Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/403

 ON MR. s. HODGSON'S METAPSTSIC OF EXPERIENCE. 389 I think it will appear that Mr. Hodgson uses reality in a quite different sense in his argument on the untenability of Idealism from that which he uses in his argument on the untenability of Materialism. In the one case reality is agency, in the other it is self-subsistence. The plausibility of Idealism consists, Mr. Hodgson con- siders, in the ambiguity consequent on a confusion of the two uses of the term consciousness. Its refutation consists in showing by analysis that efficient agency is not to be found in consciousness. The idealist assumes that thinking or dia- lectic is per se its own efficient agent and does not see that the efficient agency lies in the conditions of its existence. If the idealist replies that the conditions of the existence of con- sciousness are universally modes of consciousness he is failing to distinguish the two aspects of consciousness, he is asserting of consciousness as an Existent what is only true of conscious- ness as a Knowing. The refutation of idealism consequently rests on this conception of agency. To Mr. Hodgson agency I is the distinctive mark of a reality which qua existence is not ! consciousness and the idealist identifies with this real agency the movement of thought or dialectic. " It would seem that there are two ways, and only two, in which the fundamental tenet of Idealism might be established, the first positive, by showing that efficient agency is inherent in consciousness per se, the second negative, by disproving the possibility of a valid inference from the data of consciousness to any real existent other than, but knowable by, consciousness, whether as a Subject or as an Object of it " (iv., 378). Now in the first place these two ways are in reality not two, they are different presentments of an identical argument, for agency and otherness are the same. To take first the positive proof, I am unable to see, keeping to Mr. Hodgson's distinction between consciousness as an existent and consciousness as a knowing, that by showing agency inherent in consciousness per se we should establish Idealism. Consciousness as an existent is in Mr. Hodgson's system an object, it is in every sense as much an other to consciousness as a knowing as any part of the existent order, so that even if we could prove the exact reverse of this theory and show consciousness as real condition and matter as conditionate there would still remain the problem of a dual order, existence and knowledge. We should be as far as ever from establishing the idealistic tenet, " There is no Being but Knowing, or Being and Knowing are one and the same " (iv., 373). Secondly, as to the negative proof or rather the disproof that there can be a valid infer- ence from consciousness to an other than consciousness, it