Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/105

Rh METAPHYSIC 95 view, the intelligence, in apprehending the indivisible unity of elements in the object, is at the same time apprehending the unity of the object with itself. The mind cannot be deceived in regard to that which forms a part of its con sciousness of itself. In freeing the essential conception of the object from the contingency of matter, science has freed the object from that which made it foreign to intelligence, and the relation of thought to things ceases to be one of correspondence, and becomes one of identity. The legitimate inference from this view of the relation of the intelligence to the intelligible world would seem to be that the partial separation of thought from its object and its imperfect correspondence with it is characteristic of our first empirical consciousness of things, and of the progress from that consciousness to science, but that in completed science the division ceases. The esse of things is not their percipi, but their intelligi. But, if this be taken as the truth, then it can no longer be supposed that the process by which scientific knowledge is attained con sists simply in an analysis of the object as it is given in immediate perception. On the contrary, it must be held that, if our thought has to submit itself to the object, and to be brought into conformity with it, by a process of induction, it is equally true that in this process the object also must be changed, that it may be brought into con formity with the principle of thought. The genesis of science, according to this view, is not merely an analysis of given facts, but a process of vital transformation by which consciousness on the one side and the object on the other are brought into unity with each other. The idea, indeed, of an empty process, a process in which the activity of the mind is merely formal, is one which will not stand the slightest examination. A mind without categories, if such a thing were conceivable, would have no questions to ask in relation to the object presented to it, and could therefore get no answers. Those who make a pretence of approaching a subject in an absolutely receptive attitude, and without any presuppositions, only show that they are unconscious of the categories by which their thought is ruled ; and they will be most slavishly guided by these categories just because they are unconscious of them. The schoolmen, when they applied their logical principles to the matter of Christian dogma, did not recognize that they were doing more than analysing and bringing out clearly the meaning of that dogma. But the effect of their work was to turn the system of divinity into a collection of insoluble puzzles; for the doctrine was a doctrine of reconciliation between divine and human, infinite and finite, universal and particular, and the principle of their method was to treat all these oppositions as absolute. In like manner it might be shown that the analysis of social phenomena which was made in the last century was inadequate and superficial, just because of the latent assumption of individualism on which it proceeded, and that the greater success of writers like Comte and Spencer does not arise merely or mainly from their being more careful observers of the phenomena of social life, but in great part from the fact that, rather by the unconscious movement of opinion than by any distinct metaphysic, their minds have become possessed by more adequate categories. The idea that the process of thought is merely formal, or analytic of given matter, is, however, an error that has a truth underlying it. This is the truth expressed by Aristotle in his much misunderstood comparison of the intelligence of man to a tabula rasa, upon which nothing at first is written, and again in his assertion already quoted that the mind is a pure SiWpus, without any distinguishing quality of its own which could prevent it from apprehending the real nature of other things. In other words, self-conscious reason is not a special thing in the world, but the principle through which all things are, and are understood ; and hence, as regards the distinction of things from each other, it is in the first instance undeter mined and indifferent, and therefore open to be determined in one way or another, according to the object to which it is directed. But this simply means that the conscious subject, as such, is not bound to his own individuality, but can regard things, nay, in a sense, must regard them, from a point of view which is independent of it. This is what makes possible the self-restraint and self-abnegation pre scribed to the scientific man, whose whole duty, as it is often said, is to keep himself out of the way and let the objects speak, to lay aside all subjective idola and prejudices that stand between him and the reality of things. This at first sight may seem to be equivalent to the assertion that the mind ought to be in a state of simple passivity or receptivity towards objects. What is really meant, how ever, is not that the intelligence should go out of itself, or cease to be itself, that it may know its object, but simply that it should show itself in its universality, or freedom from the limits of the individual nature. The self-abnega tion of science is an endeavour, so to speak, to see the object with its own eyes, but this it can do only in so far as the consciousness for which the object is is that con sciousness in relation to which alone all objects are, and are understood. Or, to put it in another form, the con scious self in its scientific self-abnegation does not give itself up to another, and become purely passive ; it only gives up all activity which is not the activity of that universal thought for which and through which all things are. Hence, when it has so abnegated itself, its most intense constructive activity is just beginning, though, just so far as the self-abnegation has been real, that constructive activity has become one with the self-revelation of the object. As, however, it is only through the constructive activity of thought that there exists for us any object at all, so it is only through its continued activity that the conception of the object is changed, till it is completely revealed and known. And this activity involves a con tinuous synthesis, by which an ever wider range of facts is brought together in an ever more definite unity, until the mind has, if we may use the expression, exhausted its store of categories upon the world, and until the world has completely revealed itself in its unity with itself and with the mind. To combine these two ideas on the one hand that science begins in a self-abnegation by which the mind renounces all subjective prejudices, and thereby attains a purely objective attitude, and on the other hand that this purely objective attitude is not a mere attitude of reception, but one in which the mind is continually transforming the object by its own categories, to see that the universality of the mind in knowing is not mere emptiness, and that its activity is synthetic just when it is most free from all pre suppositions extraneous to the nature of its object, is one of the greatest difficulties of the student of metaphysic. Universality at first looks so like emptiness, and a universal activity so like a merely formal activity, that it is no wonder that the one should be mistaken for the other. But if we make such a confusion, we may soon be forced to choose between a sensationalism that makes knowledge impossible and a mysticism which makes it empty. The pure identity of thought with itself which is involved in the process of analysis is put on the one side, and the manifold matter of experience which is the object of thought on the other, and between these opposites no mediation is possible. If we take our stand upon the latter, we are forced to reject all mental synthesis as invalid, because it involves a subjective addition to the