Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/404

 390 H. W. GARB seems to me that the difficulty of all philosophy is to establish the validity of the inference from consciousness to an other rather than to disprove its possibility. To me the main difficulty of Mr. Hodgson's philosophy is to see hpwjm his principles the inference is possible. Which of the meanings of consciousness is intended ? If consciousness as an existent, that by the hypothesis is an object among other objects, if consciousness as a knowing, that as subjective aspect is uni- versal. In other words, the otherness of consciousness as an existent must fall within consciousness as a knowing, and to consciousness as a knowing there can be no otherness except objectivity which is a difference of aspect only. The doctrine of the distinction of aspects is a doctrine of the identity of content of consciousness and object of consciousness. Con- sequently we have this dilemma, if a real other to conscious- ness can be conceived, then the doctrine of aspects is untrue, for that doctrine involves identity of content. If on the other hand we accept this doctrine of aspects we are bound to deny that there can be a real other to thought. The reply I expect is, that otherness in the sense of unknowability is not intended, externality to consciousness means agency, and that is not unknowable. But if Idealism is to be refuted the question is whether a real other to consciousness must not imply unknowability. We cannot begin by defining agency as otherness, we must show that it is otherness. The refutation of Idealism consequently rests on the proof Mr. Hodgson claims to make clear by subjective analysis that agency is not in consciousness but belongs to a real order of existence other to and independent of consciousness. This real order of existence is in its subjective aspect a mode of consciousness. In putting the question of the real conditions of matter we have, says Mr. Hodgson, " to supply, in imagina- tion, our objective but abstract time and space with a new content composed of elements different in kind, or at any rate in the mode of their combination, from any of those co-elements of feeling which are now known to us as con- stituents of matter, but elements which like them are modes of consciousness and like them are immaterial" (iv., 289). The italics are mine. The external order is a mode of conscious- ness, this taken absolutely is the basis of Idealism. Any qualification must, it seems to me, assert an unknowable. I have said that Mr. Hodgson uses a quite different sense of reality in his argument against Materialism. Materialism is rejected because Matter is not a self-subsistent reality. "Matter is the only positively known object which can be held to be at once non-consciousness and real" (i., xi.).