This 'transcendental,' 'absolutist,' 'a priori' philosophy, which stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay to comprehend and see the true measures and dimensions of this much-quoted Experience. All knowledge rests in (not on) the unity of Experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality of one experience,—ultimate, all-embracing, absolute, infinite, unconditioned; universal and yet individual, necessary and yet free,—eternal, and yet filling all the nooks of time,—ideal, and yet the mother of all reality,—unextended, and yet spread through the spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific phrase connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions: the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations. Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is also much more than either yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience, builds on and in the Absolute, in the System—a system which is not merely his. In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouth-piece of the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his words expect and require assent, belief, acceptance;—they are candidates (not necessarily, or always successful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth: they are dogmatic assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none the less infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise, it would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips.
It is the aim of the Absolute a priori philosophy to raise this certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits—not of this absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)—but in this experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,—the correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the unconditioned field. It examines the foundation of all knowledge. But—if this be the phrase—we must be on our guard against a misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge: they are in all knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and its analytic distinctions. We must not shrink from paradoxes in expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet moving, self-poised and free.
We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on the Absolute and Unconditioned. The Absolute, and Infinite, and Eternal is no mere negation:—the only pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in its claim. It is perfectly true—and it can only be babes and sucklings that need to be reminded of the fact—that none of us realises and attains the ne plus ultra of knowledge and that all our systems have their day,—have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive are covered only with fragments of shattered ships, and we behold no intact vessel in their bays[10].' So too the whole earth is full of graves; and yet humanity lives on, charged with the attainments of the past and full of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be critical and not dogmatic: let us never entirely forget that each utterance, each science, each system of ours falls short of what it wanted to be, and for a moment at least thought it was. But let us not carry our critical abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention: or, if so, let us silently accept the great renunciation of all utterance henceforth. System we all presuppose in our words and deeds, and should be much hurt if our defect in it were seriously alleged: the Absolute we all rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other distractions we feel and see it not. The philosopher proposes for his task—or rather the philosopher is one on whom this task forces itself as for him the one thing inevitable—to determine what is that system and what that Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the philosopher traces to its unity, and retraces into its differences that Experience—that felt, known, and willed synthesis of Reality,—that realised ideal world—on which and in which we live and move. He does not make the system, nor does he set up the Absolute. He only tries to discover the system, and to construe the Absolute.
It may be said that the best of philosophers can do no more than give us a System and an Absolute. Undoubtedly that is so. Each philosophy is from one point of view a strictly individualist performance. It is not, in one way, the Absolute truth, which it promises or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one being's eyes; and his 'measure,' as Protagoras might have said, is upon it. Yet it is still the Absolute, as seen through those eyes; it is still in a marvellous measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the actual generations garble.' For both the artist and the philosopher, if they create, only re-create or imitate; if they are makers, they are still more seers: and their power of 'imitation' and of 'vision' rests on their capacity to de-individualise themselves of their eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them which is the common truth of all essential thought and vision. In proportion as they purge themselves of this evil subjectivity are they true artists and philosophers. They are both—and so, too, is the religious genius—idealists: but the test of the value of their idealism is its power of including and synthetising reality. That is their verification: that, and not their concord with this or that opinion, this or that theory of individuals or of groups. Not that the views either of groups or individuals are unimportant. But often they are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary islands which have lost their fluidity, and which imagine themselves continental and permanent.
Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience, absolute system, is the theme of philosophy. Or, in Hegelian language, its theme is the Truth, and that Truth, God. Not alum, an aggregate, or even what is ordinarily styled a system, of truths: but the one and yet diverse pulse of truth, which beats through all: the supreme point of view in which all the parts and differences, occasionally standing out as if independent, sink into their due relation and are seen in their right proportion.
[1] Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236.
[2] Ibid. 244.
[3] 'In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of that absolute unity; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative unity, thou seest nought but an image—only drawn amiss in another direction—of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little determined by thought as thought by being.'
[4] Schelling, iv. 252. See further, iv. 327: 'The pure subject, that absolute knowledge, the absolute Ego, the form of all forms, is the only-begotten Son of the Absolute, equally eternal with him, not diverse from his Essence, but one with it.'