Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/92

 80 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR. " combining principle " as the only thing which renders a world of experience possible. But in so doing is he not employing a method of investigation, useful and legitimate within the sphere of science, but wholly inapplicable to the elucidation of a problem in metaphysics ? How can he tell what nature would be without mind ? How does he know that it would be a " manifold," incapable by itself of bring- ing itself into a unity, without at the same time being lost in a " featureless identity " ? How again is it possible to say that this is a task which mind can perform, unless we can observe the action of mind on a " manifold " in the same way that a chemist observes the action of an acid on a metal, viz., by first seeing them separate and then seeing them together ? Yet is not this an operation which we are told even more emphatically by the transcendental system than by any other is impossible ? The analysis of experience on which that system is based, professes to show, positively, of what elements the knowable consists, and, negatively, that as these elements cannot exist apart, one of them can- not be the cause of the other. It shows, for instance, or professes to show that, as the phenomena of the material and organic world are nothing except in so far as they exist for a self-conscious mind, a self-conscious mind cannot be their product. To this reasoning I am not concerned to raise any objection. But is not the very principle on which it rests violated by the attempt to draw a distinction between these necessary elements in knowledge ; a distinction according to which one is to be regarded as active, the other ,s passive, one as real really, the other as real only relatively (p. *104) ? If mind and nature form one inseparable whole, if they cannot be put asunder without at once becoming meaningless abstractions, then one cannot be before or after the other, and it becomes in the highest degree inappropriate to describe the indivisible whole as specially the product of either of its essential members. Or, if we do so describe it, we must allow that it is as correct to say that nature makes mind as that mind makes nature ; that the World created v God as that God created the World. The truth is that " the analysis of the conditions which make experience possible " (p. 18) is an operation for which more magnificent results are claimed than it can always legitimately produce. The analysis of a material object consists in breaking it up into those other material objects which are its elements, and it is only when we know something of the properties of these elements as they exist separately that we regard our analysis of the whole as satisfactory. But the transcendental