Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/155

No. 2.] reality. When the poet speaks of "a Presence which disturbs him with the joy of elevated thoughts, a motion and a spirit which impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought," he is metaphysically contrasting the essential Spirit with the universe of intelligences and intelligibilia, which are its manifestation or phenomenon. Natura naturata, in the old phrase, is the phenomenon of natura naturans. If, with Goethe, we say that nature is the garment of God by which we see Him, we make nature the phenomenon of a divine essence. If we take atoms and the void as our metaphysical principia, then the human consciousness and the variegated face of nature as it appears to that consciousness are phenomena of what Berkeley calls the materialist's "stupid thoughtless somewhat." If we say with the Hegelians that Thought is the ultimate reality which manifests itself alike in nature and man, we are engaged with the same metaphysical contrast; if we say Will with Schopenhauer or the Unconscious with Hartman, it is still the same it is a metaphysical contrast, a metaphysical problem, which engages us. But phenomenon has also come to be used in an epistemological reference, and then it means, and ought to be restricted to mean, the subjective state as contrasted with the trans-subjective reality known by means of that state. In that sense, familiar to us from Kant, to say that we know only phenomena means that we know only our own conscious states and cannot know "things-in-themselves," that is to say, the trans-subjective realities of which our states are the evidence. Here it is obvious the use of the term "phenomenon" is quite a new one. Nor is the epistemological thing-in-itself to be identified with the metaphysical essence. For even if we possessed that knowledge of trans-subjective realities which Kantianism denies, we should still be dealing only with phenomena in the metaphysical sense with the particular existences of the universe, not with the essence or universal of which they are the expression. When such a serious ambiguity is discovered lurking in a term which is so freely bandied about as "phenomena," it may well be doubted whether the controversialists