Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/399

 ON MR. s. HODGSON'S METAPHYSIC OF EXPERIENCE. 385 sarily impairs the proposition, the assumption admitted into the premisses is bound to reappear in the conclusion. But is it not at least equally true that without assumption philosophy is barren, the problem you set out to solve will remain unsolved at the end? It is the latent contradictions in ordinary thought that constitute the problems of philo- sophy, analysis cannot get rid of these contradictions, it makes them explicit, to attempt to solve them of necessity involves assumption. But what does philosophy without assumptions mean ? Mr. Hodgson apparently holds the view that knowledge is based on immediate experience and in its nature partakes of the character of immediacy, is veri- fiable at every step by reference to immediacy, a reference made possible by the universal subjective aspect of experience, ' and that the means of this reference is the philosophic ' method of subjective analysis. Even allowing that immedi- ate experience in its immediacy is knowledge, which I take to be Mr. Hodgson's meaning in his analysis of the moment of experience, yet at some stage comes inference. Is not an assumption latent in all inference ? Is any progress in knowledge conceivable that does not involve assumption ? The only consistent philosophy without assumptions is solipsism, and solipsism is the reductio ad absurdum of phil- osophy without assumptions. What is meant by direct analysis of experience? It is based on the fundamental distinction between nature and genesis, between what is ? and how comes ? and it means that I the question of genesis can be and must be postponed and 'subordinated to the question of nature. It means that it is possible to directly interrogate experience and to get a direct and immediate answer to the question of the nature of experience. Consequently Mr. Hodgson begins by ana- lysing the moment of experience and claims that that analysis reveals the ultimate nature of the analysandum. The mo- ment of experience is obtained immediately by making, so to speak, a cross Section through the stream of consciousness. iThe nature of experience as revealed to analysis is direct and immediate. To know it is not to transcend it. Experience is not a whole, the nature of whose parts consists in their relation to the whole. Every moment of experience has an in itself nature that analysis can reveal. It is in this view of experience that Mr. Hodgson allies himself with the line of the English philosophers Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and 4%**iT*** dissociates himself from the line taken by Kant and his successors. The contrary view is that the nature of experi- ence is not directly revealed by analysis of the content of 25