Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/98

Rh 88 METAPHYSIC science must first determine the laws of nature according to the principles of causality and reciprocity, ere philosophy can be in a position to discover the ultimate meaning of nature by the aid of higher principles. &quot; The philosophy of nature,&quot; says Hegel, &quot;takes up the material which physical science by direct dealing with experience has pr spared for it at the point to which science has brought it, and again transforms this formed material without going back to experience to verify it. Science must, therefore, work into the hands of philosophy, in order that philosophy in its turn may translate the lower universality of the understanding realized by science into the higher universality of reason, and may show how in the light of this higher universality the intelligible world takes the aspect of a whole which has its necessity in itself. The philosophic way of looking at things is not a capricious attempt, once in a way for a change, to walk upon one s head after one has got tired of walking upon one s feet, or to transform one s work-a-day face by painting it over ; but, just because the scientific manner of knowing does not satisfy the whole demand of intelligence, philosophy must supplement it by another manner of knowing.&quot; 1 The result then may be briefly expressed thus. Kant and his successors showed the relativity of the object of knowledge to the knowing mind. He thus pointed out that the ordinary consciousness, and even science, are abstract and imperfect modes of knowing, in so far as in their determination of objects they take no account of a factor which is always present, to wit, the knowing subject. For their purposes, indeed, this abstraction is justifiable and necessary, for by it they are enabled within their pre scribed limits to give a more complete view of these objects in their relation to each other than if the attempt had been made to regard them also in relation to the knowing subject. At the same time the scientific result so arrived at is imperfect and incomplete, and it has to be recon sidered in the light of a philosophy which retracts this provisional abstraction. For it must be remembered that the fact that science looks at things only in their relation to each other, and not to the knowing mind, narrows the points of view or categories under which it is able to regard them, or, in other words, limits the questions which the mind is able to put to nature. Just because science does not treat its objects as essentially related to the mind, it is unable to rise to what Hegel calls the point of view of reason, or of the &quot;notion&quot;; i.e., it is obliged to treat objects and their relations merely under a set of categories, the highest of which are those of causality and reciprocity, and it is incapable of attaining to the conception of their organic unity. In other words, it is able to reach only a synthetic unity of given differences, and it cannot discover a principle of unity out of which the differences spring and to which they return. Now philosophy goes beyond science just because, along with the idea of the relativity of things to the mind, it brings in the conception of such a unity. Its highest aim is, therefore, not merely, as Kant still held, to secure a place for the supersensible beyond the region of experience, but to reinterpret experience, in the light of a unity which is presupposed in it, but which cannot be made conscious or explicit until the relation of experience to the thinking self is seen, the unity of all things with each other and with the mind that knows them. 2. Relation of Metaphysic to Psychology. It has already been shown that the doctrine that the thinking subject is presupposed in all objects of knowledge or, in other words, that existence means existence for a conscious self is not to be taken in a psychological sense. The idea that all science is based on psychology, and that, therefore, Hegel, vii. p. 18. metaphysic and psychology are identical, cannot be retained by any one who has entered into the full meaning of the Kantian criticism. It is, however, so natural a misinter pretation of it, and it is so much favoured by the letter of the very book in which it was first decisively refuted, that it will be useful to point out more directly the fallacy involved in it, especially as this will place us in a better position to determine the true relation of the two parts of philosophy thus confounded. The misunderstanding first took a definite form in the introduction to Locke s Essay, in which he proposes to provide against any undue application of the intellectual powers of man to problems which are too high for them, by first examining and measuring the powers themselves. Stated in this way, it is obvious that the proposal involves an absurdity ; for we have nothing to measure with, except the very powers that are to be measured. To see round our knowledge and find its boundary, we must stand outside of it, and where is such a standing ground to be found 1 We cannot by knowing prescribe limits to knowledge, or, if we seem to be able to do so, it can only be because we compare our actual knowledge with some idea of knowledge which we presuppose. In this way the ancient sceptics and modern writers like Sir W. Hamilton and Mr Spencer who have followed them turned the duality involved in the idea of knowledge against its unity, and argued that, because we cannot know the object except as different from and related to the subject, we cannot know it as it is in itself. Obviously in this argument it is involved that in true or absolute knowledge the object must not be distinguished at all from the subject, to which the easy answer is that ivithout such distinc tion knowledge would be impossible. The sceptic argu ment, therefore, lands us in the unhappy case pictured in the German proverb : &quot;If water chokes us, what shall we drink?&quot; The object cannot be known if it is distinguished from the subject, and it cannot be known if it is not distinguished from the subject. Obviously the one objection is as good as the other, and both combined only show that the idea of knowledge involves distinction as well as unity, and unity as well as distinction. The sceptic insists on one of these characteristics to the exclusion of the other, and condemns our actual knowledge because it contains both. In Kant there is undoubtedly some trace of the same fallacy, in so far as the idea by contrast with which he condemns the objects of experience as pheno menal is the idea of an abstract identity without any difference ; but we have seen that with him this abstract identity is on the point of passing into an altogether different idea the idea of self-consciousness as the type of knowledge. It appears, then, that the idea of measuring our powers before we employ them rests on a paralogism ; for what is really meant is that we abstract one of the elements of the idea of knowledge, and then condemn knowledge for having other elements in it. It is possible to criticize and con demn special conceptions, as not conforming to our idea of knowledge ; but it is not possible to criticize the idea of knowledge itself ; all we can do is to explain it. It is possible to see the limited and hypothetical character of certain of our ideas or explanations of things, because we are conscious that in developing them we have left out of account certain elements necessary to the whole truth ; but this criticism itself implies, as the standard to which we appeal, a consciousness of truth and reality, a consciousness which we cannot further criticize. Here, therefore, we come upon what must seem to all who think it admissible to question the very possibility of knowledge an inevitable reasoning in a circle. We can answer objections only by means of the very idea which they dispute. But the