Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/47

 36 W. MITCHELL : experience, yet experience is the only instrument ; for it is the universal postulate from which alone reason can begin and to which alone it can return. The consciousness of this circular progress of philosophi- cal knowledge was especially evident to Hume, Kant and Fichte. Philosophy, they saw, must end where it began illuminating, purifying, unifying, but never destroying or creating. And so, when none of the three could exhibit a rationally complete representation of the philosophical circle, they did not blind themselves to the deficiency. They did not strive to make experience correspond to their theories. Experience as such was their assumption, and their failure to complete the rational cycle in it was not obscured by charg- ing experience with delusion in respect of that part of it which resisted them. So that philosophy was no petitio principii to them. They all consciously failed to find a metaphysic of knowledge, that is, of experience in general, which was also a metaphysic of ethics of experience in practice. What they did was not to attenuate the latter but to leave thought and practice in isolation, each with an explanation of its own. Now it is just in this respect that their successors have committed their most vital error. The result of it is seen in the existence of so many self-existent systems, each gaining adherents among the unattached but seldom or never prose- lytising at the expense of one another. We are accustomed to overlook the seriousness only from the commonness of the error. All plead the actual illusoriness and contradiction in experience. Are we, then, in the dilemma of either taking experience as we find it and maintaining our various beliefs however recalcitrant to theory, or of proceeding throughout on the logical fallacy of questioning and purifying our pos- tulate the standard of our truth? If these are the only alternatives, it is evident that Ethics must proceed in an eternal see-saw of equally possible contradictions. In a c where one refuses to question the validity of the feeling Freedom, Obligation, Responsibility, while another explains them away, how can either be justified or condemned ? It would be a very easy matter to show that the philo- sophical interpretation of duty is not the interpretation of duty as I or all feel it, that the benevolence of altruistic Utilitarianism is to me no benevolence, and so on. Krn supposing me to be right in such contentions, I am not justi- fied in thus defending the testimony of my feelings to objec- tive truth except from something in them which inevitably distinguishes them from feelings that are illusory. I may maintain with Reid and Hamilton that they cannot with