Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/35

Rh totality of existence there can be no existence. That reality is one, is a conviction which has tacitly or expressly been the guiding idea of every thinker since Thales, and, as we may even say, of the whole race of man since the dawn of consciousness. But there have been as many definitions of the Unity which is presupposed in all forms of existence as there have been philosophies. Now, the Kantian conception of the ultimately real is at bottom that of a reality which is complete in itself, not by the inclusion, but by the exclusion, of all differences or relations. This is the assumption which leads him to affirm that knowledge is never of the real, but only of the real as distorted by the subjective forms of space and time. It is because no object that is completely isolated from all connection with other objects can be found in the sensible world, that he brands the whole of our knowledge as phenomenal, and falls back upon a faith in a reality that cannot be compressed within the frames of our perception or thought. Here is the point where Idealism joins issue with Kant. Admitting that the real is the individual or self-complete, it affirms that the true individual must be sought, not by the exclusion of all differences or relations, but by their inclusion. The reality of any object is determined by the degree in which it participates in the totality of relations by which the organic unity of the world as a whole is constituted. It follows from this conception of reality, that the process of knowledge is a progressive specification of the one reality of which all forms of existence are phases. And in proportion as this one reality is progressively determined, the consciousness of what it is becomes deeper and richer. We may put the same idea in other words by saying that the world is brought under ever higher categories, if only we are careful to observe that these categories are not fixed and unchangeable conceptions, but logically distinguishable points in the living process by which thought develops from lower to higher stages. Strictly speaking, thought has not a number of conceptions, but different conceptions are but convenient distinctions which we make in the one process of conception by which we become conscious of what reality truly