Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/92

Rh 82 METAPHYSIC those beliefs which outward experience seemed unable to support. But this basis was soon found to be treacherous. Introspection, observation of the inner life as opposed to and distinguished from the outer life, could be only an observation of the facts of the individual consciousness as such; and to base religion and morality on such a founda tion was to treat God and right as subjective phenomena, which do not necessarily correspond to any objective reality. Nor was this conclusion really evaded by the assertion of the self-evidencing necessity of such ideas and beliefs, or of the principles upon which they are founded. For this necessity, as a subjective phenomenon, might be accounted for otherwise than by the supposition of their objective validity. Such scepticism, further, was favoured by the progress of science, which, as it advanced from physics to biology and sociology, became more and more in consistent with the idea of an absolute breach between inner and outer experience, and narrowed the sphere which had been hitherto reserved for the former. Man, it was urged, is but a part in a greater whole, not exempted from the law of action and reaction which connects all parts of that whole with each other. His individual life contains only a few links in a chain of causation that goes back to a beginning and onward to an end of which he knows nothing. And, as Spinoza says, vis qua unaquxque res in existendo perseverat a causis externis infinite superatur. Hence to treat ideas which are only states of the individual consciousness as the explanation of the world, instead of treating them as phenomena to be explained by its relation to that world, seemed to be an absurdity. The particular beliefs and tendencies of the mind were to be regarded, not as ultimate facts in reference to which everything is to be interpreted, but rather as facts which are themselves to be referred to more general causes and laws. It thus appeared that the attempt to divide truth into an a posteriori and an a priori part, the latter of which should find its evidence in an inner experience as the former in an outer experience, is an illusive pro cess. If the a priori is reduced to the level of the a posteriori, it becomes impossible to base on the a priori any beliefs that go beyond the range of subjective experience. If the self and the not-self are taken simply as different finite things, which we can observe in turn, their relations must be brought under the general laws of the connexion of finite things with each other ; and the phenomena of mind must be treated, like the phenomena of matter, as facts to be accounted for according to these laws. But this of itself indicates a way of escape both from the introspective theory and from the empiricism to which it is opposed. For it suggests the question What is the source of those very laws which guide the procedure of science in accounting for facts, psychological facts among others ? When a scientific psychologist of the modern school attempts to show how by habituation of the individual and the race the necessity of thought expressed in the law of causation was produced in the minds of the present generation of men, it is obvious that his whole investigation and argument presuppose the law whose genesis he is accounting for. A glaring instance of such circular reasoning is found in the writings of the most prominent representative of the school in the present day. Mr Spencer begins by laying down as a first postulate of science that necessity of thought must be taken as a criterion of truth. It is by the continual aid of this postulate that he constructs his system of nature, and finally his psychological theory of the development of consciousness in man. Yet the main object of this psychological theory seems to be to account for the very necessities with which the author starts. Obviously such a philosophy contains elements of which the author is imperfectly conscious ; for it involves that mind is not only the last product but the first presupposition of nature, or, in other words, that in mind nature returns upon its first principle. But to admit this is at once to lift the conscious being as such above the position which he would hold as merely a finite part of a finite world. It is to assert that nature has an essential relation to a con sciousness which is developed in man, and that in the growth of this consciousness we have, not an evolution which is the result of the action of nature as a system of external causes upon him, but an evolution in which nature is really &quot; coming to itself,&quot; i.e., coming to self-conscious ness, in him. Now it was Kant who first though with a certain limitation of aim brought this idea of the relativity of thought and being to the consciousness of the modern world. In the Critique of Pure Reason, thought, indeed, is not set up as an absolute prius, in relation to which all existence must be conceived, but it is set up as the prius of experience, and so of all existences which are objects of our knowledge. Experience is for Kant essentially relative to the conscious self ; it exists through the necessary subsumption of the forms and matter of sense under the categories, as, on the other hand, the consciousness of self is recognized as essentially dependent on this process. On this view, the a priori and a posteriori factors of experience do not really exist apart as two separate portions of knowledge. If they are severed, each loses all its mean ing. Perceptions in themselves are void; categories in themselves are empty. We do not look outwards for one kind of truth and inwards for another, nor do we even, by an external process, bring facts given as contingent under principles recognized as necessary ; but the a priori is the condition under which alone the a posteriori exists for us. Even if it is allowed that the facts of inner and outer experience contain a contingent element or matter, given under the conditions of time and space, yet neither time nor space nor the facts of experience conditioned by them exist for us except as elements of an experience which is organized according to the categories. This is the essential truth which Kant had to express. It is marred in his statement of it by the persistent influence of the abstract division between contingent matter given from without and necessary principles supplied from within, a division essentially inconsistent with the attempt to show that the contingent matter is necessarily subsumed under these principles, and indeed exists for us only as it is so subsumed. But Kant himself puts into our hands the means of correcting his own inadequacy, when he reduces the inaccessible thing in itself, which he at first speaks of as affecting our sensibility and so giving rise to the contingent matter of experience, to a noumenon (voov/nevov) which is projected by reason itself. The Dialectic exhibits the idea of thought as not only constituting finite experience but also reaching beyond it, though as yet only in a negative way. The mind is, on this view, so far unlimited that it knows its own limits ; it is conscious of the defects of its experience, of the con tingency of its sensible matter, and the emptiness and finitude of its categories ; and by reason of this conscious ness it is always seeking in experience an ideal which it is impossible to realize there. Thought measures experience by its own nature, and finds it wanting. It demands a kind of unity or identity in its objects which it is unable to find in the actual objects of experience. It is this, demand of reason which lifts man above a mere animal existence, and forces him by aid of the categories to determine the matter of sense as a world of objects ; yet, as this finite world of experience can never satisfy the demand