Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/159

No. 2.] ; in other words, it is not a brute fact existing outside the sweep of the divine life and its intelligent ends. In all this I most heartily agree with the neo-Hegelians. Whether we can absolutely prove so much or no, it is certain that so much is involved in every constructive system of metaphysics; and certainly we cannot believe less without lapsing into scepticism. If we put this metaphysical sense upon the words, then I most certainly believe, in Berkeley's phrase, that "the absolute existence of unthinking things are words without a meaning." There is no metaphysical thing-in-itself, no res completa, except the universe regarded as a self-existent whole. The thinker who leaves anything outside in this way makes confession of speculative bankruptcy. But though the unrelated thing-in-itself can have no place in metaphysics, it is quite otherwise with the epistemological thing-in-itself, if we are to designate trans-subjective reality by this ill-omened phrase. The existence of the latter must be asserted as strenuously as that of the former must be denied. All my fellow-men are things-in-themselves to me in the epistemological sense, — extra-conscious realities, — and I fail to see how we can draw any hard and fast line at them.

Hence, as I have argued on a previous occasion, anything which tends to confuse the two questions is to be deprecated: we cannot deal with the two in the same breath without confusing the issues. Our epistemological premises will not bear our metaphysical conclusion. Epistemology starts, and must start, from the individual human consciousness — the only consciousness known to us. If, however, it be pointed out to a neo-Hegelian that the epistemological assertions which he makes as to the relation of knower and known are plainly untenable as applied to this consciousness, we are met by the rejoinder that they are not meant to be understood of any subjective or individual consciousness, but of a so-called universal or divine consciousness. It is not my purpose at this stage to discuss the satisfactoriness of this hypothetical divine epistemology as a metaphysic of existence, but I would point out that by this procedure, illegitimate as I consider it, the real question of