Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/402

 388 H. w. CARE: ideal of his philosophy none the less. " For in all reasoning, whether we are engaged in analysis or in construction by inference founded on analysis, we are compelled to push the process to its farthest limits, the ideal limits consisting in either case of something ultimate and in its own kind self- explanatory, demanding and indeed capable of no further questioning " (iv., 308). How then does Mr. Hodgson meet this requirement ? By keeping distinct the two aspects of experience and the two senses of reality which respectively belong to them. For analysis, immediate experience is ultimate reality, for construction, reality is an inference. This inference is not an assumption if based on the imme- diate experience revealed by analysis. Is then this definition of reality as self-consistency which, if I am interpreting rightly the sentence I have quoted, Mr. Hodgson himself acknowledges, a third sense ranking pari passu with the two senses, or if not in what relation does it stand to them ? It appears to me that to speak of two senses of reality is a contradiction, for to be real in one sense only is not to be real at all. The qualification is absolutely destructive. Self-subsistency is the ordinary and the only meaning of reality. Unless percipi or agency con- tains this idea it cannot satisfy our notion of reality. Esse is percipi was to Berkeley a full expression of the meaning of reality, admitting no reservation. To have replied to him that it was true of one aspect only of experience would have seemed to him a reductio ad absurdum. The doctrine meant the absolute and final character of perception that it was not a reference to an other which had independent reality but that it was itself, qua perception, real. The reality of the perception was the perception. Whether his doctrine was right or wrong he undoubtedly meant by reality self-subsistence. Esse is percipi is in no sense true if there be any sense in which it is not true. The second or full sense of reality is to have efficiency or agency as a real condition. It is an inference based on the subjective analysis of experience and owing entirely to that analysis its justification and its necessity, or, as Mr. Hodgson would express it, its freedom from assumption. The only actual existent known to us in this full sense is matter. Matter as a real existent is inferred from percept matter, which is an immediate experience. Now why if this is so, should the inference fail to give final and absolute satisfac- tion ? It does so fail, for Mr. Hodgson rejects Materialism as untenable and the ground of the argument is simply the ^failure of matter to fulfil the condition of self-subsistence.