Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/508

 492 J. H. MUIRHEAD : THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. If these contentions are valid the unity of apperception does not really stand in antithesis to the unity of the percept as the transparent to the opaque. The two stand on the same level and must be treated alike. They were so treated by Kant, who placed the ultimate reality of both beyond the sphere of discursive intelligence. The contention of this paper is that this is an uberwundene Standpunkt. Its error is, in a word, that it mistakes mere existence for reality. Instead of being the fullest of the predicates of thought containing the reality of the thing as an unrevealed and (let us be frank) unreveal- able secret, the determination of it as an existing " this " is the emptiest and most abstract. For it is just that one which cuts it off from other things and from the mind which thinks it ; and just as the surest way to miss the reality of mind is to look for it in abstraction from the world it knows, so the surest way to miss the reality of the object is to look for it in abstraction from its relations to other things and to the mind for which these relations exist. To sum up: We have seen that knowledge aims in the first place at exhausting and in the second place at reduc- ing to unity the complex contents of experience. In the second place these two (complete differentiation and com- plete unification) are not two different ideals but different sides of the same. They take their place as constituent elements in the process by which individuality, significance, reality is given to things. Coming in the third place to the question of the relation of such individuality to ultimate essence, I have tried to show that there is no reason to hold that the system of predicates, which is the form this indi- viduality takes in the mind, is a mere appearance which, in order that it may correspond to the nature of the thing as it is in itself, must lose this form and be merged in another which is no longer knowledge. To maintain this, as has recently been done, is to revive Kant's doctrine of the Thing- in-itself in a form which ignores without meeting the most characteristic contention of modern philosophy, that reality is to be looked for not in the abstract but in the concrete individual.