Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/220

 206 B. B. HALDANE : contributed by sense, by understanding, and by reason. Ex- perience was not to be broken up. For the methods of science, including psychology, it was final reality. It could only be resolved further if it could be looked at as the out- come of the logical activity of an absolutely final subject, which was the condition of its possibility, and never itself capable of presentation as object within experience. It was an easy step from this to treat the sciences as the modes in which were presented, not the rich concrete reality of experience itself, but mere aspects of that reality, isolated and made definite by the investigator confining himself to selected conceptions or categories in the attempt to get a clear and definite grasp of these aspects. There are no such experiences in the concrete real world as a straight line, or a limit, or a cause distinct from its effect, or a physical atom, or a whole which determines and in their metabolism con- serves its parts. Yet, if we are to get clear and distinct knowledge of special kinds, we must abstract from other aspects, and view experience as though it could be reduced to these. If, going further, we confound the abstractions so obtained with independently existing realities, we shall get into trouble. If we forget that the conceptions or cate- gories with which we have to work, are only of limited application, and, for example, insist on regarding the develop- ment and self-conservation of the embryo as an effect brought about by an outside cause, to be expressed in terms of quan- tity, or talk of the ultimate subject as of a magnified and non-natural man, we shall fall into contradictions. So at least the Hegelians tell us, and so they explain the apparent contradictions which have arisen between science and relig- ion, the outcome for them of a confusion of categories and standpoints. Hegel and his school did their work on the footing that the final reality was not substance but subject. The other school of post-K&niian thinkers presently subjected this doctrine to scrutiny. What, they asked, do we mean when we speak of an absolute subject in intelligence ? We know what are the forms of intelligence which psychology and formal logic describe. But these are taken from the field of the object, and cannot be what we are in search of. Yet of intel- ligence, excepting as object in knowledge, we have no direct knowledge. We have, therefore, no business, so they argued, to talk of an absolute subject as though the phrase were one to which we could attach meaning. But, they go on, although the process of resolving the object world of experience into existence for what as such is not and cannot be object does