is realized 
 and rendered intelligible. It is inclusive of both theoretic 
 and practical activities, and contemplates the realization of 
 the world for feeling and will as well as for thought. The 
 whole activity of knowledge is to be conceived as internal 
 to experience, and consists in the realization of the world 
 for and in the thinking activities. The real is to be con- 
 ceived as the whole content of experience, and as therefore 
 internal. If there is anything transcendent it will still be 
 included in actual or possible experience. The content of 
 knowledge is the content of experience intelligibly appre- 
 hended and defined under presentative and conceptual 
 forms. The content of knowledge is also content of experi- 
 
108 GROUND CONCEPTS OP KNOWLEDGE. part i. 
 
 ence, and is therefore real. Now the method of knowledge, 
 as we have conceived it, is an embodiment of the inner dialecti- 
 cal process hy which the content of experience is reduced to 
 content of knowledge. And inasmuch as knowledge itself is 
 included in experience, and therefore experiential, the 
 method of knowledge is experiential in this broad sense. It 
 is not only internal to experience and limited by experience, 
 but its function in the large sense is the explanation of the 
 content of experience. We may expect, then, that in 
 following the gradual development of the knowing processes 
 we will be at the same time achieving a more adequate 
 view of experience. 
 
PART II. 
 
 EVOLUTION OF THE CATEGORIES OF 
 KNOWLEDGE. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 NATUEE OF THE CATEGOEIES. 
 
 David Hume, viewing consciousness exclusively from the 
 side of content, and finding it outwardly composed of a 
 plurality of sensuous feelings, concluded that the mind is 
 primarily only a mass of unrelated sense-elements, and 
 sought in the aggregations of these elements for the genesis 
 of the principles of knowledge. Given the sense-elements 
 and a disposition to cohere when in some way unaccountable 
 they are brought together, and the whole structure of 
 experience could, he thought, be explained. But Hume had 
 not reckoned with the possibility that in the data of 
 knowledge may be included elements of different species. 
 Nor did he sufi&ciently realize the obstacles that beset the 
 epistemological problem when it is approached from the 
 point of view of a mere observer of phenomena. The mere 
 observer sees only the outward mechanical aspects of 
 consciousness and needs to inner himself to the point of 
 view of the experiencer of phenomena before he can be in a 
 position to understand the complexity of his problem. 
 Kant's insight was deeper than that of Hume, and his 
 conception of the conditions of the problem of knowledge 
 was more adequate in at least two respects — (1) in the 
 distinction which he recognized between the ordinary sense- 
 elements in consciousness and certain structural terms which 
 he called categories ; (2) in his recognition of the dual 
 
 111 
 
112 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 aspects of consciousness, subjective and objective, and his 
 attempt to relate its mechanical plurality to the unity of 
 self-consciousness. Whatever we may think of the value of 
 Kant's work, and on that point opinions will vary, I do not 
 think that the necessity of some such diagnosis as that of 
 Kant can be successfully denied. To confine our observations 
 to the second point, it will be clear on reflection, I think, 
 that such a business as that of knowing cannot be fully 
 understood from the mere observer's point of view. It is 
 open to the psychologist, in some parts of his field at least, 
 to perform the office of a mere generalizer of observed facts ; 
 but the epistemologist, if he attempts this purely external 
 office, soon loses the thread of his discourse and begins to 
 utter nonsense. Consciousness is so manifestly internal in 
 its structure, and knowledge is so clearly a function of this 
 internal structure, that the hopelessness of the task of 
 attempting to construct a natural history of knowledge from 
 the standpoint of external observation ought by this time 
 to be generally conceded. The only road open to the 
 epistemologist, as distinguished from the psychologist, is 
 that of the experiencer or knower himself In other words, 
 he must start as knower rather than as the outward 
 observer of knowing, his method must be internal rather 
 than external, and his materials will be found to be dual 
 and complex rather than simple. For the process he is 
 endeavouring to trace will be found, from the beginning to 
 the end of it, to consist in the effort of a subject conscious- 
 ness to overcome its object, the world of not-self, and to 
 reduce it to the form of realized content. Obvious without 
 much reflection it ought to be, that the point of view of the 
 subject consciousness is the only tenable one for the student 
 of knowledge. 
 
 In treating epistemology from this internal stand-point 
 the problem of the categories of knowledge becomes central. 
 It is not hard to understand why the very notion of the 
 categories should be foreign to such a method as that of 
 Hume. If consciousness be taken as inwardly simple, and 
 
CBAP. I. NATURE OP THE CATEGORIES. 113 
 
 outwardly a mere plurality of sensations whose business is 
 aggregation, no problem of a subject-consciousness re- 
 lating itself to the content of an object-consciousness, 
 which it seeks to penetrate and realize, is even conceiv- 
 able, much less real. This being the case, the rise of 
 mediating conceptions like the categories will not be 
 anticipated, nor will they be understood if they do 
 appear. What, then, are we to understand by categories 
 and their part in the activity of knowledge ? To answer 
 this question we must seek to know how the category 
 first made its appearance as an element in epistemo- 
 logical theory. This leads us back to Kant, who was the 
 first to attempt a thorough analysis of the knowledge- 
 psychosis, and who made the discovery that every act of 
 cognition is, on its subject side, a judgment ; but that this 
 judgment when submitted to sufficient pressure is forced to 
 disgorge a concept or form of synthesis through which the 
 judging consciousness is enabled, on its part, to appropriate 
 a plurality of sensations or feelings as realized content. 
 To this concept Kant applies the name category, and the 
 term is used in his philosophy for certain organizing 
 conceptions which stand between the unitary activity of the 
 judgment and the unmitigated plurality of ,the sensations, 
 and whose business is to reduce these to forms in which 
 they can be appropriated by the judgment. Kant does not 
 apply the name category to all mediating conceptions, but 
 distinguishes those concepts, which have obviously been 
 generalized from particular experiences, from others which 
 resist this mode of analysis, and seem to be necessary 
 conditions rather than products of the experience-process, 
 and confines the name to the latter species. In Kant, then, 
 the term category is used to designate original and constitu- 
 tional modes of synthesis in consciousness which arise between 
 the judgment activity and the plurality of the sensory 
 consciousness, and. whose fu/nction is to mediate the process by 
 which the former appropriates the latter and reduces it to the 
 form of realized content. 
 
 H 
 
114 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIKS OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 We are not directly concerned here with the somewhat 
 mechanical character of the above representation, or with 
 the question whether Kant's doctrine of categories is tenable. 
 The point we are interested in is the fact that, in Kant's 
 doctrine of the categories, moclern thought has brought safely 
 to birth something of permanent value, and we proceed to 
 the investigation of the categories with the conviction that 
 they will be found to contain a large part of the secret of 
 knowledge. This will appear if we endeavour to realize 
 what essentially the problem of knowledge is. Eeverting 
 to the previous discussions, we are able to say that the 
 activity of knowing owes its form to the internal structure 
 of consciousness. This internal structure involves a dis- 
 tinction of a self or subject-consciousness from an object- 
 consciousness, and its content of not-self The whole activity 
 of experience expresses itself in the effort of the subject- 
 consciousness to penetrate and realize the world of the not- 
 self; and the activity called knowing is this effort of the 
 subject-consciousness in so far as it expresses itself in 
 presentation and idea. Our knowledge of the world is our 
 idea of the world, and our idea of the world is the not-self 
 penetrated and realized by the subject-consciousness and 
 reduced to the form of ideal content. We do not, of course, 
 mean to say that this ideal is realized in any actual subject- 
 consciousness, for here it is necessary to again distinguish 
 between the actual and the possible. The ideal of knowledge 
 is that of possible content of the subject-consciousness. The 
 not-self will, and perhaps must, always transcend the limits 
 of actual knowledge. What we actually know may forever 
 remain a small fragment of what we conceive to be reality. 
 To know then, when translated into terms of activity, is the 
 effort which the subject-consciousness makes to translate the 
 not-self from the state of possible into that of actual content 
 by means of presentation and idea. 
 
 We thus obtain a workable conception of the meaning of 
 the knowledge act. It is essentially the subject-conscious- 
 ness' translation of its object, the unrealized world of the 
 
CHAP. 1. NATURE OF THE CATEGORIES. 115 
 
 not-self, into realized content, and we may be said to know 
 our world completely when we have, reduced it to this form. 
 The world known must be the world as envisaged in our 
 idea. How, then, shall this translation of the unrealized 
 world into the realized world of idea be effected ? The 
 answer involves the office of the categories. We do not 
 mean at this point to defend any metaphysical doctrine of 
 the categories; our aim is substantially the same as that of 
 Kant in the first two parts of the Critique of Pure, Season ; 
 that is, to determine the nature of the categories and to exhibit 
 their function in experience. Now, in view of the concept of 
 the knowing act which we have reached, it is clear that the / 
 formal office of the category will be to mediate the act by 
 which the subject-consciousness appropriates its world, and 
 reduces it to the form of idea-content. This, however, does 
 not determine for us what the categories are, and how they 
 perform their office. Only the first of these questions is 
 germane in this chapter, while the remaining chapters of 
 this section will be a detailed answer to the second. If we 
 take our stand within experience, and seek to realize the 
 process by which it gradually achieves and appropriates its 
 world, we will find it possible to arrange the stages, in a 
 quasi-genetic scale, somewhat as follows : (1) The world of 
 immediacy or presentation ; (2) the world of mediacy or of 
 concept relations ; (3) the world of the higher immediacy or 
 of the self-unifying reason. And following the vision from 
 its beginning through its successive stages, the following 
 categories will inevitably reveal themselves. Our world- 
 vision in the lower presentational stage will be a world of 
 space and time, and by that we mean a world in which the 
 structural organizing relations are spatial and temporal. In 
 the mediate sphere the structural concept will be dynamic 
 and actively synthetic in their character, and our world will 
 be one of cause, substance, and interaction. Finally, the 
 world of higher immediacy will be a sphere of unification in 
 which the lower stages, or perhaps the better word here would 
 be forms, of world-manifestation are brought into the final 
 
116 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 unity of the idea by relation to some ground principle. 
 Here the categories are manifestly the self-relating ideas of 
 ground and unification. 
 
 Here, then, we come upon, as I think, the fundamental 
 categories of the process by and in which the knowing 
 activity realizes its world. In its first and simplest stages 
 the world presents and organizes itself in the forms and 
 relations of space and time. Our reactions, so far forth 
 as they possess objective form, are reactions in space and 
 time. The process has its subject side, of course, which 
 is presupposed in all acts of knowledge. But the fact 
 signalized here is that whatever the complexity of motives and 
 conditions may be, the form of the world-vision that emerges 
 is that of space and time. A point is reached, however, in 
 the epistemological history when the presentational aspect of 
 the world no longer proves satisfactory. The knowing subject 
 begins to have an awning that some parts of its vision are 
 not final, that they are there because of something else that 
 is not now present, and the everlasting what and why are 
 born. It is clear that these questions initiate us into the 
 sphere of dynamic relations of things which do things, and 
 have aims in doing them. From this epoch in our mental 
 history our world becomes an occult region of hidden 
 relations, and its presentative aspects lose in great measure 
 their finality as things in themselves, and tend to lapse into 
 mere symbols of a world of deeper meanings. This pro- 
 founder and now more interesting world is one of cause 
 primarily, and then of substance and interaction. The 
 question has been put to the world, which will only find its 
 answer in the everlasting unrest of consciousness and the 
 ceaseless activity of science. Nor in these even will it 
 attain its final answer. For the persistent what and why 
 shape themselves at last in a question as to the final 
 meaning and purpose of this whole sphere of reality. "What 
 is reality in its last analysis, and what is the self-explaining 
 principle of its existence? It is clear that in these 
 questions we encounter the demand for a completely realized 
 
CHAP. I. NATURE OF THE CATEGORIES. 117 
 
 world, for a reduction of our world to ideal content of the 
 knowing consciousness. We have seen that the knowing 
 activity in its very constitution involves the reduction of 
 the world from the form of possible to that of actual and 
 realized content of knowledge, and it is here that we come 
 upon the point of the consummation of that process. The 
 last act of knowledge is that in which our world reaches 
 final unity as the content of an idea, in the light of which 
 it is self-grounded and self-explained. The categories here 
 are manifestly those of ground and unification. 
 
 Let us say that the whole aim of knowledge is the 
 reduction of the world, or the not-self, to ideal content of 
 consciousness. We will then be able to see that the 
 categories are the constitutional forms of this content. 
 The world, in so far as it is realized and realizable, presents 
 itself in certain forms which are essential to its manifesta- 
 tion. By that we mean that otherwise it could not become 
 ideal content of consciousness. The categories are never to 
 be confounded with subject-activities. They presuppose 
 these of course, and arise, as we have seen, out of the 
 reactions of the subject-activities, but in their own proper 
 character they belong to the world of content as the forms 
 of its actual and possible realization. They are the ways in 
 which the world must express itself to and in consciousness 
 in order to get recognition, as well as the perceptual andv^ 
 conceptual modes which the subject-conciousness must adopt 
 in order that it may be able to penetrate and realize its object. 
 The categories are not then merely subjective nor merely 
 objective. They are not exclusive features of the self, nor yet 
 of the not-self, but are true mediators like the soul in Pla- 
 tonism, participating in both subject and object nature, and 
 thus rendering the act of knowing possible. A category may 
 then he defined : subjectively, as the constitutional mode through 
 and in which the sviject-conseiousness penetrates its world, and 
 reduces it to ideal content, and ohjectively, as the form which the 
 world or not-self is obliged to assfiime in order to present itself 
 to and in consciousness and become content of its world-idea. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 SPACE AND TIME— PRESENTATIVE. 
 
 The central problem in knowledge is that of the categories 
 and their function in experience. But the whole problem 
 involves three terms : the subject-consciousness or self, the 
 not-self or unrealized world of objectivity, and the categories. 
 The principal interest here attaches to the categories, but the 
 treatment of these involves at least a provisional conception 
 of the other terms. In dealing with knowledge, genetically, 
 as we propose here, it is not necessary that we should have 
 at the outset a developed doctrine either of the self or the 
 not-self For the development of the self we cheerfully 
 accept all the results of genetic psychology, but at this point 
 and for the purposes of our inquiry the question of interest 
 is not how does the self grow, but rather what conception 
 of the nature of self is necessary in order that the activity 
 of knowing may be intelligible ? This question has been 
 virtually answered in previous discussions, and will require 
 here only a brief and explicit statement. We cannot assume, 
 as a condition of the knowing activity, any developed form 
 of self-consciousness : this, as we shall see, is one of the last 
 products of experience. What we must assume, rather, is a 
 consciousness in which a subject-activity is seeking to 
 penetrate and realize an, as yet undefined and unrealized, 
 object. This must be assumed in order that the spectator 
 may have an adequate view of the situation. But if the 
 
 118 
 
CHAP. II. SPACE AND TIME— PRESENTATIVE. 119 
 
 observer asks himself what consciousness of the situation on 
 the part of the knowing subject itself must be presupposed, 
 the answer is not so clear. But this much must, I 
 think, be conceded ; namely, that to a distinctionless con- 
 sciousness an act of knowledge would be impossible. The 
 very act of knowing carries in it a distinction however 
 rudimental, between the knowing activity itself and its 
 content, or that on which the activity terminates. This 
 much must be conceded. But if we presuppose the first act 
 of presentation, the knowing activity can continue only as a 
 search for and recognition of the same among differents. 
 Let us conceive this activity of identifying and differentia- 
 ting, of appropriating and rejecting in its lowest possible 
 terms; it is evident, I think, that we cannot cancel it altogether 
 out of consciousness without destroying the possibility of the 
 knowing act. For when we consider the matter, we realize 
 that to know involves more than self-distinction from a not- 
 self. If this were all, the not-self would be, for aught 
 we know, as impenetrable as is a stone wall for ordinary 
 vision. The possibility of the knowing act involves, in 
 short, the possession of a rudimentary instrument of know- 
 ing, and when we ask what the nature of this instrument 
 must be we are close to the answer that it must be what 
 Plato thought it to be, a rudimentary power of distinguishing 
 the same from the different. If then we suppose conscious- 
 ness to involve as part of its internal nature rudimentary 
 distinctions between the knowing activity itself and its 
 object, and between the sames and differents in the sphere 
 of the object, we have conceived a situation in which an 
 act of knowing becomes possible. And I think it will 
 become evident on consideration that less than this cannot 
 be assumed. Again, if we ask the question what view of 
 the object is involved in the very possibility of the knowing 
 act, it will be conceded that there must at least be a rudi- 
 mental distinction between the knowing activity and its 
 object, and to that extent a determination of it as a not-self. 
 But when this concession is made it will become still 
 
120 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, paht ii. 
 
 further evident that something more is necessary. If the 
 not-self is ever to become realized content, it must not 
 simply be differentiated from the self. It must be penetrated 
 and appropriated. An act of knowledge must involve a 
 rudiment of realization, and this is only conceivable on the 
 supposition that distinctions are possihle in the object. In 
 other words, the object must be a sphere of possible sames 
 and differents. The not-self cannot, therefore, be represented 
 as absolutely opaque and distinctionless, for that would be 
 tantamount to representing it as absolutely impenetrable 
 and unknowable. We must take a further step, then, and 
 in order to achieve these objective conditions that are 
 necessary to make a knowing act possible, must conceive 
 the not-self as involving that which may be distinguished 
 as the same and the different. The internal nature of the 
 not-self cannot then be represented as absolutely simple, 
 for this, as we see, would render the act of knowledge 
 impossible. In order that the knowing act may be possible, 
 the nature of the object of knowledge must be conceived as 
 internally complex, that is, as involving possible dis- 
 tinction ; for it is now evident that it is only through this 
 internal complexity of the object that the knowing activity 
 can penetrate it and make it its own. 
 
 Assuming this rudimentary structure, we shall now pro- 
 ceed to the main business, that of tracing the evolution in 
 experience of the categories of knowledge. Taking the 
 scheme of categories and stages as outlined above, we find that 
 the very first form of the cognitive consciousness that begins 
 to define itself is that of space. Bearing in mind that the 
 world of objectivity is as yet an indifferentiated sphere, 
 although involving possible differences, and taking our stand 
 with the subject-consciousness, which may be conceived as 
 on the point of rousing into action, we will find that the 
 initial procedure may be represented somewhat as follows. 
 Consciousness may be supposed to be in a state of 
 diffusion, nothing having happened as yet to induce it to 
 pull itself together in an act of attention. But let some- 
 
CHAP. II. SPACE AND TIME— PEESENTATIVE. 121 
 
 thing obtrude itself into the field of consciousness of a 
 sufficiently interesting character to attract attention ; the 
 indifference of the subject-consciousness is instantly broken, 
 and from a state of diffusion it passes into one of concentra- 
 tion, and focuses itself upon the point of disturbance. Up 
 to this point the psychologist and the epistemologist see the 
 same thing. But here the epistemologist begins to have a 
 special problem. He is specially interested not in the 
 natural history of consciousness as a whole, but rather in 
 the rise and function of the formal categories of knowledge. 
 Fixing our attention, then, on this focussing activity, and 
 bearing in mind the fact that the subject-consciousness is 
 implicitly a differencing, integrating activity, we may ask 
 what aspect of this activity will first become explicit in the 
 focussing process with which we are now dealing. Clearly, 
 it will be the differentiating aspect. This will be quickened 
 into life, and attention wiU be first of all a faculty of 
 distinction. Now, if we connect this with the fact known 
 to psychologists, that attention is intermittent, and proceeds 
 by alternating pulsations of flow and ebb, that there is a 
 succession of concentrations and diffusions in the central 
 activity of consciousness, we will be ready, I think, to admit 
 the following representation. The focussing consciousness 
 will not hit upon any points of objective fixity which resist 
 its energy point blank, for in that case no progress could be 
 made, but rather, every point at which it concentrates will 
 be like a vent out of which issues an expulsive energy that 
 hurls consciousness back upon itself in a more or less dif- 
 fused state. The whole phenomenon presented here is that 
 of alternating and opposed energies, the one outgoing and 
 concentrative, the other inflowing and diffusive ; the one 
 marking the flow, the other the ebb of attention. To the 
 inflowing energy the psychologists apply the name stimula- 
 tion, and the movement of consciousness is called a response 
 to stimulation. This representation will be useful here in 
 enabling us to connect our analysis with that of psychology, 
 for the stimulation is the term which the activity of 
 
122 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 consciousness is going on to define, and the process is at 
 this stage explicitly objective. The question here is, then, 
 what element of objective form will first arise out of this 
 ebb and flow of consciousness which the psychologist repre- 
 sents as response to stimulation ? Translating the terms of 
 psychology into more appropriate epistemological phrase, we 
 may designate stimulation and response as objective and 
 subjective consciousness, and bearing in mind the fact 
 already stated that the process at this point is explicitly 
 objective, we will be prepared to find the first element of 
 form showing itself in the objective consciousness. Ke- 
 turning now to the point, where in response to motives 
 already indicated, consciousness focuses itself in the act 
 of attention, we have, as it were, a collision of the subjective 
 and objective consciousness, followed by the rebound of the 
 subjective consciousness. Now, it is at this point evidently 
 that presentation has its origin. If the rebounding conscious- 
 ness did not bring back with it a rudiment of presentation, 
 the origin of presentation would be inexplicable. It is 
 evident, too, that this rudiment of presentation will be a 
 determination of the objective consciousness, and that out of 
 the successive rebounds will arise our first definition of the 
 object-world. 
 
 From the very nature of the situation it will also be 
 evident that we are dealing with a process, and that it will 
 have to be represented in terms of activity. Considered 
 objectively, what then, essentially, is this process ? WeU, 
 the first activity that is quickened into life is that of differ- 
 ence. "We saw that above. But this difference must be of 
 some specific kind, and, I think, we will not mistake if we 
 call it the difference of outness or externality. The objective 
 consciousness begins to stand out as something confronting 
 and alien. For this is what outness or externality means 
 in the last analysis, something's assertion of itself as a not- 
 self. My not-self is that which is outside of me and ex- 
 ternal to me. Manifestly this is the way in which I must 
 begin to define my world if I am to begin at all. But the 
 
CHAP. II. SPACE AND TIME— PRESENTATIVB. 123 
 
 definition takes a specific form. The pulsating activity of 
 consciousness possesses the characteristic, as we saw above, 
 that it is never able to find a point of rest, but that the 
 expulsive energy of the objective consciousness perpetually 
 drives it back upon itself, only to be followed by reconcentra- 
 tion of attention on the object. If we conceive this activity, 
 then, as an alternating and incessant process of point- 
 intuiting and point-outering or externalizing, we will have 
 seen how consciousness takes the first step in the perception 
 of space. No doubt, in perception colour is inseparable from 
 space, and that the first overt element of space will present 
 itself only as a patch of colour. But colour presupposes 
 surface, and it is the activity out of which surface arises as 
 an objective form that we are considering here. Let us 
 suppose, then, that the mode of determining space-points in 
 experience has been truly represented. We have only to 
 suppose the continuation of this activity in order to see 
 how the perception of space is developed from these 
 elements. As a matter of fact the points involved are 
 not mathematical, but the smallest units of perceived space. 
 This was pointed out by Hume, and is a commonplace in 
 psychology. The mode in which these space-points come 
 together into an extended superficies is the same substantially 
 as that in which different space-aggregates fall into one 
 space. We have only to suppose on the side of content, the 
 operation of that tendency which James has pointed out, of 
 the homogeneous in experience to become one ; and on the 
 side of the subject-consciousness, an integrating activity, in 
 order to be able to realize how the presentation of surface 
 arises. The point of vital interest in this analysis is 
 not so much the natural history of the space consciousness 
 as the kind of activity out of which space-presentation 
 arises, and the fact that space is a first determination 
 of the objective consciousness. Attention, out of its first 
 repulse by the objective, extracts the germ of a presenta- 
 tion of the object, and this is a rudiment of space. The 
 whole of the activity of space-determination is, therefore. 
 
124: EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 a development of a presentation-form of the objective 
 consciousness. 
 
 Space, then, is a first determination of the form of an 
 objective world, and the point reached in the doctrine of 
 space may be stated as follows. We have been determining 
 the space of simple perception, the space which the young 
 animal and the child apprehend in common with the adult. 
 The first perception of space-form involves no reflection, and, 
 therefore, no explicit activity of judgment. By this we do 
 not mean to deny the presence of anything analogous to 
 judgment in the simplest acts of consciousness. The reverse 
 seems to be the truth. That dual activity of concentration 
 and rebound, out of which the first elements of space- 
 perception arise, has something akin to judgment in it. 
 It is, in fact, an activity that develops later on into an 
 explicit judgment-function. Now it is of this simple space 
 of perception that Hume seeks to trace the genesis. But 
 Hume's account starts too far down the stream, and after 
 some important things have happened. Space, he thinks, 
 comes in with the impression as an arrangement of coloured 
 points. There, no doubt, occurs somewhere an arrangement 
 of points, but it seems evident that the first step in space- 
 perception is the getting of the points, and no account of 
 the rise of space-perception will be adequate that does not 
 attempt an analysis of the activity of consciousness out of 
 which the elements of space arise. Having overlooked this 
 first stage in space-perception, Hume was led to regard as 
 original what is really derivative. This error misled him 
 in various ways ; among other effects blinding him as to 
 the true objective character of the space-form in perception. 
 Kant represents the space-form in perception as a pure 
 intuition, and in this would seem to deny that it has any 
 development. He also characterizes it as apriori, and by 
 implication denies that it has its origin in an experience- 
 process. These positions of Kant were taken in order to 
 vindicate the originality and truly objective character of 
 space from the criticism of Hume. But it seems to me 
 
CHAP. 11. SPACE AND TIME— PRESENTATIVE. 125 
 
 that these ends can be secured without proceeding to such 
 extremes. No one will claim at this stage in psychological 
 analysis that space-perception is not amenable to the law of 
 development. We have seen how it starts with a mere 
 rudiment of space. It is equally clear that it has its origin 
 in experience ; that it is, in short, the product of a certain 
 form of conscious activity. Do these facts go to prove that 
 space is derivative, or that it is not truly objective ? Such an 
 assumption has surely run its course in the history of 
 philosophy, and may now be honourably retired. We 
 believe that everything arises in experience, the original 
 and the derived, the subjective and the objective, and that 
 it is the business of the explorer of experience to distinguish 
 one set of elements from another. Kant could have estab- 
 lished the essentials of his doctrine of space without claiming 
 that it is in any sense apriori or aloof from the process of 
 experience. 
 
 We have said that by implication the above denials are 
 contained in Kant's doctrine. Strictly speaking, Kant 
 rarely, if ever, takes psychological ground. His real con- 
 tention is that space, being a logical prius of perception, 
 cannot be regarded as content which is given, but must be 
 referred to the subject-consciousness as an element of form 
 which it supplies out of its own constitution. N"ow, the 
 premise of this reasoning is indisputable, but the conclusion 
 is open to denial. If we distinguish between the subjective 
 and objective aspects of consciousness, we will not need to 
 suppose that space is one of the original possessions of the 
 subject-consciousness. Eather it will become clear that 
 space is to be regarded as an affair of the objective con- 
 sciousness, and that it arises as an element of objective 
 form. It is objective from the outset, and its real prius is 
 the collision which takes place as we have seen, between 
 the subject- and object-consciousness in the alternating 
 pulsations of attention. 
 
 From the point of view held here, a critique is also 
 possible of what for convenience we may call the Berkeley- 
 
126 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, pam ii. 
 
 Lotzean doctrine of space. It is not maintained that the 
 views of Berkeley and Lotze are the same in all respects, 
 but that these thinkers agree on the one point of the 
 subjective derivation of space. Berkeley, who was the 
 first modern thinker to treat space-perception analytically, 
 finding the development of our perception of the 
 dimensions in space to be accompanied by certain 
 subjective feelings arising as secondary reactions from the 
 adaptive movements of the sense organs, drew the conclusion 
 that these subjective feelings are constitutive of space- 
 perception, and that space is, therefore, a purely subjective 
 phenomenon. Little reflection is needed to show that a 
 distinction must be made between the subjective conditions 
 of space-perception and the perception itself. "When once 
 we have attained to the space-percept, it may well be that 
 its development depends on certain feelings of muscular 
 tension, but Berkeley overlooks the whole question of the 
 origin of our perception of space. Had he begun at the 
 beginning of his problem he would probably have discovered 
 that however space-perception may develop, in its origin 
 and first rise it is objective. In like manner the Lotzean 
 theory of local signs may be accepted as a substantially 
 correct account of the subjective aspect of the development 
 of space-perception. Nor is Lotze's doctrine, that space 
 arises as a unique reaction of consciousness upon stimulation, 
 here called in question. The one point in debate is Lotze's 
 subjectivity, which is a matter of the interpretation of data. 
 And the criticism to which we think he is open is the 
 following. After having correctly represented the rise of 
 space-perception out of a unique reaction of consciousness 
 upon stimulation, Lotze misinterprets the nature of this 
 experience. So far as we can see, the stimulation in Lotze's 
 account does not get any determination in the process, but 
 remains mere abstract stimulation at the end as in the 
 beginning. It is the subject-consciousness that receives a 
 modification, as yet non-spatial, which by certain processes 
 it works up into an element of space. On the contrary, 
 
CHAP. II. SPACE AND TIME— PRESBNTATIVB. 127 
 
 we think the stimulation comes out of the process with 
 a modification. We have represented the stimulation as 
 an objective consciousness, and it is in the sphere of this 
 objective consciousness that the first element of space-form 
 appears. It appears as an objective determination. Our 
 world is now no longer a formless and unintelligible chaos, 
 but it takes on in space its first element of intelligible 
 form. The doctrine maintained here against both Berkeley 
 and Lotze is the original objectivity of space. This is its 
 primal character which it maintains to the end, no matter 
 how much subjective machinery may be involved in its 
 development. The subject-process is not contested at all. 
 But the point insisted on is that the experience cannot 
 be purely an affair of subjectivity. The space element 
 must be there as a datum of the process. 
 
 We have attempted above a mere sketch of a doctrine 
 of presentative space. Its essential features may be very 
 briefly stated. The assumption on which the whole analysis 
 proceeds is that space, like every other feature of our world, 
 will have its rise and development in experience. For us 
 there is no space in itself apart from experience. In order 
 that any experience may be possible, a distinction between 
 a subject-consciousness which shapes itself in the act of 
 attention, and an object-consciousness that presents itself in 
 the form of stimulation, must be recognized. The first 
 activity of consciousness will take the form of a concen- 
 tration of the subject-consciousness on the point of 
 stimulation and the accompanying rebound. Thus the 
 pulsating movement of consciousness arises. Now, space- 
 form has its origin, so far as we can determine at this 
 point, in this experience. It arises as the first element of 
 determination in the sphere of the objective consciousness, 
 not as a contribution of the subject-consciousness to the 
 object, but as a real determination of the object, so that now 
 the world of the not-self is not wholly opaque and undefined, 
 but in space takes on its first form of intelligibility. 
 
 It is difl&cult, if not impossible, to distinguish the rise of 
 
128 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 time from that of space. We may distinguish, as Kant does, 
 between the inner and outer senses, and may represent time 
 as the form of the inner sense. No doubt time is the form 
 of the inner sense, but we get no light here on the question 
 of its origin. How does time arise as the form of the inner 
 sense ? If we abstract the pulsations of attention from the 
 objective consciousness and regard them as purely subjective 
 phenomena, they present themselves as a series of changes, 
 and it would seem that all we have to do is to consider this 
 series as such and we will have the idea of time. But the 
 case is not so simple. What should direct the attention to 
 this subject-series ? There is no reason to suppose that 
 self-attention is a primary act. There is every reason for 
 assuming that primary attention is objective and that self- 
 attention would, therefore, arise in the form of reaction from 
 the objective. Can the jform of reaction, out of which time- 
 perception arises, be determined ? We will perhaps be on 
 the right track if we assume that space-perception is 
 somehow involved in the origin of the perception of time. 
 It is the peculiarity of time that it must originate as a series, 
 if at all. We cannot conceive a change absolutely, but 
 in order to be perceived it must not be alone. If now, the 
 perception of a subjective series is not primary, but arises in 
 a reactive consciousness, and if this reactive consciousness 
 is somehow related to space, we may ask how space comes 
 to be mixed up in the transaction. The answer will be 
 suggested, I think, if we suppose that some advance has 
 been made in space-perception, and that the contents of the 
 objective world began to have rudiments of definite and 
 distinguishable form. These will present themselves to the 
 attentive consciousness in a succession, and the first per- 
 ception of a series will be derived from the one-after-another 
 order of these objective events. But just as the subject- 
 consciousness reacts from one term of the series, so it will 
 react from the series itself, and the result will be the first 
 apprehension of inner change. For accompanying these outer 
 events there are inner events or changes in the subject 
 
CHAP. II. SPACE AND TIME-PRESBNTATIVB. 129 
 
 consciousness and what is maintained here is that the 
 inner changes are not apprehended as chaTiges directly, but 
 by way of reaction upon the apprehension of the change- 
 series in its outer form. In order to understand the situa- 
 tion we must distinguish between the existence of an inner 
 state of consciousness and the apprehension of this state as 
 a change. It is out of change that time arises, but change 
 already involves time, for it is time when abstracted from 
 the content that changes. The perception of time clearly 
 involves then the fixation of a certain degree of attention 
 on the inner processes of consciousness, and time-form arises 
 as a result just as space-form arises in the objective con- 
 sciousness, but the perception of time is more erudite than 
 that of space. It presupposes space as the condition of the 
 objective series in reaction upon which, the first sense of the 
 subjective series arises. The truth is, we are unable to see 
 how the sense of the subjective series can arise at all until 
 after the consciousness in which it appears has had con- 
 siderable objective experience. Let us suppose then that 
 the point has been reached where the first element of time- 
 form begins to arise. How is this origin to be conceived ? 
 The concrete fact in consciousness is that of a plurality of 
 conscious states or acts. When viewed as a whole these 
 become a series of changes. But no state of consciousness 
 taken by itself is a change. The presupposition of a change 
 is a series and this series is time. It would seem then that 
 when consciousness becomes able to perceive its states as 
 changes, the whole business is complete and time is already 
 here. The secret of time-perception must be sought, I 
 think, in that moment when consciousness lays its hands 
 upon several of its states in one act and senses them in their 
 relation. Then, in its relation to the group thus brought 
 under our view, each state becomes a change inasmuch as 
 consciousness must make a movement in order to get into 
 that state. It is only then, as a member of a series, that a 
 state of consciousness can be a change, while, on the other 
 hand, the series cannot be apprehended apart from the 
 
 I 
 
130 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 changing states of consciousness. This account is sufficient 
 at least to disprove the theory that the perception of time 
 arises as a kind of result of the perception of change. In 
 order to account for time we must find some psychosis that 
 will yield time and change in one act. No such psychosis 
 is conceivable as a simple state. It must arise as a reaction 
 of attention upon the inner life, in an act which compre- 
 hends a considerable portion of that inner life, enough at 
 least to include the passage of consciousness from one state 
 to another. Out of this complex sense of passage from one 
 state to another will emerge the rudiments of both time and 
 change, time from the experience as a whole and change 
 from the sense of transition. 
 
 Presupposing, then, the ability of consciousness to realize 
 some intuition of the objective space-world, from which, by 
 way of reaction, consciousness is able in an act such as we 
 have indicated, to achieve the first rudiment of time, there are 
 still two questions which press for answer. We wish, in the 
 first place, to know something further of that objective intui- 
 tion which leads to such important results, and, secondly, 
 we are interested in the development of time-perception. It 
 would simplify matters greatly if we could say that time and 
 change are first apprehended in an objective form, and that 
 the subjective apprehension is simply a reflex of the objective. 
 The difficulty here is, that it is impossible to conceive a 
 purely objective intuition of either time or change, for then 
 time and change would arise primarily as forms of the objec- 
 tive world. But it seems clear, in the case of time at least, 
 that this is imposssible. We seem to be in a dilemma, and 
 the case would, perhaps, be hopeless did we not remember 
 that our outer experience embodies itself in a very concrete 
 form which we call movement. It is customary to define 
 motion as change of position in space. But this is a defini- 
 tion in terms of what motion presupposes. Without space 
 there could be no motion, and without the perception of 
 space there could be no perception of motion. This is 
 obvious. It may be that motion is an extra-conscious condi- 
 
CHAP. 11. SPACE AND TIME— PRESENTATIVB. 131 
 
 tion of space-perception, but in order to be itself perceived 
 there must first be some determination of space-form. 
 This is to say, that something must appear in order that it 
 may appear moving- Let us then assume the perception 
 of space, what more than this, we may ask, is involved 
 in the perception of motion ? Simply change, which is the 
 shifting of attention, and is objectified solely through its 
 connection with space. We find then that space mediates 
 our first perception of change and makes it seem objective. 
 But change is the shifting of attention, and attention is a 
 form of subjective consciousness. The sense of change is, 
 therefore, in its roots subjective, and the rebound of conscious- 
 ness from the object is only necessary to make this apparent. 
 When, therefore, consciousness reacts from the phenomenon 
 of change the sense of time is born. For change is essentially 
 time, and the reacting consciousness takes the form of a sense 
 or presentation of itself in state of change. Subjective 
 motion, or rather the subjective equivalent of motion, is the 
 changing consciousness. But motion is only the objective 
 image of this mediated by the perception of space, and the 
 experience, when it comes to its own, finds itself to be 
 subjective. Thus time is born as the sense of a changing 
 consciousness. 
 
 Having determined the origin of time-form in experience, 
 it is scarcely necessary to maintain that the intuition is unique, 
 and that time is an original form of experience. The close 
 relation of time in its objective form to space might seem 
 to justify the supposition that time-perception is in some 
 way derived from space experience. But we have seen that 
 time originates as the form of a changing consciousness, 
 while outer change, that is motion, presupposes space as its 
 condition. But, that space is not constitutive of motion, 
 becomes evident from the fact that space is not motion, nor 
 does it move. Space does not change, but when that 
 which is already spatial changes we call the phenomenon 
 motion. Space is then a priKs and not a constituent of 
 motion, and the perception of change is an unique intuition, 
 
132 EVOLUTION OF CATBGOEIBS OP KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 irreducible to anything simpler than itself. The perception 
 of time being this perception of change rendered inner, the 
 impossibility of deriving it from space-perception becomes 
 apparent. Nor do we need to dwell at length here on the 
 development of time-perception. This is mainly a psycho- 
 logical affair and is not difficult to trace, once the origin 
 of time-perception has been determined. The one fact 
 which we would emphasize here is the persistent subjectivity 
 of time. Space is relatively remote, and the spontaneous 
 tendency of consciousness is to represent the space-world as 
 a sphere of independent existence. But time is so closely 
 associated with the pulsations of consciousness that it is 
 impossible for us in the same way to segregate the time 
 world. We cannot conceive a time world apart from the 
 activity of a pulsating consciousness. 
 
 While space and time are inseparable in experience, they 
 are in fact self-distinguishing and self-differentiating forms 
 which tend from the outset to distribute the contents of con- 
 sciousness into two distinct, though closely related, worlds. 
 If we revert to the primary distinction, which, as we have 
 seen, underlies the whole experience-process, the distinction 
 of a subject-consciousness from an object-consciousness, it 
 will appear that in the intuitions of time and space we have 
 the first determination in experience of the forms of these 
 two worlds. While there is a sense in which time is 
 objective, yet it is essentially subjective, and the rise of the 
 time-intuition is the first formal definition of self in experi- 
 ence, whUe the rise of the space-intuition is a corresponding 
 first definition of the world of the not-self. This fact led 
 Kant to distinguish time and space as the forms, respectively, 
 of the inner and outer sense. The conclusion we have 
 reached is in substantial agreement with that of Kant, only 
 we have avoided Kant's presuppositions and have presented 
 the origin of the space and time intuitions in the terms of a 
 developing experience. We assume that it is the business 
 of experience in its cognitive activity to gradually develop 
 for us our whole intuition of the world. The first form 
 
CHAP. n. SPACE AND TIME— PRBSENTATIVB. 133 
 
 which this intuition takes is that of the time and space 
 worlds. There is involved in the original structure of 
 experience a complexity that expresses itself in a duality of 
 consciousness, subjective and objective, and out of this 
 arises the two worlds of the self and the not-self. The 
 first formal determination of this distinction is effected in 
 the time and space intuitions. The time- world is, therefore, 
 the first explicit form which the self-term takes in experi- 
 ence. The young quail and the child have some form of 
 self-consciousness. But the self-awareness which all con- 
 sciousness must be conceived as possessing in rudiment, will 
 be largely implicit and latent in the ■ quail and the young 
 child. The first overt step in the development of self- 
 consciousness, and consequently the first explicit form of 
 the conscious life, will be that of time. The young dog in 
 his waking moments as well as in his dreams, will know 
 himself at least as a flowing stream, albeit as one in which 
 the / is as yet submerged. But that, explicitly, he will 
 have any richer self-intuition there is no reason to assume. 
 The subject-world will be a flowing stream with implicit 
 elements that await further experience for their develop- 
 ment. In like manner the not-self will be a world whose 
 first formal determination will arise in the space-intuition. 
 In Kantian phrase, space is the form of the outer sense, and 
 expressing this in terms of experience, things get themselves 
 outered ; that is, explicitly segregated from us and set over 
 against us as external to us in the space-world. The 
 young chick has its outer external world, but so far as that 
 world has defined itself in an intuition, it is that grub 
 which it seeks as food and the things which it is to pursue 
 and shun. The development of its world is motived by a 
 whole complex of interests and feelings, but the cognition- 
 form is simple. That the first cognitive consciousness pene- 
 trates into the underlying sphere of causes, or that the 
 outer world is explicitly determined other than spatially, 
 there is no reason to suppose. The other elements of the 
 experience are either subjective or they lie in a region 
 
134 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 that has not as yet been penetrated by the cognitive 
 intelligence. 
 
 Space and time take their place then as the first categories 
 of a developing experience. They arise as the first presenta- 
 tion-forms, through the mediation of which consciousness 
 begins to realize its world as content. Space stands as 
 the simplest presentation-form of the world of objectivity, 
 the world of not-self. In space the world presents itself 
 as a sphere of outer, external existence. Time is the 
 form in which the subject-consciousness first realizes its 
 own inner content. In time it envisages itself as a flowing 
 stream whose sense of unity and self-hood is as yet implicit. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 SPACE AND TIME— CONCEPTUAL. 
 
 Kant failed to distinguish with sufficient clearness between 
 space and time, as forms of presentation and the same 
 categories as forms of reflection, and this failure led him to 
 ascribe necessity and universality as well as apriority to 
 presentative space and time. We have seen in the pre- 
 ceding chapter that they cannot be regarded as a priori in 
 any sense that would tend to make them prior to experience. 
 Logically they mediate the cognition of the world as the 
 first forms of its apprehension. It is almost needless to 
 argue that space and time do not present themselves in this 
 stage under any appearance of universality or necessity. 
 In ascribing these qualities to them, Kant is regarding them 
 exclusively from the reflective standpoint. As presentations 
 space and time are simply there, and no question of necessity 
 or universality can arise. But when that epoch in the 
 mental life occurs in which the cognitive consciousness 
 passes out of the stage of simple presentation into that of 
 mediate and conceptual experience there results a trans- 
 formation not only of the content but of the space and time 
 forms ,of our world. Other categories, it is true, have their 
 rise at this period, of which account will have to be taken 
 later on, but the point of special interest here is the trans- 
 formation that reflection effects in the categories of space and 
 time. We may say, in brief, that here a passage is made 
 
 135 
 
136 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 from the space and time of ordinary experience to the space 
 and time of mathematical intuition. The position may be 
 revolutionary, but it seems obvious, that the space and time 
 which the mathematician has in view is different from the 
 space and time from which Hume and the empiricists have 
 attempted to derive the concepts of mathematics. In 
 dealing with presentative space and time we find ourselves 
 in agreement with Hume when he takes the ground that 
 neither are infinitely divisible, but that the element of each 
 is some mmimiim visible or appreciable. In short, the 
 element of presentative space or time is an empirical term 
 not further resolvable, and cannot, therefore, be either in- 
 finitely great or small. Nor can any apodictic certainty 
 attach to any processes in which simply these concrete 
 terms are involved. If mathematics founds directly on these 
 empirical data it is folly to claim any certitude beyond 
 ordinary experience for its concepts and results, and 
 empiricism seems to have won its case so far as mathematics 
 is concerned. 
 
 But I feel sure that something important has been over- 
 looked here, and that the Humian doctrine of mathematics 
 is largely an illusion. What then is the trouble ? It is 
 that the important epoch which is marked in experience by 
 the rise of reflection has been completely overlooked. Con- 
 ceding that mathematics is founded on space and time 
 intuition, we may here ask two questions : (1) What trans- 
 formation is made on space and time by the reflective 
 consciousness, and (2) is mathematics immediately connected 
 with the space and time of presentation or with that of 
 reflection ? The nature of the transformation effected may 
 be expressed in the statement that the space and time of 
 reflection are not the products of perception but of concep- 
 tion. Now the peculiarity of conception is that its first 
 step is one of abstraction, and that abstraction works by 
 objectifying the aspect of experience involved and by 
 putting it into a position where it can be contemplated and 
 critically examined by itself. It is to the reflective con- 
 
CHAP. III. SPACE AND TIME— CONCEPTUAL. 137 
 
 sciousness therefore that space and time become abstract 
 objects of contemplation. And it is when space and time 
 are thus conceived that they become really one to us and 
 are seen to be universal and necessary forms of realization 
 even for the first stages of experience. We see, in other 
 words, that if any world is to begin to appear at all it must 
 present itself in the forms of space and time. These are 
 necessary conditions of a certain determination of our world. 
 Such judgments are reached, however, not by any simple 
 extension of the perception-process, or by any operation in 
 which perceptive data are directly involved. But in con- 
 ception the whole point of view has been transformed, for 
 now space and time are considered as pure forms of content, 
 as forms of a world that is represented as purely objective. 
 These forms have been abstracted as objects of contempla- 
 tion, and the question of reflection is not how they arise in 
 experience, but rather what is the inner nature of space and 
 time as formal determinations of objective reality ? 
 
 Now, when reflection brings its activity to bear on space 
 and time it does not rest satisfied with external appear- 
 ance, but seeks to penetrate to the inner nature of these 
 objects. When space is the object of contemplation it is 
 found to involve two opposite characteristics. From one 
 point of view it is altogether discrete, no assignable point of 
 fixity being found in it. The fluency of space under 
 analysis is only arrested when a position is postulated as an 
 absolute starting-point for this process of unbridled flux. 
 This postulated point cannot be identified in any way with 
 the units of presentative space, for here we come in view of 
 the other and opposite characteristic of conceived space, 
 namely, extension. We mean by extension the opposite of 
 discreteness ; that is, continuity. Space is not only the 
 principle of unlimited fluency, but also that of unlimited 
 consistency. And just as there must be a beginning of 
 fluency in some fixed point, so there must be a beginning of 
 extension in some point that is not extended. To state the 
 matter shortly, while it is true that presentative experience 
 
138 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 has its starting-points, which are relative and fluent, this 
 is not true of reflection. The reflective consciousness 
 demands something more stable, and it finds it in the point 
 which is dimensionless and yet the spring of all dimension. 
 That the mathematical point is not a term of ordinary space, 
 only the crassest materialism would dispute, and that it is 
 the indispensable starting-point of mathematics no one 
 would have the hardihood to deny. What then are we to 
 make of the fact that the mathematical point is not itself 
 spatial ? There is, I think, only one conclusion to be drawn : 
 the mathematical point is a transcendent term so far as the 
 space and time of presentative experience is concerned. It 
 is the reassertion in reflection of the point of view from 
 which the whole world-vision begins. We have seen how 
 that vision starts in the reaction of a subject-consciousness 
 upon something objective, and how out of this arises a spatial 
 determination of the objective. The whole experience arises 
 as that of a subject-consciousness striving to penetrate and 
 realize its world. The vision of the world presupposes, 
 therefore, a subject point of view which transcends it. 
 
 To carry this a step further, the world of reflection pre- 
 supposes as its condition a point of view which transcends 
 that of ordinary preception, and this point of view will be 
 found in the explicit subject-activity, of which reflection 
 is a function. In order to reflect the subject-consciousness 
 must assert itself as a subject ; that is, as an I. It is 
 in the effort of reflection that the subject rises out of and 
 above the stream of time, and the moment of its appearance 
 changes everything. It becomes henceforth the centre of 
 all experience. The space and time worlds stand before 
 it as objects of contemplation, and the transformations that 
 it makes have already been indicated in the account of the 
 rise of conception. But in relation to space the advent of 
 the I is all-important. We have seen that the mathematical 
 point is transcendent of the whole world of presentation. 
 The truth here becomes apparent that the mathematical 
 point represents the new standpoint of reflection from which 
 
CHAP. in. SPACE AND TIME— CONCEPTUAL. 139 
 
 the naive world of perception is to be transformed. The 
 self-realizing subject in the reflective act is virtually 
 summoning the space-world before a higher tribunal to 
 be judged. And its verdict is that the naive space-world 
 of presentation is self-contradictory when considered ab- 
 stractly, and that in order to be accepted as real it must 
 submit to transformation from a higher point of view. 
 That point of view is a posit, so to speak, of the reflective 
 consciousness. Let us here take a step backward, and note 
 the conceptual activity as it first operates on space. In 
 general, we have seen that conception arises as a search for 
 the same in the midst of difierents. But in the- case of 
 space, when the power of abstraction has objectified it, there 
 are no differents. All spaces are perfectly homogeneous, 
 and fall together in a perfectly seamless identity. For this 
 reason Kant calls space a pure intuition. We have, then, 
 in the one space a concept which shows no traces of the 
 piecemeal process by which it has been achieved. The 
 seamlessness of the intuition is due to the absolutely homo- 
 geneous nature of the content. There may be a thousand 
 spaces of a thousand different worlds, including the worlds 
 of madness and dreams ; but to conception all these spaces 
 are homogeneous and melt into one. 
 
 It is this one space of conception that supplies the basis 
 of the reflective processes involved in mathematics. In a 
 seamless space the units of perception have disappeared. 
 There is absolutely no trace left of the colour^ point which 
 constituted the unit of the presentation. Let us now connect 
 this with the reflective / which was the outcome of the 
 above analysis. We have said that the mathematical point 
 is a posit of the reflective consciousness. We are able here 
 to realize in a measure how this comes to pass. The stand- 
 point of reflection is that of free activity. The I has risen 
 out of the space- and time-stream which becomes an object 
 of its contemplation, and the whole mathematical intuition 
 is the function of this free contemplation. Let us suppose 
 the reflective consciousness to concentrate itself in an act of 
 
140 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 attention upon this objective representation, if we may be 
 allowed to apply this term to the content of conception ; it 
 is clear that the aim of the activity will be to fix in the 
 first instance a point of departure from which the whole 
 space may be conceived. But it finds the object absolutely 
 fluent with no stable points in it, and reflection, in order to 
 achieve a point of rest which shall serve also as a point 
 of departure, posits the mathematical point, which is simply 
 a hypothetical pou sto which consciousness finds necessary in 
 its efforts to realize a space conception. The mathematical 
 point has none of the properties of presentative space, it is 
 not extended, and occupies no room, simply because it is a 
 hypothetical but necessary view-point of the reflective 
 consciousness in its effort to achieve a conception of space. 
 Having achieved this ;pou sto, the mathematical dimensions 
 are readily determined. The moving of the point out of 
 itself generates the line which has one dimension, length, 
 but no breadth ; that is, except in the one aspect it 
 maintains its transcendent ideality. The moving of the 
 line out of itself generates the surface, which is still ideal 
 in respect of depth, having no thickness. Finally, the 
 moving of the surface out of itself generates the solid, and 
 with it three-dimensional space, the space of ordinary 
 experience, is realized. 
 
 The mathematical elements, points, lines, superficies and 
 solids, are thus achieved. Hume in his empirical derivation 
 of the terms of mathematics ridicules the notions of points 
 without dimension, lines without breadth and surfaces with- 
 out depth. Everything in his view is built up from the 
 concrete units of perception. I think we are able to see that 
 Hume's doctrine rests on a complete misapprehension. It 
 supposes mathematics to arise as a kind of manipulation of 
 the terms of perception, but in so doing skips the whole 
 process of conception, and the important transformation 
 which it effects. The truth is, in reflection a new point of 
 view is achieved from which the space-world is transformed. 
 The mathematical point has nothing in common with the 
 
CHAP. III. SPACE AND TIME-CONCEPTUAL. 141 
 
 unit of presentation, nor have the lines and surfaces of 
 mathematics anything in common with the presentative 
 lines and surfaces except what they acquire through motion. 
 It is through motion that the mathematical intuition 
 gradually achieves an empirical result. Thus the moving 
 point realizes the line which as to its length may be 
 empirically determined ; the moving line gives the surface 
 which as superficies may be empirically determined. The 
 moving surface yields the solid which as such is amenable 
 to empirical treatment. It is not claimed here that the 
 mathematical and the empirical worlds are two different and 
 mutually exclusive spheres. On the contrary the mathe- 
 matical world arises as a reconstruction and reinterpretation 
 of the world of ordinary perception from a higher point of 
 view. The ^om sto of the mathematical activity, the point, 
 is purely ideal and transcendent, but the intuition achieves 
 itself through motion, in the process of generating lines, 
 surfaces and solids. This movement which mediates the 
 result also squares it with experience, for it is found that 
 the space yielded by mathematical conception is a space 
 capable of empirical determination. The mathematical 
 therefore contains or involves the empirical. Its results are 
 open to empirical processes. The important distinction to 
 be observed, however, and that on which the conception of 
 pure mathematics depends is this, that the mathematical 
 process is not a simple extension of the empirical. To pure 
 mathematics the points, lines, surfaces, and solids are ideal 
 and the internal determinations of these are ideal. The 
 conception of space when once realized supplies an adequate 
 basis for the processes of pure mathematics. 
 
 Mathematics ceases to be pure when an element of 
 empirical determination enters into its data. Thus if the 
 orbit of a comet is to be calculated its actual course must be 
 ascertained by observations, or in at least a part of its extent. 
 Taking the result of these observations, the mathematician 
 asks what is the ideal law of these data ? and he answers 
 his own question by conceiving with the aid of calculation. 
 
142 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 an ideal line or curve, which is not at all identical with the 
 path actually travelled, but which represents the path to 
 which the body approximates and which it would realize, 
 were all empirical variations eliminated. The difference 
 between pure and applied mathematics is, therefore, largely 
 one of relation to ordinary experience. The one starting 
 with the ideal and approximating to the empirical sphere ; 
 the other starting from ordinary experience and approxi- 
 mating the ideal. 
 
 Similar results will follow from a consideration of the 
 transformation which reflection brings about in the appre- 
 hension of time. We have seen that time is primarily the 
 form of a flowing consciousness ; it presents itself, therefore, 
 as an onward movement. Time has only one dimension 
 which might be represented in the line described by a 
 mathematical point in passing from one position to another.^ 
 Time presents three aspects, which we call past, present, and 
 future; or memory- time; that "saddleback of time," which 
 is grasped in a present experience ; and anticipation-time. 
 These are empirical distinctions in the time of presentation. 
 Eeflection, however, involves, as we have seen, the achieve- 
 ment of a new stand-point from which presentation time is 
 transformed. When the I rises out of the stream of time- 
 presentation its self consciousness has deflned itself against 
 the stream which now becomes object and is played upon by 
 the activity of conception. The result is the concept of 
 time as pure change, as the incessant flow of discrete pulses, 
 an endless sequence of discreteness. Now, the reflecting 
 consciousness here as in the case of space, seeks some point 
 of rest as the pou sto of its determination of time, but it 
 finds everywhere the instability of incessant flux. Where 
 then shall the stand-point of the concept of time be found ? 
 We have seen how the mathematical point arises as an ideal 
 posit of the /. A corresponding point in time is required 
 
 1 Strictly speaking time ia not dimensional at all, but rather tke form of 
 pure discreteness. It only becomes quasi-dimensional when it is spaced 
 in the act of generating the line. 
 
CHAP. III. SPACE AND TIME-CONCEPTUAL. 143 
 
 which shall mark the distinction between lapsing and on- 
 coming time; this point can only be the present. But here 
 again the old difficulty is encountered. Any empirical 
 moment contains both lapse and onflow. A moment of 
 pure presence can be achieved then only by transcending 
 empirical time altogether and taking the stand-point of the 
 reflective intelligence. In short the ideal-present is the 
 posit of the /, and like the corresponding term in space is a 
 hypothetical but necessary point of departure for the 
 realization of a reflective intuition of time. When time 
 becomes an object of contemplation to the self which has 
 risen out of its stream, the starting point of the conception 
 is found in a timeless moment, a point of stability occupied 
 by reflection and in relation to which time becomes an 
 objective flow of discrete moments. 
 
 The notion of time is that of unlimited discreteness. The 
 flow of time is only the procession of incessant, difference 
 and change. Time is a purely separative, divisive, individu- 
 ating conception. Nothing has any continuity in the same 
 time as it may have continuity in the same space. The 
 present is, therefore, a moment of stable identity in a stream 
 of endless differences. It is this property of time which 
 mathematical reflection seizes upon when it extracts from 
 the notion of time the principle of discrete magnitude. The 
 simplest operation of arithmetic is counting. But there is 
 an experience antecedent to this which leads to practical 
 results that are similar. A cat with three kittens finds on 
 returning to them that one of the group has strayed away, 
 and goes off in quest of it. " See the intelligence of the 
 cat. She is able to count," exclaim the unreflecting. But 
 the experience does not necessarily involve anything like 
 actual counting. We have only to suppose the powers of 
 memory and association in the cat's mind in order to see 
 how on her return to her kittens a memory-image of the 
 absent one arises and sends the mother off in quest of its 
 original. There is, in short, a representation in the cat's 
 mind of an object that is ordinarily present, but which is 
 
144 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part it. 
 
 now absent. In order to reinstate the experience of pre- 
 sence the search is instituted. Counting is, however, a 
 more complicated process. It involves in its very simplest 
 form a power on the part of consciousness to segregate 
 the content of any distinct pulse of experience from that of 
 other pulses, and to regard it apart from these. This is 
 involved in its ability to say, or at least to conceive, OTie, or 
 the unit. The unit is the content of a present experience 
 conceived apart from other contents, and as indivisible, 
 though the indivisibility may be a sort of uncritical assump- 
 tion. This content of a present experience will usually be 
 some object of sight, say, a marble, but that is unessential. 
 When consciousness has objectified the content of any 
 moment of present' consciousness as one, it has thereby 
 achieved the pou sto of the counting process. To count is to 
 pass our world before us in its discreteness ; to note as dis- 
 crete and by itself, the content of each moment or pulse of 
 consciousness as it passes. Thus, the boy having achieved 
 the one stand-point of number, is able to segregate this 
 marble world which has been to him up to this point a 
 mere undefined aggregate, into the discrete series one, two, 
 three, four, and so on indefinitely. To count, says H. B. 
 Pine, in his profound little book on number, " is to note the 
 one to one correspondence of things." To this I agee, and 
 it is his process that I am here seeking to ground in the 
 reflective consciousness.^ One to one correspondence implies 
 the possession of the consciousness of the one. This 
 achievement I have tried to exhibit above as the initial 
 step in the development of the number-consciousness. 
 The first counting is relatively concrete, the distinguishing 
 of several successive contents of successive moments of con- 
 sciousness, and naturally breaks down before it has proceeded 
 
 1 Fine also connects counting with space rather than time. The justifi- 
 cation of this is to be found in the fact that in the objective act of counting 
 things, time has already coalesced with space and the situation is already- 
 complex. It will be found by analysis, I think, that the notion of discrete- 
 ness involved in the ability to count is a pure product of time. 
 
CHAP. HI. SPACE AKD TIME— CONCEPTUAL. 145 
 
 far. But gradually a nuviber-form. or concept is abstracted 
 from this experience, this number-form being simply the 
 ability of consciousness to hold before it the representation 
 of a succession of empty moments, which take gradually the 
 form of the number series, one, two, three, four, say, up to 
 nine. The boy in making this achievement is gradually 
 developing that term in his own consciousness, the concept 
 of the number series, which is necessary to render free 
 counting possible, and his counting from this point will take 
 the form of noting a one to one correspondence of things, 
 one term of this correspondence being the number-series 
 which he now carries in his own mind. 
 
 The notion of number, when once achieved, becomes the 
 principle of discrete magnitude, while that of space when 
 achieved becomes the principle of continuous magnitude. 
 Mathematics thus attains the ground-principles that are 
 necessary to its operations, and from which may be developed 
 the mathematical view of the world. There is, however, a 
 distinction upon which we are tempted to dwell here, although 
 at the risk of digressing from the main line of our discussion. 
 I mean the distinction that is ordinarily made between the 
 two kinds of magnitude, discrete and continuous. We are 
 in a position here to see, as I think, how this distinction 
 arises out of a difference in the nature of space and time. 
 Space is continuous, and its generation shuts out discreteness, 
 and naturally reflection finds in space-dimension, or rather in 
 the generation of space-dimension, its notion of continuous 
 magnitude. Time supplies, as we have seen, the principle of 
 unlimited discreteness, and thus leads naturally to the 
 number-principle and the notion of discrete magnitude. 
 Now magnitude is a general name, of which quantity is a 
 specification ; the former being a concept of indefinite 
 extension or indefinite plurality ; the latter involving the 
 notion of some limit-determination. The quantus or how- 
 muchness of magnitude involves more than the simple noting 
 of the one to one correspondence of things ; it involves the 
 further notion of a limit of plurality or extension at least 
 
 E 
 
146 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 in a genninal form. When we come to the notion of measure 
 we strike a further determination. The concept of measure 
 is that of a definite limit of magnitude. It involves not only 
 the quantus, how much, but it is already in possession of the 
 answer, so much. The notion of quantity has thus been 
 seized upon by consciousness, and defined as a standard 
 of objective measurement ; the yard, or foot, or hour. This 
 being true, I think it will be evident that the iirst processes 
 of counting are much simpler than the simplest processes 
 of measurement. 
 
 It is clear at this point, I think, that the space and time 
 of reflection, while rising upon that of presentation, is not a 
 simple continuation of it, but rather a transformation. It 
 is upon the transformed space and time of reflection that 
 mathematics and the mathematical intuition of the world 
 are founded. We have seen above how the concepts of 
 space and time arise, and how the principles of continuous 
 and discrete magnitude are grounded in these concepts. In 
 all this we have simply been observing one aspect of the 
 process in which experience, through the mediating activity 
 of reflection, takes a new step in the conquest of its world. 
 The further significance of this will be the theme of another 
 chapter. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 
 
 Experience passes definitely into the quantitative stage 
 when it begins to shape the question, How much ? The 
 child that says, " Me wants much berries, or two, or a lot of 
 berries," has doubtless as yet made no formidable inroads 
 into the territory of abstract ideas, but he has put the 
 interrogation to his world that will in the end revolutionize 
 and transform it. The child's question is a demand on 
 reality which arises under the pressure of immediate want, 
 and this is doubtless the way in which all our problems 
 originate. Eventually it frees itself from the slavery of 
 particular desires, and then the question becomes the pioneer 
 in a quest for the meaning of the world. We are not 
 concerned here with the general form of that question, but 
 rather with that special form which we call quantitative. 
 The question, how much, is one that involves a definite 
 category of content, either space or time; it is a question 
 that involves either discrete or continuous magnitude. 
 We have seen in the last chapter that the notion of quantity 
 involves that of limit ; not of fixed limit, but of one, 
 rather, that is to be determined. The question of quantity 
 is simply the form which curiosity about our world takes 
 when we are conceiving it under the categories of space and 
 time. Now, there are two modes in which this curiosity 
 may express itself. It may take the form of an effort 
 
 147 
 
148 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 either to develop the internal properties of space and time 
 conceptions, or to determine the character of space and time 
 as forms of the world of experience in general. The former 
 effort leads to the development of mathematics in its pure 
 form, and as an organ for the determination of the ideal 
 laws of the concrete phenomena of space and time. 
 Mathematical intuition, as we have seen, beginning with the 
 analysis of conceptual space and time into dimensional 
 terms, develops from these the principles of continuous and 
 discrete magnitude, space yielding the former and time the 
 latter in the notion of number or counting. That we have 
 here the starting-point of the whole mathematical deter- 
 mination of the world is obvious. 
 
 The second form of the quantitative notion is that which 
 leads to the efifort to determine the character of space and 
 time as forms of the world of experience in general. It is 
 important to bear in mind here that the standpoint we have 
 now achieved is not that of ordinary perception, but that of 
 reflection. The space and time we are considering are the 
 transformed space and time of conception. It is this space 
 and time to which the predicates, universal and necessary, 
 may be ascribed. There is no point of view from which 
 presentative space and time assert themselves as either 
 universal or necessary. Presentative space and time are 
 simply present as elements of an immediate experience. 
 The question of the necessity of the present does not arise, 
 and that of universality in relation to a present experience 
 has no meaning. No marvel, then, that Hume was unable 
 to find either in space and time forms of a present ex- 
 perience. Kant was true to experience when he denied 
 Hume's denial and reasserted universality and necessity; 
 only he regarded experience as purely presentative, and was, 
 therefore, led to assert for these, priority to all experience. 
 We are able to see at this point that there is no priority of 
 universality and necessity to presentative experience, and 
 that when considered in relation to conceptual space and 
 time, priority is simply another name for the mediacy of 
 
CHAP. IV. CONSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 149 
 
 experience. A few steps of analysis will make this clear. 
 We have found it necessary to distinguish conceptual space 
 and time from the space and time of presentation, and it 
 has appeared, also, that conceptual space and time involve 
 a fresh starting-point from which a unique intuition is 
 achieved. All this goes to show that conceptual space and 
 time are not forms of any world that is immediately realized 
 in perception, that is, of any actually experienced world. 
 How, then, are they related to the world ? Philosophy is 
 tempted to say here that conceptual space and time are 
 pure subjective abstractions having no objective validity or 
 relation to a real world. But if this temptation be with- 
 stood, I think we can find a better way. We have only to 
 remember a vital distinction which we have already found 
 it necessary to recognize, namely, that between the actual 
 and the possible, in order to see a way out of the difficulty. 
 It has been found that conception generally is a mediatory 
 term, and that what it mediates is the possibility of experi- 
 ence. The whole of experience must be regarded as an 
 effort to translate the possible into the actual. The concept 
 mediates this effect by supplying the form of a possible 
 experience, and conceptual space and time are to be 
 regarded, therefore, not as forms of an actual, but rather as 
 the forms of a possible experience. If experience is to go 
 on, there must be the possibility of further advance, and the 
 mode of this advance must be conceived. The starting- 
 point is, of course, the presentative space and time of 
 perceptual experience. Space and time are here forms of 
 present and immediate realization. Experience is a process, 
 however, and in order to get on there must be the possible, 
 and the possible is that which is conceived as experience- 
 content, but has not as yet become actual. It is to this 
 sphere of possibility that universality and necessity belong. 
 Let us seek the notion of this universality and determine, if 
 we can, what it involves. In the first place, it is clear that 
 universality of no specific character is not one that anybody 
 can have any interest in affirming. The universal that has 
 
150 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 significance must be specific in its character. Universality 
 does not absolutely exclude the notion of limit. The idea 
 of space may find a real limit in the idea of duty. If the 
 question be, Can we conceive other possible forms of 
 experience that are not spatial or temporal ? Plainly, Yes. 
 If the question be, Can we conceive a limit to any given 
 actual experience ? Again, plainly, Yes. But if the 
 question be, Can we conceive a limit to possible experience ? 
 the answer is just as plainly in the negative. If the 
 possibility of experience is to be limited, the limit must be 
 fixed outside the conceivable. The possibility of conceivable 
 experience cannot be limited. Now we have seen that 
 space and time are forms of conceivable experience. They 
 are the forms, and the only forms, which enable us to 
 conceive the extension of quantitative experience, and with- 
 out them the conceivability, and, hence, the possibility, of 
 quantitative experience would lapse. A universal may be 
 defined, therefore, as the mediating form of a possible 
 experience. Space and time are in this sense universals 
 because they alone make a quantitative experience possible. 
 Necessity is simply the obverse side of universality. If 
 space and time mediate the possibility of quantitative 
 experience, the question of necessity is one as to the 
 quantitative experience itself. Is it conceivable that a 
 limit should be fixed to the possibility of quantitative 
 experience ? If we answer in the negative, as clearly we 
 must, then space and time take their places as necessary in 
 a world where the possibility of quantitative experience 
 cannot be limited. 
 
 It appears then that the quantitative aspect of the 
 experience-world is not capable of internal limitation. By 
 that we mean that no quantitative limit to quantity is 
 conceivable. We cannot conceive space as stopping any- 
 where, or time as reaching the end of its string. The 
 world of quantity must be conceived as unlimited, therefore, 
 in its own kind. We mean by this (1) that no limit can 
 be assigned to the possibility of quantitative experience, and 
 
CHAP. IV. CONSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 151 
 
 consequently to space and time as forms of a possible 
 world ; (2) that the notion here involved is a purely 
 quantitative conception. It means the negation or can- 
 cellation of quantitative limit. The reasoning here seems 
 to be tautological, but the conclusion which it aims to 
 express is that no assignable limit of kind can be imposed 
 on to either space or time. Hume refutes the doctrine of 
 the infinite ^ divisibility of space and time by showing its 
 inconsistency with his own doctrine of empirical units of 
 space and time. We do not need to point out here that 
 this refutation rests on a misunderstanding which vitiates 
 Hume's whole doctrine of mathematics. The space and 
 time here involved are the conceptual forms of possible 
 experience. The hypothetical starting-points in both con- 
 ceptual space and time are without dimension, and nothing 
 but an endless process can achieve the passage from the 
 dimensionless to that which has dimension or the reverse. 
 The endless divisibility of space and time is, therefore, 
 necessary. That the unlimited extensibility of space and 
 time is equally necessary a little analysis will suffice to show. 
 Can we conceive a limit to the possibility of quantitative 
 experience ? No. Then it is impossible to assign any 
 limit to space and time. The Kantian conclusion developed 
 out of the mathematical antinomies, that the only space- 
 and time-world that is knowable is one that is indefinitely 
 extensible in experience, strikes in the neighbourhood of the 
 truth then, and it is only necessary to substitute the term 
 endlessly, as explained above, for indefinitely in Kant's 
 phrase, in order to reach the essentials of our own doctrine. 
 We have only to lay the spectre of a space and time in 
 themselves and identify the unlimited space and time with 
 the universal and necessary forms of the possible world of 
 quantitative experience. 
 
 The consciousness of quality is different in kind from 
 that of quantity, and yet closely incorporated with it. It 
 
 1 The term infinite as used by Hume is the equivalent of endless or 
 unlimited. 
 
152 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part n. 
 
 would be misleading here to attempt to deal with this 
 consciousness from the point of view of objective qualities. 
 These are in a sense its products, and what we are con- 
 cerned about here is the genesis of the notion of quality 
 and its essential nature. Here we may, I think, learn 
 something from Kant. On its objective side quality is 
 substantially reducible to existence, while on its subject side 
 it is, as Kant truly apprehended it, the alternating pulse 
 of assertion and denial. The truth in a nutshell is that 
 the space- and time-world is not simply conceived in an 
 ideal representation, but that it is posited in existential 
 judgments. The problem to be solved is that of the origin 
 of these existential judgments as elements of experience. 
 The business here is in the first instance one of analysis. 
 The existential judgment is resolvable into its judgmental 
 and its existential elements, and the existential element is 
 resolvable into the notion of existence as such, and that of 
 the quantitative form or aspect of the conception. Now 
 judgment, as we saw in the first section of this book, is an 
 unique activity differing in species from conception and 
 reasoning. It is in substance the characteristic act of the 
 subject-consciousness in which it appropriates or rejects 
 proffered content of experience. To judge is, therefore, to 
 self-appropriate or to self-exclude, and an act of judgment 
 may be characterized as an act of self-appropriation or 
 self-exclusion. Judgment presupposes a presented content 
 either of simple apprehension or of conception. In order 
 that judgment may act, there must be present the vision of 
 either an actual or a possible world, and the judgment will 
 embody the attitude which the subject-consciousness takes 
 toward the objective material presented to it. In the 
 judgment we have an experience which arises as a reaction 
 upon the content of the objective consciousness, primarily 
 given in presentative and conceptual forms. The whole 
 activity of knowledge cannot be packed into the judgment- 
 form, for when we analyze out of the concrete judgment, 
 the elements which the activity presupposes we find re- 
 
CHAP. IV. CONSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 153 
 
 maining as the essence of judgment a subject act, a species 
 of consciousness in which the self relates itself definitely to 
 some hypothetical content of experience. 
 
 The judgment is so closely bound up with existence, 
 however, that all judgments would seem in their very 
 nature to affirm existence, and there is a sense in which 
 this is true. But the differentia of existence is not to be 
 sought in judgment, and this is the vital point. Existence is 
 primarily a matter of presentation or conception, not at all, 
 in the first instance, a matter of judgment. To exist is 
 to be present or presentable to consciousness. Existence 
 may be defined as presentableness to consciousness. Kant 
 involves himself in a knot of difficulty in his discussion 
 of existence simply because he imagines it to be altogether 
 an affair of judgment. The difference between the hundred 
 dollars imagined and the hundred dollars in my pocket 
 is, he thinks, the difference between non-existence and 
 existence. The imagined hundred dollars do not exist, 
 while the hundred dollars in my pocket do exist. But 
 Kant is wholly unable to say what the notion of existence 
 adds to the hundred dollars in my pocket. It adds nothing 
 if we presuppose the dollars as already there, for in that 
 case we must either identify existence with the content, and 
 then in the judgment of existence we have the affirmation 
 of content twice over; or, with some of the processes 
 of consciousness by which the content is realized, and in 
 that case the process is already there. We do not need to 
 tangle ourselves in this net if we hold to the point that 
 oxistence is not primarily an affair of judgment but of pre- 
 sentation and conception. Existence is presentableness 
 to consciousness, and things may exist either actually or 
 possibly. That exists actually which is content of a pre- 
 sentation or is reducible to such by the ordinary processes 
 of experience, while that exists possibly which is content of 
 a conception. We have seen that a concept is a mode of 
 representing the content of experience as a whole. This 
 content can never be reduced to actual presentation, but 
 
154 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 must remain in the category of the possible. The object of 
 conception, so far forth as it is conceived content, exists 
 therefore only as a possibility, not as an actuality. Let us 
 return with this insight to the problem of the hundred 
 dollars. We say that existence is a property of the repre- 
 sentation of the dollars, and is in this case present in the 
 conception as truly as it is in the judgment.^ Only the 
 content of the conception is that which exists as a bare 
 possibility, while the content of the judgment is that which 
 exists actually; that is, either as actual content of pre- 
 sentation, or as that which may be reduced to this form 
 by the ordinary processes of experience. 
 
 In the above representations there are, it is true, certain 
 qualifications necessary in order that the position may be 
 able to bear criticism. We have used the terms actuality 
 and possibility in a way that requires some further definition. 
 The actual has been defined as content of a presentative 
 experience, and by this is meant not only what may be 
 there at the present moment, but what may be there as 
 a result of the ordinary processes by which experience is 
 reduced to the form of presentation. Thus I believe that 
 the Soudan exists actually, not merely as a possibility, 
 because I am convinced that if I comply with certain 
 conditions of cognition the Soudan will become actual 
 content of presentative experience. The term actual in- 
 cludes, then, presented content, and that which may be 
 reduced to this form by compliance with the ordinary 
 conditions of cognition. The term possibility is also in 
 need of further definition. We do not deal with the term 
 abstractly here, but simply in its relation to existence. 
 What do we mean by existing possibly ? This question 
 brings out a double meaning that is often concealed in the 
 phrase. By existing possibly may be meant that which is 
 conceived as content of a possible experience ; that is, of an 
 
 ^ To put the matter in somewhat different form, we conceive the dollars 
 as existing content just as truly as we judge them to be existing content. 
 Cone eptiou does not, however, go beyond possible existence. 
 
CHAP. IV. CONSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 155 
 
 experience which may become real, but perhaps not reduc- 
 ible to the presentative form; as for example the satisfaction 
 felt in the attainment of some good or the ideal content 
 obtained through some process of learning. In the broad 
 sense we say that such things exist, as content of a possible 
 experience. But this meaning is not to be confused with 
 another that is perhaps more germane at this point. 
 Existing possibly may be simply the presence of the 
 conditions of a disjunctive judgment. Let us consider how 
 this may be. We have seen already that judgment is not 
 the first activity, but has a presupposition. There must be 
 presented or conceived content before judgment is possible. 
 But the situation is not always simple. In fact the ordinary 
 situation is that of rival alternatives contending for 
 endorsement. To recur to the illustration of the hundred 
 dollars, let us suppose that the alternatives are my pocket 
 with the hundred dollars, and my pocket without this 
 content. So far as the alternatives themselves are con- 
 cerned, we have two contrary representations, either of 
 which may be reduced to actuality by complying with the 
 ordinary conditions of cognition. The situation represents 
 the suspension of the judging function, and during this rest 
 of judgment we can see clearly enough that the alternatives 
 bear precisely the same relation to existence. They are 
 both contents which may be reduced to actuality by 
 complying with the ordinary conditions of cognition; which 
 one of them is so reducible, is a question of fact, and does 
 not affect their essential existential character. 
 
 The above result, if true, simplifies our problem some- 
 what, for our two alternatives, in the case of a suspension of 
 judgment, bear the same relation to existence and exist 
 actually, according to the above definition of actuality. 
 Considered in their relations to experience and the ordinary 
 conditions of cognition, they are both reducible to the 
 content of presentative experience. For the term existing 
 possibly there is left then only the one meaning, that of an 
 experience-content which may be realized, but not perhaps 
 
156 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 in the presentative form ; while to all content which 
 belongs definitely to the sphere of presentation, the term 
 existing actually is applicable whether this content has been 
 reduced to a present experience or not. Now, the situation 
 as it presented itself to Kant was radically different from 
 the one we have supposed. In Kant's case there was no 
 suspension of judgment, but the pocket was first supposed to 
 contain a hundred dollars, and then it was supposed to be 
 empty. "We have here a pair of judgments to start with. 
 Then the case was debated on the supposition that the 
 existential judgment applied to the full pocket, while the 
 idea or representation of the hundred dollars applied to 
 the pocket when it was empty. Thus we have placed over 
 against each other, a judgment in accordance with fact, and 
 a supposition contrary to fact, a situation out of which it 
 is impossible to obtain any instructive result. In order 
 to get on we must abolish all this complexity, and suppose 
 that the fulness or emptiness of the pocket is the very 
 point in question, and that with reference to this, judgment 
 is at a point of rest. These are then the presented alter- 
 natives both existing actually, in relation to which the 
 question of fact can be settled only by complying with 
 the ordinary conditions of cognition. And it is only after 
 the question of fact has been answered, and the pocket found 
 to be full, let us say, that the alternative of the empty pocket 
 is seen to be contrary to fact, and, therefore, to represent non- 
 existence. The non-existent is, therefore, that alternative 
 content that is cancelled by an experience which realizes 
 some definite content opposed to it.^ Thus experience in 
 
 ' Some confusion as to existence might be avoided by distinguishing its 
 notion from that of reality with which it is ordinarily identified. The 
 existent is that which is present to consciousness, and this may be either 
 actual, possible, or necessary : or it may be real or unreal. To become 
 real consciousness must take some definite attitude toward it, either of 
 appropriation or rejection. It is this act of self-appropriation or rejection, 
 which embodies itself in our theoretic and practical judgment, that 
 translates the presented into the real world. Apart from this there may 
 be existence in plenty but no reality. 
 
CHAP. IV. COKSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 157 
 
 affirming the content of the full pocket, throws out as 
 non-existent the alternative content of the empty pocket. 
 
 The doctrine we are defending here is not that existence 
 and non-existence have no relation to judgment, hut rather 
 that they are in the first instance qualifications of content 
 and not of the judgment-form. Things are not non-existent 
 hecause they are judged to be so, but they are judged to 
 be non-existent only after they have been rendered so by 
 actual content of experience. It is impossible to see how 
 a judgment of existence could rest on any other ground. 
 We have seen, moreover, that the essence of judgment is 
 self-appropriation or rejection of proffered content. But 
 there is none of this activity in existential experience. The 
 so-called existential judgments represent the activity of 
 judgment at its vanishing point. It is in a strict sense 
 only an act of re-cognition ; we find that primarily our 
 judgments have little to do with the existence of things, 
 except to admit what has already been determined before 
 some other court. In the light of this fact the question 
 becomes pertinent as to what precisely the relation of 
 existence to judgment may be. Is a simple assertion of 
 existence a real judgment ? We think not. When we say 
 Grod is, have we affirmed anything that we did not already 
 possess ? It is impossible to say that this judgment adds 
 any new content to experience or knowledge. This will be 
 clearer if we recall the fact that judgment is not a primary 
 activity, but that it presupposes presentation and conception. 
 Content presents itself in these forms, and its existence, 
 actual or possible, has already been determined. The judg- 
 ment of existence in reference to such content is exactly 
 like the judgment we pronounce when we recognize the 
 presence of some content in the familiar phrase : " Well, 
 here you are." The judgment adds nothing that was not 
 already in the presentation. 
 
 On the contrary, a real judgment effects some modifica- 
 tion of content. It either adds content to content, as, "God 
 is love," or it adds some definite form to content already 
 
158 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 there, as, "the field is triangular.'' Of course there is a 
 sense in which the qualification af&rmed in these judgments 
 must be already in presentation or conception. We are not 
 asserting that judgment is independent of other processes, 
 but simply that in a real judgment some qualification of 
 content is involved. And we have seen that this qualifica- 
 tion may be brought about in two ways, either by adding 
 content to content or by a formal determination of content. 
 When either of these things is done a real judgment has 
 been pronounced. What then is the relation of such 
 existence to judgment ? Simply that existence is the jpre- 
 sumptive point of all judgment. The judgment, God is 
 love, means that the presented content of the idea of God 
 is such that love becomes part of its qualifying content. 
 The field is triangular, means that the presentation of the 
 field is such that triangularity becomes a formal qualifica- 
 tion of its content. Unless this material or formal modifi- 
 cation is effected no real judgment has been pronounced, and 
 the judging activity has been simply playing around its 
 presumptive point. Existence is this presumptive point, 
 and we may say, therefore, that all judgments involve 
 existence, in so far as they presume the presence of some 
 content about which they are affirmed. 
 
 Eeturning then to the main line of the discussion, we 
 may say that judgment is a function which presupposes 
 existential content, and the judging activity is, objectively 
 considered, the qualification of this content. What then, 
 we may ask, is it subjectively or in its significance for 
 consciousness ? Clearly judgment is the activity in which 
 the subject achieves its own self-consciousness. The judging 
 activity is an ego-function. In it the self asserts itself in 
 an act which objectively may be described as an operation 
 on reality, but subjectively it is an act in which the subject 
 rises to the consciousness of itself as possessing or excluding 
 certain qualified real content as its own. Judgment always 
 represents the subject-moment of experience. The elimina- 
 tion of judgment from consciousness would mean the lapse 
 
CHAP. IV. CONSCIOUSNESS OF QUANTITY AND QUALITY. 159 
 
 of self-consciousness. If it were possible, which it probably 
 is not, consciousness would become purely objective, a thing 
 of content, but with no sense of its subject-relations. The 
 judgment-consciousness on its subjective side is what Kant 
 had in view in his category of quality. The designation is 
 in view of its objective aspect as a qualifier of content, but 
 the moments are subjective. Affirmation and negation are 
 acts of a pulsating consciousness, and limitation, for which we 
 might substitute qualification is simply a designation of this 
 consciousness in view of the function it performs on content. 
 Every judgment, whether it be affirmative or negative, is, 
 so far forth, a definition of the real. Its function is de- 
 finition, qualification, limitation of some existential content. 
 Now, if we conceive this qualifying activity as mediated 
 in its relation to the objective, by space and time, we will 
 be able to see how a synthesis of the qualitative with the 
 quantitative is effected in judgment. The judgment is 
 subjectively an activity in which the self becomes related to 
 its content. Objectively it is a qualification of reality. But 
 this qualification cannot be effected by judgment alone. 
 Without the mediation of some percept or concept, judgment 
 would simply play around its presumptive point. Here the 
 mediating terms are space and time, or, to be more accurate, 
 the principles of the quantitative use of the understanding 
 derived from them, those of continuous and discrete magni- 
 tude. The qualitative consciousness has not at this stage 
 in its evolution achieved a point of view from which pure 
 qualitative self-determination is possible. The self-con- 
 sciousness, while it does shape itself into the I, is always an 
 I that is absorbed in some objective operation. It is a 
 stage, therefore, in which there are e^fo-functions, which 
 operate under objective categories, but no ej'o-function which 
 relates itself consciously to its activities as a whole. The 
 subjective unity of experience as a whole is as yet a latent 
 term in consciousness, and only to be awakened when con- 
 sciousness begins to conceive its own activities under more 
 subjective categories than those of space and time. 
 
i60 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 The aim of this chapter has been to show how conscious- 
 ness of quality becomes incorporated with that of quantity, 
 so that our judgments in this sphere become quantitative 
 and mathematical. We have seen that this incorporation is 
 effected through the mediating concepts of space and time, 
 which are the categories of the world of quantitative 
 determination. From the concepts of space and time, 
 as we have seen, the principles of discrete and continuous 
 operations in quantity have been deduced. The mathe- 
 matical consciousness is thus equipped for its work. Not 
 only so, but the apodictic character of the mathematical 
 data stands vindicated from the destructive criticism of 
 Hume. On the one hand we have achieved the stand-point 
 in reflection from which mathematical science may be 
 developed in its pure and applied branches, while on the 
 other we have seen how space and time serve as mediating 
 categories of a certain phase of experience. To exhibit 
 this has been our main purpose. In the synthesis of the 
 qualitative and quantitative under the concepts of space 
 and time we not only achieve an instrument of mathematical 
 reflection, but also an important stage in the experience of 
 reality. By means of this synthesis the objective world 
 takes on its first formal aspects, and the subject world utters 
 itself in these e^'O-judgments which stand as first forms of 
 definite self-realization. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 THE VOLITIONAL CATEGOEIES. CAUSE. 
 
 We do not come upon the various aspects of reality by a 
 species of accident, but they arise inevitably in the course 
 of a normal experience. Space and time constitute for us 
 the representation-forms of the world of quantity. But 
 that they are not exhaustive is proved by the fact that 
 other ways of representing reality may and do arise. It is 
 not by accident either that we have designated the group 
 of categories under this section, volitional. The common 
 characteristic of the group is that they are dynamic, and 
 constitute the forms of a world of energies. We saw in an 
 earlier chapter how closely the whole cognitive activity of 
 consciousness is connected with underlying volitional func- 
 tions, so that our first intellections are dominated by purely 
 practical motives. In space and time cognition achieves 
 categories which enable it to assert relative independence 
 of volition, and to develop an instrument for the intellectual 
 determination of the content of reality. But underlying 
 this whole sphere of space and time determination is that of 
 volitional activity and effort, and it is inevitable that this 
 activity should itself at some point in experience become an 
 object of cognitive interest, and that through this interest 
 certain categories of a volitional type should arise, in the 
 light of which a further objective determination of the 
 world becomes possible. 
 
 L 161 
 
162 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 Where, then, shall we look for that fontal experience out 
 of which these dynamic categories are to emerge ? If we 
 bear in mind that the order of experience is first the objec- 
 tive, then the subjective, we will be prepared to look for our 
 starting-point somewhere in the region of the objective con- 
 sciousness. We saw also, in seeking the origin of space-form 
 in experience, how the content of the objective consciousness 
 gradually becomes defined as an object, so that the world of 
 stimulation is now no longer wholly undetermined. Let us 
 now see whether this supplies the datum needed for the 
 «mergence of a dynamic category. The fact we are made 
 conscious of when our volitional energy falls upon an object 
 that has been somewhat defined is that of resistance. 
 Psychology has magnified this experience as the spring of 
 some of the most important elements of the mental life. 
 The point of importance here is that the experience of 
 resistance when interpreted objectively, which it always is 
 in the first instance, presents itself to us as a qualification of 
 the object. We do not experience resistance, but resisting 
 objects. In short, we find ourselves environed by things 
 which seem to take delight in thwarting and nullifying our 
 own energies. These recalcitrant objects may be the bodies 
 of our own companions, which we conceive as being moved 
 by will-energies like our own. In fact, it is very probable 
 that our world will at first be filled up largely with living 
 beings with which we are associated. But this is a matter of 
 comparative indifference, for whether our objects be animate 
 or inanimate, their resisting quality will be equally con- 
 spicuous. The objective world from this point of view will 
 obtrude itself upon us as a system of resisting things which 
 obstruct our movements and stubbornly persist in making 
 us get out of their way. 
 
 Out of this experience of resistance several categories 
 will gradually emerge, the first, and in many respects the 
 most important, being 'that of cause. Let us then proceed 
 to the analysis of cause in order to determine how it comes 
 to be a dynamic category of the objective world. There are 
 
«HAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 163 
 
 no doubt three stages that are distinguishable in the genesis 
 of our experience of cause, the first of which is involved in 
 our experience of the effect which resisting objects produce 
 upon us. Not every effect will serve, but the object must 
 set itself in resistance to our will, we must feel ourselves 
 put out of the way by the object and must suffer something 
 from its resistance, say a stumped toe or a bruised finger. 
 The second stage will no doubt be that of our reactions 
 upon resisting things in which we will have the experience 
 of mastering the things and putting them out of our way. 
 The first stage gives us the passive aspect of cause, ourselves 
 mastered and put out of the way by things. The second 
 stage supplies the active side, our wills mastering things and 
 putting them out of our way. This is the sense of agency. 
 Now there is a third stage in which we learn to translate 
 the impacts and collisions of things among themselves into 
 terms of our own experience with things. Out of our own 
 causal experience arises the power of seeing things, not our- 
 selves resisting one another, and putting one another out of 
 the way. If the subject of this experience be a boy or a 
 savage, he endows things with wills, and translates their 
 experience into an exact counterpart of his own. This 
 shows the volitional root of the category. As the boy 
 grows older or the savage more intelligent, he becomes less 
 finthropomorphic in his conceptions of things. He no longer 
 «ndows the inanimate with conscious will. In short he 
 subtracts his notion of consciousness from his conception of 
 agency and the causality of things upon things becomes to him 
 a species of non-conscious energizing. But the volitional 
 character of the relation survives in an important sense. 
 The notion of agency, of things mastering things and 
 producing changes in them, persists as the essential feature 
 of the notion of cause. From the genetic point of view 
 Locke was right, then, when he identified the notion of cause 
 with that of agency and conceived power to be its essential 
 characteristic. Naive and uncritical as Locke's account is, 
 it seems to me to strike much closer to the genetic root of the 
 
164 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 notion of cause than does the more laboured and critical repre- 
 sentation of Hume. The truth is, Hume's account of the 
 origin of the notion of cause is largely mythological. He 
 excludes all dynamic quality from it at the outset and attempts 
 to reduce it to an idea of invariable time-sequence which 
 has been generated by experience of the uniform sequences 
 of certain elements in consciousness. We might admit the 
 mode of genesis without thereby conceding Hume's concep- 
 tion of the nature of the notion. But it is safe to say that 
 Hume has missed the true genetic account. It may be that 
 the boy's notion of cause is crude, and that reflection will 
 lead him to modify it, but that a cause is to him an agent 
 that does something to something, is sufiBcient proof that the 
 origin of the notion is volitional, and not as Hume 
 conceived it to be. 
 
 In his genetic account Hume is in reality exploiting a 
 result of reflection. This will be clear if we remember that 
 it is the notion of cause as universal and necessary, that he 
 is seeking to explain. It has already appeared in the doctrine 
 of space and time, that the criteria of universality and 
 necessity are absent from the space and time of presen- 
 tation, and belong only to that of conception. The same 
 distinction will need to be observed in the treatment of 
 cause. There is a spontaneous experience of cause which 
 precedes its reflective apprehension. When the boy observing 
 some behaviour of an object asks what makes it do that, he 
 is expressing the spontaneous notion of cause. The cause 
 of the behaviour is the something that makes it do it. 
 There is, of course, a latent assumption here of the 
 necessity of some cause, but such reflection has never 
 risen into the boy's consciousness. The cause of the spon- 
 taneous consciousness is an efficient agent that is factual 
 rather than necessary. When, however, we begin to 
 reflectively apprehend cause the graver issues begin to arise. 
 The principal of these are the questions concerning the 
 nature of the idea of cause, and of cause as universal and 
 necessary. What is cause and how is it related to the 
 
CHAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 165 
 
 objective world ? It is here that we meet directly the issue 
 raised by Hume. Is cause a category of energy or is it 
 merely a relation of time-sequence ? It is evident to 
 reflection that cause bears some temporal relation to its 
 effect, and Hume may be right in seizing on this temporal 
 relation as the most available datum in experience for 
 determining the special causal connections of its contents. 
 The question is different, however, when we ask for the 
 nature of the connection between a and & when it is said to 
 be causal. We are then interested to know not how a and 
 h came together but the nature of their connection. Do 
 we mean to say that there is nothing in the connection that 
 cannot be explained by the supposed method of their 
 coming together ? This question was never fairly faced by 
 Hume. It was left to J. S. Mill to meet it squarely, and it 
 soon became apparent to him that the definition of cause 
 as invariable time-sequence would have to be given up. 
 The uniqueness of the causal relation impressed him, and in 
 order to escape the implications of the volitional theory, 
 which he denied, he conceived a cause to be an unconditional 
 time-antecedent of a change or event. The cause of & is 
 that time antecedent a, the absence of which would inevit- 
 ably entail the absence of 6. Here we have plainly a 
 relation of necessity, and the question is whether this 
 necessity is mathematical or of some other species. Now, 
 Kant has shown that the necessity of cause is not mathe- 
 matical, since, as he contends, there is nothing in the notion 
 of an event or change from which an antecedent could be 
 infallibly deduced. This is true of both terms of the 
 causal relation. If the unconditionality of cause is not 
 deducible from time it must represent something unique 
 and irreducible in the notion. Locke thought the essence 
 of cause to be power, and this points, I think, in the right 
 direction. We have seen that genetically, cause is a form 
 of volitional agency, and when the notion of volition is 
 eliminated that of agency stiU survives. But agency is 
 activity and the cause is, therefore, a form of activity. In 
 
166 EVOLUTION 01" CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 the two terms, activity and time, we may possibly find data 
 that will lead to important conclusions. 
 
 There are only two species of activity conceivable, that 
 which contains the principle of its own initiative, and that 
 which finds its initiative in another. The first we call 
 self-activity, the second stimulated or conditioned activity. 
 Now, that whose activity is conditioned or stimulated has as 
 its presupposition an antecedent stimulation ; and extending 
 this supposition we reach the conception of a series or 
 system of activities in which each depends on an antecedent 
 activity for its initiative, and each in turn becomes the 
 antecedent source of initiative for another. We thus arrive 
 at the notion of a system of conditioning activities which 
 we call causes, and of conditioned activities which we call 
 effects. But inasmuch as such a system contains no point 
 of first initiative, no absolute term, each of its parts is at 
 the same time cause and effect. From one point of view it 
 is the stimulation needed to initiate another activity, and 
 from another it owes its own activity to the stimulation of 
 another. The notion of causality is thus one of conditioned 
 agency, and this is the element of uniqueness in it. It 
 involves time in a very essential way. Por conditioned 
 agency — that is, agency which depends for its own initiative 
 on another — is not possible out of time. Time in its order 
 of sequence supplies the form of such agency. The depend- 
 ence of activity on other could express itself in no other 
 form than that of time. Hence, if we distinguish the form of 
 cause from its content, its inner pulsation, we will find that 
 formally it is invariable antecedence and consequence in 
 time, while in its inner nature it is a species of activity. A 
 good definition of cause would be, conditioned activity in 
 time. 
 
 We have seen that cause on its inner subjective side is 
 agency, and it is on this side that we are able to trace 
 the development of the subject-consciousness in the ex- 
 perience of causation. The spring of it all is the volitional 
 activity of consciousness, which takes the form of a subject- 
 
CHAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 167 
 
 consciousness reacting upon stimulations in the way of 
 appropriating or rejecting their content. In short, volitional 
 experience is an activity which brings the subject-conscious- 
 ness into relation with something on which it depends as 
 the stimulating source of its own adaptive activities. Now, 
 while it is true that the first outcome of this situation 
 for knowledge, will be some determination of the object, yet 
 the development of the subject-consciousness is inseparable 
 from that of the objective. The very form of volitional 
 experience, as we have seen, involves a collision between 
 the subject-consciousness, and something objective, and the 
 cognitive gain of this experience for the subject comes in 
 the development of the subject's awareness of itself as 
 standing over against an object or not-self. It is in volitional 
 experience that the distinction between self and not-self is 
 developed and the self defines itself as opposed to and 
 distinct from the not-self. Clearly it is in volition that the 
 duality of experience is effected and clearly defined. Will 
 is a principle of self-determination in the sense that it must 
 have as a background at least, another or not-self in view of 
 which the self is defined. In volitional activity we have, 
 then, the spring out of which the first sense of conditioned 
 self-agency arises. 
 
 The most concrete notion of cause we have found to be 
 that of volitional agency. The will-element is, however, 
 soon abstracted from, while the notion of agency persists. 
 We learn to detach agency from our own consciousness and 
 from that of others, and to conceive that unconscious things, 
 sticks and stones, are also agents which may do something 
 to us and to one another. This is the first stage in the 
 definition of the notion of cause. There is first the 
 volitional activity itself, which is by degrees extended to 
 things as well as persons. But an abstraction has now 
 been made, and the boy, say, is able to represent things 
 without wills as agents that receive changes from other 
 things and are capable of producing changes in others. The 
 world of things is represented as a system of give and 
 
168 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 take. Now, the essential core of this representation is the 
 notion of agency, and, to define more strictly, conditioned 
 agency. The boy has not conceived the notion of condi- 
 tioned agency in a very abstract form, but he has the 
 substance of it in his notion of things without wills 
 engaging in this give- and take-activity. The truth is, 
 we may suppose the boy to have reached this stage of 
 causal experience without ever having conceived the notion 
 of cause abstractly. The causal experience, like that of 
 space and time, has its stage of relative immediacy. Cause, 
 if not a presentation like space and time, has at least 
 a spontaneous stage in connection with presentative space 
 and time. If we suppose that the perception of space has 
 developed sufficiently for the perception of things, then by 
 an unreflecting, if not unconscious, process, activity which as 
 first apprehended is volitional, is gradually transferred to 
 things which are no longer represented as having wills. 
 The notion of cause thus achieved is a product of the 
 spontaneous activity of consciousness, and there is no reason 
 for believing that the situation has been in any proper 
 sense of the term, conceived. The concept of cause arises 
 at a later stage when consciousness has become reflective. 
 This conditioned agency is mediated by time. We have 
 seen that time is the form of a change-series. In the stage 
 we are now dealing with time has not been abstracted from 
 change, but is apprehended in the concrete ; and it would 
 be perhaps more strictly accurate to speak of the time-sense, 
 and to ask how the time sense mediates the experience of 
 cause. Put in this way the answer is clear. The time 
 sense is in its first overt form, as we saw, the sense or 
 perception of objective change. It is through the time- 
 sense that the world presents itself as a series. But the 
 serial form is indispensable to the notion of cause. A world 
 of causation is a world of serial conditions. Kant saw the 
 fundamental connection of time with cause, although, as it 
 seems to me, he missed this connection in his famous section 
 on the category of cause. For, if the time-sense supplies the 
 
CHAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 169 
 
 form of the causal series, it follows that no series in which 
 the primal overt relation of the parts is not that of time- 
 sequence can be considered causal. We may contemplate 
 in succession, backward and forward, upward, and down- 
 ward, the parts of a building, but we are all the time 
 presupposing as the basis of our experience a certain fixed 
 order of parts in space. The time-sequences do not in any 
 sense affect this order, and hence the relation of its parts 
 cannot be regarded as causal. The boat moving down the 
 stream supplies a different situation in which time enters 
 as a constituent factor in determining the form of the events. 
 The series is, therefore, causal. Time mediates cause by 
 supplying its indispensable event-form, and thus deter- 
 mining the world of cause as a world of sequence. The 
 causal experience then becomes possible. The most con- 
 crete presentation of the causal world, that is, of things 
 suffering and inflicting changes or modifications, has as its 
 form the time-series, inasmuch as the changes themselves 
 are terms of a time-series, and coul'd not be otherwise 
 conceived. 
 
 But the causal experience is not completely exhausted in 
 the time-series. It is vitally important that we should 
 note this. The time-sense is not identical with the experi- 
 ence of cause, any more than time is identical with change. 
 Time is the form of change, but change itself in its inner 
 nature is activity. Change might be defined as activity in 
 time, and as we have already defined cause as activity in 
 time, the two might seem to be identical. To conclude so 
 would be a hasty inference. Let us ask ourselves whether 
 the experience of change is the same as that of cause. 
 What is the experience of change ? It is clearly the sense 
 we have of passing from one condition to another following 
 it, and objectively, our perception of the passage of things 
 from one state to another. The change is this activity of 
 transition. Now, what is the experience of cause ? It is 
 our sense that some change we observe in ourselves or 
 others, say the change in an animal from life to death, is 
 
170 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 due to some activity which is not identical with this 
 passage, but is presupposed by it. Thus, poison may have 
 been administered, and the change-series, from a state of 
 health to one of death, follows. Now this whole change- 
 series may be observed by us without our having any ex- 
 perience of cause. The first experience of cause, as we have 
 seen, is that of ourselves doing something to something else, 
 or suffering something from something else. Later it becomes 
 more detached from ourselves, and we observe things acting 
 and reacting as agents in the game of give and take. But 
 through all this refining process the notion of agency 
 survives. This being the case, our experience of the 
 passage of the animal from a state of health to one of death 
 becomes causal when we connect it with some agent which 
 is supposed to have initiated the changes we have observed. 
 Our experience becomes causal by virtue of that connection. 
 This is what the boy is in quest of evidently when he asks, 
 What killed the bird ? or What makes the engine behave 
 so ? The change-series has been observed, and the question 
 of cause is one of initiative. The time-world is one in 
 which things have a beginning, and the question of cause is 
 one concerning the conditions of this beginning. 
 
 The notion of causality must be distinguished, therefore, 
 from that of change. The notion of change is rather to be 
 identified with effect than cause, for it is that of the series, 
 the beginning or initiation of which is to be accounted for. 
 Effects are changes or series of changes that are connected in 
 experience, either directly or indirectly, with some initiating 
 agent, and it is in their relation to this agent alone that they 
 are considered effects. Apart from this relation, changes are 
 simply events in time, and do not point beyond themselves. 
 We see the sparrow flying about alive, and a moment later 
 we see it drop to the earth dead. These are simply 
 happenings; facts in a time-world which only call for 
 explanation when we seek to make the experience causal, 
 and ask for the initiating agent of the change. And we 
 may refine the concepts of cause and effect as much as we 
 
CHAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 171 
 
 like, the notion of initiating agency will still survive. A 
 cause will never be reducible to a change-series, but will 
 always remain the concept of that which it is necessary to 
 presuppose in order that the changes may be initiated. 
 And it will be found that this presupposition will take the 
 form of connecting activities observed, with other activities 
 antecedent in time which are supposed to be necessary, in 
 order that the activities observed may have a beginning. 
 
 In order intelligently to understand causal experience, it 
 is important that we should distinguish at least two of its 
 principal stages. These we call the stage of spontaneity 
 and the stage of reflection. There is, of course, a sense in 
 which a certain degree of reflection is involved in the 
 simplest causal experience. That anything has a cause is, 
 of course, not a perception but a kind of reflection. Up to 
 a certain point, however, this reflection is not self-conscious, 
 and it is immediately acting. In this stage the experi- 
 ence involves little or no abstraction. The agents are 
 concretely conceived, and their activities are not considered 
 apart from themselves. It is either one or other ; living 
 beings doing or suffering things, or else sticks and stones, 
 which we have learned to regard apart from conscious will, 
 doing and suffering things. The notion of agency is central 
 in the whole experience, and the distinction between the 
 agent that does or suffers and the other that suffers or 
 makes to suffer, is never slurred. The situation is in the 
 nature of the case one in which the self defines itself more 
 and more clearly in relation to its objects. It is only in 
 the reflective stage, however, that any definite conceptions 
 of cause arise. The point in our experience when the 
 notion of cause becomes an object of arrested attention, and 
 we begin to be curious as to what the term means, marks a 
 new epoch in our mental history. At that point we begin 
 to develop a concept of cause and to subsume our world 
 under it, and thus make a start in a process which it 
 requires the whole of science and philosophy to complete. 
 The reflective notion of cause from the outset is that of the 
 
172 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 conditional beginning of things. The world of happenings 
 is one that is not self-explanatory, but the very fact that 
 change is its most obtrusive aspect leads us to conceive 
 agents to whose activity the initiation of these changes may 
 be ascribed. To the first reflection these agents themselves 
 may not be further determined ; the question as to whether 
 or not a cause is to be taken as an absolute beginning may 
 and doubtless will be as yet in abeyance. No doubt the first 
 step of reflection will be one of extension, and will involve 
 the scope of causation. We have seen how the distinction 
 between the possible and the actual arises in experience, 
 and how in reflection we conceive a possible world in 
 relation to which the categories of space and time take on 
 the aspects of universality and necessity. The same process 
 leads to precisely similar results in the case of causality. 
 Spontaneously we seek a cause for every change or change- 
 series. Eeflectively we conceive that a cause is a universal 
 and necessary term in a world of changes. We first 
 conceive our world of change in terms of a world of possible 
 experience. The conception may not be in any sense 
 complete ; in fact, it is likely to be a mere sketch, few of 
 the details of which have been filled in. It is sufficient at 
 least for the present exigencies of reflection that we have 
 been stirred to think on the change-aspect of things. From 
 this starting-point the concept of a world of change soon 
 evolves, and not far from this is the reflection that any 
 change has a cause. This reflection contains the germ of 
 the more advanced thought that a cause is a universal and 
 necessary antecedent in a world of change. 
 
 The notion of cause as a universal and necessary category 
 in a world of change thus develops. But the question still 
 presses. What is a cause ? and reflection must go on. We 
 have seen how the notion of agency persists in that of 
 cause. At this point we have a further illustration of the 
 same fact. The point which reflection attacks here is not 
 so much that of agency as it is that of the kind of agency 
 involved in causal initiative. The question, in short, whether 
 
CHAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 173 
 
 a cause is to be conceived as an absolute beginning, or only 
 in a relative conditional sense, arises here, and we very soon 
 begin to distinguish the notion of a causal beginning in a 
 series of change from that of an absolute beginning. The 
 two concepts are, as we shall see later, inseparably connected, 
 and the notion of cause has, as Dr. Wm. T. Harris has well 
 said, the notion of self-activity coiled up in it. But that 
 consideration belongs to another chapter. The point of 
 interest here is that reflection very soon reduces the notion 
 of cause to that of a term in the change-series itself. A 
 cause does not transcend our world of change; it is an 
 element in that world, and is itself, in one aspect at least, a 
 change. The temptation of reflection at this point is to 
 become sceptical and to deny the difference between cause 
 and change. A cause is simply a change among changes 
 and has nothing characteristic. This was Hume's thought. 
 Anything, he says, may be the cause of anything. From 
 this it is a short and logical step to the identification of 
 cause with mere time-sequence. A cause is only that 
 change that happens to invariably precede another in time. 
 But reflection must go back and resist the temptation. A 
 cause may be an element in a change-series and still remain 
 an agent. For when we ask for the cause of a change or 
 series of changes, we are not looking for terms of that 
 particular series, but for terms of another series that is 
 conceived to be more fundamental. A teacher in a pre- 
 paratory school finds that the majority of his pupils in a 
 certain year have failed to pass the entrance examinations 
 to college. This is a fact to be explained. No satisfaction 
 will be gotten, however, out of the relation of this pheno- 
 menon with changes of its own series ; that is, with results 
 of former years. The only service of such comparison will 
 be the clearer definition of the phenomenon to be accounted 
 for. The first step in the right direction will be a search 
 for a more fundamental phenomenon or series of phenomena^ 
 the operation of which will supply the initiative of the 
 series to be explained. This explanatory series will be 
 
174 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 found, let us say, in the indolence of the pupils or in bad 
 methods of instruction, or in both. The discovery of these 
 phenomena and their definite relation to the phenomenon to 
 be explained supplies what we call its cause. This cause is 
 in one aspect of it only a change or a series of changes, but 
 in the aspect of it which entitles it to be called a cause, it 
 is an agent which initiates another change or series of 
 changes. The change we call cause belongs to a series that 
 is conceived to be more fundamental than the series we call 
 effect, and in relation to it, is the term that we must 
 presuppose in order that the origin of the effect-series may 
 be conceivable. The notion of agency is, therefore, a per- 
 sistent element of that of cause. Assuming this, we are in 
 a position to deal with the relative character of the notion 
 of cause. The notion of cause is that of agency. But all 
 the discoverable causes in this world of temporal phenomena 
 are themselves phenomena and subject to the law of succes- 
 sion. Not only so, but they are subject to the law of 
 agency itself. While we find them necessary in order to 
 conceive the beginning of some other elements in our world, 
 we find it impossible to conceive their own beginning 
 without relating them to prior agency. If we seek in cause 
 for a point of rest in our world we find that every cause is 
 a vanishing point. There is no absolute cure for mutation 
 in the notion of cause. Through the notion of cause we 
 are able to relate changes to other changes deeper down in 
 our world. But however deeply we may penetrate, we do 
 not get below the foundation of sand. We are in the world 
 of Heracleitus, where the flux is eternal and remediless, and 
 were our reflection to stop here and attempt to take the 
 notion of cause as final, despair would be our inevitable 
 doom. There is a sense in which this despair has already 
 seized upon the modern spirit, and we may admit with 
 Hume that long-continued reflection on the world of change 
 and the incessant flux which it presents, if not accompanied 
 with something more profound, will inevitably plunge the 
 mind into sceptical despair. That this despair is not in- 
 
CHAP. V. THE VOLITIONAL CATEGORIES. CAUSE. 175 
 
 evitable, and that reflection may lead to better and more 
 positive results will not be denied if we consider for a 
 moment that conditional agency is not an ultimate con- 
 ception. That which owes its initiative to another has its 
 presupposition in that which contains its initiative in itself. 
 The prius of conditional existence is self-existence. This 
 is an insight as old as Aristotle, and as necessary to 
 experience as the notion of cause itself. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SUBSTANCE. 
 
 Cause has been treated as the first of the volitional cate- 
 gories, and in the genetic order of experience it is no doubt 
 the first of this group that rises into clear apprehension. 
 The child is a seeker after causes long before he becomes 
 curious about substances. Yet in the spontaneous experi- 
 ence there is an early appearance of the notion of substance. 
 The unreflective consciousness first hits upon the notion of 
 substance in the form of particularity. The child does not 
 in its first experiences have the concept of gold, or wood, or 
 stone, but its first experiences are of this piece of gold, this 
 stick, that stone. Any one may remind us, of course, that 
 the notion of gold is involved in the recognition of this 
 piece of gold, and that it is somehow involved in the most 
 particular experience. No doubt, but it is true, nevertheless, 
 that notions make their first appearance well swaddled in 
 the garments of a particular experience. Though important 
 they seem to cut little ice at first, and take a very humble 
 place in the experience as a whole. This is all we claim. 
 The first substances with the boy are the pennies which he 
 spends for sweetmeats or ammunition, the sticks or stones 
 with which he persecutes the dogs and cats of his acquaint- 
 ance. He has not consciously conceived stones and pennies 
 as abstract entities, nor has he at this stage of his experience 
 made any definite distinction between the notion of a thing 
 
 176 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 177 
 
 and that of its qualities. To conceive a thing as a mere 
 bundle of qualities, or, on the other hand, as something 
 apart from its qualities, belongs to a much later stage of 
 reflection. The qualities get their recognition, and the boy 
 says this lemon is sour or this stone is rough and hard. 
 Along with this there is, however, a spontaneous recognition 
 of substance. It is this stone that is hard and rough, and 
 this lemon that is sour. In the very form of the experience 
 a conscious distinction is betrayed, not between a thing and 
 its qualities, but rather between something and its ways of 
 showing or behaving itself, and in the recognition of a some- 
 thing that does show itself, or behave in certain ways, we 
 have the germ of the notion of substance. 
 
 The central experience out of which the notion of cause 
 arises is, as we have shown, that of resistance to our efforts 
 to master things and put them out of our way. Now in 
 this experience of resistance a peculiar feature begins to 
 show itself. The resisting thing, however much we may 
 master it and put it out of our way, will not vanish from 
 our path. It manifests a kind of resistance which we learn 
 to call solidity, and however much we may push it about in 
 space there will be some place that it will monopolize and 
 from which it will exclude and defy us. In other words, 
 we experience the persistence of things as a special feature of 
 their resistance. And inasmuch as our objective world is a 
 space-world in which things define themselves and their 
 qualities, our first experience of substance will take on the 
 forms of the space-world. The forms in which persistence 
 will first manifest itself in our experience will be spatial 
 and may be expressed in the term solidity. The very first 
 notion of substance which the boy gets is no doubt that of 
 things as solid. If they simply resisted his energies they 
 might escape substantial determination. But in the same 
 activity in which they resist they also define themselves in 
 space. The stone persists by virtue of its solidity, that is 
 its holding out iu a certain part of space against all the 
 boy's efforts to expel or suppress it. If he were asked to 
 
 M 
 
178 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 formulate his experience, and was able to give it expression, 
 he would say that a thing is substantial to him only as it 
 shows itself able to hold its own against his efforts to sup- 
 press or squash it. In a world where everything could be 
 squashed, it is not at all likely that the notion of substance 
 would ever arise. The notion of substance is clearly voli- 
 tional in its origin. It arises, as we have seen, as an aspect 
 of the experience of resistance which is at first very con- 
 cretely interpreted by the child. The resistances it meets 
 are the transactions of things with wills and are resented as 
 such. No doubt the persistences of things are conceived in 
 the same way. The refusal of things to be squashed will 
 not at first be abstracted from volitional transactions, but 
 will arouse the same kind of resentment as is provoked by 
 resistance. The first notion of substance will involve then 
 the notion of agency, and we might be tempted to conclude 
 that agency is its essential feature. But this would be hasty. 
 The fact of importance here is that substance and agency are 
 inseparable, inasmuch as a substance that does nothing is 
 inconceivable. A substance is not a substance however by 
 virtue of what it does but by virtue of the fact that it persists 
 in doing. Substantiality and persistibility seem to be inter- 
 changeable terms. The distinction here noted will be found 
 to square with representations already made. The sub- 
 stantial is in the first instance the solid, and the solid is 
 that which refuses to be squashed. The stone may scratch 
 the boy's hand ; it may fall on his foot and crush it even. 
 This is not the experience out of which the notion of 
 substance is born. The boy must bite upon the stone and 
 find that it will not be crushed ; he must stump his toe against 
 it; it must resist his effort to squeeze it with his hand. 
 These are the experiences that give birth to the notion of 
 substance. If, now, we differentiate the experience of per- 
 sistence from that of simple resistance, we will also be able 
 to differentiate the notion of substance from that of change. 
 The notion of change expresses itself in that of a series of 
 vanishing points. There is no point of rest in change. 
 
€HAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 179 
 
 The truth is the very notion of change involves the negation 
 of rest. A change supplies no ground on which anything 
 could support or assert itself. The world of change ab- 
 stractly conceived is the incessant flux of Heracleitus. But 
 the notion of substance supplies the point of rest in a world 
 of change. The notion of substance as opposed to that of 
 change is that of the stable, the persisting, the resting. 
 Things not only resist, but they persist, and just as resistance 
 is the spring of causal experience, so persistence is the spring 
 of the experience of substance. Find me a point of stability 
 and rest in experience, and to that point I will apply the 
 name substance. 
 
 The experience of substance, like that of cause, is 
 mediated by time, but in a peculiar way. Time mediates 
 cause, as we saw, in its flow ; that is, in the aspect of it 
 which is the form of change. We saw, however, in our 
 analysis, that the starting-point of time is a timeless 
 moment, a posit of consciousness to which the flow in every 
 part of it stands related. The present, in other words, is 
 a starting-point for the whole of time. Now, the notion of 
 substance is mediated by time in this point of present 
 departure for all its moments. It is only in the light of 
 this point of departure that time can be said to persist or 
 continue. The time series does not persist, but vanishes. 
 That time persists and that time shall not end, these are 
 true to the point of departure, for to that point there shall 
 always be time ; the world shall always flow on. And 
 this is true, because in the present we achieve a point of 
 rest which transcends the flow, and from the point of view 
 of which alone the flow of time becomes a fact of experi- 
 ence. It is in its timeless point, then, that time mediates 
 the notion of substance. The notion of substance, as 
 determined by time, is that of something which in its par- 
 ticipation in the time-series, its flow through the succession 
 of changes, has in it a point of present departure from which 
 the whole series may be conceived and constructed. This 
 is, in truth, involved in the simplest experiences. When 
 
180 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 the boy selects out the ball with which he has been in the 
 habit of playing from the other balls, he in fact takes that 
 and that alone which unifies a whole series of experiences by 
 supplying them a point of present departure. The other 
 balls are not substances to him in the same real sense. In 
 truth they are only substances in the sense that through 
 their similarity to his own ball they supply to him starting- 
 points for possible experience-series like his own. He does 
 not think of this, of course, but the translation of what he 
 does think and feel into these terms is a short and easy 
 process. 
 
 Let us take this notion of substance then, and follow it 
 through the spontaneous and reflective stages of experience. 
 Originating, in the first instance, as a notion of solidity, as 
 something that succeeds in keeping us out of its place, it 
 takes on an additional qualification when we come to regard 
 it as a point of present departure for the unification 
 of a series of experiences in time. The boy's ball is 
 more to him than a persistent solid ; it is an object which 
 supplies to him a point of present departure for the 
 unification of a whole series of experiences. The notion of 
 substance here indicated is a virtual achievement, as we have 
 seen, of the spontaneous and relatively unreflecting conscious- 
 ness. When real reflection originates, and the notion of 
 substance itself has been arrested in an act of attention and 
 is made the object of reflective activity, the implications of 
 the spontaneous experience begin to unfold, and a critical 
 determination of the notion becomes possible. Now, one of 
 the first efforts of reflection is to distinguish the notion of 
 substance from that of quality. The merit belongs to 
 Locke of having embodied this infancy of reflection in his 
 treatment of the subject. Starting with a distinction of 
 things into substance and qualities, he precedes his doc- 
 trine of substance with an analysis of quality. "Without 
 entangling ourselves in his theory of perception, we may 
 start with his distinction between primary and secondary 
 qualities of things. The primary quality is the respect in 
 
CHAP. VI. SXJBSTANCE. 181 
 
 which the thing resembles our perception of it. Thus, its 
 solidity or figure is a primary quality. A secondary quality, 
 on the other hand, is an effect in consciousness due to some 
 unknown property of the thing. The plexus of primary and 
 secondary attributes constitute the qualitative aspect of the 
 thing. Locke found that when he had summed up the 
 solidity, figure, colour, sonance, etc., of things, he had ex- 
 hausted the resources of perception, and he had to face the 
 doubt whether after all a thing is anything but the sum of 
 its qualities. Locke was guided by a correct instinct when 
 he refused to allow this and protested that a thing is a 
 substance. But what is the substance of things apart from 
 their qualities ? Here was the sticking point with Locke. 
 His conception of qualities was such as to leave no place 
 for substance except as an outside support for qualities. 
 The substance of a thing was, in Locke's view of it, some 
 residuum, after its qualities have been exhausted, and which 
 by rights ought to make itself known. Its failure to do so 
 threw Locke into the most painful perplexity. Now we 
 may well agree with Locke's critics, that the substance he 
 was seeking is a Will o' the Wisp. We will never find 
 substance apart from its qualities, or as a mere external 
 support of these, but whether this failure justifies us in 
 denying the reality of substance is another question. 
 
 The next step in modern reflection was in this negative, 
 sceptical direction. Finding no other ground in experience 
 for the affirmation of substance, Locke contents himself 
 with protesting that it is necessary. Berkeley agrees with 
 Locke that substance has no empirical ground to rest on, 
 and then by calling in question the Lockian theory of 
 perception, seeks to show that the plea of necessity is 
 groundless. Berkeley's scepticism is confined to the notion 
 of material substance, but that of Hume is more sweeping. 
 It is in Hume that modern reflection first gets down to real 
 fundamental criticism. Taking as settled all that Berkeley 
 had accomplished, Hume attacks that which we have seen 
 to be central in the notion of substance, namely, the 
 
182 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 persistence of things. He has no difficulty in showing that 
 our perceptions of things do not persist. In order that 
 the thing may persist through a series of perceptions it 
 must maintain itself apart from our perceptions, and he the 
 same to-day, for example, that it was yesterday. The 
 notion of substance involves, then, the ability of so-called 
 things to maintain their self-identity apart from our per- 
 ceptions. Hume's criticism may be summed up in two 
 propositions. (1) There are no things apart from our per- 
 ceptions ; things and our perceptions of them are one and 
 the same ; there is no persistence in our perceptions, but 
 what seems to be continuity is only rapid succession of 
 resembling parts. Now, if we would avoid the pit into 
 which Kant fell in supposing an abstract world of isolated 
 things in themselves, there is a sense in which we will 
 admit that the first proposition states an important truth. 
 There are no things apart from our perceptions, if by our 
 perceptions we mean experience. If we say that there are 
 no things apart from experience, and remember that experi- 
 ence has two categories, the actual and the possible, we are 
 taking a defensible position. We do not know that Hume 
 meant this. In fact, it is certain that his concept of 
 experience was defective. Be this as it may, the doctrine 
 that there are no things apart from experience does not 
 carry with it the conclusion that things are identical 
 with our perceptions. A perception may be a very simple 
 affair and yet lead to a very complex construction. Our 
 experience of a thing will no doubt begin with some per- 
 ception, but the thing will be the outcome of a more or less 
 complex process of reinstatement. It is not always recog- 
 nized that the experience of a thing is largely a process of 
 reinstatement, and that the perception must furnish a 
 starting-point for this reinstatement or the apprehension of 
 the thing will -not follow. The experience of things arises 
 at such points and nowhere else. We do not mean that 
 such reinstatements may not take place without the rise of 
 the apprehension of a thing, for we remember that percep- 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 183 
 
 tion is also an indispensable condition of the apprehension 
 of things. The experience of a thing is inseparable from a 
 present perception. The point we are arguing is that it is not 
 completely identical with this perception. It involves also 
 a point of departure for the reinstatement of a series of 
 actual or possible experiences. In other words, it involves 
 a point with reference to which the flowing stream of per- 
 ceptions will be one. 
 
 If this be admitted, it will be easy to concede the second 
 of Hume's propositions, namely, that the law of our percep- 
 iions is not persistence, but rapid succession. The apparent 
 inbrokenness of perceptional experience is that of a flowing 
 stream, which may be broken up into moments. The con- 
 tinuity of things is what the perceptions testify to, rather 
 than the substance of the perceptions themselves. When a 
 jresent perception reveals the boy's ball to him, the per- 
 ception is not the thing, but the witness of the thing. It 
 Bveals to him one of these points of departure from which 
 i reinstatement of experiences becomes, in this instance, 
 jctual. The perception is a passing moment, but the thing 
 s persistent and recurrent. Now, we have seen that the 
 lotion of substance is precisely that of such a point of 
 •einstatement. The first experience of substance is that of 
 persistence in the form of solidity. But this experience 
 joon coalesces with that of time at its point of present 
 departure. The notion of substance thus becomes that of 
 a persistent point of present departure for the actual or 
 possible reinstatement of experiences. But this we have 
 seen is also an essential element in the notion of a thing. 
 The bearing of it all is obvious. The notion of a thing 
 necessarily involves that of substance, and Locke is right in 
 protesting that substance is necessary. The critics were 
 right, however, in refusing to accept Locke's notion of 
 substance. But they were wrong in thinking that things 
 could be adequately conceived as mere plexuses or bundles 
 of qualities. The bundle cannot be conceived as a thing in 
 itself, but there must be some persistent point in experience 
 
184 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, past n. 
 
 for the reinstatement of the bundle as a whole. The bundle 
 must be made up every time it is experienced, and we call 
 the bundle a thing when the initiative of this making-up 
 process is found in a present perception. 
 
 Hume was virtually blind to that whole aspect of things 
 which is involved in the notion of substance. Things are 
 simply bundles of qualities, and he thinks the bundle some- 
 how makes itself up. When, on maturer reflection, this 
 seems impossible, he becomes sceptical, and is disposed to 
 regard things as illusions. It was at this point that Kant's 
 criticism began. Kant was keen-sighted just where thi 
 vision of his predecessor failed. There is a sense in whic' 
 it is true that Kant was sthe first modern mind to hav 
 a fresh intuition of substancS^sJIp to his time the notio: 
 of substance had been treated asmij/^g^ggS^Sii ontologici 
 condition of experience and not as one of its element^. 
 Kant repudiated this method, and the fundamental aim o' 
 his whole discussion was to develop such a concept o 
 substance as would bring it into vital relations witl 
 experience as one of its constitutive elements. We d< 
 not mean, at this point, to enter into the details of Kant's 
 doctrine of substance. What we propose is simply to poini 
 out the fact that Kant laid the foundations of an epistemo4 
 logical concept of substance, and, in doing so, made an 
 epoch in modern thinking. We are not concerned here 
 with his apriorism, which has been more often criticized! 
 than understood, but simply with the fact that the vitalsl 
 of Kant's doctrine are to be found at the point of Hume's 
 greatest blindness. Kant saw that the whole business of 
 the concept of substance is to relate the fluent elements of 
 experience to stable points of departure, from which their 
 unification or reinstatement as a whole becomes possible. 
 Without these stable points of departure it is impossible to 
 conceive a flowing experience as realizing any centres of 
 self-relation, and, therefore, as being rational. Kant's whole 
 contention is that these stable points of self-relation are 
 absolutely necessary. For otherwise the whole world of 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 185 
 
 experience would lapse into the Heracleitean flux, and there 
 would he no point of reference from which anything could 
 be either true or false; either substance then or the total 
 and irrevocable lapse of the possibility of any knowledge. 
 
 Now, it is not necessary to be an unqualified believer in 
 Kant's doctrine in order to see that the importance of his 
 work consists quite as much in what is gradually defining 
 itself in his representations as in anything that he actually 
 says. He is too much given to stickling over the formal 
 aspects of his doctrines, and his notion of architectonic is 
 that of a pedant. But what Kant was really defining to 
 our later vision was the close analogy of the notion of 
 substance with that of self. Kant did not see this, at least 
 with any clearness, but in his hands substance begins to 
 assume the lineaments of a subject-activity. This will 
 appear not only from his conception of substance as a 
 necessary point of permanence and self-reference in ex- 
 perience, but from his whole doctrine of the categories and 
 their relation to the judgment-functions in which they are 
 afi&rmed. The categories are modes of conceiving experience- 
 content, and we have seen how the judgmental function 
 connects each with the /-consciousness. But the /-conscious- 
 ness is itself a point of departure for the conscious 
 unification of experience. Is it not significant, then, that 
 the category of substance should be conceived as such a 
 point objectified ? Are we not at liberty to conclude that 
 in the notion of substance the /-function objectifies itself, 
 and thus originates in experience, objectively conceived, 
 those stable points of self-reference which have been 
 found to be so essential ? It is in the thought of Kant 
 that the notion of substance is revolutionized and quickened, 
 ceasing to be that of a mere dead substrate and becoming 
 the analogue of a living subject. 
 
 It would be interesting at this point to follow the post- 
 Kantian development of the notion of substance through the 
 reflection of his successors. "We would then see how in the 
 thought of the idealists the notion of substance became 
 
186 EVOLUTION OP CATEGOBIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 gradually ontologized without losing its vitality until, in the 
 system of Hegel, it becomes identical with that three-jointed 
 activity of thinking which constitutes the inner core of all 
 reality, while in that of the realists the self-assertiveness of 
 substance is emphasized, and its notion becomes that of 
 self-maintaining units of individual being. But to enter 
 into any detail into this chapter of the history would lead 
 us afield from our epistemological inquiry. Kant has 
 brought us to see how the notion of substance supplies a 
 vital element in our experience, and in so doing provides a 
 true basis for epistemological doctrine. Eeverting then to 
 the main line of the discussion, we have seen how the 
 reflection on substance developed in our modern thinking 
 from Locke to Kant. And it is no doubt true that the 
 principal stages in this development have their analogues in 
 individual reflection. The business of reflection in general 
 is to develop an adequate concept or thought of that which 
 hitherto has been only implicitly or crudely apprehended. 
 "We have seen how the boy implicitly treats his ball as a 
 persistent point of departure for the reinstatement of 
 experiences as a whole. The same boy, if he goes on to 
 reflect on the things of his experience, will find himself 
 gradually distinguishing things from his perceptions of them. 
 His first philosophy will be that of crude realism, and he 
 will conceive things as having a life wholly apart from his 
 perceptions. A second stage will be entered upon when it 
 is discovered that this aloofness must be given up, inasmuch 
 as things must adapt themselves to the mode of perception 
 as a condition of being apprehended at all. This reflection 
 is likely to lead the mind from crude realism to the opposite 
 extreme of subjective idealism. For what is more natural, 
 when the dependence of things on our modes of perception 
 has once been discovered, than to jump to the conclusion 
 that things are pure subjective constructions, and that being 
 and perception are one and the same thing. And when 
 this stage has been reached and things have become the 
 creatures of our own imagination, so to speak, the plunge 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 187 
 
 into scepticism as to the reality of our world will be almost 
 inevitable. The subjective world will almost inevitably 
 seem to be an illusion, and our scepticism can be cured 
 only by achieving some point of view which shall be 
 revolutionary. The stage here indicated represents a point 
 of departure for opposite conclusions. The reflecting con- 
 sciousness will either succeed or fail to achieve the revolu- 
 tionary conception. Failure will mean the death of 
 philosophy, or at least sceptical despair. But let us 
 suppose that success follows the effort. We may then ask 
 what is the nature of the new point of view which is to 
 work such momentous consequences ? Kant compared the 
 revolution effected to that which Copernicus brought about 
 in astronomy. He claimed that just as Copernicus had 
 shown that instead of the earth being central in the solar 
 system the sun itself is central, so he was seeking to bring 
 about the corresponding change in the intellectual world by 
 showing that things must give up their absolute pretensions 
 and become satellites of the intelligence in which they are 
 apprehended. 
 
 Now, as a matter of fact, Kant only half effected the 
 revolution he intended, when in truth it ought to have been 
 altogether successful. The change he contemplated involved 
 as its necessary outcome the substitution of the notion of an 
 experience in and through which the world of things is to 
 be realized for that of a world of things to which experience 
 and its activities are simply related. But clearly, if such 
 a revolution is to be successfully carried out, experience 
 itself must be endowed with a realizing function. We 
 cannot blow hot and cold with the same breath, and after 
 taking away the independence of things, leave them a 
 ghostly existence in a sphere that is inaccessible to ex- 
 perience. The notion of the dependence of things must be 
 carried out to its logical conclusion in the doctrine that 
 experience is a realizing activity, and that things can have 
 no other reality than as content of actual or possible 
 experience. Kant's lack of success was due to the fact that 
 
188 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 he was still in bondage to the conception he was seeking to 
 destroy, and was thus restrained from clothing experience 
 with true realizing activities. That these are not two 
 mutually exclusive spheres, a world of things standing in its 
 own right and an experience trying to gain entrance into 
 this world, Kant could never clearly make up his mind. 
 But, thanks largely to his failure, we are beginning to leain 
 the lesson that complete and unconditional surrender to 
 experience is the first condition of the maintenance of the 
 true objectivity of things. It is surely by this time becom- 
 ing obvious that Kant's doctrine of the categories is central 
 to his whole point of view, and that the categories are the 
 only modes by which experience-content can be realized. 
 If this be true, is it not clear that to persist in distinguish- 
 ing between the content of experience and a supposed real, 
 outside of it, is to infallibly reduce experience-content to 
 pure subjectivity and illusion ? We will then have on 
 our hands an experience-world of pure illusion, over against 
 which stands a world of inaccessible realities, and our last 
 state will be worse than our first. 
 
 The revolution will be made effective if we clothe experi- 
 ence with a realizing prerogative and are willing to concede 
 that the content that is achieved through the normal 
 activities of experience is content of reality ; that the world 
 we are gradually realizing in the experience-process as a 
 whole, is the real world. Now, it is this reflection, that the 
 world which is defining itself to us in our experience-pro- 
 cesses is the only real world, and that we have only to 
 complete our notion of experience by connecting the actual 
 with the possible, in order to see how the world of reality 
 may be included in its content; it is this reflection, I say, 
 that cures our scepticism and brings us back again to the 
 status of reality. In its light all the categories commend 
 themselves to us as functions under which the real becomes 
 conceivable and takes its place as part of an actual or 
 possible world. 
 
 The bearing of this reflection on the development of the 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 189 
 
 notion of substance will now become clear. The passage 
 from perception to conception is in a sense a passage from 
 objectivity to subjectivity. The concept is relatively more 
 an affair of the subject-consciousness than is the percept. 
 That being the case, the process of reilection would naturally 
 be conceived as one that is abstracting and leading us away 
 from reality were we not convinced that experience is itself 
 a realizing activity. Let us once obtain a firm grasp of the 
 doctrine that experience is a realizing activity, and it will 
 follow that those concepts which arise as normally out of re- 
 flection as percepts arise out of the spontaneous activity, are 
 also modes in which the real is defining itself. The conviction 
 will grow upon us that the concepts of reflection are necessary 
 in order to mediate the extension of our experience of the real 
 world. Assuming, then, that the sceptical transition has 
 been made and that we are prepared, from a new point of 
 view, to regard things as solid realities, the question that 
 remains will be how these solid realities are to be conceived. 
 We are absolutely cut off from regarding them as inde- 
 pendent of experience. They must be brought inside and 
 treated as determinations of experience-content, and the 
 only question here is what sort of a determination is involved 
 in the notion of substance ? In seeking an answer we will 
 avoid thrashing over old straw by assuming at the outset 
 that the notion of substance has been so far determined that 
 we may take it as the analogue of a subject-activity. A 
 substance will at least be a persistent point of departure 
 for the integration of actual or possible experiences. In 
 the further determination of this conception we will be 
 helped, I think, by the reflection of the post-Kantian realists. 
 The tendency of the realists was, as we have seen, in the 
 direction of emphasizing the self-asserting individuality of 
 substance. The points of departure in our world which we 
 call substances, persist by virtue of their self-assertiveness. 
 The only notion of persistence that is possible in the last 
 analysis, is that of self-assertiveness. The persistent only 
 persists by asserting itself. Every substance, then, must be 
 
190 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 conceived as a point of self-assertiveness. Now, it is easy to 
 see that in this conception, while conscious will has been 
 abstracted from, the essentials of volitional agency yet sur- 
 vive. It is of the essence of will to be self-assertive and to 
 be dualistically self-assertive; to assert itself against, or at 
 least in reaction upon, a not-self. And it is only necessary 
 to carry this reflection out logically in order to see how a 
 pluralistic and individualistic notion of substance will 
 emerge. The Cartesian conception of substance, which is also 
 that of Spinoza, is dominated and determined by the idea 
 of space. Substance is therefore a continuous and relatively 
 lifeless monster not capable of division into real parts. But 
 the Leibnitzian conception, which is also that of post- 
 Kantian realism, is that of self-assertiveness incorporated 
 with points of departure in time. Naturally and necessarily 
 then the notion of substance which thus arises is thoroughly 
 individualistic. It takes the form of a point of activity 
 asserting itself against a not-self, and when we remember 
 that our world is a world of experience, and that the notion 
 of substance is that of a determination of the content of the 
 experience-world, it will be clear how the whole sphere of 
 experience-content will resolve itself into a plurality of these 
 self-asserting individuals. 
 
 The doctrine of substance as developed by the post- 
 Kantian realists is unquestionably defective in some 
 important respects. It leads, in one aspect of it, to an 
 extreme form of metaphysical individualism. But there is a 
 sound reflection at the heart of it which renders possible an 
 important advance in the notion of substance. We have 
 seen how the concept of substance was transformed in the 
 thought of Kant into that of an objective analogue of 
 subject-activity. In the thought of the realists this notion 
 is further determined in an individualistic direction. The 
 notion of substance becomes that of monads which repre- 
 sent points of individual self-assertion in the world of 
 experience-content. The notion of the content of experience 
 as resolvable into a plurality of points of self-asserting 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 191 
 
 individuality is, I think, an essentially valid one, and we 
 have only to abstract from the definite notion of self- 
 assertion, as we have already abstracted from that of vpill- 
 determination, in order to reach the concept of substance 
 which is fundamental to modern physics, the notion of 
 it as in the last analysis reducible to points of persistent 
 energizing. Modern physical reflection has found the atom 
 conceived merely as a unit of soUdity to be untenable because 
 it involves the notion of dimension as an ultimate quality of 
 substance. But we have seen that the concepts of both space 
 and time are dimensionless in their points of departure. In 
 the last analysis the same is true of substance. The vital core 
 of the notion of substance is that of a persistent point of 
 departure for the individualistic determination of content of 
 experience. This point of departure, as we saw in the 
 instances of both space and time, is transcendent of dimen- 
 sion, and represents, implicitly at least, the /-point in present 
 experience. The point of departure for substance is similar 
 to those of space and time. Only the departure here is 
 distinctively one of persistence or self-assertiveness, and 
 is, therefore, volitional in its type. The real unit of substance 
 is the self-assertion of the J-point in experience, and 
 objectively, as a determination of content, it is a dimension- 
 less point or centre of persistent energizing. 
 
 In conclusion, the connection between the categories of 
 cause and substance may be very briefly indicated. We 
 have seen that a cause is a conditioned beginning of a 
 series of changes. It is that term in experience the sup- 
 position of which makes the beginning of any given series of 
 changes conceivable. A cause is, therefore, a principle of 
 change or modification. We find clear water changing its 
 colour and becoming black, and this change becomes con- 
 ceivable when we are told that ink has been dropped into it. 
 But the notion of cause, although it has that of self-activity 
 coiled up in it as a presupposition, is that of conditioned 
 agency. It is itself a change among changes, and in itself 
 supplies no point of rest in the shifting scene. It is at this 
 
192 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 point that the notion of cause finds support in that of 
 substance. It would be impossible to conceive an experi- 
 ence made up merely of changes. There must be at least 
 one persistent point of departure ; the point where the ex- 
 perience of the / asserts itself. But the category of substance 
 arises, as we have seen, as a determination of experience- 
 content. In short, an indispensable condition of the rise of 
 a world of content in experience is that this content should 
 be related to a plurality of persistent points of self-assertion 
 analogous to the /-point in experience. Why shonld it be 
 necessary for experience to conceive its content under the 
 qualification of substance as well as cause ? The answer is 
 not far to seek. The world of changes demands cause as the 
 principle of the beginning of its series of events in time. But 
 cause itself is simply a more fundamental phenomenon, and 
 is itself subject to the law of change. But we have seen 
 that experience of mere changes is inconceivable. Changes 
 as a whole demand persistence. There must be an aspect of 
 the world which itself transcends change. The world-content 
 must, therefore, be related to a plurality of persistent points 
 of departure for change series, and these persistent points, 
 which are to serve as the unifying principles of change- 
 series, are supplied in the concept of substance. 
 
 The category of substance supplies to experience those 
 points of rest which are needed in order to make its pro- 
 cesses conceivable. Or, to state the matter in different 
 phrase, the category of substance represents the mode by 
 which experience realizes those points of rest or permanence 
 in its world which are necessary in order to render the 
 series of changes possible. Without cause no beginning of 
 change would be conceivable, but without substance the very 
 notion of change would be absurd. Cause is the principle in 
 accordance with which changes are organized into a mutually 
 dependent system : substance is the principle which supplies 
 in its notion of permanence the condition which our world 
 demands in order that the system of changes may be 
 possible. Neither the notion of substance nor that of cause 
 
CHAP. VI. SUBSTANCE. 193 
 
 as we have developed them, supplies experience with an 
 absolute principle. The notion of cause is that of condi- 
 tional agency, and has its presupposition of agency that is 
 self-acting, while the notion of substance as we have 
 developed it here, is that of persistent points of departure in 
 the sphere of experience-content, which, however, have a 
 common relation to the central /-function of experience as 
 a whole. The points of rest are relative, therefore, and 
 have their common presupposition in the central activity of 
 self -consciousness. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 COMMUNITY OE INTERACTION. 
 
 While the notion of community has always found a place 
 in the common consciousness, it failed of distinctive philo- 
 sophical recognition till Kant gave it a position in his list 
 of dynamic categories. Long before this date, however, 
 physics had recognized the principle of community in its 
 notion of action and reaction, which it had reduced to 
 definite quantitative statement. After its recognition by 
 Kant the notion of community or reciprocality was taken 
 up by the Herbartians and made central in their individual- 
 istic metaphysics. This was inevitable, since, in a world of 
 co-existiag individuals, the transactions among its units 
 become of prime importance. It was not an accident then 
 the emphasis which the realists put upon the reciprocal 
 activities of things, but the result of insight, the metaphysical 
 outcome of which is seen in the Lotzean doctrine of inter- 
 action. At this point, however, we are not so much concerned 
 with the metaphysical interpretation of community as with 
 the genetic question of its rise in consciousness. There can 
 be little doubt that in its first rise community is a category 
 of the social consciousness. The notion, even in its crudest 
 form, will, no doubt, be absent from the first experiences of 
 the child, which will, so far as consciously realized at all, 
 be either objective or reflexively subjective. The early 
 experiences will take the forms of either suffering or doing 
 
 194 
 
CHAP. VII. COMMUNITY OR INTERACTION. 195 
 
 something, and while, of course, to our reflection, there is 
 community of action yet in the consciousness of the child 
 one of the terms will be mostly in the background. Only 
 when it reaches a point where it is able to hold the terms 
 of a relation in consciousness will the sense of community 
 or reciprocality have its origin. 
 
 The experience out of which this sense will emerge, will 
 not, we think, be any form of simple reaction such as would 
 be possible to an isolated individual. For anything that 
 we can see to the contrary, the germs at least of the 
 experience of cause and substance could arise in a conscious- 
 ness that was simply related to things. The community of 
 personal wills does not seem to be essential to either of 
 these notions. But the notion of community has its rise in 
 a social situation. There must be at least two wills 
 seeking to appropriate the same thing before the sense of 
 community will be possible. Hence the importance of the 
 quarrels of childhood in the development of the social 
 sense. ^ Let us suppose then that a and 6 find themselves 
 striving to appropriate the same toy, say a rubber ball. 
 Their efforts bring them together in a collision of will — 
 efforts which gives each the sense of other agencies com- 
 peting with and modifying his own. The experience is not 
 that of simple resistance, but a peculiar type of resistance, 
 that which arises out of the efforts of a plurality of agents 
 to secure the same thing. 
 
 This is the complex situation out of which the sense of 
 community will first arise. Now it is not in the line of the 
 main purpose here to follow up this experience on its social 
 side, or to attempt to show how, out of the collision of 
 agencies, social co-operation gradually emerges. What we 
 are seeking is the origin of a category with whose general 
 epistemological significance we are chiefly concerned. And 
 
 ' Those who wish to follow out the genetic process in detail will find it 
 ably developed in Professor Baldwin's two volumes, entitled Mental 
 Development in the Child and the JRace, to which I am greatly indebted 
 in this representation. 
 
196 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 the points of vital interest here are — (1) that the experience 
 out of which the sense of community arises is distinctively 
 volitional in its character; (2) that the peculiar feature 
 of this experience is the presentation of the simplest form 
 of social situation, the sense of colliding agencies in the 
 quest of volitional satisfaction. 
 
 The germinal notion or sense of community thus arises 
 out of a social situation, and from one point of view 
 continues central in the development of the social con- 
 sciousness. But from another point of view ; the broad 
 epistemological in which our interest centres here, the notion 
 of community becomes abstracted from the concrete social 
 situation and takes on a more general character. We have 
 seen how the notions of cause and substance are gradually 
 distinguished from that of will-activity while preserving the 
 quality of agency, and here a corresponding differentiation 
 takes place. Abstracted from the notion of colliding wills, 
 the concept of community still perseveres as that of 
 activities colliding at some point of common tendency. The 
 mere fact of collision of forces is not adequate to the notion 
 of community. That notion could only originate out of a 
 social situation in which the collision is the resultant of a 
 common will-aim, if we may be allowed the term, and the 
 abstraction from will leaves the oneness of aim intact, and 
 is of the essence of the notion. The social philosophers 
 suppose that they have found the principle of this com- 
 monalty of aim which conditions the social situation, in the 
 sense or consciousness of kind,^ and whether their principle 
 be adequate or not, it is at least a recognition of the fact 
 that community does involve, in its simplest form, some 
 point of common tendency or reference. In a universe of 
 completely isolated parts, where there are no common 
 objective aims or tendencies, collision would be impossible, 
 or, if it did arise, would be pure accident and without 
 significance. 
 
 Let us consider, then, what additional features the notion 
 
 1 See Professor Giddiugs' work, The Principles of Sociology, No. 1, 1896. 
 
CHAP. VII. COMMUNITY OR INTERACTION. 197 
 
 of community introduces into our world of cause and 
 substance. The world of cause is a system in which all 
 changes must be referred to terms that will render their 
 beginning conceivable. It is a world of conditioned begin- 
 nings. The world of substance is, as we have seen, a system 
 in which persistent points of departure are necessary in 
 order that the series or succession of changes may be con- 
 ceivable. The notion of abstract change is absurd, and 
 a world of abstract change is intrinsically impossible. The 
 very existence of a change series is conditioned by its 
 reference to a persistent point of departure which we call 
 substance. We have seen also that the world of cause and 
 substance is a world of plurality, whose unifying principle 
 or point of common reference is to to be sought in the 
 central activity of experience. Now, we have only to 
 identify the conditioned starting-points of our world of 
 cause with the persistent points of departure of our world of 
 substance, in order to reach the conception of a world of 
 co-existing parts or units whose causal activity will take the 
 form of an inter-activity of these parts, out of which will 
 arise the series of modifications or changes which we call 
 phenomena or effects. The notion of causal agency in such 
 a world is thus modified into that of inter-activity, and the 
 notion of substance becomes that of the persistent points of 
 agency between or among which this inter-activity subsists. 
 In short, when we conceive the world under the notion 
 of community, its causal and substantial apects resolve 
 themselves into a quasi-social situation broadly conceived, in 
 which the great fact becomes the action and reaction of 
 the parts of which the situation is constituted. 
 
 Now, it seems to me that reflection renders the passage to 
 this category, in our experience of the world, necessary. 
 It is conceivable that a world of bare causality would not 
 involve the notion of co-existence, although it is open to 
 doubt the possibility of such a world. But when our world 
 has been qualified by the notion of substance as well as by that 
 of cause, then the relation of co-existence becomes necessary. 
 
198 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 A world that contains a plurality of substances must be 
 conceived as a world of co-existing parts. This will be its 
 fundamental aspect, while that of succession will become 
 secondary. In short, the series of modifications or changes, 
 which we call effects, will take their places as phenomena of 
 the inter-activity of a plurality of co-existing agents. We 
 are thus driven to the notion of community, or interaction 
 as Lotze calls it, as a necessary step in the evolution of our 
 experience of the world. And this transition, as we have 
 seen, carries with it a very profound modification of our 
 whole conception of the world. Whereas up to this point 
 co-existence has played a minor part in our world-drama, 
 it now becomes the protagonist, and sequence assumes a 
 subordinate role. The flow of changes or events from being 
 the principal feature of our world is forced to take its 
 place as a phenomenal aspect of a profounder world of 
 CO- existent and interacting parts. 
 
 The notion of community or interaction as a world-cate- 
 gory involves, therefore, a transformation in our mode of 
 conceiving the world. It is now no longer its historical 
 aspect of succession in time that is uppermost, but rather its 
 static aspect of co-existence in the light of which it presents 
 itself as a community of permanent and mutually influencing 
 individualities. The notion of community ; or interaction, as 
 we shall now call it, is not simple, however, but very com- 
 plex, and thus far we have treated only its most obvious 
 features. The subtlest discussion of interaction to be found 
 is, of course, that of Lotze, and to him our indebtedness will 
 be obvious. The notion of interaction involves not simply 
 the idea of bare collision and rebound, but something much 
 more profound, namely, the internal modifiability of the 
 colliding agents. Take for example the simplest possible 
 case, that of one billiard ball striking against another. We 
 say that the impact of one ball against the other communi- 
 cates motion, so that the stricken ball passes from a state of 
 rest to one of motion, while the striking ball has experienced 
 a change of an opposite character. But nothing is explained 
 
CHAP. vn. COMMUNITY OR INTERACTION. 199 
 
 by this account, for if nothing happens but the communicat- 
 ing of motion, why does it not pass through the stricken ball 
 and leave its state unchanged ? The phenomenon cannot be 
 of this simple character, but there must be a point some- 
 where at which the recipient of the impulse gathers itself 
 up, so to speak, into a knot and becomes the subject of the 
 impulse which is thus translated into movement. We have 
 thus movement, impact, impulse, which is translated again 
 into activity, and outwardly the billiard ball changing from 
 a state of rest to one of motion ; or in the case of the 
 impelling ball, from a state of motion to one of rest. Now 
 the case of the billiard balls is one of the simplest examples 
 of interaction. "We have seen that the problem it supplies 
 is not simple but very complex. The situation is not 
 thinkable at all if we do not suppose the internal modifi- 
 ability of the agents, and this means that these agents are 
 able somehow to receive internally and to re-act upon, 
 impulses which are communicated externally in the form of 
 motion or activity. The simplest form of interaction 
 involves the supposition, therefore, of internal subject-points 
 or their analogues from which impulsions are received and 
 responded to. 
 
 In all this field we have to acknowledge Lotze as our 
 master. It was his reflection that brought out clearly the 
 impossibility of conceiving interaction as an external activity 
 among elements which remain internally indifferent. If 
 a and 6 interact it is impossible to conceive a and I as not 
 being internally moved. The possibility of any communal 
 relations is conditioned then on the internal modifiability of 
 the elements involved. This is Lotze's way of saying that 
 being cannot be conceived as internally simple. Everything 
 is internally complex and behaves itself as though it had in 
 it a point of subjective reference. Otherwise no behaviour 
 at all could be ascribed to it. Lotze helped us to see that 
 the principle of change is, in the last analysis, internal to 
 being rather than external. For after all, the notion of 
 interaction resolves itself into that of substance. The 
 
200 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 actual collisions, in so far as they are not accidental, are to 
 be regarded as phenomena of internal character. Let us 
 suppose that a and I come into relations with each other 
 and that certain changes or modifications ensue. The 
 phenomenon and its results can be understood only in the 
 light of the nature of a and h. The whole transaction must 
 be read, in the last analysis, in terms of internal character. 
 This reflection led Lotze to a concept of substance analogous 
 to that of Leibnitz, whose monads are internally determined 
 substances, only Lotze proceeds more empirically than 
 Leibnitz. The earlier thinker reaches his concept of sub- 
 stance deductively, and employs it to determine the notion 
 of relation. But Lotze finds relation in experience and 
 follows it inductively back to substance. The notion of 
 substance is not predetermined then, in Lotze's reflection, 
 but post-determined, and in the light of its manifestations. 
 There is behaviour, and there is behaviour of a certain kind. 
 What must the subjects of this behaviour be in order that 
 they may behave at all, and what must they be in order that 
 they may behave as they do ? We have seen that any be- 
 haviour at all involves internal character of which it is the 
 expression, and so the further question comes up as to 
 the implications that may be involved in the way that 
 things actually behave. 
 
 It was by reflection on the actual behaviour of things 
 that Lotze reached the conviction that substance must be 
 regarded not as internally simple, and, therefore, unmodifi- 
 able, but on the contrary, as internally complex and subject 
 to internal modification. And this reflection led to the 
 further conclusion that in view of the actual behaviour of 
 things they are only unreal abstractions, if we do not go the 
 length of conceiving them to be internally the analogues of 
 our own selves : Lotze uses the term " soul-like beings," by 
 which he evidently means beings of the self-type which 
 have a point of internal activity analogous to the I-function 
 of experience. Now, a conception analogous to this has 
 already been developed in our doctrine of substance, which 
 
CHAP. VII. COMMUNITY OR INTERACTION. 201 
 
 we found it necessary to represent as a persistent point of 
 departure for the unification or reinstatement of experiences, 
 and as a point of rest in relation to change-series. The very 
 notion of substance is one that clothes it with subject 
 functions. The substantial points in our world are points 
 of departure for a possible experience, and a substance 
 cannot be thought in any other way than as bearing to 
 the series of changes or modifications which it grounds a 
 relation in all essential respects the same as that borne by a 
 subject to the content of its experience. In view of this it 
 is doubtful whether Lotze succeeds in exhausting the mean- 
 ing, for substance, of the category of community or interaction. 
 We have seen that the situation presented by interaction is 
 essentially social. The a's and the &'s mutually affect each 
 other through their internal characters, and not in a purely 
 external way. And it is inevitable that the self-analogy 
 should be employed in conceiving their nature. But the 
 question that will not down at this point is this; Are we not 
 obliged to go one step further and ascribe to our a's and b's 
 something analogous to sociality ? If things are capable 
 of transactions that are essentially social can we avoid 
 ascribing to their internal character something that is 
 analogous to the social ? The whole of Lotze's very subtle 
 discussion of what he calls transeant activity bears, on this 
 problem, and tends to demonstrate the unthinkability of 
 purely external agency. The purport of Lotze's reasoning 
 stated in a nutshell is that inasmuch as a and b cannot be 
 conceived as affecting each other externally, they must be 
 conceived as affecting each other internally. The notion of 
 the passage of influence from a to 6 is absurd, for how can 
 it be conceived as crossing the gulf that separates a and b 1 
 
 Lotze goes so far in this reflection as to conceive all 
 agency as, in the last analysis, internal; but he still, in a sense, 
 leaves the a's and the 6's external to one another. It is 
 evident, however, that our position will only be a half-way 
 house, unless we in some way achieve the conception of the a's 
 and the b's as internal to one another. And it is in this con- 
 
202 EVOLUTION OF OATEGORIKS OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 nection that the doctrine of the self that is being developed 
 by the social psychologists comes to the aid of our efforts to 
 present the inter-relations of things. The demonstration is 
 gradually forthcoming that the self is not an isolated unit of 
 conscious activity, but is essentially social. The conscious 
 self grasps its fellow along with itself, so that the relation 
 between it and its other is internal rather than external. 
 The consciousness of a includes & as an internal term in 
 relation to which the behaviour of a is to be determined. The 
 social self is the a, into which the 6's have entered as 
 modifying factors, and all changes, social adjustments, etc., 
 are internally effected. The behaviour of the social self is 
 that of a subject whose activity is a function of polar 
 opposites, the self and the other. From this point of view it 
 becomes clear that the social organism is an expression of 
 the internal nature of the units of which it is composed. 
 In the reflection of social psychology we have the self 
 transformed into a social unit by making it inclusive of its 
 fellow with which it interacts, and this leads to the concep- 
 tion of the social aspect of the world as a manifestation of 
 internal nature. In view of this, what we contend for here 
 is the completion of the Lotzean doctrine of things in the 
 light of this social intuition. When we have conceded that 
 the agency of a and 6 in their inter-relations, must in 
 the last analysis be internally rather than externally con- 
 ceived we have taken a step that in order to be valid 
 logically involves another. The mutual agency cannot be 
 mutual unless the agents are conceived as internal ; that is, 
 the 6's, in order to affect the a's, must become internal 
 to them, so that a somehow includes &, and by a reversal 
 of relation is included in 6. In short, the situation must 
 be socially apprehended, and the a's and the &'s must be 
 conceived as social units in mutual intercourse. 
 
 But this process must be accompanied by the necessary 
 abstraction in order that we may avoid illusion. In order 
 that things may be social units in the full sense of the term, 
 they must of course be conscious, but the notion of conscious- 
 
CHAP. vn. COMMUNITY OR INTERACTION. 203 
 
 ness has been abstracted from that of things. A thing is a 
 substance manifesting qualities, and we saw that when we 
 attempt to think a thing we are forced to conceive it after 
 the analogies of self. And we have further seen that the 
 effort to think the inter-relations of things leads to the 
 conception of them as analogous to social selves. These 
 conclusions stand on their own ground, and are independent 
 of the difficulty involved in the attempt to realize how such 
 agency would be possible without consciousness. The points 
 of vital interest are (1) that the notion 'of things has been 
 reached by the abstraction of conscious agents and agencies 
 from the consciousness in which they become known, and by 
 their objective employment as determinations of the content of 
 experience ; (2) that the notions of things and their relations 
 preserve the essential characteristics of the selves and their 
 relations that are known in consciousness. There is no other 
 mode conceivable by which definition and determination 
 could be introduced into the world of content. The whole 
 defining and determining process is a normal and necessary 
 activity of experience, and the world that arises is both a 
 necessary world and the only world conceivable. The 
 system of things, as they are determined in this experience- 
 process, is necessary, therefore, and as we have seen, part of 
 that necessary outcome is the construction of the world of 
 things under the social category. Full as the conception 
 may be of difficulties, and I am convinced that it involves 
 fewer intrinsic difficulties than any other, it supplies a 
 notion which renders the behaviour of things possible, 
 and is itself a strictly necessary outcome of the experience- 
 process. 
 
 The difficulty of conceiving things as non-conscious social 
 units arises mainly from the attempt to stop with the notion 
 of a thing as that of a final term in reality. But such an 
 attempt is purely arbitrary. The very nature of the 
 experience-process, out of which the definition of things 
 arises, is sufficient to show the impossibility of regarding 
 things as absolute terms in reality. That process, as we 
 
204 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 have seen, involved from the outset a subject-activity which 
 gradually defines itself as an I or self-function, and in 
 relation to which the world of content arises. The process 
 of experience, objectively and cognatively conceived, is one 
 in which this content is defined under successive categories 
 until it reaches the dignity of a system of inter-related 
 things. But we have seen that the thing is, in the last 
 analysis, a persistent point of departure for the reinstatement, 
 or more primarily, the integration of a changing content, and 
 it is obvious that a thing has a presupposition in the central 
 self which conditions the possibility of the whole experi- 
 ence in which alone it is real. A thing arises as the defined 
 content of experience, and it is the resultant of a point of 
 defining activity which is conceived in the consciousness 
 that is central to the experience. In the last analysis then 
 a thing is resolvable into a posit of some consciousness. The 
 central or /-consciousness defines its world of content by 
 positing in it points of departure for possible experiences 
 like its own. Around these are constituted the things of 
 experience which are individually conceived to be agents 
 analogous to our own wills, while, as members of aggregates 
 and in their inter-relations, they are conceived after the 
 analogy of social units in a world-community. From this 
 point of view the difficulties which seem to beset the notion 
 of things as being essential analogous of the selves of the 
 social organism, change their aspect and take the form of 
 problems as to the final relation of things to the experience 
 in which they arise. For the present these problems must 
 give place to an attempt to conceive the world of the 
 categories as a whole. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 The group of categories reviewed in the preceding chapters 
 may be called dynamic, in the first place, because, as we 
 have seen, they are rooted in volitional experience, and 
 secondly, because they are forms of the activity of things. 
 Even the notion of substance, which involves the point of 
 rest, is essentially dynamic in its character. For this reason 
 the consciousness, in which these categories arise may be called 
 the dynamic consciousness and the world which they define 
 may be called the dynamic world. Now, it is true of the 
 categories that while they represent modes of defining and 
 realizing the objective world of content, they are also modes 
 of consciousness. Every category, when it has become 
 reflective, is a mode of conceiving, and expresses a charac- 
 teristic way in which consciousness thinks its world. The 
 group of dynamic categories will then, taken as a whole, 
 embody the modes by which consciousness realizes its world 
 as a sphere of activity. The world of activity is, however, 
 the world also of space and time. The two worlds become 
 incorporated in one experience, and are in fact inseparable. 
 It is only after things have defined themselves in space and 
 time that they are qualified for the world of the dynamic 
 categories. The order of experience is : first, space and time, 
 and then upon these, or rather from a deeper spring, arises 
 the world of cause, substance, and interaction. But all 
 
 205 
 
206 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 these categories are to be conceived as defining principles of 
 the one world. It is only in a relative, subordinate sense 
 that a variety of worlds can be apprehended. Everything, 
 in the last analysis, gets itself related to the central activity 
 of experience and takes its place in the one world of 
 content. 
 
 Like space and time, the dynamic categories are conceived 
 as actual in the sphere of actual experience. I mean by this 
 that the spontaneous experience of cause, substance, and 
 interaction does not take on the forms of universality. Our 
 first judgments of cause or substance are not judgments of 
 necessity, but judgments of - actuality, and the boy is not 
 concerned with the question whether any change series can 
 originate without a cause, but rather with the actual cause 
 of the change-series which is troubling him at the present 
 moment. The category is an actual term in the sphere of 
 actuality, and this determines the form of our judgment 
 regarding it. Only when reflection enables us to break the 
 bondage of present experiences, and we begin to conceive the 
 outlines of a possible experience, do these categories assert 
 themselves as universal and necessary. The universality 
 and necessity of cause comes to birth in the reflective act by 
 which we seek to complete the world of experience. The 
 question. Can any event or change originate without a 
 cause ? is an interrogation of the possible, not of the actual. 
 We assume that events do not originate without causes, but 
 the question of possibility implies that we are endeavouring 
 to conceive some world, in which events could arise inde- 
 pendently of causal antecedents, and the negative answer to 
 such a question is our recognition of the impossibility of the 
 conception. We do not conceive a causeless situation and 
 then judge it to be impossible, but we find the conception 
 impossible and our judgment is our acceptance of the 
 impossibility of the situation. A causeless world is an 
 inconceivable world, and this being the case, cause becomes 
 an indispensable feature of any world that is conceivable 
 and, therefore, universal and necessary. Obviously the same 
 
CHAP. VIII. THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 207 
 
 conclusions follow with respect to the whole group of 
 dynamic categories. 
 
 There is, however, an important qualification that must 
 be admitted here in order that the above conclusions may 
 be completely valid. In saying that space and time are 
 universal and necessary forms of a possible experience, we 
 mean a presentative experience. In order that a world may 
 present itself it must take on the garments of space and 
 time. No vision of a world of continuous magnitude is 
 possible under any other forms than that of space, and no 
 experience can present a change series in any other form 
 than that of time. We do not mean that experience may 
 not have aspects that are not spatial or temporal. In like 
 manner the universality and necessity of cause are limited 
 to the change-aspects of the world. A cause, according to 
 our definition, is a conditioned agent, and itself a term 
 in a change-series. That which is permanent demands no 
 cause. We say, then, that so far as experience presents a 
 world of change, cause is a nniversal and necessary feature 
 of it, and the conception of a causeless world is impossible. 
 The same is true in a somewhat different sense of the 
 category of substance. We have seen that a substance is 
 at least a point of relative stability which serves as a 
 nucleus for the consolidation of experience-content into 
 things. The question whether any world that presented 
 the aspect of change would be possible without these points 
 of relative stability, is soon answered in the negative, for 
 change is an abstraction unless there be that with reference 
 to which it changes, and an experience-content that is all 
 drift and no persistence cannot be conceived. A world of 
 possible change must also have its points of relative stability. 
 But just as in the case of causality, so here, the universality 
 and necessity of substance does not mean that experience 
 may not have other aspects besides substance or that sub- 
 stance itself is not a relative conception, which has as its 
 presupposition a transcendent aspect of reality. Every 
 category is universal and necessary on its own plane of 
 
208 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES 0¥ KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 being, but there its prerogative ends. It is not open to 
 space to say that there shall be no room for causality, or 
 for cause to set itself up in opposition to substance. 
 
 The conception of the dynamic categories as universal and 
 necessary aspects of a world of possible experience supplies 
 a point of view from which the problem which agitated the 
 mind of Kant may be treated. The final aim of Kant in 
 his deduction of the categories as necessary forms of experi- 
 ence was to find in them those basal concepts which rest at 
 the foundation of the proceedure of science. Kant's en- 
 deavour here is related to the scepticism of Hume, which 
 practically swept away the foundations of science and left 
 the world of experience adrift without any points of stability, 
 in a sea of change. Kant finds in the categories the organiz- 
 ing principles of a coherent world, and his aim is to show 
 how in these principles the possibility of science is grounded. 
 Having in the categories of quantity and quality already 
 grounded the scientific procedure of the mathematical 
 sciences by showing how the fundamental conceptions of 
 discrete and continuous magnitude have their roots in time 
 and space, he is now concerned with the corresponding roots 
 of the physical sciences. Now, it is not my purpose here 
 to attempt a reproduction of Kant's doctrine, but rather 
 with his investigation in mind to seek to show how 
 physical science does find its ground in the concepts of the 
 dynamic consciousness. Science starts with the world of 
 phenomenon or change, and, therefore, with the world of 
 time. This world presents to us the aspect of mutation 
 and instability. When we begin to reflect, the world 
 seems to vanish before a universal dissolvent and we seem 
 to be in a scene of shifting sands which nowhere supplies 
 any points of rest or stability. From another point of 
 view our world seems to be a plurality of isolated events or 
 happenings, no one of which is self-explanatory or able to 
 give any account of itself. This aspect of unmitigated 
 change and plurality will present study at first in a purely 
 objective manner and the first motive of reflection will be 
 
CHAP. vm. THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 209 
 
 cosmological or physical, although at some stage man him- 
 self will come into competition with nature as an object 
 of reflection. The first question that will arise in the 
 reflection of the race, as well as in that of the child, will he 
 one of causation. And the first qualification of the un- 
 mitigated change and plurality of the world will arise in 
 the notion that changes are not without anchorage, but 
 that somewhere in our world there is something that will 
 shed light on their origin, and thus clothe them with a 
 degree of rationality. 
 
 Now, this naive impulse, as it may be called, in the 
 consciousness of the undeveloped man or boy, becomes in the 
 reflection of the awakened adult a concept of the dependence 
 of phenomena generally on conditioning antecedents the 
 supposition of which will be adequate to account for their 
 origin. The boy's question, Who broke my bat ? or Why did 
 the bubble burst ? implies a search for conditioning terms in 
 a world of experience which, when found, will enable him 
 to understand the rise of events which as yet stand un- 
 explained. In the reflection of the awakened adult this 
 impulse becomes generalized in the notion of cause as a 
 necessary and universal feature of a world in which changes 
 have a place, and we are interested specially at this point in 
 the form which this notion takes in the adult's scientific 
 construction or reconstruction of his world. Evidently it 
 takes the form of a universal and necessary connection of 
 all the terms in a series of changes with antecedents which 
 are conceived to be the conditioned agents of their origin. 
 And by conditioned agents we mean terms in the world of 
 change that are needed to mediate any given change or 
 series of changes that may be conceived. We have found 
 it necessary to distinguish between the notion of cause, 
 which is that of conditional agency, and that of absolute or 
 unconditional agency, which the notion of cause presupposes. 
 The notion of cause then introduces into a sphere of un- 
 mitigated change and plurality, the principle of dependence, 
 and this principle, in its universal form, grounds the con- 
 
 o 
 
210 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, past ii. 
 
 ception of the change- world as a system in which every 
 term has a conditioned antecedent in some other term or 
 series of terms by connecting it with which, we are able to 
 answer our questions, how or why. The whole of science 
 originates in the questions we put to our world, and the 
 first question is that of the connection of things. Not 
 satisfied to leave the phenomena of our world in the state 
 of unmitigated instability and plurality in which they seem 
 to arise, the first question we ask is for some relation that 
 will connect one term with another in the order of depend- 
 ence. The development of the notion which this question 
 implies leads to the conception of the world as a flowing 
 stream of phenomena that are related, not simply in the 
 succession of time itself, for the time-succession only 
 supplies the form of the problem here, but in an order 
 of conditional dependence. The primal instinct of science 
 is to seek in some antecedent phenomenon the term that will 
 supply an answer to the question, how or why, raised in 
 connection with any section of the phenomenal stream. 
 Now, we have seen in our discussion of cause that the 
 antecedent is never a phenomenon on the same plane with the 
 term or series which is to be explained. It belongs to a 
 relatively deeper series, so that the question of cause is that 
 of relative grounding. The trend in causal explanation is 
 to refer phenomena not simply to antecedents, but rather to 
 deeper antecedents, so that in the development of causal 
 explanation we are not only realizing a system of depend- 
 ence among phenomena, but we are also developing a pro- 
 founder conception of our world. We are gradually reach- 
 ing a concept in which the explanatory terms are becoming 
 more and more profound ; in which not any antecedent, but 
 only the first antecedent, will supply an adequate answer to 
 our question. The first principle of scientific explanation 
 will be one, therefore, which formulates the requirement 
 that phenomena shall he eix^lained hy connecting them as 
 consequents with other phenomena which shall not simply be 
 antecedents in time, but which shall be conceived to belong to a 
 
CHAP. VIII. THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 211 
 
 deeper conditioning series. In the light of this formula it 
 becomes evident that causal explanation leads to no view of 
 the world that can be called final, even from the standpoint 
 of physical science. There is no transcendence of the pheno- 
 menal -sphere, but simply a grounding of change-series in 
 deeper change-series. There is no grounding of change as such 
 in any permanent principle, but the mere search for causes 
 represents a form of that restlessness of spirit which ever 
 seeks a stable ground of repose in its world, but never finds it. 
 It is clear that the scientific demand cannot rest in 
 causality, but must go on to the more stable concept of 
 substance. Now there is a sense in which the very 
 suggestion of substance is enough to disturb the equanimity 
 of science. The term has come down from the middle 
 ages with connotations which not infrequently lead to its 
 unceremonious ejection from good society. But the notion 
 of substance with which the present discussion is concerned 
 is the one that we have taken pains to unfold in a preceding 
 chapter. There is a sense in which science finds the 
 concept of substance to be necessary in its efforts to explain 
 its world. Science, as we have seen, resolves itself into 
 •questions which the reflecting adult puts to his world. The 
 instability and plurality of this world is somewhat mitigated 
 by the causal answer which leads to a gradual innering 
 of the phenomenal series. But no explanation is satisfactory 
 that merely connects one unstable condition with another. 
 The bond of causality is, after all, a rope of sand that gives 
 no security, and we are forced to seek a more satisfying 
 principle. This we find in the notion of substance. We 
 have seen that the concept of substance is that of a per- 
 sistent point of departure for the organization of a plurality 
 of experiences into one, and the identity of substance 
 with the inner principle of things has also been pointed 
 out. The demand of science for a more stable grounding 
 of its world finds its apparent answer in the notion of 
 substance, and though the keen scientific intellect cannot 
 Test satisfied with the unanalyzed things of ordinary experi- 
 
212 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 ence, yet its analytic leads not to the suppression but rather 
 to the transformation of the ordinary notion of substance. 
 We have seen how the concept of substance is resolvable in 
 the last analysis into that of a persistent point of organizing 
 activity for the content of experience. Science reaches a 
 result that is analogous in its resolution of things into the 
 elements of which they are constituted, and the conception 
 of these elements as points of departure for the genesis of 
 material phenomena. These points may be taken with a 
 qualiiication of dimension, as in the atoms of the chemist, 
 or they may be stripped of this qualification and become 
 the dimensionless force centres of the physicist. Whatever 
 form they may be reduced to, they will preserve their 
 essential character as points of permanence which are 
 conceived to be the necessary grounds of the world of 
 change. The whole system of things, qualities and rela- 
 tions, will be conceived as rising out of these permanent 
 elements which will be represented as persisting through all 
 the changes of things. It has become apparent, of course, 
 that this assumption of permanence cannot be absolute, and 
 that the postulated atom has its presupposition in some 
 central positing activity, and it is also true that the inner 
 simplicity of the atoms which science apparently assumes 
 cannot be maintained. But this does not affect the fact 
 that science seeks and finds in the notion of substance those 
 points of relative unphenomenal stability which it conceivea 
 to be necessary to a more complete grounding of its world 
 than is possible under the category of cause. The principle 
 which the concept of substance supplies to science may b& 
 stated as follows : All changes must be conceived in connection 
 with persistent points of activity, of which they are the 
 phenomena, and in connection with which they become parts 
 of a stable system. That the principle of substance is 
 profounder than that of cause is evident. It grounds a 
 much more adequate conception of the world and leads in 
 the end, as we shall see, to a transformation of the notioa 
 of cause itself. 
 
CHAP. VIII. THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 213 
 
 That the categories of substance and cause fail to ground 
 an adequate conception of the world will become clear if we 
 recall the apparent assumption that is involved in the 
 notion of substance ; that is, the internal simplicity of the 
 stable points of being. This assumption is not, it is true, 
 in reality essential to the notion of substance, and a true 
 doctrine of substance will survive its dismissal. But it is 
 true, nevertheless, that science needs at this point some 
 category other than that of substance in order to attain a 
 concept of the inner nature and relation of things that shall 
 be adequate. This category is found in the notion of 
 community on interaction. This notion involves, as we 
 have seen, the internal modifiability of the permanent 
 elements of being, the a's and &'s which we conceived as 
 persisting in a changing experience. The internal modifi- 
 ability of the elements involves, as already pointed out, a 
 modification of the ordinary conception of the relation of 
 changes to the permanent elements. The changes become 
 phenomena of the internal character of these elements, and 
 thus are more profoundly and more rationally grounded. 
 The notion of interaction implies then a doctrine of the 
 internal character of things, as well as a modification of 
 the causal conception of their relations. Assuming the prin- 
 ciples already deduced from the notions of cause and 
 substance, we have reached a conception of the world in 
 which the fundamental agencies which underlie its changes 
 and give rise to its phenomena are a plurality of persistent 
 points of causal energy. But as yet these agencies have 
 been conceived as related to one another only in the 
 sequence of time, while it is evident that the notion of 
 permanence makes necessary also the relation of co-exist- 
 ence. And when we apply the notion of co-existence 
 to that of a plurality of persistent causal energies, it is 
 clear that the causal activity must be conceived as a re- 
 ciprocal interchange. The relations between the a's and 
 the h's can no longer be represented as protensive 
 causation, but rather as reciprocal influence. There is 
 
214 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 a real transaction between and among the elements of an 
 aggregate, the result of which is that all parties have both 
 given and suffered some modification. Now, the problem at 
 this point is that of the grounding of a principle that shall 
 express the nature of our world from this new point of 
 view. In order to reach a solution we must bear in mind 
 that in the principle of substance we have that of the self- 
 assertion or self-maintenance of the elements of being. 
 There could be no world of content if things did not main- 
 tain themselves against all attempts to suppress them. 
 Assuming this and applying it to a reciprocal aggregate of 
 elements, we reach inevitably the conception of a system 
 of interacting and mutually modifiable parts in which each 
 element must be conceived as giving as much as it receives. 
 This equality of action and suffering is involved in the very 
 notion of self-maintenance in such a system. Any other 
 supposition would make it necessary to conceive the possible 
 suppression or cessation of elements of being, than which 
 the notion of the collapse of the whole universe would not 
 be more absurd or irrational. The principle we are seeking 
 will be one, therefore, of reciprocal and equal agency, and 
 may be stated as follows : All changes must, in the last 
 analysis, he regarded as 'phenomena of the activity of co- 
 existent and interacting elements whose influence upon one 
 another is to be conceived as reciprocal and equal. 
 
 The three dynamic categories thus lead to the enunciation 
 of three principles which are manifestly fundamental to a 
 scientific conception of the world. They also represent in 
 their order a gradual deepening of the scientific conscious- 
 ness. The first efforts of science are to a great degree naive 
 and superficial. The whole of science will be conceived as 
 a search for causes, and the most obvious dependencies will 
 be accepted as adequate explanations. But a point will be 
 reached some time in scientific reflection when it will be 
 felt necessary to penetrate beneath the change-aspect of the 
 world and lay hold of permanent elements as supplying the 
 only adequate grounds of explanation. The result will be a 
 
CHAP. VIII. THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 215 
 
 profound dip of reflection into the depths and the formu- 
 lation of a doctrine of atoms or elemental forces. The 
 passage from this conception to that of some kind of com- 
 munity will not be a long one, since the simple fact of 
 the co-existence of a plurality of active elements involves a 
 species of reciprocity. But it required the profound reflection 
 of Lotze to penetrate the situation and show that community 
 is only possible on the supposition of the internal modifia- 
 bility of the elements, and that it is the recognition of this 
 internal modifiability of the elements of being that renders 
 possible an important advance in the scientific conception of 
 the world. For, in the light of it, the phenomenal aspect of 
 the world becomes internally rooted and acquires a new 
 significance in its relation to the nature of things. 
 
 We have achieved in this category of interaction or 
 community a point of view from which it will be possible, 
 I think, to define what is called the mechanical conception of 
 the world in the essentials of its nature and limits. We do 
 not have in mind here the popular conception which con- 
 trasts mechanism with design, for this distinction arises at a 
 considerable distance down the stream, but rather one that 
 when achieved will enable us to realize the principle which 
 determines a concept as mechanical. Now, I think, we will 
 achieve this principle if we abstract the notion of community 
 or interaction from that of the internal modifiability of 
 the elements, and conceive the law of interaction as an 
 expression of the mutual activity of elements which are 
 assumed to remain internally unchanged. Mechanism, as I 
 understand it, rests on the assumption of unalterable ele- 
 ments. Assuming a co-existent aggregate of these impene- 
 trable parts in reciprocal action and reaction upon one 
 another, the mechanical conception will be adequately 
 grounded. Mechanism, in other words, is the notion of 
 a system in which all changes are determined by the external 
 agency of impenetrable and, therefore, internally unmodified 
 parts. The notion of mechanism is not then opposed, in the 
 first instance, to that of design or purpose, but rather as 
 
216 EVOLUTION OF CATEGOBIES OF KNOWLEDGE, past ii. 
 
 external agency to that of internal agency. The starting- 
 point of a mechanical conception is made when we abstract 
 from the notion of internal agency and the internal modifia- 
 bility of the elements of being, on which it is founded, and 
 regard agency as the external activity of impenetrable 
 elements. Such being the case, the questions (1) of the 
 legitimacy and (2) of the limit of the mechanical conception 
 arise. The first question in reality involves the considera- 
 tion whether there is an aspect of the world that truly falls 
 under the category of mechanism, and the correct answer 
 will be found, I think, if we correlate our results here with 
 conclusions reached in the discussions of space and time. 
 We have seen how these categories ground the mathematical 
 sciences in the principles of discrete and continuous magnitude. 
 Now, whether we conceive our terms under the principles 
 of discreteness or continuity, we conceive them externally 
 and under the form of plurality. It is obvious also that 
 mathematics rests on the assumption of the internal un- 
 modifiability of the elements with which it deals. Its 
 operations would be thrown into chaos, if its points, lines, 
 and angles were conceived to be liable to internal change. 
 
 All phenomena fall under the mathematical categories 
 .as truly as they fall under the dynamic, and our concrete 
 mode of conceiving them will therefore be mathematico- 
 dynamic. The abstraction involved in the mechanical view 
 has its roots in the mathematical categories. The world is 
 first apprehended in space and time, and the first reflective 
 principles for its scientific reconstruction are the mathe- 
 matical, founded on space and time. The mathematical 
 principles are forms of external reflection under which the 
 elements of the world are conceived in mutually external 
 or externalizing relations. This mode of conception involves, 
 moreover, the employment of terms which shall be fixed in 
 their definition, and therefore internally unmodifiable. Let 
 us suppose, then, that the principles of mathematical 
 reflection are applied to the sphere of the dynamic relations, 
 the effect will be that all its terms will be represented in 
 
CHAP. VIII. THE DYNAMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 217 
 
 accordance with the exigencies of mathematical conceptions. 
 The sphere of causation will be represented as one of 
 external conditioning agencies and that of substance as a 
 plurality of persistent points of being external to one another 
 and fixed in their internal nature, while the world of inter- 
 action will be conceived as a plurality of co-existent elements 
 fixed in their internal character and giving rise to the 
 phenomena of change by means of their external actions and 
 reactions. When we ask whether the mechanical method of 
 treating the world is legitimate, and, if so, how far it may be 
 carried, we are simply seeking to know whether we can 
 abstract from the internal complexity of the elements of the 
 world and still develop a representation that shall be true 
 and how far this mode of procedure may be carried without 
 involving a departure from the truth. Now, it seems 
 evident that we may abstract from the internal complexity 
 of our elements and assume that they are internally simple 
 so long as our aim is not to ground the phenomena of the 
 world in some nature, but simply to develop formulae 
 for the statement of their relations. If our question is how 
 do things act and what is the law of their action, not how 
 are the actions and things grounded, or how is their possi- 
 bility to be conceived, we may work out our answer under 
 mechanical categories. Mechanical science is, therefore, 
 description reduced to the exactness of mathematical formula- 
 tion. It is explanation only so far forth as its development 
 of the formula that determines its place in the phenomenal 
 system may be called such. But that it is explanation in 
 this sense cannot be gainsaid, and that such explanation is 
 of immense value for practical purposes is as little open to 
 denial. The mechanical method of conceiving and explain- 
 ing the world may then be regarded as legitimate, and in 
 fact the only legitimate method, in all that sphere where 
 abstraction may be made from the connection of phenomena 
 with the internal nature of things. 
 
 There is a point, however, where the mechanical method 
 of conceiving the world ceases to be adequate; a point to 
 
218 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, past ii. 
 
 which reflection is gradually led under the guidance of the 
 dynamic categories. We have seen how the dynamic 
 categories arise in obedience to a demand for the grounding 
 of the changes in the world of experience and how succes- 
 sively the notions of cause, substance, and interaction are 
 developed in the effort to satisfy this demand. There is a 
 sense in which the dynamic consciousness begins at the very 
 outset to satisfy this demand. There is a sense in which 
 the dynamic consciousness begins at the very outset to 
 transcend mechanism. The demand for grounding with 
 which it originates has in it the germ of this transcendence. 
 But it becomes overt in the notion of community or inter- 
 action. We have seen how the very possibility of interaction 
 implies the internal modifiability of the elements of being. 
 In order that there may be any transactions at all among 
 the elements these must be conceived as internally complex 
 and modifiable. In the notion of interaction then we reach 
 a point of view where the question changes its form and 
 becomes one not of descriptive formulas, but essentially one 
 of ground-principle. The notion of interaction is found to 
 be iiiipossible unless we conceive phenomena as arising out 
 of the internal nature of things. We thus reach a point at 
 the same time of the grounding and the transcendence, of 
 mechanism. It becomes clear on the one hand that the 
 situation which renders the mechanical explanation possible 
 is conceivable only if we regard it as a phenomenon of the 
 internal nature of things, and on the other hand it is equally 
 evident that in recognizing the necessary connection of 
 phenomena with the internal nature of things we are 
 achieving an ultra-mechanical conception. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 
 
 The categories treated in the preceding chapters have been 
 named volitional because it is in volitional experience that 
 their origin has heen found. We have seen how these cate- 
 gories are necessary in order to mediate a growing conception 
 of the world, and also how they lead up to a point where the 
 mechanical conception which they are necessary to complete 
 is transcended, and the germ of an ultra-mechanical point 
 of view achieved. Up to this point we have been dealing 
 largely with volitional experience and its out-working in 
 the sphere of cognition. Even the forms of space and time, 
 though purely presentational, arise, as we saw, out of 
 volitional soil, while the categories of cause, substance, and 
 community spring directly out of volitional roots. If man 
 were not a creature of wiU it is not conceivable that he should 
 develop such notions as that of cause, substance, or inter- 
 action. There is, however, in our experience a very 
 obtrusive element of which up to this moment very little 
 notice has been taken. Man is not only a creature of will 
 but he is also a creature of feeling. From the outset his 
 experience not only meets his volitional exigencies but it 
 has the quality of being pleasant or painful to him, and this 
 quality, which at this point we may call pleasure-pain, is 
 important from two points of view ; (1) as supplying the 
 primary motives of the will-activity, and (2) as an important 
 
 219 
 
220 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 factor in the development of the cognitive consciousness. 
 The second topic is the one of special interest to us, and we 
 may ask what epistemological value does the feeling-element 
 in experience possess, and to what categories, if any, does it 
 lead ? If we revert to the doctrine of consciousness de- 
 veloped in the first chapters of this section we will recall a 
 distinction which was found necessary, between the subject 
 and the object consciousness, or at least between these aspects 
 of one consciousness. And in that connection the fact was 
 brought out that the element of feeling in consciousness arises 
 as a pleasure-pain quality of the original stimulations and 
 gives rise to a form of secondary reaction or impulsion to 
 obtain more of these stimulations that are pleasurable and 
 to avoid those that are painful. 
 
 Before proceeding further, however, it will be necessary 
 to make another distinction of importance. If we regard 
 feeling as arising in the first instance as a reaction of con- 
 sciousness upon some stimulation, it will be found that 
 these reactions will fall into two different classes. They 
 will either be pleasant or painful in their first effects, or 
 the pleasure-pain quality will arise out of their connection 
 with some want or desire which the stimulation tends to 
 gratify or thwart. In the former case the pleasure-pain 
 reaction will be immediate, and will take the form of a 
 qualification of objective content. The pleasure-pain re- 
 actions that are mediated by some want or desire which 
 they tend to gratify or thwart, enter directly into the 
 motives of action and may be called volitional. Of these 
 we shall have something to say in another connection. 
 Confining our attention here to the other class, which we 
 may call aesthetic, these arise, as we have seen, as imme- 
 diate responses to the stimulations of the objective con- 
 sciousness, and from the first take the form of qualifications 
 of content. Locke recognized a difference between those 
 qualifications, which he called secondary, and others which 
 seemed to be more primary, and he finds the source of this 
 difference in the alleged fact of their greater subjectivity. 
 
CHAP. IX. THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 221 
 
 The secondary qualities, he says, are effects in us of the 
 unknown properties of things to which they bear no 
 resemblance, whereas the primary resemble the properties 
 which they represent. Now, without entangling ourselves 
 in Locke's theory of perception, let us ask whether the 
 distinction as he conceives it is valid. We have seen that 
 the so-called primary qualities seem more fundamental to 
 things for the reason ; namely, that as conceived, they involve 
 the notion of substance. If we abstract from the notion of 
 substance, then it would seem that the secondary qualities 
 are as fundamental as the primary, to the qualitative aspect 
 of things. Every quality has its subjective aspect, inasmuch 
 as it arises as a function of the subject-consciousness. But 
 it is also truly objective since it arises as a definition or 
 qualification of objective content. The colour of the leaf is 
 a definition of the leaf-content of consciousness and the 
 taste and odour of the orange are definitions of the orange- 
 content of consciousness. The distinction of the secondary 
 quality consists, not in its being less objective than the 
 primary— all qualities are equally objective — but rather in 
 the fact that its subjective aspect is more dominant and 
 obtrusive. And the ground of this is to be found 
 mainly, not in the mode of its origin, hut in the kind of 
 consciousness from which it takes its rise. A so-called 
 secondary quality is an element of definition which rises 
 out of a feeling-reaction. It is characterized, as we saw, by 
 its immediacy, and being a product of feeling, has a greater 
 degree of warmth than the primary quality. The secondary 
 qualities of things are in fact what constitutes them 
 emotional objects. 
 
 Our chief concern in this chapter, however, is not with 
 any special forms of representation which may rise out of 
 feehng, but rather with the nature of what we may call the 
 aesthetic consciousness considered as an organ through which 
 experience defines its world, and with the special categories 
 which arise in this field. The aesthetic consciousness 
 embodies itself in a psychosis that is dominantly feeling. 
 
222 EVOLUTION OF CATEaORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 We have found reason, however, for denying the possibility 
 of any psychosis that is mere abstract feeling. No feeling 
 is possible without an element of representation. This 
 may, of course, be a mere germ. But that anything should 
 be felt without being, in some sense, apprehended, is incon- 
 ceivable. The psychosis that we call aesthetic will therefore 
 involve a knowledge-element, but the form of this will be 
 determined by the character of the psychosis of which it 
 is a function. A consciousness that is dominantly feeling 
 will not define its object in the same way precisely as 
 one that is dominantly intellectual. The mode of deter- 
 mination will be a function of feeling and will be what is 
 called aesthetic, rather than intellectual or logical. We 
 may ask then what the distinctive characteristic of an 
 aesthetic mode of representation is, and we will find our 
 answer in the kind of consciousness of which it is the 
 function. Now, what we call a mathematical mode of 
 representation is one that is determined by the fundamental 
 principles of mathematical conception. These principles are 
 those of discrete and continuous magnitude. Mathematically 
 considered then, any content must fall under the quantita- 
 tive concepts of geometry or number, and whatever the 
 actual content may be, these are the categories under which 
 it will be defined. Again, what may be called a dynamic 
 mode of determination as distinguished from the mathe- 
 matical, will be one in which the content will be defined 
 under the concepts of cause, substance, or community. In 
 other words, we will be seeking the explanation of a 
 phenomenal content by relating it to a more or less 
 permanent ground. But in aesthetic determination the 
 principle is not, in the first instance, one of quantitative 
 determination or one of grounding. The characteristic of 
 feeling is that it develops a form of presentation and 
 conception that is congruous to its own nature. And this 
 leads to a closer consideration of the inner nature of the 
 psychosis that we call feeling. In a former chapter we 
 have taken the position that no state of consciousness is 
 
CHAP. IX. THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 223 
 
 internally simple but involves, in germ at least, the distinc- 
 tion between a subject-consciousness and some form of 
 content. The distinguishing characteristic of feeling, as 
 such, is that the subject term in this duality is more 
 emphasized than it is in any other form of consciousness. 
 In the very form of feeling there is a subject-determination, 
 and feeling has, from the outset, something of the centrality 
 as well as the warmth of a self-experience. In view of 
 this fact we will be led to expect that the mode of presenta- 
 tion and conception which feeling develops will be a kind 
 of self-assertion upon the sphere of content. And the 
 question as to the nature of this self-assertion will lead us 
 back to the dominating characteristic of feeling as pleasure- 
 pain, or in general the type of consciousness which expresses 
 itself in the forms of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. 
 
 How then will this activity of self-satisfaction or dissatis- 
 faction express itself in the form of objective representation? 
 Manifestly in some mode of defining content that will render 
 it congruous to subjective feeling. The feeling-self is so 
 constituted that some forms of representation will pain it 
 while others will give it satisfaction. This original germ 
 of aesthetic nature we cannot avoid assuming. And this 
 feeling-self shapes itself into a demand or requirement 
 that the content of experience shall take a form congruous 
 to its own nature ; that is, a form upon which it will 
 react with pleasure rather than with pain. As a matter of 
 fact, however, the aesthetic consciousness finds the world of 
 space and time, as well as that of cause and substance, 
 already here. It has to face a world that is given and in 
 relation to which it is liable therefore to be pained as well 
 as pleased. There is no guarantee that the world of space 
 and time and cause will embody itself invariably in forms 
 that shall be aesthetically pleasing. Just as there are forces 
 in the actual world that tend to thwart the will so there are 
 forms in the mechanical that will be painful to feeling. 
 The aesthetic demand can find complete satisfaction only as 
 an ideal. The truth is, we enter the sphere of the ideal 
 
224 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 whenever we touch that of aesthetic experience. In the 
 very nature of the case whenever the self begins to 
 distinguish itself from its object an ideal demand begins 
 to shape itself. The self is no longer able to take its world 
 as it finds it, but it helps us to erect a standard of a norma- 
 tive world. The world that shall be is one that shall 
 respond ideally to aesthetic demands. 
 
 What, then, are the fundamental categories of the aesthetic 
 consciousness ? It is evident that if by category we mean 
 relation between feeling and its content, the fundamental 
 aesthetic category will be that of eongruity. Any content 
 will be pleasing or displeasing to feeling accordingly as it is 
 congruous or incongruous to the nature of the self that shapes 
 the aesthetic demand. This is an important psychological 
 consideration. But the category we are seeking here, as 
 elsewhere, is one that functions as a defining principle 
 of content. The question we have to answer is not what 
 relation shall the representation as a whole bear to the 
 aesthetic consciousness, but rather what relation of parts 
 shall prevail in the representation ? On what principle 
 shall it be constituted ? The answer is that the relation of 
 the parts must be one of harmony, and when we ask what 
 constitutes harmony, we answer such a blending of parts or 
 elements as will constitute a whole that is pleasing. To the 
 question what, in the last analysis, is the pleasing element 
 in a representation, we answer, its unity, the harmonious 
 blending of its parts into one. To the question, however, 
 why this unity pleases, no answer can be given except the 
 fact itself. In the aesthetic sphere we seem to strike in 
 the notion of unity, a category as irreducible as those of 
 space and time. Of course we may say that unity is the 
 congruous and may seem to have accomplished something, 
 but the congruous is the pleasing, and we are back at 
 our starting-point. Again, if we attempt to resolve unity 
 into harmony we find that harmony has no significance 
 apart from the notion of the blending of parts or elements, 
 a notion which is manifestly a torso until the concept of 
 
CHAP. IX. THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 225 
 
 some whole is supplied. That the unity of the parts of the 
 representation contains by implication, if not explicitly, the 
 notion of some whole, seems to be the fundamental objective 
 category of the aesthetic consciousness. Now, the applica- 
 tion of this category may be traced through the presenta- 
 tive and conceptual stages. Thus, in the sphere of colours 
 or sounds the principle of blending will be a kind of rhythm, 
 and the same is true perhaps of tastes and smells. In 
 music the notes must form a melody, and a plurality of 
 melodies must form a rhythm in order that they be 
 aesthetically pleasing. The lack of unity is called discord 
 here, and everywhere it will be found that unity expresses 
 the principle of the representation, a departure from which 
 wiU cause pain to the aesthetic consciousness. 
 
 When the aesthetic consciousness becomes reflective its 
 category of unity becomes explicit, and it finds it no longer 
 possible to rest satisfied with any conception short of that of 
 a self-centred system. This is no doubt due to the fact that 
 the aesthetic consciousness is essentially a self-consciousness. 
 The aesthetic demand is a species of self-assertion and it is 
 very likely true that the category of unity which we have 
 found it so impossible to explain or resolve into anything 
 simpler than itself, is only the objective counterpart of a 
 unity that is first arrived at in self-consciousness. This is a 
 point of vital interest to the present discussion, the principle 
 aim of which is not the development of a doctrine of 
 aesthetics, but rather the discovery of the principles of 
 world-construction which have their roots in the aesthetic 
 consciousness. We found that in the last analysis the 
 demand for unity in our world is the voice of the aesthetic 
 consciousness, and that it finds its tap-root in the intuition 
 of self-consciousness. Feeling, as we have seen, is from the 
 outset a kind of self-consciousness, and this no doubt 
 determines the nature of the aesthetic demand from the 
 beginning to the end of chapter. The category of unity 
 contains the demand that the world of content shall realize 
 the unity of a whole, and the whole that consciousness 
 
 p 
 
226 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE. pa»t ii. 
 
 has in view is the whole of self. The aesthetic require- 
 ment is that the world shall not be conceived, in the last 
 analysis, as a plurality of unrelated parts, or as a series of 
 conditional antecedents and consequents merely, or in fact as 
 a community of interrelated elements, but rather as a unitary 
 system whose elements blend together into a self-centred 
 and self-regulated whole. The principle of aesthetic unity 
 as a category of world-explanation may be stated, therefore, 
 as follows : — Every part of the world must he conceived as 
 belonging to a system that constitutes a self-centred and self- 
 regulated whole. 
 
 The aesthetic consciousness thus supplies a principle of 
 world-unification which is rooted in the consciousness of 
 self. This principle, while its roots are subjective, is, how- 
 ever, as completely objective as the categories of cause and 
 substance. It arises as a mode of defining objective content 
 and leads, in the first instance to the development of that 
 aspect of things which embodies itself in their so-called 
 secondary qualities, while in the last analysis it takes the 
 form of a principle or category of world unification. 
 
 The analysis of the two aspects of consciousness, volitional 
 and aesthetic, and the extraction from that of their cognitive 
 elements bring us to a point where we will be able, I think, 
 to discover the root or roots of that all-important principle 
 of reflection called sufficient reason. Leibnitz caught the 
 essential function of this principle when he conceived it to 
 be the true motive of world-construction as distinguished 
 from a principle of formal consistency, like contradiction. 
 But Leibnitz has little light to throw on the question of its 
 origin. The successors of Leibnitz practically allowed his 
 intuition to lapse and it was only in Kant that the ground 
 of the principle was reinstated in the doctrine of the cate- 
 gories. Kant, however, put a too narrow interpretation 
 on the principle of rationality, as we may call it, limiting it 
 too much on one side to mechanical conceptions, and on the 
 other failing to connect it with the aesthetic springs in 
 consciousness, and it was left for Kant's successors, notably 
 
CHAP. IX. THE AESTHETIC CATEGOEIES. 227 
 
 Schopenhauer, to attempt a larger and more adequate 
 construction. Now, the intuition of Schopenhauer, profound 
 and admirable, as far as it goes, is defective, I think, in 
 putting a too mechanico-volitional construction on the prin- 
 ciple of rationality, and in practically differentiating it from 
 the aesthetic consciousness.^ The effect of this differentiation 
 has been the practical denial by post-Schenpenhaurian philo- 
 sophy of the epistemological value of the aesthetic conscious- 
 ness and the tendency, so strongly marked in Lotze to 
 divorce judgments of worth or value from judgments of 
 truth or rational certitude. The way to escape the necessity 
 for this divorce and its unfortunate consequences in various 
 fields of inquiry is, I think, to recognize the cognitive nature 
 of the aesthetic consciousness, and to seek the incorporation 
 of its intuition into the texture of our principle of world 
 construction. 
 
 The point of this incorporation will be found, I think, in 
 the nature of the aesthetic category as one of unification. 
 Unity, when conceived, is an ideal, and, therefore, a pre- 
 script for the completion of an ideal world. The notion of 
 unity as arrived at in the aesthetic consciousness, is not in 
 any sense a transcript from the world of actuality, but is 
 rather a formula for the completion of any conceivable world. 
 It is, therefore, not only a category of a possible world, 
 but supplies to consciousness the ground-motive for the 
 carrying out of its conceptions into the sphere of possibility. 
 It is this category that answers our question why the 
 actual is not sufficient, and why there should be this 
 activity in consciousness forever delineating the features of 
 a world of possible experience. We have seen that concep- 
 tion in its very inner nature is a delineation of the possible, 
 and we find the inner motive of the possible, that impulse 
 which comes in it the intuition of the possible generally and 
 the need that we should enter into it, in this unitary 
 
 ^ For an admirable statement of Schopenhauer's doctrine, see Princeton 
 Contributions to Philosophy, vol. i.. No. 1, "The History of the Principle 
 of Sufficient Reason," etc., by Professor Wilbur Urban, Ph.D., pp. 41-54. 
 
228 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 category of the aesthetic consciousness. For the aesthetic 
 principle is at the same time a demand and an intuition ; 
 that is, it is not only an ideal requirement or prescript, but 
 it is an intuition under which our world completes itself. 
 It is, in fact, a demand accompanied with insight. This 
 being the case it represents the point in our conceptions 
 where the worth and truth motives, coalesce and become one. 
 It is impossible to say that the unification of our world adds 
 more to its worth than it does to its truth, or the converse. 
 In order that there may be any science the world must be 
 conceived as completing itself in an ideal unity, and this 
 ideal completeness is also the spring of its worth or value. 
 Let us then proceed to the task of exhibiting this fact in 
 detail. We have seen that the mathematical categories of 
 the quantitative consciousness arise directly out of the con- 
 ceptions of space and time. But space and time as conceived 
 are the universal and necessary lineaments of a possible 
 world, and this possible world is possible only by virtue of 
 its being conceived as ideally unified and complete. The linea- 
 ment then owes its characters of universality and necessity to 
 the fact that it is a feature of an ideal and possible world, and 
 the mathematical concepts which arise out of the categories 
 of such a world owe the peculiar quality of their certitude 
 which we call apodictic, to the fact that they are concepts 
 of the ideal and possible rather than mere transcripts of the 
 actual. From this point of view the concepts of mathematics 
 become a system of prescripts for the completion of a world of 
 possible experience. If now we apply the term mechanical 
 to the mathematical mode of representing the world in 
 general, we may say in the light of the above considerations 
 that the principle of the mathematical conception of the world 
 is Aestho-mechanical, and may be stated as follows. Mathe- 
 matical reflection contemplates a world of possible ea^erience, 
 the parts or elements of which are organized and unified under 
 the concepts of discrete and continuous quantity. 
 
 The presence of the aesthetic motive in the dynamic 
 categories might be anticipated from the close relation which 
 
CHAP. IX. THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 229 
 
 is known to subsist between feeling and that volitional 
 experience in which these categories are rooted ; volitional 
 activity apart from feeling in some form being inconceivable. 
 Now we have seen how the volitional or dynamic conscious- 
 ness embodies itself in a group of epistemological categories 
 which mediate an important stage in the apprehension of the 
 world. And we have also found that feeling itself or 
 the aesthetic consciousness is cognitive and supplies an 
 important epistemological category. How then shall the 
 relations of these epistemological elements be regarded ? Are 
 they to be conceived as remaining apart or as coalescing 
 into one principle ? The former supposition is the one that 
 has had the widest vogue in our modern thinking, but the 
 latter seems to me to strike nearer the truth. The aesthetic 
 category is both a prescript and an intuition of unity. It 
 involves the conception of a system in which all the parts 
 or elements are related to a self- centre which reduces them 
 to unity. This conception is that of a plurality of parts 
 reduced to a unitary whole. Now there is a sense in which 
 the dynamic categories are prescripts of unity. Cause 
 requires the organization of phenomena into a system of con- 
 ditional dependence ; substance the organization of changes 
 around persistent centres or points of departure ; while 
 community achieves the same result through the mutual 
 relations of its parts. Not only are these categories 
 prescripts of unity, but, as we have seen, they prescribe the 
 principles of an ideal and possible, not an actual world. 
 Furthermore, we have seen that all these categories have a 
 presupposition in some central subject-activity of which they 
 are conceived to be the posits. In short the categories of 
 cause, substance, and interaction are principles of unification 
 whose possibility rests on the presupposition of a larger 
 unifying principle which is related to experience as a whole, 
 and which enters into and constitutes the minor unities. 
 That this major or conditioning unity is the function of that 
 very aesthetic category whose fate we are here trying to deter- 
 mine, is obvious. The aesthetic category supplies then an 
 
230 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 impulse and an intuition of unity which enter consti- 
 tutively into the dynamic principles and impart to them 
 a constitutional aesthetic quality. Abstracted from the 
 aesthetic intuition would our world of dynamic relations be 
 possible ? Would the categories of cause, substance, and 
 community express any truth ? Are they not true to the 
 same extent that they are of value, in so far as they serve as 
 organizing principles of content in our world of experience ? 
 Abstractly conceived, the categories of cause, substance, and 
 community may be regarded as principles for the organiza- 
 tion of the parts or elements of the world under the rela- 
 tions of dependence and mutual influence. But, taken in 
 connection with the central category of aesthetic intuition, 
 they become modes of defining the connections among the 
 parts of a system which is conceived to be one and self- 
 centred. The principle thus becomes Aestho-dynamic, and 
 may be defined as the conception of a unitary and self-centred 
 system in which the parts or elements are connected with one 
 another in relations of dependence and mutual influence. 
 
 Now the principle of suf&cient reason, as we have here 
 developed it, has been conceived in no abstract form, but 
 concretely as a principle of world-construction. It is 
 achieved simply by the incorporation of the aesthetic cate- 
 gory of unification with the epistemological principles 
 derived from the presentational and volitional elements in 
 experience. There are three strata of conscious activity 
 which we have been able to distinguish, the mathematical, 
 the dynamic, and the aesthetic. Each of these in turn, as 
 we have shown, is a source of epistemological categories and 
 principles which mediate the evolution of our intuition of 
 the world. The category of the aesthetic consciousness is 
 that of unity which has its roots in self-consciousness, and 
 the aim of the above discussion is to exhibit the fact that 
 the principle of sufficient reason is the net product of the 
 whole experience-activity, and that it arises out of the incor- 
 poration of the mathematical and dynamic categories with 
 the aesthetic principle of unity. The principle of sufficient 
 
CHAP. IX. THE AESTHETIC CATEGORIES. 231 
 
 reason simply embodies the form of a rational explanation 
 or conception of the world that shall be considered adequate 
 in any given sphere. It is, in short, the principle of ration- 
 ality itself. Eeason is not to be identified with volition or 
 feeling. But it is the consummate flower of our whole 
 nature, and incorporates in its constitution structural ele- 
 ments and motives from volitional as well as aesthetic 
 experience. That sharp distinction which is often drawn 
 between abstract intellect and feeling to the detriment of 
 both, has no place here, for the highest rationality is the best 
 and most complete, and is, therefore, the most worthy and 
 the most true. 
 
 The aim of the above discussion has been concrete rather 
 than abstract. The categories have been delineated as 
 modes of a growing experience, and the principle of sufficient 
 reason has been conceived in its actual function as an 
 organizer of the world of experience under the highest 
 category of unity. The relation of the logical form of the 
 principle to what may be called its experience-form, is not 
 difficult to apprehend. The problem of logic is not 
 primarily the organization of the content of experience by 
 means of defining categories and principles. But logic finds 
 its problem by making abstraction of these concepts of 
 experience, which are thus related to its content, and its 
 procedure consists in developing the principles which will 
 reduce these to internal unity and coherence. If then the 
 abstraction has yielded adequate conceptions, it is possible 
 for the logician to develop out of the internal relations of 
 these concepts a general view that will correspond in its 
 general outlines with the concrete order of experience, and a 
 method of formal procedure that will agree in general with 
 the concrete processes of science and philosophy. It is not, 
 however, the primary aim of logic to correlate with any 
 sphere of content, but rather, having abstracted from all 
 content as such, to develop abstractly a general doctrine of 
 rational principles and methods. In this view the principle 
 of sufficient reason, as logic develops it, will simply be the 
 
232 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 most adequate statement possible of the inter-dependence of 
 the conceptional elements of an abstract world. Now, the 
 interest of logic requires of course that the principle or law 
 of sufficient reason shall be logically conceived, and it would 
 only confuse logic to introduce into it categories which have 
 their sole use as organizers of experience-content. For 
 logic, then, the principle of sutficient reason must be 
 abstractly conceived in its strictness as the law of ground 
 in the interconnection of conceptions. But this is not 
 inconsistent with the conception of sufficient reason as an 
 extra-logical principle of experience. In fact the rationality 
 of the world is not to be completely absorbed into logical 
 categories, and there will always remain a sphere outside of 
 logic, the concrete world of actual and possible experience, 
 the rationality of which will have to be determined in view 
 of categories and motives that are largely extra-logical. 
 That is only to say, however, what is obvious, that reason 
 itself cannot be confined strictly within the logical preserves 
 but has other and more concrete forms of expression. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 Up to this point our attention has been almost exclusively 
 absorbed in the development of a representation of the 
 objective world. It cannot be imagined for an instant, 
 however, that the representation of the object unfolds inde- 
 pendently of the subject, or that the subject-world has not 
 also been defining itself in the clear light of consciousness. 
 We have seen that the subject-consciousness distinguishes 
 itself, rudimentally at least, from the object in the most 
 elementary psychoses, and although it is true, as we have 
 maintained, that the apprehension of the object precedes 
 that of the subject, it is yet inevitable that every step for- 
 ward which consciousness takes in the definition of its world 
 of objective content will be accompanied by a deepening of 
 the subject's apprehension of itself. Now with regard to 
 the development of the subject-consciousness, three principal 
 topics arise for consideration, (1) the form of activity in 
 which self-consciousness is specially involved ; (2) the 
 stages in the evolution of self-consciousness, and (3) the 
 categories under which self-knowledge is realized. 
 
 The discussion of the first topic need not be long drawn 
 out. In the first stages of our representation of the objec- 
 tive world we had occasion to take up and define the 
 activity of judgment in its relation to conception and 
 inference, and the conclusion which v/e reached there was 
 
 233 
 
234 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 that in judgment we have a form of self-assertion in which 
 the subject-consciousness either appropriates or rejects the 
 presented content of perception or conception. The con- 
 clusion which we reached in that part of our discussion was 
 that in judgment we have the special activity in which 
 consciousness becomes self-realizing. In the chapter on the 
 aesthetic categories, however, the special prerogative in the 
 development of self-consciousness has, by implication at 
 least, been assigned to feeling. Some reconciliation would 
 seem to be necessary, and it will be found, I think, in 
 the further development of a doctrine that has been 
 asserted from the outset, namely, the essentially cognitive 
 nature of feeling. We have maintained the inconceivability 
 of feeling that is absolutely blind. The most rudimentary 
 reaction of consciousness must involve some Ahnwug at least, 
 as the Germans would say, of the objective ; some germ, 
 however undeveloped, of presentation. Now when we have 
 abstracted from this presentative element in feeling, there is 
 left simply the consciousness of being pleased or pained, plus 
 XhQjmlsion, if we may be allowed the word, of appropriation or 
 avoidance. Distinguishing these aspects of the feeling- 
 psychosis we iind in accordance with the doctrine developed 
 in the first part of this volume, that its presentative and the 
 pleasure-pain qualities are to be regarded as immediate 
 responses to the original stimulations, while the pulsion, as 
 we have called it, arises as a species of rebound or subject 
 reaction upon these responses. The concrete feeling-psy- 
 chosis is thus found to be complex in its elements, involving 
 presentation, pleasure-pain, and a germ of volition, and in 
 this it differs from other forms of psychosis only in the fact 
 which determines its form; namely, that the quality of being 
 pleasant or painful, or, to state this aspect of experience in 
 its more developed form, the quality of satisfaction or dis- 
 satisfaction dominates and constitutes its overt, explicit 
 character. It is this form of psychosis that is constitutive 
 of the aesthetic consciousness and that is specially quicken- 
 ing to the realization of self. But if we were to seek in 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 235 
 
 this psychosis the core of activity in which the germ of self- 
 realization is specially involved, we would unquestionably 
 find it in that inner pulsion, the element which we have 
 called volitional, and, hence, while it remains true that 
 feeling supplies the greatest stimulus to self-consciousness, 
 this is true only of the concrete psychosis we call feeling, 
 while the specific root of the experience is to be found in 
 its volitional term. 
 
 Now, there is absolutely no essential difference of form 
 between the activity we call volition and the activity we 
 call judgment. They are both self-pulsions, and they are 
 both appropriative or rejective of presented content. In 
 both the self identifies itself with its presented world, or else 
 repudiates it and separates itself off from it. Where then does 
 the difference between volition and judgment arise ? Not in 
 the form of the activities, but rather in their content, or, to 
 use a phrase that is liable to misunderstanding, in their 
 objective aim. To understand this we need to convince 
 ourselves of one fact of the greatest importance; namely, 
 that an absolute beginning of experience is unthinkable. 
 Any conceivable achievement in consciousness has as its 
 unavoidable presupposition some prior achievement or some 
 prior content of consciousness. We need only attempt to 
 follow our mental history in imagination back to its begin- 
 ning in order to be fully convinced on this point. In 
 attempting to determine the difference between volition and 
 judgment proper we meet a form of this difficulty, for 
 when we ask how judgment differs from volition, we have 
 to look into the sphere of objective aims, and this involves 
 the assumption that the consciousness in question is capable 
 of aiming objectively at something. More than this, it in- 
 volves the assumption that consciousness is capable of aiming 
 at something in preference to something else; in short, that it 
 is capable of taking a discriminative selective attitude 
 toward preferred content. But we cannot suppose that an 
 absolutely experienceless consciousness is capable of this 
 selective function. There must be guidance either outside or 
 
236 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 inside, and, therefore, every beginning has as its absolutely 
 necessary presupposition, some content of experience some- 
 where. We are not, of course, interested here in the 
 metaphysical implications of such a fact, but point it out in 
 order to show the necessity, abstracting from the possible 
 metaphysical implications, of postulating a result of prior 
 experience which is conceived to exist in the form of present 
 content or tendency, and which alone renders the selective 
 activity of consciousness intelligible. 
 
 Assuming this content of prior experience, we may ask 
 what light it is able to shed on the point in question. The 
 truth is, it is an illuminating consideration. In its light we 
 may draw an important distinction and say that while 
 judgment in general has in view the relation of a presenta- 
 tion or concept to the body of presentative or conceptual 
 elements already in consciousness, volition has more dis- 
 tinctively in view an interest which attaches itseK to the 
 practical categories of good and bad. In its lowest sense 
 this interest may be represented as that of survival, while in 
 its higher forms it would involve social, ethical, and religious 
 considerations ; in fact, all the elements that enter into the 
 notion of complete good. It is not our purpose at this 
 stage to develop this practical motive further than may be 
 necessary in order to reveal the real line of cleavage 
 between the activities of judgment and volition. They are 
 both forms of self-assertion, and they both have as their 
 necessary presupposition a content of prior experience, since 
 without this a practical aim is no more conceivable than 
 one that is purely cognitive. Judgment as well as volition 
 must then be conceived as functions of a content of experi- 
 ence that has already been achieved, and the distinction will 
 arise between them in view of their objective aims; that of 
 volition being practical and operating under the categories 
 of the good and bad while that of judgment will be more 
 distinctively cognitive and will operate under the categories 
 of the true and false. Without attending further to volition, 
 we may now proceed from the point attained here to the 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 237 
 
 further determination of the nature of judgment. And 
 the topic of special interest will be the nature of that 
 relation between achieved and presented content which is 
 involved in the activity of judgment. A judgment is a 
 function in which an attitude of the self toward presented 
 content is determined. The self either receives or rejects 
 the proffered content. On what principle does this recep- 
 tion or rejection proceed ? Manifestly on that of the 
 agreement or disagreement of the proffered content, which 
 may be a presentation or a conceived situation, with the 
 whole content already in experience. The whole content 
 at any time in experience will constitute the whole of our 
 world, and the principle by which it is unified as one object 
 of experience will be our criterion of rationality, the highest 
 that is attainable, and it will be in view of this criterion that 
 the fitness of the proffered content to be received or rejected 
 will be determined. By the content of experience I mean, 
 of course, that term in the broad sense developed in the 
 earlier chapters of this volume, a content that includes 
 not only presentative but also conceptual elements, and 
 comprehends both the actual world and the world of possi- 
 bility. I mean a content that includes the highest 
 principles and aims which such an experience is capable of 
 developing. And what I mean to assert in this connection 
 is, that the judgment which determines presented-content as 
 true or false is always and inevitably a function of experi- 
 ence-content when taken broadly, as we have indicated that 
 it must be taken. That the function so conceived is not 
 absolute is clearly apparent, and that it does not touch the 
 last question regarding truth and falsehood is equally 
 apparent. But if a content of experience is everywhere 
 the prius of the judgment of the true and false, it follows 
 that in order to reach a standard of truth and falsehood 
 that shall not be relative but final, the presupposition of an 
 absolute experience becomes necessary. This is true, and 
 will be developed in its own place, but the point of vital 
 import at this stage of our inquiry is that our judgments of 
 
238 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OE KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 true and false, while they presuppose some absolute standard, 
 are in fact, and in all cases, functions of a presupposed 
 content of experience. 
 
 In view of this it will not be difficult to determine what 
 the relation is that stands central in the judgments of true 
 and false. It is a relation of harmony, consistency, con- 
 gruity, agreement. In short, it is a relation of unity. If 
 the presented elements will blend with and fit harmoniously 
 into the world of the presupposed experience, then it will be 
 accepted or endorsed as true ; if not, it is rejected as false. 
 Plainly then the constitutive relation in the judgment of the 
 true and false is some form or aspect of that category of 
 unity which we found to be the special principle of the 
 aesthetic consciousness. In the last analysis, if a repre- 
 sentation fits into the unity of our world, which, by 
 hypothesis, is the highest conceivable to us in this stage of 
 our experience, it is accepted as true, and becomes itself a 
 part of our world-representation. If it refuses to adapt 
 itself to this unity, it is rejected and cast into the limbo of 
 bad and exploded worlds where, for aught we know to the 
 contrary, there may be an eternal wailing and gnashing of 
 teeth. Are we not logically drawn to the conclusion then 
 that judgment is distinctively an aesthetic function ? In 
 view of this question, I wish to say that I think it vitally im- 
 portant that the aesthetic character of judgment should be 
 recognized. We have reached a demonstration here that 
 will doubtless commend itself to most minds as conclusive. 
 The function of judgment is an affair of the aesthetic con- 
 sciousness, inasmuch as the essence of the relation of true 
 and false is constituted by the aesthetic category of unity. 
 This should not be forgotten. But it is also important to be 
 remembered that unity as above developed is epistemological 
 and not distinctively a category of art. The position we 
 have sought to demonstrate in this book is that every 
 fundamental type of consciousness develops its appropriate 
 and characteristic categories of knowledge, and that the 
 epistemological contribution of the aesthetic consciousness is 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 239 
 
 the category of unity. In this chapter we have reached the 
 additional conclusion that unity is the constitutive principle 
 of the true and false in the activity of judgment. The 
 logical conclusion to be drawn from this is not that all 
 judgments must conform to the type of art judgments, but 
 rather that in all judgments the principle of the true and 
 false has its roots in the aesthetic consciousness. 
 
 The reason why all judgments are not judgments of art 
 is doubtless to be sought, not in the principle of judgment 
 itself but rather in the categories of objective representation. 
 When the category of unity is applied directly, and in 
 its unmodified form, to presented or conceived materials and 
 the aim is to produce a representation that shall be immedi- 
 ately pleasing or the reverse, the judgment will be one of 
 art, for its immediate aim is unity and its immediate test is 
 feeling, and when the two immediacies blend together into 
 one we call it beautiful. What art seeks is such construc- 
 tions as by directly achieving unity of form will appeal 
 directly to the feeling of satisfaction and thus give rise to 
 the experience of the beautiful. A judgment of art in 
 common with all judgments presupposes an experience-con- 
 tent of the species we call beautiful, and its acceptance or 
 rejection of proffered content is simply its aflBrmation of the 
 true or the false in relation to this beautiful content. In 
 view of this the principle may be stated as of general 
 application that the species of a judgment will be deter- 
 mined by the nature of the content it is dealing with, and 
 the categories under which it is acting, and this principle 
 will harmonize with conclusions already reached in the main 
 body of our discussion. We have seen how the concept of 
 unity applies to the categories in the various spheres of 
 world-representation, and transforms them into principles 
 of unification. Thus the world of space and time when 
 brought under the category of unity becomes a complete and 
 self-centred system in which the relations of the parts and 
 elements are mathematically conceived. In like manner the 
 application of the concept to the sphere of the dynamic 
 
240 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 categories leads to the unification of the world under the 
 rubrics of cause, substance, or interaction. The special con- 
 sideration here is the fact that while in all cases the world 
 is unified, yet the form of the unification will be mathe- 
 matical, causal or artistic, according to the nature of the 
 special categories under which the relations of the parts or 
 elements of the world have been conceived. Now, it is only 
 a recognition of this truth from a different point of view 
 when we say that the species of judgment will be determined 
 by the nature of the experience-content it is dealing with 
 and the objective categories under which it is working. 
 Let the categories be those of space and time or more speci- 
 fically, the principles of continuous and discrete quantity, 
 and the judgments of the true and false will take the 
 mathematical form. But let the categories be dynamic or 
 more specifically, the principles of causal dependence or 
 community, and the judgments of the true and false will 
 conform to the type of physical science. But let the cate- 
 gory be that of unity itself in its immediacy, and the 
 judgments of the true and false will take the artistic form. 
 
 The central principle of judgment is aesthetic, therefore, 
 while its species, whether it is to be considered a judgment 
 of art or a judgment of science, will be determined so far as 
 the form of the judgment is concerned, by the special 
 objective categories under which it is acting. This repre- 
 sentation, I admit, involves a greater degree of community 
 between the judgments of art and those of science than the 
 average votary of either art or science would be willing to 
 admit. For this I do not mean to apologize, as it is my 
 conviction which I am seeking to make good here, that the 
 categories of scientific and aesthetic truth have been allowed 
 to part company too far in our modern thinking. I think it 
 of the highest importance that the aesthetic texture of all 
 our judgments and modes of conceiving should be recognized. 
 And on the other hand, I think it no less important that 
 the artistic thinker should recognize the epistemological 
 character of his principles. In dealing with aesthetic 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 241 
 
 relations he is dealing with a kind of knowledge, and it is 
 just as incumbent upon him as it is on the man of science 
 that he have respect to the true and the false in his judg- 
 ments. The representation of the world that he is developing 
 must be a true representation and not simply one that may 
 happen to produce an agreeable titillation in his own sub- 
 jective fancy. The principal difference between him and 
 the votary of science is not that one is bound to truth while 
 the other may follow his own fancy, but rather that both 
 being bound to the truth, what the artist is seeking is a 
 representation that shall be true to the world-unity con- 
 ceived under the category of beauty, while the votary of 
 science is seeking a representation that shall be true to the 
 same world-unity conceived under mathematical or dynamical 
 categories. 
 
 The judgment function is, as we have seen, the activity 
 in which the self realizes itself cognitively. We can 
 scarcely conceive the awareness of self as reaching any 
 degree of clearness or definiteness simply in the activities 
 of presentation or conception. There must be some activity 
 in which the self term in experience is specially involved, 
 an activity in which the self takes an attitude toward the 
 content of experience, and we have seen that judgment 
 conforms to this requirement. In judging the essential act 
 is one in which the self either appropriates or rejects prof- 
 fered content of presentation or conception. This act has 
 been called the " personal endorsement of reality," and has 
 been identified with the act of belief.^ Now, it would 
 not be difficult to show, as we propose to do in a later 
 chapter, that the self-core of belief and the knowledge-act 
 are one and the same; an act of judgment. Belief and 
 cognition differ, not in their essential nature, but rather in 
 their relation to proffered content. They are both modes 
 of appropriating or rejecting this content, and are therefore 
 modes of judging. "We do not dwell on this consideration 
 
 ' See Baldwin's Handbook of Psychology, vol. ii., p. 158, where belief is 
 defined as " the consciousness of the personal endorsement of reality." 
 
 Q 
 
242 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 here but go on to the main topic of this section, the evolu- 
 tion of the stages of self-consciousness in connection with 
 the function of judgment. The point in the mental life 
 where the subject-consciousness will begin to define itself 
 cognitively, is that at which judgment proper begins to 
 differentiate from volition. And this point which it would 
 very likely be impossible to fix chronologically, will be 
 reached when presentations begin to arrest attention as 
 objects of interest and the appropriation and rejection of 
 presented content begin to be determined in view of the 
 true and false rather than the good and bad. This, I think, 
 will be obvious whether we be able or not to identify the 
 particular point in time where the history of the individual 
 experience reaches this stage. 
 
 If we assume this as settled, then it will follow that 
 inasmuch as judgment acts in view of, and upon presented 
 or conceived content, the stages in the evolution of the 
 cognitive self-consciousness will correspond in a general way 
 at least, with the stages in the development of the categories 
 of objective apprehension. We have only to retrace our 
 steps then, and consider the form which the subject's self- 
 apprehension assumes in connection with the different and 
 successive types of objective knowledge. To this end we 
 have already pointed out in connection with the categories 
 of space and time how the self takes on a temporal form 
 in which the / does not rise explicably above the stream. Of 
 course it is to be admitted that in the experience of the 
 adult-consciousness the / has risen out of the stream and 
 asserts its transcendent relation to the whole content of its 
 world, space and time included. But we are dealing with 
 a genetic problem here, and have to suppose a consciousness, 
 not of the adult whose history is behind him, but of the 
 young child and the chick who have the greater part of the 
 road to travel, and who, nevertheless, are capable of space 
 and time experience. Let us eliminate the explicit activity 
 of the dynamic and aesthetic categories from consciousness, 
 and then ask what form of self-apprehension would still be 
 
CHAP. X. THE SaBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 243 
 
 possible ? This simplifies the problem, and the answer 
 will be, I think, that the young child and the chick will 
 have the self-intuition of a flowing stream of feeling. So 
 far as it can be said to have any Ahnung of itself this 
 will take the form of a more or less defined feeling of 
 a flowing conscious life, the parts of which are continuous 
 but not related in any explicit way to a conscious centre. 
 "When the reflective apprehension of space and time arises 
 this lack of definite centrality is largely overcome, mainly, as 
 we have seen, through the more or less implicit function of 
 the category of unity, and this is especially the case in the 
 development of mathematical reflection. We have to 
 distinguish, however, between the mathematician's / which 
 has a complex personal history behind it, and the /-concept 
 which is necessary to the mathematical conception of the 
 world. If we confine our attention to the latter it will be 
 clear to reflection, I think, that the mathematical I would 
 ever remain a somewhat pale and bloodless abstraction. 
 The mathematical world is abstracted largely from volitional 
 effort and feeling, and its intuition is achieved by conceiving 
 the world of content under the principles of discrete and 
 continuous magnitude. The many-ness and outerness of 
 things conceived under some unitary point of view is 
 practically exhaustive of its intuition. And with respect to 
 this unity which asserts itself in the mathematicaTjudgments, 
 while it is true that implicitly the self affirms itself in these 
 judgments, yet after all the unity that becomes overt as a 
 necessary term in a mathematical world is largely an 
 abstraction. Mathematical reflection in common with all 
 reflection finds some centre for its world indispensable, but 
 the degree to which this centre of objective conception is 
 identified with the self-affirmation of the ego in conscious- 
 ness, is inappreciable. It may be said then that in the 
 judgment- activity that is involved in simple space and time 
 intuition as well as in the mathematical unification of the 
 world, we have a form of judgment which represents the 
 minimum of self-cognition. However full-blooded the 
 
244 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 mathematician's / may be, and we happen to know some 
 very rich examples of this species, yet so far as the mathe- 
 matical conception of the world is concerned the / need 
 scarcely lift its head above the stream. 
 
 The very fact that the dynamic categories have their 
 origin in volitional experience would lead us to expect that 
 the /-consciousness would assert itself much more vigorously 
 and concretely in the dynamic sphere than in that of the 
 mathematical categories. This fact was recognized by Kant, 
 and it is in connection with the dynamic categories mainly, 
 that he develops his doctrine of self-consciousness. Now, 
 we know that to Kant the /-consciousness, in so far as 
 it assumed cognitive form, was reducible to the notion 
 or concept of a transcendental unity of apperception, or, as 
 we may say, reflection. This notion, as Kantians are all 
 aware, was designated transcendental, to indicate that while 
 it is to be regarded as a term that is transcendent to the 
 matter which it unifies, yet it is not to be conceived as 
 having any reality outside of this function. It is, in short, 
 a notion of unity, and nothing else. We may, I think, 
 admit the essential truth of Kant's representation here, and 
 yet have adequate grounds for not accepting his doctrine in 
 the form in which he states it. If we distinguish between 
 the subjective side of the judging activity, the degree of 
 self-awareness that it involves, and its objective function 
 which it asserts in connection with the categories, we will 
 be able to agree substantially with Kant as to the nature of 
 the latter function. The business of the dynamic categories 
 is the organization of the elements of the world-series under 
 the relations of dependence, substantiality, and interaction, 
 and to Kant we moderns are indebted, more than to any 
 other thinker, for our ability to see that the judging function 
 in its " personal endorsement " of content under these cate- 
 gories, supplies to them a unitary point of view from which 
 the world of cause, substance, or interaction becomes one. 
 And if we confine our attention to the objective function of 
 the judgments, we must say with Kant that a real self is 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 245 
 
 not affirmed in this unification, but rather a category of 
 iTnity, or, as Kant would prefer, a logical concept or notion 
 of unity. We do not need to bind ourselves to Kant's 
 special conception of the term logical, but may substitute 
 for this the notion of a concept or mode of defining content 
 which arises as part of an experience-process. This will 
 enable us to see that in the transcendental notion of unity 
 Kant has in fact stumbled upon our category of unity as 
 developed in the aesthetic consciousness, and what Kant 
 sees clearly enough is, that the unification and, therefore, 
 the practical completion of the dynamic world is the 
 function of this category. But Kant missed the real 
 genesis of this category, and with it its real significance for 
 the world he was trying to delineate. We have seen how 
 this notion of unity arises as the objective category of the 
 aesthetic consciousness, and that its function is, in con- 
 nection with other defining categories, to produce a unitary 
 representation of the world. But Kant having missed this 
 derivation and finding the concept of unity among his 
 objective possessions, naturally concluded that this "logical" 
 notion represented all the self-cognition that could be 
 affirmed in connection with the world. That he was right 
 in thinking that this was all the self- cognition involved in 
 the objective unification of the world under the categories 
 is not here in dispute. We are as strenuous on that point 
 as Kant, but what we wish to effect is a connection of 
 Kant's doctrine with a true insight into the genesis of the 
 category he is employing to unify the world. The notion of 
 unity rises out of the aesthetic consciousness and serves 
 as a principle for the organization of experience-content 
 into the whole of a world-representation. But if we dis- 
 tinguish this objective activity from the consciousness in 
 which it arises and fix our attention on the judgment- 
 function itself, a different conception of the degree of 
 self-cognition that is essential to the realization of this 
 world begins to develop. The truth is Kant missed the 
 whole subjective side of his problem, and finding that objec- 
 
246 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 tively the category is the last term of unification, he drew 
 the conclusion that it is also the first term in subjective 
 experience, and that no self can be found in experience ex- 
 cept a logical concept of unity acting at its centre. We are 
 in a position to reach a more satisfactory result. The 
 dissatisfaction that is felt with Kant's doctrine at this point 
 was shared by Kant himself, and he sought to ground the 
 concept of unity in experience, in a real ego which is outside 
 of the circle of experience altogether, and therefore inacces- 
 sible, but at the same time necessary. This is but an 
 adumbration of a true doctrine which connects the concept 
 of unity with the judging activity in experience, and 
 finds in this activity a form of experience in which the 
 self peculiarly asserts itself. Here, if anywhere, we will dis- 
 cover the true root of self-cognition, and will be able to 
 determine what degree of self-knowledge is necessary to our 
 apprehension of the world. Fixing our attention on the 
 judgment activity we are able to see that under the stimulus 
 of the volitional categories the / is enabled to break through 
 the temporal stream in which it has been merged in the 
 earlier experiences, and to assert itself as a transcending 
 term to which every part of the stream is related. No 
 doubt the initial impulse to put the questions of cause 
 and substance is a condition of this transcending event, but 
 the / itself, as it realizes itself, will react in a more 
 definite conception of these questions. The boy must in 
 some sense begin to realize himself as apart from his 
 world before he can intelligently question it, but it is true 
 on the other hand that in this very impulse to question 
 he is differentiating himself from his world. In the 
 volitional exigencies of his life which underlie its cognitive 
 activities, the common root-motive of all his questionings 
 is doubtless to be sought. But that the self breaks 
 through the stream in obedience to a dynamic impulse, and 
 that this impulse leads to a bifurcation of two trunks, one 
 of objective world-representation and the other of subject- 
 realization, both of which are very closely inter-related at 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 247 
 
 every point as well as commonly rooted : this is the 
 truth I wish to emphasize here, for on this foundation rests 
 the whole " law and the prophets " of an adequate doctrine 
 of self-knowledge in its relation to the knowledge of the 
 objective world. 
 
 N"ow, the self-intuition that must be regarded as indispens- 
 able to the simple, spontaneous experiences of the dynamic 
 consciousness, is not very rich in deiinite content. The 
 self-consciousness of the boy who begins to ask what made 
 the milk turn sour ; or why God does not take away the 
 thunder; or what makes the stone lie there to stump his toe; 
 will have rolled itself up into a ball, and will have asserted 
 itself in an /-function against its world of content. A great 
 epoch will thus have been made in his experience, and 
 he will have achieved the standpoint of a conceptual 
 and reflective experience. But we must not suppose 
 that he has travelled this road very far. The objec- 
 tive world is as yet largely a sealed book to him, 
 and we do not need to suppose that he finds his subjective 
 world in any different condition. The truth is, we must 
 suppose it even more undeveloped, for as yet the impulse to 
 put questions to self as the boy questions his objective world 
 has not explicitly arisen. The fact of importance is that there 
 is at this point a subject-world, and that it has asserted itself 
 as an / that stands over against, and questions its world of 
 content. The categories of the subject-world may all be as 
 yet implicit, and the boy may not trouble himself about his 
 personal identity or the meaning of anything that belongs 
 distinctively to this subject-world. He may be a pagan 
 instead of a Christian, in the sense that he takes no interest 
 in the salvation of his soul. But in the judgment-acts in 
 which he puts his questions, and more especially in the 
 answers to these questions at which he arrives, a con- 
 sciousness of his own reaction upon his world is achieved 
 which represents the first, in any sense defined cognitive 
 apprehension which he achieves of himself The very nature 
 of these questions will indicate the type of self- apprehension 
 
248 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 which he is developing. They are all questions of agency 
 and presuppose the development of the agency-conscious- 
 ness in the mind that puts the question. Moreover, they 
 are questions as to the agency of things, over against us 
 and our agency. In short, they are questions as to the 
 objective agency of things as they affect us and our agency. 
 It is clear that the kind of self-apprehension that is un- 
 folding here is that of self-agency as opposed to, at least 
 distinct from, the agency of other things. There is unfolding 
 at the same time and in the same experiences, the conscious- 
 ness of the other as well as the consciousness of the self, 
 and as in the order of development the objective takes 
 precedence of the subjective, we have here the conscious- 
 ness of self-agency unfolding in connection with the con- 
 sciousness of the agency of the other or not-self. No doubt, 
 as genetic psychology tells us, the first and most important 
 factors in the development of this dual consciousness are the 
 other living beings which surround us. But for our purposes 
 here the kind of object that may call forth the experience 
 is relatively unimportant as compared with the more general 
 consideration as to the form which the dynamic experience 
 of self takes in our apprehensions. 
 
 The spontaneous activity of the dynamic consciousness 
 thus yields the intuition of a self-activity standing over 
 against the activity of an objective not-self. The whole 
 consciousness of self may be said thus to include the not- 
 self in inseparable relations with the self which is ever 
 distinguishing and opposing itself to the not-self. We do 
 not need to suppose that the boy is in possession of all this 
 philosophy of what he is doing, but we must credit him with 
 the consciousness of what he is doing. The questions he 
 puts to his world betray that consciousness, and we are 
 unable to conceive how such questions could arise out of a 
 consciousness that was not in this stage of self-apprehension. 
 This result will be important, moreover, when we go on 
 to consider the form of self-knowledge that develops in 
 connection with the reflective activity of the dynamic 
 
OHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 249 
 
 consciousness. We have seen that this consciousness 
 develops certain objective conceptions of relation, under 
 which the world-content which presents itself is defined 
 and organized, and we have seen that judgment is a self- 
 activity in which the presentations of these categories are 
 endorsed as true or rejected as false. Now, in view of the 
 above results, we are ready to go a step farther, and say 
 that in this judgment-activity the categorized world is 
 brought into the relation of another or not-self, to the self of 
 the judgment-activity. In short, the judging activity in its 
 relations with the categorized world develops a dual mould, a 
 self and not-self mode of apprehending, and under it further 
 categorizes its world. Only, in this instance, the dual mould 
 is large enough to hold the wine of the subject-activity, as 
 well as that of the objective representation. Eeturning, 
 then, to the Kantian doctrine of self-consciousness as simply 
 a logical conception of unity in experience related to a 
 necessary presupposition, a transcendent subject outside of 
 experience ; we see where it is in need of amendment. The 
 category of unity represents only the objective term in a 
 true doctrine of self-consciousness. The subjective term is 
 the selfs apprehension of its own agency as connected 
 with and distinguished from, the world of objective agency 
 conceived under the categories. The true doctrine of self- 
 consciousness, so far as it can be developed as a function of 
 the dynamic consciousness, is one that includes in ex- 
 perience the self-agency which relates itself to the not-self; 
 that is, to the sphere of objective agency that is realized under 
 the dynamic categories. Kant's logical notion of unity is a 
 torso, therefore, when conceived as standing alone in 
 experience. It has a presupposition which is not a 
 transcendent self outside of experience, but a real self- 
 activity within experience. 
 
 We may assume, then, that the self that functions in 
 experience is not a mere logical notion of unity, but rather 
 a subject that gradually defines itself as it develops its 
 definite apprehension of the objective world, and the re- 
 
250 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 maining question of this section will be how far the 
 subject's self-definition proceeds in connection with this 
 objective representation ? What we have to say here is an 
 anticipation of the fuller treatment of the following chapter. 
 But taking the objective categories as our guide, and bearing 
 in mind that the dynamic consciousness develops certain 
 principles of objective agency in connection with the notions 
 of cause, substance, and interaction, we may say in general 
 that in relation to this experience the growth of self-con- 
 sciousness takes the form of the evolution, first of the feeling 
 and then of the definite notion of self-agency as related and 
 co-related with these objective agencies. In connection with 
 its experience of cause it will become more and more clearly 
 conscious of its own causal agency in both its active and 
 passive aspects. The development of the objective category 
 of substance will tend to bring into clear consciousness the 
 fact of its own persistent agency and the unbroken identity 
 of its life, while the unfolding of the objective experience of 
 interaction will be accompanied with the fuller and clearer 
 consciousness of its own relation to a community of inter- 
 acting agencies like itself The development of self- 
 apprehension in this sphere takes, as we see, the form of a 
 self-agent responding to the agencies of the not-self, and 
 eventually defining itself in relation to and over against 
 these objective agencies. The self-consciousness that de- 
 velops out of dynamic experience is necessarily dualistic, 
 therefore, and takes the form of a self-agency or activity 
 defining itself in various ways in relation to the agencies of 
 the objective world. 
 
 But this dualistic intuition while it is a vital moment is 
 not the last moment in the development of the self-cognition. 
 The truth is, we find the self in connection with the last of 
 the dynamic categories, that of objective community or 
 interaction, entering a stage of experience in which the 
 duality while persisting is seen to be not ultimate but 
 subordinate to some comprehending principle. The objective 
 category of community was inconsistent, we saw, with the 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 251 
 
 notion of purely external action and reaction of parts, and 
 involved the supposition of internal agency which is possible 
 only when we suppose that each of the terms a and h 
 somehow internally comprehends the agency of the other. 
 We have only to apply this insight to the growing self- 
 consciousness in order to see that a point is reached at 
 which a communal intuition begins to develop. The self 
 begins to apprehend itself in such a way as to include the 
 agencies of the not-self as internal terms in its own experi- 
 ence, and to realize its self-agency as included in the broader 
 experience of the community. I apprehend that the real 
 sense of the social situation involves as the necessary con- 
 dition of its realization this transcendence of the duality of 
 self and not-self as mutually external agencies, and the 
 inclusion of them as terms in a broader intuition. This 
 fact of conscious interpenetration is recognized whenever we 
 realize that the community in order to affect us vitally must 
 enter as an internal factor into our lives, and that con- 
 versely if we would affect the community vitally our agency 
 must enter as an internal factor into its life. It is clear, 
 however, that this higher intuition is never achieved except 
 in the light of some common objective aim, which brings the 
 self and the community of not-selves into perhaps hostile 
 collision. "We have seen that collision always involves a 
 community of aim either ultimate or proximate, and there- 
 fore the experience of collision may be an important factor 
 in the development of the sense of community. At all 
 events the communal consciousness will first give itself an 
 objective representation, and this objective representation 
 will take the form of a reduction of an objective plurality 
 to unity. No doubt that we reach the notion of the unity of 
 the social life of the community as a whole, and that, as a 
 subjective reflex of this, we attain to the consciousness of 
 our own inclusion in this unity. The point of vital im- 
 portance to us, however, is the fact that this stage of 
 conscious realization is mediated by the category of unity 
 which we have found to be a distinctive product of the 
 
252 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 aesthetic consciousness. The complete realization of the 
 social consciousness in which the agencies of the self and 
 not-self become mutually inclusive is a consummation in 
 which the dynamic consciousness is transcended, and the 
 principle of comprehension is reached in the intuition of the 
 aesthetic consciousness. This accounts for the emotional 
 quality of the concept of sociality, and the fact that in the 
 notion of the social we are very close to the spring of 
 beauty. 
 
 Under the concept of unity the self becomes cognizant of 
 itself, therefore, as a social unit, as a conscious agency that 
 is included in a community of agencies, and that includes 
 this community in its own life. The effect of this is a 
 further advance in the development of self-apprehension. 
 This step which shall be final here is one in which the self 
 which we have represented as internal to experience, becomes 
 conscious of its relation to the world of experience as a 
 whole. We have seen how the category of unity leads to 
 the unification of the world, and we have also followed the 
 applications of this category to the contents of the mathe- 
 matical and dynamic consciousness. At the climax of this 
 objective process we reach a point of immediate unification 
 which gives rise to the notion of objective beauty. The 
 subjective term of this experience we found in the im- 
 mediate response of the aesthetic consciousness, in feelings 
 of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, to the objective repre- 
 sentation. It is in this aesthetic experience that the 
 subject's self-intuition completes itself. It is the final 
 act of self-assertion embodying itself in the last judgment 
 of self-consciousness, and it may be represented as an act in 
 which the self integrates itself with the unity of its world. 
 And it is important to ask here what form this integration 
 takes, whether it results in the inclusion of the world in the 
 self so that the whole world becomes the content of self ; or, 
 on the contrary, in the integration of the self and its content 
 in the unity of a larger world of experience which embraces 
 a community of selves. That there is a measure of truth 
 
CHAP. X. THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 253 
 
 in both forms of representation we are not disposed to 
 dispute. But that the latter is the more adequate view 
 follows, I think, from the immediacy of the experience in 
 which the unification is realized. The self begins to become 
 objective and self-transcending in the social intuition, and 
 this process completes itself in the aesthetic intuition 
 inasmuch as in it we have consciously realized our integral 
 unity with a larger content of experience. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 CATEGOEIES OF THE SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 The fact is generally recognized that our knowledge of the 
 world of self is not so clearly definable as is that of the 
 objective world, and this, notwithstanding the fact that we 
 are surer of the existence of self than we are of the 
 existence of an objective world. Things may be illu- 
 sions, but the self cannot be altogether an illusion. The 
 impossibility of reducing our self- apprehensions to clearly 
 defined terms leads in some instances to a refusal to 
 apply the term knowledge to that which is apprehended 
 only in self-consciousness, and is lacking, therefore, in the 
 definiteness of an objective presentation. Now, while 
 admitting that there is a degree of reasonableness in 
 such a view we are not willing to allow that the position has 
 been well taken. That a fact of which we are so sure as we 
 are of our own self-activity should be denied the name 
 of knowledge seems to indicate that our notion of what 
 constitutes knowledge is in need of reconsideration. But, 
 admitting that there is some diflSculty here, it will help to 
 dissipate it, I think, if we consider the question why the 
 content of self-consciousness is not so clearly definable as 
 that of objective perception. The answer will be found 
 partly in the fact that self-apprehension is from the outset 
 a function of a reactive consciousness, and that the self is 
 realized in this reaction. But the reaction itself is from or 
 
 254 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 255 
 
 upon the objective; it is in no sense a reaction upon any 
 subject term that has any analogy to a material object. The 
 self-representation is lacking, therefore, in those features 
 which are most characteristic of objective cognition. 
 The self does not present itself as coloured, or round, 
 or rough, or hard, and for this reason the self-in- 
 tuition cannot be developed piece by piece as can an 
 objective representation. If, then, we cannot piece together 
 a representation of self, does it not seem reasonable to deny 
 that any representation of self is possible ? We do not say 
 that a representation of self is possible in any ordinary sense. 
 The reaction of the subject-consciousness is a reaction as a 
 whole, and self-apprehension will be a function of this mode 
 of reaction. When we say that we can realize no clear 
 representation of self we mean one that is resolvable into 
 parts and that may be apprehended in detail. In regard to 
 all such representation Hume's challenge to any one who 
 thinks he has such an intuition to point it out, is final. No 
 such intuition is possible. The self-reaction is a whole that 
 has no parts although it involves distinctions, and if it is to 
 be grasped in an act of knowledge at aU, it must be grasped 
 as a whole. The significance of this for self-knowledge is 
 obvious. The assertion that we are sure of our own activity 
 and yet cannot know what that activity is, really involves 
 two statements that are mutually contradictory. If we are 
 sure of our self-activity we have that assurance because we 
 grasp it in an act of immediate intuition. It cannot be 
 disputed then that we know the fact of our self-activity. 
 But we must distinguish between the that; the bare fact, and 
 the what ; the definition of the fact. There may be bare 
 content of self present without our having or being able to 
 acquire any definite knowledge of its nature. This may be 
 admitted hypothetically, but how does it apply to the case 
 in hand ! If, in the reactive consciousness s«^-activity and 
 not simply activity that has no label, is revealed ; then it is 
 clear that we have a qualification of the content as a whole 
 which renders it not merely a that but a what. The fact 
 
256 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 that the activity is taking the form of a self shows that it is 
 not formless, but is defining itself as a whole. This being 
 conceded, it follows that there may be a mode of knowing 
 which consists in defining a content as an indivisible whole, 
 whose representation cannot, for that reason, be achieved 
 piecemeal or broken up into parts. And if this much be 
 granted, as we think it must, the impossibility of reducing 
 the content of self-consciousness to the definiteness of 
 objective representation has been accounted for, while, at the 
 same time, the possibility of another type of knowing, to 
 which this content may be amenable, is left open. 
 
 In order to trace fundamentally the categories of the 
 subject-consciousness, we must recall at this point the three 
 forms of psychosis to which we found consciousness in the 
 last analysis reducible. Employing the term cognitive in 
 a broad sense as a name for any knowledge-element what- 
 ever, we may say that these forms of psychosis may be 
 distinguished as cognitive, volitional, and emotional, and the 
 designation of each will be determined by its overt, explicit 
 character. Thus, while it is true that every psychosis is 
 complex, and involves cognitive, volitional and emotional 
 elements or germs, yet it is true, on the other hand, as a 
 fact of mental history, that some one of these elements will 
 dominate and determine its outer character. Now, it is 
 evident that among these forms of psychosis the one of 
 special epistemological value is the one that takes the form 
 of cognition. This psychosis will represent the form which 
 consciousness will take whenever it is attempting an act of 
 knowledge. And in connection with the various stages 
 which the knowledge-activity passes through in its appre- 
 hension of the world, this psychosis will take the forms 
 successively of the mathematico-presentational, the dynamic, 
 and the aesthetic categories. This is important for the 
 determination of the categories of the subject-consciousness, 
 on account of the close connection which has to be recog- 
 nized as subsisting between the objective and subjective in 
 the development of knowledge. These successive forms of 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 257 
 
 the cognitive consciousness are to be conceived, moreover, in 
 connection with other conscious elements and as responding 
 successively to the motives of volition and feeling. 
 
 The special problem here is to trace the forms under which 
 the subject-consciousness progressively apprehends itself as 
 a whole. If we confine our attention to that stage in the 
 conscious life in which objective experience is purely pre- 
 sentational under forms of space and time, it will be clear, 1 
 think, that the subject-consciousness, so far as it asserts 
 itself at all, will take on the form of time and will be simply 
 a flow of conscious life. This will be the form taken by the 
 inner life of the young child or the chick so far as it is con- 
 scious of it at all. Now it is clearly very difficult to conceive 
 any special forms of subjectivity as arising out of this simple 
 consciousness. The feeling- of self -hood will be so vague and 
 so completely merged in the stream that it will cut no figure 
 in the life of the individual. The germs of self-consciousness 
 must be conceived as present even here, but they do not 
 develop into any definable forms of apprehension. They 
 simply remain in solution till some element is introduced 
 which alters the psychic relations and induces something an- 
 alogous to a precipitate. The real beginning of the subject 
 development occurs at that point where the / breaks 
 through the temporal stream and begins to assert itself in 
 relation to the flowing consciousness as a whole. We saw 
 above that the self at this point, which is that of the origin 
 of the dynamic representation of the world, asserts itself as 
 an agent, and in various phases of agency determined in 
 their form by the different species of the objective categories. 
 We do not need to travel this road again, but what we are 
 interested in here is how the life of the self which begins 
 overtly at this point to assert itself, gives itself formal 
 expression as a whole. This question introduces us to the 
 distinctive categories of the inner life, such as individuality, 
 self-identity, and personality. The first and most funda- 
 mental of these is, doubtless, the category of individuality, 
 for if the self did not assert itself as an individual it could 
 
 E 
 
258 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 not assert itself as anything at all. We are not concerned 
 here with the principle of individuation, which will come up 
 for treatment in another connection, but rather and speci- 
 fically with the form in which the self asserts its individuality. 
 This problem must be considered in the light of the fact 
 that the categories of self-activity will all be modes of ap- 
 prehending self as a whole, and will be irreducible to parts. 
 What we mean by the individuality of the self is, then, 
 its most fundamental assertion of its own indivisibility, 
 an assertion that is central in the very notion of the /. 
 The /is centrally a pulse of indivisible oneness, and this is 
 the explicit nature of the first assertion of the self against 
 the stream of flowing states. The appearance of the / for- 
 ever vetoes the possibility of the breaking up of the mental 
 life into parts. Whatever else the self may become or 
 assert itself to be, its first and fundamental assertion is its 
 own inseparable oneness. Nor does this assertion of 
 individuality leave the sphere of content unmodified ? The 
 assertion of oneness declares that there shall be no floating 
 unrelated content, but that all the elements of the experi- 
 ence-world shall henceforward range themselves around and 
 relate themselves to, the I as their centre. The / asserts 
 itself as a rallying point, a point of self-relation for the 
 whole world of content. The category of individuality is 
 the form, therefore, in which the self asserts itself as the 
 unitary centre of an experience in relation to which all its 
 parts become united and related in one being. 
 
 Now the self as an individual is capable of performing 
 causal functions and of developing the distinctive conscious- 
 ness of causal agency. We do not delay on this considera- 
 tion here but go on to the next distinctive category of the 
 subject-world, namely that of self -identity. The notion of 
 self-identity could not originate until the self has not only 
 distinguished itself as an individual from the flowing stream 
 in which it has been hitherto merged, but has again re- 
 entered the stream and conceived itself in connection with 
 different sections of it in time. The / must have a yesterday 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OP SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 259 
 
 as well as a to-day before the notion of self-identity can 
 arise. The notion of self-identity involves, in short, the 
 notion of persistence — the selfs conception of itself as a 
 persistent point of departure for actual and possible 
 experience. We see then that the notion of self-identity 
 is the subject-aspect, and we may say, the final point of 
 reference of the category of substance. But the self does 
 not assert itself specifically as a substance or thing, but 
 rather as a persistent individual, the same yesterday and 
 to-day, leaving the process by which persistent points are 
 determined as things, open. The self's assertion of its self- 
 identity is rooted therefore in its assertion of its individuality 
 and is essential to its being. We could not conceive a real 
 solution of self-identity that did not carry with it a solution 
 of individuality. I am of course not oblivious of the 
 phenomena of double, triple, and alternating personality in 
 which a breach of identity seems actually to take place. 
 But the vital point in these experiences, namely that these 
 different personalities do not intermingle but reassert them- 
 selves, each as continuous with its own type of experience, 
 is confirmatory of the doctrine we have been maintaining. 
 A real breach of self-identity would involve the dissolution 
 of the bond which holds the elements of our experience 
 together, in the event of which there would be no conceiv- 
 able reason for supposing that the elements would ever 
 reassemble again as parts of the same conscious experience. 
 The phenomena which present the appearance of a breach 
 of identity are in fact illustrations of it. They apparently 
 present the unusual and astonishing fact that more than 
 one self-centred experience may be connected with the same 
 physical organism, and this involves a mystery which science 
 is at present unable to explain. But conceding the possi- 
 bility of this, the law of self-identity is seen to prevail 
 without breach in case of each personality. It remains 
 self-centred and continuous with itself, and does not 
 manifest the slightest tendency to lose itself in the stream 
 of other personal experiences. 
 
260 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 Individuality and self-identity are categories of the life of 
 the self as a whole. They are inconsistent with its resolu- 
 tion into parts. In fact such a resolution would mean its 
 destruction. The same is true of personality, which is not 
 to be confounded with individuality and self-identity. These 
 latter categories do, in fact, enter into personality as moments, 
 but do not constitute its whole significance. Originally the 
 term persona was used for the dress, and especially for the 
 mask, of an actor, and meant a mode of appearance or ex- 
 pression. We find a corresponding but deeper root in the 
 Greek term Xoyoi from Xeyco, to speak or utter, a term which 
 involves the notion of a form in which some inner nature is 
 uttering or manifesting itself. The term \oyos came to 
 mean the self-manifesting reason of the world, and was 
 taken up in Greco-Jewish, and later, in Christian reflection, 
 and employed to express the manifested nature of God in 
 distinction from his inner essence, and as a principle of 
 symbolizing or defining the essential forms into which this 
 manifestation is distinguishable. When the Latin tongue 
 succeeded the Greek in our western life as the language of 
 religious thought, the term persona and its derivatives became 
 the vehicles of this profounder significance which still consti- 
 tutes the inner sense of our modern notions of person and 
 personality. In truth, however, the modern conceptions of 
 personality have been vague and confused, and have left 
 much to be desired in the way of clearness. The derivation 
 and history of the term are sufficient to indicate the fact 
 that its special significance is that of a mode of expression. 
 Personality is a kind of language or symbolic form in which 
 an inner nature expresses itself and reveals itself in and 
 through the expression. The presupposition of personality is 
 some nature that is individual and self-identical, and in relation 
 to this nature it is a fundamental mode of self-manifestation. 
 By any one's personality we do not mean every manifestation 
 of his activity, but only such an expression as will reveal 
 his real nature. Let a man act in some truly characteristic 
 fashion, and we say that he has given a true personal 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 261 
 
 expression of himself. But if he does not act in character 
 he belies his inner nature, and his manifestation is not 
 truly personal. "What, then, are we to understand by the 
 notion of personality ? It is clear in the first place that 
 personality involves some inner nature, and that this nature 
 must be a self. There can be no person apart from a self. 
 It is also clear that the nature involved must be individual 
 and self-identical, these being, as we have seen, the funda- 
 mental categories of the subject-consciousness. There can 
 be no question then that the notion of personality must 
 include or presuppose an individual, and self-identical 
 nature; in short, that it must be a category of a real self. 
 Taking this for granted, then, we may go on to inquire 
 what the notion of personality involves in reference to this 
 real self, and the answer will be, I think, that the self 
 becomes personal when it takes on some fundamental mode 
 of self-expression. In order to realize what is meant here, 
 let us recall the analysis by which consciousness has been 
 reduced to three fundamental forms of psychosis, each of 
 which is a concrete expression of the complex nature of 
 consciousness, and is distinguished from other forms of 
 psychosis, not in content, but in form, as being overtly and 
 explicitly either cognitive, volitional, or emotional. This will, 
 I think, give us a clue to the real differentia of the notion of 
 personality. The personality of a man will be such an ex- 
 pression of his nature as embodies itself in the form of one of 
 the fundamental psychosis of which his consciousness is 
 constituted. That is, a man may give himself a personal 
 expression in either an intellectual, volitional, or emotional 
 form. He may express his nature through the channels of 
 thought, or will, or feeling, and his personality may take on 
 the intellectual, practical, or aesthetic form. This will be 
 intelligible if we remember that there is no abstract 
 psychosis of either thought, will, or feeling, but that all 
 psychoses are complex and concrete, and that the form is 
 determined simply by the element that dominates. This 
 will make it clear how an inner nature can give itself a 
 
262 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 concrete expression in any of the forms we have indicated, 
 and will, therefore, enable us to conceive the double nature 
 of personality, (1) as an expression of the inner nature 
 as a whole, and (2) as an expression of this nature in a 
 plurality of forms. On the first point we do not need 
 tO'-dwell at length. That the self is individual and self- 
 identical, and that each psychosis is a concrete embodiment 
 of its nature are, as we have seen, fundamental articles in a 
 doctrine of self. Personality being a mode by which this 
 indivisible nature expresses itself, will necessarily be unitary 
 in its root-significance. It will be the expression of the 
 nature of the self as a whole, not of any part or aspect 
 abstracted from the whole, and it will be a fundamental 
 expression of nature, not a mere flash in the pan which 
 signifies nothing. Personality is an expression of real 
 nature as a whole. The second point may need somewhat 
 more elaborate treatment. The insight that personality has 
 an aspect of plurality has almost lapsed in our modern 
 thinking. The presumption that personality is unitary has 
 seemed to shut out the supposition that it may be plural, 
 and it is true, of course, that in the sense in which it is one 
 it cannot also be many. The real question is not whether 
 personality involves unity, but rather whether it is not one 
 of those categories which involve unity in diversity, or 
 rather diversity in unity. It seems to me that a true 
 analysis of consciousness commits us to this latter view, and 
 that the notion of personality carries with it not only 
 the presupposition of a unitary nature that is seeking 
 self-expression, but also that of the possibility, and in 
 view of the complex nature of consciousness, the necessity 
 even, of a plurality of modes of expression. The multi- 
 personality of the manifested life of the self seems to follow 
 necessarily then from the complexity of consciousness, and 
 it is difficult to conceive any aspect in which the plurality 
 of personality is less adequately grounded than its unity. 
 In view, then, of the double aspect of personality, we 
 may define it as a fiiTidamental mode in wnd through which 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEaORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 263 
 
 a self-identical and individiial self manifests or expresses its 
 nature as a whole. 
 
 The question of personal identify then will not, in view 
 of this definition, be precisely the same as that of self- 
 identity. The category of self-identity is that of the 
 persistence of the self as a unitary individual, while personal 
 identity involves that and something more. When we assert 
 personal identity what we affirm precisely is the persistence 
 of the same self identical nature through all personal 
 variations. The same nature we conceive to be capable of 
 various forms of manifestation, or to put the matter more 
 empirically, we find experience expressing itself in an almost 
 infinite variety of forms, and tracing these variations back 
 to their source in consciousness we find them to spring 
 primarily out of three fundamental forms of psychosis, each 
 of which is a concrete embodiment of conscious nature. To 
 each of these root-forms we apply the term personal, and 
 say that consciousness may have as many distinct types of 
 personal expression as there are fundamental elements in 
 consciousness which embody its complex nature. Connect- 
 ing the result of this reflection with the doctrine of the self- 
 identical and individual subject of the conscious life as 
 already developed, this plural manifestation is connected 
 with a unitary nature which it presupposes, and the notion 
 of personality completes itself in that of a plural mani- 
 festation of a unitary self. The category of personal identity 
 is one that involves the sameness of the nature which ex- 
 presses itself as a whole, but not the absolute unitariness of 
 the form of manifestation itself, which may be manifold and 
 variable. 
 
 The question as to what is involved in the maintenance 
 of personal identity is one of some difficulty. That it 
 involves absolute continuity of consciousness is an assump- 
 tion that has been largely given up on account of the 
 practical difficulties with which it is beset. If continuity of 
 consciousness be a necessary condition of the maintenance 
 of personal identity, then we must suppose that consciousness 
 
264 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OE KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 continues unbroken during sleep and during those apparent 
 lapses caused by accident and disease. Moreover, the 
 phenomena of alternating personality seem to interpose 
 serious obstacles to that assumption. In fact the doctrine 
 of the unbrokenness of the conscious stream seems to be 
 untenable, and we have to seek an idea of personal con- 
 tinuity which will be consistent with the existence of 
 temporal gaps and breaches in the conscious life. Now, it 
 seems to me that we have in memory an example of the 
 maintenance of such a continuity. For memory connects 
 the present self with its former content, not by traversing 
 and reinstating the links which connect the present with 
 the moment in the temporal stream to which the past 
 experience belongs, but rather by finding some point of 
 identity in the two experiences which leads to their immedi- 
 ate coalescence and integration into one conscious experience. 
 The psychological process by which this is effected is given 
 in the hand-books, and begins with a feeling oi familiarity in 
 connection with some element of present content which 
 arrests attention and induces consciousness to put out its 
 feelers, so to speak, in search of its past connections. This 
 leads to the re-integration of the past with the present in a 
 unitary state in which the feeling of familiarity has developed 
 into the consciousness of the identity of the life of the pre- 
 sent with the past in the unity of a present experience. 
 Now, if time may thus be ignored by memory, and the past 
 integrated with the present without any regard to the 
 temporal continuity of the conscious stream, what reason 
 have we to suppose that any such temporal continuity is in 
 any way involved in the maintenance of the identity of the 
 personal life? We have seen in our doctrine of space and 
 time that the point of present departure for time as well as 
 space, is one that transcends the stream and in relation to 
 which the notion of the stream itself becomes possible. 
 That conclusion fits in with what memory reveals to us as 
 to the actual way in which experience integrates its past and 
 present, and favours the doctrine which we are about to 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 265 
 
 enunciate here ; namely, that the maintenance of personal 
 identity is not an affair of time-continuity at all, but rather an 
 experience which in its roots transcends the temporal stream. 
 In short, the maintenance of personal identity is the conser- 
 vation by the individual self of its relation to the temporal 
 stream as a whole. This relation is conserved by the 
 inclusion of all the parts of the temporal stream as elements 
 of content in one experience. And this involves the possi- 
 bility at least of the reinstatement, under certain conceivable 
 conditions, of all the parts of the temporal stream that have 
 actually been connected with conscious experiences^ But it 
 does not carry with it the implication that every part of a 
 continuous temporal stream shall have been filled with our 
 experiences. We cannot assert for our experiences an 
 unbroken stream of time at all, we pick our time up by 
 pieces, so to speak, and there is no continuity of actually 
 apprehended time. It is only when we conceive time 
 ideally that it presents itself as an unbroken continuity, 
 and even here this continuity is not absolute, but is resolv- 
 able largely into other elements. We have seen that time 
 is conceived as a universal and necessary form of a possible 
 experience, and this is the point of view from which it 
 seems to be absolutely continuous. But the intuition of 
 universal necessity resolves itself, in the last analysis, into a 
 perception of the necessity that any experience that would 
 persist and complete itself must, as one of its conditions, 
 conform to the requirements of time : that is, it must be an 
 experience whose content in one aspect of it will be realized 
 in the form of a time-succession. Even this does not 
 involve the necessity that time should be continuous, or 
 that in a finite experience every moment of a continuous 
 succession should be filled with content. We have not 
 broached the question here whether from some point of 
 view the absolute continuity of time may not be necessary, 
 or whether on that supposition an absolute experience may 
 not be found to be necessary. We take our standpoint here 
 from our own finite experience, and the conclusion to which 
 
266 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 we seem to be driven is that the maintenance of personal 
 identity is an affair of the self, and is essentially a category 
 under which it maintains the unity of its life in and through 
 a temporal experience that may be in itself fragmentary and 
 incomplete. 
 
 It is to this subject of experience which maintains its 
 being as a persistent and individual self amid the frag- 
 mentariness and plurality of its personal life that the term 
 Soul is applied. Soul ic therefore a perfectly concrete and 
 intro-experiential term. When we speak of the soul we are 
 characterizing experience from the point of view of its 
 unitary and personal self-hood. Now it may be that the 
 psychologist does not need to recognize the soul in his treat- 
 ment of the facts of consciousness, though I am at a loss to 
 see how he is to avoid some implicit recognition of its ex- 
 istence ; but I feel sure that the epistemologist will come to 
 a point in the development of his science where the recogni- 
 tion of the soul will become a fundamental necessity. He 
 will see that without the assumption of a soul as a unifying 
 and integrating subject of experience its parts fall into 
 fragments and its world of content becomes chaotic. He 
 will find, in fact, that without the assumption of a soul the 
 very problem which he has started out to solve, namely, that 
 of knowledge, has become impossible and absurd. For the 
 only point of view from which a cognitive experience can 
 be conceived as possible is that of the subject of experience 
 itself It soon becomes apparent that knowledge cannot 
 arise in experience except as a function of a personal and 
 persistent self If, then, we assume the soul as the centre 
 of the subject-activity in experience, the function of the 
 subject-categories as means or modes of defining its nature 
 as a whole will become clear. The soul is, in the first 
 place, a self that defines itself in opposition to and yet in 
 co-relation with a not-self. Its consciousness includes with 
 its own agency, therefore, that of the other, and it becomes 
 by its very constitution a socius and an integral part of the 
 social organism. We have followed in detail the process in 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 267 
 
 and through which this soul realizes and defines its ob- 
 jective world of content. And in these later chapters we 
 have been developing a concept of self-knowledge and have 
 been endeavouring to unfold the nature of the categories by 
 which this knowledge is realized and defined. We have 
 seen that the categories of the soul-life are forms of its unity 
 and characterize it as a whole, and in the categories of 
 individuality, self-identity, personality, and personal identity 
 we have unfolded the rubrics under which the soul as the 
 central organ of experience is to be conceived as real. 
 There remains then for consideration the question as to how 
 far and in what sense the objective categories are applicable 
 to the life of the soul. That the category of space is not 
 applicable in any direct form is obvious. We could not 
 quantify the soul specially without destroying its indivisible 
 unity. We have also seen that time only applies to it ex- 
 ternally, and that its essential life is transcendent. The 
 fragments of the soul-life are temporal, but the soul in its self- 
 maintaining individuality transcends and comprehends the 
 temporal experience. The dynamic categories seem, how- 
 ever, to assert a more fundamental relation. The notion of 
 cause, as we saw, involves as its, essential part the idea of 
 agency, and a causal term in an objective series was repre- 
 sented as a conditioned antecedent which holds in it the 
 initiative of a change or change-series. The notion of sub- 
 stance involves that of persistent agency, and objective 
 substances were conceived as persistent points of departure 
 for the organization or reinstatement of actual or possible 
 experiences, and therefore as centres of objective qualities. 
 Finally, the category of interaction was seen to involve 
 the reciprocal and internal agency of a plurality of co- 
 existent parts or elements under the notion of a community. 
 We have seen how the dynamic categories as a whole arise 
 as objective forms of volitional experience and define the 
 world-content under dynamic relations. In their roots, 
 therefore, they are specially related to the soul in its 
 effective agency as will. It is to the soul as will, specially. 
 
268 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KKOWLEDGE. part ii. 
 
 that the category of agency is applied therefore, and under 
 this it is conceived on the one hand as a patient or re- 
 cipient of stimulations or modifications from its other, while 
 on the other hand, as active, it is a conscious initiation of a 
 series of effects. The soul relates itself specially as cause to 
 its own volitional activities, and the relation between its 
 volitional pulses or choices and the modifications which 
 ensue are conceived under the category of cause and effect. 
 Again, the soul conceives itself as a substance, specially in 
 view of its volitional activity and in the sense that it is the 
 persistent subject of experience. But the notion of sub- 
 stance must be construed in the light of the subject- 
 categories under which the real nature of the soul is cog- 
 nized. It can be a substance; that is, maintain itself as a 
 persistent agent, in the same sense only as it maintains the 
 continuity of its life. The notion of temporal continuity 
 must be read out of both notions, and the soul must not be 
 represented as a substance in any other respect than that 
 which is involved in the maintenance of its individuality 
 and personal identity in and through its volitional activity. 
 The application of the category of community or inter- 
 action to the life of the soul leads to profound modifications 
 of our conceptions of its agency. Did the soul conceive 
 itself as standing alone in its activity, then it might have a 
 sense of absolute agency. It might realize itself as contain- 
 ing the absolute initiative of its own acts, and it might feel 
 itself to be a self identical individual in the absolute sense 
 of that term. But the soul does not stand alone, nor is it 
 conscious of itself in isolation. We saw in developing the 
 objective category of interaction that it has its spring in 
 the community-consciousness of the subject of experience. 
 The soul is not conscious of itself as standing alone, or as 
 excluding its other, but it is conscious of its own agency as 
 including and responding to the agency of its other. The 
 fact of collision which is the most external phenomenon of 
 social relationships, we have seen to be essentially internal 
 and leading to internal modifications of the colliding 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SDBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 269 
 
 elements. It is this internalness of the social situation, 
 entering as it does as a real moment into self-consciousness, 
 that exerts the profoundly modifying influence on the soul's 
 sense of its own agency of which we have spoken above. 
 As a socivs the soul is conscious of its status as a unit in a 
 community of interacting parts or individuals, and this 
 consciousness determines its whole conception of its 
 individual agency. Philosophers have been too much given 
 to representing the volitional agency of the soul as that of a 
 self-sufficient and self-isolated individual, and little or no 
 account has been taken of the social consciousness that must 
 enter into the conception of such agency. One effect of this 
 mode of representation has been a persistent but fruit- 
 less effort to ascribe to the soul a kind of freedom which 
 it is not conscious of possessing, the freedom of absolute 
 initiative which lifts the spring of its choices above the 
 sphere of motives, and makes it, in the last analysis, 
 absolutely self-determining. Were there only one soul in the 
 world the ascription of such agency to it would perhaps be 
 necessary. But inasmuch as the soul's consciousness of its 
 own agency includes in it its relation to the agency of others, 
 its sense of initiative must always be modified in its con- 
 sciousness by the sense of the initiative of its other. Its 
 consciousness of its agency, and consequently its concept of 
 its agency will be that of a reciprocal activity, in which the 
 initiative of each individuality will include in it the moment 
 of modification by its other. There will then be no absolute 
 initiative in such a system, the initiative of each element 
 will be, in the last analysis, relative, and the sense of free- 
 dom which accompanies conscious initiative will be insepar- 
 able from the feeling of dependence which springs oiit of its 
 relativity. 
 
 The application of the categories of the dynamic con- 
 sciousness to the soul's life do not enable it to overcome the 
 dualism of its experience, although the chasm is profoundly 
 bridged in the social consciousness which includes the other 
 along with the self. Now the work, not of closing the chasm, 
 
270 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 for it remains, but of uniting its two moments by means 
 of a unifying bond, is completed in the aesthetic category of 
 unity. The notion of unity springs as we have seen out of 
 the feeling-consciousness, and is, therefore, an emotional 
 bond. The effect of the application of this bond to the 
 subject-consciousness is the soul's sense or feeling of its 
 unity with the life of others. This feeling is developed 
 into cognition by the emphasis which feeling puts on self- 
 consciousness, which in its highest development asserts itself 
 as a unifying principle of the conscious life and agency of 
 the self and its other. Self-consciousness is essentially a 
 function of the socius. It is only in and through his 
 relations with his other that man becomes conscious of 
 himself, and although it is possible by an act of abstraction 
 to conceive himself apart from and in opposition to his 
 other, yet this abstraction itself presupposes the broader 
 concrete consciousness which arises out of a synthesis of the 
 elements that are conceived to be separate. Self-conscious- 
 ness has its genetic root in a consciousness in which the 
 social situation is central, and in which the internal sense 
 or feeling of interacting agency gives rise to the sense of the 
 inseparable unity of the terms of that agency in the 
 individual life. In self-consciousness, then, the soul obtains 
 a cognitive grasp of the unity of its life with that of its 
 other, and this it is that constitutes it consciously and 
 definitely a soeius, and not an isolated unit. 
 
 We do not need to travel over again the road by which 
 the soul comes to the realization of itself, as an individual 
 and self identical personal being. Nor do we need to dwell 
 longer on the method by which the soul comes to a realiza- 
 tion of the nature of its agency in the system to which it 
 belongs, or on the final achievement of the unification of its 
 life with the life of others in the unitary category of self- 
 consciousness and the bond of feeling. It is only necessary 
 to connect this representation of the subject-consciousness 
 with that of the objective categories, through which its world 
 •of content is realized. We will then have a vision of a 
 
CHAP. XI. CATEGORIES OF SUBJECT-CONSCIOUSNESS. 271 
 
 dual world: on the one side a sphere of objective reality 
 gradually defining itself under the forms of the presenta- 
 tional, dynamic, and aesthetic consciousness ; as a jworld of 
 space and time, cause, substance, and interaction, and as 
 a world that finally integrates and completes itself under the 
 category of unity. On the other hand, we will have en- 
 visaged before us the rise of the subject- world, the develop- 
 ment of the soul from the simple spontaneous flow of 
 consciousness in time through the successive stages of the 
 definition of its individual and personal character, up to the 
 point where it asserts itself as a socius; a life that is 
 essentially bound up with the life of others, and exercising an 
 agency that is profoundly involved in the agency of the other. 
 The two worlds, while they remain two therefore, and their 
 dualism is not suppressed, become one through the mediation 
 of the categories, which in addition to their function as 
 defining principles of the real, also mediate the duality of 
 subject and object, and reduce them to the unity of one 
 system. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE WOELD OF INDIVIDUALS. 
 
 The world of experience, the development of which we have 
 been following, is a world of individuals. We have nowhere 
 in it struck a principle the logic of which involves the 
 suppression of the individual in behoof of any universal 
 interest. On the contrary, the whole trend of experience 
 seems to be in the direction of, first, defining the real in 
 individual forms; and, secondly, correlating them into a 
 unitary system of reciprocally interacting parts. Now, the 
 question may arise at this point why this world should take 
 the individual form ? Why, in short, there should be such 
 a universal "penchant on the part of reality to turn out 
 individuals and nothing else ? And we might answer, that 
 for this experience is not responsible, inasmuch as it does 
 not create its individual content, but simply finds it. This 
 answer is in one sense perfectly true and wiU. be insisted on 
 at the proper place, but just here we propose to set it aside, 
 in order to see whether and how far the question admits of 
 any other kind of a reply. In the first place, it is im- 
 portant that we should recall the representation in the 
 preceding pages of the process by which experience defines 
 its world of content. This process, as we have seen, is 
 mediated by the categories, whose main function is that of 
 defining content in realizable forms. And we saw that 
 under these defining principles the content tends to assume 
 
 272 
 
OHAP. XII. THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALS. 273 
 
 the individual form. This is not so manifest, of course, in 
 the sphere of simple space and time presentation, but in the 
 conceptual sphere it becomes more pronounced, while the 
 categories of the dynamic and aesthetic consciousness are 
 distinctively principles for the defining of individuals and 
 their inter-relations. We do not need to be told at this point 
 that the subjective consciousness is individualistic in its 
 character, since in the soul that is central in it we find 
 the point of departure for the whole individualizing 
 activity, so far as experience is concerned. 
 
 Now, if we designate this whole cognitive activity by 
 which experience reaches its apprehension of the world, a 
 thought-activity, we may say in view of the result that 
 thought is an individuating principle, and we would mean 
 by that statement that it is of the very nature of thought to 
 conceive individuals, and the question, therefore, why thought 
 individuates, becomes as futile and unnecessary as would 
 be the question why thought thinks. Again, I think we 
 will have to admit that the answer has validity. For if 
 thought does individuate in the very form of its activity, 
 we have no special right to ask it to account for its own 
 essential nature. This answer, however, tends to bring to 
 the front a consideration which, as I think, has been at the 
 heart of the question from the beginning ; namely, why 
 should the particular individuals be defined that are 
 autually defined ? Not the individual or the function, there- 
 fore, but the selective function that is involved in it is the 
 point in question, and we must admit, I think, that here we 
 have a real question. Does the selective motive rest in 
 thinking itself, or is it to be sought for in some other region 
 of experience? In seeking the answer to this question, 
 however, we must recall the first consideration, and take 
 into account its bearing on the whole situation. It is true 
 that experience is not the creator of its own world, nor are 
 we the creatures of our own experience. The processes of 
 experience, so far as we are conscious of them, are those of 
 discovery and realization, not those of absolute origination. 
 
274 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 We are unable to conceive, in fact, what absolute origina- 
 tion is or may be, and the best we can do toward reducing 
 it to intelligibility is to represent it under some approximate 
 symbol. The world that we realize is, therefore, not a 
 world of fancy or caprice, but one of strict and inevitable 
 necessity. In the broadest sense we realize the one world, 
 because there is but the one world that, so far as we are 
 concerned, can be realized. It would appear then that the 
 question, why this particular world ? is, after all, absurd, 
 and that we have absolutely no option as to our own world. 
 Such a conclusion is felt by every one to be extreme, 
 inasmuch as it takes away from the soul even that relative 
 initiative in its world of which it has so strong a sense, 
 and reduces it practically to the condition of a slave. 
 
 In order to meet this difficulty we may suppose, applying 
 the principle of Leibnitz in a different sphere, that thought 
 has, in spite of the fact pointed out above, a certain in- 
 itiative or free relation toward its world, and this may take 
 the form of conceiving other possible alternative worlds 
 which are virtually set aside in the selection of this par- 
 ticular world. This is, of course, possible, but its futility 
 and aimlessness cannot but be manifest also. A more preg- 
 nant suggestion is that of Eoyce, who supposes on the part 
 of thought the ability and, in fact, the necessity of con- 
 ceiving the hypothetical opposite of what it actually thinks 
 as real. This seems to be indisputable, and this negative 
 mode of conceiving no doubt serves as an important principle 
 in defining reality. But, after all, a negative conception 
 does not of itself determine a real act of selection without the 
 interposition of a more positive motive. There must be 
 something in the world of experience that determines it as 
 our own world, otherwise it could not be real, but would be 
 the simulaoni/m of a world in relation to which our ex- 
 perience has no agency. Such a situation would reduce 
 both the world of experience and the transcendent world to 
 unreality. From this dilemma it is clear that the power of 
 conceiving and excluding the hypothetical opposite will not 
 
CHAP. XII. THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALS. 275 
 
 deliver us. We must go deeper, I think, and connect the 
 knowing activity with its volitional roots in order to find a 
 selective motive that shall be adequate.-^ We believe, with 
 Schopenhauer, that the will-impulse is deeper than that of 
 cognition, and we have tried to show how the knowledge- 
 activity is primarily motived by volition. But we do not 
 believe that will is mere blind impulse. Will has its own 
 category of survival, or good, or whatever we may see fit to 
 call it, that mediates its relation to the world and defines it 
 as a selective activity. To us, then, will is a selective 
 activity, and supplies an important motive, as we saw, in the 
 cognitive apprehension of the world. Here we are in- 
 terested in will principally as a selective motive in the 
 relation of the soul to its world as a whole. It is true that 
 the world-representation that arises is a necessary one, and 
 we have no option as to whether it shall define itself as this 
 kind of a world or some other. But from the standpoint of 
 will the activity of the soul is to be conceived as one of 
 appropriation or rejection under the gradually defining 
 category of the good. There are appropriations of content, 
 but there are also rejections and exclusions, and the net 
 outcome of this process is that out of a gross world involving 
 the possibility of a much larger and, in fact, wholly in- 
 definable or conceivable content, a world has been volition- 
 ally determined composed of selected elements standing over 
 against a dark negative background of elements and possi- 
 bilities which have been excluded. 
 
 It is, as we have endeavoured to point out, in connection 
 with this volition-world, and as presupposing it, that the 
 •cognitive activity arises and unfolds its world-representa- 
 tion. It will be clear, then, that the selective motive of the 
 cognitive world will not be found in the cognitive activity 
 
 ' The connection of this section with Boyce's profound and subtle dis- 
 cussion of the Principle of Individuation in the last part of his Conception 
 of Ood will be obvious. I take pleasure in admitting obligation here, 
 though my own doctrine has been independently developed and for it I 
 alone am responsible. 
 
276 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 itself, but in the volitional activity which underlies it and in 
 a sense precedes it. We must then make a distinction 
 between the question of individuation and that of selection. 
 The question of individuation is answered by pointing to the 
 nature of the thought-activity in its principles of positive 
 and negative definition. And the process by which the 
 individual is progressively defined is that of the categories. 
 We cannot say that space, or time, or cause, or substance is 
 the special principle of individuation. The categories as 
 they arise and in their own sphere are defining and in- 
 dividuating principles. But the world of individualities as 
 it finally emerges is a result in which they have all par- 
 ticipated. The soul itself supplies, no doubt, the type of 
 individuality, and the form which it assumes under the sub- 
 jective categories is doubtless the form to which the in- 
 dividuals of the objective- world are gradually approxi- 
 mating. The soul's individuality expresses itself ultimately 
 in the form of a socius, and this determines, as we have seen, 
 the final stage in the conception of the individual constitu- 
 tion of the world. It might be said, then, with some reason, 
 that in the soul itself the ultimate motive of individuation 
 is to be found, and this is no doubt true. But when we 
 have distinguished the soul as a thinking activity from the 
 soul as a voluntary agent, the former is no longer com- 
 pletely explanatory. It answers the question of individua- 
 tion, and therefore enables us to see that it is inevitable 
 that the world should become defined in individual forms. 
 But it does not answer the question of selection which we 
 have found it necessary to distinguish from that of individua- 
 tion. For the selective motive of the world we must fall 
 back upon the soul as a voluntary agent which, through the 
 activities of appropriation and rejection, is progressively 
 realizing its ideal of the good. This volitional activity is 
 presupposed in the cognitive, and our world, which we 
 realize, is felt to be one in regard to which we have some 
 option. In spite of its necessity, the part of it which we 
 actually realize has in a sense been selected from a much 
 
CHAP. XII. THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALS. 277 
 
 larger sphere of possibilities. It is at least a world toward 
 which our wills have had an opportunity to take an attitude, 
 and this answers our question, so far as it can be answered 
 from our human point of view ; why this particular world ? 
 That the question is not completely answerable from our 
 human point of view every one will admit. There is no 
 point of absolute initiative anywhere in experience. The 
 volitional agency of the soul is one that is qualified by its 
 inter-relations. The individualities that arise in the objec- 
 tive representation of the world are, as we saw, in their 
 subjective relation, posits of the central activity and pre- 
 suppose it, while in relation to the soul itself the world and 
 its individualities are necessary. If there is any point 
 from which absolute initiative can be conceived and, there- 
 fore, absolute freedom in relation to the whole world of 
 experience, this point must be one that is transcendent of 
 any human individual experience but not necessarily one 
 that is transcendent of any possible experience. Eelated 
 to this consideration is the question of more speculative 
 than practical importance, how we come to know and affirm 
 other individuals besides ourselves. The common answer, 
 which is confined to our knowledge of conscious beings like 
 ourselves, is that we reach this knowledge by a process of 
 inference from external signs, and this is, no doubt, true 
 as far as it goes. But it does not go very far. If we 
 distinguish the general question as to the basis of our 
 knowledge of other individuals from the special and alto- 
 gether local question as to how we come to specialize this 
 acquaintance in becoming aware of some particular indi- 
 vidual, it is easy enough to see that the popular answer 
 has the latter mainly in view, and that it is relatively 
 satisfactory. That the individual in question is my son 
 Jack, and not some other boy of my acquaintance, I know 
 by the interpretation of a multitude of outward signs. 
 But the question how we come to assert other individuals 
 besides ourselves is a phase of the more profound question 
 how the content of our experience comes to individuate 
 
278 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 itself. The final reason for this we do not find in our experi- 
 ence, inasmuch as we have seen that our experience-processes 
 are not creative. They do not absolutely originate the 
 individuals which they apprehend, and the profoundest func- 
 tion of initiative that they do exercise with respect to them, 
 is, as we have seen, that of volitional selection. But though 
 this be true, the fact that the whole cognitive process is one 
 of individuation has been made clear. The root-intuition of 
 individuality is to be found in the soul itself. We do not 
 puzzle ourselves over the question how we apprehend our- 
 selves as individuals. Our whole representation of self 
 takes normally the individual form. Our trouble is about 
 others. But why should we vex ourselves about this 
 question? Have we not seen that the soul is essentially 
 a soc^^ls, and that its consciousness of itself includes the 
 recognition of its other? In the act, then, in which the 
 soul asserts itself, it also posits its other ; that is, another 
 individual. Also, in regard to objective experience, we have 
 seen that the fundamental inner act in the cognition of 
 things is a posit in which a point of individuation is 
 afi&rmed, for this is the meaning of the experience-act 
 which takes place under the notion of substance. Things 
 are, therefore, constitutionally individuals, and can in the 
 nature of things be nothing else. That we know the 
 not-self in individual form is the result of the consti- 
 tution of our experience, and that we should cognize some 
 individuals as other selves is provided for by the nature 
 of the soul, as not an isolated tmit but a socivs. The 
 truth is, as we have seen, that the spontaneous ten- 
 dency in the untutored consciousness is to regard all 
 others as other selves. This tendency springs directly out 
 of the social constitution of our consciousness, and the fact 
 that we make a distinction and conceive some individuals 
 as things and not selves, is a result of the tutoring of 
 experience. The tendency to posit the other in all cases as 
 a being like ourselves, is checked and modified by our 
 experience of the objective world in which some individuals 
 
CHAP. XII. THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALS. 279 
 
 fail to behave as beings of consciousness and will, would be 
 expected to behave, and this experience leads gradually to 
 the notion of things as individual agents without conscious- 
 ness and wiU. Instead, therefore, of puzzling ourselves 
 over the question how we come to recognize some indi- 
 viduals as beings like ourselves, we ought rather to ask 
 how it comes to pass that we do not regard all individuals 
 as beings like ourselves, and the answer to this question will 
 be found, if at all, in a careful analysis of the processes of 
 objective knowledge. 
 
 The last topic which we shall discuss in this connection is 
 the question of the reality of the world whose representation 
 we have been unfolding. We saw in the first section of 
 this book that to be real is, in the last analysis, to be realized 
 content of experience. And to be objectively real is, there- 
 fore, to be realized objective content of experience. But in 
 working out the definition of reality we were careful to 
 show that under the term, realized content of experience, we 
 meant to include not merely content that has been or will 
 be actually realized but also, and in fact we may say, 
 rather, the whole sphere of possible content of experience, 
 together with the necessary implications which may be 
 involved in the experience-content itself. In the only true 
 sense that is conceivable the meaning of a thing includes its 
 implications and the application of this common-sense 
 principle to experience itself leads us, not to the affirmation 
 that anything may be transcendent of experience when that 
 term is conceived in its absolute sense, but rather that in 
 any actual or possible content of experience there may be 
 terms whose implications are transcendent of experience of 
 that type. Now it is in the light of this larger section of 
 reality that we wish to consider the question of the world 
 which we apprehend in our experience. And in view of 
 this the first step of our answer will consist in distinguishing 
 between the world of defined content which arises normally 
 and necessarily out of the processes of experience as a whole, 
 and any world of fancy, or caprice, or disordered cognitive 
 
280 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 activity which fails to bear the tests of reality that we are 
 able to devise. We do not need to enumerate these tests 
 but simply to accent the fact here that experience has means 
 of testing its own results and that these tests are in the 
 main sufficient to enable us to distinguish between reality 
 and illusion. The real from this point of view is then, that 
 representation of the world which, having arisen by normal 
 processes, is able to bear the ordeal of the tests that ex- 
 perience itself applies to it. But it is clear that this does 
 not completely satisfy us as to the reality of our world. 
 The very nature of our experience is such, as we have 
 endeavoured to show, that nothing final can arise in it, and 
 in view of this relativity it may be possible for our world to 
 bear all the empirical tests and to vindicate itself as a 
 normal product of cognitive activity, and at the same time 
 to be purely subjective: that is, purely an affair of our 
 experience. The incurable root of illusion and scepticism 
 in subjective idealism arises here. It may accept the 
 world of experience as valid for experience and as able to 
 bear all the empirical tests, but its insistance on the pure 
 relativity of the representation reduces its world to illusion 
 by a logic that is irresistible. The notion of reality is 
 satisfied only when we are able to dispel the Ulusion of pure 
 relativity by anchoring our world of experience to points of 
 transcendence where it becomes evident that the experience- 
 processes, in the last analysis, are not creative. In its 
 profoundest significance our experience fiinds its content, 
 and in regard to its world as a whole in the largest sense, 
 it has no option. It must find what it does find. Now, it 
 is this inevitableness of things ; this coerciveness of our 
 world by virtue of which it leaves us no option as to 
 whether we shall apprehend it or some other world ; it is 
 this inevitableness, I say, that satisfies us of its reality. 
 And to the objection that this inevitableness itself may be 
 purely subjective in its origin and be simply a reflex in 
 consciousness of the uniform mode by which we realize 
 our world, we can only say that such a supposition is 
 
CHAP. XII. THE WORLD OF INDIVIDUALS. 281 
 
 incapable of any demonstration, and has against it the whole 
 weight of the intrinsic relativity of our experience. The 
 shallowness of subjective idealism is evinced in its inveterate 
 tendency to regard the experience in which the world of 
 content arises as itself absolute and only the experience- 
 content as relative. This being the case it becomes the 
 simple creation of the experience-activities. Then by a 
 dialectical feat worthy of a logical acrobat the objective 
 reality of the content is denied on the ground of its pure 
 subjectivity, when in fact its absolute reality ought rather 
 to be affirmed. We have found on the contrary that the 
 experience-processes themselves are relative. The cognitive 
 activity has a very limited sphere of freedom within the 
 broad outlines of its world, and it finds its world in the main 
 compulsory. Its activities as it becomes conscious of them are 
 nowhere creative or originative, but everywhere acts of dis- 
 covery and definition. When we relate the cognitive 
 activity to that of voluntary agency we reach a sphere of 
 larger freedom where our world is in a sense the outcome of 
 our own choice. But even here we find, as we have pointed 
 out in another section, that volitional agency as we are 
 conscious of exercising it, is only relative, and qualified. 
 Our wills have no absolute initiative, they are not creative 
 but selective and assimilative, and the initiative which they 
 do exercise is modified by the social consciousness which 
 renders them patients and incorporates the impulsions they 
 receive from their other into the central motivity of their 
 own agency. From the point of view of volitional agency 
 then, as well as from that of cognitive activity the inevit- 
 ableness of the world springs from the relativity of the 
 experience-activities out of which its representation arises. 
 We have only to trace our experience to its last resorts in 
 order to discover an exhibition of its relativity. The points 
 of its initiation are invariably found to be points of 
 transcendence, in relation to which experience has no 
 option, but which it must receive in the spirit of a little 
 child. The world is accepted as real in the first instance 
 
282 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 therefore, if it is able to prove itself normal by submitting 
 to all the tests which experience is able to devise for the 
 guaranteeing of its own content. It is accepted as real, in 
 the last analysis, if it rebukes and punishes all our attempts 
 to rebel against it or to treat it capriciously as a creature of 
 fancy, and forces us to approach it submissively and in the 
 true spirit of a learner. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 
 
 In the preceding chapters we have seen how the world of 
 experience resolves itself ultimately into a world of in- 
 dividuals and how the relations among these individuals are 
 reducible to the category of community or interaction. In 
 the analysis of interaction we have also found that the 
 notion makes necessary at a certain point, a transition from 
 the concept of external to that of internal influence. A, in 
 order to really influence h, must in some sense become 
 internal to 6 so that the pulse of 6's activity shall contain in 
 it the moment supplied by the modifying agency of a. 
 This transition from the notion of external to that of 
 internal agency is identical with the passage from the 
 mechanical to the teleological, as we shall see later on, but 
 the point of interest here is not so much the characterization 
 of the change as the determination of its nature. What is 
 involved in the notion of the agency of the other becoming 
 internal and included ? Clearly it means that the mode of 
 6's being influenced by a, will be determined by the capacity 
 of & to receive impressions or their equivalent from a and 
 to translate these impressions into impulses to activity. In 
 short, the influence of a must enter into the life-activity of 
 6 as part of its motivity. The question how this is possible 
 naturally suggests the analogy of conscious activity, but it is 
 clear that we come upon this mode of activity in nature 
 
 283 
 
284 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, pakt ii. 
 
 before the stage of internal consciousness is reached, or at 
 least before we can affirm the internal presence of con- 
 sciousness. The description of the form of internal agency 
 as realizing itself through the inclusion and assimilation of 
 the influence of the other, might be taken as a provisional 
 definition of life, and we are clearly dealing with the form 
 of individual agency to which the term living is ordinarily 
 applied. Our question, therefore, becomes ; what is living 
 agency in its essence, and how is it to be distinguished from 
 the form of agency which we call mechanical or non-living? 
 There are, of course, various points of view from which 
 differentiae might be developed, but we are seeking a basal 
 distinction and we will find it, I think, in the notion of 
 individuality already developed. The world of content is 
 reducible to a plurality of interacting individuals. Now, it 
 is only necessary to suppose that there is an inherent 
 tendency on the part of the individual toward self-assertion 
 and self-realization, a tendency which we shall seek to 
 ground at a later stage, in order to be able to connect the 
 form of agency we call life, with mechanism on the one hand, 
 and with conscious directive agency on the other. Let us 
 suppose that what we call mechanical activity implies the 
 minimum of individual self-assertion and that this minimum 
 is involved in the notion of force or that which includes 
 in its definition simply the moment of forward pulsion but 
 not in any sense the end or outcome of its action. Mechanical 
 activity will be conceived therefore as internally pulsive but 
 not internally selective or directive. It will be clear in the 
 light of this conception that the individuality of force will 
 consist mainly in its supplying a point of departure for a 
 mechanical process, and this will give us the notion of 
 individuality in its lowest terms. 
 
 Let us suppose now that the agency of the individual 
 reaches a point where it begins to include not only the 
 moment of straight-forward pulsion, but also a disposition 
 to be selective and assimilative. As a result it begins to be 
 choice of its company and manifests this by admitting some 
 
CHAP. XIII. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 285 
 
 kinds of stimulating influences and turning away from others. 
 It is clear that this kind of agency is beginning to be end- 
 conserving, and that there is beginning also to be a centre 
 of contained motivity in the individual itself and that this 
 will make it necessary for us to enlarge the concept of in- 
 dividuality beyond the point required by mechanism. For 
 the individual can no longer be represented as simply a point 
 of departure for a straight-out pulsive force, but it must 
 now be regarded as a point of departure which is at the same 
 time a centre of selective and assimilative activity. The 
 activity of the merely living individual thus becomes end- 
 seeking, but not consciously so, inasmuch as it does not in any 
 direct sense contemplate an end, but its activity, in so far as 
 it is selective and assimilative, works out in the form of 
 action that seeks an end. The real motive of the activity 
 is, however, a pulsion that has in it the moment or potency 
 of selection and assimilation. That we here come upon a 
 form of individuality that is capable of being internally 
 influenced and through this, of acting selectively and 
 teleologically, is the important fact, and to this form of 
 individuality as well as to the agency that it manifests, 
 the term organic is applied to distinguish it from the 
 mechanical and inorganic. An organism is therefore an 
 individual that is susceptible of being internally influenced by 
 its other, and that through this internal susceptibility develops 
 a form of agency that is both responsive and selective. 
 
 We reach in this way the notion of the biological indi- 
 vidual pure and simple, as distinguished from that higher 
 form of life that is accompanied with consciousness. The 
 living individual, by virtue of its internal and selective 
 character, becomes an interacting centre of a peculiar kind. 
 The problem of its inter-activity is no longer that of a 
 mechanical clash or composition of external forces, nor 
 yet that of chemical composition, but it is that of an 
 individual which has developed a power of receiving its 
 other into itself, and, through this receptiveness the 
 capacity of responding to its environment in a way that 
 
286 EVOLUTION OF CATBGOKIBS OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 is at once self-conserving and adaptive. Now, it is in 
 view of this form of individual agency, which we call 
 living, that the categories of organic activity are to be 
 construed. The temptation of the biologist will be, in the 
 first instance at least, to imagine too wide a gap between 
 the mechanical and the organic, and to suppose that it will 
 be necessary for the organic to develop a set of brand- 
 new categories of its own. He will find, however, 
 that the categories he uses are for the most part the old 
 concepts of mechanism modified so as to adapt them to 
 the transformed agency which we call life. That this is 
 true a brief analysis will be sufficient to prove. So far 
 as space and time are concerned no appreciable modification 
 takes place. The relations of the organic to space and time, 
 in so far as they do not involve consciousness, will not 
 differ appreciably from the time and space relations of the 
 inorganic. It is only when we take into account the cate- 
 gories of agency that we will find important modifications 
 necessary, and even here the change will be largely one of 
 form, while the principle of the category remains unchanged. 
 For if we enter into biological thinking on this point I 
 think we will find that the concept of agency assumes two 
 leading forms. (1) That of a causally conditioned series in 
 time, and (2) that of a system of co-existing and interacting 
 individual organisms. Out of the first will arise the con- 
 cept of organic evolution, with its complemental notion of 
 heredity, which is the form taken by substance, or the 
 moment of persistence in an organic series. The second 
 notion, that of interaction, when applied to co-existing 
 organisms, will yield the categories of differentiation and 
 integration on which the fortunes of organization are so 
 vitally dependent, while the combination of the two 
 notions of agency will yield those categories of co-ordination 
 and equilibration which characterize the biological move- 
 ment as a whole. It is only necessary, then, to attain an 
 intelligent concept of the difference in the forms of indi- 
 viduality, which are involved respectively in organic and 
 
CHAP. XIII. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 287 
 
 inorganic science, in order to become convinced that the 
 categories of the organic may be regarded as, in the main, 
 transformations of concepts that are fundamental in the 
 science of the inorganic. 
 
 We come at length to the point where consciousness 
 arises and becomes internal to the organism and transforms 
 the biological individual into the psychic and social. The 
 biological situation involves, as we have seen, an individual 
 in responsive relations with its other, which is represented as 
 external. The biological individual is directly pulsive in its 
 activity, and only indirectly, and by a secondary intention, 
 end-seeking, through its selective susceptibility. To the 
 conscious organism, however, the selective motive becomes 
 internal. Consciousness, as we have seen, is never simple, 
 but internally complex, even in its lowest forms. It involves 
 a rudimental duality, and there is included in it a subject- 
 centre of individual activity related to an objective other 
 with which it is in responsive relations, and it is through 
 this internalization of what is partly external to the biologi- 
 cal individual, that the psychic and social individual is able 
 to translate a biologically-outlying environment into an 
 internal world of realized content. Let us suppose, then, 
 that the individual has become internally conscious and 
 psychic ; by virtue of the same transformation, it' also be- 
 comes social Now, the social nature is not wholly absent 
 from the plant, for wherever there is kind, and the basis of 
 genus and species, there is also the germ of possible 
 sociality, but in a non-conscious organism the motive of 
 kind can be only pulsive and indirectly end-seeking through 
 its selective susceptibility. In order to be consciously appre- 
 hended, and to enter into the individual activity as a real 
 determining motive, the end-seeking must become direct 
 through the selective activity becoming conscious. This is 
 what happens when an individual organism becomes 
 conscious; the pulsive energy and the selective susceptibility 
 unite in one conscious impulse to appropriate the object 
 which has become internally represented. Conscious activity 
 
288 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 is therefore end-seeking, and it is so primarily because the 
 object that is external to the biological activity becomes 
 internal to the conscious activity. 
 
 In order to realize how the object-term becomes internal 
 to consciousness we have only to take account of the whole 
 cognitive activity of consciousness, in which, viewed objec- 
 tively, a world becomes internal through impressions that 
 are worked up by the presentative and conceptual activities 
 into the idea or representation of the object. This idea or 
 representation is the environment, the external other of the 
 biological situation become internal, and we do not require 
 to be told that it is of the very nature of consciousness to 
 incorporate this internal object-representation with the 
 pulsive activity, and thus to translate the whole into the 
 form of conscious end-seeking activity. Conscious activity 
 is therefore directly and immediately end-seeking, and does 
 not become so by a kind of second intention. The dialectic, 
 that is external to the biological individual and relates it 
 to a non-included object, thus becomes internal to the psychic 
 individual and relates it to an object-term which it is the 
 nature of consciousness to internalize and render an included 
 factor in its end-seeking activity. 
 
 Now, just as the end-seeking activity in the biological 
 individual is also kind-realizing, so we find the same to 
 be true in a higher sense of the conscious activity, and the 
 thought occurs to us that here we may be very near to the 
 spring of the sense of kind itself. The truth is, an end- 
 seeking consciousness may, in the first instance, be repre- 
 sented as a consciousness whose activity is motived by a 
 sense of kind, and when we seek to trace this motive to its 
 root we find that biologically it merges in the selective 
 susceptibility itself, and that the root of this susceptibility 
 must be referred, in the last analysis, to the primary indi- 
 vidual nature that we have to presuppose as the ground of 
 all processes. In like manner we are obliged to trace the 
 primary root of the sense of kind to the self in some 
 primary individual nature that in becoming internally 
 
CHAP. XIII. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 289 
 
 conscious, becomes also the "fontal type'' of all the ends 
 which it seeks objectively. The sense of kind, or, in a more 
 developed form, the notion of kind, is thus in the last analysis 
 the sense or notion of that which is congruous with the feeling 
 or notion of self, while the absence of the sense of kind 
 would involve the absence or failure of this sense of congruity. 
 We seem in this way to be able to establish a fundamental 
 analogy between the assimilative activities of the biological 
 organism and the kind-sense of the socius. The kind-sense 
 is simply the recognition of the social material that is 
 congruous and therefore assimilable, whereas the absence of 
 the kind-sense indicates non-assimilable social material. 
 The sense of kind will thus arise in view of socially assimil- 
 able material, and we have seen that the fontal type of 
 the assimilable is to be found in the last analysis in the 
 nature of the self. Right here, however, we must connect 
 this result with one obtained some way back : namely,' that 
 the end-seeking activity of consciousness is constituted by 
 the incorporation of the notion of the internally represented 
 other with the pulsive energy of consciousness. This is the 
 essential constitution of a conscious activity, and we cannot 
 conceive any activity that is conscious in the full sense, 
 other than in this form. Genetically, then, the antecedent 
 of such activity must be either purely biological and un- 
 conscious, or it will be what we call instinctive, which is 
 simply conscious activity with one leg as yet buried in the 
 slime. Instinct may be regarded as consciousness that is 
 conscious of its pulsive energy but has not as yet made its 
 object completely internal, and is not, therefore, consciously 
 end-realizing. Instinct will therefore be the true genetic 
 antecedent of full consciousness, and it will be necessary 
 here to represent consciousness as going on to full realization, 
 and to this end, as passing inevitably through the stage of 
 half realization which we call instinct. Taking this as 
 settled, we find it necessary then to regard the moment of 
 object-inclusion and end-seeking, as an essential part of the 
 constitution of individual conscious activity, and it must, 
 
 T 
 
290 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 therefore, enter constitutionally into the determination of 
 self. 
 
 Let us now put our two conclusions together and see 
 what the result will be. We have found in the first place 
 that the sense of kind has its fontal spring in the sense of 
 self, and we have seen in the second place that consciousness 
 is constitutionally inclusive of its object, and that the 
 representation or notion of this enters into the conscious 
 pulse of self-activity. Eight here we come upon that 
 duality which, as we have seen in another connection, 
 determines the form of that modified agency of which we 
 finite beings are conscious, and which here exhibits to us 
 that inner dialectic between the self and the object or other, 
 which constitutes man a socitis. The result of this dialectic 
 is that the self and the other are mutually and reciprocally 
 determining. The self is determined as self through the 
 entrance into it of the modifying sense or concept of the other, 
 and the other is determined as other through its inclusion of 
 the sense or concept of the self. The self-consciousness of 
 the socius is thus constitutionally reciprocal and dual. Ee- 
 turning, then, to the consideration of that sense or notion 
 of kind which, according to Professor Giddings,^ is central 
 in the social consciousness, we find that its roots are dual. 
 It arises out of an inner dialectic between the sense or 
 notion of self and the sense of an other that is congruous 
 to self, but we have to avoid the supposition that either 
 term in this duality is absolutely fixed. They are mutually 
 modifiable, and the incorporation that takes place is the 
 result of mutual adjustment. The sense or notion of kind 
 is, therefore, the sense or notion of the other like ourselves, 
 which becomes incorporated with our sense or notion of self 
 and internally moulds it into the sense or notion of a 
 self that is a socius. The internal dialectic between the 
 self and the other like itself, thus underlies the social con- 
 
 ^ Art. "Sociology" in Vol. VII. of Johnson's Cyclopedia and. The Theory of 
 Sociology, in which the positions are fully elaborated, and a good beginning 
 made in sociological theory. 
 
CHAP. xiii. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 291 
 
 scioHsness which it constitutes, and when we seek to analyze 
 the mode of this dialectic and the steps by which the social 
 consciousness is achieved, we are directly in the domain of 
 social psychology, and may take as our guides such pioneers 
 in this field as Tarde and Baldwin,^ who find in imitation 
 the mode by which the self-activity enters into its other, 
 and thus in the end renders it internal to itself as part of 
 its own constitution. It is through attempts to imitate, 
 these writers contend, that the child's realization of its 
 objective world is mediated, and imitation becomes a 
 category in the development of the social consciousness just 
 in so far as it mediates the realization of the other like 
 ourselves. The problem of genetic social psychology may 
 from this point of view be represented, then, as that of the 
 development of the consciousness of kind through that 
 imitative activity which enables us to enter into the inner 
 life of the other like ourselves, and by means of this 
 objective moment, to make the sense or notion of the other 
 internal to our own consciousness. 
 
 We may conceive now that the social self-consciousness 
 has been achieved, and this will supply us with the form of 
 individuality that is central in the sphere of social activity. 
 It is an individual whose self-conscious activity — we may 
 call it the primary pulsive energy of the conscious self — has 
 incorporated with it the consciousness of the other like itself, 
 and the incorporation of which determines the social con- 
 sciousness to be an end-conceiving and end-seeking activity. 
 A conscious end-seeking activity is, as we have seen, an 
 activity the sense or notion of whose object has become 
 internal as a motive for its own realization, and a social 
 end-seeking activity is surely this same form of agency in 
 which the object is one of TeiTid. The social individual is 
 therefore one that is brought into conscious end-seeking 
 relations with others of his own kind, and whose con- 
 
 1 Gabriel Tarde, Les Loie de I' Imitation, 1890. Baldwin, Mentai Develop- 
 ment, 2 vols. In both these works, and especially in the latter, the function 
 of imitation as a building category of sociality is emphasized and elaborated. 
 
292 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 sciousness of these relations constitutes the ground of the 
 sociality of his nature. 
 
 There is an aspect of the process by which the social 
 consciousness is developed that has been too much over- 
 looked, and that is yet of vital importance. "We have seen, 
 in dealing with other phases of experience, that it is neces- 
 sary everywhere to distinguish between the subject and 
 object activities in experience, and it will be necessary to 
 observe this distinction here in order not to overlook one 
 whole side of the social situation. The dialectic of the 
 social consciousness is one in which the subject or self 
 develops into a socius. This may be called the subject- 
 moment of the activity. But the dialectic would not be 
 conceivable if it did not include also a moment of objective 
 activity which is determinative of the nature of the other. 
 The peculiarity of the situation is that it is a compound 
 dualism ; the subject-determination resulting in a self that is 
 a socius, while the object-determination, in which, as we 
 have seen, the moment of self is included, results in an 
 object or other that is a self. The whole social situation 
 must include, then, the representation of a subject that is a 
 socius in dialectical relations with an object or other that 
 is a social self, and the dialectic will be simply the reci- 
 procal or interacting relations of these self-terms in which 
 each not only distinguishes itself from its other in the funda- 
 mental differentiation of the self from its object, or not self, 
 but also identifies itself with its other in the sense or 
 notion of kind. In short, the social situation is a modi- 
 fication of the general psychic situation brought about by 
 the incorporation into consciousness of the sense or notion 
 of kind. This will not, it is clear, effect any change in the 
 relation of the object to the conscious activities, but will 
 only modify the nature of the object itself, making it an 
 objective socius rather than an object of another kind. The 
 point which it seems necessary to emphasize here is that the 
 object of the social consciousness is a socius as truly as is 
 the subject, but that it is a different socius. If we take 
 
CHAP. XIII. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 293 
 
 into account only the process by which the self becomes a 
 socius, then it will be hard for us to conceive why the other 
 should not be completely absorbed into the subject-self, 
 and there would be danger of a kind of social solipsism, 
 whereas by taking into account the objective activity also, 
 we are able to see how the other socius objective to us is as 
 essential to the situation as the socius that is ourself, and 
 this will supply us with a true basis for social interaction. 
 
 The notion of the community-consciousness is not identi- 
 cal with that of the individual socius, but it is rather the 
 notion of a consciousness that develops out of the conscious 
 interaction of the social self with his social other. "We 
 have simply to view the social situation objectively in order 
 to reach the idea of a community of interacting individuals 
 of the social type, and of the communal consciousness as 
 the consciousness that arises out of the experiences of social 
 interaction. We are not concerned here to trace the 
 agencies in experience which lead to its development, but 
 there are two fundamental moments of the social dialectic 
 for the theorizing of which the present point in the discus- 
 sion seems to furnish a most favourable opportunity. I 
 mean the moments of egoism and altruism. The dialectic 
 of social interaction must be conceived as having two 
 distinctive moments, that of objective identification with the 
 social other in which we are conscious of entering into the 
 life of the other, and that of the rebound or return from 
 the other and the assertion of the self as distinct from the 
 other, in which we are conscious of including the other, or 
 of incorporating it into ourself. The moment of egoism is 
 therefore a pulse of self-realization through the appropria- 
 tion of the other, while that of altruism is a pulse of other- 
 realization through self-inclusion in and identification with 
 the life of the other. The impossibility of separating the 
 two moments thus becomes obvious, and it also becomes 
 clear that normal egoism is not abstract individual self- 
 assertion, but the self-realizing pulse of a consciousness that 
 includes its other ; nor on the other hand is altruism pure 
 
294 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 abstract otherness, but a pulse of other-realization in which 
 self is included. The form of egoism which we call selfish- 
 ness or self-seeking arises only when some subject-self 
 attempts to ignore the objective side of the dialectic in its 
 feelings or life-aims and seeks to absorb the wealth of the 
 other without in turn returning its own wealth to the other, 
 and it is clear that extreme altruism is an opposite abstrac- 
 tion of the same type. 
 
 What we call the community-consciousness, then, is a 
 consciousness which, proceeding on the general sense or 
 notion of kind, arises out of the interaction of social in- 
 dividuals, and embodies itself in the opposite and alternating 
 moments of egoism and altruism, as above explained, through 
 which it progresses towards maturity. We are not specially 
 interested here in the means by which this result is achieved, 
 except to remark that when the situation is objectively con- 
 ceived it becomes obvious that the moment of difference will 
 assert itself as well as that of identity, and that collision and 
 conflict will perhaps share the honours with imitation in 
 bringing about social results. Historically, of course, this is 
 verifiable, but we are here seeking to show how such a situ- 
 ation has its grounds in the human constitution. A class of 
 modern thinkers, from Hobbes to Benjamin Kidd, have 
 espoused the doctrine that the nature of man is purely 
 egoistic and self-seeking, and that the restraint of altruism 
 must be imposed from the outside — Hobbes finding it in 
 an absolute State and Kidd in Eeligion. And a logical 
 deduction from this theory of human nature is the con- 
 clusion that the natural state of man is one that is pre- and 
 anti-social ; one in which the egoistic wills simply fly at one 
 another's throats, and that sociality is a superinduction 
 brought about either by force or by the instinct of self- 
 preservation. In such a scheme there is no common ground, 
 but the isolated units clash together in a conflict that cannot 
 be mediated except from without. The doctrine of these 
 thinkers rests on a false and defective analysis of human 
 nature, which might have been avoided by a study of the 
 
CHAP. XIII. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 295 
 
 ever-wonderful Greeks and more especially of the Politics of 
 Aristotle, which distinctively defines man as by nature a 
 political animal. The freshest results of modern investiga- 
 tion are tending to confirm this Aristotelian insight, and to 
 establish the constitutional sociahty of man's nature. 
 
 We proceed now to consider the categories of the com- 
 munity-consciousness. In treating of the biological individual 
 we saw how the taking into account of the nature of the 
 living organism enabled us to see that the principal categories 
 of the organic sphere are simply transformations of the 
 categories of the inorganic and mechanical. A similar in- 
 sight will come to us here if we take into account the 
 nature of the individuals which constitute our social com- 
 munity, namely : that their own individuality has been 
 achieved through the inclusion of the mechanical and 
 organic as moments in their own more developed conscious- 
 ness. And the proposition which we wish to state here as 
 capable of proof, but which we shall not stop to prove, is 
 that the leading categories of the mechanical and organic are, 
 when so modified as to be adapted to the more developed 
 form of individuality to which they are related, also lead- 
 ing categories of the social consciousness. What I mean 
 is that, allowing for the difference of the socius from the 
 mechanical or biological individual, in dealing with and 
 organizing the materials of our social world into the forms 
 of knowledge we make an application of the categories of 
 cause, substance, interaction, and unification. We have 
 seen, however, that interaction is the category par excellence 
 of the social sphere, and this is what we would be led to 
 expect when we consider that as the point of individuality 
 becomes emphasized so will the inter-relations of individuals 
 tend to rise into prominence. From another point of view, 
 however, the category of cause, or rather that of conditioned 
 causation in time, becomes prominent, and constitutes the 
 point of view from which we conceive historical and genetic 
 evolution. Taking the objective view, we may conceive the 
 whole contents of the present social consciousness as the 
 
296 EVOLtfTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, pabt ii. 
 
 last link in a chain of causal developments in a time-series, 
 and then it will be incumbent on us to apply to it the 
 methods and principles of historical and genetic analysis. 
 On this aspect we do not dwell here, since, important as it 
 is to the investigation of social phenomena, it is only when 
 we conceive our content under the category of community 
 or interaction that we are able to grasp the fundamentals of 
 the social situation. To this point of view we return, then, 
 for the final considerations of this chapter. 
 
 We have seen that in the last analysis the social con- 
 sciousness resolves itself into a dialectic between a self 
 that includes its other and an other that includes the self 
 in its larger scope, and that the meaning of the terms egoism 
 and altruism must be determined in the light of this rela- 
 tion. Now, we may go a step farther, and, observing that 
 we subjectively apprehend the self that includes its other, 
 whereas the other that is inclusive of self is objectively 
 apprehended, we may apply distinctions already recognized 
 as fundamental, and may represent the two terms as the sub- 
 jective and the objective selves, and in view of this the terms 
 of the social dialectic will be a subject and an object self. 
 The result of this situation will be, that the self that includes 
 its other finds itself related to the other in which it is itself 
 included, as to an objective social world. The objective self 
 will be the world of social individuals in which its own ob- 
 jective life is included, and the dialectic will take the form of 
 reciprocal action between the subject-self and the objective 
 social world of which it is a part; and it is important that 
 we should take into account here that this objective social 
 sphere,- while in the last analysis it is a community of inter- 
 acting individuals, is also the world of social grouping and 
 organization, though we are obliged to assume it here with- 
 out further analysis. As a result, we have the social 
 individual as a subject self or ego, including the other in its 
 own consciousness, standing in functional relations with 
 society, or the social organism in which its own objective 
 life is included, and that functional relation expresses itself 
 
CHAP. xni. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OP COMMUNITY. 297 
 
 in a dialectic between two opposite moments, the one 
 egoistic, in which the objective social is regarded simply as 
 the nourishing mother of the self, and as tributary to the 
 self-realization of the ego : the other altruistic and objective, 
 in which the ego identifies itself with and becomes included 
 in, the objective life of society. 
 
 It is clear, I think, that we have a situation here out of 
 which will develop some of the most fundamental features 
 of our human experience. We are not concerned so much 
 with the actual mode in which the various forms of social con- 
 sciousness have developed, or with the conditions that may 
 have influenced and modified that development, as we are with 
 the, to us, more fundamental consideration, the structural 
 conditions out of which these forms of social consciousness 
 have arisen. In regard to this root-problem, as it may truly 
 be called, an insight into the real nature of the social 
 dialectic is fundamental, inasmuch as it enables us to see 
 how the individual can, and in fact must, regard himself at 
 the same time as an individual unit and as an included part 
 in a social organism. The fact that man is conscious of 
 himself as both an individual unit and as an undivided part 
 of a larger and objective whole is the most fundamental fact 
 of his social life. It not only supplies to him a point of 
 independent status as an individual, and thus secures him 
 from complete absorption into the socio-political organism, 
 but it relates his ego to a larger and richer whole in which 
 its own life is objectively included, and which from this 
 very relation is destined to perform an all-important part in 
 the economy of its own life. The very fact that its own 
 subjective experience is in a sense isolated and apart from 
 that of its fellows, while its objective experience is an 
 undivided part of a larger and richer common life, tends to 
 destroy the equi-balance which we might expect to find 
 existing between the two moments, by subordinating the 
 subject-consciousness of the ego to the object-consciousness 
 of the community and investing the latter with quasi or 
 real legislative authority. The point we are making here 
 
298 EVOLUTION OF CATEGORIES OF KNOWLEDGE, part ii. 
 
 is not one of mere speculation, but is the normal outcome 
 of our experience as beings that are conscious of our social 
 relations. We are not considering at all at this point the 
 relatively external and accidental function which mere force 
 and violence may have performed in bringing about the 
 subordination of the individual to the community, for what 
 mere force has done may be undone in the same manner. 
 The real problem here is something deeper, and we are 
 seeking, in fact, the rationale of the supreTr".cy of the objective 
 consciousness of the community over that of the subject 
 individual, in the fundamental relations of the social situa- 
 tion itself Taking this as settled, then, we have only to 
 recall the conclusion reached in a former chapter ; namely, 
 that the principle of rationality, which, as we shall see in 
 the third division of this work, is also the rational ground 
 of all authority, is simply the principle of the unity of our 
 experience as a whole; in order to be convinced that in a 
 situation that is constituted by a dialectical relation between 
 the consciousness of a lesser subjective whole called the ego 
 or self and that of a larger objective whole called society or 
 the objective self, the demand of the latter would seem to 
 the former to be more rational than its own self-affirmation, 
 and would, therefore, exert the pressure of authority. We 
 do not consider here external sources of authority at all, but 
 simply that intra-conscious authority which the objective 
 consciousness of the social claims over the subject-conscious- 
 ness of the ego, and which the ego recognizes. Were it not 
 for this internal assertion and recognition of authority 
 founded on the sense of a higher objective rationality, it 
 would be difficult to conceive how any externally constituted 
 authority could obtain and hold permanent internal recogni- 
 tion. The internal recognition must have its own intrinsic 
 grounds, and these will have their root in the recognition 
 by the ego of the larger rationality of the objective self. 
 
 The claim of society upon the individual rests, therefore, 
 on solid grounds of essential rationality, and the individual 
 feels that in recognizing it he is yielding allegiance to a 
 
CHAP. XIII. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF COMMUNITY. 299 
 
 higher reason that has the right of prescription over him, at 
 least within certain limits that will be defined by the 
 legitimate assertion of his egoism. The individual will 
 always be conscious of, and will exercise his right to regard, the 
 social organism as a nourishing mother to his self-realization, 
 but in thus making society tributary to his personal good he 
 will at the same time recognize his subordination to the 
 claims of the objective social world in which his own life is 
 included, and the claim of this world will assert itself as law 
 to his wUl. Now, it is in this connection that it will be 
 most clearly seen, I think, how the moment of social law 
 develops and yet how in connection with it the individual 
 consciousness is always able to maintain a standpoint trans- 
 cendent to, if not outside of, law. The moment of law is 
 the point where the subject-consciousness admits and recog- 
 nizes the superior claim of the objective social consciousness, 
 thus placing it in the seat of Legislation, whereas the moment 
 of transcendence is simply the pulse of egoism itself in so far 
 as it involves the individual's assertion of its own distinctive 
 reality and its right to make society tributary to its own 
 good. These are the fundamentally legitimate pulses of the 
 social life, and it is only, as we saw, when egoism attempts 
 to repudiate the objective claims of society that it becomes 
 false and selfish, just as, on the other hand, the claims of 
 society become despotic in so far as they tend to deny or 
 encroach upon the legitimate claims of egoism. The whole 
 of social history may be regarded, in one aspect of it at 
 least, as a manifestation of this inner dialectic. 
 
 We wish to dwell a moment longer, in conclusion, on the 
 concept of law reached in the last paragraph. It is not 
 claimed here that other factors do not enter into the deter- 
 mination of the consciousness of social law, but merely that 
 here we come upon that point of inner origination which 
 enables us to connect its claim with a general scheme of 
 rational experience. The right of the stronger to rule must 
 be in the last analysis resolvable into the right of the better 
 and higher, if authority is not to remain forever purely 
 
300 EVOLUTION OP CATEGORIES OP KNOWLEDGE, paet ii. 
 
 arbitrary. If we suppose, then, that the objective social 
 consciousness, by virtue of its higher rationality, is legislative, 
 and has its claim recognized by the subject-consciousness, 
 we will find in this act of recognition by the subject-con- 
 sciousness, a germ of conscience that will contain both 
 juristic and distinctively ethical moments. The juristic will 
 arise in the ego's recognition of the right of the objective 
 consciousness to prescribe rules for the organization and 
 regulation of its objective social life, while the distinctive 
 moment of ethical authority will arise when the claim of 
 the objective acts as a direct pressure or restraint on some 
 motive or impulse of egoism. And this leads to the final 
 insight that we have been leading up to for some time, 
 namely, that it is the function of the juristic conscience to 
 define directly, in terms that shall be prescriptive to the 
 subject-consciousness, the content and standards of objective 
 social good, while the function of the ethical conscience will 
 be rather to define the subjective good of the individual in 
 terms (prescriptive in common with those of the juristic 
 conscience) that shall bring this good into harmony with 
 the requirements of objective social good. The distinction 
 here reached enables us to see why it is that the ethical 
 must always, in the nature of the case, be a more personal 
 interest than the juristic, inasmuch as it bears directly on the 
 egoistic motives and the ideal of individual good, while the 
 relation to these of the juristic requirements is only indirect. 
 
 With this result we bring the second division of our 
 work to a conclusion. It would be interesting to follow the 
 development of these juristic and ethical roots out into some 
 of their matured forms, but this enterprise does not lie within 
 the permissible scope of the present work. In another 
 chapter in Part III. we expect to resume the ethical topic, 
 and it will be our endeavour there to show that morality has 
 another root besides the social, or rather, transcending the 
 social, and that the complete ground of morality is only 
 achieved in a correlation of the social with the transcendent. 
 
PAET III. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENT FACTOE IN KNOW- 
 LEDGE. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 
 
 Though the plain man of common sense is not in general 
 given to distinguishing very clearly between what he knows 
 and what he merely believes, yet in the heat of controversy 
 he is liable to have the need of such discrimination forced 
 unpleasantly on his attention, and in moments of subse- 
 quent reflection he will perhaps endeavour to make clear to 
 his own mind the difference between an act of knowledge 
 and one of belief. The first conclusion that his reflection 
 reaches will probably be embodied in the dictum that what 
 we know is the objective fact or truth, while belief simply 
 expresses a subjective state of the one who entertains it ; 
 and this will do well enough in practice, inasmuch as it will 
 enable the plain man in any subsequent controversy in which 
 he may become embroiled, to challenge the mere opinions of 
 his opponent and demand that they be shown to be objec- 
 tively true before they can be regarded as binding on any 
 one but him who may happen to entertain them. Further 
 reflection will show, however, that the plain man's distinc- 
 tion, however true it may be and valuable in practice, is, 
 after all, superficial, and does not yield much insight into 
 the real difference between an act of knowledge and an act 
 of belief. We do not have to carry our scrutiny very deep 
 in order to see that neither can an act of knowledge be 
 completely differentiated from belief nor can belief be ab- 
 
 303 
 
304 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt hi. 
 
 solved from assuming some relation to objective facts. 
 When we know, we know something to he true, and when 
 we simply believe, we believe something to be true. How, 
 then, shall we distinguish between knowledge and belief in 
 a way that will enable us to realize their characteristic 
 differences ? In order to reach an answer that shall be 
 in any sense adequate, we must bear in mind the respects 
 in which the knowing and believing functions are the same. 
 For it is obvious, in the first place, that both knowing and 
 believing involve an act of judgment, either in its germinal 
 or developed form. Whether we perform an act of knowing 
 or simply one of believing, the psychological core of the 
 experience is that personal appropriation or endorsement of 
 content that in some way presents itself, to which the name 
 of judgment has been applied. 'Now, we have seen in pre- 
 ceding analyses that what judgment asserts in its activity is 
 either the truth or falsehood of some presented or proffered 
 content ; and this brings us to the second point of agreement 
 between knowing and believing. They are both appropria- 
 tions of content — endorsements of that which is presented as 
 true or rejections of it as false. The two activities thus 
 have a common relation to the categories of truth and 
 falsehood. 
 
 We have seen that the truth or falsehood of proffered 
 content consists in its congruity or agreement with the 
 whole content of experience as we conceive it ; or, to state 
 the matter in its broadest possible form, when we accept 
 anything as true we accept it as being congruous with or 
 agreeing with experience as a whole, and as that which will 
 therefore be able to bear the tests which experience may 
 apply to it. It is obvious, now, that whether we assert a 
 thing as a fact of knowledge or as one of belief simply, we 
 commit ourselves to its objective truth in the sense above 
 indicated. We either know or believe a thing to be objec- 
 tively true or false. And in both knowledge and belief there 
 is some content that is a candidate for adoption into the com- 
 monwealth of reality. It would appear, then, that in many of 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 305 
 
 their essentials the two acts are the same, or at least similar. 
 Where, then, shall the differentiae of knowing and believing 
 be sought ? It seems to me that we have to seek the prin- 
 cipal ground of difference on the subjective side of the general 
 situation. A belief as well as an act of knowledge deter- 
 mines the relation of some candidate for admission into 
 the kingdom of reality, to the content of experience as a 
 whole, and the ground of its acceptance or rejection will 
 be its ability to harmonize with the unity of experience. 
 But in an act of knowledge, and in so far as it is 
 an act of knowledge, the relations that will determine 
 the congruity will be the categories under which the 
 world of content has been defined and reduced to unity. 
 This we might express by saying that the relations which 
 we are determining here are logical, were it not for the 
 danger that the term logical might be taken in a too abstract 
 sense. Let us say rather that the congruity is determined 
 here in view of the epistemological relations, those categories 
 which have shown themselves to be structural principles of 
 all knowledge. The judgment-act in knowledge is then 
 a personal acceptance or rejection of content, in which 
 the dominating, and in fact the sole determining motive, is 
 in the last analysis, epistemological congruity or harmony 
 of the presentation with the categorized content of experi- 
 ence as a whole. Now, it is true that the epistemological 
 relations and the epistemological motive enter into belief. 
 But they are modified by being brought into relation with 
 another set of motives which arise on the side of volitional 
 experience. We have seen how the wiU, acting in the 
 interest of survival, and under the categories of assimilation 
 and rejection, develops gradually its objective categories of 
 good and bad which constitute the objective aim of its 
 activity and supply it with motivity. The volitional world 
 will then present a system of content in which the determining 
 motives will be, not those of the true and the false, but 
 rather those of the good and the bad, and a candidate for 
 admission into this commonwealth wUl have to submit to 
 
 tr 
 
306 TRANSCEINDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt hi. 
 
 the criteria of the good and the bad. If, now, we suppose a 
 coalescence of the volitional and epistemological spheres and 
 interests, we will be able to conceive a situation in which 
 the volitional motive or interest in the good, which tends to 
 shape itself into an ideal demand, will coalesce with and 
 modify the epistemological motive, which also tends to shape 
 itself into an ideal of truth. The whole motive will thus be 
 partly volitional and partly epistemological. Now, such a 
 coalescence is inevitable. We cannot keep the interest in 
 good from mingling with the interest in truth, and the result 
 is in most cases a somewhat turbid stream. But the point 
 of special interest here is a distinction which we wish to 
 draw between a motive in which the volitional demand is 
 subordinate to the epistemological, and one in which the 
 volitional motive asserts itself as equal to or greater than 
 the epistemological, and thus tends to dominate. It is here, 
 I think, that we will find the real subjective distinction 
 between belief and knowledge. An act may be one of 
 belief and knowledge at the same time, and it is not in 
 dispute that every act of knowledge is also one of belief; 
 but the point where the act ceases to be an act of knowledge 
 and becomes one of belief simply, is the point where the 
 volitional motive begins to dominate the epistemological 
 and to determine the judgment in view of what the ideal 
 of good may demand. Or, if we call the volitional motive a 
 consideration of worth, and the epistemological a considera- 
 tion of truth, our judgment will cease to be a judgment of 
 knowledge, and will become one of belief simply, at the 
 point where the consideration of worth gets the upper hand 
 in determining it. I do not mean to say at this point that a 
 judgment of worth may not also be a judgment of know- 
 ledge, or at least be translated into one ; nor do I mean to 
 say that a belief as such has no objective epistemological 
 value, for I believe both statements to be false ; but I am 
 interested here in pointing out what seems to me to be the 
 principal subjective difference between an act of knowledge 
 and one of simple belief. 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 307 
 
 Thus on the subjective side we find a motive which is 
 mainly instrumental in determining our judgment as one of 
 belief rather than knowledge. This motive is a practical 
 interest which reinforces the theoretic interest and leads to 
 an affirmation that fails to be cognitive. The subjective 
 motive alone is not sufficient, however, to differentiate the 
 judgment of belief from that of knowledge. We may be 
 able to affirm that as true which we have the strongest 
 motive for believing, and our judgment may be one of 
 knowledge, and not one of simple belief. We may have 
 the strongest possible motive for believing that we are 
 about to fall heir to a large fortune, and yet the judgment 
 in which we affirm that prospective good may be a judg- 
 ment of knowledge. We may know whereof we affirm. 
 There must then be some important objective difference 
 between a judgment of belief and a judgment of knowledge, 
 and this will be found, I think, in the quality of objective 
 coereiveness which is inseparable from the judgment of 
 knowledge, but is not essential to the judgment of belief 
 This coereiveness arises in the first instance from the 
 demonstrability of the judgment of knowledge. We say 
 that its truth can be exhibited, that it can be proved. 
 But in the last analysis the coereiveness of a judgment of 
 knowledge springs from that which makes it demonstrable, 
 and when we ask what this is we find on analysis that it 
 consists in the possibility of reducing our judgment to one 
 that is immediately presentational or necessary. Thus, if I 
 say the stone is hard, the judgment may be presentational. 
 I may have the stone in my hand. But I may see the stone 
 without touching it, and my judgment will still be one of 
 knowledge, because it may be reduced to the presentative 
 form. I know that all I have to do in order to experience 
 the hardness of the stone is to touch it. Or I say that 
 change is impossible out of time, and this judgment is 
 reducible to the form of immediate necessity, inasmuch as it 
 is impossible to conceive change apart from time as its 
 form. It is this reducibility of the judgment of knowledge 
 
308 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 to the form of immediacy, either of presentation or necessity, 
 that renders it capable of objective demonstration or proof. 
 Clearly this is the essence of the matter, for when I have 
 discovered the quality in a judgment that makes it objec- 
 tively coercive, I have discovered the source of its coercive- 
 ness to myself and to all others. The same quality that 
 coerces me, coerces others. The social test proper, the 
 concurrence of the judgments of others with my own or 
 their failure to concur, while it would have an important 
 influence on my subjective state of mind, yet could not in 
 any sense be regarded as primary. The first presupposition 
 of knowledge is that there shall be relations of immediate 
 coerciveness to which its judgments are reducible, and the 
 sole value of the social consists in the degree to which 
 it is tributary to that result. The social test is an im- 
 portant part of demonstration, but in common with every 
 form of demonstration its possibility rests on those primary 
 relations of judgments which constitute them acts of 
 knowledge. 
 
 That a simple belief is lacking in this objective coercive- 
 ness is clear enough. There may arise a kind of subjective 
 necessity in connection with beliefs, due to habit, and it 
 may become practically impossible to resist certain habitual 
 states of mind or feeling. But this form of coerciveness is 
 clearly distinguishable from the objective species which 
 enters into knowledge. We may say that the final tests 
 constitutive of knowledge are immediate presentation or 
 immediate necessity. If any judgment is reducible to this, it 
 is a judgment of knowledge, and what we call the objective 
 coerciveness of a judgment of knowledge as distinguished 
 from an act of simple belief, is the effect of the immanence 
 of these relations in the truth affirmed. How then shall 
 we exhibit the absence of these relations in an act of belief? 
 There will be little disposition, I think, to deny that the 
 act of simple belief is not forced in the same sense as the 
 act of knowledge. There is a sense of objective freedom or 
 option attaching to belief that is one of its most marked char- 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. S09 
 
 acteristics. We may feel subjectively bound by our belief, 
 but we do not have the sense that it is objectively binding 
 on others in the same way that an act of knowledge is 
 binding, and this recognition of the freedom of others has 
 its root in our own feeling of freedom with reference to the 
 objective content of our belief. And when we submit this 
 feeling of freedom to analysis we find it reducible to the 
 implicit recognition of the possibility that our judgment of 
 belief may not be true; in short, that things may be 
 different from what we believe them to be. The possibility 
 of failure ia the sphere of judgment introduces the element 
 of contingency which enters constitutionally into the judg- 
 ment itself. I do not mean to deny that judgments of 
 knowledge are also affected with contingency. But this 
 very important distinction is to be observed. The judgment 
 of knowledge may be contingent in fact, but it is not a 
 judgment of contingency. It is a judgment from which 
 contingency is excluded by the immanence of immediate 
 presentation or necessity. This renders it coercive, whereas 
 the judgment of simple belief does not involve the im- 
 manence of these relations, and hence is affected with inner 
 contingency, the sense that it may possibly be untrue. 
 
 Now, the contingency of simple belief rests in the last 
 analysis on the failure we have pointed out above. It is a 
 contingency which affects its inner constitution rather than 
 its outer relations. Let us now consider how this con- 
 tingency may arise. We have had occasion in the earlier 
 part of this work to distinguish between judgment and those 
 presentational and conceptional activities which supply judg- 
 ment with the materials upon which it works. We saw 
 that judgment is an act of " personal endorsement " or re- 
 pudiation of proffered content of presentation or conception. 
 And we saw that the activity of judgment proceeds under 
 the objective categories of the true and the false, a prof- 
 fered content being decided true or false according as it 
 proved itself congruous or the reverse, to the whole content 
 of experience. In view of this we may say further at this 
 
310 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi., 
 
 point that immediate presentation embodies one form of, 
 congruity, while immediate necessity embodies another. A 
 judgment of knowledge is coercive, therefore, because there 
 is immanent in it one or other of these forms of congruity^ 
 and a simple belief is characterized by the absence of these 
 objective forms, an absence which is due to the fact that 
 the content of the judgment of belief has not as yet been 
 reduced to the form where this inner congruity realizes and 
 asserts itself The failure here may be for either one of 
 two reasons, either the content is reducible by a further 
 process to the knowledge-form, or it is not. In the former 
 case our judgment of belief may possibly be translated into a 
 judgment of knowledge. But what needs to be done in 
 order that this result may be achieved ? Let us take as an 
 illustration a belief which has turned out to be partly true 
 and partly false. The ancients believed that the earth was 
 a flat surface surrounded by water, but they had no means 
 of reducing their belief to knowledge. These means have 
 been discovered by the moderns, and it is now known that 
 the part of the earth known to the ancients is a continent 
 surrounded by water, but that it is not flat but spherical. 
 How was this result achieved ? By supplying the steps of 
 reduction necessary to bring the content of the judgment 
 into immediate relation to experience. The result is the 
 rejection of one part as no longer credible, while the other 
 part becomes a coercive judgment of knowledge. Or let us 
 suppose that the belief takes the form of a hypothesis not 
 as yet verified. We have here another form of the same 
 thing, and the reduction of the hypothesis to a judgment of 
 knowledge will consist in bringing it into immediate relation 
 to presentation or necessity. 
 
 Let us suppose, however, that our judgment of belief is 
 one of the latter sort, and that it is not reducible to a 
 judgment of knowledge. It is clear that in this type of 
 judgment we have the point of real departure between the 
 spheres of knowledge or possible knowledge and that of 
 simple belief. Let us take an illustration regarding which 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 311 
 
 there will be no dispute. Christians believe in the existence 
 of disembodied spirits. But they are unable to conceive 
 how a disembodied spirit can be possible. There is no form 
 of experience to which the content of this belief is reducible, 
 and it must continue to lack the inner confirmation of either 
 presentation or necessity. The root of the difficulty lies, no 
 doubt, in the impossibility of achieving any concept of a 
 disembodied spirit to which any of the knowledge-tests of 
 our experience is applicable. Could some definite concept 
 be achieved it could then be tested, and could some concept 
 be achieved that would commend itself as authoritative it is 
 very likely that the root of this <authoritativeness would be 
 found identical with some of the fundamental relations of 
 knowledge. But so far as we can see, the belief in disem- 
 bodied spirits is destined to remain a simple belief, because 
 the content of it lacks those basal relations to experience 
 that are necessary to constitute a judgment of knowledge. 
 
 Going back then to the beginning of our inquiry, the 
 plain man would find himself very far afield from his point 
 of departure by the time he reached the above conclusion, 
 and he would begin to have some inkling of the complex 
 situations which sometimes confront the philosopher. I am 
 inclined to think also that his refiection would not be alto- 
 gether unprofitable even from the standpoint of the plain 
 man. He would have learned, in the first place, that the 
 tendency of our beliefs to outrun our knowledge has its root 
 in the depths of man's constitution. For it is the nature of 
 our volitional, and we may also say our emotional, nature to 
 express itself in certain demands, which, acting in view of 
 the objective ideals of the good and the bad, inevitably enter 
 into and affect our objective judgments. For this reason it 
 is natural and inevitable that our demands on the objective 
 should outrun slow-paced knowledge, and that a part of our 
 world representation should develop in immediate response 
 to the subjective requirements of our nature and without 
 special reference to the objective criteria of the true and 
 false. He would see moreover that this subjective reason is 
 
312 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part ni. 
 
 sufficient only to explain the fact that belief tends to out- 
 strip knowledge. It would not give him the final differentia 
 of belief, inasmuch as any judgment, whether it be motived 
 by a pure epistemological interest or by a consideration of 
 value, may become a judgment of knowledge, provided the 
 objective conditions of that result be present. He would 
 thus be led to seek in the objective situation the real point of 
 difference, and he would find it proximately in the quality of 
 objective coerciveness which is present in a judgment of 
 knowledge and absent from a judgment of simple belief. 
 This discovery would lead him on to a deeper analysis and 
 to the further discovery that the coerciveness of a judgment 
 of knowledge springs from the immanence in it of its relation 
 to either the presentational or the necessity test of experi- 
 ence. A judgment of knowledge is one, therefore, that is 
 reducible to this basis. But a judgment of simple belief he 
 would find to be one which lacks this objective basis either 
 because a number of steps are yet necessary before it can be 
 brought into relation to the necessary tests, or because in the 
 nature of the case the application of the knowledge-test is 
 impossible. He would see then that there are two classes of 
 beliefs which need to be distinguished, those that may 
 possibly be reduced to the knowledge-form, and those that 
 are irreducible and constitute a different species. 
 
 One of the important results of the preceding analysis is 
 the conclusion which may be drawn from it to the effect 
 that the only species of belief that is likely to possess any 
 independent value for metaphysics is that species which is 
 irreducible to knowledge. Any belief that is reducible to 
 knowledge by any possibility of experience may be regarded 
 simply as an imperfect form of knowledge, and may be 
 treated accordingly. But in the belief-species proper we 
 have a distinct form for the expression of subjective con- 
 viction. The simple species of judgment are reducible, 
 therefore, (1) to the knowledge-form which speaks coercively 
 through its immanent relation to the immediacy of experi- 
 ence, and (2) to the belief-form which fails of this objective 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 313 
 
 relation and speaks mainly with the force of subjective 
 conviction. Taking this distinction as settled, we may now 
 proceed to consider the method by which experience reduces 
 the content of its knowledge and belief activities to intel- 
 ligible form. We are not about to thrash over the old straw 
 of the categories, but, on the contrary, there is a distinction 
 between two different modes of representation to which up 
 to this point we have not alluded, I mean the distinction 
 between the concept — using that term in a sense broad 
 enough to include the whole activity of cognition — and the 
 symbol. It is necessary only to mention the conceptual 
 form of representation in order that it may be briefly 
 characterized. The cognitive mode of realizing the world- 
 content is a mode which proceeds by means of internal 
 definition and distinction under certain objective principles 
 called categories. A content of reality has been conceived 
 when it has become defined to our intelligence, and con- 
 ceptual definition as a rule touches internal and common 
 characteristics, so that when an individual is realized its 
 type has also been determined. Now, between this mode of 
 realization and that expressed by the symbol there is a well- 
 marked distinction. A symbol is in the first instance a form 
 that represents something without directly defining its inner 
 nature. To represent strength by the lion and swiftness by 
 the antelope is the result of later reflection, and such symbols 
 are also definitions. Now it is doubtless true that there are 
 no symbols that are not also, in some senses, definitions; 
 but a symbol, in so far as it is purely symbolic, will be a form 
 or object that will have no direct defining power, but will 
 represent by means of association or analogy. A nation's 
 flag may be an emblem which has been arbitrarily chosen 
 and whose whole significance comes through its association 
 with national life and history. The first signs of language 
 are not pure symbols. They may and do have defining 
 elements in them which render them truly cognitive or con- 
 ceptual. Thus the sign by which the Indian represents a 
 man on horseback is partly at least a descriptive imitation. 
 
314 TRANSCENDENT TACTOK IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 The sign-language is from the first largely presentational or 
 conceptual in its nature. Furthermore, the leading theories 
 of the origin of spoken language trace its roots to sounds 
 that are in some respects definitive of the feeling or state 
 which they are meant to express. Thus the harsh emotions 
 tend to utter themselves in rough or guttural sounds, while 
 the gentler emotions tend to express themselves in the softer 
 cooing tones. There is nothing symbolic about this : it is 
 truly and directly representative of inner meaning, and 
 naturally develops into perceptual and conceptual forms. 
 
 A symbol, in so far as it is purely symbolic, may on the 
 other hand be defined as a form or object that represents 
 meaning or inner nature indirectly through some kind of 
 suggestion. Suppose we deny this, and seek to conceive 
 some intrinsic representative power in the symbol. We 
 simply confuse it with the concept or directly defining mode 
 of representation. If the symbol is to be anything charac- 
 teristic it must not attempt to do the work of the concept 
 on its own ground, but it must do the work in its own way, 
 and that cannot be other than the way of indirect repre- 
 sentation. We have seen that a symbol may be arbitrarily 
 chosen, as in the case of a nation's flag. I may choose 
 to let a certain colour represent my affection for my wife or 
 child. But the arbitrariness is an accidental, not an 
 essential feature. Why should the bread and wine have 
 been chosen as symbols of the spiritual communion of the 
 Christian with his Lord ? Possibly arbitrarily, but almost 
 surely in order to represent communion under the figure of 
 a meal whose sustaining and invigorating function in its 
 physical economy was to represent indirectly the essential 
 function of the spiritual communion. The meal thus 
 becomes symbolic. It represents content indirectly by 
 means of its power of representing other content directly. 
 At this point I think we are perhaps justified in making a 
 further distinction, and saying that an arbitrary symbol 
 would better be called an emblem, thus ruling arbitrariness 
 out of the meaning of symbol altogether, and retaining the 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE ANB BELIEF. 315 
 
 name symbol for any form or object that is employed to repre- 
 sent content indirectly through its direct representation of other 
 content. This definition is sufficient to show how profoundly 
 the processes of imitation and analogy enter into the con- 
 struction of the symbolic. In truth we might define 
 symbolism as an analogical mode of representing meaning. 
 
 Now, the relation which exists between concept and 
 symbol is not always the same. The symbol may be 
 simply a half-way station on the way to the concept. I 
 mean by that that the use of indirect representation may 
 form simply a stage in the development of direct representa- 
 tion. The use of the lion to represent strength may be 
 dispensed with in time for a more direct mode of repre- 
 sentation. In the development of knowledge the concept 
 tends more and more to supplant the symbol as a mode 
 of defining content. If this were the only relation which 
 the symbol bears to knowledge, to serve as the pioneer 
 of conceptions, then, important as it would still remain, 
 the metaphysician might leave its consideration to the 
 students of psychology and philology. But it is a fact of 
 the vitalest import that the symbol stands at the end as 
 well as at the beginning of knowledge. A point is reached 
 in the higher stages of reflective experience where the mode 
 of direct representation begins to prove inadequate, and the 
 mode of indirect representation comes in as a supplement 
 and in a sense as a substitute. In short, there is a higher 
 symbolism as well as a lower, and in this higher use of the 
 symbol it can no longer be regarded as a purveyor of 
 concepts, but as itself the only accessible method of 
 grasping the nature of content that is not directly and 
 immediately definable. The metaphysician has been slow, 
 we must admit, to recognize the necessity of the symbol in 
 this higher sense, and this reluctance has not been due, as a 
 rule, to any disrespect which he may happen to entertain for 
 the symbol, but rather to a largely mistaken fear that its 
 recognition would in some way open the door to a flood of 
 abuses. We do not share this apprehension, but believe 
 
316 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 that the symbol will be found a help rather than a 
 hindrance to true knowledge. 
 
 The question then arises, at what point in the progress of 
 reflective experience does the symbol become necessary as a 
 supplement to the concept ? The answer to this is vital, 
 and I think we will find it at that point, or rather those 
 points of transcendence which are necessarily presupposed 
 in the realizable content of experience. I do not mean that 
 these points of implication lead to the transcendence of the 
 notion of experience itself, for I do not believe that to be 
 possible, but rather that there are points in our finite form 
 of experience where something transcendent is clearly pre- 
 supposed. Without going into detail at this stage, which 
 would be superfluous in view of what is to follow, it will be 
 sufficient here to indicate one or two of these points of 
 transcendence. In treating of the form of agency that 
 develops in our experience and of which we become conscious, 
 we found that in the last analysis it is relative and not 
 absolute. There is nowhere in experience agency whose 
 initiative is not bound up with the modifications of other 
 agency. But that the notion of such agency is not final and 
 that it has a necessary presupposition in absolute agency or 
 activity that is free in its initiative, is not only an unavoid- 
 able implication of our experience, but one that Aristotle 
 pointed out two thousand years ago in his doctrine of self- 
 activity. Again, we find in the sphere of objective ex- 
 perience that cognition everywhere strikes a point where it 
 loses its freedom and becomes simply receptive and neces- 
 sitated. The abdication of creative or originative function 
 thus becomes necessary, and we are obliged to admit the 
 essential relativity of our cognitive activity. It is clear then 
 that we here strike another point of transcendence where the 
 self-originating and free, asserts itself as a necessary implica- 
 tion of the relative form of our own experience. If we 
 define our experience as finite, and we mean here by the 
 term finite, simply not final but involving unfulfilled impli- 
 cations, then that which transcends may be characterized as 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 317 
 
 infinite, while if we designate our experience as relative, 
 meaning, by that term that which is not self-dependent but 
 dependent on other, then that which is transcendent may 
 be called absolute. We thus strike the points in experi- 
 ence where the finite and relative present unfulfilled 
 implications and where in a very intelligible sense, therefore, 
 the necessity of something that is infinite and absolute 
 asserts itself. 
 
 Eeturning then to the question of the relation between 
 concept and symbol, it is clear that the necessary implication 
 of transcendence is an immediate certainty of experience. 
 That some infinite and absolute is necessary we need no 
 symbol to inform us. That is a truth of direct intuition and 
 comes to us in ordinary conceptual form. The function of 
 the symbol will arise, if it arises at all, in helping us to 
 define the nature of this transcendent term. It may be that 
 in this attempt we will reach a point where the direct mode 
 of conceiving and defining content will break down, and 
 where our only resource will be that indirect analogical 
 mode which we have called symbolism. And that such a 
 point will be reached is, I think, in the nature of the case 
 certain. For when we come to consider it, however sure we 
 may be that an infinite and absolute experience is necessary, 
 and however certain we may be that such an experience 
 embodies the only possible idea of completeness and perfec- 
 tion, we do not find that the nature of such an experience 
 is directly definable. In short, we find that no direct con- 
 cept of the infinite or absolute is possible, but when we seek 
 to realize the meaning of these terms we are obliged to 
 begin with a finite and relative experience, and tracing this 
 down to the last analysis where the points of transcendence 
 appear, we have to consider these points of transcendence in 
 order to discover what necessary thing it is which the finite 
 and relative lack. Now, in general we find that what it 
 lacks is self-contained completeness of being, while in detail 
 we find that it lacks from the point of view of its agency, 
 self-dependence or self-initiating activity, while from that of 
 
318 TRANSCENDENT EACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. past hi, 
 
 its cognitive activity and in the objective sphere it lacks 
 self-originating power, so that its. posits are not constitutive 
 but only re-constitutive of that the origin of which is a pre- 
 supposition. An absolute and infinite experience must then 
 be self-dependent and self-originative, whereas the finite is 
 dependent on other and in the last analysis receptive of the 
 posit of another. These conclusions we are able to reach by 
 a direct process and they are impregnable. But the difficulty 
 arises in our effort to determine the nature of this infinite 
 and absolute experience which is at the same time conceived 
 to be necessary. The first step in this direction will be of 
 course the affirmation of some quality of the absolute and 
 infinite, which the relative and the finite lack, and the 
 absence of which supplies the negative criterion of their 
 finitude and relativity. Let this qualification be expressed in 
 the terms we have already developed, self-dependence and 
 self-origination. Have we any definite concepts of self- 
 dependence or self-origination or are we able to develop any 
 by any direct process ? We are obliged to answer both ques- 
 tions in the negative. Our experience is simply lacking in 
 the data necessary to the formation of concepts through which 
 we can realize an intuition of infinite and absolute nature. 
 Here the agnostic thinker is disposed to stop and say, " that 
 settles it, we can go no further." But can we go no further ? 
 We have seen that the absolute and infinite are necessary, 
 and the total block which the agnostic conclusion puts in 
 the way of any intelligible attempt to reach any conception 
 of what the nature of this necessary being may be, puts the 
 human mind into a dilemma where it is doomed to remain. 
 We will perhaps be able to catch a glimmer of light if we 
 return to experience and consider the nature of the terms 
 in it which we have characterized as relative and finite. If 
 we consider the nature of our agency as we realize it in 
 experience we will find that it is not lacking in the pulse of 
 self-dependence which is the moment that expresses itself in 
 our sense of freedom, but that this moment is irreparably 
 involved in another which gives us our sense of dependence 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE ANB BELIEF. 319 
 
 on Other. Our self-dependence is, therefore, modified by 
 dependence on other, just as our sense of dependence on other 
 is modified by the moment of self-dependence. It is not 
 true then to say that we have no conception of self-depend- 
 ence, but rather that we have no conception of absolute 
 unmodified self-dependence. Nevertheless our experience 
 teaches us that an absolutely self-dependent agency is 
 necessary. Now we have the germ of a conception of absolute 
 self-dependence in our concept of our own modified self-depend- 
 ence, arid we mmj and actually do make the effort to conceive 
 absolute self-dependence by conceiving the progressive removal of 
 the limit or modification from our own agency. 
 
 We can never reach the end of this process in an intui- 
 tion, to be sure, but we do actually follow the method of 
 gradual approximation, and then by a leap like that which 
 the mathematician makes in completing his infinite series 
 the goal is reached and the absolute agent is af&rmed. This 
 may be taken as representative of the process of infinitation 
 in general. It is a process where judgment is reached by 
 performing an operation of gradual approximation, or a 
 concept which involves the notion sought in a modified 
 form. It is true that the notion is not completely achieved, 
 and that we do not realize an intuition of absolute nature. 
 But starting on the assumption of the necessity of an absolute 
 nature we have formed a concept in our experience of such a 
 character as to serve as a basis for an approximating 
 conception of that nature. 
 
 Now, it is in the achievement of approximating de- 
 finitions of the absolute and infinite nature that the 
 metaphysical use of symbolism is involved. The method 
 of approximation is not itself symbolic. It rests on a basis 
 of the strictest necessity. "We can no more escape that 
 approximative effort to conceive the necessarily transcendent 
 than we can escape cognition. But the symbolism enters 
 when we apply our approximate concepts ai actual defining 
 principles of absolute nature. We recognize the fact that 
 our principles do not define the inner nature of the trans- 
 
320 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 cendent in such a way as to give us an intuition of it. But 
 that they define this nature in some way is certain. And 
 when we ask how we are led to see that the absolute nature 
 is not directly accessible, and that it is only indirectly 
 defined, we find concepts like that of modifiM self- 
 dependence in our own experience, and applying the method 
 of approximation, as above indicated, to them we reach proxi- 
 mate concepts of self-dependence or self-origination. Then we 
 apply these as defining principles to the nature that is directly 
 inaccessible. This is a symbolic method of dejming the inner 
 nature of reality. It follows then that symbolism enters 
 into the very texture of our conceptions of the transcend- 
 ent. We cannot think metaphysically without symbols, and 
 therefore, some would argue, we can do no real thinking at 
 all in the metaphysical sphere. Mr. Herbert Spencer recog- 
 nizes only one kind of legitimate symbolism, that which 
 leads on to direct knowledge, and he stigmatizes the results 
 reached by the higher symbolism as " symbolic conceptions 
 of an illegitimate kind " and as " pseudo conceptions." If, 
 however, the above analysis be true, this way of represent- 
 ing the metaphysical application of symbolism is certainly 
 inadequate. The mathematician does not doubt the validity 
 of his formulae, even though they do not give him a direct 
 intuition of the infinite. The symbolic conceptions of 
 metaphysics are reached in the same way, and though 
 they lead to no intuition of the nature of the transcendent 
 which can have the coerciveness of that which is directly 
 represented or conceived, they yet determine for us the 
 direction in which these intuitions lie if they could be 
 achieved, and they do not leave it at all uncertain that 
 the way towards these intuition-points is the only pathway 
 of intelligibility. 
 
 The last topic which we wish to notice briefly in con- 
 cluding this chapter is that of the relation of metaphysical 
 symbolism to the distinction between knowledge and belief. 
 There is a sense, of course, in which all metaphysical judg- 
 ments regarding the nature of the transcendent would fall 
 
CHAP. I. KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF. 321 
 
 under the category of belief rather than under that of 
 knowledge. If we refuse to allow that symbolic conceptions 
 may give valid knowledge, and insist on confining the term 
 knowledge to the results of the direct cognitive processes, 
 then clearly enough the whole of metaphysics with the 
 exception of its basis, the intuition of the necessity of the 
 transcendent, would fall outside of knowledge and into the 
 category of belief. The question is partly one of nomen- 
 clature, but not wholly so, for if we propose to rule sym- 
 bolism out of knowledge we must exclude everything that is 
 not ultimately reducible to intuition. This, I think, would 
 not only defecate mathematics but would also leave physics 
 in a bad way. As I understand it the chemist has no 
 intuition of his atoms, and it is certain that the physicist 
 has no intuition of the ultimate forces on which his system 
 rests, and much less of the ether which is perhaps more of 
 a luxury than a necessary of life. But, in general, if 
 from physics and mathematics all the elements which are 
 held under proximate conceptions were eliminated, I tremble 
 for the result. I fear that the physicist in particular would 
 not have a rag to cover his nakedness, and that even the 
 rocks, which under more favourable conditions he might seek 
 as a covert, would have vanished in the general wreck. 
 These considerations lead me to think that symbolism can- 
 not be excluded bodily from knowledge, but that under it 
 we must distinguish a sphere of knowledge from one of 
 mere belief. And reverting to the distinguishing mark 
 which in the last analysis we found to separate belief off 
 from knowledge, I think we may include under symbolic 
 knowledge those proximate concepts of the transcendent 
 which embody necessary presuppositions of experience, and 
 are reached by a vigorous application of the indirect method, 
 while for the category of symbolic beliefs there would be 
 left that large body of judgments which are not strictly 
 reducible to this form, mainly because the terms in ex- 
 perience with which they start are not reducible to the 
 knowledge-form. This body of symbolic beliefs, while 
 
322 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 resting on a less secure basis than the judgments of symbolic 
 knowledge, will be found to possess different degrees of 
 certitude, and to include much that is most precious in 
 experience. It is clear then that under the symbolic pro- 
 cedure of metaphysics there must be included elements of 
 both knowledge and belief. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 
 
 An ordinary conception of the relation of science and 
 metaphysics is one that represents the latter as concerned 
 wholly with the transcendent while science confines itself 
 strictly to experience. This conception is at least partially 
 false. We have seen that science deals with the trans- 
 cendent and that metaphysics has something to do with 
 experience. "Without attempting at this point to say any- 
 thing final on the subject, it seems to me that the discussion 
 of the preceding chapter has put us in a position to see 
 that one of the points of difference consists in the fact that the 
 aim of science, in so far as it finds it necessary to recognize 
 the transcendent at all, is simply to employ the concept of it 
 in determining the nature of the relative in experience. This 
 accounts for the fact that science stops in its attempt to 
 define the transcendent at that point where that process 
 ceases to be necessary to the definition of the relative. 
 Metaphysics, on the other hand, is directly concerned with 
 the determination of the transcendent not so much as a 
 principle for the definition of the relative in experience, as 
 for the complete determination and satisfaction of the 
 relative experience as a whole through the grounding of it 
 in that which is absolute and complete. Having for its 
 aim then the grounding and completing of the relative ex- 
 perience itself in the nature of that which transcends it, the 
 
 323 
 
324 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part in. 
 
 determination of this transcendent nature becomes a matter 
 of direct interest to it, and its attitude toward the transcend- 
 ent is from the outset, therefore, different from that of 
 science. 
 
 An essential point of distinction between science and 
 metaphysics arises, then, in the different use which they 
 make of the transcendent in experience. Now it is our 
 purpose in the discussion of this chapter to attempt an 
 exhibition of some of the most fundamental points of dis- 
 tinction and agreement between the notions of science and 
 metaphysics, as a preliminary to a broad definition of the two 
 conceptions. That one cannot be characterized as purely 
 empirical, the other as non-empirical, except in a very 
 narrow sense, will be obvious from the fact brought out above 
 that both deal with the transcendent and both treat it as a 
 term arising in experience. It is very likely that we will 
 come upon some of the points of fundamental relation if we 
 consider (1) the constructs or concepts, and (2) the funda- 
 mental motives of science and metaphysics. By a construct 
 we mean a concept which has its rise at the point where 
 experience becomes conscious of the transcendent. We have 
 seen that both science and metaphysics involve transcend- 
 ence, and the point here is to determine, if possible, how the 
 basal notions of each arise out of this consciousness. If we 
 consider how science originates we will find that as a matter 
 of fact it arises piecemeal — little bits of research being 
 instituted at this and that point in experience in order to 
 meet some immediate practical emergency to which ordin- 
 ary experience has proved itself unequal. This emergency 
 may be real or imaginary. Thus the search for the elixir 
 of life and the philosopher's stone led to the birth of 
 chemistry, while mathematics in all probability originated in 
 the practical need of a calendar and a means of anticipating 
 eclipses and other portentous phenomena. These bits of 
 investigation, instructive as they may be as indicating the 
 point of departure for science in the inadequacy of ordinary 
 experience to meet some demand that has been made upon 
 
CHAP. II. SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 325 
 
 it, are yet not to be considered real science. Science 
 originates in reality when the notion of it becomes self- 
 conscious in experience ; that is, when it begins to be 
 recognized that ordinary experience is in general inadequate 
 from the epistemological point of view, and that, in short, its 
 content is not final in any sense but requires to be referred 
 to something more fundamental than itself. The feeling of 
 the inadequacy of ordinary experience from the point of 
 view we are now considering, may arise from the instability 
 or the unmediated plurality of its terms, or it may arise from 
 the pressure of some new problem which it is unable to solve, 
 as when Socrates demanded of Aristodemus a definition 
 of justice. Let this be as it may this sense of inadequacy 
 will lead to the notion of something more fundamental 
 with which the terms of ordinary experience are to be con- 
 nected or to which they are to be reduced, and this will give 
 us the concept of science. Science means the reduction of 
 phenomena, or in general the contents of experience, to law ; 
 that is, to some formula or principle that will express their 
 inner nature. The great defect of ordinary experience is 
 that it is too outer and superficial. The concept of science 
 is essentially the idea of the removal of this superficiality by 
 the effort to conceive experience-content not in its unmiti- 
 gated plurality but under the notion of a law which, while 
 it perhaps formulates a mere mode of behaviour, yet 
 formulates it as common behaviour, and therefore as a 
 manifestation of inner nature. 
 
 However the concept of science may arise, it will involve 
 the notion of the reduction of things to laws which shall be 
 expressions of their inner nature, and, therefore, of their 
 truer selves. And these laws will be conceived as the early 
 Greeks conceived them, as archae or first principles, and 
 these archae will be employed in order to achieve a truer 
 and more adequate conception of the nature of things. We 
 know, of course, that the early Greek reflection was mis- 
 taken in many ways, and that its results are now of little 
 value. But we do not know that they were of little value 
 
326 TRANSCENDENT fAcTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 to the early Greeks themselves, and it is open to us to 
 know that the Greeks were responding to a real motive, and 
 that the form which their response took was fundamentally 
 right. I mean that with all their shortcomings they were 
 exhibiting the essential form and spirit of science. We 
 have to recognize the fact, however, that in this first notion of 
 science there was no distinction recognized between science 
 proper and metaphysics. The archae of the early Greeks 
 were concepts of transcendence, but in them no account was 
 taken of a distinctively scientific or a metaphysical form and 
 use of these concepts. It was only in later reflection, and 
 particularly in that of Aristotle, that the notion of science 
 came to its birth. Suggestively enough, in this birth the 
 concepts of science and metaphysics arose as twins, for it was 
 in the same reflection of Aristotle that, under the notion of 
 Philosophy as the broadest possible category of knowledge, 
 a distinction arose between the sphere of ordinary philo- 
 sophical reflection which proceeds discursively to reduce the 
 content of experience to concepts or laws that have only 
 a relative finality, and that of First Philosophy in which 
 reflection takes up and develops the principles of ultimate 
 finality that are presupposed in the relative procedure. 
 We have here not only the germ of the distinction between 
 ordinary science or philosophy and a discipline which has 
 for its special function the consideration of what we have 
 called the concepts of the transcendent, but a fairly well- 
 developed idea of the distinction which has been main- 
 tained with greater or less fidelity from Aristotle's time 
 down to the present. 
 
 Without dwelling further on the genesis of the distinction 
 between science and metaphysics we may go on to de- 
 termine the nature, limit, and aim of what we have called 
 the constructs of science and metaphysics respectively. 
 Science, as we have seen, involves the consciousness of the 
 transcendent, and we have maintained that the basal con- 
 cepts of science arise in connection with this consciousness, 
 and are in a sense formulations of it. We are interested 
 
CHAP. 11. SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 327 
 
 here in determining the special modes in which these con- 
 cepts arise and the special forms which they assume. Now 
 it has been shown in the analysis of the dynamic categories 
 that these are all reducible to the notion of some kind of 
 agency. The notion of cause is that of conditioned initiative 
 or origination. But we have seen in this connection that 
 right here we touch a point of transcendence, and that the 
 notion of conditioned origination rests on that of uncon- 
 ditioned or self-origination, and by that we mean a first 
 spring of causal activity. It is at this point that a basal 
 concept of science emerges in the notion of primal forces 
 or centres of force, which we postulate as original springs of 
 causal energy and define in the formulae and laws which 
 express their modes of behaviour. The notion of a force 
 is then the notion of a cause incorporated with its 
 point of transcendence. Again, we have seen how the 
 category of substance arises as the notion of a persistent 
 point of departure in experience for the organizing 
 energy of things. This also we have found to have a pre- 
 supposition, inasmuch as it is the posit of some absolute 
 starting-point of experience. Now science reaches here 
 another of its basal concepts, its notion of the indestructi- 
 bility of matter or force, by incorporating the category of 
 substance with the notion of transcendence with which it is 
 connected. For science would be a clear impossibility if its 
 foundations did not include the presupposition of the un- 
 conditioned persistence of the elements with which it deals. 
 Again, we have seen hoW the category of community is 
 reducible to the notion of interacting agencies, each of 
 which is suffering internal modifications, and therefore 
 passing out of one state of nature into another. This 
 modifiable agency has its transcendent presupposition in a 
 nature to which all these modifications are internal, but 
 which in its whole inner essence persists unmodified and 
 self-identical. In this connection it is easy to see that 
 science reaches certain basal concepts when it connects its 
 notion of the interaction and consequent internal modi- 
 
328 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 fiability of its causal forces witli their transcendent pre- 
 supposition. For out of the coalescence of the intuition of 
 the internal modifiability of interacting causal forces, with 
 the necessary presupposition of a common nature that is 
 transcendent of this mutatiousness and preserves its self- 
 identity, emerge those concepts of correlation and conserva- 
 tion without which the foundations of science would 
 crumble to atoms. 
 
 Science thus achieves a set of conceptions that are funda- 
 mental to its existence, and it is interesting to consider what, 
 precisely, reflection has been doing in this achievement. 
 We have seen that the whole scientific activity awakes in 
 the demand for arehae or first principles of things, and we 
 have also seen that the scientific consciousness, when it has 
 once waked up, does not and cannot rest satisfied until it 
 has incorporated the principles which it discovers in experi- 
 ence and uses in order to define its world and reduce it to 
 law, with their transcendent presuppositions which have the 
 effect of giving them unqualified validity in their applica- 
 tion to experience. It does not enter into the aim of the 
 reflection of science to develop the transcendent terms in 
 its data further than may be necessary in order to give 
 unqualified validity to its categories of experience. If it be 
 true, as we have pointed out, that the notions of cause, 
 substance, and interaction must be incorporated with their 
 transcendent presuppositions in order that science may 
 achieve the concepts of force, persistence, and conservation 
 which are necessary to her foundations, then it follows that 
 science is obliged to recognize the transcendent so far at 
 least as it proves itself necessary to the constituting 
 of fundamental principles. But that science as such is 
 obliged to go beyond this in her recognition or in the 
 development of her world-view, we cannot say. It is not. 
 in fact, the business of science to make a transcendent use 
 of her principles or to develop a doctrine of the nature of 
 the transcendent presuppositions of experience. But having 
 employed these presuppositions in order to achieve concep- 
 
CHAP. II. SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 329 
 
 tions that are fundamental to her own .procedure, which is 
 the definition of the content of experience under intra- 
 experiential categories, she has discharged her duty to the 
 transcendent and may go about her business with a quiet 
 mind. 
 
 With metaphysics the case is different. If the question 
 be asked why metaphysical reflection may not rest satisfied 
 with the basal concepts of science, and why it should strain 
 itself in the seemingly vain effort after something more 
 ultimate, the answer must be that metaphysics is not able 
 to find in the ultimate concepts of science precisely the kind 
 of a category she needs. And that this reply does not beg 
 the question will be clear if we consider the fact that science 
 does not profess to investigate the nature of the transcen- 
 dent, and her principles are not designed for that kind of 
 use. We may expect then to find on investigation that an 
 ultimate concept of science will show itself defective at 
 points which are vital to metaphysical reflection. For 
 example, we have seen that science incorporates the notion 
 of a transcendent nature into its conception of ultimate 
 persistent forces or atoms. But when reflection fastens on 
 this concept and attempts to treat it as absolutely final ; 
 that is, as the very last conceivable term in reality, we 
 immediately come upon this difflculty. There has been no 
 attempt to define this transcendent nature, but it has simply 
 been assumed and incorporated into a relative procedure. 
 Consequently whether we take the notion of force or that of 
 the atom as representing finality, we soon involve ourselves in 
 contradiction. For the very notion of a force as a final term 
 involves that of activity. But an active force is unthink- 
 able except in terms of successive pulses of causation, 
 and this considered as final, lands us in a relative series 
 and abolishes the notion of transcendence which was in 
 our premises. The atom fares no better since the point 
 of transcendence in it is a transcendence of dimension. We 
 have seen that in the last analysis our space conceptions 
 lead us to a point of departure which is itself not spatial. 
 
330 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 But in the atom this point of transcendence is included 
 in the presumption of its finality ; but the concept itself is 
 the embodiment of an effort to conceive the dimensionless 
 under the notion of dimension. It thus includes the 
 starting-point of dimensional experience, but in a concept 
 which involves a self-contradiction if we attempt to take 
 it as absolutely final. 
 
 The above results will make clear what we mean when 
 we say that the last terms of science cannot be taken as 
 metaphysically valid although even metaphysics is interested 
 in affirming their validity for the use which science makes 
 of them. What I mean is that they are not adequate or 
 valid for metaphysical reflection and that metaphysics is 
 obliged therefore to develop concepts that wUl be adequate to 
 her own requirements. Nor will the metaphysical procedure 
 in this respect be aimless or without reference to the con- 
 cepts and procedures of science. Metaphysics involves a 
 form of reflection that has the whole of experience for its 
 object. It is related, therefore, to ordinary experience and 
 to other interests besides that of science. We do not forget 
 this general relation when at the present point of our dis- 
 cussion we confine our attention to the special relations 
 between metaphysics and science. Metaphysical reflection 
 will find its point of departure in the transcendent terms 
 involved in the basal concepts of science, and its aim with 
 reference to these terms will be to develop them in their 
 relation to experience as a whole, and to define their nature 
 as far as this may be possible. It cannot be taken as a 
 matter of surprise, then, if metaphysics does not find the 
 terms with which it starts completely satisfactory. There 
 would in that case be no demand for metaphysical reflection, 
 and the transcendent term would not be developed at all but 
 would be left imbedded in relativity. No direct effort would 
 have been made to define its relation to experience or to 
 determine what it may be in its inner nature. It would 
 not be known, therefore, whether such an effort would be 
 fruitful or not, or what the outcome of such an investigation 
 
CHAP. n. SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 331 
 
 might possibly be. But neither would it be known what 
 science can accomplish in her field except as she puts forth 
 her efforts. That the object of investigation exists, however, 
 and that there is a demand for metaphysical reflection and 
 vital concerns at stake in the venture is certain, and in 
 view of these exigencies, metaphysics has the courage of her 
 convictions and decides to essay the solution of her problems. 
 Now, the basal concepts which metaphysical reflection 
 will develop are concepts of the nature of the trans- 
 cendent presuppositions of experience apd of their relations 
 to that which is intra-experiential. If we take the basal 
 categories of science we will find that the absolute term 
 involved in them is that of transcendent agency, in the sense 
 of self-origination. Or, if taking our departure from the 
 subject-side of experience, we consider our own agency, we 
 see that its transcendent presupposition is that of absolute- 
 ness or self-dependence. Now, it is the business of meta- 
 physical reflection to make these concepts of transcendence 
 its objects, and to develop, as far as its resources will render 
 possible, a method of conceiving and defining the nature of the 
 transcendent, or in other phrase, the transcendent nature of 
 reality. And it is in the furtherance of this aim that scope 
 will be found for the application of that indirect method of 
 definition which has been described under the term symbolic 
 in the preceding chapter. We do not claim for metaphysics, 
 at least not in this stage of our investigation, the possession 
 of any direct mode of conceiving or defining the nature of 
 absolute or infinite reality. If there were such a method 
 the absolute would not be a transcendent term in experience, 
 and its nature would not be distinguishable from finite ex- 
 perience. The inner nature of the absolute would then be 
 directly deducible from data within experience and an 
 intuition of it might be achieved. We do not claim the 
 possibility of absolute intuition, but rather, on the assumption 
 that this is not attainable, we have endeavoured to show 
 how in the constitution of experience there is provision for 
 achieving proximate concepts of absolute nature, just as the 
 
332 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 mathematician deals with his infinite series by approxima- 
 tion. By the application of this method of approximation 
 or, as we may call it, the infinitation of the concepts of 
 experience, metaphysical reflection aims to supplement the 
 reflection of science, and by that means to achieve a doctrine 
 of reality in which the transcendent nature shall be included. 
 In order to reach a concept of the aims of science and 
 metaphysics in their relation, let us return to the illus- 
 tration of our plain man in the preceding chapter. We 
 have already followed him in the reflection to which he was 
 prompted by the exigencies of debate. His primary situa- 
 tion before the reflection was entered upon, may serve as 
 an illustration of the conditions of ordinary experience 
 which create the occasion and the necessity for science. 
 That there is some dijEference between knowledge and simple 
 belief, and that the simple belief of another cannot assert 
 the same claim on my assent as a fact of knowledge, is 
 something that even ordinary experience may tell me. 
 But in the case of the plain man of the illustration, who 
 may be taken as a type, this distinction is felt but not 
 understood, and the whole objective aim of his reflection is 
 to ground his feeling of difference in a clear knowledge of 
 the nature of the distinction. We have here a typical 
 example of the relation of science to ordinary reflection in 
 the motive that prompts the scientiflc activity, and in the 
 kind of service which science renders to ordinary experience. 
 It need not set ordinary experience aside, although this may 
 be the result in special cases. But in all cases it will 
 remedy the superficiality and relative instability of ordinary 
 experience by the discovery of a deeper and more satis- 
 factory principle for the construction of its world. Now in 
 order to determine where metaphysical reflection would 
 arise as a necessary supplement of the procedure of science, 
 we have only to suppose that our plain man, in view of the 
 important part which the distinction between the true and 
 the false has played in his reflections, should begin to ask 
 himself what in the last analysis the distinction between 
 
CHAP. II. SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 333 
 
 truth and falsehood can be. He would discover from reflec- 
 tion that the standards which our experience supplies are 
 relative. In view of them any proffered content will be 
 taken as true that fits in with the whole of experience as 
 we conceive it. But our conception of experience and its 
 requirements is a variable quantity. Can the standard of 
 the true and false be conceived as in the last analysis 
 variable ? This would involve a contradiction and the final 
 collapse of the distinction. At this stage then the plain 
 man's reflection comes upon a point of transcendence in 
 experience, and his further reflection will be an attempt to 
 develop the notion of an absolute standard of truth and 
 falsehood. And the outcome of this process, if it reaches v 
 definite, positive conclusion, will be the reference of the 
 distinction to its source in some transcendent nature which 
 he will probably be led to conceive as the subject of an 
 absolute experience. The reflection we may conceive as 
 ending here in a concept of transcendent nature that is 
 adequate to the exigencies that arise within experience. 
 
 The service which the metaphysical reflection will render 
 our plain man will consist in the grounding of something in 
 his experience which otherwise would have no ultimate 
 foundation. In the question of the ultimate ground of the 
 distinction between truth and error, whether we approach it 
 from the positive side, as did Augustine in his refutation 
 of the academic scepticism,^ or from the negative side as 
 Koyce does in his discussion of truth and error in the 
 Beligious Aspect of Philosophy ^ and in The Conception of God, 
 it will be found that the sands of foundationless expediency 
 can be escaped only when in the last analysis the ground^of 
 the distinction is found in some transcendent nature. 
 Our plain man has been led to this highly metaphysical 
 result by the pressure of demands within experience, and 
 were he to reflect a little beyond the point where the 
 
 ^ Contra Academicas. 
 
 ^ The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, chap. viii. ; The Conception of Ood, 
 Part I. 
 
334 TBANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 practical necessities of the case end, he would realize the 
 fact that the recognition of the transcendent as the pre- 
 supposition of experience has led to the generation of a new 
 concept within experience, namely, the concept of perfection, 
 in the light of which every part of experience takes on a 
 different meaning. The old sophistical doctrine of the final 
 relativity of truth and error was and always will be, the 
 logical outcome of that view of experience which denies its 
 relation to the transcendent and seeks to make the relative 
 sufficient unto itself. For in that case analysis of the dis- 
 tinction simply leads down to a vanishing point where truth 
 and error become one. The distinction will thus appear to 
 be groundless and conventional, and every part of experience 
 will, as a consequence, be affected with instability. It is a 
 sense of this inadequacy of the relative that invariably leads 
 to the Socratic effort to find principles of stability in ex- 
 perience itself. This is the enterprise of science which finds 
 its concepts to be, after all, only relative, and the genius of 
 a Plato is needed to develop the concepts of the transcendent 
 as the ultimate principles of reality. This result creates in 
 turn the demand for an Aristotle to restore the transcendent 
 to its relation to experience by showing that the relative can 
 be reduced to stability only in and through its connection 
 with transcendent nature. 
 
 But the problem which the plain man has been considering 
 has its negative side. He has, up to this point, been chiefly 
 concerned, we may suppose, with the development of a 
 positive concept of truth. The possibility of truth carries 
 with it, however, the possibility of error, and the question 
 arises how anything can be false or erroneous. Now, we 
 have seen in the discussion of truth that the true to us, is 
 proximately that which harmonizes with our whole of ex- 
 perience, while ultimately it is that which conforms to the 
 standard of a transcendent nature. In like manner we may 
 define error as proximately that which is incongruous with 
 our whole of experience, and which is therefore excluded as 
 negative. It is possible, however, that some one may assert 
 
CHAP. II. SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS. 335 
 
 our error as his truth, and there are no clear grounds for 
 denying that from the standpoint of pure relativity one 
 man's truth may he another man's error. But can we 
 accept this as final ? If what is true to one may, in the 
 last analysis, be false to another, then the distinction be- 
 tween the false and true reaches at last a vanishing point. 
 My truth is, in the last analysis, your falsehood, and your 
 truth may in turn be the falsehood of someone else. There 
 is no assignable limit to such instability, and it is clearly 
 impossible to ground the true in the transcendent and at 
 the same time to stop with a purely relative conception of the 
 false. If anything is to be really false to you and to me and 
 to the man in the next township then it must be that the false 
 cannot be, in the- last analysis, purely relative. If the false 
 is relatively your and my incongruous and inconsistent, then, 
 in the last analysis, the false must be conceived in relation 
 to a transcendent nature. The objectively false will find its 
 ground in the concept of that which is incongruous and 
 inconsistent with a transcendent nature. If the distinction 
 of truth and error or falsehood involves transcendence at all, 
 then the concept of error involves transcendence. There 
 must be an objective standard of error, and this will be the 
 notion of that which would be excluded as incongruous 
 and inconsistent by a transcendent nature. If we ask, 
 then, how any such standard can be determined and are 
 met with the statement that an indeterminate standard of 
 error is valueless, we can only reply : (1) that the question 
 of determinateness and the question of necessity have to be 
 distinguished here. That a transcendent ground of the true 
 is necessary follows from considerations that are independent 
 of the question whether or not the transcendent nature can 
 be determined. If this be true of the positive conception 
 there is no reason why it should not be true of the negative ; 
 (2) that an important function of the transcendent in its 
 relation to the relative is to ground concepts of stability in 
 experience, which would otherwise be impossible. The 
 demand for stability we have seen to be the birthcry of both 
 
336 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt hi. 
 
 science and metaphysics, and we have also, by detailed 
 analysis, shown that concepts of stability are possible only 
 when the transcendent is assumed as the ground of experi- 
 ence. The consideration of error is a special case of this 
 general truth, and it is found that an objective standard of 
 error involves the notion of that which is transcendently 
 false or erroneous. 
 
 Eeturning then to the main topic of discussion, that of 
 the respective motives of science and metaphysics, we have 
 seen that they both arise in view of common qualities of 
 ordinary unreflective experience, its instability and its 
 inability to answer the questions which we found it 
 necessary to ask. Science carries the investigation up to the 
 point where the transcendent becomes plainly involved, and 
 then hands over the problem to metaphysics which seeks a 
 final solution of the problems in the development of certain 
 concepts of transcendence, through the mediation of which, 
 the shifting sands of experience are reduced to stability. 
 The common aim of both science and metaphysics may, 
 speaking broadly, be said to be the development of a com- 
 prehensive and adequate concept of experience. In attempt- 
 ing to achieve this we have seen that both disciplines are 
 led to a common recognition of the transcendent, which 
 enters into the constitution of the fundamental concepts of 
 both science and metaphysics. While science employs the 
 transcendent in order to ground principles which have as 
 their aim the direct investigation of experience and the 
 direct definition of its content, metaphysics, on the other 
 hand, seeks a further and indirect interpretation of experi- 
 ence by referring its content to its ultimate ground in 
 a transcendent nature in connection with which alone it can 
 reach a basis of ultimate stability. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND JUDGMENTS OF VALUE. 
 
 We are indebted to Kant for the first conscientious attempt 
 of modern philosophy to distinguish between judgments of 
 truth and judgments of value. A judgment of truth is one 
 which pronounces on content in view of its worth for the 
 intellect, while a judgment of value is one that pronounces 
 on content in view of its worth for will or feeling. 
 This distinction was substantially made by Kant for the 
 first time, and it grew out of his fundamental separation of 
 the theoretical from the practical consciousness. I use the 
 term separation advisedly, inasmuch as Kant's persistent 
 attempt to prevent the motives and process of knowledge 
 from becoming mixed up with or modified by the motives 
 and processes of will or feeling, amounts practically to a 
 divorce. The theoretical is kept so pure that epistemology 
 is perpetually in danger of losing its real content and 
 becoming little more than formal logic, while, on the other 
 hand, the practical is kept so purely practical that it is in 
 danger of losing all epistemological insight. The judgment 
 of truth is, in Kant's view, one that springs from a purely 
 logical motive, and is wholly abstracted from considerations 
 which arise in the sphere of the feelings or wiU. The 
 judgment of value is, on the contrary, one in which these 
 considerations are the sole determinants. The result of the 
 divorce is peculiar : on the one hand, an epistemology that 
 Y 337 
 
338 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 has little practical value, inasmuch as it fails to justify 
 theoretically any of the practical interests ; and, on the 
 other hand, an ethic that lacks epistemological worth, for 
 while it asserts the reality of the objects demanded by 
 certain practical interests, it postulates these as practical 
 necessities merely, and denies to them all epistemological 
 value. It was reserved for the subtle mind of Lotze, 
 however, to develop the distinction of Kant and give it its 
 final philosophical expression. Lotze separates off the 
 ethical and aesthetic motives and aims, from the motives and 
 aims of knowledge, and designates the former considerations 
 of worth, the latter considerations of truth. The judgments 
 in which these respective motives and aims are embodied 
 he designates judgments of worth and judgments of 
 truth. Lotze here makes a valuable distinction, but one 
 which some of his successors have used to justify the 
 Kantian divorce of the practical from the theoretical, and 
 ultimately of the whole sphere of religious experience and 
 doctrine, from metaphysics.-^ It is needless to say, however, 
 that Lotze himself does not contemplate any such divorce, 
 but simply maintains the necessity of the judgment or con- 
 sideration of worth in order to complete the metaphysical 
 basis of religion. This appears clearly from his Outlines of 
 the PMlosffphy of Religion^ in which he shows how on the 
 general theoretical grounds of metaphysics a spiritualistic 
 and broadly theistic conception of the world is established. 
 But religion is not simply a theoretic interest of the intel- 
 lect, but a practical interest of the heart, and from this 
 point of view the distinctive basis of religion is found in 
 the idea of God as good. But Lotze endeavours to show 
 that in the light of purely theoretic considerations the 
 issue between optimism and pessimism cannot be settled. 
 "We cannot determine by purely metaphysical considerations, 
 and as a simple question of truth and falsehood, whether 
 
 ' Ritsohl and hia school, who distinctively repudiate the metaphysical 
 ground of religion. 
 
 'See Ladd's Translation. 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 339 
 
 there is goodness at the heart of the world or not. In 
 order to reach a solution, argues Lotze, we must include 
 the demand of our practical nature which regards goodness 
 as the one consideration of supreme worth, and the 
 notion of G-od without goodness as involving a supreme 
 and intolerable contradiction. The consideration of worth 
 thus determines our judgment, and in the postulate of a 
 God of goodness the basis of religion is completed. 
 
 "Without following the history further we may preface 
 our own discussion by distinguishing between two species 
 •of what may be called judgments of value. Xhe one is the 
 Kantian species, which simply affirms the practical necessity 
 of its content in a moral or aesthetic postulate without 
 asserting its truth as a judgment of knowledge. The other 
 species is one that employs practical motives in order to 
 reach epistemological conclusions : that is, in order to 
 assert judgments of knowledge. Now it is with the latter 
 species that we are most concerned at this stage of our 
 discussion. What we wish to determine, if possible, is the 
 epistemological value of the considerations of worth. It is 
 possible at this point to make a still further simplification 
 of our problem by eliminating from it all those judgments 
 which originating as judgments of practical worth are at 
 some stage translated or shown to be translatable, into 
 judgments of knowledge. Thus the homesick mariner may 
 embody the desire of his heart in the practical proposition 
 that the coasts of his native land cannot be far off, and this 
 may be translated into a judgment of knowledge by the 
 testimony of the log-book or the sight of some familiar 
 object. We may neglect judgments of this species just as 
 we neglected those affirmations of belief that are capable of 
 translation into knowledge. And we may single out for the 
 special object of consideration, the judgment of worth that is 
 not translatable into a judgment of knowledge. Limiting 
 ourselves to this species it is evident that it is divisible into 
 two sub-species according as the motive or consideration 
 involved amounts to clear practical necessity or falls short of 
 
340 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 that standard. The consideration of practical necessity is of 
 course the strongest form of worth, and if it is ever possible 
 for the motive of worth to turn the epistemologieal scale in 
 favour of affirmation or denial it will be when the con- 
 sideration takes this extreme or supreme form. Let us 
 revert again to the Lotzean basis of religion. We have here 
 an instance in which a theoretic balance is reached so that, 
 epistemologically, it is impossible to decide between the 
 optimists and pessimists and to say whether good or evil is 
 dominant in the world in the sense of representing the 
 victorious tendency of things. Let us suppose here that 
 Lotze's ground is well taken and that the question is im- 
 possible of solution on purely theoretic grounds, but that, as 
 he argues, there can be a strong case of practical necessity 
 made out in favour of the optimistic view ; namely, that 
 goodness must be at the heart of the world. Let us suppose 
 that it can be shown that the highest category of morality is 
 the good, and that if good be not supreme in the world and 
 attainable by moral beings then the respect in which reality 
 becomes of supreme worth to us is an illusion, and the 
 whole moral conception of life becomes unreal. Let us 
 suppose that this can be shown : it is clear that we have a 
 plain case of practical necessity in which the validity of life 
 in its aspect of supreme worth and highest value, is at stake. 
 Here if anywhere will be a situation in which the practical 
 motive may rightfully become a moment in the determina- 
 tion of an epistemologieal judgment, and we may affirm as 
 true that God is good. The necessity is so clear and so 
 pressing in a case of this kind that to persist in maintain- 
 ing the theoretic balance in face of it would threaten the 
 rationality of our whole world. As much therefore to 
 escape a lapse into irrationality as to affirm the truth of 
 what we feel to be supremely valuable, we redress our scales 
 in the light of the motive of value and affirm goodness to be 
 a central feature of the world. 
 
 I do not say that the situation could not be altered by 
 the shifting of the terms or that all the terms possess 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 341 
 
 necessarily a fixed value. The pessimist in whose mind the 
 theoretic balance does not exist, may not find the practical 
 necessity so coercive even when its force is acknowledged. 
 For in the first place, he is not concerned to affirm the 
 rationality of the world. In truth it seems to him to be 
 supremely irrational and its irrationality is the root of the 
 misery and evil of which he complains. He too would like 
 to see the good triumphant, but from his point of view the 
 whole inner constitution of things would have to be revolu- 
 tionized in order to make such an end attainable. Clearly we 
 are here at the dividing of the ways where the human spirit 
 has a supreme option and may choose its whole conception 
 of the real. For if a man chooses the pessimistic view and 
 is radical enough in grounding it, his position will be un- 
 assailable. But he must accept the logic of his position and 
 must surrender all pretensions of maintaining any sort of 
 rationality in his world. Pessimism when radical rests on 
 the postulate of irrationality, which is as unassailable as the 
 postulate of rationality. Now if the issue of good and evil 
 could be clearly reduced to this basis it would be possible 
 to assert goodness in a judgment of knowledge, inasmuch as 
 its denial would be tantamount to absolute scepticism or 
 the denial of all knowledge. But there is a third alterna- 
 tive that comes in to render the situation more complex. 
 This is the alternative of indifference. If, as Lotze argues, 
 there is a theoretic balance, this may mean that the world at 
 its heart is indifferent to both good and evil, and that what 
 appears as good and evil in the world may be accidental or 
 at least not part of the real meaning of the world. It is 
 this possibility of indifference that enters in and renders it 
 impossible to assert the goodness of the world as a truth of 
 knowledge unless it could be shown to be clearly possible to 
 reduce the postulate of indifference to an aspect of universal 
 scepticism. In that case goodness might be affirmed in a judg- 
 ment of knowledge. But short of that, however pressing the 
 necessity might be, it could not become a judgment of know- 
 ledge, but at best would take the form of a necessary belief 
 
342 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. paet hi. 
 
 We seem to have reached, a conclusion of some value 
 here. In order that a consideration of worth may be 
 sufficient to turn the balance in favour of a judgment of 
 knowledge, its coerciveness must be so great as to involve 
 the postulate of irrationality with reference to our whole 
 world. If the refusal to yield to the practical consideration 
 be tantamount to asserting the essential irrationality of the 
 world and, therefore, the wreck of all knowledge, it must be 
 allowed to turn the balance in favour of knowledge. If,, 
 however, the pressure does not reach this point or cannot 
 be shown to reach it, the judgment into which it enters 
 will fall short of positive knowledge, although it may have 
 the form and cogency of a necessary belief. It may be 
 said then that while the consideration of worth, standing 
 alone, can never constitute a judgment of real knowledge, 
 yet at the top of the scale where its force is strongest 
 it may turn the scale of a theoretic situation in favour of 
 the judgment of knowledge. In general, however, the 
 epistemological function of the motives and considerations of 
 worth, will be confined to the determination of beliefs rather 
 than of judgments of knowledge. 
 
 We have seen in the analysis of the first chapter 
 that the subjective condition of belief arises when there 
 is a dominance of the practical interest over the theoretic, 
 and we have seen here that where the practical motive 
 is a consideration of real necessity the belief that it motives 
 will be a necessary belief. And the force of the belief- 
 judgment will, other things being equal, correspond to the 
 subjective worth of the practical consideration by which 
 it is motived. When we have reached the conclusion that 
 considerations of worth have in general, except in the 
 extreme cases indicated, as their normal function the genera- 
 tion of beliefs and practical convictions, the question of the 
 value of beliefs becomes one of vital importance. We are 
 considering here only the question of epistemological value, 
 of course, and the point of interest is, in what sense and to 
 what degree may a belief be taken as a valid form of 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OP TRUTH AND VALUE. 343 
 
 objective affirmation. In the extreme case where the denial 
 of the belief would overthrow the rationality of the world, 
 the belief has as we saw the force of knowledge, and we may 
 rest in it with the certainty that it is assailable only by an 
 absolute scepticism which is self-destructive. But we are 
 concerned here with beliefs that fall short of the certitude of 
 knowledge and with that species of belief that is not trans- 
 latable into knowledge. What is the certitude-value of the 
 judgment of belief in general ? Can it be determined, and 
 can we discover any criteria which will be of general appli- 
 cation ? Some things may, I think, be determined which 
 will help at least to bring relative order into the situation. 
 In the first place we have seen that, objectively, a belief can 
 never be reduced to a cognitive basis. We can never bring 
 the content of belief into immediate relation to objective 
 cognition or necessity, and it cannot therefore be reduced to 
 an intuition. But we can apply a negative test here of 
 considerable value. We can say that the situation contem- 
 plated in the judgment of belief must not be inconsistent 
 with the world as we know it. The system of things as we 
 know and conceive it must not be inconsistent with the 
 content of the belief, or to put the matter in the form 
 of utmost generality, the content of the belief must not be 
 inconsistent with the objective rationality of the world, that 
 rationality being expressible in our sense or concept of the 
 internal unity and consistency of the world-representation as 
 a whole. But this is only a negative criterion at best, and 
 can have little to do in determining positive conviction. 
 A stronger objective criterion would be the fact that our 
 world would seem less rational if the belief were not true ; 
 in short, that it adds to the objective rationality of the 
 world. This is a consideration of some value in the positive 
 determination of belief, but it is probable that in most cases 
 it is resolvable, in the last analysis, into some of the subjec- 
 tive tests which we shall now proceed to consider. 
 
 The distinctive subjective generator of belief is, as we 
 have seen, the motive or consideration of worth, and this 
 
344 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 motive arises primarily out of volition and feeling, and 
 voices some demand of our nature in view of the practical 
 issues of the good and the bad. In short the worth-motive 
 is primarily a demand for the good, not for the true, and it has 
 only a secondary interest in the truth of its object, as a con- 
 dition of its realization as good. Now we have seen how 
 the whole system of epistemological relations rests on and 
 correlates with the system of practical motives and relations 
 involved in volitional and emotional experience. In view 
 of this there may be two sets of considerations arising re- 
 spectively in view of the good and the beautiful. Confining 
 ourselves at present to the volitional end, the good, we find 
 that in the large sense we categorize our whole world-con- 
 tent under the volitional category and demand that it shall be 
 good, and that a large part of this content may be cognitively 
 apprehended as good. But there will be a point reached as 
 we approximate the sphere of the ideal and complete, where 
 cognition breaks down and the practical motive is left to 
 bear out its demand mainly by its own force. In this con- 
 nection it is clear that the form of the question ought to be, 
 what is the epistemological value of a practical consideration 
 of good ? Is it ever sufficient to justify a belief in the 
 objective truth of its object, in the absence of convincing 
 proof of the theoretic kind ? Two cases may be conceived 
 in this connection : (1) where the belief -judgment is practi- 
 cally necessary ; (2) where it is not necessary but highly 
 reasonable. Now it is clear that under the head of 
 practical necessity would fall such judgments as the Kantian 
 postulates ; for without stopping to argue the soundness of 
 Kant's positions, it will be sufficient for our purposes here 
 to state the postulates hypothetically and say, if the validity 
 of the category of practical good unconditionally demands 
 that man should be a free self-determining agent, then we 
 must in the interests of morality assert the reality of free 
 self-determining agency. Or if the attainableness of the 
 good that is practically necessary, has as its indispensable 
 condition the immortality of the soul, then we must in the 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 345 
 
 interests of morality affirm that the soul is immortal. In 
 connection with these judgments we have seen that Kant 
 endeavours to affirm their practical truth while denying 
 to them epistemological validity. But what we maintain 
 here is that a practical judgment cannot escape the refer- 
 ence to truth and must have epistemological value of some 
 sort. In the above judgments, assuming the conditions out 
 of which they arise to be valid, we cannot stop with the 
 Kantian conclusion, but must say that the postulate justifies 
 some attitude toward the theoretic truth of what is affirmed. 
 If it be true that the validity of the practical end, the good, 
 depends on the immortality of the soul, then the denial of 
 immortality is tantamount to the denial of goodness, and the 
 failure to affirm immortality is tantamount to a failure to 
 affirm goodness as a reality in the world. If now we 
 assume the truth of our hypothesis we will have an instance 
 of a judgment the denial of which would involve the sup- 
 pression of the rationality of the world, and therefore a 
 judgment of worth that is equivalent to knowledge. "We 
 say this would follow provided the conditions were not in any 
 sense hypothetical, and we could say with the infallibility of 
 intuition that the validity of the good is unconditionally 
 staked on the immortality of the soul. If the postulate of 
 immortality cannot be affirmed as a judgment of knowledge, 
 it is because the practical necessity on which it rests may 
 be debatable, and thus theoretic uncertainty may enter 
 into its very foundations. 
 
 But admitting for the sake of the argument that immor- 
 tality cannot be affirmed as an unconditional certainty, 
 the practical consideration may still be sufficient to 
 render it a necessary belief. If it can be made obvious 
 that the denial of immortality and the termination of 
 our being with the temporal death of the body, would 
 inevitably rob life of its value and tend to dry up those 
 springs of inspiration which condition the realization of the 
 good even in the present life — if this could be made clear, 
 then just so far belief in immortality would become practi- 
 
346 TKANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part in. 
 
 cally necessary, since its denial would involve the defeat, or 
 at least the peril of the defeat, of the practical good in this 
 life. We are not concerned here to prove that any particu- 
 lar belief is necessary, but rather to vindicate the possibility 
 of a class of necessary beliefs and to show the grounds on 
 which such necessary affirmations may rest. The pressure 
 of the consideration of practical necessity, on the question 
 of the truth or falsehood of the object of the practical 
 demand, will lead to a belief that the practical object 
 must be true and real, and the affirmation will be valid 
 in so far as the practical necessity is beyond dispute. 
 (2) The second case is that of a judgment of worth 
 which commends itself simply as reasonable, not as absolutely 
 necessary. If, for example, the immortality of the soul 
 be asserted as a necessary belief, then the belief that 
 there will be mutual recognition beyond the grave between 
 souls that knew each other in this life, becomes reasonable. 
 In other words, that belief is supported by the analogies of 
 present experience and is in no sense out of harmony 
 with anything that our experience has taught us. But the 
 belief is not necessary, for we do not and can not know what 
 changes may be involved in the passage through death. 
 The physical basis of conscious life may be so profoundly 
 modified as to involve, if not a total, yet a partial lapse of 
 memory, and that lapse might involve an indefinite portion of 
 the relations of the present life. We are acquainted with 
 temporary lapses of this kind and cannot say that they may 
 not be total. Such a belief cannot, therefore, take the form 
 of necessity. We cannot say that there must be mutual 
 recognition beyond the grave, but rather that it is reasonable 
 to think that there will be such recognition. The belief is 
 conditional on a prior belief in the immortality of the soul, 
 which, being assumed to be true on its own ground, it 
 becomes reasonable but not necessary to believe that the 
 truth of the life beyond the grave also includes the mutual 
 recognition of souls that have known each other here. And 
 we can say in this connection that the practical motive, 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 347 
 
 which is here the strong emotional requirement of our nature^ 
 that we should not be finally estranged from those we have 
 known and loved, is sufficient to justify a reasonable belief 
 that the event we call death will not involve the necessity 
 of such estrangement. 
 
 The notions of belief and authority are very closely 
 associated in our thoughts, and the relationship is in fact so 
 close as to render this a favourable point for a brief con- 
 sideration of the subject of authority. There are two 
 species of this category : authority for action and authority 
 for conviction, only the latter of which enters into the scope 
 of our present inquiry. Again the relation of authority t& 
 conviction involves a number of aspects, some of which may 
 be excluded. In general it may be said that authority is 
 a condition of belief but not of knowledge, since in the 
 respects in which it seems to be a condition of knowledge it 
 is in reality only a first step in the process of knowledge. Let 
 us specify one or two of these aspects. In the first place it 
 is commonly urged that all our knowledge rests in the last 
 analysis on authority, inasmuch as its validity depends on 
 our acceptance of the testimony of our faculties. This is in 
 fact a reversal of truth, for knowledge rests ultimately on our 
 perception of its own grounds, and scepticism, which may 
 arise of course, is in the last analysis cured by the test of 
 the same perception. How do we get rid of disbelief in our 
 own faculties ? Simply by finding that they normally give 
 us knowledge rather than illusion. There is no other cure. 
 Again, it is urged that all historical knowledge rests ulti- 
 mately on authority. But this is true only in a very 
 secondary sense. Our acceptance of historical content 
 generally rests in the last analysis on our perception that it 
 conforms to the conditions of possible knowledge. We do 
 not need to be told that Munchausen lies, since it is obvious 
 that his statements violate the conditions which render 
 truth possible. That historical content conforms to the 
 conditions of possible knowledge, is the first ground of its 
 acceptance. The second condition of our acceptance is its 
 
348 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 congruity with the whole of our present experience. We 
 could not believe in antipodes if we thought with the 
 ancients that all bodies gravitate in some absolute direction. 
 The historic representation must be congruous with our 
 present experience as a whole or it will be rejected as in- 
 credible. Then again we must satisfy ourselves as to the 
 competency and reliability of the narrator. How is this to 
 be done ? Well, we must get to know something about his 
 means of information, his ability to select his materials, and 
 above all his capacity for putting a correct construction on 
 his materials. And with reference to his veracity we must 
 have means of satisfying ourselves that he is honest and 
 truthful. In all this process where does authority begin ? 
 It is clear that it must be excluded from the sphere of the 
 objective grounds. These are grounds of direct certitude of 
 a cognitive character. When we come to the subjective 
 grounds we find that we employ various means to satisfy 
 ourselves as to the competency of the historian, and these will 
 be of the nature of direct knowledge, in so far as we can 
 make up our minds from first-hand data and reach an inde- 
 pendent judgment. And the same will be to some extent 
 true in regard to the question of veracity. But at some 
 stage we will reach a point where this process comes to 
 an end and we accept the whole on the simple faith that 
 the historian is telling us the truth. We seem to have 
 come to the authority of the historian as the last ground 
 of our acceptance of his story. But we have in truth 
 been reversing the order of experience. The act of 
 simple faith, when it takes place at all, is the very first 
 step of experience and not the last. We receive the 
 message with any degree of belief that may attach to it; 
 this is indeterminate, and then we proceed to reduce our 
 epistemological attitude towards it, so far as may be 
 possible, to one of knowledge. This leads to the develop- 
 ment of all the considerations spoken of above. In the 
 end we are able to say, if the result has been positive, 
 that we know the historian's message to be true or 
 
CHAP. HI. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 349 
 
 we believe it to be true, and our belief will be epistemo- 
 logical rather than practical. 
 
 We find then that in the case of historical knowledge 
 sheer authority comes first instead of last. The first act 
 is belief on purely ethical grounds, but the last act is a judg- 
 ment that rests mainly on epistemological data. The same 
 conclusion applies without much modification to our relation 
 to the whole body of knowledge and belief, including the 
 products of special and expert investigation. Authority is a 
 first comer, and stands at the portal of knowledge. We 
 receive with what degree of faith may be, and then proceed 
 to translate our judgments by which the content is affirmed 
 into the epistemological form. It makes no difference, so 
 far as the essential relations are concerned, that with many 
 and perhaps most of us the judgment of simple acceptance 
 remains practically the last act. It would not be so if we 
 were not convinced that the content was in conformity with 
 the conditions of possible knowledge or if in any way it 
 seemed to be inconsistent with the whole of our experience. 
 It would not be the last act did we not feel justified in 
 believing in the competency and veraciousness of the in- 
 vestigator who supplies us with the increment of knowledge. 
 If we are ready to assert that the conditions of reducing our 
 judgment to the epistemological form are available, and on 
 that ground make the act of acceptance the last act so far 
 as we are concerned, our conduct is rational, and mainly so 
 because we have recognized the rightful place of authority 
 in such matters as the first and not the final ground of 
 certitude. 
 
 It is clear then that authority when it enters at all 
 is not a condition of knowledge but rather a first step in 
 the process of knowledge. But is there not some sphere 
 of conviction to which authority bears a more vital 
 relation ? Let us consider the relation of authority to 
 belief. I said by implication at least at the beginning of 
 this paragraph that authority is a condition of belief. That 
 statement may have to be modified. For we must bear in 
 
350 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt hi. 
 
 mind here that we are considering belief only in its epistemo- 
 logical aspect as an assertor of truth and not as a judgment 
 of practical good. We have seen, however, that judgments 
 of practical good may have epistemological value, and it is 
 the epistemological aspect of belief that is under considera- 
 tion here ; beliefs, in short, as assertors of truth. Let us 
 take, for example, the Christian belief in the resurrection of 
 the body. This belief is doubtless at first an act of simple 
 acceptance on the authority of the Founder of Christianity. 
 In the first instance the Christian believes simply on the 
 testimony of Jesus. But is this true in the last analysis, 
 and can this simple testimony be taken as the last reason 
 for believing ? It is clear, I think, that it cannot. St. Paul 
 betrays the necessity of grounding this belief on some- 
 thing more than mere personal assurance in his plea 
 that if Christ be not risen then would the hope of the 
 Christian be vain. In short, St. Paul is willing to admit 
 that simple assurance is not sufficient in this case, but that 
 it is necessary for the one who asserts the resurrection, to 
 exhibit the truth of what he is affirming in his own body 
 in order that his followers may be convinced that he knows 
 whereof he speaks and has power to bring it to pass. St. 
 Paul is certainly seeking to produce conviction by arguing 
 that if Jesus is able to realize the resurrection in his 
 own case he is also able to do so in the case of his 
 disciples. Doubtless St. Paul himself had at one time 
 received the doctrine of the resurrection by a simple 
 assent of faith. But he had reached a point in his 
 experience when he deemed it necessary for himself as well 
 as for others to seek rational justification for this belief He 
 finds the needed confirmation in the attested fact of Christ's 
 exhibition of the possibility of what he asserts and his 
 power to bring it about in his own resurrection. Now it is 
 not necessary that every one should look precisely where 
 St. Paul looked for the " holding turn " to his conviction. 
 But it is evident that every one must look somewhere. 
 Even the disciple of the Johannean type who approaches his 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 351 
 
 Master in the relation of intuitive love will believe the 
 Master's assertion of the resurrection of the body mainly on 
 account of his knowledge of what that Master is and can do. 
 Authority is a means to assurance, never the last ground of 
 assurance, and it is therefore as a means, as a first and not a 
 last step in knowledge and belief, that it is to be considered 
 as a term in an epistemological world at all. 
 
 Having reached this conclusion we are in a position to 
 determine the place that authority may rightfully hold in 
 a system of knowledge and belief. We may accept things 
 because they are good and not because they are true, but 
 in so far as we accept things as true we perform an act which 
 we call epistemological, and it expresses itself in a judgment 
 of knowledge or a judgment of belief. Now we have seen 
 that in so far as authority enters as a factor in the process it 
 is a first and not a last step. Assent to authority is always 
 preliminary to assent to that in which it is grounded. The 
 settlement of this fact does not, however, determine the 
 question of the value of authority as a factor in conviction. 
 The truth is that authority has different degrees of value in 
 connection with different species of certitude, and it has 
 greater value in general for belief than it has for knowledge. 
 The root of authority is in the will, and it is given to will 
 to exercise the exclusive prerogative of speaking authorita- 
 tively ; that is, of laying down the law and requiring 
 obedience. We will be led to expect then that in belief, in 
 which the will-motive is stronger than it is in knowledge, 
 there will be a larger sphere for authority than there is in 
 knowledge. The will to know expresses simply a readiness 
 or a determination to exercise the faculties of knowledge. 
 But the "will to believe" is more ambiguous. That one 
 should will to believe something by sheer force of dogged 
 resolve, is at least a conceivable state of mind, and that one 
 should succeed in the end is not incredible when we take 
 into account the power of habit. Now the mere will to 
 believe has no epistemological significance, since it is possible 
 to will to believe anything, but where the will to believe 
 
352 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. past hi. 
 
 terminates in actual belief then it will be true that we 
 either believe simply without any reason, or that our belief 
 has rational grounds. The former would be a case of 
 belief on pure authority since authority is the expression of 
 pure will, and it makes no difference whether the will be 
 our own or that of another ; while the latter might have the 
 moment of authority in it but would ultimately rest on 
 epistemological grounds. The will to believe, in itself con- 
 sidered, is then the pure motive of a belief that rests on 
 simple authority, and the question of the validity of authority 
 as an ultimate ground of conviction will be bound up with 
 the question of the validity of the will to believe as a 
 motive for accepting anything as true. Let us then dis- 
 tinguish the will to believe from the epistemological motives 
 of belief or knowledge, and we have a simple case of the 
 judgment that a thing must he true because it is good. 
 The will does not act apart from some end-category of 
 volition, and we have seen that this is the good. To say 
 that we will a thing because it is good is inaccurate, for 
 what we will is the good as we conceive it, and we will the 
 good just as we af&rm the true. The will to believe is not 
 the resolve to accept anything as good, for this is involved 
 in willing it at all, but rather the determination to assert 
 its truth on the ground of its being good. So far as the 
 pure will to believe is concerned this must be the only and 
 final consideration. To the Moslem it seems to be the 
 greatest practical good that when he is killed in battle 
 fighting for his religion he should go straight to the 
 Mohammedan paradise, and, therefore, he affirms and 
 believes in it as true. He may have other reasons for his 
 belief, but so far forth as it is a pure case of will to believe, 
 this will be his motive, and he will believe it to be true 
 because it is good. 
 
 Now, I am not attempting to deny here that beliefs are 
 formed on this basis. Nothing is more common than for 
 men to assert the truth of things on the ground of their 
 practical value. They begin by wishing that they were 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 353 
 
 true, and end by aflBrming that they must be true. This is 
 the natural history of a large proportion of the most 
 cherished beliefs of the race, and there is no disposition 
 here to challenge the validity of many of the beliefs so 
 formed. But the question here is not whether the will to 
 believe may or may not lead to true beliefs, but rather 
 whether the will to believe, the determination to assent to 
 the truth of a thing because of its practical relation to good, 
 is a sufficient final ground for any belief. And in order to 
 reach an answer it will be necessary to revert to some con- 
 clusions already reached in former sections. In the discus- 
 sion of the epistemological value of motives of practical 
 worth we found that it was necessary to apply the general 
 test of rationality, and we found in general that it is 
 possible for what Kant calls a postulate of the practical 
 reason to take such a form that the denial of it would 
 be tantamount to a denial of the objective rationality 
 of our world. In this case we saw that our postulate 
 acquires the force of knowledge. Again, we have found 
 that a practical postulate may assume such a form that 
 the denial of it would be tantamount to a denial of the 
 subjective rationality of our world; that is, to an overthrowal 
 of all standards of value. In this case the belief takes on 
 the form of necessity. In the case of other practical 
 postulates, as for instance that there shall be recognition 
 beyond the grave, we saw that the conditions of necessity 
 are not present, and that only a degree of probability could 
 be asserted. Now, the conclusion which I wish to draw 
 from these considerations is just this : that while the fact 
 that the will to believe is a generator of beliefs is not in 
 dispute, yet when the question of the legitimacy of beliefs 
 thus generated comes up it cannot be answered by simply 
 claiming the right to believe a proposition because its 
 affirmation carries with it a practical good. This would 
 inevitably throw wide open the floodgates of credulity and 
 superstition. But what is needed is such a criticism of the 
 grounds of belief as will enable us to determine the relation 
 
 z 
 
354 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 of the good involved to our world as a whole. If the good 
 is of such a nature that it is involved in the rationality of 
 our world, and its denial would be tantamount to a wreck 
 of that rationality, then we have the strongest reasons for 
 believing it to be true, and the same is true in regard to 
 beliefs that may be asserted as necessary or as only 
 probable. The final grov/nd of their affirynation is not the 
 fact that they are good, hut rather our conviction that they are 
 implicated either necessarily or in a lesser degree, in the 
 rationality of the world, and that their denial would leave the 
 world so far forth, irrational and absurd. And this con- 
 viction rests in the last analysis on our intuition of the truth 
 that the ultimate harmony of the good and the true, so that the 
 good shall he true and the true good, is involved in the essence 
 of that idea of rationality the denial of which means the wreck 
 of all knowledge. 
 
 There are two spheres into which the moment of autho- 
 rity, or assent founded on will-demand, may enter : those 
 of belief and conduct. In the latter sphere the end- 
 category is, of course, the good, and the claim is for 
 obedience rather than mental assent. N"ow, while in 
 ordinary usage the notion of authority is taken in the 
 concrete as including the grounds of its validity, yet these 
 may always be analyzed out, and it will be found that the 
 final grounds of obedience, the basis of the right to be 
 obeyed, are to found in the assumed goodness of the 
 enjoining agent. In the last analysis the will yields its 
 allegiance only to the good. There is no binding force 
 in evil as evil, though it may be able to coerce by superior 
 force or guile, but the source of practical authority, in the 
 sphere of conduct, is ultimately traceable to the end-category 
 of the practical, the good. It has already been made clear 
 in reference to authority in the sphere of belief that while 
 the term may be concretely employed as including the 
 grounds of its claims, yet these when analyzed out will 
 be found to take the form of considerations that are directly 
 related to the good and indirectly and ultimately to the true. 
 
CHAP. III. JUDGMENTS OF TRUTH AND VALUE. 355 
 
 The will to believe is, then, a first and not a final motive 
 of belief. The final ground will always be some reason that 
 will serve as its justification, and in the absence of which 
 the belief will have no epistemological significance. In 
 common usage, however, the phrase " will to believe " is 
 employed indiscriminately so as to include legitimate motives, 
 as well as others that are not adequate, and nothing is more 
 needed than a discriminating analysis that will supply us 
 with some criterion which will enable us to distinguish 
 legitimate reasons for believing from those that are unsound 
 and misleading. And in this we have also said a final word 
 respecting authority. The term is used with the greatest 
 indiscrimination, so as to include all the grounds, valid or 
 invalid, for the acceptance of any content as true. In view 
 of this the great need is a critique that will enable us to 
 determine the place and value of authority in a scheme 
 of knowledge and belief. When we have seen that the 
 pulse of authority, so far forth as it is involved in a scheme 
 of knowledge and belief, is bound up with the will to 
 believe, we will be prepared to recognize the distinctions 
 arrived at above, and to admit that while authority may be, 
 and no doubt is, an important and in some spheres, even 
 a necessary factor in belief, yet its true place is at the 
 beginning rather than the end. The last grounds of belief 
 must be grounds that will also justify the authority by 
 which they are enunciated. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE TEANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 
 
 In this chapter we return to the main line of metaphysical 
 reflection in the development of the doctrine of the 
 transcendent. We have in former chapters exhibited the 
 presence of the transcendent in experience and have shown 
 its necessary relation to both science and metaphysics. 
 Here it is our purpose to develop as far as may be possible 
 the concept of the transcendent itself, and the heading of 
 the chapter will indicate the general trend of the discussion. 
 There are two questions here: (1) that of the connection of 
 the transcendent with experience and (2) the question as to 
 the nature of the transcendent, whether there are sufficient 
 grounds for conceiving it as itself a form of experience. 
 The first question has already been argued to some extent. 
 We have seen that at various points in experience the 
 transcendent is involved, and we have pointed out in certain 
 connections how the transcendent leads to the formation of 
 intra-experiential concepts and principles which are necessary 
 for its reduction to unity and stability. It is only necessary 
 here to enlarge on these same considerations. Let us 
 suppose the denial of the transcendent in experience and 
 then consider what follows. In the first place it would 
 be impossible to find any adequate basis for the con- 
 sciousness of the transcendent that asserts itself concretely 
 in religious experience and more abstractly in those 
 
 356 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 357 
 
 notions of the perfect, the infinite, and the absolute which 
 are as inexpugnable as any of the concepts of relativity and 
 also impossible of reduction to them. Why should we have 
 the transcendent in consciousness if there is no transcendence 
 in experience ? The logic of the situation is coercive. There 
 is no deduction possible of the concepts of transcendence 
 from the relative. The notion of relativity itself is possible 
 only in view of the concepts of the transcendent. Conceding 
 the element of transcendence, we have only to exhibit the 
 points where it asserts itself and the bearing it has on 
 intra-experiential elements. Now, we have seen that the 
 transcendent asserts itself in both an objective and a 
 subjective manner. In the sphere of the objective con- 
 sciousness we find not only a point of presentation, but also 
 one of conception, under each of the categories, at which the 
 transcendent makes itself known in consciousness. The 
 presentation will arise in connection with the space and 
 time world, as well as with the world of the dynamic 
 and aesthetic categories. The space world is not an 
 absolute creation. This is involved in the immediate con- 
 sciousness in which it is apprehended. That the presentative 
 experience in this sphere is in the last analysis non- 
 originative, is an immediate implication from the coercive- 
 ness or the unqualified inevitability of that experience. 
 Ultimately our relation to the transcendent must be 
 receptive. The same is true of the spontaneous experiences 
 of the dynamic categories. The world of energies is not a 
 creation of our own energy. This is involved in the coercive 
 nature of the experience, and is expressed in its immediacy, 
 in the consciousness of resistance and the persistent agency 
 of the resistent terms. Again the unity of the world has 
 a point of inevitability at which our control ceases. That 
 our world is unified is not altogether a function of our 
 thought or even of our will, but thought and will are 
 brought into relation with some term that puts the stamp 
 of necessity on their procedure and in relation to which 
 they are not free. 
 
358 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 The conceptual points of transcendence are equally clear. 
 The transcendent element in the concept of space and time 
 is found at that point where dimension lapses and the 
 initiative is taken by the non- or ultra-dimensional. "We 
 have seen in our treatment of conceptual space and time 
 that the genesis of dimension involves a point of dimension- 
 less initiative. The significance of this is, surely, that at 
 the point where our experience touches and defines the 
 objective under the forms of space and time, being asserts 
 itself as transcendent to these operations. The abso- 
 lute origin of the content that is realized in space and 
 time is therefore a presupposition of the experience in 
 which it is realized. The dynamic categories speak a 
 similar language. The notion of cause is that of conditioned 
 origination, but it has wrapped up in it the concept of 
 unconditioned or absolute origination. We call this self- 
 origination, and it means simply that in the last analysis 
 there must be a first point of initiative for things. The 
 necessity of this is involved in the very concept of cause. 
 The concept of substance involving the point of persistent 
 organization in the objective sphere, utters more clearly the 
 consciousness of the transcendent. The objectively per- 
 sistent necessitates the distinction of the object from our 
 mental constructs of it in so far as the self-assertion of the 
 object as such a point, introduces the element of coercive- 
 ness or inevitability into our experience. The notion of 
 substance is not exhausted, we may say, in that of succes- 
 sive posits in our experience, but the consciousness in 
 which it is affirmed posits its own transcendence in the 
 consciousness that the content it realizes under the sub- 
 stance-category, is in the last analysis, not its own doing, but 
 the deed of its other. Lastly, in the category of interaction 
 we find that the modification of causal agency which the 
 idea of community involves, necessitates the concept of 
 internal rather than external activity. The a's in order to 
 be able to affect the b's must become internal to them, and 
 this as we have argued, renders it necessary that the terms 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 359 
 
 of the interaction should include an internal point of 
 departure for the reception of impulses and the organization 
 of responses. Now, the reflection of Lotze comes to our 
 aid at this stage, and enables us to see that the concept of 
 interaction has led up to a point where the notion of 
 objective things begins to merge into that of subjects, and 
 our world becomes peopled with individualities analogous to 
 the Leibnitzian monads. But the Leibnitzian monad is in 
 its very nature a self-transcending conception inasmuch as 
 it is a relative agent in an interacting system of mutually 
 modifying agencies, which yet involves a point of departure 
 for its activities that shall be absolute. 
 
 The notion of objective agency thus involves the point of 
 transcendence where the function of something unconditioned 
 and absolute is plainly implicated. We have seen that the 
 whole of objective experience is pervaded with this implica- 
 tion. If we enter the sphere of the subject-consciousness 
 we will find that the situation there is not materially differ- 
 ent. We will find that the self is conscious of itself as a 
 socius ; that is, as the bearer of a modified, relative agency in 
 which its point of initiative is correlated with, and modified 
 by, the initiative of the not-self. But the very concept of 
 experience implicates the notion of an absolute centre in 
 relation to which every part of it may be unified, and the 
 agency of which shall not be dependent on other, but self- 
 determining. We have, however, in experience a plurality 
 of selves presented under the category of community, and 
 exercising a reciprocally modifying influence upon one 
 another. This activity is accompanied by the consciousness 
 of its relativity. And yet there is in relation to it all, a 
 point of transcendence in the concept of an absolutely free 
 and unifj'ing agency, which it renders necessary. The point 
 of transcendence which is, in some sense, extra-conscious in 
 the objective sphere, becomes intra-conscious and fully realized 
 in the experience of the subject. In connection with the con- 
 sciousness of our own form of relative individuality and agency 
 there arises necessarily the consciousness of a transcending 
 
360 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE part. m. 
 
 individuality and agency, and it is true here, as it is in the 
 objective sphere, that the general concept of the transcendent 
 is a necessary outcome of experience. It is so interwoven 
 with the processes of experience, subjective and objective, 
 that its elimination would reduce experience to chaos, and 
 it is so obtrusive in every department of consciousness that 
 the failure to see it is good evidence of metaphysical blindness. 
 Let us consider, then, in a brief paragraph the intra- 
 experiential bearings of this element of transcendence. We 
 have only to recall at this point considerations that have 
 already been urged. We have seen that the basal concepts 
 of science involve the transcendent, and that these concepts 
 are necessary in order to render scientific knowledge 
 possible. And we have seen that the respect in which they 
 are needed to render science possible, is as a means of 
 transcending the internal instability of the relative and 
 achieving a stable basis of certitude. The transforma- 
 tion which the principles of transcendence produce in the 
 sphere of relativity is, therefore, a necessary condition of the 
 existence of science. Now, we have seen that the same 
 necessity arises at any point in experience where we begin 
 to reflect and follow our reflection out to a satisfactory con- 
 clusion. The plain man's reflection on the distinction 
 between knowledge and belief, which led him ultimately to 
 the consideration of the ground of the true and the false, is 
 an illustration which we may generalize, for it will be found 
 that there is no halting place for reflection in the mere 
 relative, and that the reason for that is the fact which we 
 soon discern, that there is no satisfactory answer to our 
 questions in the mere relative. The general instability 
 of the relative can be overcome only by anchoring it to 
 some absolute ground, and that this instability should be 
 overcome is a condition of the possibility of true science. 
 There can be no relative science of the relative. But in the 
 last analysis science must ground itself in a principle which 
 enables the transcendent to enter into and transform the 
 whole constitution of the relative. 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 361 
 
 We come then to the point where the second question 
 arises, as to the nature of the transcendent ; can it be 
 determined as itself a form of experience 1 It is here that 
 we come upon the favourite position of agnosticism ; namely, 
 that nothing can be determined regarding the nature of the 
 absolute. The Positivistic denial of the necessity of the 
 transcendent has been dealt with in our answer to the 
 preceding question. But Herbert Spencer and his school 
 tell us that the nature of the transcendent, the existence of 
 which they postulate as necessary, is and must remain 
 inscrutable; that since all our categories are relative we have 
 no resources left for the determination of absolute nature. 
 Now in regard to this position it may be urged (1) that the 
 ability to affirm the necessary existence of any being 
 involves some concept of its nature. We could not say that 
 the transcendent is necessary if it were not possible to 
 conceive some points of difference between it and the 
 relative. The agnostic will admit this much, but will take 
 the ground that, after all, we have reached only negative 
 determinations of the absolute. We can say only that it is 
 not relative but can go no farther. That there is a measure 
 of truth in this contention we are willing to admit. When we 
 characterize anything as non-relative and non-finite simply, 
 we do no more than deny that it possesses the attributes of 
 relativity and finitude, but leave undetermined the attributes 
 which it may possess. Were the transcendent an isolated 
 term in experience there would perhaps be no possibility 
 beyond this mode of negative determination. But it is just 
 the reverse of isolated. We have seen that it is so impli- 
 cated with the relative terms of experience that these can 
 be rendered valid only by relating them to the transcendent. 
 The school of Spencer admits that the whole sphere of the 
 relative and finite would become irrational if it were to be 
 divorced from its transcendent ground. The absolute of the 
 school of Spencer is not an isolated term but rather a 
 transcendent that is implicated in the whole texture of 
 experience, Now the point of our contention here is that 
 
362 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt hi. 
 
 the determination of the transcendent as not isolated but as 
 necessarily implicated in the very texture of experience, this 
 kind of determination, I say, is impossible without some 
 positive insight into the nature of the transcending term. 
 It may be an unknown x like that of the mathematician, 
 but it cannot be an unknowable x, at least we cannot affirm 
 it to be such, because in that ease, our term would in the 
 last analysis be isolated and unrelated, and it would not be 
 possible for us to say whether it were a necessary ground of 
 relativity or not. The respect in which the transcendent 
 becomes necessary to the relative must itself be intelligible; 
 in other words, it must a Ugn itself with positive as well as 
 with merely negative aspects of experience. There must be 
 something in the positive experience-content itself that 
 supplies the basis for intelligently conceiving the transcen- 
 dent nature. "We find these positive terms in the concepts 
 of relative agency which develop in an objective and sub- 
 jective experience. For example, we have seen that the 
 concept of objective agency involves the notion of self- 
 initiative or self-origination modified and as we may say 
 relatived, by the internal influence of an agency not its own. 
 This is constitutional so that our consciousness has at its core a 
 sense of reduced activity or agency, determined in part by the 
 agency of the other. Now, I have admitted in another con- 
 nection that we have no intuition of absolute agency and that 
 we cannot therefore fully conceive the nature of absolute 
 agency. But we have a moment in our consciousness ; that 
 which gives us the sense of initiative in our own activity, 
 which supplies a basal insight for conceiving the absolute. 
 Without this moment it would be impossible for us to 
 conceive an absolute at all, whereas with it and in the light 
 of it, we find the concept of absoluteness necessary, and we 
 have only to apply to this moment that method of approxi- 
 mation or infinitation which has been elaborated in another 
 connection, in order to reach an intelligible conception of 
 what the absolute nature, in this aspect of it, must be. In 
 short, by the progressive removal of the modifying influence of 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 363 
 
 other co-ordinate agencies, the moment of free self-initiative 
 asserts itself, until it reaches the point of absoluteness. We 
 have only to analyze the processes of our consciousness closely 
 enough in order to see that this is true. I do not think that 
 we need carry this line of reflection further. What has 
 been made obvious here is this, that the whole ground in 
 experience out of which the necessity of the transcendent arises, 
 also contains the ground of the intelligible conception of the 
 nature of the transcendent, and the extent to which the absolute 
 may he intelligently conceived will he determined hy the positive 
 data in experience in which the implication of the absolute 
 is contained. 
 
 The questions then come up; is it necessary that the 
 transcendent should itself be conceived as a form of ex- 
 perience ? are there valid grounds for the adoption of this 
 concept of its nature ? The ansv?er to these questions 
 involves certain general as well as special considerations. 
 In the first place, there is the line of reflection involved in 
 St. Augustine's doctrine of truth and in Professor Eoyce's 
 discussion of truth and error in his Beligious Aspects of 
 Philosophy and his Conception of God. This reflection sets out 
 from the position of the plain man in ordinary experience 
 and the quest in the case of Augustine is for a standard of 
 truth. If the distinction between the true and the false is 
 not purely relative and conventional, then in the last analysis, 
 the ground of the distinction must be transcendent. This we 
 have also concluded in the course of the plain man's reflection. 
 But a transcendent distinction cannot be an ultimate abstrac- 
 tion. If truth is not relative, but involves an absolute basis, 
 then there must be some nature whose content is the truth. 
 Augustine draws the theistic conclusion here, but v/e are not 
 concerned with theism specially, but rather with the broader 
 question whether the necessity of a transcendent ground of 
 truth justifies or renders necessary the conclusion that the 
 transcendent nature must be a form of experience. The 
 same consideration is central in Eoyce's reflection, only 
 Eoyce makes his approach from the negative side. Some 
 
364 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 deny the existence of truth, he says, but everyone admits 
 that there is error.^ Now, we may ask what does the 
 possibility of error involve ? and the substance of Eoyce's 
 contention is that the possibility of error necessitates the 
 truth, and an ultimate standard of the true which can have 
 its ground only in an absolute ; that is, in an errorless 
 experience. I am only attempting here to give the core of 
 the argument, and much of the juice of the original has, I 
 fear, been lost. But allowing for individual differences, the 
 two lines of reflection are substantially one. Both the early 
 and the later thinker, starting like our plain man with the 
 consideration of knowledge, which leads on in a quest 
 for an adequate ground of the distinction between the false 
 and the true, are able to find this ground only in the 
 postulate of an absolute experience. The inference seems to 
 be inevitable. If we are not able to ground the distinction 
 between truth and error in pure relativity — and we have seen 
 that this is impossible — then the necessity of a transcendent 
 ground is plain. But what can a transcendent ground of 
 the distinction between the true and false be, other than a 
 nature in which it is primarily affirmed and recognized, and 
 what can such a nature be if it is not absolute experience ? 
 But there is another line of reflection which may be 
 expressed in the following question : if the transcendent be 
 not a form of experience why should the whole of the 
 relative express itself as experience ? We have found that 
 the real, in order to get recognition at all, must come under 
 the forms of actual or possible experience. The whole form of 
 conceivability is an experience-form. Now, if there must be 
 anything that lies beyond the scope of this form that thing is 
 wholly indeterminate. We could not say, in the first place, 
 that it is, and in the second place, if we admitted that it is in 
 some sense real, we would be unable to conceive any relation 
 that it could bear to experience. It is clear that such 
 a term may be safely eliminated from our calculations. The 
 real transcendent is one that is so related to the intra- 
 ' Conception of God, pp. 1, 2. 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. .365 
 
 experiential as to be implicated in the determination of all 
 its concepts. The primary motive of experience in asserting 
 the transcendent, apart from the direct consciousness of its 
 presence in experience, is its necessary relation to the 
 processes of experience itself. This being the case, the 
 logic of the situation shapes itself into the following argu- 
 ment. If the transcendent has as its necessary function 
 in experience, the grounding of the experience-processes by 
 supplying to them those concepts of absoluteness which are 
 needed to give them stability, we may conclude that the 
 transcendent itself is a nature which expresses itself in 
 those concepts of the absolute — that is, an absolute 
 experience. 
 
 These general considerations may be confirmed, more- 
 over, by the implications of special points of experience. 
 In the sphere of objective agency we have seen that the 
 moment of transcendence is the sense we have of the 
 necessity of some point of absolute self-initiative in con- 
 nection with the relative initiative in experience. Now, we 
 have only to analyze this relative initiative in order to see 
 that it has in it a point of free spontaneity which is modified, 
 however, by the internal influence of co-existing agencies. 
 We have only to conceive this modified freedom as absolved 
 from its modification, in order to reach the concept of 
 absolute agency or unmodified free initiative. That this 
 concept is not completely attainable we have admitted. 
 But that it may be approximated along intelligible lines 
 has already been demonstrated, and here the question is ; to 
 what kind of a nature does our approximate conception lead 
 us ? and the answer is clear enough : a nature in which the 
 agency we are conscious of in a modified form, is free and 
 unmodified. What else can such a nature be but one that 
 realizes itself in an absolute experience ? If we take into 
 consideration our subjective agency the inference seems to 
 be even clearer. We have found that our self-consciousness, 
 is constitutionally social and communal, and that what we 
 realize in it is a self^agency that is internally influenced and. 
 
366 TRANSCENDENT FACTOB IN KNOWLEDGE. part Hi. 
 
 to a degree, determined by the not-self. This gives rise to 
 the feeling of dependence and the consciousness of relative 
 self-determination. The moment in this experience which 
 involves the transcendent is that of self-determination or, as 
 we may say, self-initiative, and we reach an intelligible 
 concept of the nature of the transcendent by raising this 
 term of self-determination to the point of absoluteness, 
 where the moment of dependence lapses altogether. The 
 notion of the transcendent thus becomes that of an 
 absolutely self-determining agent which realizes itself as 
 an absolute experience. From whatever point of view we 
 approach the transcendent then we find that it is only tran- 
 scendent in its relation to our finite relative experience, but that 
 it is included in the notion of an absolute experience. 
 
 Let us, then, take up the question as to how far the 
 nature of absolute experience may be determined, meaning 
 by determined, intelligibly conceived in the light of proxi- 
 mate conceptions. And we may first ask how much of our 
 analysis of consciousness can be taken as valid also for the 
 nature of the transcendent ? In reply to this, I think we 
 will have to accept the results of that analysis in which it 
 was found that consciousness is not internally simple but 
 complex. This result was developed as a doctrine of con- 
 sciousness in general, without respect to the mode in which 
 it might express itself. Now, the doctrine of the internal 
 complexity of consciousness involves, as we have seen, the 
 internal duality of consciousness ; its cardinal disposition to 
 shape itself into a subject-consciousness in relation to an 
 object-consciousness of content. That this is involved in 
 the very notion of consciousness will become clear on re- 
 flection. What James calls " sciousness," in so far as it has 
 any intelligible meaning at all, must simply be the attempt 
 to conceive consciousness as, in the last analysis, absolutely 
 simple and structureless, but we have seen that this is im- 
 possible, and to conceive consciousness as absolutely simple 
 is tantamount to denying to it all internal nature and thus 
 destroying the possibility of even mechanical response. The 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 367 
 
 notion of consciousness involves internal complexity, the 
 primal expression of which is the distinction of subject and 
 object forms. If, then, the tendency to duality of expression 
 in subject and object forms is inherent in the nature of 
 consciousness, we cannot refuse to allow that the tran- 
 scendent experience will involve this distinction so far forth 
 as it is to be conceived as conscious at all. We admit the 
 possibility of denial at this point, and the force of the con- 
 siderations that may be urged against conceiving absolute 
 experience as involving consciousness. But when we come 
 to consider the question ; what an experience could be that 
 was devoid of consciousness, we find ourselves wholly unable 
 to answer. We find that the notion of the unconscious is not 
 an ultimate conception. For the unconscious must be con- 
 ceived either as standing by itself or as in relation to the 
 conscious. In the former ease, we simply conceive it as a 
 thing, or one of the objective forms of being. The concept 
 of matter, for example, is the notion of that from which 
 consciousness has been eliminated. But when we proceed 
 further in the analysis of the notion of matter we find that 
 we can only conceive it as part of the objective content of 
 experience, and that its intra-experiential status depends 
 ultimately on its relation to a subject-activity in which it is 
 posited. That this is conscious we need not argue. And, 
 further, when we trace it to its transcendent ground we find 
 this to be a moment of transcendent positing which can 
 logically be referred only to a subject-activity in the tran- 
 scendent sphere. We are thus obliged to ascribe a conceiving 
 activity to the transcendent, and when this is conceded it 
 seems to me that all motive for denying consciousness to 
 it will disappear. 
 
 That the internal complexity of consciousness carries with 
 it the tendency to duality of subjective and objective experi- 
 ence in the transcendent, may then be assumed. We may 
 consider in the next place the validity for the transcendent, of 
 our analysis of consciousness into the three concrete forms of 
 psychosis : the intellectual, the volitional, and the emotional. 
 
368 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. past m. 
 
 When the question is brought down to the last analysis and 
 it is asked whether any of the elements, thought, will, or 
 feeling, can be eliminated from our concept of transcendent 
 experience, the answer must, I think, be in the negative. 
 Thought and volition seem secure, and the point of real 
 debate would seem to be whether feeling can be ascribed to 
 the transcendent. The central difficulty arises from the 
 seeming impossibility of dissociating pleasure-pain from the 
 notion of the agency of the not-self, and in this difficulty 
 thought and volition are to some extent involved also. The 
 difficulty will be escaped, however, if bearing in mind the 
 tendency which we have found in relative experience toward 
 the resolution of all activity into internal agency, we con- 
 ceive this process of internalizing as absolutely carried out. 
 We will thus arrive at the notion of an all-comprehending 
 experience from which modifying influences have not been 
 eliminated, but in which they have been included. The 
 transcendent thought will be an all-inclusive thought, and 
 the transcendent will and feeling will also be of the all- 
 including species. Now, we find in our own experience 
 that just in proportion as our thoughts, feelings, or volitions 
 cease to be special and tend to become all-inclusive, in the 
 same proportion they tend to become responses to the inter- 
 nal motives of our whole experience. Let this law be 
 recognized and it will supply a basis for intelligibly con- 
 ceiving the possibility of absolute feeling, as well as absolute 
 thought and voUtion. We do not propose here to deny but 
 rather to affirm, the possibility of special thoughts, feelings, 
 and volitions on the part of the transcendent. But the 
 pivotal point in the argument is the establishment of the 
 possibility of internal motivity, and if this be conceded, there 
 is no reason to deny that thoughts, feelings, and volitions 
 may specialize themselves internally. 
 
 There is no counter necessity then to prevent our yielding 
 to the necessity of ascribing the capacity for thought, feeling, 
 and volition to the nature of transcendent experience. What 
 remains to be considered in this connection is the question 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 369 
 
 as to what limitations of our ordinary experiences of these 
 activities must be removed in order that they may become 
 absolute. We have seen that one of these restrictions is 
 that of external motivity. The motive must become internal. 
 Let us take the three forms of activity and see whether 
 we can determine reflectively their points of absoluteness. 
 To begin with feeling, we find that feeling is reducible 
 in the last analysis to some form of interest, which in its 
 relative forms is never free from the moment of simple 
 responsiveness. But interest is not responsive through and 
 through. There is a point of free initiation in it which 
 asserts itself in connection with the modified form of 
 responsiveness. That this point is real we assume when we 
 conceive a passive moment of capacity for feeling, as prior 
 to the actual response. We have only to free this moment 
 from its relation of passivity and conceive it as wholly active 
 in order to achieve the notion of a self-active spring of 
 emotional interest. That this concept is not completely 
 attainable we again admit, but it supplies the point of ap- 
 proximation which renders the ascription of interest to the 
 transcendent, intelligible and possible. In the case of will 
 the problem is not so difficult. It is easy to select out of 
 the" relative agency of will the moment of self-determination 
 and to conceive this as raised to the absolute. Por we have 
 only to regard the motives of will as becoming completely 
 internal in order to see how complete self-determination may 
 be realized. For absolute self-determination is not to b& 
 confounded with arbitrary or motiveless determination. In 
 truth the self-determination of the absolute must rather be 
 conceived as motived by the whole internal nature of the 
 absolute, and as more completely motived, therefore, than is 
 relative choice. Lastly, we may ask for the point of absolute- 
 ness in thought. Now the ordinary relative form of thought 
 is that of the presentation or concept. The presentative 
 function is largely passive and ascriptive, but it involves in 
 it as a condition of its possibility, a moment of potence or 
 latent initiative which has only to be raised to the point 
 
 2 a 
 
370 TRANSCENDENT FACTOK IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 of absoluteness in order to become an activity of free self- 
 originating representation. The concept is less passive and 
 more free from the outset. But we have seen that it involves, 
 nevertheless, that point of coerciveness where it becomes 
 passive and receptive. This is the character of ordinary 
 relative thinking of the objective type. There is an Anstoss 
 that overcomes its initiative and reduces it in a sense, to the 
 position of a copyist. But there is in conception the moment 
 of free initiative which only needs to be raised to the absolute 
 by the method of approximation already indicated, in order 
 to render the notion of absolute intellection intelligible as 
 that of a function in which the conceptual activity is self- 
 originative. 
 
 There is a difficulty here that may not have escaped the 
 observant reader. We have seen that the transcendent is 
 necessary in experience in order to reduce the unstable 
 relative to stability. But here we seem to be freeing the 
 transcendent from restriction and asserting for it an absolute 
 freedom of initiative which would seem to threaten our 
 whole world with a reign of caprice. But we have only to 
 consider that what we have actually accomplished is the 
 liberation of the absolute from the dominance of external 
 motives, and that we have accomplished this not by abolish- 
 ing motives but by rendering all motives internal. Spinoza 
 conceives the infinite as acting from the internal necessity of 
 its own nature. We reach a conclusion of the same type here 
 when we assert the absolute freedom of intellection, feeling, 
 and volition in the transcendent experience. What we do 
 affirm, is the absolute's independence of external motives and 
 its complete self-initiative and self-determination. Now when 
 we undertake to determine what absolute self-initiative and 
 self-determination involve, we find no other conception 
 possible than that of an activity whose internal motivity is 
 complete ; that is, whose activity is the function of the whole 
 internal motive, or of the internal nature as a whole, so that 
 every act shall be completely and absolutely characteristic. 
 The distinction between freedom and necessity lapses in the 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 371 
 
 absolute and that which is absolutely free is also that which 
 is absolutely determined by internal nature. This being the 
 case, it is clear that our apprehensions of a world of caprice 
 are not well grounded. The absolutely free is the absolutely 
 stable, and we have only to relate our principles to their 
 springs in absolute nature in order to render them principles 
 of the utmost stability. 
 
 It is clear, then, that the necessity of ascribing thought, 
 feeling, and will to the transcendent has no counter necessity 
 to oppose it. Is there, then, any further relative modification 
 which must be removed in order to make this trinal 
 concept of transcendent experience completely tenable ? 
 There is, no doubt, one to be found in the partial separation 
 and conflict which may and do arise in our relative 
 experience. Nothing is more common than the appearance 
 of individuals in which either the volitional, intellectual, or 
 emotional element predominates and yields as a result the 
 practical, the intellectual, or the contemplative mystical type 
 of mind. These variations are inevitable in a world of iinite 
 individualities. Again, in the same individual the emotional, 
 intellectual, and volitional may not always harmonize. There 
 may be a sense in which the iinite nature will express itself 
 in psychoses which will not be inclusive of the whole, and 
 there may be and is, not uncommonly, such a thing as 
 schismatic and divided individual experience. But it is 
 clear that all this must be excluded from the absolute. The 
 variations of individual experiences must be merged into the 
 one complete experience, and whatever differences may 
 survive must become internal, and the schismatic dualisms 
 or trialisms of the finite experience must be conceived as 
 transcended in the absolute nature. This being the case, 
 we may ask what relation between thought, feeling, and will 
 such transcendence involves, and the logic of the situation 
 will lead us, I think, to this conclusion. The internal unity 
 and solidarity of transcendent experience carries with it the 
 internal unity of its processes, intellectual, volitional, and 
 emotional, and this internal u/nity conceived under the category 
 
372 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 of absoluteness involves the notion of thought, will, and feeling 
 as moving along common channels, so that what is conceived is 
 also loved and willed, and what is loved is also thought and 
 willed. 
 
 This unity of the processes of transcendent experience is 
 not to be conceived in a one-sided way as excluding the 
 activity of negation but rather as including it. Eoyce takes 
 the ground in his Conception of God that the power of con- 
 ceiving the hypothetical opposite of what is realized cannot 
 be denied to the absolute. The case for the negative admits, 
 I think, of an even stronger statement than Eoyce gives 
 to it. That the affirmative activities of thought, feeling, 
 and will have their negative side, which is necessary as a 
 means of determination, no one will dispute. But we have 
 seen that what these relative activities lack is : (1) the power 
 of complete self-determination to the true or good, and (2) 
 a final criterion of the true and good in the exercises of the 
 thinking, feeling, and willing functions. In order to raise 
 these activities to the absolute we must conceive the removal 
 of the limits to self-determination so that the determination 
 of the transcendent shall inevitably embody the true and good. 
 If, however, no discriminative insight were presupposed on 
 the part of the absolute and its determination of the true 
 and good were not supposed to be accompanied with some 
 apprehension of their truth and goodness, the action of the 
 transcendent would lose all rational and ethical character 
 and would be more the action of a stone than that of a 
 conscious agent. In order to preserve the type of activity 
 which embodies itself in the psychic processes of thought, 
 feeling, and will, we must include in its notion, negation and 
 rejection as well as affirmation and appropriation. The 
 activity of the absolute will not be capable of grounding the 
 relative activities of experience at all if it does not have in 
 it the root of the discrimination which makes these activities 
 possible and intelligible. We have to consider, then, not 
 whether the absolute must distinguish in some way the true 
 and good from the bad or false; but rather what the form of 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 373 
 
 this discrimination may be. Now, from the very nature of 
 the concept of the transcendent which we have reached, we 
 will be precluded, it is clear, from supposing that the 
 negative activity can be aroused by the presentation of 
 anything that can be said to have independent reality of its 
 own. All reality must be conceived as dependent and, 
 therefore, as internal rather than external to the absolute. 
 The absolute activities, so far forth as they terminate on 
 realities at all, must find them internal and contained. It 
 is evident, however, that in speaking of an absolute activity 
 as terminating on things that are already real, we are missing 
 the primal activity of the absolute which can be conceived, 
 if at all, only as the prius of the reals on which it is 
 supposed to terminate, and as, therefore, the spring of their 
 being as reals. In the last analysis the question concerns 
 the relation of the negative to this primal activity, and it is 
 at this point that I think it becomes necessary to suppose 
 that the act in which anything originates and becomes real 
 will have a negative moment or aspect, in which the hypo- 
 thetical opposite or inconsistent will be present in conception 
 and will be negated in an act of judgment, as false, and in an 
 act of will, as bad. To deny the presence of the false and 
 bad as hypothetical possibilities in the primal intellections 
 of the transcendent would be tantamont to denying to it 
 any intellectual or volitional function at all. But the 
 reasoning here proceeds on the supposition that these 
 psychic functions are to be ascribed to the absolute, and the 
 point at issue is whether the absolute can be conceived as 
 exercising them in an affirmative and not also in a negative 
 manner. 
 
 The primal activities of the transcendent will involve, 
 then, the presentation of the bad and false as hypothetical 
 possibilities, and their negation and rejection as such. This 
 conclusion seems to carry with it the force of demonstration. 
 Now, it is in this two-edged activity that we find the source 
 of distinctions that are vital to the relative. If the realiz- 
 ing activity of the transcendent experience is accompanied 
 
374 TEANSOENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt hi. 
 
 with the presentation and the rejection of the false and bad 
 as hypothetical possibilities, then absolute determination of 
 its own content as true and good, will not be the product 
 of blindness but of intelligent insight and choice. And this 
 being the case, the transcendent distinction between truth 
 and falsehood, good and bad, which the relative demands, 
 will rest in the last analysis on intelligent discriminating 
 insight and choice. In other words, what the absolute 
 judges and chooses as true and good, will be the ultimate 
 truth and good, and what it judges and decides to be false 
 and bad will be the ultimate falsehood and evil. The ulti- 
 mate ground of the true and good are not to be found, 
 therefore, either in abstract arbitrary will or in abstract 
 intellection without will, but rather in that concrete activity 
 of discriminating judgment and choice in which the absolute 
 determines the content of its nature as at the same time 
 real and true and good. Now, the plain man of our 
 illustration having traced the distinction of the false and 
 the true to its root in some transcendent nature will, if he 
 carry his reflection far enough, be led to this formal question ; 
 how such a distinction can be conceived as having its springs 
 in such a nature, and his answer, if it be adequate and 
 finally satisfactory, will include two steps. He will be led, 
 in the first place, to see that such a root-distinction could 
 arise only in an absolute experience, and this would lead, 
 as the last and final step, to the conclusion that the primary 
 activity of such an experience must be one in which an 
 intelligent apprehension and choice of the true and good, 
 involving the rejection of the false and bad, enters as an 
 essential part of its nature. 
 
 The conclusions which we have reached in the preceding 
 sections will shed some light, I think, on the relation which 
 we will be led to conceive as subsisting between subject and 
 object in the absolute experience. We have seen that this dis- 
 tinction is involved, in its germ at least, in the very notion of 
 consciousness, and that it cannot be denied to the absolute. 
 We cannot admit that this distinction lapses in the absolute 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 375 
 
 nature, inasmuch as we have found it impossible to conceive 
 any nature as internally simple, while the beginning of com- 
 plexity marks the rise of this fundamental distinction. We 
 do not mean at this point, however, to re-argue that question, 
 but, assuming it to be settled, to ask how the distinction is 
 possible in an absolute experience. Let us first consider 
 the form which it takes in our own relative experience. 
 We have seen that the subject in our experience becomes 
 conscious of itself as a soeius, that is as one of a fellowship 
 of co-existing and interacting individuals. Again, we have 
 seen that the objective content of our experience in general 
 defines itself in individual forms. The individuating activity 
 seems to be everywhere essential, but the special feature of 
 these individualities, which determines our experience as 
 relative, is that, in the last analysis, they assert their inde- 
 pendence, and our attitude toward them becomes passive 
 and receptive. Now, in view of these characteristics of the 
 relative we may say, in the first place, that the transcendent 
 subject cannot be conceived as a soeius. The absolute has 
 no fellow. This is involved in the very notion of absolute- 
 ness or unmodified and independent agency. I do not mean 
 by this that internal distinctions may not be possible in the 
 nature of the absolute which will supply an adequate ground 
 for a plurality of personal manifestations. But the con- 
 tention here is that the distinctions must be internal rather 
 than external, and that the plurality of personal manifesta- 
 tions must be consistent with the individual unity of the 
 absolute nature. The absolute can have no fellow in any 
 sense that would involve modified agency. Again, it would 
 be impossible to conceive the content of absolute experience 
 as presenting individuals that would be in any sense inde- 
 pendent of the activity by which they are posited. The 
 notion of absolute experience does not exclude individuals. 
 We have seen that the objective content of our own experi- 
 ence is reducible, in the last analysis, to individual forms, 
 and that the point of relativity arises in the fact that our 
 posits are not absolutely creative but rather receptive and 
 
376 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part hi. 
 
 reproductive. This is the modification that must be removed 
 from the individuals of our experience in order that the 
 individual of absolute experience may be conceived. There 
 is involved, not the suppression of the individual, but the 
 elimination of coerciveness, so that the individual becomes 
 the out and out posit of absolute activity. This reduces the 
 individual to a relation of dependence on the experience in 
 which it is realized, not only for its relative realization but 
 for its origination. The individuals of the absolute experi- 
 ence are to be regarded, then, as more completely internal 
 and dependent than the individuals of our relative experi- 
 ence. But the point of difference involves, not their 
 individuality, but their externality and independence. That 
 the activity of experience should express itself in individual 
 forms is, we are convinced, necessarily involved in the 
 notion of experience itself, and, in the last analysis, 
 no other deduction of the individual is either possible or 
 necessary. 
 
 Let us dwell a moment longer on this point as it involves a 
 consideration of fundamental importance. There have been 
 two opposing tendencies in philosophical thinking which 
 have marked it from the beginning : the one a tendency to 
 suppress the individual in the interests of the universal ; the 
 other a tendency in the opposite direction, to the suppression 
 of the universal in the interests of the individual. The 
 result is that philosophy has been presenting us with two 
 different types of world : the one a world in which the indivi- 
 dual exists by mere sufferance, the other a system in which 
 the individual monopoKzes everything and the universal has 
 no recognized status, and we are left to choose between them or 
 to mix them together as best we may. Now I think it will be 
 evident that the only way to transcend this dualism of con- 
 tradictory conceptions is through the adoption of the concept 
 of an individuating experience ; for, if it is found that ex- 
 perience is individuating in the very constitution of its 
 activities, we may universalize our concept of experience 
 without impairing the status of our individuals. That the 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENBENX AS EXPERIENCE. 377 
 
 individuating activity is fundamental, our whole analysis of 
 the experience-processes teaches, for we find everywhere at 
 the heart of things that positive function which is individual 
 and individuating in its essence. No wonder then that our 
 world becomes a world of individuals, and that being every- 
 where tends to take the individual form. What other form 
 could it conceivably take ? Admitting this, we are able to 
 see that the universal does not involve the transcendence of 
 individuality, but the reduction of the plurality of individuals 
 to the unity of dependence on some common activity, and it 
 will be apparent that this activity itself may not be con- 
 ceived as transcending individuality, but rather as absolved 
 from the dependence and modified agency of the relative. 
 The individuating quality of the experience-activity thus 
 survives and peoples the absolute world with individuals. 
 In fact, when we recognize those special features of relativity 
 which must be removed from the individuals of our experi- 
 ence in order to reach the conception of the individual of an 
 absolute experience, we are not left in doubt as to the security 
 of the individual in its relation to the absolute. The fact that 
 individuals cannot be external and independent in their 
 relation to the absolute arises from the nature of absolute 
 experience in which all wor}d-content must be internal and 
 dependent. But let us admit this in connection with the 
 insight that the activity of absolute experience is individu- 
 ating in its nature. It will then become apparent that the 
 true ground of individuality is to be found in the activity 
 of absolute experience. We have seen how the freedom of 
 the absolute is identical with necessity: that is, with the 
 requirement of its whole nature, and is therefore a principle 
 of stability rather than of caprice, and here a similar con- 
 clusion is reached respecting individuality. If the activity 
 of absolute experience is individuating in its nature, then it 
 is true that we find the ultimate ground of the individual in 
 the absolute. In the relative sphere the individual, though 
 so fundamental, presents the appearance of instability. 
 Nature seems to be constantly producing individuals in order 
 
378 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt iii. 
 
 to recklessly sacrifice them until we are tempted to believe 
 that the individual is not an end but simply an expedient 
 which serves a temporary purpose and possesses no further 
 value. The same kind of a difficulty arises here as that 
 which troubled our plain man in his reflection on truth and 
 falsehood. The instability of the relative led his reflection 
 to a final anchor in the nature of the absolute, just as ours 
 here leads us to the same goal. For if we are in doubt 
 as to whether the individual is a mere accident or a well- 
 grounded reality, we have only to discover the individu- 
 ating activity in our own experience and follow this as a 
 clue to its source in the nature of the transcendent. There 
 we will find its ground in the individuating activity of the 
 absolute, and, if the completed inclusion and dependence of 
 individuals in their relation to the absolute might seem to 
 us to militate against their stability, we have only to reflect 
 that the free activity of the absolute is simply the necessary 
 expression of the whole nature of the absolute, and that the 
 absolute's posit of the individual has the whole unitary force 
 of the absolute nature behind it. "What better security could 
 be conceived or demanded ? 
 
 We have determined the concept of transcendent experi- 
 ence far enough, I think, to enable us to reach some 
 conclusion as to its bearing on the ultimate relations of the 
 true and the good. We have already found reasons for 
 concluding that the absolute nature must be internally 
 harmonious so that what is thought as true shall be willed 
 and loved as good, while that which is willed and loved as 
 good will be intuited by the intellect as essentially true. 
 The spheres of the good and true thus tend to coincide, and, 
 in fact, must coincide to an extent that will justify the 
 affirmations that nothing that is essential to the realization 
 of the good can be conceived as resting on an outside limbo 
 of theoretic falsehood ; or that nothing that is theoretically 
 true can be practically bad or evil. The truth of these 
 affirmations follows from the concept of transcendent ex- 
 perience which we have developed. Now, in the preceding 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 379 
 
 chapter we have found that in the sphere of our own finite 
 and relative experience we cannot assume the identity of 
 the true and the good, except under very rigid restrictions. 
 That a thing is of practical worth may not ordinarily be 
 taken as a sufficient guarantee of its theoretic truth. But 
 we saw that there is at least one species of practical judg- 
 ment which carries with it the force of positive knowledge, 
 while in other cases it may supply justifiable grounds for a 
 necessary belief. Taking the extreme case we find that 
 where the denial of the practical demand amounts to the 
 overthrow of the rationality of our world and the reduction 
 of it to chaos, in that case the theoretic truth of the content 
 of the practical judgment is guaranteed beyond the possi- 
 bility of cavil. And we saw that the principle on which 
 the theoretic truth of such judgments is asserted rests ulti- 
 mately on the conviction that in the last analysis the 
 concepts of the good and the true are completely harmonious, 
 so that what is fundamentally good will also be theoretically 
 true. We were forced to leave this statement in a large 
 measure unsupported because, as is now evident, the proof 
 of it involved the considerations of the present chapter. 
 Having reached our present point, however, in the develop- 
 ment of the concept of transcendent experience it is possible 
 to trace the conviction of which we have spoken to its true 
 ground. It is simply one of these fundamental affirmations 
 which arise in connection with our consciousness of the 
 transcendent, and it is in reality a judgment which is 
 unconditionally true only in the transcendent experience. 
 It embodies the concept of an experience in which every 
 act will be a function of the inner nature as a whole, and 
 which, therefore, will be valid for the will and feeling as 
 well as for the intellect. The notion of such an experience 
 is necessary to the grounding of the conviction that in the 
 last analysis such a relation subsists between the good and 
 true as will justify us in the denial that any ultimate incon- 
 sistency can arise between them. 
 
 Moreover, we find in this notion of transcendent experi- 
 
380 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, pjlrt hi. 
 
 ence the ultimate ground of our concept of rationality. We 
 have found this concept obtruding itself into our reflections 
 and asserting itself at various points as a final consideration. 
 In the chapter on the aesthetic consciousness, in the middle 
 section of this book, the result of our analysis served to show 
 that the principle of rationality arises in view of the whole 
 of our experience expressing itself in its unity. Whatever 
 presentational or conceptual content proves itself to be con- 
 gruous with the whole of experience is accepted as rational 
 and is integrated with the true body of experience-content. 
 The principle of rationality was seen to be the last and 
 highest criterion of the true and the false, and the embodi- 
 ment, therefore, of the highest expression of the demand of 
 sufficient reason. But it is clear that the principle of 
 rationality itself only possesses relative value so long as we 
 regard it simply as a product of our own finite experience. 
 It does not enable us to transcend the instability of our 
 knowledge in general. We cannot be sure, in fact, that 
 what may seem rational to any finite experience will, in 
 fact, be rational, or that different individuals may not adopt 
 conflicting standards of rationality. It is clear, however, 
 that any appeal to reason is nugatory if reason may in the 
 last resort be in conflict with itself. There must be some 
 court before which our antinomies may be adjudicated and 
 resolved, and no other tribunal is conceivable that could in 
 any sense be regarded as final, except that of absolute 
 experience. The rationality to which we appeal is not any 
 relative form of reason, but that reason which expresses the 
 unity of an absolute experience, and the fact that such is the 
 nature of our appeal is betrayed whenever we are called on 
 to show that anything is rational rather than irrational. 
 We find ourselves unable to refute the proposition that the 
 distinction between the rational and the irrational is, in the 
 last analysis, conventional and unreal, so long as we confine 
 ourselves to the notion of a relative experience, inasmuch as 
 here final antinomy and conflict are possible. But the 
 concept of an absolute experience supplies us with the 
 
CHAP. IV. THE TRANSCENDENT AS EXPERIENCE. 381 
 
 grounding which our principle negds in order to give it final 
 and real validity. 
 
 The preceding discussion will be sufficient, I think, to 
 demonstrate the incompatibility of the notion of experience 
 with that of the internal simplicity of being. That the 
 absolute is to be conceived under the notion of transcendent 
 experience is what I am contending for here, but that such 
 a conception of its nature is wholly inconsistent with the 
 internal simplicity of being, in its last analysis, will be 
 obvious. The very possibility of experience rests on the 
 notion of certain internal distinctions, and the conclusion is 
 absolutely coercive that if we postulate the internal sim- 
 plicity of being we must give up the notion of experience. 
 
 Not even the logical ingenuity of a Bradley could avoid 
 this dilemma. The notion of experience involves complexity 
 of nature, and if we propose to identify the absolute nature 
 with experience we must accept the logical consequences 
 and admit the internal complexity of its nature. But internal 
 complexity, as we have seen, supplies the principle of a true 
 phenomenal expression. If, then, we find reasons on one 
 hand for grounding the phenomenal and relative in an 
 absolute experience, the inner complexity of the absolute 
 supplies on the other hand the guarantee that the pheno- 
 menal and relative shall not be mere ScMen or illusion, 
 but a true expression of the nature in which it is grounded. 
 
CHAPTEE V. 
 THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOaY]. 
 
 In the Kantian cosmology we find that Kant's method is to 
 take the categories for which he has demonstrated an em- 
 pirical use and applying them transcendently, to show that 
 it is possible to demonstrate of the world so conceived, two 
 sets of opposite and incompatible predicates. For example, 
 he argues that if we take the space and time world to be a 
 thing in itself — that is, a transcendent object — we may prove 
 to our satisfaction that it is both limited and unlimited in 
 space, and has a beginning and is beginningless in time. 
 We may also prove that it is iafinitely divisible, and that 
 there is some final limit of divisibility, and so on. We do 
 not need to dwell on this ingenious reasoning, which might 
 possibly be found to be intrinsically unsound ; for Kant has 
 himself pointed to the true way out of his difficulties in the 
 contention that the world be not conceived transcendently, 
 but as an object of experience. Inasmuch as transcendent 
 in Kant's terminology is used as a designation for the ultra- 
 experiential, or that which transcends the concept of ex- 
 perience, we are prepared to follow the Kantian suggestion, 
 and endeavour to show how a cosmology that will be free 
 from internal contradiction can be developed on the basis 
 of a transcendent experience. 
 
 In the Kantian doctrine the categories themselves are 
 conceived to be ultra-empirical in their origin and nature, 
 
 382 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 383 
 
 but as having legitimately only an intra-experiential use. 
 We have endeavoured to reform this position by showing 
 that the categories are intra-experiential in their roots as 
 well as in their functions, and that the only sense in which 
 a transcendent use could be asserted for them would be in 
 relation to some form of experience that transcends our 
 relative and finite experience. From this modified stand- 
 point we will be justified, I think, in spending a little time 
 in the effort to determine whether the logic of the categories 
 involves the elimination of the transcendent, or simply an 
 altered conception of it that will bring it into harmony with 
 the notion of experience. The first two groups of categories 
 which Kant designates mathematical, and which we have 
 shown to be constitutive of the quantitative consciousness, 
 are primarily those of space and time, out of the reflective 
 activity of which arise the principles and concepts of 
 mathematical thinking. Now, we have shown in the 
 discussions of the second part of this book how space and 
 time arise as formal determinations of content in the 
 experience-process, and this ground need not be again 
 traversed. What we wish to bring out in this connection 
 may be stated under two propositions — (1) that the exposi- 
 tion given there, may be taken as an exhibition of the fact 
 that space and time are forms or, as we may say, functions of 
 a developing experience, and that in their origin and nature 
 they are, therefore, completely experiential; (2) that this, so 
 far from carrying with it the conclusion that these categories 
 are therefore in their scope and implication, purely relative 
 and finite, is in fact consistent with the notion of tran- 
 scendence. The first proposition may be accepted on the 
 basis of the preceding analysis without further debate, and 
 we may go straight to the consideration of the transcendent 
 implication of space and time. Now, reverting to the 
 former analysis, we have found that the experience of 
 both space and time is traceable back to a point of 
 departure where these categories are transcended ; I mean 
 a point of dimensionless activity, in which the space and 
 
384 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 time posits are made. This is true of both presenta- 
 tional and conceptual space and time. The initiative of 
 both must be assumed to be dimensionless, and we have 
 the intuition here of the dimensional originating in the 
 dimensionless, on the one hand, and on the other, the 
 dimensionless becoming dimensional in its very first outgo. 
 But that the dimensionless point is itself an experience is 
 evident when we reflect upon it, for it is reducible to a 
 formal pulsation of consciousness individuating itself in a 
 dimensional form. It would seem then that in the point of 
 space and time origination, we become consciously aware of 
 two things — (1) of being's transcendence of space and time 
 determinations, and (2) of the necessity that dimensional 
 determination should express itself spatially and temporally. 
 We strike the point of transcendence here on the sub- 
 jective side. Objectively the situation is very much the 
 same. Space and time as categories are formal definitions 
 of content, but if we take the notion of objective content, 
 that of matter say, and follow its analysis far enough, we 
 will reach a point where the persistence in dimensional 
 determination will involve contradiction. What is matter in 
 its ultimate constitution ? The effort to conceive this leads to 
 a point where we are obliged to drop the notion of dimension, 
 and regard the primary matter as dimensionless. We may 
 attempt this by translating our concept of matter into that 
 of force, but here the difficulty of time-dimension wUl 
 arise, and we will find it necessary to track being to its lair 
 in a moment of self-origination, which is the logical prius of 
 activity in time. 
 
 When we consider the significance of this we find that 
 the notion of the dimensional leads necessarily to the 
 point of its own transcendence, and that it is necessary 
 to suppose that dimensionless reality is the prius of 
 dimensional experience. But when we ask whether this 
 transcendence of dimensional experience involves the tran- 
 scendence of experience itself, we are led to see that this is 
 impossible. The activity which defines the dimensional 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 385 
 
 content can be nothing but a posit of the subject in 
 experience, while the moment of dimensional transcendence 
 objectively considered, is simply the point where dimen- 
 sional determination has its beginning, and in which matter 
 of reality is still presupposed. It involves, therefore, 
 transcendence of dimensional experience, but not tran- 
 scendence of experience as such, for, as we find on further 
 reflection, the presupposed real persists as experience-con- 
 tent, and in fact utterly refuses to be separated from the 
 primal experience-activities in their springs. The doctrine 
 maintained here that the transcendence of dimensional 
 experience does not involve the transcendence of all experi- 
 ence, is consistent with the principles of mathematical 
 thinking, as well as with their utmost application. Mathe- 
 matical thinking, as we know, is an activity of dimensional 
 determination. It is always defining things under quanti- 
 tative categories and relations. But the mathematician 
 knows better than any one, no doubt, that his starting points 
 in this dimensional activity are themselves dimensionless. 
 The dimensional always in the last analysis, strikes a point 
 of transcendence where the dimensionless must be pre- 
 supposed. This does not, however, involve any real limit 
 to mathematical reflection, for the mathematician has only 
 to conceive his categories and principles as intra-experi- 
 ential in order to perceive that there can be no internal 
 limit to the scope of his operations. I mean by this, that 
 if the mathematician does not embroil himself with the 
 claim that in the last analysis there is no other way of 
 conceiving being than the dimensional, and if he is wUling 
 to regard the universe of mathematics as intra-experiential, 
 no assignable limit can be fixed to the business of 
 dimensional reflection. 
 
 If we pass from the mathematical categories to those of 
 the dynamic consciousness, we find that the main considera- 
 tions here are two, involving the question of agency and 
 that of necessary being. The question of agency is that of 
 the dynamic categories : cause, substance, and community. 
 
 2b 
 
386 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 We find in this connection that Kant's procedure is not 
 quite identical with the method followed in treating the 
 mathematical categories. Assuming the intra- experiential 
 function of the dynamic categories his contention here is 
 that within experience they must he conceived as without 
 limit, and as exclusive of all other forms of agency. But 
 he is willing to admit the possibility of a sphere tran- 
 scending the world of experience in which forms of agency 
 transcending the category-types, may prevail. This conces- 
 sion impairs the force of the antinomies which he had 
 developed in connection with the notions of freedom and 
 of necessary being transcending the sphere of contingency. 
 But we may for the present neglect this consideration and 
 confine our attention to the main situation as Kant con- 
 ceives it. Here, as we have seen, Kant's contention is that 
 within experience the categories are exclusive of all other 
 types of agency, while any implications which they may 
 have of any higher form of agency will lead to the tran- 
 scendence of experience into a region where the categories of 
 experience are, therefore, inapplicable. In this region absolved 
 from the " carking cares " of this sublunary sphere, freedom, 
 for example, may disport itself and enjoy all the tranquillity 
 of the gods of Epicurus. Now, there is one criticism on 
 Kant's procedure here that it is important to make, and 
 that concerns his failure to develop a psychological doctrine 
 of the agency of the self in experience, as a basis for his 
 discussion of freedom. The failure to do this not only 
 renders the cosmological discussion unnecessarily vague, but 
 also precludes the possibility of reaching any positive notion 
 of what is involved in freedom. The result is that the 
 freedom which Kant is willing to admit as a possibility, is 
 wholly indeterminate, and amounts in the last analysis to 
 the notion of something that we do not possess, and the 
 nature of which we cannot imagine. I do not say that 
 Kant leaves the concept of freedom finally in this undefined 
 state, but in his cosmology the notion is wholly vague and 
 indeterminate. 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 387 
 
 Passing over this difficulty, however, and confining our 
 attention to cosmological considerations, we iind Kant main- 
 taining that the form of determined and dependent agency- 
 expressed in the dynamic categories has no transcendent 
 implication which is not also ultra-experiential, and, there- 
 fore, beyond the scope of determination, either as to its 
 reality or its nature. It is only necessary, however, to 
 consider what form the dynamic agency takes in the last 
 analysis, in order to see that such a conclusion cannot be 
 maintained. The objective world is resolvable, as we have 
 seen, into a community of interacting individuals, which we 
 may designate either things or in terms of the elemental 
 forces or atoms which they imply. These interacting terms 
 are mutually modifying, and we have seen that ultimately 
 the modifying function must be conceived as operating 
 internally so that the agency of any individual in the group 
 will be an activity into which the agency of the other will 
 have entered and become internal. This, in the last analysis, 
 is what we mean by conditioned activity. It is activity 
 into which the determining influence of the other enters as 
 an essential moment. Again, we have seen that conceiving 
 the world from the point of view of substance, or matter, or 
 force, or any of the terms which science uses to designate 
 the ultimate in its operations, it presents an aspect of coer- 
 civeness and inevitability that not only evinces the relativity 
 of our conceptions, but also the necessity of presupposing 
 something that is absolved from the limitations which they 
 impose. In other words, our concepts of the ultimate con- 
 stitution of our world all involve a point of transcendence 
 and the presupposition of some non-relative ground of 
 relativity. We reach then, as the last terms of our relative 
 experience, the notions of conditioned activity and dependent 
 being, and the question here is whether the transcendent 
 implications of these will lead to the postulate of an absolute 
 that transcends experience, or rather, to the affirmation of 
 absolute experience. Kant takes the former alternative. 
 But we have only to analyze the situation as it presents 
 
388 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part hi. 
 
 itself in order to be convinced that the latter presents the 
 more tenable position. Conditioned activity, as we saw, 
 is activity that is modified by its other. It has in it, how- 
 ever, the moment of self-initiative, which, could it get full 
 and unimpeded expression, would express truly the freedom 
 of unconditioned activity, and we have only to conceive this 
 moment as freed from its limitations in order to reach the 
 notion of a self-initiating, self-determining activity. And it 
 is clear that such an activity, arrived at in the way indi- 
 cated, would be the function of an absolute experience. A 
 similar result follows from the examination of the second 
 notion : that of dependent being. That being is dependent 
 means in the last resort that there is some other being in 
 relation to which it is compelled to be passive and re- 
 ceptive. This other being will then possess the active 
 originative function, the lack of which renders itself relative. 
 When we consider dependent being, however, we do not find 
 its dependence pure and unqualified. The truth is that the 
 notion of dependence is essentially a qualified conception. 
 The dependent can be conceived as dependent only in pro- 
 portion as the initiative that must be in it is forced to lapse 
 into passivity in presence of the agency of another. In this 
 case the other is a transcendent other, but we will not need 
 to argue at length here that the concept of the agency of 
 this other is to be reached by conceiving the initiative that 
 is in the dependent to be freed from its modification and 
 given full unimpeded scope. The transcendent thus realizes 
 itself in a free activity whose potential germ is contained in 
 the relative experience. 
 
 The conclusion that we draw from this is that the 
 categories of the dynamic consciousness do truly involve 
 transcendence, but not a transcendence of the concept of 
 experience. The points of transcendence are terms within 
 experience which are made relative by the modifications of 
 other agencies, and we have only to conceive the removal of 
 the conditions of these modifications in order to reach the 
 notion of an absolute experience in which these transcendent 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 389 
 
 functions shall be normal. The bearing of the conclusion 
 arrived at here on the problems of freedom and necessary being, 
 cosmologically considered, is clear enough. The doctrine of 
 cosmological freedom is, stated broadly, the proposition that 
 somewhere either in the world or out of it there is uncondi- 
 tioned activity or absolutely free self-initiative. Kant admitted 
 the possibility of this in some hypothetical sphere outside of 
 the world, but denied it a place in the world of experience. 
 "We, however, demand a reconstruction of the notion of experi- 
 ence such as will render it large enough to include both the 
 relative and the absolute, and we affirm that in this broader 
 concept of experience and of the experience-world, must be 
 iacluded the absolutely free self-initiative which we call 
 freedom. We contend, moreover, that this cosmological 
 freedom is an absolutely indispensable term in our world, being 
 necessary in order to ground the relative processes and to 
 render them either conceivable or possible. The doctrine of 
 cosmological necessity, stated in equally broad terms, is that 
 either in the world or out of it there is an absolutely 
 necessary being ; that is a being whose activities are all self- 
 moved and free from passivity and dependence on other, a 
 being, therefore, whose activities are all strictly self-deter- 
 mined by the inner necessity of its own nature. Kant was 
 willing to concede the possibility of such a being outside of 
 the world, but denied it a place in any scheme of actual or 
 possible experience. Wc contend, however, that the concept 
 of experience must be made all-inclusive and that it must 
 contain necessary as well as contingent being. For we 
 have seen that th€ notion of contingence or dependence on 
 other is impossible without clothing the dependent individual 
 with a potentiality of inner self-origination that has been 
 reduced to passivity by the conditions of its relative exist- 
 ence. And in this connection also we maintain that the 
 cosmological postulate of a necessary being is indispensable 
 to the world of relativity as the only principle that is 
 able to reduce it to the stability required in an object of 
 knowledge. 
 
390 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 Let US proceed then to the determination of the tran- 
 scendent object of cosmology, so far as this may be possible. 
 Let us start iirst with the concept of energy or that of the 
 world-forces operating under the category of time. This will 
 give us in general the notion of a world-process or world- 
 evolution in time. The question here is whether the notion 
 of evolution as a process in time can be taken as final. Is 
 .the notion of a world-stream which generates and completes 
 everything, an absolutely final conception ? I am not here 
 calling in question at all the fact of evolution, for I believe 
 in it as one aspect of the real, and I am ready to believe 
 that in the sphere of production it is supreme. It is a 
 different question, however, when we ask whether cosmology 
 can ground itself in the concept of evolution. This is 
 equivalent to asking whether time itself and the series of 
 conditioned changes in time, can be regarded as ultimate. 
 Now, as to time itself, I shall not repeat again what has been 
 said more than once before, but shall content myself with 
 pointing to the timeless presupposition of time in order to 
 show that in time we strike nothing final. It is impossible to 
 reach any final construct of experience that does not involve 
 the transcendence of time. The notion of time supplies us 
 with a genetic form for the conception of a process of 
 generation, but holds in it no final concept of reality. Let 
 us then consider the other notion, that of a series of condi- 
 tional changes. It is clear that we have a whole nest of 
 conceptions here requiring analysis. What about the change- 
 series, and what about the notion of the conditioned ? We 
 have seen that a change-series is not conceivable unless it 
 be connected with persistent points of initiative which ground 
 the changes and render them intelligible. In other words, 
 change is not conceivable at all as something which ranges 
 itself into a series like the links of a chain. It is only con- 
 ceivable as the internal modification of some nature which 
 has the principle of persistent individuality in it. This being 
 the case, it is evident that the conditioned change-series must 
 be reducible to the world of individuals, inasmuch as it is 
 
CHAP. r. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 391 
 
 only in the notion of an individual that any permanence can 
 be realized. The notion of a change-series must, it is evident, 
 be translated into a phenomenon of individuals of v?hich the 
 changes are internal modifications. Now, in relation to the 
 world of finite individuals conceived in time, we have to ask 
 
 (1) how far the notion of time is adequate to explain the 
 individual series, and how, if at , all, is it transcendent ? 
 
 (2) What are the implications of the notion of a conditioned 
 series ? 
 
 The first question involves, of course, the point which we 
 have already considered, as to whether the category of time 
 can be taken as a final construction of reality, and the 
 negative answer to that question is here assumed. But the 
 special point in this question as put above is whether any 
 series or system of things can be conceived as absolutely 
 beginning, that is, absolutely contained in time. We may, 
 as Koyce suggests in his ingenious reflection,^ conceive a 
 cycle of being in which there is a self-contained system of 
 movements that are eternally repeating themselves, and there 
 might seem to be no contradiction in supposing this to be 
 completely contained in time. If, however, our system be 
 conceived as completely self-contained, it could not be main- 
 tained without contradiction that it could be wholly contained 
 in time. The supposition that it could would involve the 
 assumption of an absolute time prior to all content of time, 
 and, in fact, prior to all reality whatever. At this stage of 
 our procedure it is not necessafj' to argue the untenability 
 of such an assumption. Now, if we cannot regard time as 
 absolute it must be conceived as the form of a series of 
 changes, and this series will have no assignable limits. I 
 mean that the attempt to think the real under the category 
 of time inevitably drives us out in an endless regress on the 
 one hand, and in an endless progress on the other. The 
 real in time takes the form of an unending series, and the 
 question here is whether this endless series gives us an 
 adequate concept of the real or whether there is not some- 
 ^ Spirit of Modem Philosophy, pp. 323-36. 
 
392 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part m. 
 
 where a point of necessary transcendence. Let us ask the 
 question, then, why it should be necessary to push our 
 thoughts along this limitless chain of progressive or regressive 
 links ? and the answer is that we find neither the beginning 
 nor the end of being in time. It is not time that forces 
 the endless series, but rather the real in time, which in its 
 beginning, its first initiative, transcends every moment of 
 time, so that every moment necessarily refers back to a pre- 
 ceding moment, which also says, the beginning of the matter 
 is not in me. There can be no end to this process, inasmuch 
 as the transcending point of one moment of time is the 
 transcending point of time in general, and endless time is no 
 more capable than is the smallest moment of finite time, of 
 grasping the initiative of the real. There can be no absolute 
 beginning in time. Nor can there be an end in time. The 
 real is going on to some goal, and the spring of the proten- 
 sive movement is in the nature of being and not in time. 
 The beginning of things is the self-initiative of being, which 
 in its nature transcends the notion of time. The end can 
 be nothing else than the ideal of self-completion, to which 
 the real is tending. Why should there be an onward flow 
 of time ? — not because of any necessity contained in the 
 notion of time, but because the real chooses to go on. 
 Why, then, does the choice of the real to go on involve its 
 refusal to be satisfied with any assignable limit of the time 
 series ? Simply because the notion of end is like that of 
 beginning, it is transcendent of any moment of time, and is 
 therefore transcendent of the whole time-series. The for- 
 ward moving series becomes necessary in view of the fact 
 that to any assignable time limit the notion of end is 
 transcendent. In both its beginning and its end, therefore, 
 the world content will transcend the time-series. 
 
 We have seen how the world of reality transcends the 
 time-series as respects both its beginning and its end. The 
 time-series is nothing absolute. It does not include the 
 springs of being, nor, in the last analysis, the destiny of 
 being. If, however, we assume the moment of beginning, of 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 393 
 
 self-initiative, the whole history of being, in so far as it 
 manifests itself under the categories of growth and develop- 
 ment, will belong to the time-series. Time is necessary in 
 order to afford scope for change and movement, and wherever 
 the world takes the form of progressive change, there time 
 and the time-series become indispensable. When we ask 
 why it should be indispensable, we find that we are again 
 sent to the real in time, and not to time itself, for the 
 answer. The initiative of motion is in the real, not in 
 time, and we find that in the last analysis the time-series is 
 necessary because the real has taken the form of the 
 conditioned series of changing parts. In short, we find 
 ourselves on the relative side of things, where the condi- 
 tional series is fundamental. We are thus led to our 
 second problem, that of the implications of the notion of 
 a conditioned series in time. Now, it is evident that the 
 notion of evolution rests on that of the conditioned series in 
 tiine, and the question here in reality is how far the concept 
 of evolution is adequate to the real, and in what respect, if 
 any, it involves the transcendent. Keverting to the con- 
 sideration of time, it is clear that what we are interested to 
 know here is how far the concept of evolution may be 
 considered self-sufficient, and in what sense, if at all, it 
 implies the transcendent. The notion of evolution is that 
 of the development of being, in and through a conditioned 
 series ; that is, a series of stages, each of which is conceived 
 to be dependent on some preceding stage. The central 
 thought in evolution, therefore, is that of a progressive 
 causal series in time. If, then, we assume a beginning 
 at any point; that is, if we assume that any set of 
 conditions contains in them the point of self-origination 
 which we have seen to be necessary, we may then represent 
 as possible a progressive series in time, each stage of which 
 will develop out of the preceding. But the validity of the 
 whole representation will depend on the assumption made 
 at the outset, some stage in which the absolute initiative is 
 supposed to have been present, because without this assump- 
 
394 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLED"GE. pabt in. 
 
 tion no initiative of a series of changes can be conceived as 
 possible. Let us take, as an illustration of this, the principle 
 of Mr. Herbert Spencer and his school of evolutionists, 
 according to which the evolution process is traced back to a 
 point at which the matter and motion of the universe are 
 conceived to be in a state of absolute homogeneity. No 
 distinction has arisen in the diffused mass, and no positive 
 tendency to differentiate or aggregate is as yet predicable of it. 
 It is true that Mr. Spencer points to what is termed the 
 instability of the homogeneous as a negative cause of the 
 processes which are set up in evolution. But as he repre- 
 sents it, this instability means simply a condition of rest that 
 is very easily disturbed, so that only a very little cause is 
 needed to do the business. The vital point, however, ie 
 that this very little cause has not been provided for in the 
 homogeneous mass. It lies there motionless and without 
 positive tendency, and is by hypothesis the whole universe. 
 There is no reason in the mass itself why any change series 
 should be set up, and we can only wring our hands and 
 pray that the very smallest accident possible may happen 
 in order to break the deadlock. It is plain, however, 
 that if anything does happen it wiU be a rank miracle, 
 and not iacludable in the homogeneous conditions of the 
 universe. 
 
 When we seek for the root-difficulty in such a concep- 
 tion, we find that it amounts to the assumption of the 
 absoluteness of some term in the series of causal conditions 
 in time. If, however, we are justified in assuming the 
 absoluteness of any term, we are for precisely the same 
 reasons justified in assuming the absoluteness of all the 
 terms in the series. This will appear if we consider that the 
 state of homogeneity or any other state must be thought in 
 connection with preceding states, and these will either be 
 states in which something has happened or they will be 
 states in which nothing has happened. On the latter 
 supposition being will have remained stationary while time 
 moves on, which is absurd. But the former supposition 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 395 
 
 simply connects the homogeneous mass with antecedent 
 conditions out of which it grew, and it can no longer be 
 taken as the pfius of the evolution process. Here, I think, 
 the real nature of the difficulty will be revealed. What the 
 evolution process requires, in order that it may be ration- 
 ally grounded, is an absolute prius which transcends the 
 process as such, and which when postulated so conditions 
 the series as a whole and every point in it, that its origin 
 and progressive movement become not only conceivable 
 but rational. We regard it as a true insight that leads Mr. 
 Spencer to rest the whole sphere of the evolutionary on the 
 postulate of an absolute reality, and our dissatisfaction with 
 the doctrine at this point arises from what is manifestly a 
 failure to realize the true point of connection between the 
 relative process and its transcendent ground. If the evolu- 
 tion-process is one of condensation or, as Clifford says, 
 " the falling together of the masses and becoming solid," 
 the reverse of this process will be one of diffusion, and it 
 will be possible to follow it back in thought to any 
 assignable limit, in fact, to conceive the process as infinite. 
 But it is to be observed that in so doing we are not 
 following a real process, but the reversal of one, and in 
 the second place it is impossible for us to say that 
 the process we have been conceiving is not purely imagi- 
 nary. If the masses have been falling together, then it 
 is true that to conceive a reversal of this process will 
 enable us, not to hit upon any real process of things, but 
 rather to conceive the conditions regressively out of which 
 the evolution movement has proceeded. All that this 
 justifies us in saying unconditionally, is that evolution 
 always presupposes some condition of things as its ante- 
 cedent, and that this antecedent condition will represent a 
 state of relatively greater diffusion. But we cannot carry 
 this out into infinity and say that there ever was a time 
 when the molecules were at an infinite distance and 
 moving toward one another, for in the first place the notion 
 is contradictory as it involves the supposition of a preceding 
 
396 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part hi. 
 
 time when the molecules were still further apart, that 
 is, a little more than an infinite distance apart, and in 
 the second place the supposition has no ground of necessity, 
 inasmuch as it is not necessary to suppose that the process 
 of falling together and becoming solid has itself filled infinite 
 time. The fact that the tendency of the material universe 
 is thus to run down until it reaches a state where matter 
 has been completely integrated, while energy has been 
 completely dissipated, would rather bear out the supposition 
 that any material system will come to a point where the 
 initiative of a new order of things will be necessary, and 
 that, therefore, it is likely that the present system had a 
 beginning in time, and is finite. It is more reasonable to 
 suppose this than to endeavour to connect an infinite 
 past time of consolidation with an infinite future of dis- 
 solution. The dif&culty involved in conceiving any material 
 system to be infinite has led in both ancient and modern 
 times to the substitution of the notion of cycles for that of 
 the straightforward evolution and dissolution of things. 
 Heracleitus and the Stoics postulate the fiery cycle which is 
 constantly repeating itself in a ceaseless round of develop- 
 ment and decay, and Mr. Spencer has reinstated the same 
 notion in his doctrine of evolution and dissolution. The 
 truth is, the notion of a cyclic process of evolution and 
 decay has its chief merit in the fact that it removes the 
 strain from the present system of things by enabling us to 
 regard it as a finite process in time which has had a 
 beginning, and will come to an end. This is a great gain, 
 but the cyclic conception has its own difficulties if we 
 attempt to conceive it as absolute and self-sufficient. It 
 enables us to regard all material systems as finite by 
 postulating a series of relative starting-points for move- 
 ments. But each one of these starting-points involves the 
 same difficulty as the one starting-point of the concept 
 which it displaces. If we attempt to regard it as absolute 
 we involve ourselves in a self-contradiction, whereas, if it is 
 only relative, then it follows that the whole cyclic process 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 397 
 
 is relative. Nowhere in the cyclic process do we transcend 
 the notion of a conditioned causal series in time. 
 
 Now, the impossibility of conceiving any process of de- 
 velopment as other than a conditioned causal series in time, 
 establishes the complete relativity of the notion of evolution 
 in general, and the impossibility of regarding the evolutionary 
 aspect of the world as final. The notion of development is 
 one that we have found to be limited on the side of time 
 and limited on the side of process. The world of evolution 
 is a world of temporal conditions and phenomena. It 
 nowhere holds its own initiative in itself, and at no point is 
 it self-explanatory. In its beginning and at every stage of 
 its progress it involves the point of transcendence, and we 
 may now consider briefly the question as to how this point 
 of transcendence manifests itself in our world. We have 
 seen that the world-content is resolvable, in the last analysis, 
 into individual forms. The world is constituted of its indi- 
 vidualities, and the world-series is a series of individuals. 
 If, now, we postulate the germs of individuality it will be 
 possible to show how in the evolution process the growth of 
 the individual is conserved and carried on. Physics and 
 chemistry show us how the elements combine to form the 
 inorganic world. Biology shows us how the living organism 
 develops, and genetic Psychology gives us a natural history 
 of the life of the soul. What each in turn is obliged to 
 assume is the type of individual with which he is to deal, 
 the chemist, his atom, the physicist, his force-centre, the 
 biologist, his centre of organic life, and the psychologist, his 
 point of conscious activity. If these be assumed the 
 naturalistic process becomes possible, and the scientific book 
 of genesis may be written. But in these assumptions the 
 necessity of a transcendent grounding of the natural pro- 
 cesses has been acknowledged, and when we imagine what 
 kind of transcendence is involved we find that the points of 
 transcendence in connection with the individualities of the 
 series are unable to originate the individual norms or types 
 of reality with which they build up their processes. But 
 
398 TEANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt hi. 
 
 these norms of individuality must be conceived as given in 
 these moments of self-origination which, as we have seen in 
 another connection, are necessary to the grounding of the 
 relative in general. The individual type of real which in 
 each sphere of organization is central in its characteristic 
 activity, is precisely that which must be accepted in relation 
 to the process in this sphere as a transcendent term. 
 
 We come now to the deeper aspect of the world which 
 presents itself under the categories of cause and substance. 
 The connection of cause with the temporal series falls under 
 the general concept of evolution. But the world presents a 
 deeper aspect to which science must penetrate in order to 
 ground its processes. From this deeper point of view the 
 world presents itself as an interacting plurality of individual 
 substances, atoms or force centres. We have seen how the 
 notion of community, or the interaction of a plurality of indi- 
 vidual causal agents leads to the substitution of the notion of 
 internal modification for that of external mechanical impact, 
 and the point of special interest here is the question of the 
 construction that, in the last analysis, must be put upon this 
 kind of agency. It has been shown that the mutual internal 
 modification of a and 6 involves the necessity of a and 6 
 becoming in some sense mutually internal and comprehended 
 of one another. And in general it is true that the mutual 
 modifiability of terms rests on the possibility of this act of 
 internalizing by means of which one term is able to compre- 
 hend another and include it in its own causation. 
 
 When we make the effort to conceive what such agency 
 must be in its internal nature, we find that there is only one 
 model that is at all adequate, and that is the type of inter- 
 action that is exemplified in our own experience. In order 
 to be internally modified by another, the other must be 
 included and comprehended in some way in our own con- 
 scious life. Now, this comprehension may take place in an 
 act of feeling, but we have seen that feeling involves pre- 
 sentative and conceptual elements. A feeling cannot be 
 conceived as cognitively blind. In fact, the power of feeling 
 
«iiAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 399 
 
 to include its other is a function of its cognitive character. 
 Our own power of interaction thus depends, in the last 
 analysis, on our ability to represent the other and its 
 activity in presentative or conceptual terms. If I am to be 
 iaternally influenced and modified by Eichard Eoe it will be 
 because I am able to make some internal representation of 
 Eichard Eoe and his agency, for no direct external inter- 
 change is thinkable. The reduction of the objective agency 
 of the world to this form will carry with it the same 
 necessity. The moment we transcend the notion of mere 
 external impact, which we have found to be only relatively 
 valid, we are in the sphere of agency that is intelligible 
 only when we ascribe to our terms something analogous 
 to our own conceiving activity. The a'a and &'s in order to 
 be internally and mutually modifiable, must have some 
 power of including one another in a concept so that a will 
 determine b through the notion of a or his agency which he 
 is able to form, and this may be generalized so as to apply 
 to the whole world of objective agency. The result will be 
 that the objective activity or rather, interactivity of things 
 will have to be referred ultimately to some form of activity 
 analogous to conception, and the application to this notion 
 of the category of unity under which we find it necessary to 
 reduce the plurality of our world to unity we will find that, 
 in the last analysis, it is necessary to refer the plural 
 activities of our world to some unitary comprehending 
 activity analogous to that of conception, as their ground. 
 
 Let us, then, attempt to correlate the two aspects of our 
 world. We have found that the attempt to represent the 
 world as a conditioned causal series in time under the 
 notion of evolution, is only successful when we recognize 
 the relativity of the evolutionary aspect of things and its 
 dependence on something transcendent. The necessity of 
 the transcendent appears from the analysis of both time and 
 the concept of causal development in time. We find the 
 notion of the series essentially relative, and it has been 
 made to appear that the points where the world concept 
 
400 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 transcends that of evolution in time are the points where 
 it asserts its individual and individuating activity. The 
 resolution of the world into a plurality of coexisting indi- 
 viduals marks a deeper aspect of the real than that which is 
 presented in the concept of evolution. We are thus led 
 necessarily to the deeper aspect of the world in which its 
 agencies become interacting individuals, and the notion of 
 external causation has to be given up for that of internal 
 influence. The logical outcome of this deeper view of the 
 world, as we saw, is the final reference of the activities of 
 the world to a unitary and comprehending agency analogous 
 to that of conception. Now, the notion of substance as we 
 find it in our world involves, as we have seen, the necessity 
 of a transcending self-initiating activity as the persistent 
 ground of the relative, and when we bring this conclusion 
 into relation with the conclusion reached here, that the 
 world-activities are ultimately referable to some unitary and 
 comprehending agency analogous to that of conception, the 
 two fall together into a concept of a self-active agency 
 analogous to conception, as the transcendent and necessary 
 ground of the relative activities of the world. 
 
 This brings us to a point where it will be possible to 
 formulate what may be called the ultimate postulate of 
 cosmology. In the second book of this treatise we en- 
 deavoured to show how the doctrine of the categories leads 
 to the formulation of the ground-principles of construction 
 in the mathematical and dynamical sciences. Again, in 
 the chapter on the Transcendent as Eoaperience in this third 
 book we endeavoured to show how the principles of science 
 lead, in the last analysis, to the postulate of something 
 transcendent as the indispensable ground of their own 
 procedure. This conclusion has cleared the ground for the 
 discussions of the present chapter which have led to a 
 further vindication and a further determination of this 
 transcendent ground. We have found that the notion of 
 objective activity, or agency, leads necessarily to the con- 
 clusion that the relative processes of the world are nowhere 
 
CHAP. V. THE TRANSCENDENT OBJECT [COSMOLOGY]. 401 
 
 self-sufficient, that they are nowhere able to comprehend 
 the ground of their own activity but at every point relate 
 themselves to a deeper and transcendent ground. And we 
 have found reason for affirming that the cosmology of the 
 world can be rationally grounded only in the postulate of a 
 self-initiating and unitary activity at the basis of its processes, 
 analogous to the activity of conception. 
 
 2c 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 
 
 In the development of his metaphysical conceptions Kant 
 found it necessary to separate rational psychology in its 
 grounds, from theology. The concepts of God and the 
 transcendent subject of experience, could never be made to 
 coalesce in his system and the outcome has been unsatis- 
 factory for both psychology and theology. We do not 
 propose here to follow these consequences, but rather to deal 
 with their source and point out, if possible, how other and 
 more adequate consequences may be deduced. The root- 
 difficulty with Kant in this aspect of his philosophy is to be 
 found in his inadequate and, to a great degree, mistaken 
 treatment of the self in psychology. Kant, as we know, 
 was unable to find any real self or soul in experience. It 
 has a vicegerent, however, a logical concept of unity, 
 which presides over the mental activities while itself is 
 purely transcendent and, in the last analysis, indeterminate 
 both as to its nature and reality. We have endeavoured to 
 show in our treatment of the Subject- Consciousness and its 
 Categories, the unsoundness of the Kantian psychology and 
 the necessity that the subject of experience should be, not a 
 pure logical abstraction but a real self that does and suffers 
 everything. The initial result of the Kantian exclusion of 
 the real subject from experience is the inability which he 
 experienced, to determine the self as real or as in possession 
 
 402 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 403 
 
 of any conceivable nature. This result was to be expected, 
 for if we take the self away from the warm activities 
 of experience, where it does and suffers everything, and 
 banish it to region where it does and suffers nothing that is 
 thinkable, it is logically necessary that it should fade into 
 an unreal abstraction in regard to which knowledge would 
 seem scarcely worth while. In order that the self may 
 be determinable in any sense, it must be the subject in 
 experience, and in that case we have seen that both its 
 reaKty and its nature lie open to knowledge. The first 
 step that must be taken then in order to a real reform 
 of Kantism is the recognition of the self as the intra- 
 experiential subject of which the logical notion of unity 
 of which Kant speaks, is an objective function. 
 
 Does this recession of the self into experience as its real 
 subject destroy the notion of transcendence and render the 
 self of which we are conscious, the actual subject of our 
 experience, all the subject that our world demands? There 
 is a sense, of course, in which the Kantian concept of 
 transcendence will have to be given up. We cannot harbour 
 the notion that anything may transcend the notion of experi- 
 ence, or that the contents of our world may be conceived 
 other than as intra- experiential. That there is any con- 
 ceivable self that is transcendent of experience in the 
 absolute sense is of course unthinkable, and this carries with 
 it the dismissal of the thing in itself in so far as it claims 
 to be ultra-experiential. The notion of transcendence that 
 survives the reform which we are seeking to effect, is that of 
 something that transcends the limits of relative and finite 
 experience, and is necessary for the grounding of its pro- 
 cesses. This sense of the concept of transcendence is not 
 touched by the dismissal of the thing in itself, but survives 
 and everywhere asserts itself as necessary. Now, it is 
 precisely this kind of transcendence that we hope to be able 
 to prove necessary for the grounding of the metaphysics of 
 religion, but at this point we are more directly concerned with 
 a further criticism of Kant. Having relegated the real self of 
 
404 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 experience and psychology to an inaccessible region, Kant 
 finds it necessary to develop his theology on purely objective 
 grounds. This he does first, by a logical development of the 
 notion of the world as a totality of conditions, the application 
 to which of the method of disjunctive reasoning leads to the 
 concept of a subject of which all the parts may be predicated 
 in a disjunctive judgment. This is complicated enough, but 
 Kant proceeds unappalled to translate this notion of a mere 
 logical subject of disjunctive predicates into that of a real 
 subject of qualities, and to characterize the notion of 
 the world-subject thus arrived at as that of an ens realissi- 
 mum, a most real being, and in truth the being that is 
 conceived in theology as God. Now, without entering into 
 the intricacies of Kant's reasoning, it is only necessary 
 to point to the fact that the process starts not with a real 
 self, but with a logical notion of objective unity which 
 is first applied to the plurality of existing conditions 
 in the world in order to reduce these to the unitary 
 ground that is necessary in order to make our world 
 rational. This we have also found reason for doing in our 
 cosmological reflection, though on somewhat different ground. 
 But what we wish to call attention to here is the fact that 
 Kant is as yet on purely logical ground. He has simply 
 affirmed the necessity of a logical unity of the world. But 
 at a certain point in his argument, without giving any 
 warning, he transforms this logical unity of the world into a 
 real subject, of which the predicates become qualities, and 
 affirms this subject to be God. Where is the clue, we may 
 ask, to this transformation ? We find it in a paralogism into 
 which Kant suffers himself to fall at this point. Having 
 developed his-concept of the unitary ground as logical subject 
 of a disjunctive world-system, and having present in con- 
 sciousness the notion or, we taay say, the intuition of a real 
 subject of experience which does and suffers everything, the 
 two concepts unconsciously coalesced and became one. The 
 transformation was thus effected, and the unitary subject of 
 the disjunctive system becomes a real subject of which the 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 405 
 
 disjunctive predications become qualities. Had Kant been 
 conscious of the paralogism involved in his procedure he 
 would no doubt have reformed it, but at all events he would 
 have escaped some of the pitfalls of his subsequent pro- 
 cedure ; for, having achieved in this illegitimate way the 
 notion of a real world-subject that is in all essential respects 
 convertible with the notion of a subject of experience, Kant 
 feels it incumbent on him to cramp this real subject into 
 the limits of a mere logical subject. Everywhere in his 
 effort to define his concept of God and to determine his 
 nature and relations to the world, his efforts are reduced to 
 illusion by the concealed fallacy in his premises. He has 
 no difficulty in finding the notion of such a being necessary, 
 but it is impossible to show that the notion stands for any- 
 thing real. In spite of all his efforts Kant finds the object he 
 is searching for shpping away from his grasp, and his efforts to 
 reach an intelligible concept of the nature of the transcendent 
 subject has no better result. It resists all efforts of definite 
 conception and vanishes slowly but inevitably into the mists 
 of the inconceivable. 
 
 It will be evident, I think, that our analysis has supplied 
 us with a firmer and more fruitful basis for the development 
 of a doctrine of the transcendent subject. We find our start- 
 ing-point in that from which Kant was cut off, namely, in 
 the notion of a real self as the subject in experience. We do 
 not need to go over again the ground on which the real self is 
 affirmed, but assuming it as real, we may go on to show how 
 it enables us to solidly ground a postulate of a transcendent 
 subject whose nature is rendered intelligible by the appli- 
 cation to it, under -the method of approximation which is also 
 familiar, the categories under which we define our own 
 subject nature. It will not be necessary to debate here the 
 fundamental considerations which engaged us in the chapter 
 on The Transcendent as Eoeperience. That the transcendent 
 involves the fundamental distinction of subject and object, 
 and that its internal nature must be conceived as complex 
 rather than simple, need no further consideration here. 
 
406 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 And that the transcendent psychosis involves the three 
 moments of thought, feeling, and relation may also be taken 
 as settled. It is on the assumption of the results of the 
 foregoing chapter that the entire discussion of the cosmo- 
 logical and theological aspects of the transcendent proceed. 
 Let us then, on the basis of these results, make a survey of 
 the inner world in order to determine what it can justify us 
 in saying, first as to the inner ground on which the tran- 
 scendent subject is postulated, and secondly as to the nature 
 of this subject so far as it is conceivable or definable. 
 
 There is a sense in which the whole life of the self can 
 be conceived as history and arranged under the categories of 
 development as a conditioned series in time. This view of 
 the inner world has been made familiar to us in genetic 
 psychology, and to our contemporary way of thinking the 
 study of the history of the self is more interesting than the 
 analysis of its inner nature and content. There is no dis- 
 position here to deny, but rather to magnify the importance 
 of the genetic inquiry. The view of the present self which 
 resolves it into a conditioned and developing series in time 
 and regards its content as in some way the product of its 
 past experience, is one that has shed much light for us on 
 the question of the nature of the present self. Just as we 
 are enabled to understand a law or a custom or a social or 
 political institution better if we are able to approach it from 
 the point of view of its origin and history, so in the case of 
 the contents of our minds a new light is shed on the question 
 of their nature by a study of their history. All this is con- 
 ceded, but the main question we are debating here does not 
 concern the value of the genetic concept of mind, but rather 
 its finality. Can the view of the self which resolves its 
 content into history and ranges its life in the terms of a 
 conditioned series in time, be taken as in any sense final ? 
 The answer to this is, I think, obvious. The whole discussion 
 of evolution in its objective aspects as a world-process applies 
 here, and we may say in general that the concept of the 
 psychic life as a flowing stream in time cannot be taken as 
 
CHAP, VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 407 
 
 final. But let us specify the argument a little more in its 
 bearing on the inner world. We have said that the content 
 of the present self may be ranged in a historic series in time, 
 and we are willing to admit that the points of origin of most 
 of that content may be found within the limits of the series. 
 But what we find the series unable to explain in the sense 
 of locating its origin somewhere in the series, is the quality 
 of the series itself I mean by this that characteristic 
 individuality which determines or predetermines the form 
 of all its results. To be plain, the series does not explain 
 the kind of soul that is in it and that individuates all 
 its results. But on the contrary the presupposition of this 
 soul is necessary in order to make the series itself con- 
 ceivable and its progress possible. This being the case, it 
 follows that there is nothing final in the historic series. 
 If we suppose it to be grounded and grant it the initial 
 norm of the individuality which it is realizing, we may 
 commit ourselves to it with a whole heart and may accept 
 all the treasures it has to give us. But it is clear that the 
 value of the genetic concept and its results depends, in the 
 last analysis, on our recognition of its conditioned and 
 relative character. 
 
 We find then that the notion of the mind-series, as we 
 may call it, is not final. It does not include the moment of 
 its own origination or the secret of that individual world 
 which predetermines the character of all its results, just as 
 in the objective world we are forced to go deeper and for 
 substantially the same reason. The form of conditioned 
 causality in time cannot be taken as a final form of agency. 
 The individualities of the time-process transcend that cate- 
 gory ; they point deeper and we must follow their direction.. 
 Now we find when we go beneath the temporal stream that 
 we are immediately in the sphere of the self and its agency. 
 Every part of the stream we find related to the self, and 
 through this relation alone it derives, in the last analysis, its 
 psychic character. The genetic point of view thus leads in 
 the act by which it is transcended to a point of view in 
 
408 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt hi. 
 
 which the inner world presents itself, no longer as a flowing 
 stream, but rather as a sphere, every part of which is related 
 to a unitary centre. This inner world, including unitary 
 centre as well as peripheral parts, we call the world of self 
 It is the world in which the self asserts its real agency and 
 in which the inner world becomes known, therefore, in a 
 truer and deeper sense than before. We may ask then what 
 form of a world do we find here, and the answer can be 
 obtained only by a study of the form of agency of which we 
 become conscious in our experience as a whole. We do not 
 at this point need to go over again the considerations which 
 have led to the conclusion that man's consciousness of his 
 fundamental agency is that of a socius, a self that includes in 
 its constitutional point of view the concept or idea of the 
 other, however rudimentary in form, and whose self-agency 
 is therefore constitutionally modified by the moment which 
 we call the influence of the other. In short, there is a 
 moment of passivity bound up in the nature of our psychic 
 activity which prevents us from becoming agents in the 
 absolute sense and reduces our agency to the relative form. 
 The subject-world, then, so far as we are conscious of our 
 agency in it reduces to the form of a plurality. Our con- 
 sciousness of ourselves and our agency are inclusive of the 
 other and its agency. Our subject-world is a world of 
 plurality and relative agency, and we touch no point of final 
 realized unity or of unqualified self-activity in it. 
 
 Now it is this relativity of the deeper world of self that 
 leads to its transcendence. We do not need to go into 
 details here, for we have already shown in a former chapter 
 how this transcendence is effected. It is not true that we 
 have not the consciousness of something higher than the form 
 of agency that we realize. The vital point of our doctrine 
 here is that we have a norm of absoluteness in our own 
 consciousness. The self is not conscious of exercising or of 
 being able to exercise, the function of unchecked, unmodified 
 initiative, for there is ever present the moment of passivity, 
 but it is conscious of the presence of the moment of self- 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 409 
 
 initiative in all its activity. There is that in it which has 
 been thrown into latency, which, could it assert itself 
 in an untrammelled way, would realize the notion of 
 absolute or transcendent agency. The ideal of self-determi- 
 nation, for example, is not absent from human consciousness; 
 in truth it is ever present as a characteristic feature. But 
 what is realized, and the agency we are conscious of as being 
 capable of exercising, is not unimpeded self-determination 
 but determination modified by the initiative of the other. 
 Our agency is at best an undivided interest in a joint-stock 
 concern. Such agency, it is clear, is not final, but has a 
 presupposition, and the iiature of that which is presupposed 
 is clearly determined by the moment of latent self-initiative 
 that is ever present in our consciousness. This moment 
 inevitably asserts itself in an ideal of self-initiative and 
 self-determination, and forms the norm in consciousness out 
 of which the concept of the transcendent subject or self is 
 developed. We do not need to dwell at great length on 
 the mode by which the notion of transcendent nature is 
 unfolded. We have seen how the infinitation of concepts 
 is effected by conceiving the absolute term as freed from the 
 modifying limit which reduces it to a term in a relative 
 system. In this case the modification of the agency of the 
 other as an externally initiated determination is conceived 
 as removed. By applying the method of approximation to 
 this norm in consciousness, the notion of unmodified self- 
 initiation, we are enabled to reach a proximate conception 
 of a being in whose activity this form of agency becomes 
 real and expressive of the whole nature. The procedure 
 here indicated, let us say, involves nothing arbitrary. 
 Anyone who cares to follow the course by which his 
 consciousness reaches out to and includes, the transcendent 
 term, and, in particular, the method which his thoughts 
 naturally adopt in their attempt to render the concept of 
 the transcendent intelligible, will soon begin to realize that 
 what has been unfolded above represents a normal trend 
 of consciousness. 
 
410 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 The outcome of the above reflection is the conclusion 
 that the psychic agency, as we are conscious of it in our 
 experience, is not final, but that it necessitates the presuppo- 
 sition of a transcendent agency on which it depends and in 
 which its own ideal of absolute self-agency is realized. 
 This supplies us with a point of view from which the real 
 significance of the reflection involved in Kant's reasoning 
 can be appreciated. Kant, as we have seen, starts with the 
 logical concept of a necessary unity of experience as 
 involved in the subject of a disjunctive judgment and then 
 makes an abortive effort to translate the notion of this 
 logical universe into that of a real one. This is the signifi- 
 cance of the ens realissimum, and we have traced the source 
 of Kant's failure to his neglect of the psychological subject 
 in experience. Now, in the foregoing considerations we 
 have sought to remove this difliculty by showing how an 
 adequate recognition of the subject in experience leads 
 necessarily to the postulate of a transcendent agency as its 
 ground. But the great vantage of the situation arises out 
 of the fact that the transcendent term which we thus attain 
 supplies a real basis for further reflection analogous to that 
 of Kant. What we have shown so far, is that some real 
 agency transcending our own is necessary. If, now, we 
 connect this conclusion with the Kantian reasoning, and 
 suppose that the reflection has a real rather than a merely 
 logical centre, it will become clear that Kant was simply 
 applying to the situation the category of unity or unification, 
 which we have seen to be as coercive as that of causality 
 itself. We admit that, logically, this category expresses 
 itself in a disjunctive judgment which resolves the members 
 of a totality into the disjunctive predicates of a subject in 
 which they are unified and comprehended. But there is no 
 way to translate this logical unification into real unification 
 except by connecting the whole logical process with some 
 term in reality. This we are here able to do. Instead of 
 abortively attempting to deduce a real world from one that 
 is purely logical, we are able here to find the transcendent 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 411 
 
 real as a term presupposed in experience, and applying to it 
 the category of unity, as we must, we reach as a result the 
 postulate of a unitary agency transcending the plurality of 
 the subject-world of experience, just as it has been shown 
 to transcend its relativity. That it is necessary to conceive 
 this transcendent agent which is thus absolutely and 
 unitarily related to the subject-world, as a transcendent 
 subject, the disjunctive process is sufficient to show, and 
 that this subject will be an etis realissimum follows now from 
 the fact that it has been reached as the unitary subject of a 
 real world. The transcendent subject must be conceived as 
 world-subject and, therefore, as ens realissimum. 
 
 The notion of ens realissimum is not achieved, however, 
 by simply relating the transcendent subject to the world- 
 content in its unmodified and relative form, and by regarding 
 this content as the content of the absolute subject. This 
 would be pantheistic, and while we do not object to Pan- 
 theism as such, yet at this point the pantheistic method 
 shows defective insight. We have seen all along that the 
 transcendent is only reached through the supposition of 
 a modification of the relative content of experience ; a modi- 
 fication that is effected by the removal of certain 
 limitations that determine things as relative and finite 
 rather than absolute. The road from the relative world- 
 content to the transcendent lies necessarily through this 
 removal of modifying restrictions. Shall we suppose, now, 
 that in the reverse process the passage from the transcen- 
 dent, the point of relativity can be neglected, and the 
 content of our world of experience be conceived as in its 
 relative form, the content of the transcendent world also ? 
 There would be a most fatal defect in such reasoning. For 
 if the content of the relative world may be conceived with- 
 out modification as the content of the transcendent world, 
 it would follow that the distinction between the relative 
 and the absolute is not real, and may, in the last analysis, 
 be set aside. If, however, we adhere to the point of view 
 which has been developing into clearness throughout these 
 
412 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. paet in. 
 
 discussions, it becomes evident that we cannot commit 
 logical suicide at this stage by admitting that the unmodified 
 relative may be conceived as content of the transcendent. 
 The notion of ens realissimum is qualitatively different from 
 the notion of the relative and finite, and could never be 
 reached quantitatively by conceiving some subject of which 
 the totality of the relative should be regarded as a quali- 
 fication, and as therefore predicable of it. The notion of 
 ens realissimum clearly contains the implication of the tran- 
 scendence of relative limitations, and the raising of the terms 
 of relativity to perfection and completeness. To realize it 
 then involves the application of that infinitating method 
 which is described elsewhere, to the content of relativity, 
 and the raising of it to the point of ideal completeness. In 
 other words, the predicates of the transcendent subject will 
 be predicates of perfection, and we will be justified in repre- 
 senting it as an ens realissimum only as we recognize the 
 necessity of raising the content of our relative experience 
 to the standard of ideal perfection before regarding it as 
 predicable of the transcendent subject. 
 
 With this important qualification the disjunctive process 
 becomes necessary, as it amounts simply to the demand that 
 our world shall be a world of thought-relations as well as 
 one of volitional agency. The application of the process of 
 disjunctive unification is simply the effort of thinking to 
 render the real situation intelligible. It is tantamount to the 
 claim that if there is to be a world of transcendent agency, 
 then in order to be conceivable at all, it must conform to 
 the form of disjunctive thinking, and so stand in the relation 
 of subject to a world-totality, the parts of which are to be 
 conceived as its predications. The remaining question to be 
 considered here is then : how the relative content is to be 
 conceived as related to this absolute subject or ens realis- 
 simum. Shall we conceive two world-s and two contents, 
 one relative, the other absolute, and shall these two worlds 
 be represented in such a way as to be, virtually at least, 
 exclusive of each other ? To take such a position would be 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 413 
 
 to betray a lack of insight at the opposite pole from 
 pantheism, and to condemn our world to absolute dualism ? 
 Shall be conceive them, on the contrary, as absolutely one 
 in the sense that there is no difference of content, but the re- 
 lative is to be regarded as absolute from perhaps a merely 
 altered point of view ? This would lead us again into the 
 pantheistic blindness. The only course of true insight here, I 
 feel sure, is to assert a distinction between the two worlds, 
 but to deny its absoluteness. There must be some pathway 
 from the relative and finite to the absolute and infinite, by 
 means of which our thinking can travel from one to the other 
 — a veritable Jacob's ladder on which the angels of reflection 
 may go back and forth between earth and heaven. Now, 
 the connection of the relative with that which transcends it 
 has, we think, been exhibited in this whole discussion up to 
 this stage, and also the mode by which our thinking, finding 
 certain points of departure in the relative, is able to travel 
 the road toward infinity. That the reversal of the process 
 involves the retracing of the road in the opposite direction 
 must seem obvious, and also that this return will involve 
 the origination and imposition of the modification which 
 constitutes the differentia of relativity. Why should 
 we halt in the presence of such a necessity ? The ens 
 realissimum is the transcendent subject of an ideally perfect 
 and infinite world. The content of such a world must 
 partake of this ideally perfect and infinite character. But 
 we must relate this ideally perfect world to the relative and 
 infinite world, and in the last analysis there cannot be two 
 worlds. The mode of reverse-relating must not then involve 
 at any point an absolute breach of continuity, so that the 
 two worlds will at any point fall absolutely apart. The 
 demands on an adequate metaphysic at this point are two 
 and not one. On the one hand the unity of the two worlds 
 must not be broken, and on the other the distinction must 
 be recognized as real. Even the absolute cessation of in- 
 sight at some point would not justify the denial of either 
 demand, since each rests on its own irrefragable ground, and 
 
414 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 the fact that thought is in a dilemma may be the result of 
 our own imperfect thinking. 
 
 I do not think, however, that insight does break down 
 absolutely at this point, although I am not claiming omni- 
 science for any mode of thinking. Here, however, I think, 
 we may find an important clue to the insight we need in the 
 sphere of relative experience itself. We have seen on both 
 the objective and subjective sides of experience, that the 
 relative begins to be transcended at the point where 
 plurality and dependence begin to merge into the unitary 
 and independent, and we have seen that the modification 
 that reduces the agency of things in experience to rela- 
 tivity arises out of the mutual modifications of the parts 
 of an interacting system. This needs only to be restated 
 here. The moment of dependence seems to be determined 
 then by the plurality of co-ordinate agents, and the over- 
 coming of this plurality would also involve the overcoming 
 of the dependence. In short, just so far as the real asserts 
 its unity it also asserts its non-relativity and independence. 
 But we have seen that the passage from the relative to the 
 transcendent is essentially a transition from plural to 
 unitary agency. Shall we not say, then, that the point of 
 origination for the relative and dependent is identical with 
 the beginning-point of plurality and differentiation, and that 
 if we are seeking the origin of the modification which deter- 
 mines the relative to be relative, we will find it at the point 
 where being ceases to be one and begins to become many ? 
 The conclusion seems to be necessary. 
 
 But right here I think we will find one of those pitfalls 
 of reflection which Kant was not always successful in 
 avoiding. The point of plurality and differentiation with 
 which we are concerned here is not to be regarded as a 
 point in logical thinking merely, but as a distinction of the 
 real. We must remember that the distinguishing feature of 
 our reflection here is that the notion of real agency is 
 central in it, and that the predications of our thought are 
 predications of real activity. When, therefore, we say that 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 415 
 
 the root of relative agency is to be found in the beginning 
 of plurality, we do not mean mathematical plurality simply, 
 but a plurality of agents or activities. This being conceded, 
 it will begin to become clear, I think, how the origin of 
 relativity can be found in the beginning of plurality. We 
 have already reached the insight that the beginning of 
 plurality is also the point of initiation for the individualities 
 of the finite world. The original posit, as it has been called, 
 in which the finite begins is an individuating activity, and 
 manifests itself as such in the whole history of the relative. 
 Let us carry this insight with us, then, when we go on 
 to the next insight, namely, that the beginning of plurality 
 marks a breaking up of the world-content into parts, and a 
 finUe being may therefore he defined as an iTidividual whose 
 content is only part of the world-content as a whole. The 
 beginning of plurality marks, therefore, the beginning of a 
 partition of content, not in the sense that there can be no 
 common content, but in the sense rather that no individual 
 shall be able to comprehend all content, and thus achieve 
 virtual absoluteness. In all this, however, we have simply 
 been trying to render a situation intelligible, and have 
 ventured no suggestion of a final reason for its existence. 
 What we have aimed at here is to develop the situation as 
 one that is real and not simply logical, and also to make 
 clear the fact that the dependence of the relative has its 
 root, perhaps not the sole root, in the plurality of individuals 
 which determines them as finite through the partition of 
 world-content which it involves. 
 
 Eeturning then to our main question, how the relation of 
 the two worlds is to be conceived, we may assume here, 
 as a point to be taken up later and investigated, the fact 
 that the agency of the transcendent at the point where it 
 touches the finite world is individuating in its character, 
 that is, its first posit is a germ of individuality which 
 predetermines all the individuation of the world of experi- 
 ence as we know it. This being predicated, the relation 
 becomes, in a measure, at least, conceivable. The Transcen- 
 
416 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part m. 
 
 dent Subject is an ens realissvmv/m, and that means that it is 
 an absolute subject of a world that is infinitely complete 
 and perfect, a world, therefore, of ideally complete and 
 perfect activities. In order to translate this into more 
 intelligible terms, let us say that the notion of an ens 
 realissimwm is that of a world-experience in which the 
 subject is related to and comprehends the world-content 
 as a whole. There is thus no partition and exclusion in 
 such an experience, and, therefore, no limitation. Its 
 activities are determined by the world-content as a whole, 
 and being self-sufficient and self-contained, they will all 
 be self-initiative and self-determining. We thus realize 
 the notion of a transcendent world of absoluteness and 
 infinite ideality. Now, the first point we wish to make 
 regarding the relation of this world and the sphere of 
 relativity is that the transcendent world must be considered 
 as comprehending and including the relative. The sense in 
 which the relative is external to and exclusive of the 
 absolute must be qualitative and not inconsistent with the 
 notion of inclusion within experience. The transcendent 
 experience could not, therefore, be other than all-inclusive. 
 The qualitative distinction between the relative and the 
 absolute will be a distinction that will render them non- 
 identical, while the relative remains content of the absolute 
 experience. The only method by which the achievement 
 of absoluteness is conceivable is that of inclusion and 
 unification of content, and this inclusion must be all- 
 inclusive, inasmuch as it is the notion of excluded content 
 and external agency that enables us to determine the 
 differentia of relativity. I am perfectly aware of the fact that 
 there is a temptation to flinch at this point in our reflection 
 on account of the apparent implication of pantheism. But 
 I am prepared to deny the necessity of the pantheistic 
 inference. What is the point in the pantheistic inference 
 that would be objected to here ? Not certainly the fact of 
 inclusion, but rather what that fact on the face of it seems 
 to carry with it, the suppression of all real individuality and 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 417 
 
 individual agency except that of the absolute. I acknow- 
 ledge that such a disaster is to be avoided, but why should 
 inclusion contain this implication ? The root of the whole 
 difficulty is to be found, I take it, in the assumption that 
 to suppose a point of individuality as internal to a conscious- 
 ness that comprehends it is tantamount to suppressing its 
 real individuality and reducing it to the position of a mere 
 mode of the containing consciousness. Were this true it 
 would be impossible to conceive anything as relative or 
 dependent without destroying its individuality. We have 
 seen that the relative is determinable as relative by virtue 
 of something that transcends and comprehends it. There is 
 no other way by which relativity can be determined. There 
 is always some limit of reality in the relative which must 
 be conceived as removed in the absolute. The notion of the 
 complete contains that of the incomplete, while that of the 
 incomplete implies that of the complete as transcending and 
 comprehending it. Otherwise the absolute could be no 
 ground of the relative, and no principle for its explanation. 
 But why enlarge on this point ? The truth of the matter is 
 this. If we assert that the relative is excluded from the 
 absolute we thereby assert the absoluteness of the relative, 
 for we have cut the relative off from the possibility of any 
 absolute grounding, and have therefore forced it to become 
 absolute. The very notion of the relative is of that which 
 requires internal grounding in the absolute, and which must 
 be conceived therefore as included in it. And we will find 
 no reason for being scandalized at such a conclusion if we 
 do not make the mistake of supposing that individuality, in 
 order to be real, must be absolute. The kind of objection 
 we are considering here does not contemplate a complete 
 solution of bonds between the finite individual and some- 
 thing absolute on which it depends. Thinkers who make 
 the objection are in nine cases out of ten theists who regard 
 the finite individual as a creature which owes its existence, 
 if not its continuance, to a creative act. Thinkers of this 
 type as a rule assert the omnipresence of God while they 
 
 2d 
 
418 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part iii. 
 
 seem to forget that God cannot be conceived as being present 
 in any other sense than consciously, and that conscious 
 omnipresence can be realized only by the comprehension of 
 everything in consciousness. How can a being be con- 
 sciously present to anything from vrhich its consciousness is 
 excluded ? Not in any real sense, surely. What the 
 theistic thinker is concerned to deny, in order to maintain 
 the reality of the finite individual, is not the dependence of 
 the finite on a transcendent agency which includes and 
 grounds its own ; not the inclusion of the finite individual in 
 the interpenetrating consciousness of the divine, but rather 
 such a construction of this comprehension and inclusion as 
 would be inconsistent with the reality and persistence of the 
 finite individual. Any concept of inclusion that involves the 
 reduction of the individual to a mere mode of the absolute 
 is one which the theistic thinker abhors, and in this we 
 confess that our sympathies are with the theist. To us an 
 individual that is neither real nor perdurable has no value 
 whatever. 
 
 Waiving the further discussion of this question for the 
 present, we go on to the second point in the determination 
 of the relation of the two worlds. This we may call the 
 internal posit of individuality. We mean by the internal 
 posit of individuality the same thing that our analysis of 
 relative experience has made us acquainted with as that 
 individual posit which constitutes the point of transcendence 
 in the relative sphere. The world of individualities is re- 
 ducible in the last analysis, as we have seen, to these 
 points of transcendence. Now it is this same posit 
 of individuality that we are approaching here from the 
 standpoint of the transcended itself, and to this we have 
 applied the phrase, internal posit of individuality, in order to 
 indicate (1) the internal grounding of the individual. The 
 finite individual is posited by that which transcends it, and 
 to which it is therefore in a sense external ; but we have 
 already argued that this transcendence and externality are 
 not to be construed as inconsistent with the conscious 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 419 
 
 inclusion of the finite by the transcendent. (2) The phrase 
 is intended to imply that individuality is in the last analysis 
 a posit of the absolute, and therefore rooted in absolute 
 nature. We have seen that individuality is not a passing 
 phase of the finite world, but its deepest truth, and that it 
 has its roots in the transcendent. What we affirm here is 
 that it is in this transcendent grounding rather than in 
 anything in the nature of the individual himself that we are 
 to look for the last ground of his reality and perdurability. 
 We cannot go the length of Leibnitz in conceiving the 
 finite individual as in its nature a self-sufficient being, for 
 then the finite individual would itself become absolute, and 
 we would be involved in a fundamental contradiction from 
 which the Leibnitzian resources would not be able to deliver 
 us. We are shut up to the notion of the finite individual 
 as essentially relative, but as having its roots in the absolute 
 nature, and it is there that we are obliged to look both for 
 the source and the guarantee of the individual existence. 
 (3) The next point of relation which we wish to note is a 
 negative one. That the finite and relative are comprehended 
 in the absolute and infinite experience we have already 
 maintained. Here we wish to add that the distinction 
 between the absolute and the relative is ineradicable. It 
 has its root in that breaking up of content which determines 
 the relative as both relative and finite. The transcendence 
 of this would involve the lapse of the finite and relative in 
 the one absolute nature. But there is not anywhere in experi- 
 ence any tendency for distinctions to lapse. The real tendency 
 is that of transcendence, which is the name of a process in 
 which experience asserts the unitary comprehension of dis- 
 tinctions which, instead of being thereby abolished or set 
 aside, are in truth grounded and rendered valid. The notion 
 of lapse in this connection is wholly misleading. If we 
 follow the actual processes of experience we will travel a 
 road of transcendence and conservation rather than one of 
 submergence and lapse. When experience crosses a bridge 
 her wont is to take her belongings with her. There is no 
 
420 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt in. 
 
 reason to suppose then that the distinction between the 
 absolute and relative is other than ineradicable, but, on the 
 contrary, the whole trend of experience tends to confirm 
 what is also a necessity of thinking; namely, that the ground- 
 ing of any distinction in the absolute is the highest guarantee 
 we can have of its reality and permanence. 
 
 We admit that there is still room for doubt as to the 
 possibility of real and permanent finite individuality within 
 the absolute experience, and it is in view of this lingering 
 doubt that attention is here recalled to a fundamental dis- 
 tinction in the nature of absolute experience which was 
 considered in the chapter on The Trwnsc&ndent as Experience. 
 I mean that distinction of subject- and object-consciousness 
 which is fundamental to the notion of experience. The 
 absolute experience cannot be conceived otherwise than as 
 involving this distinction as basal to all its processes. 
 Otherwise the notion of experience would have to be dropped 
 entirely, and some other category applied to the absolute 
 nature. We have seen, however, that the real choice is 
 either the concept of the absolute as experience or an 
 agnosticism so radical and sweeping that even the notion of 
 final ground becomes a fiction. Taking this distinction then 
 as fundamental to the concept of absolute experience, the 
 consideration which we wish to advance here is that the 
 finite individual is to be regarded as a posit of the objective 
 consciousness of the absolute rather than as a posit of its 
 subject-consciousness. We have seen that the subject-con- 
 sciousness of the finite individual is rendered finite and 
 relative by the fact that in the consciousness in which it 
 becomes aware of its own activity it also becomes aware of 
 the modifying activity of its other. It may be said then 
 that in the same pulse of consciousness in which it realizes 
 itself it also posits its other. This would, however, be 
 manifestly impossible to an absolute consciousness, which 
 must in the nature of things stand alone in the sense that it 
 could have no self-modifying term which asserts itself as a 
 not-self. The apparent over-subtlety of this distinction will 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 421 
 
 be condoned, I feel sure, for the sake of its importance, 
 since it involves the whole difference between an absolute 
 and a relative experience. It is not conceivable that there 
 should be any subjective posit of the iinite individual 
 at all. The self posits itseE' or its co-ordinate and 
 self-modifying other. We have seen that the positing 
 of a self-modifying other is excluded by the very notion of 
 absolute subjectivity, and it only remains then to admit that 
 the absolute self can posit subjectively ; that is, be self- 
 conscious, of nothing but itself. (This reasoning does 
 not, however, preclude the possibility of internal self-dis- 
 tinctions in the subject-consciousness of the absolute, a topic 
 which will be reverted to in a subsequent chapter.) 
 
 The pou sto of the finite individual must be sought then 
 in the objective consciousness of the absolute. It is here 
 that the breaking up of content takes place which determines 
 the plurality and at the same time the relativity, of the 
 individuals of our experience. And on the transcendent 
 side of the problem it is here that the posit takes place 
 in which finite individuality originates and we thus reach the 
 conception of the absolute activity objectively taking the 
 form of a positing of individuals. Now it is in this 
 connection that we can put the question as to the final 
 status of the finite individual with the best hope of reach- 
 ing a satisfactory answer. Is there anything anywhere in 
 the realms of experience or thinking that is not consistent 
 with the supposition that a direct objective posit involves 
 finitude and relativity by virtue of the fact that it 
 is an objective posit ? We fail to see that there is 
 anything that is inconsistent with such a supposition. It 
 may be urged, of course, that the absolute itself is a posit of 
 the finite, but this is not true in any real sense. The posit 
 of the finite, which in this case can be nothing more than an 
 aifirmation of absolute being, does not constitute the absolute, 
 which must be recognized as being in the last analysis a 
 presupposition of the finite rather than its posit. There 
 is no exception here, and if we seek our analogies in that 
 
422 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 which is truly posited in our experience, we will find that 
 no exception can be thought even as possible. Let us 
 distinguish, then, between the immediate content of a posit 
 and that which is primarily a presupposition of the positing 
 activity, and we will find that whether we regard the posit 
 as a pulse of volition or a pulse of thinking or a pulse 
 of feeling, as a direct objective posit, it involves a finita- 
 tion, or splitting up of the whole content of experience, 
 an act of exclusion and differentiation as well as one of 
 inclusion and integration. This finitation is involved in the 
 very constitution of the objective individual and is funda- 
 mental to its nature. It may be urged, of course, and this 
 is admitted in advance, that the positing activity has 
 another side, and that thinking as well as willing and 
 feeling are activities that overleap the barriers which they 
 make in the very act of making them. But it is to be 
 observed that this overleaping aspect has been partly ex- 
 plained at least as presupposition which is to be distinguished 
 from the immediate positing activity. The whole consciousness 
 involved in thinking, feeling, or willing includes the pre- 
 suppositions of these activities as well as the content on which 
 they directly terminate, and it is through this consciousness, 
 as we have seen, that our finite experience realizes its 
 connections with the transcendent. We find, then, that 
 in connection with our objective activities we must think 
 the transcendent, in order to avoid imprisonment in our own 
 finitude. But when we pass over to the subjective side of 
 our own experience we are confronted with a similar situa- 
 tion. The thought of the transcendent is our only mode of 
 escape from our finite selves. We might be tempted then 
 to take the form in which transcendence asserts itself 
 in our finite experience as essential to the activities of any 
 conceivable experience, were it not for the fact that in 
 connection with the subjective consciousness of the absolute 
 we are obliged to deny it. The very notion of an absolute 
 subject of experience precludes the consciousness of 
 transcendence. The absolute is the transcendent, and its 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 423 
 
 subject-consciousness will be the self-consciousness of the 
 transcendent. Plainly our category must be modified here, 
 and the distinction that is necessary to the life of the finite 
 processes must be conceived as transcended in the absolute 
 self-consciousness and thereby rendered internal, as possibly 
 the feeling of the dependence of the finite and relative 
 upon its own objective activities. 
 
 When, however, we come to consider the objective 
 consciousness of the absolute experience, the same necessity 
 for regarding the presupposition of thinking as internal to its 
 positing activity does not arise. The presupposition of the 
 objective activity of the absolute is, of course, the subjective 
 activity of its self-consciousness. The positing act of the 
 absolute will therefore have its transcendent presupposition, 
 which is the self-consciousness of the absolute subject. 
 There is no difficulty here, and we may say then that in 
 the last analysis the consciousness of the transcendent which 
 pervades all our activity and connects it with its absolute 
 grounds, is subjective rather than objective. The transcend- 
 ence of the object is traceable ultimately to the consciousness 
 of the transcendent subject, and all transcendence is, there- 
 fore, in the last resort, subjective. From this point of view 
 it would appear then that the objective activity of the 
 absolute may be connected with a transcendent term, the 
 consciousness of the absolute self, which will render it truly 
 an infinite and absolute function, while at the same time it 
 may be conceived as in its immediate positing act essen- 
 tially finitating if not finite. And it will be possible at this 
 point of our reflection, therefore, to generalize and to say 
 that all objective activities in experience are, as concerns their 
 immediate objects and apart from presurppositions of the tran- 
 scendent, both individuating and finitating in their essential 
 nature and constitution. 
 
 In this conclusion it seems to me that the ground of the 
 difficulty referred to some time back has been completely 
 removed. The point of that difficulty was to see how the 
 finite individual could be regarded as internal to the absolute 
 
424: TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 experience without danger of absorption into the absolute 
 subject. We have seen that a distinction is to be made 
 between the subject- and object-consciousness of the absolute, 
 and that the finite individual is to be regarded as a posit of 
 the objective consciousness. We have found reasons for 
 concluding, furthermore, that the objective positing activity 
 of the absolute is individuating and finitating in its very 
 nature. There are no obstacles then in the way of accept- 
 ing the logic of the situation and regarding the world of 
 finite individuals as included in the absolute experience. A 
 final consideration comes up at this point with which we 
 shall close this chapter. We have seen that the absolute 
 consciousness cannot include the sense of anything tran- 
 scendent, but there is nothing to hinder the supposition that 
 it may be conscious of its own transcendence. In truth it 
 would seem that the objective activity of the absolute 
 involves necessarily the consciousness of self-transcendence 
 of its processes in that presupposition of subject-transcen- 
 dence which we have already developed in connection 
 with these processes. The absolute subject will then have 
 a consciousness of its own transcendence in relation to its 
 objective activities, and the point of interest here relates to 
 the form in which this consciousness will embody itself. 
 We have spoken of the possibility of the distinction be- 
 tween the absolute and the relative as internal in the 
 absolute consciousness, and here we meet the same thing as 
 not only possible but as apparently necessary. How then 
 are we to suppose that an internal distinction can exist by 
 virtue of which the absolute subject may distinguish itself 
 from the relative terms included in its experience ? We 
 may fall back on psychological analysis for our answer. 
 Locke tells us that in connection with the objective activities 
 of the mind simple notions or ideas of these activities arise 
 in consciousness, and on these he constructs an important 
 element in knowledge. That Locke has here struck a 
 fundamental process in consciousness no one will deny. He 
 is here simply laying the foundations of all epistemology in 
 
CHAP. VI. TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT [PSYCHO-THEOLOGY]. 425 
 
 the faculty which consciousness has of shaping some sort of 
 a representative of all its content. That this is a feature of 
 consciousness as such, and not peculiar to its relative or 
 absolute forms, may be taken as certain, since it is deducible 
 from the very notion of conscious activity. Applying the 
 insight of this analysis to the question in hand, we are led 
 to the conclusion that the absolute subject will inevitably 
 be, not only conscious of its objective activities, but will 
 also develop in connection with them a concept or notion of 
 the functions themselves, and if these activities are both 
 individuating and finitating, which ex hypothesi they are, 
 these concepts or notions will take the form of concepts or 
 notions of finite individual existence. And by virtue of the 
 fact that the consciousness in which these concepts are 
 supposed to arise is not temporal but absolute, the priority 
 involved will be logical and the concepts of the activities 
 may be conceived as co-existent with the functions them- 
 selves. The consciousness of the finite and relative will 
 thus be co-existent in the absolute experience with the 
 activities in which the finite and relative forms of existence 
 arise, and the distinction of relativity and transcendence 
 will thus be internally grounded in the consciousness of the 
 absolute. 
 
 We thus arrive at the intelligible notion of an absolute 
 subject of an absolute experience whose objective activities 
 are essentially individuating and finitating and in which the 
 concept of these activities is necessary and fundamental. 
 This completes, so far as I can see, all that is necessary in 
 order to vindicate in general and render intelligible the 
 notion of a transcendent subject of experience, and we pro- 
 pose in the next chapter to consider further the doctrine of 
 the transcendent which has been developed here as a basis 
 for a metaphysical doctrine of the grounds of religion. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 
 
 Religion arises in the first instance as an experience, and 
 it is only when reflection begins that we seek to understand 
 this experience and follow it back to its ultimate grounds. 
 It is important then to determine the essential nature of 
 this experience in order that we may be able to discover 
 the true point of transcendence, if there be any, that is 
 involved in it. This seems a hopeless task in view of the 
 multitudinous forms which religion has actually assumed in 
 the experience of different men and nations, and more 
 especially in view of the apparent failure of those who have 
 attempted to define religion to reach any substantial agree- 
 ment. In spite of all this difference, however, we shall not 
 be deterred from attempting to discover the core of religious 
 experience, and our courage for this enterprise is somewhat 
 stimulated by the reflection that what we are seeking is not 
 a definition but some central fact of religious experience. 
 In a book entitled Human Progress, published several years 
 ago, the author, Mr. Thomas Blair, finds this central fact in 
 what he terms "spiritual communion." i There is at the 
 heart of all religious experience, he thinks, even in its most 
 rudimentary forms, the germ of this spiritual communion. 
 Now without stopping to consider whether the phrase 
 " spiritual communion " be the best possible designation for 
 
 1 Human Progress, N.Y., 1896. Introduction, pp. 7-11. 
 426 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OP RELIGION. 427 
 
 the fact involved, I am free to admit that I feel myself in 
 substantial agreement with this author as to the nature of 
 the fact itself. We may regard religion as of purely super- 
 natural origin, or we may agree with Herbert Spencer that 
 it originates in dreams of ancestors, or with Tyler in his 
 ghost theory of its origin. However the germ of the 
 experience originates, it consists in its very nature in some 
 sort of intercourse between the soul of the savage, let us say, 
 and some being or power with which he has somehow become 
 consciously related, and which he regards as alive, and able 
 to assume human or quasi-human attitudes towards him. 
 This is essential to the existence of the type of experience 
 we call religious, and it is easily reconcilable with the 
 diversity of forms in which the religious consciousness 
 expresses itself That the being with which the religious 
 consciousness connects the soul of the savage is not at first 
 regarded as transcendent in any appreciable sense of that 
 term is perhaps true, but inevitably the sense of tran- 
 scendence develops and proves itself to be essential. The 
 truth is, the germ of transcendence must be involved in 
 some degree in the very earliest experiences of religion, and 
 even where it cannot be clearly traced, as otherwise it would 
 be difficult to say why the religious consciousness should 
 distinguish itself from the social. From this point of view 
 the ghost would supply a more adequate starting-point than 
 a dead ancestor, inasmuch as in the notion of the ghost the 
 germinal consciousness of transcendence is already involved. 
 To the developed form of religious experience Mr. Blair's 
 designation of spiritual communion unmistakably applies, 
 and that this communion involves one term of transcendence 
 is also made clear by the developed forms of religious 
 experience. To this feature of religious experience — its 
 consciousness of transcendence — we will now turn, in order, 
 if possible, to show the ground in experience for the develop- 
 ment of the metaphysical basis of religion. That the notion 
 of transcendence is not completely apprehended in the lower 
 forms of religion, is obvious. So long as the religious devotee 
 
428 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 believes that the object of his worship is in any sense under 
 his control, so that he may coerce him as he is able to coerce 
 his social fellows, the sense of transcendence is not complete. 
 It is only in the higher forms of religion of the more 
 spiritualistic type, such as Judaism, Mohammedanism, and 
 Christianity that the notion of transcendence does reach 
 in any sense a complete development. But in the lowest 
 forms — in the savage's attitude towards his fetich, or the 
 ghost which claims his attention — there will be the sense, 
 however vague, of some transcendent power, in relation to 
 which he is simply passive and relatively helpless. This 
 feeling will be mingled, of course, with a belief, however 
 vague, that this fetich or ghost is somehow subject to his 
 power, so that in addition to effects that may follow from 
 the exercise of propitiatory observances other effects may be 
 brought about by coercion. But this element soon drops 
 out of consciousness, and the sole method of influencing the 
 god, that is felt to be available, is that of propitiation. This 
 notion of propitiation may be crude enough, but it is the 
 normal form which the religious intercourse takes in what 
 may be called the middle stage of religious development, 
 and it survives in the higher stages in some form as an 
 essential feature of religious experience. But in the higher 
 stages it becomes spiritualized, and tends to merge gradually 
 into what may be regarded as the supreme form of religious 
 experience — the consciousness of relationship with a being 
 who is at the same time our spiritual fellow and our trans- 
 cendent other. 
 
 Eeligious experience plainly involves, then, a relation to 
 the transcendent, and we are specially concerned here with 
 the further consideration of this relation, in order to develop 
 in its light a doctrine of the metaphysical groundwork of 
 religion. The entering of the transcendent as an internal 
 and fundamental moment into religious experience renders 
 it possible to correlate the grounds of religion with the basal 
 principles of our metaphysic of the transcendent in general. 
 It is not reasonable to suppose that the transcendent object 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 429 
 
 of religion should, in the last analysis, be conceived apart 
 from the transcendent ground of reality in general. When 
 it does happen that a dualism exists in our conceptions 
 it will be found to result, either from the fact that the 
 grounds of our metaphysics and of our religion have not 
 been fully considered in their relation, or else from some 
 failure on the metaphysical side of the problem, in which 
 case we may either become sceptical and agnostic as to the 
 possibility of metaphysical knowledge or we may conclude 
 that metaphysical reflection is too rationalistic, and may 
 be led to repudiate its connection with religion in the 
 interests of mystical intuition or considerations of moral 
 value. But, in any case, where our reflection has 
 proceeded normally in both channels a point will be 
 reached where the demand for a metaphysical interpre- 
 tation of religion will arise, and we will be led to 
 see that the metaphysical grounding demanded, can be 
 effected only by correlating the grounds of rehgion with the 
 principles and concepts of general metaphysics, and the 
 problem of the grounding of religion will in the first instance 
 be that of connecting it as an experience with that element 
 of transcendence on which the whole of metaphysics rests. 
 
 That religious experience does involve the element of 
 transcendence will be obvious from analysis as well as from 
 the considerations advanced above, for it is clear that the 
 religious consciousness would never differentiate itself clearly 
 from the social consciousness did not the sense of something 
 transcendent enter into it. We have only to consider this 
 in order to see that it must be true. The social con- 
 sciousness is that of the mutually modifying influence of 
 co-ordinate factors. The other of the soeius is a being like 
 ourselves and on the same plane of activity, and no sense 
 of subordination is involved. But the most characteristic 
 feature of the religious consciousness is the absence of this 
 sense of equality, and in its place the feeling of relationship 
 to an other that is superior to us, and whose agency tran- 
 scends ours, and this sense of the transcendence of the religious 
 
430 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part in. 
 
 other is the basis of that feeling of dependence which rests 
 at the very heart of the religious consciousness. This 
 sense of the transcendence of the object of the religious 
 feeling is thus implanted in the very heart of religious 
 experience, and this fact is vital in its relation to the 
 interpretation of the rudimentary manifestations of religion. 
 In the absence of any adequate psychological analysis it 
 might be difficult to refer rudimentary religious phenomena 
 in all cases to their real grounds, but with the clue that 
 analysis puts in our hands we are able to do so and also to 
 avoid certain mistakes regarding the connection of the 
 grounds of religion with other phases of experience into 
 which some, including the student of social phenomena, are 
 liable to fall. One of these is the tendency to identify the 
 root of religion with that of social experience in general 
 Because religion arises in social soil and has social aspects it 
 is assumed that it is in its origin an offshoot of sociality. 
 Now, we are not disputing here the close connection of the 
 social and the religious in man's nature, but on the contrary 
 affirm it with as great emphasis as any. But what we are 
 interested in affirming is that religion has its own individual 
 and characteristic root; that whereas the social conscious- 
 ness arises out of our recognition of an other on the same 
 plane, the religious consciousness involves the recognition of 
 an other on a plane that transcends our own self and its 
 agency. The social consciousness never could develop the 
 religious out of itself, nor on the other hand could the social 
 develop out of the religious pure and simple. The truth is 
 that we find in religion a form of experience that is 
 primary and irreducible to any other. 
 
 Another interpretation of religion which, true and valu- 
 able as it is from certain points of view, is yet, I cannot 
 help thinking, mistaken as to the central pulse of religious 
 experience, is that represented by such thinkers as Benjamin 
 Kidd and Henry Eutgers Marshall, who represent religion 
 as being essentially, a principle of altruistic restraint on 
 egoism, which tends to sacrifice the interest of the general 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 431 
 
 to that of the individual. Mr. Kidd thinks this regulative 
 principle a superinduction on human nature, from some 
 supra-mundane source, while Mr. Marshall regards it as a 
 fundamental instinct of human nature. There can be no 
 hesitation in admitting that an important aspect of religion 
 is here brought out, or that this aspect is in need of 
 emphasis, but in spite of. our high appreciation of the value 
 of the work of these thinkers, we cannot admit that what 
 they emphasise is the most primal fact of religious experience, 
 but must regard it rather as an important derivative aspect. 
 In this we are taking no novel position, inasmuch as the 
 psychologists are showing us that egoism and altruism are 
 themselves not primary aspects of sociality, but rather out- 
 growths of a social nature or a social consciousness, in 
 which man in the same pulse becomes conscious of himself 
 and his other. What the psychologists have aimed success- 
 fully to do is to show that there is a primary consciousness 
 of which egoism and altruism are simply aspects, and this is 
 precisely our own purpose here in regard to religion. 
 That religion should exercise a restraining influence on the 
 egoistic impulses will become obvious as its normal tendency 
 when we connect it with the more primary fact that the 
 religious consciousness is one in which the self is related to 
 its transcendent other. Naturally and necessarily the feeling 
 of this relationship will open the way for the influence of 
 the other with which we are thus related, upon our own 
 motives and actions. And such an influence will be in 
 a sense social, inasmuch as it will tend to modify the 
 impulses of pure egoism. But it will also be different from 
 the social restraint in just that respect which our analysis 
 of the religious consciousness enables us to interpret. The 
 restraint of the religious consciousness is one that is 
 associated with the sense of transcendence. It is character- 
 istically religious only so far forth as it involves this sense 
 of transcendence ; that is, the feeling that the restraining 
 other is a superior to which we sustain .a dependent relation, 
 rather than the co-ordinate relation of the social conscious- 
 
432 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 ness. The recognition of the primary fact of religious 
 experience thus enables us to ground not only the restraint 
 exercised by religion but also the point in respect to which 
 it is characteristically different from the social restraint. 
 
 Another mistake for which Kant is no doubt primarily 
 responsible, but in which many of our recent thinkers seem 
 to be involved, is the tendency to deny the primacy of 
 religion in the interests of morality. Everyone will recall 
 Matthew Arnold's characterization of religion as " morality 
 touched with emotion,'' which is manifestly a definition of 
 religion in terms of one of its effects. Kant refuses to allow 
 to religion any first-hand acquaintance with its object, and 
 claims that we can be related to the object of religion only 
 through our sense that this object is essential to the realiza- 
 tion of moral good ; and some other more recent exponents 
 of the ethical consciousness show a tendency to carry the 
 Kantian principle farther than Kant himself intended, and 
 to deny in the interests of morality that religion has any 
 real, distinctive basis in our nature at all. Now, it is to be 
 borne in mind that the question here is one of the true 
 analysis of experience. What we have to consider is 
 whether the experience we call religious is identical in its 
 roots with the experience we call ethical, or whether it has 
 a characteristic difference that marks it off as original. The 
 answer to this I do not regard as extremely difficult. The 
 moral experience may in its last analysis involve the tran- 
 scendent object of religion. This we do not debate here, but 
 in its primary and direct form all that can be gotten into it 
 is the pressure of some restraint in the individual conscious- 
 ness, which is resolvable on analysis into a feeling that we 
 are obliged to do or choose this or that and eschew the 
 other. Or in its more general form, that there is in general 
 something that we call good or right which we feel obliged 
 to choose and something that we call evil or wrong which 
 we feel obliged to reject and avoid. This is all that can be 
 gotten into the ethical consciousness as its immediate con- 
 tent. Its relation to the transcendent, so far as it is real. 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OP RELIGION. 433 
 
 is implicit, as is also its reference in the last analysis to the 
 transcendent object of religion so far as that reference is real. 
 This analysis of the ethical consciousness enables us to dis- 
 tinguish the religious from it and to indicate the distinctive 
 feature of the religious consciousness, while the ethical may, 
 and, as we think, does involve by implication, a transcendent 
 relation. Yet this relation is not immediate and consti- 
 tutive in the ethical consciousness, but in the religious 
 consciousness it is immediate and constitutive. The 
 religious experience is religious by virtue of the immediate 
 relation of the finite consciousness to a transcendent other 
 which it involves. If we abstract this we destroy the 
 unique basis of religion and render religious experience 
 impossible, whereas this might be eliminated and leave the 
 ethical consciousness, for aught we can see to the contrary, 
 intact. It is not possible, then, to identify the primary 
 religious consciousness with the moral without destroying it 
 altogether. 
 
 Having vindicated the experience of the transcendent 
 other as primary and fundamental to religion, we may now 
 proceed to consider how far this transcendent object of 
 religion may be reduced to the basis of intelligible concep- 
 tion. And here we may, I think, as the result of a very 
 short reflection, identify the object of religion with the 
 absolute subject which has been arrived at in general 
 metaphysics. We have only in this connection to consider 
 that this subject has been arrived at in view of a general 
 investigation of the transcendent in experience, and that it 
 has been determined as the subject of an absolute experience 
 which our finite experience generally presupposes as its 
 ground. Again, a brief reflection will be sufficient to show 
 the absurdity of supposing that there can be in the last 
 analysis a plurality of transcendent subjects. The absolute, 
 as we have seen, can have no other, and all distinctions 
 must be internal. But from the very nature of the religious 
 experience of the transcendent it cannot stop short of that 
 absoluteness that is exclusive of external plurality. We 
 
 2e 
 
434 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 admit that religious experience does as a matter of fact stop 
 short of this, just as rudimentary metaphysical reflection 
 stops short of it, and that the recognition of it is clearly 
 reached only in monotheism. But the point of interest is 
 not now, what the primary religious experience really holds 
 as content, but rather how in the last analysis the tran- 
 scendent object of religion must be conceived as related to 
 the absolute subject of metaphysics, and the conclusion is 
 that they must in the last resort be identified, and the object 
 of religion be conceived as attained by a further character- 
 ization of the absolute subject of metaphysics. We do not 
 need to enlarge on this consideration, but, identifying the 
 transcendent object of religion with the absolute subject of 
 metaphysics, may go on to consider that further determina- 
 tion of this subject which religion requires. We have seen 
 how, in order to conceive the transcendent term in the 
 objective sphere, it was necessary to transform our categories, 
 and that this transformation was rendered inevitable in the 
 last analysis by the necessity we were under of conceiving 
 a unitary transcendence of external plurality. The tran- 
 scendent activity could not be represented under the category 
 of a plurality of interacting agents, but must, on the con- 
 trary, be regarded as one independent and self-initiative 
 agent. Taking the relative category then, which in general 
 is that of conditioned agency, the requirement of absoluteness 
 does not involve the dropping of the notion of agency, but 
 simply the dropping of the notion of conditionedness or 
 limitation. The concept of agency survives, and has only 
 to be represented as unitary and originative. Passing over 
 to the subjective side, we find the conditions to be sub- 
 stantially the same. Our relative self-consciousness is that 
 of modified, and therefore, in a sense, of passive and de- 
 termined agency. In order to reach the conception of an 
 absolute subject we are obliged to drop, not the notion of 
 self-agency itself, but the notion of dependence and deter- 
 mination. The notion of self-agency survives as that of a 
 unitary and completely self-determining subject of an 
 
CHAP. vii. THE TRANSCENBENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 435 
 
 absolute experience. Now, in the second part of this 
 volume, in dealing with the subject of our relative ex- 
 perience, we found that its intelligible determination involved 
 the application to it of the categories of individuality, self- 
 identity, and personality, and the question here is as bo the 
 applicability of these categories to the subject of absolute 
 experience. In the first place then, with regard to the 
 category of individuality, the only modification of this 
 category that seems necessary is the removal of the limit 
 imposed by the inclusion of only a finite content. In- 
 dividuality has two aspects — it is including and excluding — 
 and what the finite individual excludes is other content that 
 is conceived as real. Now, in order to reach the notion of 
 absolute individuality it is necessary to preserve this 
 moment of exclusion as essential, but to avoid conceiving 
 the excluded content as real. There can be no real content 
 absolutely outside of the absolute experience. How then can 
 this moment of exclusion be real if there is no real content 
 to exclude ? I think we have here to fall back on that 
 activity of negative thinking, feeling, and willing, which we 
 have found to be essential to the conception of these pro- 
 cesses, either in their relative or absolute forms. "We have 
 only to remember here that positive inclusive activity 
 involves the activity of negation and exclusion, and that the 
 absolute subject in the activity by which it thinks itself will 
 also, necessarily, think the opposite of itself, not as real, but as 
 hypothetically possible, in order to see how the conditions 
 of true individuality will be fulfilled. What the absolute 
 thought thinks as hypothetically possible but as opposite to 
 the real, will be repelled and hated in the moment of feeMng 
 and rejected and cast away in the moment of will. But in 
 the meantime individuality will have defined itself, and the 
 absolute subject will have determined itself consciously as 
 an individual. From another point of view it is of course 
 impossible to conceive an absolute subject of experience and 
 not to ascribe to it an internal unitary character that implies 
 its individuality, and the above reasoning may be taken 
 
436 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part in. 
 
 simply as a demonstration of the possibility of that which 
 on other grounds is necessary. 
 
 We do not need to dwell at much length on the category 
 of self-identity. We have found that self-identity in the 
 relative sense does not involve absolute continuity of mate- 
 rial substance, but rather conscious continuity through the 
 feeling of sameness. This consciousness, as we saw, is not 
 dependent on material continuity in time, and the unbroken 
 stream is not one of its conditions. We found, on the 
 contrary, that the special feature of the consciousness of 
 self-identity is its ability to defy and ignore such breaches. 
 What is involved in the preservation of self-identity is that 
 the subject of experience shall maintain its consciousness of 
 sameness in its relation to an included individual content 
 which is exclusive of all other content. Thus, to use 
 Professor James's illustration, Peter and Paul may sleep in 
 the same bed and may mix up their personal lives to any 
 extent, but this does not give rise to any confusion of 
 identity or any tendency toward an intermixing of content. 
 If now, we ask, how an absolute subject can be conceived 
 under the category of self-identity, we find it necessary to 
 separate two considerations. On the one hand, it is difficult, 
 if not absolutely impossible, to conceive the absolute as not 
 being self-identical. But when we ask how the absolute 
 can be consciously self-identical, the burden of proof rests 
 on ourselves, for to the absolute there cannot be present 
 that differentiation of temporal content which supplies so 
 important a factor in our own consciousness of identity. 
 We have, however, only to distinguish what is absolutely 
 essential to the consciousness of self-identity from that 
 which may be stripped off from it without destroying it, in 
 order to see how this category is applicable to the absolute. 
 It is not necessary to this consciousness that the self should 
 be able to distinguish its content from other real content in 
 time, but rather that it should as an individual be conscious 
 of the sameness of its internal and real content as distin- 
 guished from hypothetical opposite content, which is 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OE RELIGION. 437 
 
 excluded. The conscious self-identity of the absolute 
 involves then the maintenance of this distinction, and when 
 we say that the absolute is consciously self-identical we 
 mean that in the absolute consciousness there is no tendency 
 for the real and its hypothetical opposite to intermix or 
 become confused, but that the mutual exclusiveness is 
 absolute. 
 
 The question of personality is one involving more detail, 
 if not greater difficulty. We have seen that while person- 
 ality is rooted in self-identical individuality, its distinctive 
 idea is that of a manifestation of internal nature. The 
 notion of personality is that of a form or mode of mani- 
 festation, and we have seen how this notion of a form 
 of manifestation is connected with the complex content of 
 our consciousness giving rise to the possibility of a plurality 
 of personal expressions in different individuals and to 
 some extent in the same individual. The variations of 
 personality are connected, as we have seen, with the 
 variations in the dominating elements of the concrete 
 psychoses which constitute the individual consciousness. 
 What we have to consider here, however, is the question of 
 the essential requirements of the notion of personality as 
 distinguished from what may be stripped off from it without 
 destroying it. Now when we ask what it is essentially to 
 be a person, more than is involved in the concept of a self- 
 identical individual nature, we are led to answer ; some 
 characteristic mode of manifesting or expressing this 
 nature. And the question as to the mode that will be 
 characteristic will have to be determined in view of our 
 concept of the internal constitution of that nature. In 
 view of this we may fall back on the results of preceding 
 analysis, in which the conclusion has been reached that 
 while the complexity of content must be conceived as 
 persisting, so that the absolute consciousness will have in it 
 the elements of thinking, feeling, and willing, yet the 
 mutability in the relations of these elements in the concrete 
 psychoses must be eliminated as inconsistent with the 
 
438 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 stability involved in the notion of the absolute. It remains 
 then that while we are to regard the internal nature of the 
 absolute consciousness as complex, yet the complex elements 
 must be conceived as bearing stable relations to one 
 another, so that absolute intellection will be found to be in 
 stable harmony with absolute feeling and willing. By this 
 we mean to say that we must conceive the absolute as 
 invariably willing and loving what it thinks positively, and 
 as rejecting and hating what it thinks negatively. There 
 must be a stable order and relation maintained among the 
 complex elements of content in order that the manifestation 
 may have the steadfastness and uniformity required. We 
 may ask then what bearing this requirement will have on 
 our notion of personality, and the answer will be that it does 
 not affect it essentially. The root of manifestation, and of 
 the possibility as well as the necessity of manifestation, 
 rests in the internal complexity of nature. Where this 
 internal complexity exists, expression of some sort will be 
 both possible and necessary, and where the nature is a 
 conscious one and involves a primary distinction between 
 the subject- and object-consciousness as well as complex 
 elements of thinking, feeling, and willing, there can be no 
 question that this manifestation must take the personal 
 form. The manifestation called personal may be defined as 
 ths mode in which an individual, self -identical, and conscious 
 being characteristically escpresses its internal nature. 
 
 It only remains then to consider what modifications must 
 be removed from the notion of finite personality in order to 
 render it applicable as a category to the absolute nature. In 
 the first place then we must conceive as removed, all that 
 mutability which has its source in the variations of content. 
 This liability to variation is of course due to the fact that 
 there is always external content that may become internal 
 and bring about a change in the relations of the internal. 
 But to the absolute there is only one content, and that is 
 the whole of reality. The internal relations and the personal 
 manifestations will therefore be stable. Again, it will be 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 439 
 
 necessary to exclude from the notion of absolute personality 
 everything that is due directly or indirectly to that feeling 
 of limit which arises out of the social situation. Out 
 of this arises the sense of modified agency, or of agency 
 turned into passivity by the co-ordinate agency of the other. 
 Now the absolute will be conscious of unimpeded self-activity, 
 and this will express itself in the power as well as the freedom 
 of the personal manifestation. The absolute energy will not be 
 hampered or restrained by any of the limitations which arise 
 out of modifications that are imposed on our finite energies 
 by the co-existence of other energies not our own. The 
 personal manifestation of the absolute must then be repre- 
 sented as not only stable and uniform, which we may 
 express in the one term immutable, but also as without limit 
 of power, or almighty. Then again there are the restric- 
 tions which arise from that sense of relation to the 
 transcendent which renders our manifestations of activity 
 dependent and subject to that which is above us. Not 
 only do we lack the power of initiative in our activity, but 
 in its manifestations it is for ever running upon barriers 
 which are insurmountable, and which must be respected. 
 The finite personality is subject in its manifestations, there- 
 fore, to the law of the higher. But from the absolute all 
 this restriction must be removed, and the personal manifes- 
 tation will be not only independent, that is, free, but also 
 itself the highest, that is, sovereign. Again, we have found 
 that our agency, subjectively considered, is lacking in com- 
 plete self-determination. We are conscious of the moment 
 of self-determination, but always as modified by the sense of 
 determination by other. This restriction must be removed 
 from the notion of absolute agency, and it must be conceived 
 not only as free and sovereign, but also completely self- 
 determining or free in the subjective sense. On the 
 objective side we have found our agency modified and 
 rendered finite by that feeling of the coerciveness of things 
 which springs from our lack of absolute initiative. Instead 
 of constituting things in our processes, we are only con- 
 
440 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt in. 
 
 scious of reconstituting them, and our activity is modified 
 by the moment of receptivity. But the notion of absolute 
 agency is inconsistent with this, and we must represent 
 the absolute processes as originative, or, in other words, 
 creative. 
 
 We thus arrive at the notion of a subject of absolute 
 experience that is individual, self-identical, and personal in 
 its nature and manifestations — a subject, therefore, that is 
 in all essential regards a self. The transcendent other of 
 the religious consciousness may be regarded, then, as a trans- 
 cendent self, provided always, that we bear in mind the 
 necessity of freeing the categories under which it is conceived 
 from their relative and finite limitations. The transcendent 
 self of religion is not simply our own other, or even an ideal 
 self in which the idealization has proceeded along finite lines. 
 We will never reach it by following the simple unmodified 
 categories of our own experience out to ideal completeness. 
 This would give us the ideal of sociology but not the object 
 of religion. There is a difference of kind, not simply of 
 degree, which must be recognized, and it can be reckoned 
 with only by freeing the categories themselves from the 
 qualitative limits imposed by their finitude. The observance 
 of this requirement will make it possible for us to conceive 
 how the idealization of the real along finite lines may be 
 possible without peril of the lapse of the finite at any point 
 into the infinite self-consciousness, while on the other hand 
 it enables us to see how categories which arise in our 
 experience in the first instance as forms of the finite and 
 relative may contain in them the possibility of applica- 
 tion to the transcendent, in the sense that they will enable 
 us to reach an intelligible concept of its nature. The 
 principal objection to the application of the notion of 
 personality to the absolute subject has had its root in the 
 assumption that personality is a purely finite form, and that 
 to conceive the transcendent subject as personal is tanta- 
 mount to conceiving it as finite. We have shown, as I think, 
 the fallacy of this supposition, and have exhibited the kind 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 441 
 
 of transformation necessary in order to render the personal 
 form applicable to the absolute nature. 
 
 The application of the categories of individuality, self- 
 identity, and personality to the absolute nature leads to 
 the representation of it as a transcendent or absolute self, 
 but they do not enable us to complete the concept of the 
 object of religion nor to completely identify the Grod of 
 religion with the transcendent self of metaphysics. Modern 
 religious thought is indebted to Lotze for a very important 
 consideration which he has developed at this stage of religious 
 theory. The God of religion is not simply or distinctively, 
 a being of infinite intelligence, or of infinite power conceived 
 under purely rational categories, but he is above all a being 
 who wills and feels. If we designate the organ of will and 
 feeling, as the heart, and represent the heart as the spring of 
 ethical and aesthetic interest and motivity, we may say 
 that the God of religion is reached when we conceive a being 
 in whom the principle of infinite intelligence is conceived as 
 inseparably united with the heart, the spring of ethical and 
 aesthetic attributes and motives. Owing to the dominance of 
 what Matthew Arnold calls Hebraism, the ethical has largely 
 superseded the aesthetic in our religious conceptions, and our 
 tendency is to conceive God on the practical side under the 
 moral attributes almost to the exclusion of any other. But 
 in truth the deification of the ethical at the expense of the 
 aesthetic, represents a one-sided tendency in religion, and 
 there are no adequate reasons for supposing that the interest 
 of will is in the last analysis any dearer to the absolute than 
 the interest of feeling. Let us then endeavour to hold 
 the balance at this point, and bearing in mind the results of 
 a preceding analysis, in which the principle of the emotional 
 activity was found to be that of love and its opposite hate, 
 and the principle of the will, self- appropriation or rejection, 
 let us correlate these principles in view of some end-category 
 that will comprehend and satisfy the whole practical interest. 
 We thus arrive at that notion of good, which, as we saw in 
 another connection, holds a co-ordinate position with the true. 
 
442 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part hi. 
 
 and is the basis of what are styled considerations and judg- 
 ments of value as distinguished from considerations and 
 judgments of truth. The end-category of the heart will 
 then be the good, just as the trm is the end-category of 
 the cognitive intelligence. 
 
 What Lotze has made, clear in this connection is the fact 
 that the God of religion is a being whose nature must contain 
 both the interest of truth and the interest of value. In short, 
 he must be conceived not simply as the divine intelligence 
 possessing infinite knowledge and power, but also and dis- 
 tinctively, as the divine heart of goodness which pulsates in 
 willing and loving the good of the individual creation, as well 
 as in excluding and hating its evil. In the God of religion 
 there must be a synthesis of the divine intelligence and the 
 divine heart of goodness, and in order that the identity of 
 his being with the transcendent subject of metaphysics 
 may be achieved, and the transcendent basis of religion be 
 completely developed, it will be necessary therefore to dis- 
 cover grounds sufficient to justify the application of the 
 category of goodness to the nature of the absolute self. 
 We may ask then what is involved essentially in the 
 notion of the good, and we will find on analysis that it 
 is simply conservation and unification viewed on their 
 practical side as related to the practical interests of 
 being. When we will the good of any being, the end- 
 category which we have in view is the conservation and 
 completion of its life. We will that its life shall be filled 
 with rich content and rounded out into completeness. And 
 when we love any being we desire either the unification of its 
 life with our own or our own unification with its life. Love 
 in its innermost motive is a unifying principle. The good 
 then as the end-category of the practical is simply the notion 
 of conservation and unification as the objective aim of our 
 activities. We have only to consider, then, at this point in 
 our inquiry, the question whether the notion of goodness is 
 one that is compatible with the nature of a subject of absolute 
 experience. This subject we have found reasons for determin- 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 443 
 
 ing as an individual and personal self that is related to a 
 sphere of objective activity, and we have seen that the 
 objective activities of the absolute are individuating in their 
 nature, so that through or in them, the absolute self is related 
 to a world of individuals. Now the question whether either 
 truth or goodness as an end-category is compatible with the 
 notion of the absolute self is practically one, amd the con- 
 siderations that settle the one will be sufficient for the other. 
 Let us ask again what it is to be interested in the truth or 
 the good of things, and to make these aims of our activity. 
 It is in the first place to have distinguished between the true 
 or good, and the false or evil. Now we have seen that there 
 inheres in the very constitution of the transcendent nature, 
 as we have been led to conceive it, the necessity of conceiv- 
 ing the negative and opposite, in connection with thinking 
 as well as with willing and feeling, as presenting itself as 
 hypothetically possible and thus leading to the determinate 
 choice of the real as one of possible alternatives. The 
 distinction we have spoken of is involved in the very consti- 
 tution of things; the absolute distinction between the true 
 and good and the false and evil, is secured. The content of 
 the absolute experience, that which the absolute self chooses 
 to realize, thus becomes from one aspect, the true, and from 
 another, the good. And in general, to ascribe goodness to 
 the absolute is simply to assert that the absolute wills the 
 object of its activities as good in contradistinction to a 
 hypothetical evil which is refused admission into the universe 
 of being. No reason can be assigned why the category of 
 goodness, in the general sense, should not be regarded as 
 compatible with the absolute nature, inasmuch as it simply 
 implies that the absolute aims at the conservation and unifi- 
 cation of things in general. 
 
 It is only when we conceive this aim as specialized and 
 as contemplating individuals that great difficulty seems to 
 arise. We are wont to think that the absolute may be 
 interested in the conservation of general good, but that it 
 would be derogatory to its infinitude to conceive it as 
 
444 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 interested in individual good. But when we consider the 
 matter carefully some of our most formidable difficulties 
 will disappear. We have already seen that the objective 
 activity of the absolute must be regarded as individuating 
 in its nature, so that, objectively, the content of the divine 
 consciousness will always be some finite individual. This 
 is a result of the very first order of importance, inasmuch as 
 it enables us to determine the true status of the finite 
 individual in the system of reality. If the objective 
 activities of the absolute have as their content finite 
 individuals, it will follow that the true as well as the good, 
 objectively considered, will be bound up with the fortunes 
 of the world of finite individuals, and it will be open to us 
 to say, as the mediaeval thinkers were fond of affirming, that 
 the absolute finds its objective good (and its objective truth 
 also) in the plural individuality of the finite world. This 
 was the doctrine of St. Thomas, who goes on to argue that 
 the world must embody itself in an infinite plurality of 
 individuals in order to fully express the divine nature. 
 From this point of view it is clear enough that an interest 
 in individual good cannot be regarded as incompatible with 
 the nature of the absolute. It is reasonable to suppose 
 that the very activity in which the individual originates 
 will contain in it the idea of the individual in its com- 
 plete realization and unity, and that this idea will be a 
 spring of practical interest and love. No one in view of 
 this can say with any degree of reason that the notion of 
 the good as an end-category, even in its individual applica- 
 tion, is not compatible with the concept of absolute nature. 
 
 On what grounds then may the heart of goodness be 
 actually ascribed to the absolute ? We may concede the 
 compatibility of the notion and yet doubt its reality. And 
 in connection with the question whether as a matter of 
 reality religion is right in ascribing the heart of goodness to 
 God, great practical difficulty arises from the existence of 
 evil in the world. The presence of evil in the world 
 involves a limit to either the power or the goodness of the 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 445 
 
 supreme disposer of things, it is argued, and the reply of 
 Leibnitz that while evil is unmistakably in the world, yet in 
 the last analysis, it is not real, seems a kind of solemn 
 trifling with a matter of serious import. We cannot solve 
 the problem which evil suggests by denying the reality of 
 evU, but rather by determining the kind of reality it 
 possesses and its relation to the system of things. For the 
 present we shall have to postpone the direct consideration 
 of these questions, but indirectly they will be involved in 
 the direct treatment of the problem of goodness as an 
 attribute of the absolute, to which we now return. What 
 are the direct considerations that bear on this problem ? 
 In the first place we have reached the conclusion that evil 
 in the absolute sense is not an included term in the 
 universe of absolute experience, but is excluded as the 
 hypothetically possible opposite and negative of what is 
 realized. In this sense, which is the only absolute sense 
 conceivable, the principle of evil is one of negation and 
 destruction, inasmuch as the hypothetical opposite of being 
 is that which contradicts and excludes it, which would there- 
 fore reduce it to non-being. This absolute negative is 
 excluded from the realized universe, but we have seen that 
 it performs the function of definitely determining the 
 absolute choice, so that the being of the real content of the 
 world is chosen in preference to its non-being. Here the 
 very subtle question whether the notion of good is to be 
 conceived as prior to or dependent on the distinction of the 
 real from its hypothetical opposite, comes up and requires 
 some consideration. We have spoken of the hypothetical 
 opposite of the realized content of absolute experience, as 
 possible. But it is strictly only the possible not to be ; that 
 is, the possibility of non-being. In connection with any 
 given thing, and with the real in general, the alternatives of 
 being and non-being must be recognized as real, and some- 
 where in connection with everything there must exist the 
 possibility not to be ; but with reference to the whole content 
 of the real this possibility will be, not the alternative of 
 
446 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 some other type of reality, but the negation of all reality. 
 Prom the absolute standpoint the hypothetical opposite of 
 the real is that which negatives and suppresses it, and the 
 real alternative before the absolute consciousness will be the 
 world that is actually realized or no world at all. It is 
 clear then that the hypothetical opposite of the realized 
 world becomes in its relation to that world a principle of 
 destruction and dissolution, as opposed to the positive 
 categories of conservation and unification. 
 
 We may in view of this, answer the question propounded 
 above in the following way. The distinction between the 
 real and that which is destructive of it, is absolutely primary 
 and underlies all other distinctions. The notion of the good 
 or rather the distinction between good and evil and true 
 and false are so far as we can see, first determinations under 
 these formal categories. The evil and the false are from 
 two different aspects that which is destructive and dissolutive 
 of the nature of being, that which contradicts and thwarts 
 its conservation and unification, while the good and the true 
 are, in the last analysis, that which is congruous with and 
 furthers the conservation and unification of being. The 
 distinction of the good and true is thus an intra-experiential 
 one, and there can be no other conceivable meaning for 
 either the good or the true, in the last analysis, than that 
 which applies them as first qualifications to the content of 
 absolute experience. To ascribe the heart of goodness to 
 the absolute subject of experience would from this point of 
 view be tantamount to asserting that the absolute chooses and 
 loves its own objective content. When we have once con- 
 ceded the power of the absolute to choose and love, the 
 above is practically a self-evident proposition. 
 
 Now, this general conclusion will carry with it the solution 
 of one aspect of the problem of evil, inasmuch as it will be 
 necessary to deny the absoluteness of evU as an intra-ex- 
 periential term. The only sense in which evil can be 
 conceived as absolute is one which regards it as an ever- 
 present alternative which is excluded by the positive nature 
 
CHAP. VII. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 447 
 
 of the real. Evil as an intra-experiential term must be 
 derivative and therefore relative. We have thus reached 
 an important distinction. The good is intra-experiential, 
 hut as a principle of the positive conservation of the 
 real it is absolute and has its first seat in the heart of 
 absolute nature, whereas evil by virtue of its negative, 
 destructive character is excluded from that seat and deter- 
 mined as relative. Evil as an intra-experiential term has 
 a presupposition, and that is the good. This brings us to a 
 point where we can consider the more special problem of the 
 heart of goodness; namely, its relation to the finite individuals 
 of the world. That the absolute hates evil may be taken 
 as established, but that the absolute should hate the finite 
 individual involves a self-contradiction. Hate is dissolutive 
 and destructive, but not of being: it is the negative of a 
 negation and that negation is evil. The hate of being would 
 involve its destruction and, therefore, the admission of the 
 principle of absolute evil into the world. We cannot, 
 then, allow that there is a real alternative here at all. To 
 suppose that the absolute could choose to hate being would 
 be to suppose that it could become an absolute imperson- 
 ation of evil. The notion is intolerable. We must rather 
 conclude that the absolute's choice and love of being involves 
 its choice and love of the individuals into which objective 
 being resolves itself. Even science affirms this in its 
 refusal to allow that any matter or energy can be ultimately 
 lost, and in its invincible faith in conservation. It is the 
 absolute's choice and love of the individuals of the world, 
 that is the ground of their conservation. The faith of 
 science and that of religion are one, and in asserting the 
 perdurability of the individual each from its own point of 
 view, each, in substance, asserts the immutability of that 
 choice and love in which the individual has its origin. 
 
 We may assume then that there are adequate grounds 
 for ascribing the heart of goodness to the absolute, and, 
 therefore, for regarding the absolute as the God of religion. 
 And this will practically complete the transcendent basis of 
 
448 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 religion while at the same time it will place the problem of 
 evil in a somewhat different relation to the religious view 
 of the world. We have already concluded that evil as an 
 intra-experiential term can be regarded only as relative, 
 and we have also seen that as a relative term it is not 
 co-ordinate with good but has good for its presupposition. 
 The notion of disease presupposes that of the sound 
 organism, and the presupposition of the abnormal is the 
 normal. What bearing, we may then ask, have these 
 facts of the relativity of evil in relation to the world 
 of experience in general and in particular relation to 
 the good, on the interpretation of evil as a feature of a 
 finite and relative world ? We do not propose to go 
 into detail here, but simply to make some suggestions 
 by way of answer. Jonathan Edwards, in his profound 
 treatise on The Natwre of True Virtue} defines the good 
 as in its last analysis, consent to being or being's consent to 
 entity. In this abstract phraseology this great thinker 
 expresses his conviction that good is an ultimate conception 
 and identical with the principle of reality itself viewed 
 from the standpoint of will. We have reached the same 
 conclusion in our analysis and have endeavoured to show 
 how this primary choice of good is involved in the notion of 
 absolute experience. To the mind of Edwards, had he con- 
 sidered the negative side of the problem, evil would have 
 appeared in its absolute form as the denial of this consent 
 and therefore the negation of reality itself, a moment which, 
 as we have seen, must be conceived as present, but excluded 
 from the content of absolute experience. St. Augustine denies 
 the absoluteness of evil not only in his rejection of the doc- 
 trine of the Manichaeans but more specifically in his own 
 doctrine developed in the Confessions and De Civitate Dei,} 
 in which he ascribes the origin of evil to an evil will, 
 which, as he says, has as its antecedent a good will, and 
 
 ^ The Nature of True Virtue, Chap. I. , showing wherein the essence of 
 true virtue consists. 
 'Confessions, Book VII., Chap, xvi. De Oivitate Dei, Book XII,, sec. 6. 
 
CHAP. vii. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 449 
 
 he finds the ground of the possibiUty of an evil will in 
 the defect or nothingness of finite nature. We find here 
 a profound sense of the relativity and at the same time 
 the gravity, of evil. It is relative as a feature of reality but 
 seems to be bound up with the nature of the finite. I 
 think we are in a position here to interpret this funda- 
 mentally true insight. If we conceive will broadly enough, 
 it resolves itself in the last analysis into the principle of self- 
 conservation, and this in its simplest form may be regarded 
 as the pulse of self-assertion ; the inner nature asserting 
 itself in a positive self-realizing pulsation. Will is thus to 
 be conceived as the inner self-conserving pulse of being. It 
 is here that evil originates if it is to be a real feature of 
 our nature, and we have seen that it is a feature of 
 relative, not of absolute nature. The question which 
 Augustine only partially answered arises in this connection ; 
 how does evil become possible, and, if possible, then possibly 
 actual to a finite being ? To this question Augustine truly 
 replies; through its defectiveness or nothingness. I think 
 we are able here to carry the answer a little further. The 
 content of relative nature cannot be deduced from the 
 notion of the absolute. We find that content experimentally 
 and through psychological analysis, and following these lines 
 we have been led to the insight that the finite individual is 
 a being related, on one hand to its finite or social other, and 
 on the other hand, to its infinite or transcendent other, and 
 that both of these relations impose limits and modifications 
 on its agency. We know also that the inner pulse of the 
 finite individual is one of self-conservation ; it directly seeks 
 its good. It is true, as we have also seen, that the final 
 pulse of the finite is one of unification, through which it 
 realizes oneness with its fellow and anchors its life in the 
 transcendent. But this unifying pulse presupposes the 
 pulse of self-assertion or egoism, which, as we now see, 
 may in its straightforward aspiration for self-expression 
 collide with the social and transcendent terms with which 
 its life is connected. The possibility of this is inherent in 
 
 2f 
 
450 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part m. 
 
 the straightforward pulsation of a finite will. The finite 
 agency by virtue of its finitude, that is, by virtue of those 
 respects in which it is modified and reduced to passivity by 
 the finitude of its nature, is thus rendered liable to collision 
 with other forces. We are thus able to translate the defect 
 and nothingness of Augustine into more ultimate and, as I 
 think, more intelligible terms. For it is easy enough to see 
 how out of this situation the three most striking forms of 
 evil may arise — pain, accident, sin. The collision needs only 
 to be translated into biological terms, failure to adapt or 
 maladaptation of the conserving life-impulses to their con- 
 ditions, in order that the possible origin of 'pam may become 
 intelligible. The same collision needs only to be conceived 
 in connection with the straight out-push of a plurality of 
 finite forces in order that what we call accident — that blind 
 fatality and blind cross-purpose feature which plays so large 
 a figure in human experience and drives so many minds to 
 pessimistic despair — may become intelligible. Again, we 
 have only to conceive the collision in its direct reaction 
 upon the social and the transcendent will, to be able to see 
 how sin originates as a rebellion against and opposition to, 
 the social or religious other ; that is, as rebellion and war 
 against man and God. 
 
 We are thus led to conceive evil in its intra-experiential 
 form as being a term of relativity, and yet as a very deep and 
 radical feature of our finite experience. From this point of 
 view it will also be clearly seen, I think, that the question 
 why the absolute permits evil is essentially foolish and 
 irrational. The profoundest religious consciousness rejects 
 the notion of mere permission as a kind of paltering, and 
 prefers to think that God is the author of evil as well as 
 good ; not however as a direct end like the good, for in 
 this sense we have seen that evil is an excluded term, but 
 as a relative condition of the possibility of finite good. Even 
 sin may in this sense have a necessary place in the divine 
 economy. The true solution of the difficulty which arises 
 here will not be met, I feel sure, by any timid compromise. 
 
«HAP. vii. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 451 
 
 but rather by the recognition of what we are led to by the 
 whole analysis of experience ; namely, the fact that the 
 egoistic pulse out of which evil arises is an abstraction when 
 considered iy itself, and that logically as well as really and 
 essentially, the individual only exercises its real and true agency 
 when the 'pulse of egoism is followed by that transcending pulse 
 of unification which integrates and harmonizes the individual 
 with its other, and brings the finite soul into harmony with 
 man and God. In the very constitution of experience the 
 place of evil is determined in such a way that we are able 
 to accept it as part of the constitution of things, and as 
 therefore a real and profound feature of our world, in 
 connection with the faith that the only end-category of 
 being is the good, and that the heart of goodness in the 
 world contemplates the realization of the good in and 
 through the effort that is involved in overcoming the evil. 
 
 The consideration of evil leads directly to that of the medi- 
 ational feature of religion. Evil in one of its forms is sin, 
 and the consciousness of sin in its religious aspect is that of 
 dissent from or disharmony with, the transcendent other with 
 which the religious consciousness relates us. This sense of 
 disharmony may arise from actual overt rebellion against 
 the will of God, or from failure to realize the moment of 
 unification with God. We feel ourselves to be sinners, in 
 short, when we assert ourselves egoistically against God, or 
 when we feel simply that we have not taken that final step 
 of unification with the transcendent which our religious 
 consciousness requires. The consciousness of sin thus arises, 
 and leads to a complete rupture of harmonious relations 
 between the finite soul and God, The soul begins to be 
 weighed down with a feeling of guilt, and this leads to a 
 sense of the divine wrath ; that is, the sense of being the 
 object of God's indignation and displeasure rather than of 
 his complacence and love, and this sense of the Divine wrath 
 leads to the feeling of infinite distance, of banishment from 
 God's presence and to a foreboding of punishment as the just 
 ■desert of our sins. Now, it is possible to interpret all this 
 
452 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part in. 
 
 in a purely subjective sense, and to regard it as largely an 
 illusion of feeling, and, therefore, not in any real sense a 
 genuine feature of religious experience. There is a fashion 
 of this kind in our contemporary thinking. But I think we 
 are in a position to see that what we have here described 
 springs out of the very constitution of things. The relation 
 of sin^to the finite consciousness we have already seen, and 
 all this result of guilt and alienation from God and appre- 
 hension of wrath and punishment, is the normal and necessary 
 result of the serious disturbance of fundamental relations 
 which sin brings about. Given, a finite consciousness 
 related to a transcendent other and a sense of sin, and all 
 the rest follows as an inevitable result. We think then 
 that the reasons are sufficient for accepting this side of 
 religious experience as an essential part of it, and it is in 
 connection with this feature that the mediational element is- 
 developed. A study of the history of religion shows that 
 the need of some kind of mediation has been recognized 
 from the beginning. The sense of guilt and the apprehen- 
 sion of wrath have led to various forms of expiation and 
 propitiation on the one hand, and on the other, to interposi- 
 tion of the priestly mediator and intercessor. The guilty 
 soul, troubled with a sense of the Divine wrath, feels too 
 distant and too unworthy for any direct approaches to the 
 offended being, and the mediation of a third becomes neces- 
 sary to render the expiatory and propitiatory acts effective 
 in bringing about remission of guilt and reconciliation. 
 Now, what I wish to accent here is the fact that in passing 
 from the lower forms of religion which embody the more 
 rudimentary religious experiences of the race, to the higher 
 and more developed religions of the spiritual type, we do 
 not find these features dropping away but rather becoming 
 transformed and spiritualized. In Judaism, Buddhism,. 
 Islamism, Christianity, we find in a different way, of course, 
 and one that is suited to the genius of the religion, a 
 common emphasis of the mediational features, and this is 
 what we would be led to expect when we have once come 
 
CHAP. vii. THE TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF RELIGION. 453 
 
 to regard the experiences on which this feature is founded 
 as fundamental rather than accidental. 
 
 It does not lie within the scope of this inquiry to follow 
 the individual or historical aspect of this feature of religious 
 experience into detail, but we shall conclude with a brief 
 -consideration of the metaphysical significance of the idea of 
 mediation in religion. Mediation cannot be left standing as 
 a sohtary feature, but must be related along with religious 
 experience as a whole, to the end-category of being the finite 
 individual's realization of good through the unification of its 
 life with that of God its transcendent other. Even in a 
 universe where evil did not arise, the unification of the finite 
 with its transcendent ground would be necessary, and this 
 would require, not perhaps the historic working out of any 
 scheme of mediation in finite and temporal forms, but with- 
 out doubt the personal mediation of the absolute itself in 
 relating itself vitally to the finite. I mean by this to 
 reaffirm what has in substance been already asserted. We 
 have seen that the absolute subject in its objective activities 
 relates itself to the finite individual not only in the thought 
 that conceives it but also in the selective will that realises 
 and the love that conserves it. We have here only to 
 remember that this all lies in the personal relation of the 
 absolute to its world, in order to see how, in relation to the 
 finite consciousness, the absolute may become, through its 
 whole concrete relationship to the soul of the finite, the 
 Father in which its life is conceived and purposed, the 
 Son through whose volitional energy it is realised, and the 
 Spirit in which it is conserved through the unifying force of 
 love. 
 
 We are not considering here what grounds of personal 
 distinction there may be in the absolute nature, but rather 
 what distinguishable elements are involved in the personal 
 relation of the absolute to finite existence, and we are able 
 to see that in any system of things, irrespective of the 
 presence of evil as a factor, it would be necessary to con- 
 ceive the point of mediation and unity between finite and 
 
454 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi 
 
 infinite under the personal form. But in a system where 
 evil did not arise we may suppose that this point of medi- 
 ation would continue latent and the finite soul would 
 consciously relate itself only directly and immediately to 
 its transcendent other. The rise of the consciousness of 
 evil, however, and especially that of sin, would force this 
 latent moment into explicitness, and the emphasis of the 
 mediational term would become necessary. Sin, by the 
 rupture of relations it involves and the distance and 
 alienation it effects and the load of guilt and demerit 
 it entails, projects into the consciousness of the finite 
 soul such a sense of its lost and ruined condition that 
 all its finite resources seem to be worthless, and it realizes 
 that its only help is in God. The constitutional necessity 
 thus arises for the working out of the Divine mediation in a 
 finite individual world ; that is, in the form of a finite 
 individual experience, and on a plane that will connect it 
 historically with the evolution of the life of the finite in its 
 social and historic forms — a mediation that will supply on its 
 finite,human side the ideal of a redeemed and unified humanity, 
 while on its divine side it provides an exhaustless spring of 
 regenerating and conserving spiritual energy. The Christ- 
 idea and the need of divine mediation in the sphere of 
 religion are thus rooted deep down in the constitution of 
 man's nature. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 
 
 The distinction which the conception of the absolute as 
 experience enables us to make between its subjective and 
 self-realizing and its objective and world-realizing activities 
 is of the greatest value to us in enabling us to reach a true 
 and adequate notion of our relations to God. The difficulty 
 heretofore has been to satisfy the demand of the religious 
 consciousness for nearness to God without incurring the 
 metaphysical peril of absorption into the infinite conscious- 
 ness and practical identification with the divine. Protest as 
 the finite spirit may that its only desire is absorption into 
 the infinite, it knows in its inmost heart that it is uttering 
 a falsehood, and that the thought of this absorption into the 
 subjective-consciousness of the absolute not only runs counter 
 to its own instinct of self-preservation, but also causes the 
 foundations of its being to quiver with the shock of 
 irreverence. The finite soul shrinks from absorption into 
 the subjective consciousness of God. But to be included in 
 the divine experience as the object of the thought and con- 
 serving love of God ; that is a different thing. We cannot 
 live too close to the objective thought and love of God, and 
 we do not need to fear here that our penny rushlight will 
 be extinguished in the central sun, for we have seen that 
 this objective divine energy is the very individuating force 
 which originates and conserves what we are conscious of as 
 
 4S5 
 
456 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 our personal and individual self. Our metaphysical insight 
 enables us to see how, in relation to the objective life of the 
 divine, we may unite in the aspiration of the hymn, " Nearer, 
 my God, to Thee," or in the profoundly satisfying statement 
 of the inspired writer, " For in Him we live and move and 
 have our being." Having once realized that we owe our 
 origin and continuance in being to the objective individu- 
 ating activity of the divine experience, we will be prepared 
 to realize the fact that the religious aspiration for nearness 
 and communion with God is but a form of the aspiration for 
 greater fullness and completeness of individual life. 
 
 The remainder of this chapter we propose to devote to 
 the development of the transcendent ground of certain 
 concepts of the relative, in order to establish the general 
 truth that even in their relative form they are not capable 
 of any ultimately satisfactory explanation apart from their 
 metaphysical ground. We bring up in this connection the 
 distinctions of the good and bad and the true and false, in 
 order to draw a conclusion or two which will be more 
 obvious here than at any earlier point in our discussion. 
 The final relation between the good and the true has already 
 engaged our attention, and we have seen that from the 
 standpoint of the absolute experience the same content is 
 both true and good ; true because it is congruous with the 
 notion of the absolute whole of experience, and good because 
 it fulfils the demand of the absolute to be satisfied in the 
 content of its experience. The vital point here is that the 
 same content is in one aspect of it true, and in another, 
 good. It is open then from the standpoint of the absolute 
 to say without qualification that what is good must be true, 
 and, conversely, what is true must be good. The judgment 
 of truth and the judgment of value would thus coalesce in 
 the absolute. Now it is not possible to say in general from 
 any finite point of view that the true and the good are one, 
 and that because anything is practically necessary it must 
 therefore be theoretically true, and the reason of this is now 
 obvious. The very finitude of our experience renders it 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 457 
 
 possible that our cognitive and practical activities and aims 
 should diverge and that our intellectual and practical con- 
 tent should not completely coincide, and this renders possible 
 an antinomy between the good and true, so that in the 
 extreme case, loyalty to truth may impel us in one direction 
 while loyalty to goodness may be pulling us in an opposite 
 direction. What we wish to show here is that although no 
 unvarying rule is possible, yet the connection of the relative 
 and finite with the absolute renders possible and legitimate 
 the application of the principle of the identity of the true 
 and good within certain definable limits. 
 
 In the first place, the identity, or at least the complete 
 harmony, of the good and true in the absolute experience 
 grounds the rational presumption that, in the last analysis, 
 the good and true in an experience that is only relative, 
 will be found to harmonize. That rational presumption 
 works out in the assurance that what is clearly involved 
 in the end-category of good, for the finite and relative, 
 so that the event of its not being realizable would mean 
 the virtual shipwreck of the good, cannot be regarded as 
 untrue or unreal without reducing our world to a state of 
 irrational confusion. "We are already familiar with this prin- 
 ciple and its application, and here we are seeking the 
 ultimate ground on which it rests. The presumption has no 
 other root than the notion of an absolute experience in 
 which it becomes necessary. If the finite and relative are 
 denied any connection with an absolute, then the presump- 
 tion is baseless, and we may smile at it as one of those 
 illusions with which the finite seeks to divert itself from the 
 sense of its own unreality. We have seen, however, that 
 the presumption is woven into the very texture of a rational 
 scheme of things, and that its denial is tantamount to an 
 ultimate denial of the principle of rationality in our world. 
 Here we have gone a step further, and have realized the 
 fact that an absolute experience is the only solid basis for 
 such a principle, inasmuch as it is only in an absolute 
 experience that it can be unconditionally true. In the 
 
458 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt hi. 
 
 second place, we are able here to conceive the true relation 
 between the considerations of truth and value in our judg- 
 ments. The impossibility of a hard and fast separation of 
 the two sets of motives will be apparent. The possibility 
 of an actual separation of the content of the good and true 
 is an affair of the relative, and has no place in the absolute. 
 The rationality of the world is not in the last analysis ex- 
 pressible in two judgments, but in one which involves the 
 good and the true. There can be no restriction placed 
 on the freedom of an absolute experience to assert ; this 
 is good and therefore true, or ; this is true and therefore 
 good. And this unconditional unity of the good and true 
 gives us the ultimate formulation of the principle of ration- 
 ality. The ultimately rational in our world is that which in 
 relation to an absolute whole of escperienM is ioth uncondition- 
 ally true and unconditionally good. 
 
 Another relative distinction for which we have to seek a 
 grounding in the notion of absolute experience, is that which 
 is involved in the correlative concepts of freedom and neces- 
 sity. The extreme difficulty of reaching any tenable idea of 
 the meaning of these terms has become a commonplace of 
 philosophical discussion. If we only knew what the terms 
 freedom and necessity mean, there would then be a reason- 
 able presumption in favour of our being able to determine 
 the nature of their application to our experience. The truth 
 seems to be, that in the notions of freedom and necessity we 
 have a pair of concepts which, taken in abstract relation to a 
 purely relative and finite experience, are, in the last analysis, 
 unintelligible. The first hint of their intelligibility arises 
 when we conceive them in connection with the notion of an 
 absolute experience. We find this first germ of intelligi- 
 bility in Spinoza ; only Spinoza was unable to avail himself 
 of his riches because of his failures to recognize the reality 
 of the finite and relative. Let us then take the Spinoza 
 point of view, and ask what do freedom and necessity mean 
 as categories of an absolute experience ? It will be clear, I 
 think, that we here strike a relation similar to that between 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 459 
 
 the good and true. The absolute is free and necessitated in 
 relation to one and the same content, and we have to ask in 
 what sense are these categories applicable to one and the 
 same experience ? The solution of the knot will be found, 
 I think, in the distinction already recognized as fundamental, 
 between the subjective and objective consciousness of the 
 absolute. The category of freedom is to be applied sub- 
 jectively, while that of necessity is applicable only to the 
 objective experience. In short, the presupposition of the 
 objective experience is the subjective, but the absolute 
 subject has no presupposition. We strike here the original 
 spring of power and activity. Now, the absolute subject 
 as the original spring of power and activity, must be con- 
 ceived as absolutely self-determining. We mean by that, 
 that the determination of the absolute subject-activity has 
 no prius or condition external to itself, and it is to this 
 self-originative, self-determining agency that the notion of 
 freedom in its unconditional sense is applicable. It would 
 be folly to say in connection with this self-determination 
 that it is also necessary because the subject determines 
 according to its own nature. The absolute subject is its 
 own nature, and does not presuppose it. Self-determina- 
 tion is its primal activity. But the objective individuating 
 activity of the absolute experience has a presupposition, 
 and that is the activity of the subject, and when it is 
 viewed in relation to the subject-nature of the absolute, 
 this objective activity becomes necessary. The absolute is 
 free; but objectively the absolute acts in accordance with 
 its nature. Its nature expresses itself in an unimpeded 
 objective activity, which from this point of view we call 
 free because unimpeded. But, fundamentally, it is neces- 
 sary, inasmuch as on the presupposition of the absolute 
 subject-nature, it could not be conceived as otherwise. It 
 is true then that God acts according to the necessity of 
 his nature. But his nature is himself. Because he him- 
 self is absolute he is free, and because he acts in an 
 unimpeded and unrestrained way his objective activity is 
 
460 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pam hi. 
 
 necessary, for necessity in the last analysis means the un- 
 conditional expression in object-activity of the nature of an 
 absolute subject of experience; while freedom in the last analysis 
 means the self-originating and self-determining agency of an 
 absolute subject of experience. 
 
 From this point of view we may hope to be able, I think, 
 to reach some intelligible conclusion on the problem of 
 freedom and. necessity in connection with our relative ex- 
 perience. That freedom is a category of subjective experi- 
 ence, and necessity one of objective experience, may be 
 taken as settled. The question of freedom must be debated, 
 then, in this sphere, in connection with the subject-activity 
 of the finite and relative self. And in the consideration 
 there will have to be included (1) the relation of the finite 
 self to its transcendent other, and (2) the nature of its own 
 internal agency. Let us suppose, to start with, that the 
 finite subject is free, or would be free, unless there be 
 something in its relation to the absolute that impairs or 
 destroys this freedom. We may then ask what is the 
 bearing of the absolute relation on the possibility of free 
 agency ? It is here, I think, that we meet a very important 
 root of difficulty. Man has an inextinguishable feeling that 
 in the deepest recesses of his nature he is free, but it is 
 precisely in these recesses that his nature meets its inevit- 
 able, in the agency of its transcendent other. What we have 
 to determine is whether the agency of this transcendent 
 other renders the finite individual free or necessitated. 
 Now, we have seen that it is the objective activity of the 
 absolute that grounds the finite individual, and we have 
 seen that this activity is necessary in its relation to the 
 subject-nature of the absolute. Is it a second time over 
 necessary in its relation to the finite individual? We answer 
 that the objective activity of the absolute does not suppose that 
 there is an individual already there atid that it is simply 
 acting upon it ; but its activity is in reality origirwbtive and 
 constitutive of the individual which is there as the creature of 
 this individuating activity. Let us fully grasp the fact that 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 461 
 
 the objective activity of the absolute is constitutive and 
 immediate, and then we will be ready to regard the finite 
 individual as the originating point of a new subjectivity that 
 is free in its own subject-nature, although admitting the 
 dependence of that nature for its being, on the activity of the 
 transcendent. If this be true we will then be able to 
 understand the deep sense of freedom that is our imperish- 
 able possession, as well as the sense that we have in our 
 religious experience that the near approach to God does not 
 impede, but rather tends to complete, our own freedom. We 
 come then to the question of the nature of our own finite 
 agency, as that in which the final solution of the problem of 
 our freedom will be involved. The actual determination of 
 the form of self-agency is a task for the psychologist, and we 
 have to thank him for the investigation which enables us to 
 say that in its form the agency of the self is flawlessly self- 
 determining. The mechanical notion of the activity of will 
 which conceives the motive to be a causal entity distinct from 
 the self that is determined and as external to it, is no longer 
 tenable, and the psychologist has taught us that all motives 
 in order to influence choice must become internal and a part 
 of the determining self. The determining and the deter- 
 mined self thus become one. The form of self-determination 
 is flawless, and self-determination is free-determination. 
 Why should we not admit then that man possesses freedom 
 in its unmodified sense ? This would follow if this word 
 of psychology were the very last. We find, however, that 
 we cannot regard it as such, but must enter the sacred pre- 
 cincts of the inner nature of the self which determines itself 
 in this form, and ask what this nature is that expresses 
 itself in this way, and here we find an important ally in the 
 genetic psychologist who is proving to us by his careful 
 study of mental history that the self in us is not an isolated 
 individual, but rather a socius ; that is, a self that includes 
 in its sense of itself also its sense of its other or not-self, 
 and that its whole activity is a function of this self- 
 other-including consciousness. We have accepted this result 
 
462 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part hi. 
 
 elsewhere, and have made it fundamental in our own 
 reflection. Here we recur to it again in order to lay down 
 the proposition, that it is in and through this internal con- 
 sciousness of the socius that those motives of volition which 
 are admitted to be of extra-subjective origin are able to 
 become incorporated with the self, and to perform a function 
 in that determination which takes place in an act of will. 
 Self-determination becomes in this wa.j partial determination 
 hy other, and it is through this internalising of extra- 
 subjective motivity under the consciousness of the other, 
 that the agency of the subject of finite experience is related, 
 and rendered in a measure subject, to the influence of the 
 environment of individuals with which it is in responsive 
 relations ; and, from the point of view of development in 
 time, with its antecedents through transmission and heredity. 
 This opens the agency of the self to that modification which 
 introduces the moment of passivity and receptivity into it, 
 and renders it both agent and patient in one and the same 
 activity. 
 
 It is clear then that freedom cannot be ascribed in any 
 absolute sense to the agency of the finite self The form of 
 its activity is self-determination, and it is, therefore, formally 
 free, but it is not really and unqualifiedly self-determining 
 in the sense of being an unimpeded, unmodified spring of 
 self-activity. Its activity is modified and partly determined 
 by motives that have their spring in sources outside the 
 finite individual experience. Eelatively then, it may be said 
 with truth from different points of view, of course, that man 
 is both self-determined and determined by other, and the 
 freedomists and determinists both have a case. But the truth 
 of the situation is to be sought in a concept that will 
 transcend while conserving the truth of both contentions. 
 This will be achieved in the reflection, that, after, all the core 
 of the experience is the pulse of free self-initiative which 
 the self exercises by virtue of its constituted nature as an 
 individual, and that the influence of the other operates 
 as an internal modification by forcing it partly into passivity. 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 463 
 
 This being the case, the ideal of the finite agent is, not the 
 suppression of the modification, for this would be to become 
 absolute — and the finite soul shrinks from identification with 
 the absolute — but rather an end-state in which there is 
 such an integration and unification of the modifying other 
 with the self-agency, that their motives virtually coalesce and 
 become one. The freedom that is ascribable to the finite 
 individual and that is attainable by it, is therefore (1) a 
 spring of modified self-initiative that is in harmony with its 
 social nature, and (2) an end-category or ideal that may be 
 realized through the unification of the motives of the other 
 with those that inhere in the central spring of self-activity. 
 
 The term necessity is not applicable to such agency. 
 In so far as the agency of the self is determined and not free, 
 it is determined under the form of freedom, and therefore 
 the notion of determination must be distinguished from that 
 of necessity. To be determined is to be moved to action by 
 that whose source, in the last analysis, is not in the deter- 
 mined being's own nature. Determination may be effected 
 externally and mechanically or internally and under the 
 form of freedom. We have seen that the former is excluded 
 from the sphere of self-agency. The only notion of deter- 
 mination applicable here is that of the internal influence of 
 the other, operating in the form of motive. Now, necessity 
 is a category of immediacy and excludes the notion of 
 determination by other. Necessity applies to an objective 
 activity that springs directly from some inner subject-nature. 
 It must be connected directly with the spring of self- 
 initiative, and through this immediate relation it becomes 
 necessitated. 
 
 The notion of necessity then so far as it is a tenable one, 
 must be applied to the objective rather than to the subject- 
 activity of the finite. If it is a category of the finite it will 
 apply only to that objective activity to which Locke and 
 Hume vainly tried to limit the whole question of freedom, 
 and in which Professor Paulsen seems to follow them.^ It 
 ^Principles of Ethics, English translation, chap, ix., pp. 452-472. 
 
464 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part in. 
 
 shows a complete misapprehension of the situation to assert, 
 as these and other writers do, that man is free to act in accord- 
 ance with his choice, for this can only mean that ordinarily 
 he will not be prevented by any mechanical application of 
 force from so acting. But such an assertion does not touch 
 the real direct relation between subjective determination and 
 objective activity, which is that of necessity and which would 
 be absolute were the nature that determines itself to action, 
 absolute. I mean by this that, given an absolute nature, 
 then its objective activity is absolutely predictable in the 
 light of that nature, inasmuch as all the terms of the activity 
 have their springs in its depths. But the activity of a 
 relative and finite self is not absolutely predictable, since 
 some of its springs of activity are not internal to its nature, 
 and this as we saw in the discussion of evil, introduces an 
 incalculable element which has to be reckoned with and 
 which reduces the notion of necessity here to the relative 
 form. 
 
 Another pair of relative conceptions are those involved in 
 the terms mechanical and ideological. The efforts of thinkers 
 to determine the relations of these concepts have not been 
 wholly satisfactory, largely because of their failure to deter- 
 mine the meaning of the notions themselves. One thing is 
 clear at the outset, I think, and that is, that whatever the 
 terms mechanical and teleological may signify ultimately; in 
 their first and most obvious sense they apply to the notion 
 of agency. And when we look for the point of characteristic 
 difference we find it in a distinction with which we are 
 already familiar ; between self-agency and that of the other. 
 The notion of teleology arises in connection with the thought 
 of some conscious subject either absolute or relative, whose 
 activity is motived by some end-category, the good or the 
 true, which it is conceived to be realizing. This end-category 
 entering as an internal motive becomes the aim or purpose 
 of the activity. Thus a teleological activity is said to be 
 one that is internal and contains its end within itself as a 
 spring of interest and motivity. It is clear that the concept 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 465 
 
 of teleology will be applicable, in the first instance, to the 
 absolute experience where alone it will be unconditionally 
 true that every activity springs directly from the concept of 
 it in the absolute mind. For we cannot separate thought 
 and realizing activity in the absolute as they may be separated 
 in the relative. 
 
 Mechanical agency, on the contrary, is directly connected 
 with the notion of the other, and this notion, in the first 
 instance at least, involves two concepts of agency, (1) that 
 of externality of mode as distinguished from internality of 
 mode. By this we mean that the notion of the mechanical 
 mode of influencing or producing changes is, physically speak- 
 ing, by outside impact, or at least by an agency that does not 
 involve the internalizing of the impulse as self-determining 
 motive. (2) The concept of mechanism does not contemplate 
 the straight outflow of the activity of any inner nature, but 
 rather the generation of changes, by means of the influence of 
 one factor upon another, in a system composed of a plurality 
 of parts. The concept of mechanical agency will differ from 
 that of teleological agency as the externally operating activity 
 of a plurality of terms differs from an activity internally 
 motived by the apprehension of an end-category. 
 
 Now, there are two stages, as we may say, in the applica- 
 tion of the concept of mechanism to the content of relative 
 experience. The first arises when we apply the mathematical 
 principles of quantitative determination to the world con- 
 ceived as a causal series in time. It will present itself then 
 as a developing system of causally-determined parts ; that 
 is, the several parts of the world-series will be conceived as 
 having their conditioiied rise in parts antecedent to, and 
 outside of them, in time. The application of the mathe- 
 matical calculus to such a series will develop the first 
 construct of the world from the mechanical point of view. 
 But this view of the world leads on to another that is more 
 profound. We have seen that it is impossible to stop with 
 the concept of a world-series in time, but that the content 
 of the series must be resolved into a plurality of ultimate 
 
 2o 
 
466 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 individuals that are represented as in mutually modifying 
 interaction. To this more ultimate concept of the world as 
 a plurality of interacting individuals, the principles of 
 mathematical determination may again be applied and there 
 will emerge a higher mechanical conception of the world 
 in which it is represented as a system of interacting indi- 
 viduals, either force centres or atoms, out of the reciprocal 
 and combining activities of which, arise all the phenomena of 
 the world. We have endeavoured to shew in the chapters of 
 the second part of this treatise, which deal with the categories 
 of the dynamic consciousness, how the principles of the 
 higher mechanism are developed. But the common charac- 
 teristic of both forms consists in their adherence to the 
 notion of external as distinguished from that of internal 
 agency, involving as it does the supposition of a plurality of 
 mutually exclusive and external factors. N"ow, mechanism 
 as thus far conceived, is a relative conception. We have 
 seen in another connection how in the sphere of relativity 
 there is a point where the mechanical is transcended in the 
 notion of internal agency. But here we wish to consider 
 another question, and that is, how the concept of mechanism 
 is related to the notion of an absolute experience ? There 
 is of course an indirect relation through the concept of tele- 
 ology, but is there not also a direct relation ? We think 
 there is, and that it arises in the notion of the content of 
 experience as constituting an absolute self-contained whole. 
 In dealing with the transcendent ground of cosmology we 
 saw how the moment of transcendent agency is involved in 
 all the ultimate concepts of science. Here we are supple- 
 menting the conclusions there reached by pointing out a kind 
 of transcendence that is especially involved in the notion of 
 mechanism. It is only in an absolute whole of experience 
 that we can be unconditionally certain that no loss of energy 
 will ever take place, but that what disappears in one form 
 will reappear in some other ; or that the least particle of 
 matter will never be subtracted from the sum total ; or that 
 the individuals shall be perdurable and their relations uniform 
 
CHAP. viii. GROUNDIKG OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 467 
 
 and stable. None of these assumptions could be made 
 unconditionally of a limited experience or of anything 
 short of an absolute whole of experience. The concept of 
 mechanism is therefore grounded ultimately in the notion 
 of an absolute whole of experience in which the elements 
 and relations are perdurable and stable. 
 
 Mechanism may thus complete itself directly in the 
 notion of absolute experience and there is no need from this 
 point of view that there should be any recognition of 
 teleology. We mean that the notion of externally acting 
 agency embodying itself in a quantitative form is one that 
 may be carried out to ideal completeness, and this is evidence 
 that in the mechanical aspect of the world we come upon a 
 phase of reality and not an unreal appearance. The notion 
 of mechanism is to be transcended, not because it stops 
 somewhere, but because experience has other concepts that 
 its notion does not include, and which in the last analysis are 
 perhaps inclusive but certainly not subversive, of mechanism. 
 
 E"ow, in truth the notion of mechanism begins to be 
 transcended when we reach a point in experience where a 
 transition must be made from the concept of external to 
 that of internal agency. We have seen where and how this 
 transition becomes necessary. We find that the notion of 
 external influence in an interacting system, or in any system 
 in fact, is not tenable if we attempt to conceive it a.s final, but 
 that the mode of influence must be conceived as internal, so 
 that a influences 6 by becoming internal to 6, and we have 
 seen in the chapter on The Transcendent Object how this 
 involves in the last resort an internal conceptual mode of 
 activity which embodies itself in the objective rationality of 
 the world. The mode of transcendence is qualitative, there- 
 fore, and leaves the notion of mechanism intact. Our 
 world becomes teleological not because mechanism breaks 
 down anywhere and proves itself invalid, but because 
 mechanism has a presupposition on one side which leads to 
 its own transcendence. The world becomes teleological 
 because at a point in experience that may be determined, it 
 
468 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 becomes necessary to supplement mechanism with the 
 notion of internal agency, and we have seen that internal 
 agency is the analogue of conceptually initiated agency, 
 and that, therefore, the last principle of the world must be 
 one of intelligence and rationality. This conclusion, mechan- 
 ism itself is interested in afi&rming, because in the last resort 
 its mode of agency becomes conceivably possible only when 
 qualified by and grounded in, the mode which we call teleo- 
 logical. 
 
 We have seen that everywhere the content of experience 
 is ultimately reducible to the individual form, and we arei 
 here in sight of an analogous conclusion with reference to 
 the agency of the world. We may start with the notion of 
 mechanism, which is only quasi-individual, although the 
 germ of individuality is latent in it ; but a point will be 
 reached in our reflection where it will be necessary to 
 make a transition from mechanism to the teleological con- 
 cept of agency, and this transition is effected in the emer- 
 gence into explicitness of the germ of individuality latent in 
 mechanism, and in the completion of the notion of individual 
 agency. The notion of individual agency is in the last 
 analysis that of subjectively initiated activity. The notion 
 of teleology has its root therefore in the concept of a subject- 
 activity in experience in which all objective activity has its 
 source and ground, and the point of transition from mechanism 
 to Ideology is, in the last analysis, identical with that point in 
 experierux where it becomes necessary to pass from the notion 
 of objective and external to that of subjective and internal 
 agency. 
 
 The last topic which we shall consider in this chapter is 
 that of the finite individual, and what we shall have to say 
 of its nature and metaphysical basis has been to a great 
 extent anticipated in preceding discussions. We have seen 
 how the experience-content resolves itself ultimately into 
 individual forms, so that our world becomes a world of 
 individuals. We have also in the preceding chapter found 
 that the objective activity of the absolute experience is 
 
CHAP. vni. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 469 
 
 individuating and finitating in its very constitution, and we 
 have called this the principle of individuation. Inasmuch, 
 however, as the objective activity of the absolute has a sub- 
 jective presupposition, the very last root of the individuating 
 activity of the world is to be found in the individuality of 
 the absolute subject of experience itself If the absolute were 
 not individual there would be no reason and no ground in 
 experience for the individual. The religious consciousness 
 tells us that we are individuals because God is individual. 
 Starting then with finite experience as we know it, we find 
 there a subject-activity that expresses itself objectively in 
 an activity which is, in the last analysis, individuating and 
 which reduces the content of experience to the individual 
 form. Our finite world is thus a world of individuals, and 
 it is upon this basis that science rests the ground-principles 
 of its procedure. "We found, however, on further analysis 
 that the finite individuals of the world and the forms of 
 their agency, have presuppositions which lead to their con- 
 nection with something transcendent in which alone they 
 can be completed and stably grounded; and the investigation 
 of this transcendent presupposition leads to its embodiment 
 in the concept of an absolute experience which comprehends 
 and grounds the sphere of the finite. Furthermore, we find 
 on analysis that a distinction must be made in the absolute 
 experience between its subject- and object-activities, and 
 that the world of finite individuals is related immediately to 
 the objective activity which is individuating in its nature, 
 and we are led thus to conceive the finite individual as 
 constituted in an objective posit of absolute experience. 
 That this objective posit should be individual we are forced 
 in the last analysis to refer to its sources in that primal 
 individuality of the absolute subject which determines its 
 objective activity as individuating, and that it should be 
 finite, we are forced to refer in the last resort to the 
 essential nature of objective activity, which is plwralizing, 
 and involves a partition in the content of absolute experi- 
 ence as a whole. We have seen how profoundly the notion 
 
470 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part iii. 
 
 of plurality enters into the concepts of iinitude and relativity. 
 Presupposing the objective individuating activity of the 
 absolute, the partition of content is directly involved in its 
 immediate agency, and in this is wrapped up the being and 
 nature of the finite individual. All this is either supposed 
 or implicit in the objective posit in which the individual 
 must be supposed to have its origin. 
 
 We have already admitted that the content of finite 
 individuality cannot in the first instance be deduced, but 
 that the organ of finite experience must be employed in 
 order to discover what that content is. What we have 
 maintained is that no concept of the absolute is adequate to 
 a first-hand deduction of the nature and content of the 
 finite. In this we split with the thought of Hegel, but we 
 are perhaps anticipating the truer Hegel in our contention 
 here that though the organ of finite experience must be our 
 guide in the first stages in the discovery of content, yet in 
 order to reach a final construction, Virgilius must give way 
 to Beatrice. We have seen that the analysis of finite experi- 
 ence leads necessarily to the development of the postulate of 
 absolute experience as its ground, and that the presupposition- 
 less root of absolute experience is found in the concept of an 
 absolute subject. And what we maintain here is that the 
 concept of absolute experience when once achieved iecomes a 
 necessary guide to the comprehension of the relative. We do 
 not need to enlarge on this principle so far as its application 
 to the grounding of the individual forms of finite experience 
 is concerned, for this will be obvious ; but what we wish to 
 maintain here is that the concept of absolute experience 
 once achieved, enables us to ground the content of finite 
 individuality. We have found the norm of individuality in 
 the nature of the absolute subject, and in precisely the same 
 way we find it necessary to refer the internal structure 
 of the individual to the absolute nature as its normative 
 spring. The objective activity of the absolute in the posit 
 of which the finite individual originates, cannot be an empty 
 activity, but must, as we have contended in another connec- 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 471 
 
 tion, be informed and guided by a concept which performs 
 the function of end-category. Now this concept can be no 
 less than an idea of the nature that is instituted in the act, 
 and it cannot be a mere form but must have content. Can 
 we say what this content will be ? Manifestly, it can be no 
 other than the thought of the instituted nature ; that is, 
 an idea of an individual, self-identical subject that shall 
 express itself in the objective activities of experience, and 
 be in truth a real self. This result must be connected 
 with another insight that we have reached ; namely, that 
 the objective activity of the absolute experience is immedi- 
 ately individuating, but only mediately and indirectly 
 finitating. It terminates in a fnite and relative individual 
 by virtue, first, of the constitutive nature of its agency — the 
 finite individual is its posit ; and, secondly, by virtue of the 
 plurality and partition of content which its activity involves. 
 "We thus find that while the individuality of the finite and 
 relative is involved in the immediacy of the absolute 
 thought, yet its finitude and relativity are there only as 
 qualifications which must inevitably arise in the process of 
 realization. We cannot say that the finite and relative as 
 such are immediate in the thought of the absolute ; but the 
 individual is immediately in the thought, and the finitude 
 and relativity are there as necessary conditions of the indi- 
 vidual's becoming real. 
 
 With this result, that the nature of the finite individual 
 has its prius in the idea that informs the positing activity, 
 we need to connect another that arises on the side of the 
 relative and finite. We have seen how lack of absolute 
 self-initiative, combined with the modifications of content and 
 agency involved in the plurality of individuals, determines 
 them in their nature and agency to be finite and relative. 
 That the determining conditions of finitude and relativity 
 should arise not in the notion of individuality but in the 
 process of its objective realization is confirmation on this 
 side of the problem, of the conclusion we reached by deduc- 
 tion from the notion of the absolute — namely, that the 
 
472 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt hi. 
 
 finitude and relativity of the individual is not part of the 
 immediacy of the absolute thought, but only related to it as 
 inherent in the realizing process. Taking this as settled, we 
 are in a position to make a distinction of some importance 
 between two kinds of content in the finite nature. If the 
 relation of finite individuality to the conditions in which 
 it arises are as we have represented them, we may expect to 
 find in the nature of the finite individual (1) a content that 
 comes there through the immediacy of its relation to the 
 thought of it present in the activity by which it is consti- 
 tuted ; and (2) a content put there by the modifying con- 
 ditions that determine it as finite and relative. And the 
 point which we wish to put the accent on here is that the 
 content implanted through the immediacy of the absolute 
 idea in the positing act, constitutes a germ of absoluteness in 
 our nature which is the source of our inextinguishable sense 
 of free agency as well as of our power to think beyond the 
 limits of the finite and to develop the notion of an absolute 
 experience as its ground. But while this is true, the content 
 implanted by the conditions of realization is also an essential 
 part of our real nature. We have seen that this is true in 
 the sphere of agency, and what we maintain here is that it 
 is fundamentally involved in our reality. We may conceive 
 our absolute archetype as existing in the Divine conscious- 
 ness, and the distinction here insisted on enables us to 
 dissociate the immediate content of that consciousness from 
 our finitude and relativity, so that God only "remembers that 
 we are dust " ; but we cannot conceive ourselves as we 
 really are without these modifications, nor can we conceive 
 that the end-category of individual reality should transcend 
 these modifications. This end-category conceived as an ideal 
 will not be that of an absolute nature then, for the idea of 
 the absolute is a transcendent presupposition of the finite, 
 but rather that of a nature which is finitely and relatively 
 qualified and completed after its own kind. We have seen 
 in the discussion of freedom how this ideal completeness is 
 to be conceived in one direction, and in general the aspira- 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 473 
 
 tion that will be adequate to the whole life struggle of the 
 finite would be one that completely satisfies the requirement 
 of social unity on the one hand, and that of unity and 
 fellowship with* God, the requirement of religion, on the 
 other. 
 
 It will not need to be pointed out that the doctrine of 
 individuality developed above naturally suggests the question 
 whether in the last analysis all finite individuals are to be 
 conceived as of one type. We know the conclusion to which 
 such thinkers as Leibnitz and Lotze have been led regarding 
 the ultimate nature of the individual. The latter thinker, 
 reflecting on the monad of the former, resolves all individu- 
 ality ultimately into the psychic type, and conceives the 
 world of individuals to be composed of soul-like beings. 
 How shall we deal with this conception ? It is clear that 
 no direct help can be found on the finite side of the problem, 
 and we are driven again to test the powers of the concept 
 of absolute experience. We have seen that the thought or 
 idea involved in the objective individuating activity of 
 absolute experience becomes in its relation to the realizing 
 process an end -category. What we mean by this is (1) that 
 for the absolute the idea of the individual supplies a norm of 
 realization for the will-activity in which the actual posit is 
 made. The idea or thought of the individual thus becomes an 
 end-category — conceived as internal motive — for the concrete 
 a,ctivity of realization. But the process of realization is 
 distinguishable into two moments, the first being that of 
 origination, the absolute's posit of the finite individual, 
 while the second moment is the finite's own process of 
 self-realization. If we conceive the result of the first 
 moment to be a real individual, we must regard the second 
 as initiated in the new individual's nature. To the absolute 
 thought, — if we distinguish here between a species of first 
 and second intention, both moments will be present, but the 
 second only mediately. The concrete idea with its mediate 
 and immediate content will thus constitute the end-category 
 of the individual in general. 
 
474 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 What we wish here to achieve is the distinction of the 
 part of this process, of realization which belongs to the finite 
 individual from that which it presupposes and which belongs 
 to the absolute, and the object in making this distinction is 
 to lay down the proposition, which will not be disputed if 
 the distinction be admitted, that the part of the realizing 
 process which belongs to the finite individual, is to be 
 regarded as relative, and subject to the laws of relativity, 
 and the question then changes its form and we have to 
 inquire into the real point of differentiation between the 
 relative and absolute in this sphere. On the basis of this 
 distinction where is the line to be drawn ? In the first 
 place it will be evident without discussion that the process, 
 viewed concretely, will include all the necessary conditions of 
 the individual's being and realization. The constitutive act 
 under the end-category of the individual nature will also be 
 conceded to the absolute without demurrer. The real ques- 
 tion here is what this posit involves as original and explicit 
 content of the individual nature. In order to determine 
 this we must suppose the subtraction from any knowable 
 individual, of those elements that are due to the processes of 
 relative and finite experience, and it will be the minimum 
 individuale of which we shall be in quest. Now, in order 
 that there may be any individual at all, there must be a 
 persistent and self-identical centre of self-asserting activity. 
 Less than this would not answer the necessary requirements 
 of individual existence. This, however, will not be denied, 
 but the real difficulty will arise in connection with the 
 question, what more than this is involved as real individual 
 activity ? Is it not necessary for us to suppose that a 
 thing in order to be an individual must be intelligent, 
 and in short, have the germ of a consciousness ? It must 
 be remembered here that we are not considering composites 
 but the primary demerits of things. The question is as to 
 that atom or this soul of mine in its first principle. We 
 have learned in the earlier chapters of this discussion that 
 in the investigation of the agency of things we are forced 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 475 
 
 to make a transition from the notion of external to that of 
 internal activity, and we have seen, moreover, that this 
 notion of internal agency is only intelligible when we 
 construe it as internally conceived activity, in short, it is 
 only intelligible when we connect it with its idea in some 
 individual centre. But it does not follow from this that the 
 individual centre must consciously apprehend and act from 
 this idea. On the face of it there is only a necessity that 
 the idea shall be there and that it shall exert a directive 
 influence on the activity, and the question arises whether 
 this is possible, and if possible, on what grounds it can be 
 affirmed as true ? Now I do not think the question of 
 possibility will be so difficult to determine, inasmuch as we 
 find in experience a form of agency called instinctive 
 in which it is at least partially exemplified. Whatever 
 instinct may be, it is certain that it implies a form of 
 individual activity which is teleological, but at the same 
 time not consciously apprehending the idea it is realizing. 
 The mother bird may have learned much of the detail of 
 nest-building from experience, but there will be much 
 connected with the whole enterprise of nesting at a certain 
 season and rearing and providing for her brood, that she 
 does not understand, and her activity will be purposeless so 
 far as she is concerned, and its motive a kind of blind 
 impulse. We have in instinct a type of individual agency 
 to which the idea it is realizing while internal and directive, 
 is yet not consciously present in that activity. The only 
 consciousness the individual has in relation to the idea is the 
 blind impulse to act in accordance with an idea, which must, 
 therefore, be in some way a present determinative factor. 
 We have only to suppose then that the impulsive agency 
 itself, or the equivalent of it, is possible without any 
 consciousness of itself accompanying its activity. This is 
 hard to realize ; but if there may be teleological activity 
 in which the idea is not self-conscious, then it is reasonable 
 to suppose that there may be impulsion to activity of 
 which the individual is not conscious. The one supposition 
 
476 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt hi. 
 
 is not any harder than the other. As a result then we 
 arrive at the notion of an individual agency whose con- 
 sciousness is external and transcendent. This conclusion is 
 reached by a process of reasonable supposition founded on 
 data in experience. If we were to attempt, however, to 
 reason away the minima of individuality we would find it 
 impossible, since any infraction of the concept of a per- 
 sistent and real centre of activity would be tantamount to 
 the suppression of the individual. 
 
 If we concede the possibility of individual agency whose 
 consciousness is external and transcendent to it, on what 
 ground, it will be asked, may it be affirmed as true 1 There 
 are at least two important considerations bearing on this. 
 In the first place our whole doctrine of the transcendent 
 grounding of the individuals of the world makes it possible 
 for us to see how the idea which conceives the nature of the 
 individual and becomes the end-category of its activity is, in 
 the first instance, an objective idea of the absolute experience. 
 The idea is, as we have seen, the prius of the realizing 
 process, and the realizing process includes not only the 
 institution of the individual but its attainment of its end- 
 category, and it is only necessary here for us to suppose 
 that the moment of institution does not involve the in- 
 dividual's internal consciousness of its own activity at all, 
 but that this internalizing of consciousness belongs to the 
 process of realization. In the second place there is, as 
 reinforcing the above consideration, the requirement of 
 mechanism that activity shall not be conceived teleologically 
 as emanating immediately from a conscious idea, but rather 
 fatally, if we may use the term, as the push of a force 
 whose inner nature of course determines it, but from whose 
 agency the mediation of internal consciousness in any form 
 is rigorously excluded. Mechanism thus requires the very 
 conclusion to which we are led by the first supposition, 
 and science rests on the necessary postulate of idealess 
 individuals whose whole consciousness is external and tran- 
 scendent to them. 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 47 T 
 
 We may call the conclusion reached above the doctrine of 
 individtoa minima, and we propose now to show its impor- 
 tance for another phase of scientific knowledge. If the 
 individua minima involved in mechanical science include 
 simply the moment of institution and not the power of 
 realization, and if this is the fundamental reason for con- 
 ceiving these minima as without internal consciousness,, 
 then the process of realization belongs to the history of the 
 finite, and one aspect of it will be the progressive internalising 
 of consciousness. So that pure fatalistic activity will be 
 followed by the initiating of a subject-factor or germ of 
 internal consciousness that will manifest itself at first,, 
 perhaps, as mere irritability, then as impulse, and finally as 
 ideally informed activity in the forms of sensation and the 
 higher manifestations of conscious agency. It will thus 
 become possible to subsume the history of the finite under a 
 Darwinian-Hegelian category of development, and to represent the 
 whole course of finite activity as process in which the individua 
 minima are tending to develop into full internal possession 
 of their nature and end. The notion of development thus 
 rendered is simply that of the history of individual realiza- 
 tion, and it is comprehensive enough to ground the categories 
 of both physics and biology and also to enable us to conceive 
 the nature of the transition in that history from the purely 
 mechanical to the biological and ultimately to the spiritual 
 categories. 
 
 The doctrine of individuality that we have been defining 
 in the preceding discussions is that the institution of 
 individuals is the central and essential pulse of objective 
 activity. We saw in the beginning how the simple activities 
 of cognitive experience are reducible, in the last analysis, to 
 points of individuating activity, and how the development of 
 this insight led to the notion of the finite world of experience 
 as fundamentally a world of individuals. Then on the side 
 of the transcendent we were led gradually to the conception 
 of the objective activities of the absolute as individuating in 
 their nature and as initiative of the individualities of the finite 
 
478 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pakt m. 
 
 world. Finally, we have been led to a distinction within the 
 individual itself betweea the moment of institution and that 
 of realization, and to the assignment of the latter to the 
 stage of finite history. And we have seen how on this basis 
 a concept of individual development is grounded that is 
 adequate to both mechanical and spiritual science. Professor 
 Eoyce, in the second part of his profound work on the 
 conception of God, gives a memorable discussion of the 
 principle of individuation, in which he traces the individual 
 to its transcendent roots in the thought and selective purpose 
 and love, of the absolute. This represents, I think, a funda- 
 mentally true insight, and the doctrine here developed is in 
 substantial agreement with Eoyce's thought, only we have 
 put more emphasis than Eoyce does on the central place 
 which the individual holds in the objective activities of 
 experience in general. It is in relation to the perdurability 
 of the individual rather than to its institution, that we find 
 it necessary to emphasize the moment of the absolute love. 
 That the individual should be perdurable seems to be 
 involved in its very constitution. The fundamental require- 
 ment of science is that its individua minima shall be 
 permanent and imperishable, and that the formal relations 
 among these shall be stable. There would perhaps be as 
 little hesitation in admitting the perdurability of the soul as 
 there is in admitting the perdurability of the atom could the 
 claim of the soul to the status of elementary individuality 
 be as clearly made out. The union of the soul with a 
 decomposable organism tends to breed the apprehension that 
 it may be decomposable, or in some other way, liable to 
 perish. We think, however, that the doctrine of individuality 
 developed here will tend to remove uncertainty, and vindi- 
 cate the right of the soul to the claim of essential reality. 
 A soul is simply an individual that has come into inner 
 conscious possession of its own nature and end. That such 
 individuality should be connected with a decomposable 
 organism, which by virtue of its lack of individuality is sub- 
 ject to what we call death; that is to the falling apart of its 
 
CHAP. VIII. GROUNDING OF RELATIVE CONCEPTIONS. 479 
 
 aggregated parts, does not seem to have any essential relation 
 to its own destiny. We need to be sure in the first place 
 that the soul is a real individual, and then its fortunes become 
 one with that of the individuals rather than the aggregates 
 of the world. Were it not that man is so vitally interested 
 in his own perdurability the above considerations would no 
 doubt be regarded as theoretically sufl&cient. But the very 
 interests involved create a demand for greater assurance, 
 and the satisfaction of this demand may be found, I think, 
 from two different sources. As individuals our souls are 
 related directly to the objective activity of the absolute, and 
 Eoyce's discussion has helped us to see that this connection 
 involves the moment of specializing love. This authorizes 
 us to say that God loves us with an individual love, and we 
 know that love is the principle of conservation, and that the 
 relations of the absolute activities are stable. We have here 
 a strong voucher for perdurability in the groundwork of our 
 being. Again, we find that the perdurability of the soul is 
 so rooted in the rationality of the world that its denial is 
 tantamount to an assertion that the world is ultimately 
 irrational. That the highest product of the individuating 
 energies of the world, the individual in which the process 
 of the world becomes conscious and self-realized, should be 
 developed only to perish, can only mean that the world- 
 activities result, in the last analysis, in illusion. To admit 
 this is to deny reality and to impugn not the power alone 
 but the goodness of the absolute. The soul's shrinking from 
 the thought of its own annihilation is not wholly the re- 
 action of the instinct of self-preservation ; there is in it also 
 the recoil from a kind of blasphemy. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE.i 
 
 The source of mysticism in experience is to be found in 
 the element of feeling which is never absolutely blind, but 
 involves even in its lowest forms a germ of cognition. It is 
 characteristic of feeling, however, that it is not overtly 
 and explicitly cognitive, but that its seeing eye is more or 
 less suffused with a mist of emotion which impairs its 
 power of clear conceptual definition. The apprehension 
 that is effected in such an organ may well be called 
 mystical, and we find here perhaps an important linguistic 
 motive for the selection of the term by which this type of 
 experience is designated. Tor the real significance of 
 mysticism we must, however, go deeper than etymology and 
 seek its roots in psychological and metaphysical soil. 
 Eeverting to the analysis of the first part of this volume, 
 we there found that the concrete psychoses of which our 
 consciousness is composed include moments of thought, 
 feeling, and will, and that the tendency of consciousness in 
 its movement as a whole is to pass from a stage of lower 
 immediacy called sensation, through the mediating processes 
 of reflection, to a stage of higher immediacy that is charac- 
 teristically emotional. The consciousness of this stage we 
 
 ^ The phrase mystic element is used here in a broad sense, as including 
 (1) every mode of getting content in which feeling is the dominating factor 
 and (2) any super-ordinary mode or organ of knowledge or belief. 
 
 480 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 481 
 
 were led to characterize as immanently rational, since some 
 cognitive germ or idea functions at its heart, but overtly 
 and explicitly, a form of feeling which, as we have learned 
 in the analysis of the second part, is the special agent in the 
 development of the subject-side of consciousness, and, in 
 view of the fundamental distinction that exists in conscious- 
 ness between its subject and object forms, to be classified 
 distinctively with the former. It may be said that it is in 
 the higher forms of emotional experiences^those which 
 belong to the stage of the higher immediacy — that self- 
 consciousness attains its highest level and most complete 
 realization. 
 
 Now, mysticism, while requiring this higher form of self- 
 consciousness as its condition, is not concerned immediately 
 with the vision of self. Its special organ is to be sought 
 rather in the consciousness of a transcendent other which 
 we have found to be an inseparable accompaniment of self- 
 consciousness, and the mystical intuition or vision arises 
 when this consciousness has been raised to a point of 
 intensity at which it becomes functionally active: In his 
 remarkable work on The Mystic Bases of Knowledge, the 
 author, Eecejac, conceives this moment of functional activity 
 to be one of " self-alienation," in which the ego abdicates 
 itself and becomes one with the absolute. He also charac- 
 terizes it from the ethical point of view as a moment of 
 '■ disinterestedness " in which the ordinary egoistic motives 
 are transcended and the impulse becomes purely altruistic, 
 and his theory is that in this moment of self-transcendence 
 our conscious activity becomes absolute and the true bearer 
 of an absolute intuition. "With much of Eecejac's thought 
 we find ourselves in complete sympathy, and dissent only 
 arises in connection with the author's theory of the nature 
 of the absolute, which he treats as a pure creation of the 
 consciousness in which it is conceived and as having no 
 other reality. Against this concept we have to place the 
 whole doctrine of the transcendent as developed in these 
 discussions — a doctrine that involves the assertion of the 
 
 2h 
 
482 TRANSCENDENT EACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 reality of a transcendent experience as the presupposition 
 and ground of the relative. If it be necessary to presuppose 
 an absolute experience as the ground of the relative and its 
 processes, it is plainly impossible to regard the absolute 
 itself as the creature of any of the activities of which the 
 relative is capable. It is true that Eecejac prefaces the act 
 of absolute realization with one of self-transcendence ; and 
 were his position simply that the closest approach the finite 
 consciousness can make to the absolute is through this door 
 of self-alienation, the claim would perhaps be tenable. But 
 this would not necessarily involve the assumption that the 
 relation of the self-transcending consciousness to the absolute 
 is one of identity, and that the absolute is constituted in 
 this act and has no other reality. 
 
 The special organ of mysticism is, as we have seen, the 
 consciousness of the transcendent raised to that point of 
 intensity at which it becomes functionally active, and it 
 is here, I think, that we strike the central crwa in the 
 interpretation of mystical experience. The question on 
 which theories will diverge fundamentally will be whether 
 the functional activity of the mystic consciousness is to be 
 conceived as a subjective or as an objective activity. In 
 other words, is it to be regarded as an extension of the 
 activity by which we reach an inner apprehension of self, 
 or is it rather to be regarded as an extension of those 
 activities by which objective truth is realized ? If it is 
 essentially a function of subjectivity, then we will perhaps 
 have to admit that, in the last analysis, in order to 
 apprehend the absolute, we must become absolute. But if 
 it is objective, then we have seen that in its most essential 
 nature the consciousness of the transcendent is the con- 
 sciousness of an other than oneself. It is on this conscious- 
 ness of a transcendent other, as we have seen, that the 
 whole structure of religious experience has grown up, and 
 it is clear that the suppression of the distinction by the 
 identification of the self and the transcendent other, would 
 be tantamount to the destruction of that which alone 
 
OHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 483 
 
 renders religious experience possible. In our theory of 
 mysticism, as in our theory of religion, we take the objective 
 view in preference to the subjective, as being most in con- 
 sonance with an adequate doctrine of experience. If an 
 absolute experience is the undeniable condition of an experi- 
 ence that is relative and finite, then it must be that, in the 
 consciousness of the finite, the absolute will be apprehended 
 and conceived as a transcendent other, and that the whole 
 fixperience of religion and mysticism will be best understood 
 as an activity in which the finite self is seeking to adjust 
 itself to that element in reality which it is conscious of and 
 conceives ai? a transcendent other. The transcendent other- 
 ness of the real is a quality, therefore, which is not to be 
 overcome without taking away the ground of the experience 
 and of the aspiration that lives at its heart. We may utter 
 the thought that in religion and mysticism we achieve 
 absoluteness, or identity with the absolute, but we cannot 
 suppress the inner shrinking from this virtual self-deification 
 as irreverent and blasphemous, any more than we can 
 escape the apprehension that it involves the suppression of 
 the only possible basis of our religious experience. 
 
 How, then, shall mysticism be objectively interpfS'ted ? 
 We do not mean to deny here' that mysticism has its 
 subjective aspects, but what we are concerned to assert is 
 that mysticism as an organ for the apprehension of truth, is 
 ■objective, and the question here is how this objectivity is to 
 be understood. Let us then take as our starting-point 
 consciousness in its ordinary state, which may be regarded, 
 taken as a whole, as the organ of common objective know- 
 ledge. This it will be in its first intention, for we have 
 seen that the impulse of consciousness is always to look out 
 before it looks in. Taking this conscious organ of objective 
 truth, let us suppose that it has been raised to a super- 
 normal degree of intensity. This intensifying process will 
 have two effects: (1) of rendering it subjectively more 
 sensitive or susceptible to the influences of the objective, and 
 <2) of rousing and intensifying its power of apprehension. 
 
4:84 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 Let us suppose, now, that the element of objectivity in 
 relation to which this super-sensitiveness has been induced 
 is the transcendent other of the religious experience. What 
 will be the result ? Manifestly the whole consciousness will 
 be in a unique state of susceptibility to influences from the 
 transcendent, and will manifest a more than normal capacity 
 for seizing impressions and reducing them to a greater or 
 less degree of intelligibility. The special feature of this 
 representation, it will be observed, is that it does not involve 
 the setting aside of any of the normal conditions of experi- 
 ence. There is not involved in it any moment of specific 
 self-alienation in which the self naturally becomes a cast-off 
 garment, but on the contrary a raising of the ordinary self 
 to a state of unique susceptibility and apprehensive power, 
 a result that is perfectly intelligible. Nor is there involved, 
 on the other hand, any self-identification with the absolute 
 or any achievement of the moment of absoluteness, but on 
 the contrary the supposition, which is perfectly intelligible, 
 that objective influences from that aspect of the real which 
 we call transcendent, which under ordinary conditions would 
 find no response in consciousness, may find a response in a 
 consciousness that has been raised to the mystical point of 
 emotional intensity. It is conceded to be generally true 
 that the intensification of consciousness in relation to any 
 special sphere of objective reality has the effect of rendering 
 it more susceptible and more capable in that sphere of 
 truth. Every specialist in every field will supply an illus- 
 tration to the point. And what we have been proposing 
 here is the application of this common-sense principle to the 
 explanation of the mystical consciousness. 
 
 As interpreted above there will be two moments in the 
 mystical situation : the one a moment of excited and intense 
 emotional attention or concentration in which consciousness 
 is raised to a supernormal degree of eflficiency as an organ 
 for the reception and realization of truth ; the other, the 
 influence of the transcendent to which this excited conscious- 
 ness is directed, and which will be capable of generating 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 485 
 
 content in the form of impressions to which consciousness 
 would not in its ordinary moods be susceptible. If we 
 suppose these two conditions then it is possible for us to 
 account for the whole content of the mystic vision, as intui- 
 tive. We may call the first movement, that of the excited 
 and concentrated consciousness, inspiration, and the second, 
 that of the generation of the superordinary impression, 
 revelation, and we will be able to see how the conditions of 
 realizing that superordinary content of consciousness, on 
 which the claims of mysticism are founded, will be supplied. 
 We go on then to consider two further points : (1) the 
 form in which the mystical content is realized, and (2) the 
 extent to which the criteria of knowledge may be applied to 
 this content. The first point involves a consideration of the 
 mode of conceiving and representing the content of the 
 mystical consciousness which we have seen to be super- 
 ordinary, and will not be disposable, we may suppose, by 
 the ordinary cognitive processes, which are those of direct 
 presentative and conceptual definition. There is no reason 
 for denying that some of the content thus obtained may be 
 amenable to the direct processes, and these will supply no 
 new problem. But some of the content, ap'i that the most 
 characteristic, will resist these processes and will have to be 
 conceived symholically if at all. The symbol is, as we have 
 seen, an indirect mode of representing and defining content. 
 In its relation to the direct modes it may be regarded either 
 as a preliminary method that is gradually replaced by the 
 more effective direct modes, or as having an application 
 at the point where direct definition of content ceases to 
 be possible. It is the symbolic mode of representation in 
 this superordinary field that we are treating here, and we 
 wish to consider further the question of the nature of sym- 
 bolic representation as well as its application to the content 
 of mysticism. The symbol, as we saw, is a mode of repre- 
 sentation that does not define content directly, but only by 
 way of suggestion and analogy. The effect of this is that 
 the symbol hangs more loosely to its content and may be 
 
486 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi, 
 
 selected from fields of experience widely different from that 
 in which the content is to be defined. The principal require- 
 ments of the symbol are (1) that it shall be more sensuous 
 than the content symbolized, (2) that it shall be taken from 
 some sphere of experience where it is not symbolic but directly 
 representative and defining, and (3) that it shall be related 
 to the content it is to symbolize either by suggestion or 
 analogy, preferably the latter. Take as illustrations of the 
 fine use of symbol, the vision recorded in Ezekiel xlvii. 1-12, 
 in which the full salvation which Jehovah is promising to 
 his people is figured as a river in which the water not only 
 fills the channel and supports an abundance of fish, but over- 
 flowsand fertilizes thewhole surrounding country; or thatother 
 vision of Ezekiel, in which he represents the divine govern- 
 ment of the world as a complicated system of wheels within 
 wheels; or the numerous visions of Swedenborg, in which 
 spiritual truth that could not be directly uttered is figured in 
 sensuous imagery. Literature is full of symbolic representa- 
 tions of this kind, and pictorial art and sculpture make a 
 larger use of this form of representation even than literature. 
 Take the group of the Laocoon as symbolizing a union of 
 despair and heroic courage, and the picture of the Sistine 
 Madonna as figuring the divinely idealized relation of mother 
 and child. The symbol is used here to express a meaning 
 that could not be embodied in any directly defining repre- 
 sentation. Nothing is more certain than the great extension 
 which the symbol makes possible to our capabilities for 
 realization and expression. We may figure to ourselves and, 
 dimly at least, shadow to others, meanings that are directly 
 unthinkable and inexpressible, and the mode in which this 
 is effected is invariably by the use of imagery that is more 
 sensuous than the content represented, imagery that has been 
 taken from some field of experience where it has a direct 
 application to content and which may be connected with 
 the new content by some relation of analogy. 
 
 Now, while the symbol has a wide application in the 
 ordinary fields of expression, its true home is in the mystical 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 487 
 
 sphere. We have seen that the very conditions under which 
 the superordioary content of the mystical consciousness is 
 obtained are conditions that would raise it for the most part 
 above the level of direct representation. We would have 
 to admit the possibility at least that this content would 
 prove recalcitrant to the direct modes of representing and 
 defining, and that the only possibility of bringing it into 
 intelligible relations with experience would be through 
 indirect definition of it by concept and figures that 
 directly define some portion of experience between which 
 and the new content an analogy can be traced. The general 
 validity of such an application of the terms of one sphere of 
 experience to another will not be denied, but the special use 
 that is involved in their application to mystical content will 
 be denied, and, in fact, is denied by influential thinkers. 
 We have seen in another connection how the school of 
 Herbert Spencer repudiates the attempt to represent the 
 transcendent in any form and rejects the symbol in this 
 sphere as a " pseudo-conception " that is wholly devoid of 
 real significance. We have already considered this position 
 in its general bearings, and wish here only to discuss briefly 
 its relation to mysticism. The difficulty with the school of 
 Spencer is likely to have its root in the denial that there 
 can be, in the first place, any real content of consciousness 
 that comes in through superordinary channels. This is also 
 the denial of positivism. But this radical denial involves, 
 as we have shown in another place, the cutting away of all 
 grounds for recognizing any transcendent term in reality 
 and the virtual assumption of the absoluteness of the finite 
 and relative. We do not propose here to go into the argu- 
 ment in detail. But the general position will be clear at 
 this stage of our discussion, that the only ground on which 
 the transcendent can be affirmed will be some element in 
 experience that necessitates its assumption, and we have 
 argued that the data which render the postulate of tran- 
 scendent reality necessary are also data which involve the 
 norms of characterization, and the whole process by which 
 
488 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part in. 
 
 the transcendent term is developed and determined as 
 absolute experience may be taken as our commentary on 
 that position. Furthermore, in regard to positivism, there 
 is the additional consideration that absoluteness must be 
 found somewhere, and if it is not found as a transcendent 
 presupposition of our finite and relative experience, then 
 our experience itself must be regarded as absolute. But we 
 do not need at this point to argue the essential absurdity of 
 such a supposition. A completely rational view would 
 seem to require the correlation of the mystic experience 
 with experience in general, and the admission that in it none 
 of the essential conditions of experience are set aside. Now, 
 it has become abundantly apparent that in general, objective 
 content originates in the first instance, in our experience, in the 
 form of impressions arising from some extra-conscious source. 
 This general condition differentiates our experience as finite 
 from the concept of absolute experience, in which the spring 
 of objectivity is internal and included. The condition we 
 have indicated here, the reference of impression-content to 
 extra-conscious springs, constitutes a differentia of the finite 
 and relative as distinguished from the absolute, and must be 
 regarded, therefore, as conditional of every form of objective 
 finite experience. We have reached the conclusion that the 
 mystical experience, in so far as it involves the getting of 
 new content ; that is, in so far as it is in any sense cognitive, 
 must be conceived under objective rather than subjective 
 categories. It is in truth a form of objective activity and 
 cannot claim exemption from the differentiating conditions 
 of objective finite experience. Admitting this, we are led 
 to correlate the impressions received through the mystical 
 channels with impressions received through other channels, 
 and to say that these impressions, in so far as the content is 
 superordinary, are received through the stimulating activity 
 of the transcendent, operating ultra-consciously in our 
 experience and producing effects there in essentially the 
 same way that sensations are produced in the first instance. 
 The transcendent impression will differ from the sensation 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 489 
 
 only in its content and not in the fundamental mode of 
 getting into consciousness as experience-content. 
 
 The position developed above is all-important in its 
 bearing on the general problem of the relation of the 
 mystical content to the conditions of knowledge and rational 
 belief. The doctrine here advocated does not involve the 
 supposition that this superordinary content comes into 
 consciousness, in the first instance, in any finished cognitive 
 form. The presumption is just the reverse, that it comes 
 as raw impression, and that the cognitive process by which 
 it is reduced to intelligible form will be intra-conscious. 
 Just here arises the importance of the reflection in which 
 we reached the conclusion that not only does the higher 
 consciousness involved in the mystic experience take the 
 form of emotion inforrned with rational insight, but that 
 this emotional organ is in an excited and highly susceptible 
 state so that we may expect that its cognitive processes will 
 partake of the rapidity and apparent immediacy of intuition. 
 The mystic experience begins with raw impression which is 
 reduced to cognitive form in consciousness with the rapidity 
 of intuition, and gives the appearance of immediate reception 
 in finished form. But this is never so, a^id is not at all 
 conceivable. That with which our own conscious processes 
 have nothing to do but simply to receive, must in the nature 
 of the case remain foreign and unintelligible matter. The 
 impress of intelligibility must be put on content by the 
 activity of our own faculties. If this condition is universal 
 and not to be set aside, we may ask what form it will take 
 in the excited and intense condition of consciousness here 
 supposed, and in the presupposition that the impressions have 
 their spring in the stimulations of the transcendent other. 
 Clearly, on the subjective side the term inspiration will be 
 in greater or less degrees applicable, while objectively the 
 term revelation will have corresponding degrees of appli- 
 cability. Let us consider then what meaning we are to 
 attach to these terms. Inspiration is manifestly a term that 
 applies only to an excited emotional consciousness, but the 
 
490 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part m. 
 
 special point which it emphasizes in relation to this con- 
 sciousness is not so much the strength and intensity 
 of the feeling as the activity of the cognitive norm at its 
 heart. The inspired man possesses, for the time, unusual 
 powers of apprehension and an unusual faculty of 
 realization ; that is, of rapid translation into intelligible 
 form. His cognitive powers seem to resolve themselves 
 into a faculty of immediate realization, and just in pro- 
 portion as they do so they also seem to become more purely 
 objective. Clearly, we here come upon the essentials of 
 inspiration, a subjective condition that renders consciousness 
 supernormally sensitive and cognitively active, and, afumctional 
 activity that is objective in its character and operates on the 
 new material supplied with the rapidity of intuition. 
 
 If now we turn our attention to. the other term, revela- 
 tion, we find that we have already made progress toward 
 the determination of its nature. We do not ascribe 
 ordinary impressions of the objective species to revelation 
 because we are conscious of the moment when they arise as 
 raw material, and this is distinguishable in consciousness 
 from the cognitive process by which they are developed into 
 intelligible forms. Our ordinary world does not come to us 
 as a completed product, but as a material which our 
 faculties must work up into intelligible forms. If we were 
 to suppose that ordinarily the processes of cognition were as 
 rapid and seemingly as immediate as they are in the 
 mystical activity, then no doubt our ordinary world would 
 wear the appearance of being revealed to us. The concept 
 of revelation, I am convinced, must not exclude but must 
 rather include, the cognitive operation of our own faculties, and 
 from this point of view it will be called revealed, because, owing 
 to the extreme rapidity of our own processes it will present 
 itself as more completely objective, and as seeming to come 
 to us as a finished product. But there is another differentia 
 of revelation that cannot be overlooked. The term revela- 
 tion is ordinarily restricted to that content which we owe to 
 the direct stimulation of the transcendent other, and we 
 
OHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 491 
 
 need to seek at this point some intelligible notion of what 
 is meant by the stimulation of the transcendent other. The 
 special difficulty is not as great here, I think, as we may 
 be led to suppose. In general we have been led to connect 
 our objective experience with the transcendent and to con- 
 ceive the finite individual as a posit of the absolute and as 
 deriving its internal nature, which, of course, contains the 
 norms of its activity, from the idea of it in the absolute 
 consciousness, and which its own processes of realization 
 render its own internal possession. In general then, we may 
 say that the subjective limit of our susceptibility to impres- 
 sions and our capacity to reduce these to intelligible forms will 
 place an objective limit on our world ; that is, on the extent 
 to which it may become experience-content. The general 
 law of experience in this aspect of it is, then, that the 
 extent of our world-content will vary with the susceptibility 
 and activity of our faculties. Now we have seen that the 
 mystical function involves a superordinary sensitivenes and 
 power of active realization, and we have only to make an 
 application of the general law in order to see how the 
 apprehension of a new and superordinary content will be 
 rendered possible. We are not required to consider the 
 setting aside of the ordinary conditions of obtaining content 
 in general, but rather the application of these conditions to a 
 special aspect of experience. The Twtion of revelation will 
 he completed then in the idea of the direct function of the 
 transcendent other in introducing a new and superordinary 
 content into our consciousness, the subjective condition of the 
 reception and realization of which, is that state of the subjective 
 consciousness to which the term inspiration is applicable. 
 
 That the mystical consciousness may be both inspired 
 and revelatory is not open to successful denial. The 
 confines of objective apprehension may be so enlarged as to 
 admit impressions of a superordinary kind which the 
 inspired organ will work into intelligible forms with the 
 rapidity of intuition. Admitting this, there remains to 
 consider (1) the relation of symbol to this revelatory process 
 
492 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 and (2) the vital question of the validity of the super- 
 ordinary content and the means of testing its truth which 
 our experience puts at our disposal. With reference to the 
 first question, it will be evident that the iirst resource o( 
 consciousness will be the symbol. The very character of 
 the content as superordinary will render it recalcitrant, in 
 the first instance at least, to the ordinary forms of direct 
 representation. These will have been developed in reference 
 to content of a lower grade. The only resource open, then, 
 of immediate use and availability, will be the indirect appli- 
 cation of some of the representative forms of experience to 
 this new content, and the indirect definition of it by means 
 of some analogy that is traceable between the superordinary 
 content and content of a more ordinary character. The 
 first representation will thus be symbolic. But it does not 
 follow that the mode of representation shall remain symbolic. 
 In the tendency of symbolism to give place to direct modes 
 of representation and definition we come upon a general law 
 of experience. The enlargement of the boundaries of experi- 
 ence involves, of course, the introduction of new content, 
 and the general law is to draw first on the resources of 
 experience in other fields for forms of representation that 
 will be indirectly representative of the new content. But 
 the law goes on to complete itself in the tendency to 
 replace symbolism by direct forms of representation and 
 definition, and thus to assign the new content a place in 
 the context of ordinary experience. The new content of 
 the mystical consciousness cannot be absolved from the 
 operation of this law, and we will find a constant effort on 
 the part of the human consciousness to reduce all its content 
 to the ordinary form. That it will be in a measure success- 
 ful we see no reason to deny, but the possibility remains 
 that some of this superordinary content will be of such a 
 character as not to be directly definable. The only mode to 
 which such content will be amenable is the symbolic, and 
 there will no doubt be a tendency to shade off gradually 
 into a sphere where the use even of the symbol becomes 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IK KNOWLEDGE. 493 
 
 dim and shadowy. It is an open question which philosophy 
 inay perhaps never be able to close, whether superordinary 
 content is possible of such a character that, while it takes 
 possession of us and is in a vague but intense way realized, 
 is yet unrepresentable by any conceivable mode, and there- 
 fore unutterable. The possibility of superordinary content of 
 a transcendent species seems to carry with it the possibility 
 of a content so transcendent that it defies all conceivable 
 modes of expression. In this type of experience, however, 
 we reach a point where the value of the content ceases to 
 be general and becomes purely individual and special. 
 
 The second and more important topic here is that of the 
 means which our experience supplies to us for determining 
 and testing the validity of the content of the mystical 
 consciousness. That this content may possess different 
 degrees of value we would be led to expect, and that the 
 vision itself supplies no criteria for sifting the false and 
 worthless from the true, or for testing the value of the true, 
 follows from the uniqueness of the experience. There can 
 be no criterion of the unique on its own plane, but the tests 
 of the unique must arise out of its relation to the whole of 
 experience. It is just here, I think, that a weakness will 
 be found in Eecejac's attempt to absolve mysticism from 
 science and the ordinary tests of truth and falsehood. This 
 gives the mystic a degree of freedom that he could not 
 otherwise enjoy, but he purchases it at the complete sacrifice 
 of any scientifi.c value which the mystical content might 
 otherwise possess. Now I do not mean by this to say that 
 the mystic ought to take his visions into the laboratory and 
 submit them to the rigid tests of physical phenomena, nor 
 do I say even that he is to submit himself unreservedly to 
 the tender mercies of the experimental psychologist. There 
 be things in heaven and earth that the touch of the 
 laboratory not only dissolves but destroys, and some of 
 these are our most cherished possessions. I should think it 
 profanation to submit the love which comprehends wife and 
 children, to the cold touch of the analyst ; but what I wish 
 
494 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt. hi. 
 
 to be understood as actually affirming here, is the conviction 
 that mysticism is carrying its justifiable protest against the 
 application to its results of some of the narrower and more 
 mechanical tests of science too far when it claims to occupy 
 an inaccessible position from the vantage ground of which it 
 can snap its fingers at all the ordinary tests of certitude. 
 The truer method is, in my opinion, to bring the super- 
 ordinary into as close touch as possible with the ordinary 
 concerns of life, even though in so doing it should be 
 brought into relation to some of the ordinary criteria of 
 knowledge. 
 
 How then shall we test the spirits to see whether they be 
 of God or of the evil one ? In the first place it will be found 
 that a portion, and perhaps a considerable portion, of the 
 content that is superordinary in its origin will gradually, 
 through the operation of forces on which we need not dwell, 
 become assimilated with the body of ordinary experience. 
 This will happen in all cases where it is possible to replace 
 the symbol with the direct form of representation. It is 
 clear that content that is capable of direct definition cannot 
 claim exemption from the tests of ordinary experience. Let 
 us suppose, however, that part, and that the most character- 
 istic, of the content of mysticism will always defy the ordinary 
 modes of representation and remain symbolic. Does the 
 fact that content is symbolically conceived raise it above the 
 posssibility of being tested in any way by experience ? The 
 very origin of the symbol itself precludes this. We have 
 seen that the symbol originates as a term of direct representa- 
 tion, and that it owes to this direct relation to one part of 
 experience, its power to indirectly represent another body of 
 experience- content. Only that, therefore, which resists 
 symbolization can claim exemption from the ordinary laws 
 of experience, and we have seen that such content can only 
 be of particular and personal value. But so far forth as 
 content can be symbolized, just to that extent does it confess 
 its amenability to the laws of experience. We must not, 
 however, take advantage of this to enforce the rules of 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 495 
 
 experience in the narrow spirit of martinets. A true sense 
 of the situation will shew that the business of testing must 
 be handled in a large and catholic spirit. Let us consider 
 then the practicable ways open to us for testing the value of 
 our mystical content. In the first place we must recognise 
 a two-sided law of experience as a whole. We have seen that 
 the test of truth in the relative sphere is coTigruity to our 
 experience as a whole, construing this to mean our concept 
 of the whole content of experience. But in connection with 
 this it must be recognised also that any proposed content when 
 once admitted becomes itself part of the whole experience, 
 and will influence subsequent determinations of the true and 
 false ; and it is true also that rejected elements of content 
 will have a negative influence in the same direction. It is 
 this fact, as we saw, that renders all relative standards shift- 
 ing and not absolutely valid. The cure of this instability 
 of the relative has been sought, however, in the connection of 
 the relative with an absolute experience. Bearing this in 
 mind we may say that an important test of the value of the 
 mystical content arises out of its relation of congruity or 
 incongruity with experience as a whole. We have seen how 
 the general principle of rationality is simply a formulation of 
 this congruity in the broadest conceivable sense. The 
 ultimate notion of rationality, as we saw, is that of congruity 
 with the whole of our experience, in which the good and true 
 have in the last analysis a content that is identical. It has 
 been shewn in other connections that this principle is the 
 final test of truth and falsehood, and that other tests may be 
 regarded simply as special forms of this one principle. 
 
 It is evident, now, that the superordinary content, by 
 virtue of its being open to symbolic representation, will have 
 a relation to the whole body of experience that will render 
 it amenable to this principle. In other words, the super- 
 ordinary content must fit into a general scheme of rationality, 
 it must be congruous with our notion of the content of 
 experience as a whole. This is not the same as saying that 
 it must be in agreement with any particular body of results 
 
496 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. paet in. 
 
 within experience. It may be impossible for us to work 
 out the details of harmony between different elements of 
 content both of which commend themselves as true. The 
 incongruity of internal elements must amount to contradic- 
 tion before it will be safe to say that either is false. The 
 criterion we have in mind is not one of special but of 
 general application. We have to recognise in this connec- 
 tion that there may be a fallible application of an infallible 
 principle ; but this is a contingency that besets all knowledge, 
 and from which no body of content can claim exemption. 
 The criterion of rationality may, however, be applied in 
 both a positive and negative form, and we may say (1) 
 positively and in general, that the truth or value of that 
 which is superordinary must, in the last analysis, be 
 determined by the general canon of rationality ; it must 
 prove itself able to fit congruously into the most adequate 
 concept of experience that is possible, and it must be in 
 complete harmony with the concept of absolute experience. 
 (2) Negatively and more specifically, that it must not be in 
 irreconcilable contradiction with the highest concept of 
 experience possible to us, nor must it remain in unmediable 
 contradiction with those special truths in experience which 
 are able to bear the application of all the criteria of truth. 
 In the application of these tests, however, it must not be 
 expected that the superordinary content will always or even 
 ordinarily submit to the rigour of scientific exactness. The 
 tests to which it is amenable are those of rationality rather 
 than of exact experiment or mathematical demonstration, 
 and even in the application of the tests of rationality it is no 
 thumb and finger method that may be applied. The tests 
 of rationality must be broadly construed in view of the fact 
 that all relative standards are shifting and unstable, and can 
 only reach permanence in the absolute. It is only from the 
 standpoint of an absolute experience which is approximately 
 but not completely realizable, that the criterion of rationality 
 becomes a test of absolute validity. Our experience as we 
 realize it is not a fixed quantity but is constantly changing. 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 497 
 
 and it is possible that the introduction of new content may 
 transform it altogether, and with the change make a modifica- 
 tion of our standards of rationality necessary. There is no 
 sphere where the tests of truth require to be more broadly 
 and discriminatingly handled than in relation to content 
 that wears the appearance, at least, of being superordinary. 
 In respect to such content in general, it is likely that a true 
 and adequate adjustment will be reached, if at all, not by 
 any formal or mechanical application of even the principle 
 of rationality, but rather as a result of that dialectic in 
 experience which is perpetually going on between what is 
 already established and that which is clamouring for admis- 
 sion and recognition. On one side of this process will be 
 the achieved content of experience with its tests and measur- 
 ing rods ready to try the pretensions of any new candidate 
 for admission into the commonwealth of truth, and on the 
 other will be the new content not only claiming admission 
 but also requiring a reconstruction of the criteria of 
 rationality. 
 
 It is in view of this dialectic that we wish in concluding 
 this chapter to consider the claims of the superordinary in 
 general. We have seen that, in the last analysis, the prin- 
 ciple of rationality rests on the identity of the good and 
 true, and it has been shown how this conception of the 
 principle leads to the complete incorporation of the theoretic 
 and practical interest into one, so that in the absolute the 
 judgment of truth and the judgment of worth will coalesce 
 into one judgment in which both moments will be included. 
 In actual experience, however, the unity is not fully 
 achieved but only approximated to, and it is through the 
 dialectic spoken of above that the approximation is effected. 
 The motive of the approximation is the presumption that in 
 the last analysis our world cannot be dualistic, but that the 
 content of the good and that of the true must be identical. 
 The denial of this presumption would, as we saw, be tanta- 
 mount to the reduction of our world to irrationality 
 and confusion. Now it is characteristic of superordinary 
 
 21 
 
498 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. pabt m. 
 
 content in general that its primary claim to consideration 
 arises out of its relation to the good rather than to the true, 
 and it will claim admission to the commonwealth of the 
 true because of its relation to the good. And it is on the 
 basis of this demand to be accepted as true because it is 
 good that its claims can be most intelligently tested. We 
 have reached a point here where it will be obvious, I think, 
 that the hard and fast separation of the motives of 
 theoretic truth from the motives of worth or value, which 
 some are attempting to enforce in the supposed interest of 
 scientific and religious truth, cannot be maintained. The 
 distinction is only relative after all, and while mechanical 
 science has its own proper ground-motive to which it must 
 adhere to the exclusion of the ground-motive of teleology, 
 yet we have seen that there is a point where experience 
 and, along with it, our world, becomes teleological, and it is 
 at this point that the notion of an end-category becomes a 
 vital term. While, therefore, mechanical science must 
 adhere to its mechanical motive and exclude the mystical 
 and superordinary from its own proper domains, yet the 
 problem of truth and falsehood, and with it science in the 
 broader sense, must include also the teleological sphere of 
 experience, and must recognise in fact that it is from this 
 higher point of view that the final issues of truth and 
 falsehood must be tried.^ Taking our stand then at that 
 point in experience where the end-categories of the true 
 and good assert themselves with the greatest cogency, we 
 may ask how, in the last resort, this claim of the super- 
 ordinary to be true because it is good is to be dealt with. We 
 can find no better answer than the following. That which 
 claims acceptance as true because it is good may in the 
 first place have its claim to being good directly tested by 
 
 ' This is. In fact, my answer to the plea of Professor Miinsterberg, who 
 seems to advocate a complete divorce of the two sets of considerations : the 
 result is a dualism that would be bad for both science and mysticism. 
 Recejac seems to favour the divorce in the interests of mysticism. I am 
 firm in the belief that what is needed is unification rather than divorce. 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 499 
 
 the application of the criteria of the good in general. The 
 author of The Mystic Bases of Knowledge limits these tests to 
 the ethical. Whatever can be brought under the category 
 of duty, he thinks, is to be accepted as true. This is a 
 restatement of the principle of the Kantian postulates, and is 
 unassailable as far as it goes. But the restriction of the 
 motives to the distinctively ethical would, in appearance at 
 least, exclude interests which are legitimately included under 
 the general category of the good. We are contending here 
 for a broad concept of good that will include the emotional 
 and aesthetic as well as the distinctively ethical, and what 
 we would propose as an amendment to the position we are 
 criticising is the substitution of the broader concept of good 
 for that of duty, which will be included in its scope. From 
 this broader standpoint the direct claims of the superordinary 
 content will be tested, and if it can be shown that our world 
 would realize a higher concept of good with the proposed 
 content included than it could were this content excluded, 
 the direct claim has been made out. There remains, then, 
 the indirect claim to be true because it is good, and this is 
 to be tried also on distinctively teleological grounds. We 
 may presume here that the relation of the proposed content 
 to the good is no longer in debate, and that this may be 
 taken as a station for further procedure. If we assume, 
 then, the ultimate identity of the content of the good and 
 the true as a principle of absolute experience, together with 
 the conclusion already established that the proposed content 
 is unmistakably good, or tributary to the good, I think we 
 will have a case for the application of the criteria developed 
 in the chapter on Knowledge and Belief. The problem here 
 is clearly not one of strict knowledge but rather of 
 belief, inasmuch as the insight of cognition or immediate 
 theoretic necessity is lacking. But there are gradations of 
 belief, and if we can make out, in view of the relation of the 
 proposed content to the good in general, that its denial 
 would be tantamount to a denial of the principle of ration- 
 ality and the reduction of our world to irrational chaos. 
 
500 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 then we have grounds for a belief that is a substantial 
 equivalent of knowledge. If, however, the certitude should 
 fall short of this objective necessity, it may still possess 
 legitimate degrees of acceptability ranging from the point of 
 subjective necessity through the moment of probability to 
 that of the merely possible but not provable. 
 
 It will be clear, I think, that while judgments which rest 
 on the grounds thus indicated cannot be admitted into the 
 sphere of mechanical science as such — and by that statement 
 I mean that it is not open to mechanical science to get 
 results in that way — yet the broader concept of science which 
 includes the teleological cannot refuse their admission, inas- 
 much as there may be just as valid grounds for certitude of 
 belief as there are for certitude of strict knowledge. Broadly 
 construed, science is the organ of truth and must include 
 the teleological as well as the mechanical, the judgment of 
 belief as well as its sterner sister, the judgment of knowledge. 
 
 As a final question, then, we may consider the general 
 relation of mysticism to the discovery of truth and the 
 enlargement of the content of knowledge. It cannot be 
 successfully denied, I think, that the mystical consciousness 
 when functionally active and under certain conditions, may 
 become an organ of new and superordinary impressions, or 
 that these raw materials may be reduced to intelligible form 
 with the rapidity of intuition. And in view of the general 
 relation of experience to the transcendent, it will be open to 
 affirm that the new content may take on an objective reve- 
 latory character. This being admitted as possible, the 
 whole question of the nature and worth of the content will 
 have to be to decide directly by its relation to the criteria 
 of the good, indirectly by its relation to the tests of rational 
 truth, and lastly, in view of that dialectic of experience 
 which is the final arbiter of the issues of knowledge. Let 
 us suppose, then, that the mystical content has borne suc- 
 cessfully the test of this dialectical process, and has proved 
 itself to be as persistent and as essential an element in 
 experience as the content of mechanical science itself. It only 
 
CHAP. IX. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT IN KNOWLEDGE. 501 
 
 remains to admit it as recognized content in a broad scheme 
 of knowledge, and to recognize the fact that to the ordinary 
 channels of knowledge the superordinary must, under certain 
 conditions, be added. 
 
 On the question of the value of the superordinary organs 
 of knowledge two extremes are, I think, to be avoided. We 
 can neither, with the mistaken champion of mechanical science, 
 deny all validity whatsoever to the superordinary, nor can 
 we go to the opposite extreme and, with the mystics, claim 
 exclusive validity for the mystical organ as against the 
 ordinary processes of science and metaphysics. In short, it 
 is not necessary for us to become either positivists or 
 mystical agnostics. But the claims of the mystical organs 
 may be judged on the plane of general knowledge, and in a 
 way that will not involve the overthrow of other legitimate 
 interests of truth. From this broad standpoint it would seem 
 in the highest degree rational to suppose, inasmuch as our 
 finite experience everywhere touches on the wider sphere of 
 an infinite and absolute experience, that the introduction of 
 superordinary content into our experience is not only 
 possible, but that under certain conditions of a unique 
 character, it may actually take place. And if this be 
 granted, and also the possibility of its assimilation to a 
 comprehensive scheme of rationality through the dialectic of 
 «xperience, it would follow that the question of the value of 
 the content thus obtained could only be decided in view of 
 the nature of the content and its relation to the end-categories 
 of experience. In short, its value, in the last analysis, would 
 be to decide as all other values are decided, in view of the 
 function that it performs in experience and the interests 
 that it conserves. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS— CONCLUSION. 
 
 In the last chapter of Part II. we devoted some space to the 
 development of the social root of the ethical consciousness. 
 We saw in that discussion that the sense of social law arises 
 out of the relation of the subject-consciousness of the ego to 
 the objective social consciousness, and that the claim of the 
 latter finds recognition from the former, in view of its larger 
 and higher rationality. In this internal recognition the sense 
 of law or obligation is born. We were also led to distinguish 
 between the juristic and the more distinctively ethical 
 aspects of law or obligation — the former applying directly 
 to the content of objective social good and only indirectly to 
 subjective good; while the latter reverses the order and applies 
 directly to the determination of subjective good, its aim 
 being to bring it into conformity with the requirements of 
 objective good. The social root of the ethical consciousness 
 thus becomes clear, but it has not as a rule found that 
 recognition among ethical thinkers which its importance 
 deserves. The tendency of the majority of those who 
 recognize a social ground of ethics at all is to make exclusive 
 claims for it and to deny the possibility of any extra-social 
 sources of morality. And with this exclusive claim there 
 usually goes an attempt to show how the fundamental 
 ethical categories have been developed in a purely external 
 manner until at some likely moment in the history of 
 
 502 
 
CHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 503 
 
 experience they have struck in and become thenceforward 
 internal. This is the device of the school of Herbert 
 Spencer, in which the favourite mode of procedure is to show 
 how through the pressure of external social, religious, and 
 civic restraints, the feeling of restraint at length becomes 
 internal as the feeling of obligation, and through the operation 
 of association is related to certain lines of conduct. In view 
 of this representation it is hardly necessary, I think, to 
 argue at length that if there is no ground of inner response 
 to these external pressures it is impossible to see how they 
 can become in any true sense internal. "We know well 
 enough how something can be impressed upon us as habitual, 
 and how it is possible to become even enslaved to habit. 
 In this way the habit of conforming to an external require- 
 ment may become so strong that we not only yield to it 
 spontaneously but it would be even difficult and painful to 
 go contra to custom. All this is clear enough, and if we 
 favour the concept of heredity of which Mr. Spencer is the 
 most distinguished exponent, as against' that of Weismann 
 and his school, we will be prepared to admit that these 
 acquired habits may be preserved and handed down by 
 inheritance to succeeding individuals as instinctive tendencies 
 to certain forms of reaction. All this may be conceded, and 
 yet I fail to see how we have come in sight of the ground of 
 a distinction that is truly internal. That which is truly 
 internal must be grounded in experience in such a way that 
 reflection will lead us to see its intrinsic rationality. But 
 however closely the merely habitual may become incor- 
 porated into our experience, the tendency of reflection is to 
 expose its true character and to reveal the fact that it has 
 no intrinsic reason for its existence, but owes its place and 
 acceptance to the fact that at one time in the history of 
 experience it had the opportunity to repeat itself a great 
 number of times until it had become habitual. Its status 
 in experience is thus resolvable, in the last analysis, into a 
 series of external repetitions which may have been to a 
 great degree accidental. It may turn out of course that 
 
504 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 the reaction that has thus become habitual, and then 
 instinctive, is also rational ; but this will be because of some 
 intrinsic relation between it and the whole of experience, and 
 will be only indirectly related, if at all, to the process by 
 which it has been actually introduced into experience. If the 
 notion of moral obligation is not to yield to reflection and be 
 permanently resolvable into something that is not obligatory ; 
 that is, if we are not to be doomed to witness a dissolution 
 of the ground of obligation, and a proof that the feeling or 
 notion of ought in relation to practice is, in the last resort, 
 without rational support, and, therefore, to reflection, an 
 illusion, we must seek for it some ground that will be intrinsic 
 to our experience. That ground, so far as the ethical 
 consciousness is rooted in social soil, we have found in the 
 recognition by the subject-consciousness of the ego, of the 
 higher rationality, and, therefore, the obligatoriness of the 
 claims of the objective social consciousness. 
 
 From the standpoint of social ethics there is far more 
 rationality in the position of Mr. Leslie Stephen, who finds 
 the basis of the sense of social obligation in what he calls 
 the tribal consciousness (following CliSbrd, I believe) than 
 there is in that of the school of Spencer ; for in the tribal 
 consciousness is involved that recognition of hind that is so 
 fundamental to sociology, and a tribal consciousness is more- 
 over a form of objective social consciousness, and would, as 
 such, carry with it the authority of the presumption of 
 superior rationality. We only feel disposed to demur to 
 Mr. Stephen's term tribal, as not being adequate to charac- 
 terize the whole objective social consciousness. That term 
 seems, moreover, to carry with it the implication that the 
 social consciousness is a sort of survival from the past 
 rather than an intrinsic and indispensable element of the 
 present consciousness. It must have been true at any 
 former period as it is true now, that consciousness in 
 becoming social involves the distinction of a subject-socius 
 from a larger objective aggregate called society, whose 
 requirements will seem to it to be law. This central 
 
OHAP. X. TEANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 505 
 
 germ of sociality must be presupposed in order that any 
 moral experience may be possible. If we assume then, as 
 I think we must, that a germ of morality may and normally 
 must develop out of social soil, the questions then arise 
 (1) as to the form which the social-moral consciousness 
 takes, and (2) the limit of obligation in pure social morality. 
 In order to discover an adequate point of view for an 
 answer to the first question, it will be necessary for us to 
 revert to the precise situation out of which the ethical moment 
 of consciousness originates. "We saw that it has its origin in 
 the point of contact between an egoistic impulse and an 
 objective social demand. The ethical conscience arises, 
 therefore, as a sense of some objective restraint on egoism, 
 and not only so, but as a sense that this restraint has its 
 source in the superior claim of the objective other which we 
 call our social self The restraint is therefore not only 
 objective but also altruistic. We find here, without doubt, 
 the ground on which Benjamin Kidd and his school base 
 their claim, that human nature is purely egoistic and that 
 the restraint of altruism is one that must be superimposed 
 from without. If it were possible to divorce the egoistic 
 consciousness from the objective consciousness of the other 
 there would be plausibility in such a view. But we do not 
 need to argue the impossibility of this disruption here. 
 The fundamental mistake of these thinkers consists in 
 making a cleft in human nature and lodging its altruistic 
 moment in some outer and transcendent power, which is 
 supposed to exercise its restraining function in a purely 
 external and despotic manner. These thinkers do not 
 realize, however, that their divorce if effected would 
 immediately sweep away the whole social organism, and 
 leave nothing but warring and irreconcilable fragments in 
 its place. The concept we have reached here will also 
 enable us to appreciate the truth in the contention of 
 Huxley, that the ethical moment is not involved in natural 
 selection, and at the same time to put a true construction 
 on its absence from that process. We have seen in our 
 
506 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 analysis of the biological individual in the last chapter of 
 Part II., that while the living organism from which internal 
 consciousness is absent is teleological, yet, inasmuch as it 
 lacks the inner principle by which alone ends are conceived, 
 there can be to it no distinction between subjective and 
 objective ends, and hence no inner dialectic. The dialectic, so 
 far as it can be supposed to exist at all, will be unconscious 
 and external to the inner life of the organism, whilp to the 
 organism itself the end will be undivided, and will involve in 
 its scope without distinction both the individual and the kind. 
 The end being thus one and undivided, natural selection, 
 which is a name for that end-seeking principle of the living 
 organism which, as we have seen, becomes incorporated with 
 its pulsive energy, will have the appearance of unscrupulous 
 egoism, since everywhere the organism, including the lower 
 stages even of animality, will seem to pursue its own good 
 through the ruthless disregard and destruction of other 
 individuals. It is to be said, however, in mitigation of this 
 view, that the spectacle even here is not purely egoistic, 
 inasmuch as it will be found that the same activity that is 
 individual-conserving will also be kind-conserving within 
 limits, and that what the process lacks in order to make it 
 truly altruistic is the moment of universality. The struggle 
 in the world of the plants and the lower animals rages 
 between limited groups called kinds and species and not 
 between individuals as such. Here then I think we have 
 the explanation of the ruthlessness of natural selection in 
 terms that enable us at the same time to understand the 
 absence of the ethical, and to recognize the fact that 
 natural selection cannot be represented as purely egoistic, 
 in view of the fact that it is kind-conserving in its very 
 constitution. The ethical moment, on the other hand, is 
 absent simply because the organism has not as yet become 
 internally conscious and is incapable of that distinction 
 between subjective and objective good on which the dialectic 
 between egoism and altruism depends. It is clear, however, 
 that when that distinction has once been conceived the 
 
CHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. SOT 
 
 ethical situation arises, and it is equally clear that the 
 altruistic will be an included moment in the constitution of 
 the ethical. At this point we return to the main problem, 
 that of the principle of obligation in the moral and juristic 
 spheres. We have seen that in general the objective social 
 consciousness claims authority over the subjective egoistic 
 consciousness and has its claim allowed, and we have also 
 seen that the species of obligation which we call ethical 
 arises out of the direct pressure of the altruistic claim upon 
 the egoistic impulse. The question then arises as to the 
 ultimate grounding of this principle of obligation in 
 experience, and it will be clear, I think, in the first place, 
 that the pulse of obligation, if we may use the phrase, is 
 one of will. The objective social asserts itself authorita- 
 tively over the ego and has its claim allowed. Here is the 
 meeting of the objective demand and the subjective assent 
 of will. This central point being determined, it would be 
 very easy to go on and develop a purely volistic concept of 
 the nature of obligation, tracing it to its roots, either in the 
 notion of mere arbitrary Jlai, or more philosophically, to the 
 root-category of the practical, which is the good, and there 
 would be a degree of rationality in the latter alternative. 
 The central category of will is the good, and we may assume 
 that the immediacy of ethical authority as well as of 
 obligation in general, will be a pulsation of good, and the 
 situation from this point of view may be truly characterized 
 as the claim of the objective social good upon the egoistic 
 will, which claim is allowed. This may be assumed, I say,^ 
 and yet we will not have reached a completely satisfactory 
 explanation of the whole fact of obligation. For we have 
 seen that it includes not only the claim of the objective 
 will but the assent of the subjective will, and that the feel- 
 ing of obligation arises in the subjective consciousness. Why 
 should the egoistic will assent to the claim and feel obliged 
 as it does ? Excluding the external methods of explanation 
 as presupposing that which they start out to account for, it 
 will be clear that the final explanation is not to be found 
 
508 IRANSOENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 either in will or good, considered abstractly, but rather in 
 some concrete principle that will voice the whole pressure 
 of experience. 
 
 If we take the situation as it stands we find that we may 
 describe it in the following terms. The claim of the 
 objective social consciousness to legislate for the subjective 
 egoistic consciousness, is the claim of a larger whole of 
 experience to legislate for a smaller whole and one that is 
 objectively included in the larger, and the assent of the 
 smaller whole to the claim is its recognition of the right of 
 the larger whole to take the attitude of authority. Now it 
 is clear that this transaction of wills cannot, in its last 
 grounds, be purely volistic, inasmuch as what we have to 
 ground here is not the assent of will to the good but the 
 assent of a will to the claim of authority put forth by the 
 will of a larger aggregate of experience. We simply describe 
 the transaction when we say that it is an affair of the will 
 and that it is immediately related to the practical category 
 of the good. The deeper moment of assent to the claim of the 
 objective will as right finds no grounding in such a statement, 
 and we only begin to have an inkling into its rationale 
 when we recognize the fact that the legislative will whose 
 claim is recognized as right is the will of a larger whole of 
 experience in which the self that assents to it finds itself 
 objectively iricluded. There must be then at the bottom of 
 this assent the feeling or insight that the whole interest of 
 the self, as well as the whole interest of the other, will be 
 conserved in the will of the larger and inclusive whole, while 
 in the egoistic will only the interest of a part will be con- 
 served, to the exclusion or at least the neglect, of the whole ; 
 and the assent of the egoistic will to the claim of the 
 altruistic will be simply the recognition of the rationality 
 of the claim that the whole, inasmuch as it includes the 
 parts, shall take precedence over the egoistic will of the 
 parts. The objective social will is the will of the larger 
 and inclusive whole, while the egoistic will is the will 
 of the smaller whole which, objectively, is an included 
 
CHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 50» 
 
 moment in the larger whole. This is evidently the 
 principle that explains why / as a private individual assent 
 to the claims of my family consciousness and as a family 
 individual yield allegiance to my consciousness of the claims 
 of society and the state. The phenomenon here is that of 
 an ever-enlarging and comprehending whole in which the 
 smaller wholes are objectively included and to which they 
 therefore yield allegiance. 
 
 The authority of this principle will not be absolutely 
 clear, however, until we have recognized the fact that it is 
 identical with what we have in another connection called the 
 principle of the highest rationality, and that this principle 
 rests on the supposition of the ultimate identity of the 
 content of the true and good. To be supremely rational is 
 tantamount then to being in perfect congruity with, and 
 therefore included in, both the categories of the true and the 
 good, and the principle of the highest rationality will be 
 open to two readings according to the species of content to 
 which it is applied ; that is, according as it is primarily 
 theoretic or practical. In the problem before us the situa- 
 tion is primarily one of will, and falls directly under the 
 category of the good. The theoretic reading will be the one 
 then that applies here, for the assent of the will of the lesser 
 whole to the practical demand of the larger and including 
 whole can only be completely rational if it fits into the 
 category of the highest truth also, and the point that we 
 wish to emphasize is that the assent of the will of the 
 smaller and included whole to that of the larger and 
 including whole, as right, finds its complete justification only 
 in the principle of rationality, which embodies the assump- 
 tion of the ultimate identity of the content of the true and 
 good. Ethical obligation involves in the last analysis the 
 ethically right, and the concept of right is not a pure 
 •category of will, although it is this in the first instance ; but 
 in the last resort it implies a synthesis of the practical and 
 theoretical in the presumption that what is really and funda- 
 mentally good is also really and fundamentally true. The 
 
510 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. paet iii. 
 
 assent to the demand of the will of the larger and 
 including whole as right, is therefore in the last resort 
 the recognition of its congruity with the principle of 
 the highest rationality, which in this instance involves the 
 ultimate conformity of the good to the true. The notion of 
 the right is in the last analysis that of the theoretic truth- 
 fulness of the legislative demand of the will. 
 
 We say with a measure of truth that the notion of right 
 is in the last analysis, that of conformity to the Divine will, 
 and less superficially, that it is the notion of conformity to 
 the Divine nature. The latter is manifestly the more 
 philosophical conception, hut it requires a great deal of 
 analysis to make its meaning intelligible. The position 
 involves two distinct propositions: (1) that the concept of 
 right involves the idea of conformity to some nature, and (2) 
 that this nature must in the last resort be the Divine nature, 
 or, speaking philosophically, the nature of the absolute. The 
 first proposition is one that we may interpret in the light of 
 results that have already been attained. To conform to a 
 nature is, in the last resort, to be in harmony with the 
 highest principle of that nature. Now we have seen that 
 the highest principle of a nature is a principle in which the 
 ultimate identity of what is true for it and what is good for 
 it, will be embodied, and that we have called the principle 
 of the highest rationality. The conformity of the concept of 
 right to a nature will then be resolvable into its harmony 
 with the highest rationality of that nature so that it will be 
 an expression of it. The second proposition involves a 
 further consideration on which we shall now enter. It is a 
 point of controversy whether the moment of transcendence 
 is involved in the ethical consciousness. A widespread 
 tendency of the time is to regard the basis of ethics as 
 purely social and to advocate its divorce not only from 
 religion but also from metaphysics. To this tendency we 
 have done full justice, I think, in recognizing the possibility 
 of a ground of right and obligation in the constitution of the 
 social nature. We do not deny, but wish to be understood 
 
CHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 511 
 
 as affirming, that we have here a sufficient basis for a science 
 of social ethics, and we admit the possibility of developing 
 this science up to a certain point without taking account 
 directly of its metaphysical presuppositions. But if the 
 question be put in this form ; whether a complete ethical 
 theory is possible without taking account of metaphysical 
 presuppositions, we are prepared to answer in the negative. 
 We have endeavoured to show that no science can complete 
 its foundations without taking account of the transcendent, 
 and it can be shown that ethics is even less able than other 
 sciences to neglect its metaphysical presuppositions. 
 
 In order to make this demonstrably clear we have only to 
 consider the ethical problem (1) in relation to the funda- 
 mental ethical situation and (2) in relation to fundamental 
 categories of the ethical consciousness. If we consider the 
 situation out of which the ethical experience grows we find 
 that it is essentially the relation of a lesser whole of 
 experience to a larger and including whole, and the ethical 
 consciousness which is inner to the lesser whole, takes the 
 form of assent to the legislative claims of the larger whole 
 as right. It is clear that the determinative element in the 
 experience is the concept of a whole of experience which is 
 inclusive of lesser individual wholes, and that the conscious- 
 ness of obligation arises out of the prior fact of inclusiveness. 
 It is true, however, that the fact and the consequent feeling 
 of obligation could be only relative if the whole in which 
 the inclusion is effected were to be conceived, in the last 
 analysis, as a fragment of a larger whole or as a whole that 
 only included part of a larger content of reality. I say that 
 if we attempt to conceive such a situation as final we 
 reduce the fact of inclusion to relativity and impair the 
 character of the moment of obligation. For the one 
 quality of ethical obligation that has resisted all attacks and 
 proved itself unassailable is its unconditionalness. Dr. 
 Francis L. Patton has well said that there is a fundamental 
 difference between the two propositions "You had better 
 not " and " You ought not." The former leaves an option to 
 
512 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part hi. 
 
 the will and contains the presumption that its injunction 
 may be conditionally neglected or disobeyed, but the ethical 
 " You ought not " leaves no alternative. The possibility of 
 conditional neglect or disobedience not only does not enter 
 by implication but is flatly excluded, and that, as we have 
 shown, by the assenting consciousness itself in its recognition 
 of the command as right. We are not advocating an 
 absolute system of ethics here, but rather a system that will 
 have the recognition of the absolute in it. And the point 
 of vital interest is the fact that the unconditionalness of the 
 central pulse of morality cannot be completely grounded 
 unless we carry our notion of a whole of experience back to 
 the absolute and conceive the absolute experience as an 
 all-comprehending whole in which is included the entire 
 content of reality. It is clear that in the last analysis a 
 conditioned or finite whole can speak only with a conditioned 
 authority, and that the individual consciousness may be 
 able to assert itself against the command from a point of 
 view outside of or transcending it. This is precluded by the 
 very notion of moral obligation. It follows then that there 
 is no possible standpoint of individual self-assertion outside 
 of or transcending the final point in experience from which 
 the moral authority emanates. There is no escape from the 
 conclusion that the whole of experience that is presupposed, 
 in all morality as the ground of its central category, is 
 absolute. The finite social will legislates and has its 
 authority recognized unconditionally in the human con- 
 science only because the authority which it utters has its 
 roots in an absolute and all-inclusive experience whose will 
 is absolutely and unconditionally binding, and it is the 
 entrance of this moment of absoluteness into the finite 
 aggregates that makes it at all possible for them to voice 
 our unconditional demand. 
 
 The principal objective categories of the ethical conscious- 
 ness are the right and the good. In its relation to the 
 ought or the category of obligation which we have con- 
 sidered above, the right is the ought conceived objectively 
 
CHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 513 
 
 as content, and when the content of obligation is said to be 
 right we mean, in the last analysis, that it is in conformity 
 with the absolute will which expresses the absolute nature. 
 There is, it is true, a relative right, or rather a right of 
 which a finite will is the organ. The mandate of the social 
 will is right to the individual ego. But it would be travel- 
 ling the old road over again to show how, after all, the right of 
 a finite will can be only relative, and will be recognized as 
 such until it has been grounded in the will of an absolute 
 experience, when it becomes unconditional. We are obliged 
 to seek the ultimate standard of right just where we seek the 
 ultimate standard of truth, in the nature of an absolute 
 experience, and the point of immediate relation is the 
 absolute's objective assertion of itself as will. If we con- 
 sider the right, on the other hand, in relation to the good, it 
 still remains a category of content, and qualifies the content 
 of good from a somewhat different point of view. It is in 
 its connection with the end-category of good that its relation 
 to the ultimate principle of rationality is most clearly made 
 out. To say that the content of good is right, is in the first 
 instance, to say that it conforms to the will of a finite 
 including nature, and, more fundamentally, that it is in 
 agreement with the principle of highest rationality in that 
 nature. But we have seen that to stop here would leave our 
 right relative and uncertain by leaving open the possibility of a 
 point of view from which it might not be right, or might be 
 even positively wrong, and here, we see in its relation to the 
 good, that to stop short with the finite would leave open the 
 possibility of a point of view from which our right might not 
 be good or might be positively bad. The very notion is 
 irrational, however, and we feel obliged to go on until we have 
 adequately and stably grounded the relation of the right and 
 the good in the principle of absolute rationality, which 
 involves the identity of the true and the good, and therefore 
 guarantees that in the last analysis there shall be no point 
 of view from which a thing may be pronounced right that 
 is not included in a point of view from which it may also 
 
 2k 
 
51 4 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE. part m. 
 
 be pronounced good. It is clear then that there is no stable 
 and adequate ground for the category of right outside of 
 the nature of the absolute. 
 
 There remains then the category of the good which is the 
 end-category of the ethical consciousness. The good is that 
 which satisfies the practical demand of an experience as a 
 whole, it being understood that this demand includes the 
 interests of feeling, and the good takes on ethical character 
 when it is included in the content of a larger whole. Now, 
 it is only when we abstract the notion of egoistic good from 
 the larger content, that it will seem to be in a sense devoid of 
 ethical significance. If we restore the relation, however, 
 we will find the egoistic good included in the ethical notion 
 of objective good, inasmuch as the ethical requirement arises, 
 as we have seen, as a direct pressure upon the egoistic 
 impulse. It is possible, of course, for the egoistic self to 
 assert itself against the ethical and to conceive its good to 
 be extra-ethical if not antagonistic to the ethical; but this, 
 instead of taking it out of ethical categories, simply brings it 
 under the categories of the lad and wrong. We may 
 assume then that the ethical good in the wide sense in 
 which we use the term in these discussions, will be inclusive 
 of all real good. And the question we have to consider 
 here is whether an ultimate and satisfactory concept of good 
 is possible without taking the metaphysical principle of 
 transcendence into account. Upon this question the results 
 of the consideration of the distinction between the good and 
 the bad have a direct bearing. We saw in that discussion 
 that no stable and satisfactory concept of good could be 
 achieved until we had referred the relative distinction back 
 to its roots in an absolute experience ; that otherwise, the 
 good, as well as the true, would become the plaything of 
 expediency. That conclusion bears directly here, and there is 
 the additional consideration developed in connection with the 
 nature of ethical obligation, that the claim of any good to be 
 legislative, and the assent to that claim on the part of the 
 egoistic will, involves, in the last analysis, the absolute 
 
OHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 515 
 
 completeness of the experience whose content the good in 
 question is. The considerations that bear on the category 
 of good and which lead to its metaphysical grounding are 
 thus parallel to those that bear on the other ethical categories. 
 In ethics, in general, it is necessary therefore, in order to 
 render its principles adequate and stable, that they be 
 ultimately grounded in the concept of an absolute experience. 
 Lest this mode of considering the category of the good 
 should seem to be too formal, it may be well to put the same 
 consideration in a somewhat different form. "We have seen 
 that the whole socio-ethical situation is reducible, in the last 
 resort, to the basis of a dialectic between an egoistic con- 
 sciousness that tends to appropriate its other for its own self- 
 realization and an objective altruistic consciousness that 
 includes the egoistic good, and, by virtue of being the larger 
 and including whole, takes the legislative attitude toward 
 the egoistic self. We have said that ethically this claim is 
 allowed, and that the assent of conscience is unconditional. 
 Now, it is to be observed here that the social claim is not 
 allowed in this unconditional sense. It is only in the 
 ethical moment that the egoistic claim is completely waived 
 as a separate claim. In the social and socio-political, this 
 claim persists as an important and often disturbing element. 
 We have seen in the chapter on the Consciousness of Com- 
 munity, Part II., how the maintenance of this point of 
 independent self-assertion constitutes a vital point in the social 
 and political situation. Here the dualism is in a sense a final 
 term, and the whole of political and social theory is obliged 
 to reckon with the inextinguishable claim of the individual 
 ego to a right to act from an ultra-social and ultra-political 
 standpoint. This dualism could be overcome only by con- 
 ceiving an absolutely perfect state or society in which the 
 whole interest of the individual would be completely 
 included and conserved. In short, the concepts of sociology 
 and politics are relative in their character, and can be 
 metaphysically grounded only in the concept of the absolute. 
 It is to be observed, however, that the connection of the 
 
516 TRANSCENDENT FACTOR IN KNOWLEDGE, part hi. 
 
 relative terms with their metaphysical implicates is mediate, 
 and may in a sense he neglected, in the direct scientific 
 treatment of social and political phenomena, whereas the 
 relation of the ethical consciousness to the metaphysical 
 is much more direct and immediate. In the ethical claim 
 of the objective consciousness to be legislative, and in the 
 unconditional assent of the subject to that claim, there is a 
 moment of absoluteness involved. For the unconditional 
 assent and the complete waiving ly the egoistic will of its 
 claim as in any sense outside of and over against the ethical, 
 is completely irrational and absurd unless we suppose that a 
 recognition of the absoluteness of the objective claim enters as a 
 constitutive factor into the determination of the ethical con- 
 sciousness. It appears, then, that the relation of the 
 metaphysical to the groundwork of ethical science and 
 ethical theory is even more close and vital than is its 
 relation to the groundwork of science in general. 
 
 The relation of ethics to religion involves some con- 
 siderations not directly included in the metaphysical 
 groundwork. It will be clear, I think, from the discussion 
 just concluded that the metaphysic of ethics grounds it in 
 the nature and will of an absolute experience, and that it 
 occupies in this respect common ground with religion. We 
 have seen, however, that the religious consciousness arises, 
 in the first instance, out of the finite self s conscious relation 
 to a transcendent other, and that this relation is perfectly 
 concrete and comprehensive and not distinctively a relation 
 of will. There is central to it, of course, a relation of will, 
 but the whole relation is more concrete than the ethical, 
 and may be expected, therefore, to be richer in aesthetic 
 and emotional elements. Morality must be touched with 
 emotion and also with the sense of beauty, before it can 
 become in the truest sense religious. The point of interest 
 here is not, however, one of religious expression, but rather 
 one of essential constitution. The ethical, as we have seen, 
 is in the first instance an aspect of the social, and arises 
 out of our consciousness of interaction with our fellows or 
 
CHAP. X. TRANSCENDENT GROUND OF ETHICS. 51? 
 
 social others, while ultimately, as we have seen, it involves 
 the transcendence of this social interaction in a relation to 
 an absolute experience. The most vital and distinctive 
 point of connection between the ethical and the religious 
 arises, however, in the subject-consciousness through the 
 sense of personal relationship with God. It is through this 
 personal relationship — that is, a connection in which is 
 included the originative thought and the realizing and 
 conserving purpose and love of God, the object of religion — 
 that our finite individuality is grounded and conserved, and 
 this relationship, as we saw, is the basis of our feeling or 
 consciousness, of both dependence and free, self-initiative 
 activity. Eight here, then, we discover the point of ultimate 
 relationship between ethics and religion. The spring of 
 both is the personal relation of God to the subjective indi- 
 vidual consciousness, but the personal root of religion is the 
 feeling of dependence, while the personal root of ethics is 
 the feeling of individual freedom, the inner consciousness that 
 the individual that asserts itself is real. We find here the 
 ultimate distinction between the ethical and the religious, 
 and it is also here that we find the ultimate point of rela- 
 tion and origination. For it will be clear that the two 
 moments are inseparable, and that the soul of man only 
 realizes its true status when it affirms in one concrete pulse 
 its dependence and its freedom. It will be clear also that 
 religion will be complete only when it includes in it the 
 moment of free ethical assertion, and that ethics will be 
 able to perfect itself only by including in its assertion of 
 freedom the religious moment of personal dependence on 
 the transcendent ground. 
 
CONCLUSION. 
 
 The course of reflection embodied in this volume tends to 
 the justification of two propositions that are, in the last 
 analysis, one. The first proposition is that the world is 
 through and through, experience, and the second, that the 
 world is through and through, rational. That the world is 
 through and through experience we may be pardoned, I 
 think, for regarding as demonstrated. There is no other 
 concept that has even the same grade of efficacy in enab- 
 ling us to interpret our world and render it intelligible. 
 We have found it to be almost self-evident that anything in 
 order to become in any sense thinkable must be brought in 
 some way within the notion of experience; and it has 
 appeared in the course of these investigations that in the 
 last analysis the fault of that style of thinking which effects 
 a divorce between the relative and the absolute, and then 
 reduces the former to a dialectic of appearance without 
 reality and the latter to a self-isolating and therefore un- 
 approachable thing in itself, has its root in a false or 
 inadequate notion of experience. Let us adopt that concept 
 of experience which makes it inclusive of all reality as its 
 content and we will be able to find ample scope within this 
 concept for both relative and absolute, and for a firm 
 grounding of their distinction and relation. And this will 
 make it possible for us to lay the groundwork of a theory 
 of knowledge that will be in some measure adequate and 
 satisfactory. 
 
 518 
 
CONCLUSION. 519 
 
 The second proposition, that the world is through and 
 through rational, is, when we understand the situation, a 
 necessary assumption of both science and philosophy, for 
 when we submit the methods of investigation that are employed 
 in the explanation of any content to analysis, we find that 
 they set out upon the presumption that some sort of orderly 
 connection prevails among its parts which has the effect of 
 reducing it to system, and thus renders it open to inquiry. 
 The notion of system, in germinal form at least and hypo- 
 thetically affirmed, is the norm of all investigation, and it is 
 also, as we have abundantly shown, the norm of rationality. 
 The proposition that the world is through and through 
 rational is only another way of saying that it is internally 
 and through and through systematic. But the notion of 
 system is unintelligible apart from the concept of experi- 
 ence. There is no concept of the world that can render the 
 hypothetical assumption of system with which science starts 
 either plausible or tenable except that of experience. The 
 notion of system is in its essence that of an organized whole 
 of reality, and an organized whole of reality is unthinkable 
 except as an organized content of experience. The concept of 
 experience is basal, therefore, and is necessary to the 
 grounding of the notion of system, and, in the last analysis, 
 the notion of rationality. "We have seen how the principle 
 of rationality takes its highest form as a statement of the 
 identity of the whole content of absolute experience, in 
 relation to the categories of the true and good. The notion 
 of experience is therefore fundamental, and that of rationality 
 grows immediately out of the inter-relations of its content 
 as a whole. 
 
 The relation of knowledge to experience is in the last 
 resort analogous to that of rationality to experience. The 
 notion of knowledge is that of the internal rationality of experi- 
 ence as a whole and in all its parts, and an adequate theory 
 of knowledge will involve the systematic exhibition in detail 
 of this rationality, by the reduction of every part of the known 
 and knowable to a basis of fundamental principles in experience. 
 
520 CONCLUSION. 
 
 We know only as we are able to define content in terms of 
 experience and to exhibit its congruity with the fundamental 
 principle of rationality. So conceived, knowledge includes 
 every form of intelligibility, and there is no sphere of reality 
 that can cut itself off from the possibility, at least, of being 
 reduced to an intelligible form. Whatever limit knowledge 
 may strike must be come upon in the effort to know, and 
 should a real limit be found it would no doubt present itself 
 as something altogether opaque and impenetrable, and 
 therefore neglectible in a rational scheme. That the 
 possibility of knowledge cannot be limited except in the 
 effort to know follows from the relation of knowledge to the 
 more fundamental concept of experience. The activity of 
 knowing must be conceived as internal to the broader 
 activity of experience, and it may be regarded as the effort 
 to define the content of experience directly or indirectly by 
 means of presentation, concept, and symbol, to the end that 
 this content may be not only real but intelligible. How is 
 it possible then to dogmatize about the limit of this effort, or 
 to fix any bounds that are not discovered in the process of 
 knowing ? The criteria of knowledge are also found, as we 
 have seen, in principles of experience. This is not open . to 
 dispute in the sphere of what is called experimental inquiry, 
 for a test in this field is simply the application of the deter- 
 mined in experience to the undetermined, in order to reduce 
 it to the determinate form. It is not so generally recognized, 
 however, that all the indirect and relative tests have a 
 corresponding relation to experience. The test of .necessity 
 consists in general in bringing the principle of some whole 
 of experience to bear on its parts in order to determine 
 them, while in the last analysis the test of rationality itself, 
 in its highest form, consists in the application to some 
 content of finite experience of the unitary principle of an 
 experience that is absolute and complete. The whole of 
 knowledge then, including both its process and its criteria, 
 is to be conceived as internal to experience. 
 
 There are, as we have endeavoured to make clear, two 
 
CONCLUSION. 521 
 
 fundamental modes of reducing the content of experience to 
 intelligible form. The one we have called mechanical, the 
 other teleological, or perhaps a better name for this species 
 would be spiritual. Both modes are to be conceived as 
 rational, and therefore as included modes of experience, and 
 both are subject to the canons of rational necessity, but in a 
 somewhat different way. Now, it is important that we 
 should see that the mechanical and the spiritual modes of 
 apprehension do not involve a different content of reality, 
 but are rather different modes of conceiving a common 
 content. It is the one world that is both mechanical and 
 spiritual, and the mechanical and the spiritual are, therefore, 
 alike aspects or modes of reality, and are grounded in the 
 nature of the real. The world is mechanical in so far as we 
 are able to conceive it under the categories of quantity and 
 the form of externally acting causal agency, and also in so far 
 as its ultimate elements are representable in the terms of 
 those individua minima investigated in a former chapter. ^ 
 The concept of the world that we call mechanical is com- 
 pleted, as we have seen, in the notion of an absolute whole 
 of experience, in which the parts and elements are conceived 
 to bear a common relation to some unitary principle, the 
 inter-relations of the parts and elements themselves being 
 conceived as quantitative and external. The mechanical 
 mode of organization is therefore that of composition, and 
 the notion of a pure mechanism would no doubt be achieved 
 by the application of the mathematical calculus to the 
 notion of a composition of forces. That mechanism has any 
 limit on its own plane must be denied. The mechanical 
 aspect of the world is absolutely universal and coextensive 
 with reality, and we may look in vain for gaps in its armour. 
 If the spiritual must depend for its right to be, on the 
 existence of crevices and gaps in mechanism then the 
 spiritual is doomed, for it can safely be predicted that no 
 such gaps will be found. The spiritual mode of conceiving 
 
 ^ Chap. VIII. Grounding of Relative Conceptions — Theme, Mechanism, 
 and Teleology. 
 
522 CONCLUSION. 
 
 the real asserts itself in its own right, and is as universal 
 an aspect of the world as mechanism itself. But it does 
 not assert itself as a substitute for mechanism, but by way 
 of qualitative transcendence. We do not reach the spiritual 
 by co-ordinating it with the mechanical, but by recognizing 
 that there is an internal qualitative difference by virtue of 
 which we _pa8s from the mechanical to the spiritual, 
 which is a mode of conceiving the real that at the same time 
 transcends and conserves the mechanical. For we have 
 seen that the notion of the spiritual agency is, in the last 
 analysis, that of internal agency which can be conceived only 
 as a function of an internally conscious individual that is the 
 bearer of a self-conscious activity of thought, volition, and love 
 — an activity that is therefore, progressive and end-realizing, 
 and that operates objectively under the principle of supreme 
 rationality — the notion of the ultimate identity of the true 
 and good. We may represent the form of individuality in 
 which the spiritual activity is embodied and realized by 
 the phrase individvM maxima, and we may then say that 
 mechanically the world falls into quantitative relations 
 under the category of indimdua minima, while spiritually 
 its relations become qualitative and including, under the 
 category of individua maxima. But when we wish to 
 conceive the world adequately, as an absolute whole of 
 reality we must represent it under the notion of an 
 experience in which the mechanical is ever finding itself 
 transcended and comprehended in the spiritual, and in which 
 the real must be conceived, therefore, as in the last resort 
 spiritual. 
 
 The question of the criteria of knowledge may also, in the 
 last analysis, be brought down to this dual basis. The tests 
 of mechanical knowledge have already been well developed 
 in the sciences and in formal logic, and the claim of the 
 results of mechanical investigation to be regarded as know- 
 ledge, may be taken, as in the present time, incontestable. 
 The truth is, that the tendency has been on the part of the 
 mechanical to make exclusive claims and to deny the 
 
CONCLUSION. 523 
 
 possibility of a knowledge under spiritual categories. This 
 exclusrveness we have resisted, and shall continue to resist. 
 From the standpoint of controversy the whole effort of this 
 volume may be regaTded as a plea for the rights of the 
 spiritual and for the reality of spiritual knowledge. But 
 the fundamental motive of the effort here embodied has 
 been constructive and comprehensive rather than contro- 
 versial. The conviction of this book is that in an adequate 
 concept of knowledge there is not only scope but need for 
 both the mechanical and the spiritual categories, and when 
 we af&rm that the world is in the last analysis spiritual, we 
 believe that we are af&rming a proposition that mechanism, 
 when it completely understands itself, will also affirm. And 
 when in the development of the criteria of knowledge we 
 reach the conclusion that the principle of all knowledge 
 rests ultimately in the unity of the true and the good, we 
 do not feel that we are uttering a partisan proposition, but 
 rather one in which all true lovers of knowledge can join. 
 
 THE END. 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE. 
 
 On the distinction between the that and the what, as hearing 
 on the discussion of existence in Chapter IV., Part II. 
 
 It will be obvious that the discussion of existence in Chapter 
 IV., Part II., has an important bearing on the now familiar 
 distinction between the that and the what. If we rigidly 
 separate the that from the what it will be found to be 
 identical with bare existence ; whereas, in so far as it seems 
 to involve more than this, the added meaning will be found, 
 on analysis, to be due to the unconscious reading into it of 
 the meaning of the what. For it is clear that the question 
 of the what is that of the definition of content, and if this be 
 strictly abstracted from, there remains nothing for the that 
 to signify but simple presence in either presentational or 
 conceptual form. The presentation of content is insepar- 
 able, it is true, from some degree of definition, but this only 
 proves that in reality no separation of the that from the 
 what is possible. The problem of the that arises only when 
 lare presence is abstracted from the process by which content 
 is defined and determined, and the attempt is made to con- 
 sider it by itself. Thus the question of bare existence 
 which arises is a sheer abstraction without significance for 
 reality, until it is restored to its connection with the concrete 
 
 and becomes a question of determinate being. 
 
 524 
 
ADDENDA. 525 
 
 Apart, then, from mere presence in presentational or con- 
 ceptual form, the notion of the that has no meaning. It 
 is only when the what is included in the consideration and 
 the .question becomes one of determiTiate existence that it 
 acquires any import for reality. Thus, if we take for illus- 
 tration the question of God's existence and shift the emphasis, 
 the point of contention here will become clear. When the 
 question of God's existence is mooted it may mean either 
 " does God exist," or " does God exist ? " The first form is 
 purely and simply a logical paradox, since it involves the 
 attempt to translate the presumptive point of the judging 
 activity in general into the predicate of a special judgment. 
 The criticism of the ontological proof has long since made it 
 clear that bare existence cannot be a predicate. The second 
 form alone has real significance, but it is a question of the 
 what; of determinate being, rather than one of bare existence. 
 Existence as presence in presentational or conceptual form 
 is assumed as the presumptive point of the judgment, and 
 the question in reality takes the following form : " Is the 
 existent such that from some real point of view it may be 
 defined as God ? " 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Agnosticism, 10. 
 
 Aristodemus, 325. 
 
 Aristotelian logic, 95, 97 ; concept, 
 
 96. 
 Aristotle, 94, 175, 295, 326, 334. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 432, 441. 
 Augustine, 333, 363, 448, 449, 450. 
 
 B 
 Baldwin, J. Mark, 195, 241, 291. 
 Berkeley, 126, 181. 
 Berkeley-Lotzeau doctrine of 
 
 space, 126. 
 Blair, Thomas, 426, 427. 
 Bradley, P. H., 30, 31, 52, 55, 58, 
 
 59, 61, 62. 
 Buddhism, 452. 
 
 
 Caird, E., 16. 
 Chinese idol, 59. 
 Christ, 350. 
 
 Christian, 247, 260, 314, 350. 
 Christian thinkers, early, 49. 
 Christianity, founder of, 350, 452. 
 Comte, Auguste, 4, 6, 29. 
 Copernicus, 187. 
 
 D 
 Darwinian-Hegelian category of 
 development, 477. 
 
 Descartes, 25. 
 Dewey, 34. 
 Dialecticians, 29. 
 Dionysius, 27. 
 
 E 
 Edwards, Jonathan, 448. 
 Eleatic, 55, 57, 58, 60. 
 Elijah the Tishbite, 23. 
 Empiricism, 1. 
 Engliah-Kantism, 4. 
 
 ,, Positivism, 6. 
 
 „ Kantians, 8. 
 Epicurus, 386. 
 Evolution, 1. 
 Existence, 153 et al. 
 Ezekiel, 486. 
 
 P 
 Pine, H. B., 144. 
 FouilUe, 81. 
 
 G 
 Giddings, 196, 290. 
 Greco-Jewish, 260. 
 Greek, 260, 295, 325, 326. 
 Green, Thomas Hill, 11, 16. 
 
 H 
 Hamilton, Sir Wm., 4, 6. 
 Harris, Wm. T., 12, 173. 
 Hebraism, 441. 
 
 526 
 
INDEX. 
 
 527 
 
 Hegel, 2, 29, 96, 97, 98, 470. 
 
 Hegelianism, 3, 9, 16, 17, 29. 
 
 Heracleitus, 174, 179, 396. 
 
 Herbartian, 57. 
 
 Hobbes, 294. 
 
 Hume, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 29, 30, 111, 
 112, 123, 124, 136, 140, 151, 160, 
 164, 165, 174, 181, 184, 208, 463. 
 
 Huxley, 505. 
 
 I 
 Islatnism, 452. 
 
 J 
 James, Wm., 32, 38, 75, 123, 366, 
 
 436. 
 Jehovah, 486. 
 Jesus, 350. 
 
 Johannean type, 350. 
 Judaism, 452. 
 
 K 
 
 Kant, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 30, 49, 76, 77, 
 98, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 124, 
 125, 128, 132, 135, 151, 152, 153, 
 157, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 
 226, 244, 245, 249, 337, 338, 344, 
 353, 382, 383, 387, 389, 402, 403, 
 404, 405, 410, 414. 
 
 Kantism, 2, 9, 13. 
 
 Kidd, Benjamin, 294, 430, 431, 
 505. 
 
 L 
 
 Ladd, 102, 338. 
 
 Latin tongue, 260. 
 
 Laoeoon, 486. 
 
 Xe^w, \oyos, 260. 
 
 Legislation, 299. 
 
 Leibnitz, 25, 200, 226, 274, 419. 
 
 Leibnitzian monad, 359. 
 
 Locke, 12, 30, 163, 165, 181, 183, 
 220, 221, 424, 445, 473. 
 
 Lewes, G. H., 5, 6. 
 
 Lotze, 3, 13, 45, 97, 98, 126, 127, 
 199, 200, 201, 215, 338, 340, 341, 
 359, 432, 441, 442, 473. 
 
 Lotzean doctrine of things, 202. 
 
 M 
 Manichaeans, 448. 
 Marshall, H. R., 430, 431. 
 Master, 350. 
 M'Cosh, 28, 89. 
 Metaphysics, 323 et aX. 
 Mill, James, 4. 
 MiU, J. S., 4, 5, 165. 
 Mohammedan paradise, 352. 
 Morgan, Lloyd, 69. 
 Moslem, 352. 
 Munchausen, 347. 
 Munsterberg, 498. 
 Mystics, 45, 50. 
 
 N 
 Neo-Bmpiricism, 13. 
 Neo-Positivism, 6, 8, 9, 10. 
 Neo-Rationalism, 11, 13. 
 Neo-Rationalistic school, 15. 
 
 O 
 
 Ontologists, 29. 
 
 Patton, F. L., 511. 
 Paulsen, Fr., 463. 
 Persona, 260. 
 Pessimism, 341. 
 Plato, 42, 334. 
 Platonism, 27, 28, 117. 
 Positivism, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 14. 
 Positivistic denial of the transcen- 
 dent, 361. 
 Post-Kantian Realists, 189, 190. 
 Psychologist's fallacy, 33. 
 
 R 
 Rationalism, 1, 25, 26, 45. 
 Rationalists, 46. 
 
 R^c^jac, E., 27, 86, 481, 482, 496. 
 Religion, 294. 
 Richter, J. P., 77. 
 Ritschl, 338. 
 
 Royce, 46, 85, 275, 333, 363, 364, 
 391, 478, 479. 
 
528 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Schelling's absolute, 29. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 13, 20, 45, 47. 
 
 Science, 326 et al. 
 
 Scottish intuitionism, 28. 
 
 Secret of Hegel, 11. 
 
 Sensationalism, 26. 
 
 Seth, Andrew, 55. 
 
 Sistine Madonna, 486. 
 
 Socrates, 42, 325, 534. 
 
 Soul, 266. 
 
 Spencer, H., 4, 5, 6, 7, 320, 361, 
 
 394, 396, 427, 503. 
 Spinoza, 25, 40, 190, 458. 
 State, absolute, 294. 
 Stephen, Leslie, 504. 
 Stirling, J. H., 11. 
 Stoics, 393. 
 St. Paul, 350. 
 
 St. Thomas, 444. 
 Swedenborg, 486. 
 Symbol, 313 et cU. 
 Synthetic Philosophy, 7, 8, 9, 10, 
 14. 
 
 Tarde, G., 291. 
 
 U 
 Unknowable, the, 4. 
 Urban, Wilbur, 227. 
 
 Volitionists, 45, 46, 47, 50. 
 
 W 
 
 Weismann, 503. 
 Wundt, 45. 
 
 OLASQOW : PBINTED AT THE UNIVKE.'JITY PBIBS BY KOBKRT MACLEHOSE AND 00. 
 

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