Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/589

 SCOTUS NOVANTICUS'S METAPHYSICA NOT A ET rETUSTA. 577 The author expounds his Dualism in the Second Part. He begins by drawing a distinction between extension and exter- nality. Extension, or the quality of things as extended and figured, is given in impression like other qualities. " The ex- ternality of extension," i.e., its outness from the Ego, "is given refl'.rhj by consciousness. ... This movement, moreover, lies in the very heart of consciousness ; and through it alone is con- sciousness possible." Consciousness has thus "a priu-s in the object, that is to say, it is by a movement outside itself, and independent of itself, that the potentiality of consciousness becomes actual. This irritation is, from the side of the subject, called Eeceptivity." " Dualism of subject and object is thus constituted within the sense or attuitional sphere before Eeason in the elementary form of Percipience appears on the field." When it does so appear, "its primal predication is the aforesaid externality and independence of extension and all the objects of sense. . . . There is, therefore, a radical dualism." It is at this point that the question of the so-called Relativity of Knowledge arises Can the subject truly know the object precisely as it exists? "The truly external x may be transformed into y as it enters my subject-consciousness." The transcendental .r's on which I depend for my knowledge of the sensible may be only " a series of dynamical shoves". This is the Kantian position (at least in one aspect of it), and is the only sense in which the Relativity of Knowledge has any meaning. For Relativity is something quite different from Relatedness, which latter is neces- sarily present in every case of knowing. What is said here by the author is said with admirable clearness. To the self-tortur- ing doubt of the Relativists he gives the only answer possible : " We are entitled to start with the a. sumption of a harmony between the conscious and the non-conscious, perfect equivalence between the idea and the ideatum. . . . Given an external object, that object becomes to my consciousness. Why should this pro- cess vitiate itself '? The onus probandi lies on him who supposes it does" (p. 45). Nearly half of the book is devoted to the " dialectic percepts," already referred to those cognitions, or elements in cognition, which are not data of the outer or inner sense, but are " reason- born," having " their source in the dialectic process whereby we know". The first of these is Being or Substance. Pheno- menal modes pass before the attuent subject ; but the fact that these phenomena are, is, and can be, given solely through the Ego's act of affirmation. We can evidently say nothing more of Being or Substance than that it is. If we think to reach a closer knowledge of it, we inevitably defeat our own purpose by passing into the region of phenomena; as "a reason-sprung thought," it must vanish if we attempt to sensualise it. And if this is its nature, the percept " is not to be set aside as nothing because it is without form and void". The second percept is Cause. The