Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/160

144 epistemology is burked. That question is very fairly put by Professor Huxley in a page of his little book on Hume. In pursuance of a favorite line of thought, he is skilfully balancing Idealism and Materialism against one another in such a way as to leave both problematical, and in stating the case in favor of what he calls Idealism, he uses the following expression: "For any demonstration that can be given to the contrary effect, the 'collection of perceptions' which makes up my consciousness may be an orderly 'phantasmagoria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background of the abyss of nothingness." With Professor Huxley's own view we have nothing to do here, but simply with the statement quoted, namely, that there is no logically coercive proof of any real existence beyond the subjective consciousness. Idealism is used by Professor Huxley in its epistemological sense, and is equivalent with him to Solipsism. His position amounts to this: that reason does not force us to go beyond the circle of our own consciousness: all that is may be a skilfully woven system of my individual presentations and representations. This is the true question of epistemology; that, at least, which it has first to settle. But to judge from the writings of the neo-Kantians and Hegelians, one would hardly gather that individual knowers existed at all. The subjective consciousness seems suppressed; they often speak as if knowledge were not a subjective process at all. In Hegel himself, just for this reason, there is no epistemology; we hear nothing of individuals, but only of the universal process in which objective thought comes to consciousness of itself.

Hegelianism, in fact, offers an eminent example of the confusion between Epistemology and Metaphysics on which I am dwelling. With Hegel the essence of the universe is thought here in the subject and thought there in the object; and there is some temptation therefore to think that this metaphysical identity absolves us from the epistemological inquiry. But that is not the case. However much the objective world and