Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/456

 444 G. J. STOKES'S OBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH. The aim of the Essay, as stated in the Preface, is "to enunciate a principle that may re-unite the divergent streams of speculation which flowed from Kant and Reid". The first chapter, on "The Empirical and Dogmatic Schools," explains briefly the rise of the problem which Kant and Eeid attempted in different ways to solve. Locke, as Mr. Stokes points out very truly, introduced the habit of " dealing with ideas and processes of knowledge as they are cognised rather than as themselves cognitive states of mind ". In other words, the objective reference of cognition or knowledge or ideas as such tended to be superseded by a merely psychological consideration of them as " states of consciousness " or mental facts. For the Empirical school, therefore, " the knowing or the series of impressions and ideas displaces the objects of which it is the knowing, and becomes itself at once the knowing and the sole thing known, or rather it ceases to be k/ioiviny ". This is Hume's position, which leaves nothing beyond the succession of unref erred impressions. In the Rationalistic philosophy, on the other hand, as we find it in Leibniz, " the implicative nature of thought," as Mr. Stokes calls it, may be said to be preserved. The thought-processes of each monad have an ideal reference beyond themselves ; each monad is a mirror of the universe. But, each monad being shut up within its own internal nature, there is no necessity in the system for such an objective or cognitive reference. It requires to be superadded by the (properly miraculous) theory of the Pre-established Harmony ; that is, it is simply asserted. In the Leibnizian monad, says Hegel, ideas rise like bubbles ; and the endless serial develop- ment of one out of another recalls, therefore, Hume's " bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and move- ment ". Thus both Empiricism and Dogmatism fail to explain knowledge ; they give us, instead of cognitions, psychological states considered simply as such. We pass accordingly in chap. ii. (" Idealistic and Realistic Objectivity ") to consider the method by which Kant and Reid respectively endeavoured to break through the charmed circles of ideas and reach truth or objective knowledge. Taking judg- ment as the central function of mind, Kant clearly recognises the presence and necessity in knowledge, as such, of an objective reference ; but he calls upon us to renounce the quest of the absolutely real and to content ourselves with a phenomenal objectivity. The special form of the Kantian theory speedily disappeared in Germany. It was impossible that the thing-in- itself could survive in the form which Kant had given it ; and so there arose a new Idealism in which the notion of anything beyond or outside of thought is systematically denounced as self- contradictory. Mr. Stokes makes it an objection to this whole mode of philosophising that it " treats thoughts no longer as thoughts but as things ". As against it, he emphasises the fact