Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/544

 530 CRITICAL NOTICES : "noumenal" Ego operative in knowledge, although his arbitrary restriction of the term of knowledge to the bringing of a sensuous matter under the twelve ' categories of the understanding ' pre- vented him from saying that we have a ' knowledge ' of such a self except, indeed, the practical knowledge implied in the con- sciousness of Duty. Mr. Haldane, with his ample recognition of the higher categories ignored by Kant, need have no scruple in recognising that the individual self is and may be known as some- thing more than the series of presentations of the "inner sense," and yet as something less than the Universal subject. Such a continuous individual subject seems to be called for to explain the fact of individual knowledge and the no less actual fact of individual ignorance, though that subject is nothing when taken apart from the phenomenal series which it connects. It is a conception that is required for a reasonable Psychology, whatever may be said about the higher point of view which is to transcend it. Of course this "self" is an abstraction in the sense in which everything is &n abstraction which is less than the whole, as all knowledge is an abstraction which is less than complete knowledge : and from that obvious fact it is possible to go on to infer (rightly or wrongly) that from the highest point of view the point of view of specula- tive Philosophy the individual is a part of or even a "phase" of an Absolute Mind. But, waiving the question of the possibility of applying the idea of part and whole to the relation between minds or "centres of .consciousness," it is at least incumbent upon a philosopher who takes this view to show that he can re- cognise enough individuality in the self for the purposes of ordin- ary life to say nothing of morality and Eeligion. In morality at all events it is with the individual self that we have to do. If this self is to be no more than the phenomenal self, the series of events which the Ego presents to itself, there seems to be no room for any morality but the morality of Hume. It is no use to say that the series is held together by the universal Self-con- sciousness : we do not (in morality at least) attribute our bad acts to the universal self -consciousness. If the only other self, the only connecting link between the successive moments of individual experience, that we can recognise is the Universal Self, this self surely cannot be the self which is implied in morality. Even Mr. Haldane admits that social intercourse implies the existence, or at least appearance, of individual selves. Now it is the boast of the Hegelian Philosophy, as interpreted by Mr. Haldane, that it " restores to plain people their faith in the reality of each of these phases of the world as it seems (p. 119)," that it is to enable us to " believe in the different aspects of the world as it seems life, for example, as much as mechanism ; morality as much as life ; re- ligion as much as morality ". This is just the boast, I venture to contend, which Mr. Haldane has not made good. He has hardly attempted to make it good. In his pages the distinction between myself and my neighbours is not merely " transcended " : it is ab-