Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/299

No. 3.] know itself, i.e. its content. "God" must be thought of as the "Incompletely actualized, the absolute "subject-object." We are aware that we never can know anything fully. The "I" is always striving for a more complete realization, seeking to become "real," in the moral sense, i.e. to be more adequate to what it professes to be.

Except as to this ultimate question we need have no quarrel with the realist, and are quite as ready to talk of "thought conforming to reality" as we are to talk of sunrise and sunset, although in both cases we have accepted the "Copernican" theory. We might even get at the same ultimate result, although we accepted provisionally the point of view of ordinary language and of the special sciences. If we abstract from the mode in which alone we can know the world, we may talk of phenomena as having behind them a thing-in-itself, and we may call that the ultimate reality. The tendency of modern science is to regard all the various phenomena of nature as different manifestations of one "Energy." Consciousness or thought is then simply the highest form of energy which we know. (Will itself is not the highest form: for rational volition implies thought.) If we call energy (or material substance or anything else) the potentiality of which thought is the realization, and if we take this notion of potentiality and realization quite seriously, we are arriving from a starting point of "dogmatic materialism" at the same result as if we started with a philosophical theory of knowledge: the ultimate reality is thought. But unfortunately the uncritical metaphysics of the ordinary and of the scientific understanding do not generally take the notion of potentiality quite seriously. Hence it is necessary to take the longer route of philosophical criticism.

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JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD.