Page:Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge.djvu/17

Rh subject and object as our final account of the matter, we should be left with a mechanical conception of action and reaction between two things which are external to each other, and we should be driven to deny that there is any unity which transcends the difference and manifests itself in it. Yet that, as I have attempted to show, is just the idea we have to admit, so soon as we realize that we can have no consciousness of the difference and relation of the two terms except on the basis of such a unity. We always presuppose the unity of consciousness in all our experience, inner and outer; but dualism seems natural to us because in our ordinary modes of thought we only presuppose it, and do not specially attend to it or reflect upon it. Our eyes are directed from the unity we tacitly assume to the differences we openly assert. Yet the whole problem of our lives, the problem of practice no less than the problem of the theory, is made insoluble if we begin by assuming the absoluteness of the difference between the self and the not-self, and only then ask how are we to mediate between them. If this were really the question, it could not be answered; but neither could it ever have arisen for us as a question at all. If, therefore, any one bases his theory on a presupposed dualism of subject and object, we may fairly ask how he comes to believe in it: and this is a question which he cannot answer at all without treating the difference as a relative one. But if it be so, the common notion that the Absolute, the ultimate reality, the Divine, or by whatever name we choose to name it, is a far-off something, a Jenseits or transcendental ‘thing in itself,’ involves a fundamental mistake. And it is no less a mistake to suppose, with Mr. Spencer, that it is a mere indeterminate basis of consciousness, of which we can say nothing except that it is. It must be regarded as a principle of unity which is present in all things and beings, and from which they, in their utmost possible independence, cannot be separated. It must be conceived, in short, as that in which they ‘live and move and have their being.’ And in the case of conscious and self-conscious beings such as we are, this unity must show itself as the underlying principle of all their conscious life. It is, therefore, no metaphor or overstatement of religious feeling, when we say that the consciousness of it is the presupposition both of the consciousness of objects and of the consciousness of self, if only it be remembered that, just because it is, it is , i.e. that it is the last thing which we make an object of our thought. On the other hand, though it be last in thought, yet it may be maintained that neither the consciousness of the objective world nor the consciousness of the inner life of the self can attain its highest and