[44]. The inconsistencies of both Kant and Spencer will illustrate the reluctance of the human mind to acquiesce in a genuine Agnosticism. In the Critique of Pure Reason itself Kant so far contradicts himself as to treat the Thing-in-itself as the cause of sensation, though it is a fundamental doctrine of his system that the concept of causal relation can only be legitimately applied to connect facts inside experience; and in a later work, the Critique of Judgment, he tentatively suggests its identity with Will. Of Mr. Spencer it has been truly said (I believe by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller in Riddles of the Sphinx) that in the course of his ten volumes of Synthetic Philosophy he speaks much more positively about the nature of the Unknowable than dogmatic theology ventures to speak about the nature of God.
[45]. The sceptics of antiquity, who were more alive to this contradiction than most of our modern Agnostics, tried to evade the difficulty by saying that they maintained the unknowability of things not as a demonstrated certainty, but as a “probable opinion.” But this distinction is itself illogical, for unless some propositions are certain there is no ground for considering any one proposition more probable than another. E.g. if I know that a die with six faces has four pips on each of two faces, and five pips on only one, I can logically say “it is probable that with this die four will be thrown oftener than five.” If I am totally uncertain what number of pips is marked on the various faces, I cannot regard one throw as more probable than another.
[46]. E.g., peculiarities of the individual’s colour-spectrum, total and partial colour-blindness, variations in sensibility to musical pitch, etc., etc.
[47]. The best known and most popular version of the theory is that of Locke and of a great deal of our popular science, according to which the “primary” qualities of matter, i.e. those which have to be treated as fundamental in the physical sciences, are independently real, while the rest are mere effects produced by their action on our sense-organs. The more thorough-going metaphysical doctrines of realists like Leibnitz and Herbart, being much further removed from the “naïve realism” of unreflective common sense, have never enjoyed the same currency.
[48]. Compare Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. p. 178 ff., and Royce, World and Individual, First Series, Lect. 3. Prof. Royce’s treatment of Realism, though interesting and suggestive, is perhaps a little too much of a “short and easy way” with the antagonist to be quite convincing. Mr. Hobhouse’s anti-idealistic argument (Theory of Knowledge, 517-539) seems to me only to hold good against the “Subjectivism” discussed in our next section, but the reader will do well to examine it thoroughly for himself.
[49]. We might also suitably call it Presentationism, if the name were not already appropriated in a different sense as distinctive of certain psychological theories. The English reader will find a confused but typical exposition of Subjectivism in the opening chapters of Prof. Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science. Subjectivist writers usually call themselves “idealists,” and regard themselves as disciples of Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley was, however, a subjectivist, if at all, only in respect to the physical world, while Hume’s conclusions are purely sceptical. The reader of Prof. Pearson must carefully observe that the “descriptive” theory of physical science has no special connection with Subjectivism, and is, in fact, held by philosophers like Profs. Ward and Royce, who are not subjectivists.
[50]. On the existence of my fellow-men as the one real proof of the objective existence of the physical world, see Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, essay on “Nature, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness,” and “Mind and Nature,” by the present writer, in International Journal of Ethics for October 1902. In the latter essay I have, I think, sufficiently exposed the flimsy reasoning by which subjectivists attempt to justify belief in the existence of other human beings from the subjectivist point of view.
[51]. The self-knowledge which is a fact in real life, as distinguished from the fictitious self-consciousness of some psychologists, is quite a different thing and involves two distinct acts of cognition: (1) the awareness of certain objects of cognition, and (2) the recognition of those objects as in some way qualifying my “self.” And the “self” which I recognise as thus qualified is again no immediate datum of experience, but a largely hypothetical intellectual construction, as we shall have opportunity to see later on.
This is perhaps the place to add the further remark, that if we would be rigidly accurate in psychological terminology, we ought to banish the very expression “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” from our language. What are really given in experience are attentive processes with a certain common character. We abstract this character and give it the name of “consciousness,” and then fall into the blunder of calling the concrete processes “states” or “modifications” of this abstraction, just as in dealing with physical things we first make abstraction of their common properties, under the name of “matter,” and then talk as if the things themselves were “forms” of “matter”[“matter”]. Properly speaking, there are physical things and there are minds, but there are no such things in the actual world as “matter” and “consciousness,” and we do well to avoid using the words where we can help it.
[52]. See Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, pp. 21-62; and, for the merely English reader, Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii p. 168 ff.