Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/531

No. 5.] his place. To use the well-worn words, there is the macrocosm and there is the microcosm. Ontologically or metaphysically, the microcosm must necessarily be viewed as a dependent part or function of the mighty whole; but epistemologically the microcosm rounds itself off within itself, and constitutes in perfect strictness a little world of its own. The world of consciousness, on the one hand, and the (so far hypothetical) world of real things, on the other, are two mutually exclusive spheres. No member of the real sphere can intrude itself into the conscious sphere, nor can consciousness go out into the real sphere and as it were lay hold with hands upon a real object. The two worlds are, to this extent and in this sense, totally disparate.

As soon as this is clearly recognized — and as Hume says, no very profound philosophical reflection is needed to reach this stage — it becomes evident that Realism cannot be maintained as a philosophical hypothesis in the uncritical form which it assumes in the mind of the plain man. And so far as the Realism of Scottish philosophy is merely an uncritical reassertion of our primitive beliefs, it is not to be wondered at that succeeding philosophers have so frequently treated their speculations as a negligible quantity. Immediacy must be given up before any tenable theory of perception and any philosophical doctrine of Realism can be established. The truth of the idealistic contentions must be acknowledged. It must be granted that in passing from the real to the ideal there is a solution of continuity, a leap, a passage from one world to another. The world of real things is transcendent with reference to the world of consciousness; the world of objects (as we customarily, though ambiguously speak of it) is trans-subjective or extra-conscious. In other words, it falls absolutely outside of, or beyond, the little world of consciousness, and the conscious being cannot in the nature of things overleap or transcend itself. The knowledge which we call most immediate or direct is only relatively so; so far as it is knowledge, it is mediate, or the result of a process. Knowledge puts a man in relation with things through the medium of his perceptions, but his perceptions are not the things; he does not pass over into the things, nor do the things