Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/108

Rh 98 METAPHYSIC the former kind of synthesis as objectively valid which does not equally apply to the latter. This vindication of the principles of induction has, how ever, a further consequence, which was not clearly seen by Kant. It is fatal to the antithesis of the &quot; given &quot; and the &quot; known,&quot; of what is perceived and what is conceived, of natura malerialiter spedata and natura formaliter spectata, which he still admitted. For that antithesis really rested on the idea that there is no universal and necessary principle of determination of things involved in the apprehension of them as qualified and quantified phenomena in space and time. So soon, therefore, as it is seen that there is such a principle, and that the first deter mination of things as objects of perception is due to the same a priori synthesis which determines them in the second place as objects of experience, the ground for that contrast between reality and appearance on which the theory of induction rested is taken away. Kant, indeed, finds a new meaning for that contrast by interpreting it as referring, not to the opposition between things as they are given and things as they are known, but to a supposed opposition between things as they are given and known in experience and things as they are in themselves out of experience. This new antithesis of reality and appearance, however, only means that the former antithesis has broken down, and that therefore the ideal of knowledge based upon it has yielded to a new ideal. The so-called things in themselves are noumena, the objects of an intuitive or perceptive understanding, i.e., objects in which the contrast of perception and conception, of given and known, is tran scended. We can make Kant s theory consistent only by supposing him to mean that the conception of the world as a system of substances determining each other according to universal laws does not yet satisfy the idea of know ledge which reason brings with it. In other words, just as science from the point of view of necessary law found something wanting in the conception of the world as a mere complex of quantified and qualified phenomena in space and time, so philosophy, in view of a still higher ideal of knowledge, may condemn the conception of the world as a system of objects determined by necessary laws of relation as itself inadequate and imperfect. And we have seen that this higher ideal is that which is involved in the unity of self-consciousness. Unfortunately Kant was unable, as Aristotle had been unable, to distinguish this idea from the idea of an abstract identity in which there is no room for even a relative difference of perception and conception, and therefore the perceptive understanding was named by him only to be rejected. If, however, we correct this inadequacy of Kant s state ment, as his later works enable us partly to correct it, we see that it involves a new idea of knowledge and a new logic, a logic governed by the idea of organic unity and development, just as the analytic logic had been governed by the idea of identity, and as the inductive logic had been governed by the idea of necessary law. For, if the unity of self-consciousness be our type of knowledge, truth must mean to us, not the apprehension of objects as self-identical things, distinguished from each other in quantity and quality, nor even the determination of such things as standing in necessary relations to each other. It must mean the determination of the world (and of whatever in it is in any sense an independent reality, so far as it is so independent) as a unity which realizes itself in and through difference, a unity which is indeed determined, but deter mined by itself. In a view of the world which is governed by this category, correlation must be reinterpreted as organic unity, and causation as development. Its logical method must be neither analytical nor synthetical, or rather it must be both at once, i.e., it must endeavour to exhibit the process of things as the evolution of a unity which is at once self-differentiating and self-integrating, which manifests itself in difference, that through difference it may return upon itself. Further, as this logic arises simply out of a deeper consciousness of that which was contained in the two previous logics, so it first enables us to explain them. In other words, the advance from the analytic to the inductive logic, and again from the inductive to what may be called the genetic logic, may itself be shown to be a self-determined development of thought, in which the first two steps are the imperfect manifestation of a principle fully revealed only in the last step. The consciousness of self -identical objects, independent of each other and of thought, is thus only the beginning of a pro cess of knowledge which reaches its second stage in the determination of these objects as essentially related to each other, and which finds its ultimate end in the knowledge of the correlated objects as essentially related to the mind that knows them. Or if, in this last point of view, things are still conceived as having a certain relative independence of the mind, it can only be in so far as they are in the Leibnitzian sense monads, or microcosms, i.e., in so far as they are self-determined, and so have, in the narrower circle of their individual life, something analogous to the self- completed nature of the world, when it is contemplated in its unity with its spiritual principle. Such a genetic logic is inconsistent with any absolute distinction between the a priori and a posteriori element in knowledge. For here the a priori is not simply a law of necessary connexion to be applied to an external matter, but a principle of organic development, a principle which, from the very nature of it, cannot be applied to a foreign matter. To treat the world as organic is to apply to it a category which is inconsistent with its being something merely given or externally presented to thought. The relation of things to thought must itself be brought under the same category of organic unity which is applied to the relation of things to each other in the world, otherwise the externality of the world to the thought for which it is will contradict the conception of the world as itself organic. Hence the distinction of a priori and a posteriori, so far as it is maintained at all, must shrink to something secondary and relative. It can be maintained only as a distinction of thought from its object, which presupposes their ultimate unity. From this point of view logic may be said to deal with the a priori, in so far as it treats the general conditions and methods of knowledge without reference to any parti cular object. Logic must exhibit abstractly the process by which the intelligence establishes its unity with the intelli gible world; or, to put it in another way, it must demon strate that the being of things can be truly conceived only as their being for thought. It is limited to the a priori, in the sense that it ends with the idea that the esse of things is their intelligi, and does not consider how this real intelligence or intelligible reality manifests itself in the concrete world of nature and spirit. In this sense logic cannot be separated from metaphysic if metaphysic be confined to ontology. They are simply two aspects of one science, which we may regard either as determining the idea of being or the idea of knowing. The process of knowing is never really a formal process ; it always involves the application of certain categories, and these categories are simply successive definitions of being or reality. We cannot separate the category from the movement of thought by which it is evolved and applied, nor the transition from lower to higher categories from changes of logical method. Hence a logic divorced from metaphysic inevitably becomes empty and unreal, and a metaphysic divorced from logic reduces itself to a kind of dictionary of abstract terms, which are put in no living