Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher

by Sir Henry Jones

The second is, that the knowledge of "the laws" of things gives to us practical command over them; although, according to this view, laws are not things, nor any part of the reality of things, nor even true representations of things. Our authority over things seems to grow pari passu with our knowledge. The natural sciences seem to prove by their practical efficiency, that they are not building up a world of apparitions, like the real world; but gradually getting inside nature, learning more and more to wield her powers, and to make them the instruments of the purposes of man, and the means of his welfare. To common-sense,—which frequently "divines" truths that it cannot prove, and, like ballast in a ship, has often given steadiness to human progress although it is only a dead weight,—the assertion that man knows nothing is as incredible as that he knows all things. If it is replied, that the "things" which we seem to dominate by the means of knowledge are themselves only phenomena, the question arises, what then are the real things to which they are opposed? What right has any philosophy to say that there is any reality which no one can in any sense know? The knowledge that such reality is, is surely a relation between that reality and consciousness, and, if so, the assertion of an unknowable reality is self-contradictory. For the conception of it is the conception of something that is, and at the same time is not, out of relation to consciousness.

To say what kind of thing reality is, is a still more remarkable feat, if reality is unknowable. Reality, being beyond knowledge, why is it called particular or individual, rather than universal? How is it known that the true being of things is different from ideas? Surely both of the terms must be regarded as known to some extent, if they are called like or unlike, contrasted or compared, opposed or identified.

But, lastly, this theory has to account for the fact that it constitutes what is not only unreal, but impossible, into the criterion of what is actual. If knowledge of reality is altogether different from human knowledge, how does it come to be its criterion? That knowledge is inadequate or imperfect can be known, only by contrasting it with its own proper ideal, whatever that may be. A criticism by reference to a foreign or irrelevant criterion, or the condemnation of a theory as imperfect because it does not realize an impossible end, is unreasonable. All true criticism of an object implies a reference to a more perfect state of itself.

We must, then, regard the knowledge of objects as they are, which is opposed to human knowledge, as, only a completer and fuller form of that knowledge; or else we must cease to contrast it with our human knowledge, as valid with invalid, true with phenomenal. Either knowledge of reality is complete knowledge, or else it is a chimera. And, in either case, the sharp distinction between the real and the phenomenal vanishes; and what remains, is not a reality outside of consciousness, or different from ideas, but a reality related to consciousness, or, in other words, a knowable reality. "The distinction of objects into phenomena and noumena, i.e., into things that for us exist, and things that for us do not exist, is an Irish bull in philosophy," said Heine. To speak of reality as unknowable, or to speak of anything as unknowable, is to utter a direct self-contradiction; it is to negate in the predicate what is asserted in the subject. It is a still more strange perversion to erect this knowable emptiness into a criterion of knowledge, and to call the latter phenomenal by reference to it.

These difficulties are so fundamental and so obvious, that the theory of the phenomenal nature of human knowledge, which, being interpreted, means that we know nothing, could scarcely maintain its hold, were it not confused with another fact of human experience, that is apparently inconsistent with the doctrine that man can know the truth. Side by side with the faith of ordinary consciousness, that in order to know anything we must think, or, in other words, that knowledge shows us what things really are, there is a conviction, strengthened by constant experience, that we never know things fully. Every investigation into the nature of an object soon brings us to an enigma, a something more we do not know. Failing to know this something more, we generally consider that we have fallen short of reaching the reality of the object. We recognize, as it has been expressed, that we have been brought to a stand, and we therefore conclude that we are also brought to the end. We arrive at what we do not know, and we pronounce that unknown to be unknowable; that is, we regard it as something different in nature from what we do know. So far as I can see, the attitude of ordinary thought in regard to this matter might be fairly represented by saying, that it always begins by considering objects as capable of being known in their reality, or as they are, and that experience always proves the attempt to know them as they are to be a failure. The effort is continued although failure is the result, and even although that failure be exaggerated and universalized into that despair of knowledge which we have described. We are thus confronted with what seems to be a contradiction; a trust and distrust in knowledge. It can only be solved by doing full justice to both of the conflicting elements; and then, if possible, by showing that they are elements, and not the complete, concrete fact, except when held together.

From one point of view, it is undeniable that in every object of perception, we come upon problems that we cannot solve. Science at its best, and even when dealing with the simplest of things, is forced to stop short of its final secret. Even when it has discovered its law, there is still apparently something over and above which science cannot grasp, and which seems to give to the object its reality. All the natural sciences concentrated on a bit of iron ore fail to exhaust the truth in it: there is always a "beyond" in it, something still more fundamental which is not yet understood. And that something beyond, that inner essence, that point in which the laws meet and which the sciences fail to lift into knowledge, is regarded as just the reality of the thing. Thus the reality is supposed, at the close of every investigation, to lie outside of knowledge; and conversely, all that we do know, seeing that it lacks this last element, seems to be only apparent knowledge, or knowledge of phenomena.

In this way the process of knowing seems always to stop short at the critical moment, when the truth is just about to be reached. And those who dwell on this aspect alone are apt to conclude that man's intellect is touched with a kind of impotence, which makes it useless when it gets near the reality. It is like a weapon that snaps at the hilt just when the battle is hottest. For we seem to be able to know everything but the reality, and yet apart from the real essence all knowledge seems to be merely apparent. Physical science penetrates through the outer appearances of things to their laws, analyzes them into forms of energy, calculates their action and predicts their effects with certainty. Its practical power over the forces of nature is so great that it seems to have got inside her secrets. And yet science will itself acknowledge that in every simplest object there is an unknown. Its triumphant course of explaining seems to be always arrested at the threshold of reality. It has no theory, scarcely an hypothesis, of the actual nature of things, or of what that is in each object, which constitutes it a real existence. Natural science, with a scarcely concealed sneer, hands over to the metaphysician all questions as to the real being of things; and itself makes the more modest pretension of showing how things behave, not what they are; what effects follow the original noumenal causes, but not the veritable nature of these causes. Nor can the metaphysician, in his turn, do more than suggest a hypothesis as to the nature of the ultimate reality in things. He cannot detect or demonstrate it in any particular fact. In a word, every minutest object in the world baffles the combined powers of all forms of human thought, and holds back its essence or true being from them. And as long as this true being, or reality is not known, the knowledge which we seem to have cannot be held as ultimately true, but is demonstrably a makeshift.

Having made this confession, there seems to be no alternative but to postulate an utter discrepancy between human thought and real existence, or between human knowledge and truth, which is the correspondence of thing and thought. For, at no point is knowledge found to be in touch with real being; it is everywhere demonstrably conditioned and relative, and inadequate to express the true reality of its objects. What remains, then, except to regard human knowledge as completely untrustworthy, as merely of phenomena? If we cannot know any reality, does not knowledge completely fail?

Now, in dealing with the moral life of man, we saw that the method of hard alternatives is invalid. The moral life, being progressive, was shown to be the meeting—point of the ideal and the actual; and the ideal of perfect goodness was regarded as manifesting itself in actions which, nevertheless, were never adequate to express it. The good when achieved was ever condemned as unworthy, and the ideal when attained ever pressed for more adequate expression in a better character. The ideal was present as potency, as realizing itself, but it was never completely realized. The absolute good was never reached in the best action, and never completely missed in the worst.