Page:Journal of Speculative Philosophy Volume 17.djvu/78

Rh no real relations, there can be no relativity; and, conversely, to say that feelings are really relative is to say that a relation really and objectively is, and is known. But to say this is to abandon the position that relation is a kind of feeling, and thereby to abandon Sensationalism. The fact that the two positions are so often held in conjunction is only evidence of how slightly the real meaning of either is grasped.

We summarize our results as follows: The doctrine of the relativity of feeling is incompatible with Sensationalism, and is so for two reasons. First, Sensationalism can never give knowledge of the sine qua non of the Relativity theory: the existence of an absolute object. For the very reason that sensation is relative to the subject, it can never transcend that relativity and make assertions regarding something absolute. Secondly, even if the existence of the absolute object were assured, feeling qua feeling can never demonstrate its own relativity. The Absolute here as an unknown Universal can never be known to be the Absolute which constitutes the relativity of the present content of consciousness. The feelings must be definitely referred to that absolute object. For feeling itself to make any such reference assumes that it can transcend its relativity, and know not only an absolute object, but what it is and what relations subsist between the two.

But if this knowledge of the existence of an absolute object and of its determinate relations is not given by feeling, we are justified in saying that it is given by a consciousness which by its relations determines the object. For, as we have shown that these objects must be related to consciousness, and cannot be related in the way of feeling, what they can be except as determined and constituted by relations of this consciousness it is not easy to see. Since a feeling can be known as relative only when referred to an object, this object cannot be a feeling, nor constituted by a feeling. The object must, then, be relative to a thinking consciousness.

There are two points which every theory of the Relativity of Feeling must include and explain: (a) In what does the relative character of the feelings consist? (b) What is the nature of the correlate absolute? The sensationalist hypothesis breaks down, as we have seen, at both these points. But our present theory, that relativity consists in a specific ratio between a sensitive and a non-sensitive object, which are constituted by relations to self-con-