Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/498

 482 J. H. MUIRHEAD : English Revolution as a concrete event to fade away in generality, but to give it for the first time the clear outlines of a distinct and unique event. Similarly from the side of reality. We start, of course, from an existing thing or event. But its existence in time and space is only an element in its reality. Apart from its what and its why, the hold, so to speak, which we have upon its reality is but a feeble one. In developing our thoughts about it we are not abstracting from its reality or leaving anything behind w r hich is worth having. Instead of being cancelled in the intellectual process, all that it had of reality at the outset is taken up and developed into a higher form. For reality means significance, and the significance of a thing or event is only known when the latter has become to us what his crystal is to the magician, " the ball that images the world," and we see reflected in it as in a transparent focus the characters of the whole to which it belongs. But a further question rises when we ask not whether thought has any constitutive function in building up the world of knowledge but what is the relation of the ideal of knowledge itself to ultimate reality. Can the world we know ever really be the world as it is in itself '? We have all been made familiar in these days with the doctrine of degrees of reality, and we have, I suppose, all accepted it so far as to admit that experience stands at different levels according to the degree in which it cor- responds to the ideal above described of an experience which is all-embracive and completely harmonious. But let us now suppose that this ideal is completely realised so far as knowledge is concerned, in a system of concepts which ex- hausts the contents of the world and is internally harmonious. Would such a system express reality as it is ? would it be the absolute ? or does it necessarily fail to express the truth, and must it be at last condemned as mere appearance ? The conclusions of recent English philosophy, as is well known, favour the latter alternative, and require to be squarely faced by any one who like the present writer holds an opposite view. The question itself, it will be admitted, is of sufficient importance to attract more attention than it has hitherto re- ceived 1 from philosophers. It is not only the preconceptions of ordinary common sense, but the central doctrine of the current form of speculative idealism that is called in question. 1 Since this was written Prof. Seth's book, Man's Place in the Cosmos, has appeared. It has enabled me to shorten my argument.