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282 be expressed in our language by the impersonal pronoun, but which in many languages is not expressed at all, may be described as being either "the nature of things" or "I," but "I" seems to me nearer the exact truth of feeling.

We may picture the universe as a multitude of centres of circles, recognizing that every one is the centre of his own universe — just as each of us sees a different rainbow; but such a picture is the result of inference and hypothesis. In strict truth (and that is what Philosophy is concerned with) we never get outside one circle, nor away from one centre. I may admit the truth of judgments about other persons and other things, when stated without any reference to my consciousness; but strictly speaking they are only true to me (and that is what I mean by truth) when this reference is introduced.

The distinction, noticed at the beginning of this article, between subjective and objective reality is a distinction which falls within what one may call the absolute subjectivity (or the essential relativity — they mean the same thing) of all reality. When we distinguish the particular self, the self with a history in time, from the not-self generally and from other selves, then we distinguish between the subjective and the objective. But this particular self is, as I have shown, not an individual incapable of further analysis, but like other things it is a unity of the manifold, an identity with differences in it. The ultimate subject of knowing, the ultimate reality, is incapable of further analysis, in the sense that we cannot get behind or round it: we cannot know it as an object like other objects. But on the other hand it only becomes properly "real," knowledge only passes from mere possibility into actuality, by the recognition of differences, of a manifold, within consciousness.

When the "I" is treated psychologically, it is made into an object. We are not any longer dealing with the strict truth or genuine reality of it; we are dealing with an abstracted material as in all the other special sciences. Philosophy must take account of the fact that everything we can know is within the "I." The knowledge of reality is thus the "I" coming to