Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/179

. It does not thus create itself, and is not created, as we create it and its relations in the process of attaining insight into it.

Besides proof proper, of which the essential characteristic—for this is all that is necessary for the purpose of our investigation—has been brought out, we find further, that in the region of finite knowledge the term proof is also applied to what, when more closely examined, is only the indicating of something, the pointing out of an idea, a proposition, a law, and so on in experience. Historical proof we do not require from the point of view from which we here consider knowledge, to elaborate in detail; it depends for its material on experience, or rather perception. Looked at in one light, it makes no difference that it has reference to foreign perceptions and their evidences; argumentation, that is to say, the exercise of understanding proper regarding the objective connection of circumstances and actions, makes these data into presuppositions and fundamental assumptions, just as its criticism of evidences has done in drawing its conclusions. But in so far as argument and criticism constitute the other essential side of historical proof, such proof treats its data as being the ideas of other people; the subjective element directly enters into the material, and the reasoning about and combination of that material is likewise subjective activity; so that the course and activity of knowledge has quite different ingredients from the course followed by the circumstances themselves. As regards the pointing things out in everyday experience, this is certainly concerned, in the first instance, with individual perceptions, observations, and so on, that is to say, with the kind of material which is only pointed out, but its interest is by so doing to prove further that there are in Nature and in Spirit such species and kinds, such laws, forces, faculties, and activities as are mentioned in the sciences. We pass by the metaphysical or common psychological reflections about that subjective element of