Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/102

 90 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR. degree shared with, or merged in, the personality of another. We are who we are, and only who we are ; and shall be thus isolated and self-centred so long as we are at all. To assert that the opposite doctrine, which has been a cardinal dogma of vast systems of religion and philosophy, which sages have taught and nations accepted, is unintelligible and unthinkable, would be presumptuous. But I may be per- mitted to conjecture that, if half the metaphysical ingenuity which has been expended on its defence had been used for the purpose of presenting it to the judgment of consciousness others, as it certainly seems to me, intrinsically and im- mediately incredible. It may be added that an eternal con- sciousness of which all that we know is summed up in the "proposition that it is a " principle of unity," can never be a fitting object of love, reverence, or indeed of any emotion whatever but philosophical curiosity ; and if our fellow-men excite in us any warmer feeling than this, it must be because they differ from, not because they resemble, that universal reason of which, according to Green, they are, though partially and inadequately, the manifestations. There is yet another difficulty suggested by Green's views respecting the eternal consciousness of which, on his own principles, I do not clearly see the solution. In his theory of knowledge it is, as we have seen, a cardinal principle that, everything which is known is constituted by the relations with which the knowing subject qualifies it. Apart from such qualification it is nothing for us as thinking beings : and if nothing for us as thinking beings, then nothing ab- solutely. Now in order that we may say anything intelli- gently about the eternal consciousness it is clearly necessary that it shall first be an object of knowledge ; and as such, must, like other objects of knowledge, be constituted by relations. If this be so we are forced to adopt one of two conclusions. Either the eternal consciousness exists as part of Jbhat related content of experience which is unified by con- _sciousness ; or it exists otherwise than it can be known. In the first case we must, it would seem, abandon the transcen- dental metaphysics of being, in the second, the transcendental metaphysics of knowledge. To this it may perhaps be re- plied that, though doubtless the eternal consciousness can only be known by us as " object " and therefore as other than it is, it necessarily knows itself as subject, and therefore as it is, thus differing from a " thing-in-itself " which is unknowable on any terms. But this does not really meet the objection. The point of that objection lies in the fact that we cannot intelligently say that the eternal reason knows
 * in its simplest and clearest form, it would have seemed to