Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/54

 40 A. K. ROGEES : every possible judgment the nominal subject thus points beyond itself ; thought would no longer be thought if it ceased to be the reference of an ideal content, divorced from fact, and extending beyond the given. 1 Since, then, the ulti- mate subject of the judgment comes into our experience only under the form of feeling extended by ideal relations, and since these relations are only ideal, and we have no way of telling how they are reconciled with the real in the ultimate synthesis which we never reach, our last word must be that the Absolute is, not only in detail, but in every sense, un- knowable. I shall not attempt to argue here at length against this theory the theory that judgment is the reference of an idea to a reality which is all of a piece with the real fact given to us directly in feeling. I shall be content simply to oppose to it the conception which seems to me more true. I should deny, once more, both that it is the feeling which is extended, and that it is extended by an idea. The sensation, or per- ception, has, so far as the purport of the judgment is con- cerned, nothing to do with the reality to which the idea is applied ; this is rather the fact for which the perception stands as a representation, and from which it is as an existence entirely distinct. It is, again, not the idea as such which is applied to reality. The idea is simply our tool which we use to discover the attribute we are after ; this attribute itself, however, is perfectly concrete and individual, and we recognise it as such. I am looking, we will say, for a piece of wrapping paper, and I guide my search by means of the concept brown. When however I say, " This paper is brown," I do not suppose that the paper has somehow been brought into connexion with an abstract colour, but only that here in the universe is a particular real piece of paper which answers in colour to my idea of brown, and which I can use, but whose colour is itself, of course, as definite a brown as could possibly exist. It may indeed be that I cannot tell ex- actly what this particular colour is, and I may not be, usually I am not, especially interested in its particularity ; but, never- theless, in any judgment which intends to refer to a concrete beyond it in content ; and so there is no contradiction in predicating the new attribute of it. 1 1 should say also that thought can never cease to move by way of relation, but this says nothing about the reality which is known by thought. If thought is not only a factor in reality, but knows other reality besides itself, then a non-relational fact may conceivably be known by a thought which still keeps the relational form, and an absolute truth by a thought which itself is partial.