Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/457

 G. J. STOKES'S OBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH. 445 that " a thought is the thought of something ". He considers it " a merit in Hegel that he has conceived thought as involving not merely identity but also difference. But then he conceives thought as itself giving birth to the difference through which thought is, as creating its own determinations. But thought can in its own person create nothing, not even itself. ' Abstract notions,' says Bishop Butler, 'can do nothing.'" As this sen- tence from Butler is taken as the motto of the Essay, Mr. Stokes would seem to be inclined to make common cause with Eeid's Bealistic, rather than with Hegel's Idealistic, Objectivity. Comparing Eeid with Kant, we find that Eeid sought to escape from scepticism " by simply pointing out the general character of knowledge, of perception, that it is cognition out of itself, from wn nature, of an object distinct from itself" (p. 23). "In other words, Eeid really did what Kant claimed to have done, he retorted the game which Idealism plays upon itself. Idealism said the external world exists only in the knowing, therefore it is not. Eeid sees that if it is not, the knowing of it cannot be " (p. 35). In accordance with these passages we find that, when Mr. Stokes comes to state his own position in the third chapter ("The Objectivity of Truth"), he expressly asserts, against Hegel, thought's transcendence of itself, and apparently endorses Natural Eealism : " It is perfectly true that thought cannot, so to speak, get outside of itself. . . . All such transcendence of itself by thought remains itself thought and a thinking process. Still, the very nature and essence of thought, and every particular thought, is the transcendence of itself, not of itself by itself as thinking, but of itself &?/ and in that which it thinks. * Thought, without ceasing to be thinking, does, through its very nature as thought, in its relation to the object, cognitively go forth out of itself to it, and through the presence of the object which it thus cognitively determines is this the thinking cognition of thought itself determined. Thought is, in every case, the cognition of an object, which really, actually, existentially out of thought, is ideally, intellectually, intelligibly within it ; and just because within in the latter sense, is it known as actually without in the former " (p. 53). But he has no sooner said this than he finds it necessary to protest against the separation of the two sides Being and Thought. The Eealistic school err in hypostatising the object and using it as an explanation of the origin and constitu- tion of the faculty of thought. The Idealists err no less in the way in which they conceive the relation of thought to objectivity. The relation is not to be conceived " as though thought were a something ready made, coming from elsewhere, and giving birth to the objective world as it or its. In such a case it is itself only another object producing that world ; but the fact is, it is itself only in the production of that by which it is produced " (p. 58). This is to all intents and purposes, even in the antithetical form given to it, a Hegelian statement. Mr. Stokes condemns Hegel's