Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/240

 224 HOWARD V. KNOX: constitution of the universe can only be answered along the lines of the notion of externality. It is in virtue of the notion of externality that we know the universe as a universe. For this reason the present paper has been entitled, not an inquiry into the problem of externality, but an inquiry into the nature of the notion of externality. Merely by way of giving point to the foregoing remarks, and having an eye to brevity in our choice of examples, let us take a few characteristic utterances of modern idealism and see how they look in the light of the results attained in parts i.-ii. (a) " Now in the absence of any recognition of a synthetic principle, in relation to which the successive experience becomes what it is not in itself, this [i.e., Berkeley's theory of space] means nothing else than that space is a succession of feelings, which again means that space is not space, not a qualification of bodies or parts of body by mutual externality, since to such qualification it is necessary that bodies or their parts co-exist. Thus, in his hurry to get rid of externality as independence of the mind, he has really got rid of it as a relation between bodies, and in so doing (however the result may be disguised) has logically made a clean sweep of geometry and physics." l But in the same way the doctrine that esse is intelligi means that the physical world is not physical : for to get rid of externality as independence of the mind, is to make a clean sweep of physics. Green speaks 2 of the " contradictions which, under what- ever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and through thought individualised by the relations which constitute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone the real ". But if the thing has to be thought of as external to mind, what then ? Green rightly rejected the view, as interpreted by him, that the real is "that in regard to which the mind is passive"; but failed to see that, so interpreted, it is simply the obverse of the doctrine that relations exist in and by the act of thought. " This real," he says, " in all its forms, as described by Locke, has turned out to be constituted by such ideas as, according io him, are not given but invented. Stripped of these
 * superinductions, nothing has been found to remain of it but

1 Hume's Treatise, ed. Green and Grose, vol. i., p. 145. 2 Op. cit., i., p. 141.