Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/350

 336 A. K. ROGRES : independent reality of nature in any sense. Logically, there- fore, the Hegelian can only interpret nature by the function it has in human development, and it must itself grow up in the process by which man comes to know it. We are there- fore met by this dilemma : If reality is human growth, then it is impossible to say what we mean by the apparently necessary demand of science and common sense alike, for some reality preceding, in the line of evolution, the appear- ance of the human race -a difficulty which Hegelianism has never to my knowledge fairly set .itself to meet. If, on the contrary, such a reality did exist, then it cannot be made intelligible except as a conscious life, which thus forms, so long as we use the language of common sense, a unity of experience distinct from what we call ourselves. Any attempt, therefore, to gain the favour of common sense by using language like Prof. Caird's, which seems to imply that we can understand, by reference to " experience," the evolu- tion of the real universe in the scientific sense, without at the same time distinguishing l between this and the develop- ment of human lives, is fundamentally obscure. We are led, then, to the other conception of reality as constituted, frankly, by human growth. Now this is the apparent goal of the more recent tendency in Hegelianism. Reality is growth in experience." It is experience as we actually know it developing in time. 3 We are not to con- ceive of any such thing as an independent universal mind. 4 The universe is a thinking process which realises itself, for us, only in human consciousness. 5 What we call the object is something that actually grows with the consciousness or 1 If the Absolute is really a growing intelligence like ours his coming to a consciousness of the world would at least not take the form of a multitude of human lives. 2 " Ultimately the growth of experience must consist in the develop- ment out of itself by intelligence of its own implicit ideal content upon occasion of the solicitation of sensation," Dewey, MIND, vol. xii., p. 396. 3 " What exists is a series of mental operations, activities of reality, as manifested in the subject who thinks, and in the conditions, within him and without, which make his thinking possible," Jones, MIND, vol. ii., p. 457. Cf. pp. 164, 305. 4 " The deus ex machina of an hypostasised universal mind, indepen- dent of particular minds," Eastwood, MIND, vol. i., p. 485. 5 "He (Hegel) means what he says, that God is spirit or mind, and exists in the medium of mind, which is actual as intelligence for us, at any rate, only in human self-consciousness," Bosanquet, Essays, p. 105. " I regard Idealism as a theory which represents the Universe as a thinking activity, an activity which reaches Us highest form in this world in man," Jones, MIND, vol. ii., p. 294. "To treat reality frankly as the process whereby reality manifests itself in the mind of man," Jones, Broicniny. p. 300. Cf. also, pp. 297, 298.