(1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error, the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience. Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,—since no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power, against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included, can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step, and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here also, an immediately experienced certitude.”[328]
We have, “then, immediately experienced presentations which of themselves already constitute a knowledge,—our first knowledge, and the only one possessed of absolute indubitableness.” And some of these presentations “are accompanied by a kind of immediate certainty or revelation that, in some way, they reach right into the Thing-in-Itself, that they directly express something objectively valid, present in that Thing-in-Itself”; and “this pressure ever involves, should the contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as objectively existent, the self-destruction of objective reality.”—“And this pressure can, in any one case, be resisted by the mind; an act of endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the part of the mind: for these presentations, furnished with such pressure, do not transform themselves into the Things-in-Themselves directly,—we do not come to see objective reality simply face to face.”[329] And we find thus that “in principle the entire range of reality, right down to its last depths, lies open to cognition, proceeding according to the principle of the necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle, thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-subjective significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning the ultimate reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to be necessary in thought, this affirmation possesses as rightful a claim to trans-subjective validity, as any determination, necessary in thought, which concern only such parts of the Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to our sense-impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves us only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does or does not react, under the given problems, with the said logical constraint and pressure.”[330]
(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already found that the acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline of Reality, as to be ever in part presupposed in the attacks of the most radical sceptics, necessarily involves a certain emotive disposition and volitional action. And, over and above this partially withholdable assent, such quite elementary thinking will also ever require the concomitant energizing of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and spiritual are this thinking’s subject-matters, the more will it be permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It is then all man’s faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who normally thus gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain even this elementary nucleus of certainty as to Reality. “Even receptivity,” as Prof. Ward well says, “is activity”; for even where non-voluntary, it is never indifferent. “Not mere receptivity, but conative or selective activity, is the essence of subjective reality.” Or, with Prof. Volkelt: “Purely isolated thought,”—which, in actual life ever more or less of a fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,—“is, however intensified and interiorized, something ever only formal, something, in the final resort, insignificant and shadowy.”—And, concurrently with the recognition of this fact, man will come to find that “the ultimate Substance or Power of and in the world,”—that objective reality which is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,—“is something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive aim, and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual. The world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense that this concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal necessity of its own nature.”[331]
(3) And again, I would note with Volkelt how Kant, owing to his notoriously intense natural tendency to universal Dualism, never admits, even as a point for preliminary settlement, the possibility that our subjective conceptions of Objective Reality may have some true relation to that Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature of that Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself, into an absolutely unvarying, negative knowledge concerning that Reality,—he simply knows that it is utterly heterogeneous to our conception of it. Thus he finds the view that “God has implanted into the human mind certain categories and concepts of a kind spontaneously to harmonize with things,” to be “the most preposterous solution that we could possibly choose.”[332] Thus the epistemological difference between Presentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaphysical exclusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact, whether of experience or of thought, to prevent something which is my presentation existing also, in so far as it is the content of that presentation, outside of this presentment. Indeed Psychology and Epistemology have, driven by every reason and stopped by none, more and more denied and refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.
As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: “The hypothesis that knowledge consists of two elements which are so radically different as to be capable of description only by defining each negatively in terms of the other, the pure manifold or differences of sense, and a purely universal or relative thought,” breaks down under the fact that “pure thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the one proving meaningless and the other helpless in its isolation.” These elements “are only aspects of one fact, co-relates mutually penetrating each other, distinguishable in thought, but not separable as existences.” Hence we must not “make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence which is never purely formal, upon a material which is nowhere a pure manifold”: for “the difference between the primary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest kinds of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference … between a mere particular and a mere universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a difference in comprehensiveness of articulation.” However primary may be the distinction of subjective and objective, “we are not entitled to forget the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place.” If we begin with the purely subjective, we must doubtless end there; but then, in spite of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical hypotheses, “the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as the purely objective.”[333]
Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly, even a step further. He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term “consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not left to infer my own being from my knowing.… Objective reality is immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there. “There is no such parallelism between the two.… The subjective factor in experience is not datum but recipiens: it is not ‘there’ but ‘here’; a ‘here’ relative to that ‘there.’”[334] Nothing of this, I think, really conflicts with the positions we have adopted from Volkelt, since “experience” is evidently used here in a sense inclusive of the presentations, the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement of the latter’s estimations,—the three elements which, according also to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring subjectivism can never consistently reject. At most, the term “experience” is more extended in Prof. Ward, since it includes all three elements, than in Prof. Volkelt, who restricts it to the two first.
(4) And further, we must take care to find room for the only unforced explanation of the wondrous fact that “although,” as Dr. Volkelt strikingly says, “the various schools of philosophy “—this is largely true of those of theology also,—are “in part essentially determined by historical currents, forces which follow other standards than those of logical necessity”: yet “these points of view and modes of thought, thus determined by” apparently non-logical “history, subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its” slow, intermittent, yet real “progressive realization.” The explanation is that “the forces of history are, unbeknown to themselves, planned, in their depths, for agreement with the necessities and ends of thought and of truth.” “And thus the different spheres” and levels “of spiritual life and endeavour appear as originally intended for each other, so that each sphere, whilst consciously striving only after its own particular laws and standards, in reality furthers the objects of the rest.” For “only the operative presence of such an original, teleological inter-relation can explain how historic forces, by their influence upon, and determination of, philosophical thinking, can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction of religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually advance it most essentially.”[335]—Here then we get a still further enlargement of the already wide range of interaction, within the human mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear simply external to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a corresponding increase in the indications of the immense breadth, depth, and closeness of inter-penetration characterizing the operative ground-plan, the pre-existing Harmony and Teleology of the fundamental forces of Reality. Thus once more man’s spirit appears as possessed of a large interiority; and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit stupendously rich in spiritual energy.
(5) And finally, let us never forget that “the only experience immediately accessible to us” men, “is our own; this, in spite of its complexity, is the first we know.”[336] And this means that we have direct experience and anything like adequate knowledge, (because knowledge from within,) not of things, but of mind and will, of spiritual life struggling within an animal life; and that in face, say, of plant-life, and still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a difficulty as to an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension, which, if opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards this latter apprehension we have got the convergent testimony of certain great, never quite obliterable facts without us and within ourselves.
There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity of organization, the growing depth and interiority in the animate world,—Plant-Life itself being already, very probably, possessed of a vague consciousness, and Man, at the other end of the scale, summing up the tendency of the whole series in a deep self-consciousness which, at the same time, makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference, in the midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but describe the results and explain part of the method of this upward trend, but cannot penetrate to its ultimate cause and end.
There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutually necessary, mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within our own mental and spiritual life, of sense-impressions, imaginative picturings, rational categories, emotional activities, and volitional acts; and, again, of subject and object; and, once more, of general, philosophic Thought and the contingencies of History. For the immanental inter-adaptation and Teleology, that mysteriously link together all these, profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces is far too deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of us, it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as the mostly unarticulated presupposition and explanation of both the great cost and the rich fruitfulness of every approximately complete actuation of all our faculties, each with and in the others, and in and with their appropriate objects, to be permanently ruled out of court as mere sentimentalism or baseless apologetic.