Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/384

 372 EDMUND MONTGOMEEY : the present writer also had his fill of conceptual enthusiasm, kindled by lively intercourse with some of the foremost pupils of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. It seemed all so sweepingly intelligible and piercingly clear in those young days the universe at large and our lives therein. Not so now, those amazing realities of ours with their engendering throes. Not winged ideas, transporting the soul back to archetypal being ; or " clouds of glory " trailing from a pris- tine home : but the triumphant swell of conquering actuality, efficiently, relentlessly, uplifted from death and decay ; a sphere of rigorous and veritable fulfilment, where the right and joy of every realising thought has to be earned by sub- missive zeal. in. What then is the import of knowledge ? What truth does it recognise and what use does it subserve ? Understanding, intelligence, reason, in short, the recog- nising principle in us, has it to seek for its object of know- ledge in the direction of generalising and unifying conception, or does it find it, on the contrary, quite on the other side, in the direction of multifariously given perception ? Does it, by dint of transcendentally derived powers, reconstruct in indi- vidual consciousness an eternal world of universal validity, whose recognition is truth ; or does it rather, by dint of naturally established correspondences, place our unitary being in systematised and truly valid relations with the changeful domain of external influences? Our thinking does it become true through its adequate realisation of an intelligible world eternally subsisting, or simply through its precise concordance with the mutable world of sensorial compulsion ? Is correct thought in itself veritable reality by force of its identity with universal thought ; or is it merely premonitory of such reality through its accurate foreshadow- ing of actually realisable interactions between ourselves and other things ? Is thought, in fine, identical with being ; or is it only the epitomised and unified expression of our own relations to a sphere of foreign existence, that affects our senses ? It cannot be denied that, in thought, we seem to be stead- fastly realising a unitary world of universal validity, inconi- mensurably elevated above the transitory play of sensible occurrences. The fleeting manifold of sense appears to be recognised, or to become real to our thinking, only when it has fallen into its due place within the pre-established sys- tem of thought-relations which constitutes the abiding uni-