Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/150

134 and extreme, can be quite the same that it was at the close of the eighteenth century. This, too, so far as the thinking of individual philosophers has brought it about, is very largely due to Kant.

It may be premature to suggest any outline of an answer to this epistemological problem which would probably win the acceptance, even in a qualified way, of the philosophy of reconciliation at the present time. I will use my opportunity, however, to suggest in somewhat hazy form the barest outline of such an answer; and I will try not to abuse your patience or my coveted opportunity. All cognitive experience, in every aspect and factor of it, in the harmony of its true nature, but in subjection to the law of development, has ontological value. It is in the total life of the cognitive subject, in the evolution of complete and well-rounded selfhood, that reality stands revealed.

This conclusion is justified by the results which have been even now attained by the psychology of cognition, when this cognition takes the form of so-called sense-perception or of so-called self-consciousness ; and whether it be knowledge of things or knowledge of self which furnishes the case in hand. Knowledge of any sort is only gained by the combined activity, and the relatively harmonious action, of every so-called faculty,—intellect, feeling, and will. Knowledge does not come or grow through the activity, whether cultivated or left to run wild, as it were, of intellect alone, or of feeling alone, or of volition alone. It is always a judgment, and so always indicative of a synthesis somehow obtained; but it is never in fact, and by its essential nature it is made impossible that it should ever be conceived of as being, a synthesis of intellectual elements alone, or of feeling-factors alone, or of voluntary or involuntary motor elements alone. The cognitive judgment itself is the temporary solution of the problem, What is there in experience which has ontological value? but it is a solution which reconciles for the time being the otherwise conflicting intellectual, affective, and volitional elements, in the total attitude of the self. And this is always an experience of reality.

When, now, we take these considerations derived from an