Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/101

Rh METAPHYSIC 91 the dilemma, and leaves us therefore with an unresolved dualism between thought and its object ; and this again necessarily involves a dualism between the active reason, which, as he asserts, realizes itself in man, and the passive reason which constitutes his nature as a finite being. In the Middle Ages the Platonic and Aristotelian idea that the apprehension of objective truth is one with the evolution of the mind to self-consciousness seemed to be entirely lost. Knowledge of the finite world was regarded as indifferent, and knowledge of the infinite was conceived to be something given on authority, and in reference to which the mind was confined to an attitude of passive reception or implicit faith. No greater slavery of the spirit can be conceived than that in which even the truths of religion and morality the truths that regard the inmost life of the spirit itself were taken as a lesson to be learned by rote from the lips of a teacher. Yet the consciousness that such truth, if it was to be received by the mind, still more if it was to transform the mind, could not be entirely foreign to it, found a voice in the scholastic philosophy. And the compromise or truce between faith and reason expressed in the saying of Anselm credo ut intelligam, according to which reason was to confine itself to the analysis and demonstration of the data received in implicit faith from the church, prepared the way for the recognition that the two are not essentially at variance. The mind that proceeds from veneratio to delectatio, from awe and submission to the doctrine to enjoyment and appreciation of it, must already in its awe and submission have the beginnings of an intelligent appreciation. Anselm s saying might be understood simply as meaning that we must have spiritual experience ere we can understand the things of the spirit. And in this sense it was adopted by the Reformers to express an idea almost the opposite of that with which the scholastics had associated it, the idea that the direct apprehension of spiritual truth as entering into the inner life of the subject, as identified with his very consciousness of self, is the basis of all knowledge of it. In the Protestant church of the period after the Reformation, we find a growing tendency to insist on the subjectivity of religion, in the same exclusive and one-sided way in which the mediaeval church had insisted on its objectivity. In some extreme representa tives of Protestantism this went so far as to lead to a disregard, almost to a rejection, of all objective doctrine, and a reduction of theology to an account of the religious consciousness. On the other hand, while religion was thus made subjective, science claimed to be purely objective, and the followers of Bacon seemed to adopt towards nature the same attitude of passive receptivity which the mediaeval Christian was taught to hold towards the church. While man was to learn everything from himself in religion, he was to learn nothing from himself in science. His aim must be to exclude subjective idola, in other words, to accept the facts as they were given, and keep himself out of the way. The inevitable result of this difference of view as to the nature of knowledge in these two different regions was, however, on the one hand a withdrawal of religion from all connexion with finite interests, and, especially from the attempt to connect religious principles with the knowledge of the finite world, and, on the other hand, an increasing tendency in those who represented finite science to regard religion as something merely subjective and even individual, as a feeling which could not be translated into thought or made the basis of any knowledge of the objective world. The opposite principles of certitude which were thus set up for religious truth and truth of science need only to be brought together and contrasted to betray that they rest upon opposite abstractions, neither of which expresses the complete nature of truth or knowledge. On the one hand the truths of religion were maintained just because they were not, or were not merely, objective, but were capable of being tested by inner experience, and identified with the self -consciousness of the individual. On the other hand the truths of science were maintained because they were not, or were not merely, subjective, but were capable of being verified in objective experience. It was rightly seen on the one side that mere subjective feelings or opinions have no validity for any one but the subject of them, and on the other side that what is merely objective or externally given can have permanent value and interest for the intelligence only as it ceases to be mere isolated and unrelated fact nay, that, even when science has discovered law and order in nature, it still wants the highest value and interest so long as that law and order are not seen as standing in essential relation to the intelligence itself. The idea of truth or knowledge as that which is at once objective and subjective, as the unity of things with the mind that knows them, enables us to understand the con demnation which the religious mind passed upon a merely external dogma, and even its lack of interest in a science which presented itself as an account of merely objective or external facts. And it enables us also to understand the way in which scientific men insisted upon objective fact as the basis of all knowledge, and the disrespect which they felt for a religion which seemed to admit that it had no such support. What is wanted to clear up the confusion on both sides is the growth of the perception among scientific men that the objectivity which they are seeking cannot be mere objectivity (which would be unmeaning), but an objectivity that stands in essential relation to the intelligence, and, on the other hand, the growth of the perception among religious men that the subjectivity of religion only means that God, who is the objective principle by whom things are, and are known, is spiritual, and can therefore be revealed to the spirit. When these two cor rections have been made, it must become obvious that the religious consciousness is not the consciousness of another object than that which is present in finite experience and science, but simply a higher way of knowing the same object. And in this it is also involved that the two ideas of a priori and a posteriori, of that which is evolved from within and that which is given from without, are not essentially opposed to each other, but that the a posteriori is simply the first form of a consciousness which in its ultimate development must become a priori. In that philosophy of compromise which was initiated by Descartes, one part of knowledge was regarded as innate, or developed from within, and another part as empirical, or imparted from without. In the second period of the history of modern philosophy this compromise was broken, and the names of Locke and Leibnitz though with some hesitation on both sides represent respectively the theories that all knowledge is a posteriori and that all knowledge is a priori. The compromise seemed to be renewed with Kant, but the form in which it was renewed pointed, as has been already shown, to something more than a com promise, for his doctrine was that the a posteriori element, the facts, exist for us only under a priori conditions, or, in other words, that what is usually called a posteriori. is in part a priori. The criticism of this view need^not be repeated. It is sufficient here to say that if, as Kant shows, the elements are inseparable or organically united, it is impossible to allege that so much belongs to the one and so much to the other. Furthermore, the consciousness of an essential difference in the elements of knowledge i: possible only so far as that difference is transcended by the unity of knowledge. We can distinguish the a priori from the a posteriori only on condition that we can transcend